The Choice: 1964

They said he was crazy, mad, a loose-canon, an extremist, a warmonger.  The nation was warned over and over and over again, by Democrats and their friends in the media, that if Barry Goldwater won the presidency in 1964, Armageddon might be the ultimate result.  Surely he would plunge headlong into a war in Vietnam that might bring in the Chinese or worse, the Soviets.  Social Security and any aid from Washington would be taken away.  The country would revert back to the nineteenth century, if not the eighteenth.

The only logical choice was the sitting president, Lyndon Johnson, who assumed the office tragically on November 22, 1963 when the beloved John F. Kennedy fell to an assassin’s bullet.  LBJ would carry the nation forward, not backward.  Progress would be the order of the day.

The two political titans locked horns throughout the fall of 1964.  Goldwater, a senator from Arizona, represented the conservative wing of the Republican Party, a faction that had yet to see one of its own as a presidential nominee, at least not since Calvin Coolidge.  GOP candidates thus far had been of the Rockefeller type, moderates, if not outright liberals, seeking a consensus with the other side of the aisle.  Conservatives still stung from Bob Taft’s nomination loss to Ike in 1952.  Now they would have one of their own, one who would bring back traditional values of government.

Goldwater always stood on the side of freedom and the Constitution, as the Founders intended it.  That’s why he opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, not because he was a racist, as they alleged, but because the law had specific provisions that forcefully integrated public accommodations, such as restaurants, and called for equal employment opportunity.  These interfered with the basic right of private property, he believed.  A business owner had the right to hire whomever he wanted and serve whomever he wanted.  The government had no right to interfere.

Johnson, a longtime congressman and senator from Texas, who served ably as the upper chamber’s majority leader before becoming JFK’s running mate in 1960, had an opposite approach.  He already begun laying out his vision, not for a traditional role of government, but for a transformed America, consisting of a raft of new programs he collectively termed the Great Society.

The government would declare war on poverty and illiteracy.  There would be help for the aged, the poor, the downtrodden, the ignorant, as well as displaced minorities.  The government would play an active role in the lives of the people from cradle to grave, controlling businesses, schools, and making sure everyone had enough provision for a decent life, a role that the Founders never intended for the federal government to maintain.

The choice for president in 1964 couldn’t have been any starker.

But given the circumstances, it might not be much of a choice at all.  Johnson knew, as did Goldwater, that there was only a microscopic chance that the people would change parties.  The nation saw Johnson as a continuation of the martyred Kennedy and, with emotions running high, was not eager for any change in leadership.  To elect a new president would see three different chief executives within one year.  That was something the people simply would not accept.

But Johnson wanted more.  He sought a landslide, a clear mandate to hoist his Great Society over the entire country.  And hopefully, if he were lucky, he may even set the electoral record.

With the Cold War near full blaze, foreign affairs also held a prominent place in the campaign, as it had in 1960.  Taking a page from Woodrow Wilson in 1916, and FDR in 1940, LBJ sought the mantle of peace candidate, while tarring Goldwater with the brush of war.  He reminded the American people wherever he campaigned that he would not send U.S. troops to fight an Asian war that should be fought by Asian troops, an almost identical line uttered by FDR.  With Goldwater, Johnson repeatedly said, the nation most assuredly would be in Vietnam with half a million troops within two years.  The results could be catastrophic.

To drive his point home, Johnson unveiled the infamous “Daisy Ad.”  Though airing only one time, the ad ran in primetime during the Monday night movie on CBS, where 50 million viewers saw it.

The spot featured a cute little girl in a field plucking pedals from a daisy, counting each one.  When she reaches nine, a sinister voice, presumably Goldwater’s, begins counting down from ten, as the camera zooms in to a close-up of the pupil of the little girl’s eye.  Reaching zero, a nuclear bomb explodes.  Johnson’s voice is then heard:  “These are the stakes, to make a world in which all of God’s children can live, or to go into the dark.  We must either love each other, or we must die.”

The commercial ends, as do all LBJ ads, with a narrator:  “Vote for President Johnson on November 3.  The Stakes Are Too High For You To Stay Home.”

The inference was clear:  With Johnson, the nation would enjoy peace and harmony; with Goldwater, all would die.

To plunge the knife even deeper into Goldwater, Johnson ran a second, equally damaging ad, reminding the elderly, as well as everyone else, that the Social Security program was also under threat.  In the ad, a pair of hands, obviously those of Goldwater, rummages through a wallet.  Coming to the Social Security card, it is quickly ripped in half and flung on the table.  There would be no help from Washington under a President Goldwater and Social Security might well be destroyed.

There were also ads linking Goldwater to the Ku Klux Klan, to renewed nuclear testing that would poison children, and to being a liar and political flip-flopper at odds with the mainstream of the Republican Party.

Goldwater knew he was being portrayed as an extremist.  His nominating speech did not help matters, though.  Given the fact that he was going to lose the election, no matter what he did, Goldwater did not worry about offending anyone, and said what he believed the American people needed to hear, rather than what they wanted to hear.  His statement from the convention speech, “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice,” was played endlessly throughout the fall.

Knowing he was up against a wall with many voters, Goldwater chose as his campaign slogan, “In your heart, you know he’s right.”  Johnson’s friends in the media had a field day, converting it into “In your gut, you know he’s nuts.”  Goldwater could not escape the tagline.

With the emotion of the Kennedy assassination, and the devastatingly effective Johnson campaign, Goldwater was humiliated on Election Day, carrying only five states – his home state of Arizona and four in the deep south – and just 39 percent of the popular vote.

Johnson had his landslide.  Liberalism had its mandate.  Conservatism had its tombstone.  Or so it seemed.

With the election over, the nation set off on a new, leftward course, seeing the largest domestic expansion of government since the New Deal, with new social programs that would redistribute trillions of dollars in wealth with the creation of a European-style welfare state, meddle in purely local affairs such as schools, and place the country’s finances on the road to bankruptcy; a vast expansion of a foreign war that eventually saw half a million men on the battlefield in Vietnam and 60,000 of them in body bags; a nation divided as it had not been in a hundred years, with cities in riotous blaze across the land, mass protests in the streets, and race relations set back years, all under the watchful eye of Lyndon Johnson.

And they warned us not to elect the crazy one.

