Several more predictions for the Age of Obama, and then some

I'm sufficiently happy with my first fortune-cookie job in February of '09 to undertake a second, with predictions great and small, to wit:

1. The abolition of the light bulb will be repealed. It always was madness that the useless "Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007" included a provision outlawing the incandescent light bulb as of 2012. They're light bulbs: they're harmless, they cost a matter of pennies each, and they're so towering a monument to ingenuity and improvement that the image of the light bulb is the very symbol for genius inspiration. No American government can possibly be acting as intended by the Founders if it busies itself with the likes of abolishing the light bulb. But the House of Representatives now is to be re-taken by Republicans, and those Republicans will move to repeal the ban before the impossible enforcement of it commences, polls will show something over two-thirds support for repeal, and the ban will necessarily die, if not before Obama leaves office on January 20 of 2013 then very shortly thereafter.


2. This is probably so uncontroversial as to go without saying, but I thought it would only be appropriate to put on the record here that Republicans will hold the House of Representatives and gain the Senate in 2012. The Democrats were only saved in the Senate in 2010 by the fact that the third of the Senate that was up for re-election happened to be Republican seats or sufficiently Democratic seats to have survived a Republican year like 2004, when Republicans held the House, the Senate, and the presidency. The Democrats' margin was made in '06 and '08, which were high-water marks for them, and artificially high, at that, and those seats that took them from minority to majority will be up for grabs in '12 and '14. The next two years will be the last for Democratic control of the Senate for some time.

And the House Democrats affirmed their new status as minority not long after the midterms, in re-electing Nancy Pelosi to lead them, Pelosi being the most reviled figure in national politics and government and one of three authors of the greatest disquiet in American society in at least a generation. Something like re-nominating Carter against Reagan for '84. That lot won't be entrusted again with a House majority anytime soon.

3. Obama will be a one-term president, that much seems assured to me and has all along. His 2008 campaign was a fraud and he is singularly unsuited to the American presidency. The next president of the United States will be whomever is nominated for president by the Republican Party in 2012, but that question is an open one. Already there are maybe a dozen prospects, but I'm prepared now to venture out onto a limb and predict that the next Republican nominee for president and indeed the next president of the United States will be one Rick Perry of Texas.

Yes, my forecast two years ago was for Mark Sanford of South Carolina, but that ought not be held against me: Sanford might even have been the prohibitive favorite today if he hadn't got himself ruined by taking off for Argentina one fine day in 2009 to take up with an Argie gal he liked better than his wife back in SC, which Charles Krauthammer diagnosed as subconscious self-sabotage, in his capacity as a former psychiatrist.

So barring another unscheduled Argentine vacation, Rick Perry it is. Perry is now the longest-serving governor in the second-largest state in the Union. That he is a governor at all is a boon, but he is a particularly successful one. He has kept a balanced budget in a juggernaut state with no state income tax, and between August of '09 and August '10, "half of all the net new jobs created in the United States...were created in Texas," so says the National Review. Perry is solidly conservative and forcefully anti-Obama. He's sufficiently old without his seniority being anything approaching a liability, and he looks the part of president of the United States, for whatever that's worth, and it's not nothing. He's a Methodist, which I count among the "presidential denominations", though after Obama I suspect even a Mormon president would be a relief to the nation. And Rick Perry is a former airman, a Vietnam-era veteran of the United States Air Force. There's a presidential profile for 2012 if I've ever seen one.

Perry is not often counted among the prospective Republican candidates for president, but then John McCain was running third and fourth in the Republican primary polls in October of '07 when I reckoned him for the 2008 Republican nominee, and anyway at this point Perry is arguably better off in the shadows. The nation isn't ready for another presidential race just yet; no need of making everyone sick at the sight of you before it's even time for declarations of candidacy and fundraisers and debates and interviews.

4. The next Republican president, with his Republican Congress, will re-institute America's manned space program. Obama cancelled America's manned space program for the first time since there's been such a thing as manned space flight, not by presiding over the end of the 1970s-vintage shuttle program, which is in fact overdue for retirement and was scheduled to be retired, anyway, but by cancelling the replacement for the shuttle, which was called Constellation.

