Herman Cain for President

The Naked Dollar supports Herman Cain for president.

The others are wanting, and we all know why. But it isn't simply that Cain is the last conservative standing: I really, really like this guy. He's the opposite of Rick Perry. the more you know him, the more highly you think of him. And I have friends who know him personally who tell me he's the real deal.

I think Cain's ideas are spot on, and he articulates them brilliantly. I love the fact he came from nothing and achieved so much, but none of it on the back of racial preferences. He has fantastic private sector experience. He ran the Kansas City Fed. He has a degree in math and a masters in computer science. No dummy.

But more than that, he is the personification of the American Dream, and it's something he believes in to his core. He even won the Horatio Alger Award.

He has never held an elective office. So? You want another career politician? Cain has run things, big companies. This should translate well into running the executive branch, certainly better than some senator who's run a staff of thirty. He understands the economy and that government can't create jobs, only destroy them.

He has no foreign policy experience, that's true. But neither did Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, or Barack Obama. The majority of our presidents have had no foreign policy experience. You trust that you're electing someone with intelligence who will figure it out. I have few doubts about Cain on this score.

Can he win the nomination? Yes. Conservatives have flirted with Bachmann and Perry and are largely dismissing them. Few will get comfortable with Romney. I haven't. That leaves Cain.

But here's the thing. Cain has the highest positive intensity score of any candidate by a wide margin. It's apparently the highest ever measured by Gallup. You can read about it here. His only issue is low name recognition, but the data suggest that as he becomes better known, his support will continue to grow. Just today, Cain pulled even with Romney in a national poll.

Can he beat Obama? Hell, yes. Obama enters the race in a weaker position than almost any incumbent in a century. He is hemorrhaging support from every quarter, and the economy won't recover in time to bail him out (because his own policies are keeping it down). And Cain will eat into the only strong support that Obama still has: the black vote.

Romney on the Stump

I went to a Mitt Romney breakfast this morning...lots of heavy hitters in the room. I asked Romney the following:

Our tax code is a job-killing monster, and less well understood is that it is an enormous source of political corruption. I read you policy PDF, and while you make some tweaks to the system, you seem to leave the monster in place. Would you comment?

Romney's response was an very skillful dodge, a wink and a nod. He said he'll do a few things on day one, like lower the corporate rate to 25%, and that "longer term" he'd work towards a "flatter, fairer system."

Here are my problems with this approach:

1. Presidents don't have a mandate to do something unless they actually say they're going to do it (Obama has learned this).
2. As a new president, you have maybe 18 months to do the big things. If the real fix isn't part of the initial policy push, you miss the window.

Romney fears that if he's overly specific now, he leaves himself politically exposed (coddles the rich, etc.). Sure, liberals and the MSM will go nuts, but so what? They're going to eviscerate the Republican candidate no matter who it is and no matter what he or she stands for. Have no doubt that serious opposition research is being done right now into every deal Bain Capital ever did.

But also, as I've written before, Republicans only win when their base is fired up. "Trust me, I'll take care of it once I'm elected" - does this fire you up?

Having said all this, Romney is markedly better on the stump than four years ago. He speaks asperationally about America in a way that is very Reaganesque. You end up wanting to like him, which wasn't the case last time.

We'll see how this all develops. I have a crush on Herman Cain at the moment.

No Doubt

I was with a friend the other day who knows Obama quite well - someone who spends a lot of time with him. I was genuinely curious about some things, but here was part of our discussion:

SJ: We took a man who wasn't even qualified to run a small division at General Electric and we decided that he could somehow be president of the United States. My question is, when Barack Obama is alone, when he is lost in his own thoughts, do you think he ever has moments of self-doubt, that maybe - just maybe - he's gotten in over his own head?

Friend: No.

There was no hesitation. Washington and Lincoln, our two greatest presidents, were famously plagued by self-doubt, and yet this just-turned-50 phantom who has never run anything, has never fought in a battle, who taught briefly and organized communities briefly, is supremely confident he is the right man for the task.

My friend did add that maybe Obama had some doubts about some of the people he had surrounded himself with, i.e. they aren't his equals.

The Hair Pair

John Edwards, you are but a distant memory.

George Pataki Is Thinking of Entering the Race

One question: Is he Nuts?

Separated at Birth?

Private equity honcho Leon Black and Borscht Belt comedian Buddy Hackett.

Just sayin'.

The Best Tell That Dems Are Truly Panicked About 2012

With everything else going on, no one talks about the Supreme Court much these days. But we all know how critical it is, particularly with major elements of Obamacare likely to be adjudicated upon in the next couple of years. Right now, the court has four conservatives (specifically, Consitutionalists) and four liberals (specifically, liberals). The ninth, Anthony Kennedy, is someone who's judicial philosophy at times seems guided by a random number generator, but lately he has tended conservative.

The court, in other words, is almost dead even with votes frequently hinging on Kennedy, whom no one understands. Now, consider the ages of the justices:

Ginsburg         78
Scalia              75
Kennedy          75
Breyer             72
Thomas           63
Alito                61
SotoMayor        57
Roberts            56
Kagan              51

The conservatives are going nowhere until at least after the next election. They will opine from hospital beds if they need to. On the liberal side, Sotomayor and Kagan will be with us until gravity forces the universe to collapse back on itself. Breyer and Ginsburg are more interesting, but particularly Ginsburg. At 78, she is the oldest member of the bench.  She has also been fighting pancreatic cancer for some time.

