Barack Obama: November 2008 Archives

Catching Up

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Some good recent-ish reads:

  • 2 from the Claremont Review: "The Audacity of Barack Obama" -- a fairly balance view of Obama's governing and legal philosophies; and "Reforming Big Government" -- a sober assessment of the here-to-stay welfare state:


    Supply-side tax cuts did little to necessitate or even facilitate reducing the welfare state, and there is no reason to believe an explicit campaign for that goal will succeed where Barry Goldwater's failed. Given all that, conservatives need to weigh the costs and benefits of putting liberals' minds at ease by explicitly renouncing the war against the welfare state, the one that's barely being waged and steadily being lost. They could do so by making clear that America will and should have a welfare state, and that the withering away of the welfare state is not the goal of the conservative project, not even in the distant future. What libertarians will regard as a capitulation to statism is better understood as conceding ground conservatives have been losing for 75 years and have no imaginable prospect of regaining.

  • Rathering than listing them all, I'll just tell you to read everything John Zmirak writes at Inside Catholic (yo, Deal, add author archive links!)

  • Remember way back in... January 2008, when Ron Paul was widely dismissed as a nutjob for wanting to put the US back on the gold standard? Well, those loonies at the Wall Street Journal have given prime opinion real estate not once but twice to that fringe idea. Now, I'm not saying I'm a goldbug, but I'm not goign to hold my breath that many gold advocates will be acknowledging that Paul was out front on this.

That's all for now.I have many more I'll try to get around to in the next few days.

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Unity!

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The great uniter has apparently asked this guy to be his chief of staff -- ie, his presidential gatekeeper, one of the most powerful people in his inner circle.

That night, on the northwest side, Rahm Emanuel was elected to Congress. A former Clinton whiz kid who'd gotten his start as a fundraiser for Mayor Richard M. Daley, Emanuel was connected -- in the three years after leaving the White House (where he'd helped push through NAFTA), he earned $16 million putting together Wall Street mergers. He was also zealously partisan. He had once owned a consulting business devoted to finding skeletons in Republican closets. At a Clinton victory dinner in Little Rock in 1992, Emanuel celebrated by reciting a hoped-for necrology of Democrats who had "f***ed" the president-elect. After every name, he stabbed a steak knife into a table and screamed, "Dead man!"

[...]

When Emanuel took the job [getting more Democrats elected to Cognress], he never expected to win, but he knew a president's party usually loses seats in the sixth year of his term, and he figured if he could pick up 10 or 12, he'd be rewarded with a leadership position, a step toward his goal of becoming speaker of the House. (He is now chairman of the Democratic Caucus, the fourth-ranking post in the House.) If he makes it, C-SPAN may have to institute a seven-second delay. On Election Night, 10 minutes after CNN called the House for the Democrats, Emanuel climbed up on a table in DCCC headquarters and addressed his cheering, victory-starved staff, celebrating the party's biggest win since 1992. He wanted to wrap up the campaign with a message for the Republicans.

"Since my kids are gone, I can say it," he shouted. "They can go f*** themselves!"

"Change has come to America..."

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About this Archive

This page is a archive of entries in the Barack Obama category from November 2008.

Barack Obama: June 2008 is the previous archive.

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