Constellation was inaugurated under the Bush Administration, and that may be the first clue as to why Obama ordered it cancelled. But the bigger reason seems plain enough to me, which is that Obama has an inveterate hostility to American greatness and to all those things that make for national greatness, including especially domination in rocketry which Obama and the Left like to fret will lead to a "weaponization of space", as if space isn't "weaponized" by military satellites and ballistic missiles already, and as if an American capitulation in space would make space any less "weaponized" by the Chinese and Russians.

Obama cancelled Constellation and with it America's manned space program for the same reason that Neil Armstrong came out of his seclusion along with two other Apollo commanders to oppose that cancellation, pleading that it would put America on "a long downhill slide to mediocrity." If you're the sort of person who takes it as read that America is the problem in the world, that it's a fundamentally wicked and stupid and greedy and abusive nation -- and Obama's personal history gives us every reason to believe that he is precisely that kind of person -- then "a long downhill slide to mediocrity" is the most politically-viable way of neutering and diminishing America, to where it is left to take orders from the more "enlightened" in the world, and no longer has it so good or has any capacity for venturing out into the world in the defense and promotion of its interests and values.

But Obama's red herring that America simply can no longer afford Constellation is an absurdity. At this point Constellation would be costing the United States something over $3 billion a year; Obama's worse-than-useless stimulus ended up at $862 billion, and with about 40 percent of that still unspent, Obama was calling for $266 billion more. Obama never came down against anything because it cost too much; he's against Constellation because he's against an American manned space program. For crying out loud, Obama put $2.5 billion over five years into NASA for the study of "global warming". Besides which, the American taxpayer has invested $9 billion in the program already, and the cancellation itself is supposed to cost $2.5 billion.

When the shuttle program expires and there is no Constellation program to replace it, America will have no heavy capacity for making it out of earth's atmosphere, and will be dependent on Russia for its space business, at $50 million per astronaut just to get to its International Space Station and back. There's $3 billion in the United States budget for a proper space program like America has had since there's been any such thing, and what America cannot afford is to cede space to the Chinese and Russians.

5. Obama-care will not stand. Michael Barone, who is as sober as he is encyclopedic, has called Obama-care the most unpopular major national legislation to be passed since the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, and that led in part to the Civil War. It's a plain bad bill, for a start. Megan McArdle, who is an economist and by no means a Republican partisan, has concluded that Obama-care is "unstable, politically and practically." Quite. When over a hundred companies and institutions need exempting from a national law as just the first phases come into effect, then what you've got hold of is a bad law.

And Obama-care is the only social program ever to be enacted against the will of the people and with not a solitary vote from the minority opposition. Indeed, some 34 Democrats voted against the thing in the House. There was a consensus on Obama-care, both in the nation at large and in Congress, and it was that the bill ought not be passed. In the event, the final bill had to be passed by parliamentary manoeuver to circumvent the 60-percent threshold in the Senate.

The states are about to go into revolt against the mandates in Obama-care. In these midterm elections just past, Democrats were turned out of the state legislatures in what may be the largest-ever turnover at the state level since the founding of the Republic, with something like 680 seats switching from Democrat to Republican, and those Republican legislatures will become little battlefields in the war against Obama-care. And Obama-care may well be holed below the waterline by the Supreme Court if it strikes down as unconstitutional the "individual mandate" compelling the American people to buy health insurance -- and not some bare-bones health insurance, approximate to liability insurance for cars, but the comprehensive kind, as determined by the Health and Human Services Director and enforced by the IRS. Oh, yes: Obama-care will not stand.

The Great Peasant Revolt, or, the state of the United States, Age of Obama, Year 2

(Updated and expanded, October 9, '10)

The United States is roiling. This Age of Obama has brought a wrack and upheaval in America beyond what even Obama-bashing right-wing reactionary rednecks like myself had reckoned on.

This is the greatest disquiet in American society in at least a generation, and what is called the mainstream press mostly missed the story, because it's part of the same elite that's looking over the palace balconies at all those uncouth, unlovely commoners in this Great Peasant Revolt.