Teaching Civic Virtue

Today, we have in our society a crisis.  I’m not talking about the debt crisis, though that certainly qualifies, but a crisis in our very attitudes as Americans.  We used to believe in ourselves and in our founding principles but those values have slowly eroded to the point of nonexistence.

George Washington reminded us in his famous Farewell Address in 1796 that “Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports.”

Washington was right but sadly, we seem to have lost the battle over our local schools, particularly the right to teach what we want, especially the Ten Commandments.  We can’t even post them in the halls without out the threat of a lawsuit and a court rebuke.  Though we can fight to win them back, the process will take years, if not decades.

But I think we should look at the immediate problem another way.  Instead of getting in a big, ugly fight over religion, complete with a host of costly federal lawsuits that we are unlikely to win, we should begin the reclamation process by simply teaching civic virtue, that is certain behaviors and attitudes that are essential for the success of any free nation, values that we once possessed in great abundance.

For instance, rather than teach “Thou Shalt Not Kill,” we can simply instruct students in junior high and in high school on the Declaration of Independence and what it really means – “We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.”  This phrase should be written on the hearts of all Americans.

Rather than have students learn only the Constitution’s preamble, as we all did in junior high, we should have them learn the Bill of Rights and recite those in addition.  Our children need to learn that there are sacred rights enshrined in the Constitution.

We don’t have to teach “Thou Shalt Not Steal,” but the simple fact that you have no right to take what does not belong to you.  Every person in this country is entitled to his or her property and no one, not even the government, has a right to take it from you.  If you steal, there will be legal consequences.  Our nation is one of laws, not men, and the law must be respected.

Kids today should learn that these quintessential American values are the backbone of our great nation.

If they could learn, from an early age, that they have no legal right to harm another person, to take their property, or to deny them any rights, then it might just begin a monumental change in our society.

As my great-grandfather used to say, “Your rights stop at the end of your nose.”  Anything past that point is not yours to take or yours to demand.

Teaching civic virtue could also begin to diminish what has become an “Entitlement Society.”  Many people today believe they are entitled to property that is not theirs.  And I’m not talking about personal theft here, but another form of robbery, government assistance programs.

When the government taxes its productive citizens and gives that money to non-productive citizens, it violates the sacred principles embodied in the Declaration and the values the nation was founded upon, as well as the protections in the Bill of Rights.

Until the New Deal in the 1930s, such government action was always held to be unconstitutional.  The government could not directly take a person’s property, in this case money, without due process, then hand it to the man down the street.  It was not right then and it is not right now.

Sadly many of our unproductive citizens believe they have a right to government aid for the entirety of their lives.  But students should learn that there is very little that the Constitution entitles you to, except your life, your liberty, and your property.  You are not entitled to the life of another, to the liberty of another, or to the property of another.

You are also entitled to the right to pursue happiness.  You do not have the right to demand it.  You are not promised happiness but the right to pursue it, as long as you don’t harm another.

But it remains a sad truth that many Americans do not possess even a basic understanding of these essential values or even a rudimentary knowledge of our governmental system.

Under the headline, “How Dumb Are We?”, Newsweek reported its recent finding from a survey of 1,000 U.S. citizens, in which the magazine asked the participants to take the nation’s official citizenship test.  The results were shocking, that is shockingly bad.

Thirty-eight percent failed the exam outright.  Twenty-nine percent could not name the current vice president.  Seventy-three percent were unable to correctly say why the United States fought the Cold War.  Forty-four percent failed to define the Bill of Rights.  Six percent couldn’t circle Independence Day on a calendar.

Thomas Jefferson would be horrified.  A civilized society, Jefferson believed, could not remain both ignorant and free.  So true.

We must correct this outrageous state of ignorance.  No student should be awarded a high school diploma if they can’t pass a basic citizenship test.

By dumbing down our schools, all for political reasons, we have only hurt ourselves.  And if we don’t get our schools out of the realm of social engineering and turn them back into centers of learning, then we will fail as a nation.  That does not take an Ivy League degree to figure out.

The Evolving View of Government

“The lesson should constantly be enforced,” wrote President Grover Cleveland in 1887, “that though the people support the Government the Government should not support the people.”

Cleveland made this pronouncement as he vetoed the Texas Seed Bill, a small $10,000 appropriation aimed at providing assistance to drought-stricken farmers in the Lone Star State.

The Constitution did not allow the federal government to spend money on public charity, the Jeffersonian Cleveland believed, and if Washington started down the road of paternalism, where would it end?

Such strict construction of the Constitution, a source of pride for true conservatives, drives leftwing scholars and pundits crazy, causing them to denigrate any President who had the temerity to believe in such “outdated” and “old fashioned” thinking.

For Jack Beatty, a senior editor of The Atlantic Monthly, an analyst on NPR, and author of The Age of Betrayal:  The Triumph of Money in America, 1865-1900, such views raise important questions:

“Why did the people support a government that on principle refused to support them, that wouldn’t spend pennies to save farmers from ruin?” he asked.  “Why return to office politicians like Cleveland, who vetoed three times as many bills in one term as all his predecessors combined?  What had gone wrong with the Republican experiment in positive government for the country to settle for negative government?”

Beatty believes, not in the conservative principles of Thomas Jefferson, but those of the more liberal Abraham Lincoln, a philosophy that is an antithesis to Cleveland’s.  Lincoln had broken the old Jeffersonian mold and provided a new view of the role of government in the every day lives of the people.  He once said, “The legitimate object of government is to do for a community of people, whatever they need to have done, but can not do, at all, or can not so well do, for themselves – in their separate, and individual capacities.”

Which begs another question:  Who decides what the people can or cannot do for themselves?  Or if they can do it good enough to suit the government?

Ultimately the people rejected the Lincoln line of thinking in favor of conservatism, at least for a while.  Nineteenth century Americans, and their early 20^th century brethren, did not believe in an active, or positive, government.  The American Revolution, contrary to Beatty’s thinking, was not about creating an energetic government.  Our forebears held true to the Jeffersonian admonition, “That government is best which governs least.”

The Jeffersonian view carried over into the early 20^th century.

In 1927, the Mississippi River overflowed its banks in one of the worst floods in the nation’s history.  Herbert Hoover, a great engineer and Commerce Secretary under President Calvin Coolidge, traveled to the South to offer his assistance.  But unlike the situation in New Orleans eight decades later with Hurricane Katrina, local people told Hoover to leave.  They did not trust the federal government and did not want out-of-town bureaucrats sticking their noses in local affairs.