Ginsburg is a proto-liberal. Her background includes time on the legal ramparts of feminism and the ACLU. Neither she, nor the Democrat establishment, will tolerate her seat falling into the hands of someone who thinks the constitution actually trumps social justice.

It is said that the Republicans have a weak field. As you know, the Naked Dollar believes that the Republicans could nominate a toaster and it will beat Obama, who may be the weakest incumbent of our lifetimes. Yesterday, for the first time, the prediction market odds on his re-election dropped below 50% for the first time. The scenarios for his successful re-election get fewer with each passing day and each new bit of horrible news.

Despite their capacity for self-delusion, these facts will seep into the liberal firmament. The necessary response will be for Ginsburg to yield her seat, probably around next spring. That's when you'll have confirmation that panic has set in. (Note: if Breyer resigns as well, the panic will have morphed into full-blown hysteria.)

Mark it on your calendars.

Will Obama Be Worth It?

I have a friend who voted for Obama using the following logic:

1. McCain would be a terrible president, leaving the conservative movement in disarray as people continue to confuse Republicans with conservatives. Hillary then gets elected and our collective pain gets stretched far into the future.
2. Obama would be worse, but he would focus our thinking. The pain will be worth it. Carter gave us Reagan, after all.

Obama, in other words, is some sort of perverse medicine we need to take to crystallize our national thinking and banish collectivism forever into the intellectual wilderness.
 
Whether my friend was right remains an open question. About point one, there can be no doubt. While John McCain would not have been an O-style disaster, he would have been pretty bad, and since he's a Republican, people would have blamed - incorrectly - the conservative movement for the country's problems.

No doubt you know of this confusion. It's not unlike liberals saying, "You have no credibility criticizing Obama's spending because Bush spent a lot, too!"

Leaving aside the fact that Obama has ratcheted the problem to a whole new level, I don't know a single conservative who was pleased with Bush's spending habits, particularly with things like the prescription drug entitlement. But the public is frequently confused between the conservative movement and the Republican Party. That they grew far apart accounted for the birth of the Tea Party, a development that makes the Republican establishment highly dyspeptic.

So, there are reasons not to be too upset with the last election. The wrong Republican was nominated. Conservatism would have lost relevance for decades, potentially.

But will the damage be worth it? We can't know, at this point, but I grow increasingly optimistic that the answer will be yes - by a hair. I believe that in a year and a half the Republican party will control all the White House and both branches of Congress, and they will have a mandate for some long overdue, radical change. A new tax code. Entitlement reform. Repeal of the twin job-killing monsters Obamacare and Dodd-Frank. Big stuff, and much needed.

Whether Republicans will actually do these things is probably a bigger question than whether they will have the opportunity. This all depends on who moves into the White House.

Whether any of this will offset the incredible damage Obama has managed to inflict in a such a short period of time is still debatable. He is a wrecking ball. Can you imagine if the House hadn't shifted last year? We'd be dealing with things like cap & trade, too.

At least we have a definitive answer that Keynesianism doesn't work. Hopefully, that lesson, and all the others, will be internalized for at least a generation or two, at which point we'll be seduced into making the same mistakes all over again by some new group of charlatans.

Best Cartoon in a While

Even the teleprompter approach isn't working anymore.

This presidency is in full meltdown. Not a single bullet left in the chamber.

What do You Mean, You Don't Want a Bridge?

So, this guy Chuck Todd is a political analyst for NBC. I want you to read the following statement that he made on air last week:

"The old rules no longer apply. There are two more lessons we learned last night. First, the old rules to twist recalcitrant arms no longer apply. Tea Party and conservative House members don’t really care about important committee assignments. They don’t place a value on fundraising help. And earmarks and extra pork for their districts? Forget about it. As the Washington Post recounts, GOP Rep. Jeff Flake -- who opposes Boehner’s bill -- “praised the lack of horse-trading of the type that marred passage of Obama’s health-care legislation. ‘It is the most refreshing thing in the world to see what’s going on in there,’ Flake said. ‘This kind of negotiation a couple years ago would have cost about $20 billion.’” It is refreshing. But it’s also a curse if you’re trying to get things done."

You can hear the lament in Todd's voice. In the "good old days," i.e. a year or two ago, Boehner would have taken his difficult members into the smokey room and asked them what they wanted. Ways and Means? Maybe a nice bridge? Done. Thank you for your vote.

The Democrat definition of compromise is when Republicans do what they want. Compromise itself becomes the endgame, the virtue, but only when it needs to be. It wasn't much of a virtue during the Obamacare debate, when the GOP was roundly ignored. Todd and others loved the Republicans of old because, basically, they could be bought when it became necessary. The smokey room is all about doing out money and power in exchange for betraying the voters who put you into office. Bribery, in other words.

And now, here come a bunch of newbies who don't know how the game is played. Such insolence! Why, these people are, are....terrorists! Yes, that's it. Terrorists!

Compromise is not a virtue when the deal sucks. Decades of compromise have led us to where we now find ourselves.