It does seem that there's an entire class of people who deny or dismiss what President Obama and his Congress have wrought, or else blame the American people for not more joyfully giving their country away and deferring to their elite while it "remakes the nation" unrecognizably. There's a conventional wisdom among the conventional Obama-apologists to explain it all away, invoking the old "it's the economy, stupid" formulation from the 1992 presidential campaign, that if the natives are restless then it's a simple matter of their impatience with the pace of Obama's economic "recovery," which is perceptible mainly to the most partisan Democrats and the press. It is the economy, sure enough, but it's everything else as well.

So here is a pitifully inadequate list of recent news to give some small sense of the state of the United States in the Age of Obama, Year 2. Anyone depending for their news on the news sections of this Chronicle-Herald would be oblivious to all of the following points and more besides.

In just the first year and a half under Obama, the national debt "held by the public" went from $6.3 trillion or $20,000 per American, to $8.8 trillion or $28,000 for every man, woman and child in America -- more debt in 19 months than was accumulated under the first 40 presidencies over 200 years.

In the 19 months since Obama's $862 billion stimulus to "create or save 3 to 4 million jobs," the American economy has lost 2.6 million jobs net.

More Americans have died in Afghanistan in 20 months under Obama and his suicidally-restrictive rules of engagement, than died in seven years under Bush.

The Commandant of the Marine Corps confirmed that Obama's announced date-certain for starting the Afghan withdrawal is giving "sustenance" to the enemy.

The ruinous ramifications of Obama's unread, 2,700-page health-care bill have been coming out every few days, from the very East German requirement that businesses file two "1099" forms for every transaction with another party having dealings amounting to more than $600 a year, to increases in premiums of up to 9 percent, to the outlawing of the cheaper, no-frills prescription plans held by over 3 million seniors.

Obama's mad "Cash for Clunkers" policy of destroying used cars caused a needless and predictable shortage, so that Edmunds.com found the average used car a year later cost $1,800 more.

Obama's allies at the "Business Roundtable" turned on him, its chairman blaming him and his Congress for an "increasingly hostile environment for investment and job creation."

Obama's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is regulating the smaller operators in the New England groundfishery out of business, its Obama-appointed administrator having declared openly her intent to "remove" a "significant fraction of the vessels."

The House of Representatives didn't bother itself with passing a budget for the first time since the Budget Act of 1974, despite that House Democrats have a 77-seat margin and can pass any old thing they please.

The Democratic Chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, who was as responsible as any single figure for Obama's unread, 2,300-page finance reform bill, announced that "no-one will know until this is actually in place how it works."

Two Justice Department lawyers testified that Obama's Civil Rights Division is "hostile" to "race-neutral enforcement of the Voting Rights Act."

The Immigration and Customs Enforcement union council voted "no confidence" in the Obama administration, 259 to 0, charging that Obama's ICE director and assistant director "have abandoned the agency's core mission."

When the president of Mexico used the occasion of his address to a joint session of Congress to denounce Arizona's modest and necessary steps against its illegal alien invasion -- which steps are supported by two-thirds of the American people -- the Democratic majority and Obama administration attendees rose in a 20-second standing ovation, after which the Obamas threw him a White House celebrity dance party.

And after Obama's cancellation of America's manned space program, for the first time since there's there's been such a thing as manned space flight, his NASA administrator listed three charges given him by Obama, none of which had anything to do with space, and "perhaps foremost" of which was "to reach out to the Muslim world."

Obama and his Congress have taken things uniformly from bad to worse, and conjured new troubles where there were none. They have replaced the consent of the governed with contempt for the governed, and they do not know better than the American people what's good for them. Obama's campaign was a fraud, and the question now is whether he'll even offer for re-election, or if he'll tell the American people that they can't fire him, he quits. There's a reckoning coming.

America's conservatism not melting for Obama

Conservative nation: Gallup polling as of August 2009 showed "self-identified conservatives outnumber self-identified liberals in all 50 states of the Union," by statistically-significant margins in all states but three. Graphic from Gallup.com.

America is a fundamentally conservative nation, and the most un-conservative of American presidents has thus far not shifted America's conservatism so much as reinforced it. President Obama has run up against D.H. Lawrence's observation on "the essential American soul": "It has never yet melted."

At the six-month mark of Obama's presidency, the USA Today/Gallup poll ranked his job approval rating "10th among the 12 post-World War II presidents at this point in their tenures."