People in those days had honor and pride, believing they could handle their own problems.  There were no shouts of “help” from stranded citizens who suffered from the severe flooding, as we saw around the Superdome.  They understood that with government aid also came government rules, regulation, oversight, and control.  Once the government got in, it might be next to impossible to get them out.

It was not until the horrible period of the Great Depression in the 1930s, when the economy nearly imploded, that Americans, for the first time, began to look to government for every day things.  FDR used massive government aid to help people affected by the depression, the first direct assistance in U.S. history.

From that point on, a dependence on government grew within the American people and has continued to increase.

Americans have evolved from a freedom-loving people that looked to themselves for their own livelihood to believing that government has a positive role to play in society.

The Constitution, earlier Americans correctly understood, does not contain any language that allows the government to spend money for public assistance.  It was always held to be unconstitutional to tax one group of citizens and give it to another.

But all that has changed now and the situation is much worse.  It has recently been reported that government handouts equal 35 percent of all wages in the United States.  In 1960 the figure was just 10 percent.  Forty-four million Americans are now on food stamps and fifty million receive Medicaid.  Today, fifty-eight percent of all government spending is on entitlement programs.

But what is even scarier is that it seems as if a majority of Americans believe the federal government should have at least some positive role in the lives of the people.  Many believe the government should take care of its citizens from cradle to grave.  Early Americans would have thought such thinking downright dangerous.

President Cleveland, in the late 19^th century, could foresee a potential threat to limited government if Washington got in the handout business.  He took the opportunity in his second inaugural address to remind the people that the “lessons of paternalism ought to be unlearned,” he said.  “Every thoughtful American must realize the importance of checking at its beginning any tendency in public or private station to regard frugality and economy as virtues which we may safely outgrow. The toleration of this idea results in the waste of the people’s money by their chosen servants and encourages prodigality and extravagance in the home life of our countrymen.”

In our time of near-bankruptcy, America would do well to elect a president in the mold of Cleveland, one who will stop the wealth re-distribution scheme in full swing in Washington and return our nation to the ideals and values that made it great.

 

Tales From The Liberal Playbook

From studying American political history, it seems as if liberals have a secret playbook and have been using it from the early days of the Republic, handing it down to each succeeding generation.

Liberals seem to know exactly what to do when any situation arises and history is full of interesting parallels.

1.  Use the Cover of a Crisis to Implement Your Agenda and Smash Your Political Enemies.

America’s first political party, the Federalists, the Party of George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and John Adams, led the nation from 1789 to 1801, a period of twelve years that included control of the presidency and both houses of Congress.

The liberal party of its day, Federalist lawmakers imposed a wide variety of direct taxes upon the people, centralized the banking system, and ran rough shod over the new Bill of Rights with their crown jewel – the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798.

With a quasi-war brewing with France, and with the hysteria it was causing, these acts were supposedly enacted to help secure and protect the homeland.  But the left has long used deceit to hide their true intentions, particularly during a crisis.  The real target was Thomas Jefferson’s Republican opposition.

The Alien and Sedition Acts consisted of four bills, three of which were specifically designed to weaken the Jeffersonians.

The Naturalization Act raised the period of residence required for citizenship from five years to fourteen years.  The reason for this was quite simple – a majority of new immigrants from Europe were joining the Republicans.

The Alien Act authorized the president to summarily deport any aliens, regardless of country, that he deemed dangerous “to the peace and safety” of the United States.  Under the act, aliens would not receive a jury trial and the president was not required to explain or justify his decision.  Jefferson considered the bill “worthy of the eighth or ninth century.”  Like the Naturalization Act, the Alien Act was one of pure political partisanship.

The most controversial was the Sedition Act.  It provided fines of up to $2,000 and jail sentences of up to two years for anyone who publicly criticized the president, members of Congress, or other administration officials, by publishing “false, scandalous and malicious” accusations.  It was a clear violation of freedom of speech and freedom of the press, taking aim at Republican newspapers, which were springing up all over the nation.

After the Senate passed the Sedition Act, ironically on July 4, 1798, Federalist leaders toasted the president:  “John Adams.  May he, like Samson, slay thousands of Frenchmen with the jawbone of Jefferson.”

Under this act, a number of Jeffersonian newspaper editors were charged with sedition, and those brought to trial were convicted, fined, and sent to prison.

Congress also established sunset provisions for most of these new laws, allowing them to expire just after the 1800 elections when Adams would have secured a second term.  If Federalists retained power, those laws would no longer be necessary.  This shows the level of politics attached to the new acts.

But despite administration efforts to maintain power, the people rose up against what Jefferson called “a reign of witches,” and ousted the Federalist Party from the White House and both Houses of Congress.  The party never again held power.

FDR used the Great Depression to “reform” capitalism with a litany of new government programs and newly discovered powers.  The social welfare state we now live in was born in the 1930s.

And as we well recall, Obama’s former chief of staff, now Mayor of Chicago, Rahm Emanuel, famously said during the economic panic, “Never let a serious crisis go to waste.”  This is liberal thinking in its finest.  They simply cannot express what they really want to do so they use a crisis as a way to pass laws they know the people will not support, like massive bank bailouts, stimulus spending packages, and financial regulatory bills to take more control over the nation’s economy.

But we must always remember what James Madison once said, “Crisis is the rallying cry of the tyrant.”

2.  When You Can’t Legislate Your Agenda, Use the Judiciary to Impose It.

Though the Federalists were routed in the 1800 elections, they were not down and out, but had one last trick up their sleeve – impose their agenda by judicial fiat, which is why liberals insist on a strong court system.

To keep Federalist policies in place, President Adams, in his last days in the White House, appointed a wealth of Federalist judges in the many new courts the out-going Federalist-controlled Congress hastily created.  They became known as Adams’ “midnight judges,” most of whom were named during the last night he resided in the Executive Mansion.

Adams also appointed John Marshall to the Chief Justiceship of the Supreme Court, a fierce proponent of nationalism.  Marshall used judicial power to solidify the Federalist agenda of centralizing power in Washington.  He never found a federal right he did not like.

Jefferson and Republicans in Congress fought hard to undue the Federalist-dominated judiciary with some success, but were unable to overturn it completely.

