There's a method to the Democrats' madness

By Tim Dunkin

Sometimes, you look at the actions of others, and wonder why somebody would do the things they do. People are often capable of the most self-defeating behavior, and their actions can have a long-term detrimental effect not only on themselves, but also on those around them. Many times, however, what seems like madness on the surface actually has a deeper purpose, one that is perhaps not readily apparent to the casual observer, but which can be parsed if you're willing to take the time to do so. What seems merely crazy may instead be "crazy like a fox." Or at least it's trying to be.

I suspect that this may be the case with the way that President Obama and the Democrats in Congress have been pursuing their legislative agenda to date.

So far, all the signals point to a certain insanity on the part of the Dems. They forced through a massive "stimulus" package that was unpopular with the American people, without even giving legislators the time to read the massive bill. What's more, the Democrats actively sought to hide the text of the bill from the people, despite the promises of transparency that supposedly came with this new administration. Since then, the stimulus has completely failed to stimulate anything but the wallets of the very bankers who supposedly got us into this economic mess in the first place, and has become even more deeply unpopular with the American people as time has progressed. The American people have also expressed their concern with the massive deficits that the spending by the Democrats — stimulus-related or not — are generating, and the load of debt and impoverishment that this threatens to place upon us, our children, and our grandchildren. Yet, this hasn't stopped certain highly placed Democrats from floating the possibility of further stimulus packages — bills which will probably be rocketed through Congress and to the President's desk once the present furor dies down and the people go back to a sitcom induced sleep.

The government takeover of GM was viewed very negatively by the people — but this didn't stop Obama. Neither has the unpopularity of other massive, completely unwarranted and unprecedented moves by the increasingly imperious federal government. Not content to merely restrict the pay of executives in banks receiving federal money, Congress is now moving to establish controls on the pay of ALL executives. The Democrats have also been foisting off onto the American people the extremely unpopular "cap and tax" plan to limit and tax carbon emissions by American industry and utilities, something which basically all competent economists agree will act as a de-facto tax increase on every American who buys manufactured goods, drives a vehicle, or gets electricity from a power plant that burns fossil fuels. All of this, I might add, being done in response to fears about anthropogenic global warming — a theorized phenomenon which is increasingly being rejected by scientists in the relevant fields of study, and which a majority of Americans believe is either non-existent or greatly hyped.

But now, Obama and the Democrats in Congress are in the process of pushing through the federal takeover of the health care sector — a full one-sixth of the entire economic sector. The move to socialize medicine is also broadly unpopular. It's not just being opposed by pro-life advocates who decry the efforts to include taxpayer-funded abortion as part of the deal, but also by senior citizens and their children — people who rightly worry that the rationing, bureaucratic distribution of resources, and quinquennial consultations with government health care "experts" to see if the elderly are deserving of continued medical care will severely curtail the quality and quantity of health care for the segment of our population that disproportionately needs it.

Then, to top it all off, in a nation already roiling with Tea Parties and incipient tax protest, we just found out that Obama's top advisors are recommending tax increases on the middle class to pay for this boondoggle in the making. This, after Obama's campaign promises about "cutting" taxes on the middle class, streamlining government, and making it more user friendly.

The Democrats have been taking a beating at the polls because of all this. Obama's honeymoon is definitely over. Starting from stratospheric approval ratings at the start of his administration, the popularity of his policies has dropped like a big chunk of lead in a swimming pool. Rasmussen's daily tracking of presidential approval (in which the percentage of "strongly disapprove" is subtracted from "strongly approve" to yield an approval index) has consistently sat in negative numbers — some of them quite large — for weeks now. Even mainstream media polls, which are notoriously loaded in Obama's favor, are starting to show his ratings approaching that politically deadly 50% mark, and the much more reliable Rasmussen polls have already had him below 50% in total approval for more than a week. The Democrats in Congress have been faring even worse — Pelosi's Congress can't seem to get above 30% approval, and usually hovers closer to the upper teens. Polling of preference for generic congressional balloting has had the Republicans maintaining a consistent edge for a couple of months now — something last seen heading into the 1994 mid-term elections. According to Rasmussen, voters now give Republicans higher marks on every issue they track except for the traditional "softie" issues that Democrats usually score better on — health care and education — and even on those, the GOP has closed the preference gap significantly.

So what is the point of all this data and commentary? It is that the Democrats ought to know better than to be doing what they are doing. They ought to be able to read the tea leaves and see that the socialization, the takeovers, the higher taxes, the debt, the deficits, ad nauseum, are not scoring them any brownie points with the majority of Americans. Anyone with a modicum of common sense ought to be wise enough to step back and say, "Hey, wait a second, this doesn't seem to be working." Yet, they don't. In fact, the more unpopular they become, the faster it seems the Democrats work to ram unread bills through Congress and to the President's desk before the American people can become aware of what they contain.

Are Obama, Pelosi, Reid, and their comrades fools?

I would say, "No." Generally, I am not very big on conspiracy theories, but I do think that when rational, crafty people start doing things that make no common sense, there's an ulterior reason for it. I can't help but think that there is a method to the madness here.

Despite what may be the general opinion of conservatives, these Democrats are not stupid. They are very crafty when it comes to things political, as are most successful Democrat politicians who work their way up through the various corrupt local and state political machines. These are people well-versed in the art of cutting deals, making plans, knocking the competition off the ladder, and covering it all up with various means of deception. Obama himself not only survived his ride through the Chicago machine, but prospered, managing to avoid the disgrace and prosecution that often befalls less competent but equally corrupt politicos (such as "Hot Rod" Blagojevich). So no, we're not dealing with stupid people here. They may not be particularly wise or beneficent, but they are crafty and capable.