By late July and early August, the average of all the current polling at Real Clear Politics showed Obama's job approval dipping into the 53rd percentile. Obama was down to his baseline of 53 per cent which had voted to make him president nine months earlier.

And it mostly gets worse from the job approval ratings. Disapproval of Obama on health-care hit 52 per cent in the August Quinnipiac poll, with 39 per cent approving.

Obama's $787 billion "stimulus" had become such an anathema by June that the Rasmussen poll found a plurality actually wanted the unspent provisions "canceled," 45-36 per cent. Only 34 per cent in the July Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll were calling the stimulus a "good idea."
Even after several days of press enthusing over Obama's "wildly popular" cash-for-clunkers handout, 54 per cent opposed extending the program in an August Rasmussen poll, with just 33 per cent in support. The press was apparently using some alternate definition of "popular."

And 65 per cent opposed Obama's intended closure of the Guantanamo Bay terrorist detention camp in the June USA Today/Gallup poll, with only 18 per cent accepting Obama's claim that Guantanamo "has weakened American national security."

So far in this "Age of Obama," the Gallup poll has registered an upswing in even the more controversial conservatism in America. In March, Americans placed economic growth ahead of "environmental protection," 51-42 per cent: a reversal from 42-49 per cent in 2008 and the worst showing for environmentalism in the quarter-century of Gallup polling on the question.

In April, Gallup recorded a new low in support for a handgun ban: 29 per cent. Which is half the 60 per cent that favoured the ban when Gallup began polling the question -- in the late 1950s.

In May, Gallup found pro-lifers outnumbering pro-choicers 51-45 per cent: a reversal from 44-50 per cent in '08 and "the first time a majority of U.S. adults have identified themselves as pro-life since Gallup began asking this question in 1995."

In June, Gallup's ideology survey showed conservatives unmoved, at 40 per cent "conservative" to 21 per cent "liberal." That breakdown was 40-19 per cent in 2004, when President Bush and Republican majorities in both houses of Congress were re-elected.

Then a July Gallup poll made it explicit: Americans reported becoming more conservative in their politics, 39-18 per cent. The nation is actually more conservative in Obama's first year than it was in Bush's last.

Then there are the unforgiving tendencies of American democracy. In the century and a half since the Civil War, the party holding the presidency has lost seats in every mid-term Congressional election but three.

In the past four decades, the very longest any party has held the White House and both houses of Congress is four years. By election day in November of next year, Democrats will have controlled both houses of Congress for four years and the White House for two.

Congress' job approval rating in the Real Clear Politics average recently went below 30 per cent. And the Rasmussen "who do you trust" survey which had Democrats leading Republicans on ten issues out of ten before the election, had been turned upside-down nine months later, with Republicans leading Democrats on eight issues out of ten.

So it's not the wildest guess that Republicans will gain in the midterm elections of November next year. Which doesn't necessarily mean they'll form majorities in one or both houses of Congress: the Democrat advantage in the 435-member House is 78 seats, and it typically takes more than a single election to dislodge so many incumbents. But Republicans should have a stronger hand after the midterms, and should be better able to tie Obama's hands in the second half of his presidency.

Obama and his Congress are up against a clock. They're unlikely to see such supermajorities past November of next year, and the closer to the fall of 2010 they come, the more fearful they'll have to be of pushing the trickier items on their agenda -- like legalizing 11 million illegal aliens while the unemployment rate is around 10 per cent and governments can't cover their liabilities as it is. Not to mention the unforeseeable events that distract and preoccupy a government, or blow it off its intended course altogether.

Polls are not static, of course, and neither are they elections. It's better to hold the power and lose the polls than vice-versa. But there has to be some significance in polling that's this soft, this soon.

Fraudulently campaigning on the likes of "a net spending cut," and proclaiming oneself the "change" when the system has crashed just a month and a half before election day, can go a long way to winning votes -- once. But it did nothing to alter the fact of America's conservatism. America is a fundamentally conservative nation that's got itself a radicalized leftist national government, and that discrepancy will have to be resolved somehow or other, sooner or later.

Andrew W. Smith, published in The Chronicle-Herald, Halifax, Nova Scotia