And for that, we have been living with a left-of-center judiciary nearly every step of the way.  The courts have imposed abortion rights, stripped prayer from schools, expanded eminent domain, limited property rights, interfered in state affairs, and generally caused mayhem, all in the name of liberalism.

3.  Smear, Slander, and Shame Your Enemies, Especially to Guard the All Important Supreme Court.

When it comes to conservative judges, especially for justices of the Supreme Court, liberals have vilified them in vicious personal attacks and smear campaigns in the hopes of protecting the one branch of government not subject to popular sovereignty.  By keeping the Court left of center, liberals can write laws from the bench and implement their unpopular policy goals with no opposition.

But to do that they must maintain control of the court system, especially the High Court, at all costs.

In 1888, in an effort to help end sectional tensions, President Grover Cleveland appointed Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar of Mississippi to an associate position on the United States Supreme Court.

Congressional liberals, mainly from the North, attacked Lamar, not as a Southerner, which they hated, but as “unqualified” to sit on the High Court.  One Massachusetts Senator opposed Lamar “not because I doubted his eminent integrity and ability, but because I thought that he had little professional experience and no judicial experience.”

The San Francisco Chronicle believed Lamar leaned “naturally and spontaneously to the side of the strong against the weak.  He is a friend of monopolies.”

The name Bork, Scalia, Thomas, Roberts, or Alito could have been substituted for Lamar with little difference.  The attacks against conservative nominees to the Court have been nothing short of vicious.  And the left says it’s the right that is “mean spirited.”

4.  Use Deceit to Mask Your Real Intentions.

Liberals have always been disingenuous about their real goals.

In the 1890s, the left sought to implement an inflationary monetary policy based on the free and unlimited coinage of silver.  The nation was on the gold standard, but liberals wanted to inflate the currency supply with cheaper paper money and silver coins.  They claimed to want a system of bi-metallism, allowing both gold and silver to circulate, but in reality sought to replace gold, the money of the bankers they claimed, with silver, money for the poor.

Inflation, they contended, would help the poor, especially the nation’s farmers, who were in perpetual debt.  Inflating the currency with cheaper dollars would make it easier to pay those debts.

But Gresham’s Law states that “bad money drives good money out of circulation.”  This economic rule would allow the left to get what it wanted without actually having to legislate it.

They could not advocate a silver standard, so they sought a sneaky way to implement it.  If enough silver entered circulation, Gresham’s Law would kick in, eventually driving out gold, because people would hoard it, and the nation would be placed on a silver standard.

The plan failed, however, because the people did not want it and the gold standard was saved at the ballot box by electing a string of gold standard presidents.

Does this tactic sound familiar?

The Obama-Reid-Pelosi Administration did exactly the same thing with the 2010 Health Care Bill.  They wanted a “single payer” government run system but could not get it passed, so they instituted a “public option” in the name of “competition.”

But no private insurance company can ever hope to compete with the government, which does not have to worry about making a profit and can always draw from the public trough to make up any shortfalls.

Knowing full well that any government system would spike health insurance costs, Democrats hope that businesses will be forced, out of necessity, to drop their increasingly expensive private plans in favor of the cheaper public option, eventually placing the country under a “single payer” health care system.

Liberal Democrats claim they are against monopolies and the big insurance companies, which are supposedly in the pockets of the Republicans.  But it was conservatives who sought to end the state monopolies for health insurance companies, forcing them to compete nation-wide, a move that would dramatically lower the cost of premiums.  The left, as well as the insurance companies, have fought this idea tooth and nail.

So who really favors monopolies and the insurance companies?

5.  When All Else Fails, Use Class Warfare and Denigrate the Rich.

Democrats used a similar strategy of deceit to kill the flat tax proposal but eventually pulled out one of their oldest cards to finish it off – the Class Card.

The federal tax code is so dense and cumbersome that members of the House Ways and Means Committee do not even understand it, nor does the IRS.

One conservative plan is the flat tax, which would abolish the entire code and implement one flat rate for everyone.  Gone would be the thick and burdensome forms, to be replaced by a simple index card, whether for a business or an individual.  Wherever this plan has been enacted, the economy has soared.

Democrats immediately pounced on the idea as a sop to the rich.  But is it?

The plan gives generous personal exemptions for families and children.  For instance, under one proposal each adult would get a personal tax exemption of $17,500 and $5,000 per child.  The tax rate would be 17 percent.

So let’s look at two families, each with two parents and two children.

Family A makes $50,000 a year.  The exemptions would total $45,000 ($17,500 for each parent and $5,000 per child), meaning no tax would be assessed on that amount.  So Family A would pay 17 percent of the remaining $5,000 for a total tax bill of $850, much less than they are paying now.  If they added another child, the tax bill would fall to zero.

Family B makes $1,000,000 a year.  But they receive the same exemption of $45,000, meaning they pay 17 percent of the remaining $955,000 for a total tax bill of $162,350.  If they added another child, their tax bill would only fall to $161,500.

So who really benefits from this plan and who are Democrats actually protecting?

Liberals, even though they condemn Wall Street and the “rich,” have been among their strongest backers.  Remember, it was mostly conservative Republicans who fiercely opposed the bank bailouts and liberal Democrats who wanted to make the package larger.

These are just a few examples to demonstrate how liberals have been sticking to the script for more than 200 years.  They use tried-and-true methods because the right falls for it every time.  But Sun Tzu’s rule, “Know Your Enemy,” should be on the mind of every conservative when it comes to liberals and their playbook, and a working knowledge of American political history will provide that knowledge.

Presidential Decorum

Presidents today are seen, not as statesmen, but as celebrities.   All too often we elect leaders based on style, personality, and even looks, but not on qualities that really matter.  And with that, our presidents act accordingly, not like the chief executive of a republic but more in the role of a monarch.

This was evident from the beginning.  George Washington, the Father of the Country, could have, had he desired it, become king of the new nation.  He had that kind of popularity.  Fortunately for America, he also had a wealth of integrity and would not assume any such position for himself.

But Washington did place himself high above the people when we served as the nation’s first president.

He dressed extravagantly for his inauguration and arrived at the ceremony in an elaborate carriage pulled by a team of six white horses, the fancy limousine of its day.  As president, he even refused to shake hands with people, preferring instead to bow.