They are crafty and capable enough to understand two things about the present political landscape — that it's at an exploitable tipping point, and that it won't last forever.

First, the tipping point. It is a lamentable reality of the American social landscape that we are at a point where the number of Americans who primarily or totally depend upon the government for their sustenance is close to becoming the majority. Decades of welfare, Medicare, public housing, earned income tax credits, and the myriad of other social spending programs have reduced significant portions of our population to being wards of the state. These people, while perhaps being deficient in many of the life skills necessary to get an education and maintain a steady job, are cunning enough to know who will keep the gravy train rolling, and vote accordingly.

Second, the present political landscape obvious favors the Democrats. Control of Congress and the Presidency has actually been something of a rarity for the Democrats over the past few decades. The last time it happened was the two-year period between January 1993 and January 1995, Clinton's first two years in office. While we can look back and understand that the radical policies (including health care "reform") of the Clinton administration those first two years are what precipitated the Republican takeover of Congress in the 1994 election, the Left looks at it and thinks that Clinton didn't move fast or far enough. Obama and his comrades are determined not to make this same mistake, nor to miss seizing what is, in their eyes, an even greater opportunity to mold this country into the socialist image.

In 1992, the percentage of Americans on the government dole was not nearly what it is now. But, as the Democrats understand, a larger percentage of them could have been induced to be, if Clinton had done the "right thing," i.e. pushed through plans that would have used the excuse of the recession of 1991-1992 to implement an expansive program of expanded welfare and unemployment spending. Many Americans would have jumped on it out of desperation and become permanently enamored with all things government — just like many desperate people did for Roosevelt during the Great Depression, which is why the percentage of voters who vote Democrat because they're still voting for Roosevelt remains significant. Instead, Clinton squandered his opportunity by pushing for a lot of symbolic, but politically useless, causes such as allowing gays in the military, which aroused a lot of ill will not only from the "Religious Right" but from across the populace in general. He didn't offer the free sample as a hook before trying to sell the country his drug of health care nationalization.

This time around, the recession is even worse than the one in 1991-1992. This presents Obama and Company a much greater opportunity, as well as does the fact that we're nearer the tipping point. More economically desperate people combined with a shorter distance to the magical 50% + 1 finish line means that they find the permanent socialization of the American people quote doable. So the race is on.

The economic plans being laid by the Democrats are immensely unpopular. They will greatly hinder economic growth. But that may well be the plan. The higher taxes, the reduced incentive to employ American workers, the destruction of many small businesses, the reduced standard of living, the ever-increasing unemployment — it will all work together to create a lot of people who will begin to think that taking "free" government money is the way to go. They'll "need" it, you see. They want the cushion, the protection, afforded by the government. And the Democrats will be only too happy to use government policy to artificially maintain the demand for such intervention. They are not weathering the present storm of low polls and loud opposition because they're dumb. They're enduring it to the bitter end because they're banking on the economy getting worse due to their policies, not better, and that by the time November 2010 rolls around, there will be enough people who "need" social spending and who are disillusioned with the "failure" of our free-market system that the Republicans' arguments about tax cuts, balancing the budget, and free-market economic growth (if the GOP will even make them) will seem hollow to that ever-important 50% + 1.

In short, I'm willing to bet that the Democrats are banking on the Tea Parties of 2009 turning into demands for more stimulus and more intervention by late 2010. Coupled with the disconcerting influence that ACORN is going to have over both the census and the electoral apparatus by then, the jig might well be up. The opportunity for the power play — squandered by Clinton in 1992 — won't be wasted this time around by a President whose chief advisor operates under the dictum that you should never waste the opportunity provided by a good crisis. If the Democrats act like they don't want an economic recovery, it may well be that they actually don't.

The Democrat policy makers, I believe, understand that the economic prosperity that was generally enjoyed by the United States from around 1960 to the present was fairly well correlated with the general rightward shift in American presidential politics and economic policies during that same period. The middle class expanded, real wages went up, and the opportunities for entrepreneurship were plentiful. People voted accordingly for Presidents who at least titularly represented lower taxes and less government involvement in the economy. This is because people who have good, secure, high-paying private sector jobs generally are less inclined to feel that they need the government to provide for them. Good economic times generally work to increase the sense of individualism and self-sufficiency of the people, which in turn stabilizes, or even reduces, the number of people voting for the people pushing socialism.

So, what do we as conservatives do about? We have to intensify our efforts to highlight the failures (engineered per my theory, or not) of the Democrats' economic policies and magnify public distrust to the point that enough of the weaker members of the Democratic herd break and start voting against it. We have to go to Tea Parties, call our representatives incessantly, get loud and make our voiced heard. Most of all, we have to educate people about what's going on. We need to work to re-inculcate the ideology of liberty into our people, one neighbor, one co-worker, one family member at a time. Even if I'm wrong, and there isn't some sort of grand master plan, even if the Democrats really are as dumb as many of us think they are, the net effect of their policies will still generally be the same as I've outlined above. The Democrats are hoping that the conservative resurgence will play itself out before too many people "catch on." We have to make sure that this doesn't happen.

© Tim Dunkin