Hewitt Blog

Unless Michael Steele has an explanation for his astounding statement concerning Afghanistan, then Bill Kristol is correct and Steele should resign.  He would not have been elected chair of the RNC had he said anything remotely like this before the election.  Steele's view on Afghanistan is a position of the far left and isolationist right, not of the conservative movement and certainly not of the GOP.  Not one GOP senator took such a position during the Petraeus hearings, nor am I aware of any House GOP member with the exception of Ron Paul who holds this view.  It is impossible to lead the GOP when you take a position diametrically opposed to one of its central tenets: Victory in Afghanistan, and no forced timetable for withdrawal there.

Update:  Andrew McCarthy weighs in at NRO.  The very able Doug Heye, RNC Communications director, tries to explain Chairman Steele's statement but makes little sense in the attempt.  That is because the statement is  simply indefensible.  The chairman should step up and announce that his view has zero to do with the GOP's position on the war.

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Another grim jobs report, and the credibility of the president's economic platform diminishes again, if that is even possible.  

By now all but the most immune-to-facts Obamians must recognize that not only did the stimulus fail, but that the Obama-Pelosi-Reid insistence on raising taxes in 2011 is economic suicide.  Burdened by the approached demands of Obamacare's rolling mandates and higher taxes, American employers just aren't hiring.  When they recognize, as the Wall Street Journal's lead editorial does this morning, that the president and his Congressional allies intend a push in 2011 for massive additional tax hikes even beyond those already scheduled, they pull in their expansion plans and hunker down.  There won't be job growth until there is real economic growth, and not the false growth of an expanding federal government and the false jobs of census takers.

The Tea Party movement --profiled in USA Today this morning-- is a potent reaction to the president's turn away from the private sector towards expansion of the federal government, and that after an era of massive expansion of state and local budgets and functions.  The demand to shrink the government at all levels is also a demand to let the private sector grow and to allow Americans their full freedom to innovate, invent, experiment and, crucially, be left alone.

Republican candidates have to find their tax-cutting voice and take a page from the late '70s when Jack Kemp, clutching a copy of his book An American Renaissance, criss-crossed the land demanding tax cuts and preaching economic growth as the answer to Carter's years of malaise.

The president's pathetic "the economy is headed in the right direction" declaration of Wednesday followed by his disconnected ramblings on immigration yesterday underscore the confusion of his message and the uncertainty even he feels about the consequences of his vast program of spending and government growth. 

The GOP --from top to bottom-- has to demand extension of the tax rates as they are and cuts where they will spur investment and job growth.  Getting caught in what the Journal calls "Obama's Tax Trap" isn't an inevitability.  That the president and his allies are even planning to demand more and more in taxes is an opportunity not to be missed to focus the debate and the crucial choice that will define the next quarter century even as 1978-1980 defined the 25 years that followed those crucial years.

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An essay on where the jobs, ideas and energy for freedom come from.

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The National Review is running its annual summer reading symposium, and it is always fun to participate.

My suggestions are here, but keep checking back for even more great ideas on how to spend your vacation time.

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"The economy is headed in the right direction," the president declared in Racine Wisconsin yesterday.

This is one reason the latest from Gallup reads as it does:

By an average 10 percentage-point margin since March, 45% to 35%, independent registered voters have consistently preferred the Republican to the Democrat when asked which congressional candidate they would vote for in their district. Independents' preference for Republicans has been generally consistent over this time, with the gap in favor of Republicans increasing slightly since March, from 8 to 12 points.

The president and his "economic team," like his Gulf spill team, and his Iran team and his Israel team, are not dealing with the facts.  Uncertainty over the goverment's plans and worry over rising tax and regulatory burdens is strangling investment and jobs growth. 

Mr. Magoo is driving, and he thinks he's headed in the right direction.

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Today's Washington Post features a story that will figure heavily in the unfolding attempt to shield the president from the political consequences of his epic mismanagement of the Gulf spill:  The catastrophe was just too large to handle.

In "Oil Industry Cleanup Organization Swamped By Spill" we see the first draft of a first paragraph in a speech that will be given by every Democratic operative confronting the need to defend the president's hesitant, halting and half-hearted response to the catastrophe in the Gulf.  The disaster was just too big to handle.

Even as evidence mounts of continuing chaos in Team Obama strategy for handling the spill --see the post below on "A Whale" and this column by Dick Morris from The Hill--  the MSM is struggling to help the president avoid the political consequences of his ineptitude.  The spill and the ongoing coma in the economy are the twin stories of his presidency, but the president is not being pursued on the former with anything approaching the zeal with which the MSM trailed after President Bush in the aftermath of Katrina, and the reasons why the president's policies have actually contributed to rather than alleviated the economic stallout (see the post on Allan Meltzer below) are unpalatable or not even understood by the MSMers. 

No matter.  The public understands that the president is in way over his head.  November cannot arrive soon enough, though it will be far too late for the economies of the Gulf Coast.

One has to wonder if the crisis had been in Lake Michigan and impacting states more central to the president's political fortunes, if he would have been more engaged?

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Scott S. writes from NYC that my pointer yesterday to Mark Steyn's homage to Frank Loesser ought also to have included a link to this piece on Loesser by the columnist-to-the-world "Baby, He's Gold Inside."

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The Houston Chronicle reports on the possibility of capping the leak within two weeks.

In the comments below the story is this post:

In Newport, we have a Taiwanese skimming tanker called the A Whale, capable of skimming 500,000 (yes, a half a million) gallons of oil a day but it can't get past the EPA or CG. Between the EPA, Coast Guard and this administration, government has proven its complete lack of competence and downright criminal negligence. Can anyone successfully argue one single thing our government has run competently or cost effectively since Obama was elected? I can't.

Could that possibly be true? 

Ernest Istook wrote about the ship at The Heritage Foundation's blog The Foundry.

The China Post had this story.

The merits of the argument about The Whale will surface, just like the oil, but the delayed, then confused, then partial response of the president and his team has launched not just a searching review of its competence in the aftermath of the explosion but across every one of its "initiatives."

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This is an extraordinary clip:

 

Allan Meltzer's piece in today's Wall Street Journal is a must-read, and hopefully within the White House as well as around the country.

There is little hope that this Congress will change its course despite the enormous devastation it is wrecking on the economy.

But if President Obama wants a second term, he will have to embrace real growth via tax cuts, and a new Congress --and especially a new House free of the historically awful leadership of Nancy Pelosi-- can push him in that direction.

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