John Adams loved the idea of being president and, along with Alexander Hamilton, desired the office to be like that of a king.  He arrived at his inaugural in a fancy, horse-drawn carriage and wearing a lavish ceremonial sword and cockade, along with a powdered wig.

Adams even wanted to give the president an elaborate title, “His High Mightiness, the President of the United States and Protector of their Liberties.”  But Congress wisely rejected it.

When Thomas Jefferson became the third president in the election of 1800, he set out to change it all.  He feared the presidency was already becoming like a monarchy.

On inauguration day, he would not be driven to his ceremony in a carriage, but instead chose to walk from his boarding room to the Capitol.  He wore a simple suit and what he termed “republican” shoes, which did not have a buckle, considered aristocratic in his day, but laced instead.

As president, Jefferson refused to deliver the State of the Union message to Congress, preferring to send a written copy instead, because he felt the practice of a public speech resembled the King of England’s address to Parliament to open its sessions.

Jefferson had no servants to speak of in the White House, preferring to answer the front door himself, no matter what he was wearing at the time.  He dressed in plain suits and served food and wine to his guests rather than having a servant do it.  He also took out the rectangular dining table in favor of a circular one, so all who dined would seemingly be equal.  Jefferson always wanted to be seen as a man of the people.

After the Civil War, Ulysses S. Grant, the great hero throughout the North, won the presidency in 1868.  He loved the pomp and pageantry of the presidency, bringing back much of its grandeur.  He owned an extravagant carriage, palled around with the rich and famous, and vacationed in fancy resorts.  He loved it so much that he earnestly desired a third term but could not get it, mainly because his two-term administration was thoroughly corrupt.  Had he been allowed to continue in office, it is quite likely he would have remained until the day he died, just as FDR did.

Chester A. Arthur, who served as president from 1881 to 1885, was even worse than Grant.  Arthur was a dandy who loved the finer things in life and was not shy about it either.  He loved nothing more than shopping for new clothes.  He wore the latest fashions, perfumed his aristocratic whiskers, and sported expensive jewelry, a top hat and cane.  After winning the vice presidency, he went on an elaborate spending spree at Brooks Brothers, purchasing over $700 on new suits, a massive amount of money in the 1880s.

When he arrived in the Executive Mansion, Arthur was disgusted with what he found and almost refused to live there.  To bring the White House up to his standards, he spent lavishly on new furniture and decorations for the home.  He added valets, butlers, a French chef, and other servants befitting his notion of a head of state.

Mrs. James G. Blaine dined one evening with President Arthur, writing later that the “dinner was extremely elegant,” with “hardly a trace of the old White House taint being perceptible anywhere.”  The “flowers, the silver, the attendants, all showing the latest style…in expense and taste.”

Grover Cleveland, a Jeffersonian Democrat, sought to bring back a degree of simplicity to the White House when he assumed the presidency from Arthur in 1885.

Cleveland did not like what he called the “purely ornamental part of the office.”  He personally did not like luxuries, but especially while serving the people.  He particularly detested lavish parties and gatherings.  He got rid of all the servants Arthur had hired, as well as the chef.

Once, when invited to the ballpark to attend a baseball game, he politely turned down the offer, telling the team’s manager, “What do you think the American people would think of me if I wasted my time going to a ball game?”

Oh how we need such a man in the Oval Office today.

But instead we have President Barack Obama, who has taken the concept of the “celebrity president” to new heights.

The entirety of his 2008 campaign, as well as his short stint in the White House thus far, is a testament to this irrefutable fact.

To gain the presidency, Obama spent lavishly and raised a record $745 million.  According to a report out last week, Obama is laying plans for a $1 billion re-election campaign in 2012.  This is more than obscene.  It’s downright repulsive.  Anyone who would spend that kind of money has no business occupying the nation’s highest and noblest office.

While president, Obama has also spent extravagantly on fancy parties and gatherings.  His inauguration alone cost $170 million.

Within three weeks of entering the White House, Obama threw an expensive cocktail party in which Wagyu steak was served, a Japanese variety costing $125 per pound.  It’s one of the most expensive steaks in the world.

Entertainers such as Jennifer Lopez, Stevie Wonder, Tony Bennett, Martina McBride, Alison Kraus, Brad Paisley, Charley Pride, Seal, Sheryl Crow, Smokey Robinson, and John Legend, just to name a few, have preformed for the First Couple.  The White House also put on a Fiesta Latina night.

He has also thrown two lavish Super Bowl parties, serving food the First Lady has preached that we should not eat – bratwurst, cheeseburgers, deep dish pizza, buffalo wings, twice baked potatoes, ice cream, and beer, all at his latest bash.

Obama also broke the record for first-year president in foreign travel, visiting 20 nations.  By the end of his second year, he had spent a total of 58 days in 33 foreign countries, another record.

While the nation has been in an economic crisis, and is now dealing with a crisis in the Middle East, Obama recently took his 60^th golf outing this past weekend, already more than the entire eight years of George W. Bush, who took a beating in the media for any trips to the links.

It was also announced recently that the Obamas fly in a personal trainer from Chicago every week to keep the family in top shape.

All of this while the unemployment rate climbed above 10 percent.

According to Nile Gardiner, of the London Telegraph, the Obama administration “resembles a modern Ancien Regime,” the corrupt, party-driven reign of Louis XVI that led to the French Revolution.

What we need is the return of a little Jeffersonian simplicity in the White House and elect a president unconcerned about his image or entertaining himself.  The 45^th President of the United States should be more concerned about the great problems facing the nation.  We need a man of the people, not a king.

 

Last Among Equals

President Obama recently announced that his administration would no longer defend the constitutionality of the federal Defense of Marriage Act.

Whether one agrees with Obama or not on this issue, or with his tactic, it goes to the heart of a far more important and lasting question – which branch of government rightfully has the exclusive authority to interpret the Constitution and the laws of the United States?

Most contend that the power resides with the Supreme Court, even many conservatives.  Kenneth Starr has even referred to the Supreme Court as a “first among equals,” and while I have great respect for him, he is simply wrong in this regard.

Historically, such an opinion has no basis in fact.

The Supreme Court was never designated as the strongest of the three branches.  In fact, until the 1930s, it did not even have its own building, but met in the basement of the Capitol, or where ever Congress allowed them to meet.

