by Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n
NRO’s\u00a0The Corner<\/em><\/p>\n A New Face<\/strong><\/p>\n For weeks we’ve been told that the Iraqis were playing tough and demanding time-lines for American withdrawal, the subtext being that mean George Bush was once again conniving for permanent imperial bases. Then Obama gets elected, and within hours we hear that Foreign Minister Hoshiyar Zebari had announced that Obama has “reassured us that he would not take any drastic or dramatic decisions.” Lots of luck as they say.<\/p>\n In the coming weeks we may hear some interesting variations of this theme: Obamaniac Europeans shocked that we are consulting the U.N. on trans-Atlantic problems and conflicted about free trade; new-age hedge-fund directors shocked about new capital gains taxes; and hip Silicon Valley types shocked that their shredded 401(k)s have not surged back and now they learn that a 65% combined federal, state, Medicare, and FICA income tax really does apply to them, despite the Obama sign out front on the lawn.<\/p>\n Postmortem<\/strong><\/p>\n Some postmortem thoughts on what went wrong for Republicans… (other than the mid-September meltdown and the celebrity charisma that surrounded our first serious African-American candidate that together made all else secondary.)<\/p>\n 1. Spending. When Republicans spend at rates higher than Democrats they suffer the wage of hypocrisy, and discredit tax cuts, since the public blames lower taxes for mounting deficits even when they have been demonstrably proven to have brought in greater revenue. In the future, conservatives need to forget all the gobbly-gook about deficits being tolerable as this or that percentage of GDP \u2014 and just balance the budget, since the public deals in psychology and symbolism as much as abstract economic data.<\/p>\n 2. People. Conservatism means an allegiance to past values and behavior. When the Republican Congress not only spent lavishly, but was marked by a series of scandals \u2014 Foley, Cunningham, Stevens, et al. \u2014 then Republicans lost that high ground as well. Conservative reconstruction must focus on being above the ethical norm, not indistinguishable from corrupt career politicians. By the same token, highly-visible appointments of incompetent sycophants like Press Secretary Scott McClellan or “Brownie” at FEMA remind voters that conservatives have standards no different from the alternative when they claim otherwise.<\/p>\n 3. Populism. Joe the Plumber caught on because (finally) the case was made that confiscatory tax rates (40% on top income, 15.3% FICA\/Medicare, once caps removed, 5-10% state income tax) mean that none of us can hope to have the financial success guaranteed to others by birth.<\/p>\n Down-to-earth, Fargo-talking Palin was a missed opportunity because almost immediately for some reason she was served up to the D.C. press in gottcha interviews and caricatured as a hockey-mom bimbo by NY-DC grandees of her own party. Eisenhower and Reagan worked because they were able to show the people that they came from, and were one with, them, and convince the people that they did better even when the rich were better off as well. The critical argument that the liberal party is now anti-populist and mostly one of the largely affluent who want government to enact a boutique, utopian social agenda, and the poor who want redistribution and guaranteed government 24\/7 attention, was never seriously made.<\/p>\n Postscript<\/strong><\/p>\n I think out-of-power conservatives have a real opportunity to show that they will express differences in a professional, constructive fashion that puts the country first and politics second, and that was not always true of the last eight years when we got everything from the Knopf novel\u00a0Checkpoint<\/em>\u00a0to the Gabriel Range film to the (failed) effort to rename a sewer plant after the President.<\/p>\n \u00a92008 Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by Victor Davis Hanson NRO’s\u00a0The Corner A New Face For weeks we’ve been told that the Iraqis were playing tough and demanding time-lines for American withdrawal, the subtext being that mean George Bush was once again conniving for permanent imperial bases.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[737],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-Qd","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":5973,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/reap-what-you-sow\/","url_meta":{"origin":3237,"position":0},"title":"Reap What You Sow","author":"victorhanson","date":"May 21, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson NRO's\u00a0The Corner In the next few weeks, we will probably hear more stories about journalists whose correspondence was monitored, and more creepy details about the corruption of the IRS. The fault, however, is not Obama\u2019s alone; he is what he is \u2014 a take-no-prisoners tough Chicago\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Mainstream Media"","block_context":{"text":"Mainstream Media","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/american-culture\/mainstream-media\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":3300,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/obamas-race-card\/","url_meta":{"origin":3237,"position":1},"title":"Obama’s Race Card","author":"victorhanson","date":"August 7, 2008","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton Private Papers The liberal media are in full Captain Renault mode, \u201cshocked, shocked\u201d to find race injected into the presidential campaign by a \u201cSwift-boating\u201d John McCain. How shameless can you get? The Obama campaign\u2013\u2013indeed, the whole of Obama\u2019s public existence\u2013\u2013is about nothing other than his perceived\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. Thornton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/bruce-s-thornton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":769,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-obama-romney-doggy-wars\/","url_meta":{"origin":3237,"position":2},"title":"The Obama-Romney Doggy Wars","author":"victorhanson","date":"May 20, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online Last week the\u00a0Washington Post\u00a0ran a piece on presumptive Republican nominee Mitt Romney\u2019s high-school years, in which he supposedly was cruel to a shy, perhaps gay fellow student. The piece,\u00a0mirabile dictu, appeared in the middle of the Biden-Obama reversal on gay marriage. Errors were\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Election 2012"","block_context":{"text":"Election 2012","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/obama-administration\/election-2012\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":6600,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/obama-will-cut-a-deal-sooner-rather-than-later\/","url_meta":{"origin":3237,"position":3},"title":"Obama Will Cut a Deal Sooner Rather than Later","author":"victorhanson","date":"October 10, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ NRO's\u00a0The Corner At first glance, the Republicans seemed to be losing the so-called shut-down impasse, inasmuch as Obamacare, as the president termed it, was \u201csettled law\u201d and the Republicans did not have the congressional clout to overturn it. No one likes, after all, to be\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Political Culture"","block_context":{"text":"Political Culture","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/american-culture\/political-culture\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/10\/10038532014_fdcb3ca6a1-300x216.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":7805,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-madness-of-2008\/","url_meta":{"origin":3237,"position":4},"title":"The Madness of 2008","author":"victorhanson","date":"August 26, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"A nation became unhinged by trivialities like \u201chope and change.\u201d It has now awakened. \u00a0 by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ National Review Online America is suddenly angry at the laxity, incompetence, and polarizing politics of the Obama administration, the bad optics of the president putting about in his bright golf\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Obama Administration"","block_context":{"text":"Obama Administration","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/obama-administration\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"On the campaign trail, October 2008 (Joe Raedle\/Getty Images)","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/08\/pic_giant_082614_SM_Barack-Obama-2008-G.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":694,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-potemkin-president-disintegrates\/","url_meta":{"origin":3237,"position":5},"title":"The Potemkin President Disintegrates","author":"victorhanson","date":"June 18, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. 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The political unifier who claimed, \u201cThere is not a liberal America and a conservative America \u2014 there is the United States of America,\u201d has been\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Punditry"","block_context":{"text":"Punditry","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/opinion\/punditry\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3237"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3237"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3237\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3238,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3237\/revisions\/3238"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3237"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3237"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3237"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}