This was not by mistake but intentional.  When examining a copy of the original map of the City of Washington, drawn up by its planners, one will find that no Supreme Court building exists.

It is also not an accident that provisions for the Supreme Court were placed in Article 3 of the Constitution, while Congress, intended to be the stronger of the three branches, was mentioned in Article 1, while the Office of the President was established in Article 2.

Furthermore, the Constitutional Convention of 1787 proposed a Council of Revision, a body that also included a supreme tribunal and would be armed with a veto power over all national and state laws.  The Council had the authority to review every law passed throughout the Union and to decide what would be allowed and what would not be.  The convention ultimately rejected the idea.

In a modified version, the proposed power was eventually split.  The Convention created both the Supreme Court, to exercise all judicial powers in cases brought before it, and a President who would take care of executive responsibilities, including the power to veto, or reject, bills passed by Congress.  The Supreme Court was not entrusted with such power.

The Court does not legally possess nearly the power it has usurped today, and does not have an exclusive right to interpret laws and the Constitution.  There is nothing in the entirety of Article 3 of the Constitution that gives federal courts that power.

Chief Justice John Marshall, in the case of Marbury v. Madison in 1803, assumed for the Supreme Court the power of judicial review, that is to make the final decision on the constitutionality of all laws.

The decision angered President Thomas Jefferson, who believed the federal courts, then under Federalist judges, were establishing a judicial tyranny over the rest of the government.

“The Constitution… meant that its coordinate branches should be checks on each other,” he said.  “But the opinion which gives to the judges the right to decide what laws are constitutional and what not, not only for themselves in their own sphere of action but for the Legislature and Executive also in their spheres, would make the Judiciary a despotic branch.”

Jefferson himself was skeptical of the right of the Supreme Court to exercise judicial review.  “The question whether the judges are invested with exclusive authority to decide on the constitutionality of a law has been heretofore a subject of consideration with me in the exercise of official duties. Certainly there is not a word in the Constitution which has given that power to them more than to the Executive or Legislative branches.”

Other presidents had similar opinions and took even harsher action when the Court interfered with the responsibilities of the executive.

Andrew Jackson had absolutely no respect for John Marshall or the Supreme Court.  In 1830, Congress passed the Indian Removal Act.  Georgia decided to remove the Cherokees within its borders but the Court sided with the Indians.  Jackson reacted angrily.  “Marshall has made his decision,” he said, “now let him enforce it.”  Jackson removed the Indians in defiance of the Court.

Jackson knew what many have forgotten.  “Courts have no law enforcement powers,” he wrote, “that is the prerogative of the executive alone.”

Abraham Lincoln also understood this fact and responded with even more anger when Chief Justice Roger B. Taney ruled that the President had exceeded his constitutional authority in waging war.  Lincoln even went so far as to write out an arrest order to have Taney detained, though the warrant was never acted upon.  President Lincoln simply ignored the Chief Justice and the Court.

Presidents have also used one of their strongest weapons, the veto pen, to rule on the constitutionality of laws.

Under Article 1, Section 7 of the Constitution, the President is given the power to veto, or reject, congressional acts.  “Every Bill which shall have passed the House of Representatives and the Senate, shall, before it become a Law, be presented to the President of the United States; If he approve he shall sign it, but if not he shall return it, with his Objections to that House in which it shall have originated….”

Early American Presidents believed they had a duty to determine the constitutionality of federal laws before approving and then acting on them.

In 1817, James Madison vetoed a bill for federal funding of internal improvements, projects such as roads and canals, using constitutional arguments to make his case.

“I am constrained by the insuperable difficulty I feel in reconciling the bill with the Constitution of the United States to return it with that objection to the House of Representatives, in which it originated.

“The legislative powers vested in Congress are specified and enumerated in the eighth section of the first article of the Constitution,” he continued, “and it does not appear that the power proposed to be exercised by the bill is among the enumerated powers, or that it falls by any just interpretation within the power to make laws necessary and proper for carrying into execution those or other powers vested by the Constitution in the Government of the United States.”

James Monroe did likewise in 1822 with his Cumberland Road Bill Veto.

“I am compelled to object to its passage and to return the bill to the House of Representatives, in which it originated, under a conviction that Congress do not possess the power under the Constitution to pass such a law.”

In 1832, Andrew Jackson vetoed the re-chartering of the Bank of the United States in a famous altercation with Congress.

“Having considered it with that solemn regard to the principles of the Constitution which the day was calculated to inspire, and come to the conclusion that it ought not to become a law, I herewith return it to the Senate, in which it originated, with my objections.”

The bank bill, Jackson wrote, is not “compatible with justice, with sound policy, or with the Constitution of our country.”  Congress did not possess the constitutional authority to establish a bank, Jackson believed.

Franklin Pierce rejected a bill for public works in 1854.

“On such an examination of this bill as it has been in my power to make, I recognize in it certain provisions national in their character, and which, if they stood alone, it would be compatible with my convictions of public duty to assent to; but at the same time, it embraces others which are merely local, and not, in my judgment, warranted by any safe or true construction of the Constitution.”

In 1854 President Pierce vetoed another bill that would have provided government funds for the mentally insane.  “I can not find any authority in the Constitution for…public charity,” he told Congress.  “To do so would, in my judgment, be contrary to the letter and spirit of the Constitution and subversive of the whole theory upon which the Union of these States is founded.”

Grover Cleveland became the “Veto President” when he set a record of 414 vetoes in his first term alone.  In 1887 President Cleveland rejected a bill to provide seeds for drought-stricken farmers in Texas.  “I can find no warrant for such an appropriation in the Constitution,” he told Congress.

Early Presidents did not believe in the modern notion that Congress should pass any law it chooses, and then allow the courts to sort it out.  Such actions would have been considered a dereliction of duty.

In addition to the President, Congress also has explicit constitutional authority over the Court.  The Constitution vests Congress with “all legislative power,” that is all lawmaking authority.  This is precisely why courts are not allowed to make laws from the bench.

Included in congressional power is the right to set the number of justices on the Supreme Court.

Just as the Civil War was ending in 1865, and the government was considering a plan of Reconstruction in the South, Vice President Andrew Johnson became President after Lincoln’s assassination.  Even though he had remained loyal to the Union, Johnson was still a Southerner and Radical Republicans in the North were suspicious.  When two vacancies occurred on the Supreme Court, and not wanting Johnson to name any replacements, Congress simply removed the two positions.

But later, after Johnson left the White House in 1869, Congress decided to replace the justices for policy and political reasons.

In 1862, to help finance the war against the South, as well as their other spending schemes, Republicans, with the urging of Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase, had passed the Legal Tender Act.

This inflationary plan allowed for the creation and circulation of a national currency called Greenbacks, fiat money that did not have the backing of gold, though the Constitution specifically gives Congress the authority to “coin money,” not to print it.  In all, Congress issued more than $450 million in paper dollars during the four-year conflict, producing ample inflation to double the cost of living.  The United States had not seen that level of inflation since the days of the American Revolution with the old, worthless Continental dollar.

In 1870, the United States Supreme Court, in the case of Hepburn v. Griswold, ruled the Legal Tender Act unconstitutional.  The Chief Justice in that case, who sided with the majority, was none other than Salmon P. Chase.  The decision angered Republicans in Congress, who then raised the number of seats on the Court back to its present total of nine.  President Grant then nominated two new Stalwart Republican justices in 1870, in an effort to “pack it,” and the Court reversed itself a year later, in Knox v. Lee, allowing Congress the authority to issue paper currency.

Though the Constitution sets the Supreme Court’s original jurisdiction, Congress has the authority to limit the Court’s appellate jurisdiction, a tactic discussed in recent years by congressional Republicans in the hopes of stopping the Court’s attack on traditional American institutions.  Though ridiculed by Democrats as “unconstitutional,” Congress possesses the constitutional power to limit cases the Court can hear, under Article 3, Section 2 of the Constitution:

“In all Cases affecting Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, and those in which a State shall be Party, the supreme Court shall have original Jurisdiction.  In all the other Cases before mentioned, the supreme Court shall have appellate Jurisdiction, both as to Law and Fact, with such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make.”

Congress has used that power in the past when needed.  As with the issue of the Court’s size, it was tested during the heated days of Reconstruction in the case of Ex Parte McCardle.

In 1869, a Mississippi newspaper owner and former Confederate general, William McCardle, wrote and published a series of editorials criticizing the North and its Reconstruction program.  Acting under the Reconstruction Acts of 1867, which provided for martial law, military commissions and tribunals, and the abolishment of the right of habeas corpus, the Union military commander in McCardle’s district arrested him.  McCardle sued to gain his freedom under the Habeas Corpus Act of 1867, a law passed by Congress that defined, by federal law, the rights under habeas corpus.

The Supreme Court, under Chief Justice Chase, had previously limited federal authority to try civilians in military courts and Radicals in Congress feared that if the Court heard the McCardle case, it might throw out the Reconstruction Acts, which would threaten the entire Reconstruction program.

Congress, acting under Article 3, Section 2 of the Constitution, removed the Court’s jurisdiction in all cases arising under the Habeas Corpus Act by attaching a rider to an appropriations bill.  When the case came before it, the Court upheld Congress’s right to withdraw its jurisdiction.

With such abundant historical evidence, it is perplexing why conservatives would place so much trust in the Supreme Court, an unelected body that has such great influence to affect public policy, when clearly the other two branches have been awarded more power by the Constitution.

Attacking Obama for his decision on the Defense of Marriage Act, Rush Limbaugh stated recently that the Supreme Court has the exclusive right to decide the constitutionality of our laws.

Newt Gingrich also opposed the President’s pronouncement in an interview with Newsmax, stating that Obama is not a “one-person Supreme Court” and his decision sets a “very dangerous precedent” that must not be allowed to stand.

But a fair question should be asked, would a conservative President defend the constitutionality of the Roe decision, or either the unconstitutional and obnoxious McCain-Feingold Act or the Patriot Act, both of which did so much damage to the first amendment?

The dangerous precedent is to take that kind of power away from the democratic branches of the federal government and hand it to an unelected oligarchy with lifetime appointments.

As Thomas Jefferson wrote to a friend, “To consider the judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions [is] a very dangerous doctrine indeed, and one which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy. Our judges are as honest as other men and not more so. They have with others the same passions for party, for power, and the privilege of their corps.”

Justices, with their power, are “more dangerous” because “they are in office for life and not responsible, as the other functionaries are, to the elective control. The Constitution has erected no such single tribunal, knowing that to whatever hands confided, with the corruptions of time and party, its members would become despots. It has more wisely made all the departments co-equal and co-sovereign within themselves.”

Jefferson had it exactly right.  If federal courts are allowed to make political decisions, our liberty is in grave danger.

The Incomparable Mr. Jefferson

Historians and presidential scholars have argued for decades over which president was the greatest and most influential of all time.  It is an argument without end.

On this Presidents’ Day week, one must stand out above all others.  Thomas Jefferson must be ranked as our greatest president, especially for all those who love liberty and the values of the American Revolution.

Many Americans, even conservatives, consider George Washington occupant of the White House.  He should be ranked high, for he and he alone held the nation together as no one else could.  Had Washington not supported the new Constitution, the experiment most definitely would have failed.  No one can dispute this irrevocable fact.

But as president, Washington’s record is less than stellar.  He followed the lead of his trusty Treasury Secretary, Alexander Hamilton, and supported every piece of his liberal agenda, all of which Jefferson opposed.

President Washington supported the accumulation of all state debts into the hands of the federal government.  Jefferson eventually got behind the plan but only as a means to secure the national capital near Virginia, where the new government could be watched with a suspicious eye.  Later he regretted that any deal had ever been struck.

Washington also backed the establishment of the Bank of the United States, the forerunner to the Federal Reserve.  He maintained Hamilton’s tax schemes, which made British tea taxes pale in comparison.  The new federal government taxed almost everything, including houses, land, slaves, documents, and even snuff.

It was enough to make one wonder why any war for independence had been fought.  As the late economist Murray Rothbard has noted, to the “average American, the federal government’s assumption of the power to impose excise taxes did not look very different from the levies of the British crown.”

And when a tax revolt broke out in Western Pennsylvania, Washington used the military to put it down.

All of Washington’s actions horrified Mr. Jefferson.  He worried that the federal government would soon “swallow up all of the delegated powers” reserved to the states by the Constitution.

Washington and Hamilton believed in a loose or expansive interpretation of the Constitution, using legalism to derive at ways to expand power.  Jefferson understood that the Constitution must be viewed historically, what today is called Original Meaning.

“On every question of construction,” he wrote, “let us carry ourselves back to the time when the Constitution was adopted, recollect the spirit manifested in the debates, and instead of trying what meaning may be squeezed out of the text, or invented against it, conform to the probable one in which it was passed.”

After Washington’s two terms, and a disastrous four years under John Adams, Americans were more than ready for a change.  In the elections of 1800, Jefferson’s Republican Party, created solely to oppose Hamilton’s Federalists, swept into power, taking over both house of Congress and the Presidency.

Many historians claim that Jefferson, as President, did not institute much change once he won the White House.  This is wholly untrue.  Jefferson made monumental changes during his presidential tenure, beginning with his inaugural ceremony, completely altering the decorum of the presidency.

Washington dressed gracefully for his ceremony and arrived in a fancy carriage pulled by a team of six white horses.  His entourage included marching bands and formations of soldiers.  Adams had arrived at his ceremony in 1797 in a more modest but elegant carriage with two horses.  He wore a grey broadcloth suit, but topped it off with a sword and cockade.  His hair was also well powdered in the finest aristocratic tradition.

None of this would suit Jefferson.  Rather than be escorted to the new Capitol building in grand style, Jefferson chose to make the brief walk with a few friends and supporters.  Today presidents walk part of the way up Pennsylvania Avenue after the inaugural address as a tribute to Jefferson.

Even Jefferson’s inaugural attire was carefully crafted, right down to his “republican” shoes, which were laced rather than with the traditional, and more aristocratic, buckle.

As president, Jefferson abolished the practice of publicly delivering the State of the Union message to Congress, preferring to send a written copy instead, as he felt this was too close to the British monarch’s practice of publicly addressing Parliament.  This tradition continued until Woodrow Wilson’s administration in 1913.

Jefferson insisted on answering the White House door himself, sometimes only in his robe and slippers.  The British ambassador once paid a visit to the White House and was quite astonished to find the President of the United States standing at the door in his sleeping attire.

He dressed plainly and often times served food and wine to guests himself rather than having a servant do it.  He also took out the rectangular dining table in favor of a circular one, so all who dined would seemingly be equal.

To Jefferson he was a servant of the people, not their master.

His very election caused disruption within the Northern states where a move was underway to secede from the Union.  Northern Federalists did not want any part of a republic led by a “radical republican” from Virginia.

But Jefferson did not respond to the threat of disunion as Lincoln would 60 years later.  In his inaugural address, one of the great speeches in American history, he did not threaten war with those who sought to secede.  “If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.”

He also summed up what he considered an ideal government for America.  The people needed “a wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government, and this is necessary to close the circle of our felicities.”

He believed in “Equal and exact justice to all men, of whatever state or persuasion, religious or political; peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none; the support of the State governments in all their rights, as the most competent administrations for our domestic concerns and the surest bulwarks against anti-republican tendencies” and “the supremacy of the civil over the military authority; economy in the public expense, that labor may be lightly burthened; the honest payment of our debts and sacred preservation of the public faith.”

Once in office, he set about dismantling the Federalist political and fiscal infrastructure.

By the time he left the presidency in 1809, all of Hamilton’s taxes had been abolished, to prevent what he called “the bottomless abyss of public money.”

The federal budget under the Federalists amounted to some $5 million per year.  President Jefferson cut this by more than half, to $2.4 million.  The national debt was reduced from $80 million to $57 million.  In addition, the treasury accumulated a surplus of $14 million.

Jefferson’s regard for the public money even included the new Executive Mansion, as he selected the furnishings himself and paid for them out of his own pocket rather than charge taxpayers.

He also went after laws designed to restrict liberty.  The Alien and Sedition Acts, a predecessor to the Patriot Act, had been passed by Congress and signed by President Adams in 1798 in response to war hysteria created by a diplomatic feud with France.

The most controversial was the Sedition Act.  It provided fines of up to $2,000, a massive amount in 1798, and jail sentences of up to two years for anyone who publicly criticized the president or other members of the administration, by publishing “any false, scandalous, and malicious writing against the government of the United States, or either House of Congress, or the President, with intent to defame…or bring either into contempt or disrepute; or to excite against them…the hatred of the good people of the United States.”  The law also forbade anyone from “opposing or resisting any law of the United States, or any act of the President of the United States.”

It was a clear violation of freedom of speech and freedom of the press outlined in the First Amendment, which was then just six years old.  Furthermore, Federalist judges all over the country were upholding the laws as constitutional and actively enforcing them.

With Republicans in control, all of the Alien and Sedition Acts were either repealed or allowed to expire.  President Jefferson pardoned and released all prisoners held under those nefarious acts and even returned money the convicted had paid in fines.  And he did not wait until his last day in office to do it, like modern-day presidents, but did it immediately upon taking power.

Jefferson also used every conceivable option at his disposal to keep the nation out of a war with France, a conflict the fledgling young republic could ill afford to wage.

Though his embargo failed miserably, and hurt the nation’s finances for a time, he should be credited with attempting to avert a war that could have been suicidal.

To be fair, President Jefferson did make his fair share of mistakes, as all chief executives do.  His disastrous embargo, a policy of free trade that he later admitted was a mistake, and his cuts to the U.S. Navy, which had to be re-instated when the War of 1812 came along, were not the best policies for the young nation.

Yet his “Republican Revolution” of 1800, reversing the early liberalism of the Federalists, did more to keep the Republic in line with the values of the American Revolution than any other president.  Only Lincoln’s war on Southern Independence, six decades later, destroyed those principles and began the slow but sure road toward socialism that we now find ourselves on.

Will History Rhyme in 2012?

“History doesn’t repeat itself,” Mark Twain once said, “but it does rhyme.”

People choose a variety of ways in which to view current events.  In the stark reality of modern politics, it’s typical to see any situation through the lens of a strict political ideology, a particular religious creed, or even one’s party affiliation.

But for true conservatives, current events should be viewed through the prism of history.  As Pat Buchanan has written, “conservatism is grounded in the past.  Its principles are derived from the Constitution, experience, history, tradition, custom, and the wisdom of those who have gone before us – ‘the best that has been thought and said.’  It does not purport to know the future.  It is about preserving the true, the good, the beautiful.”

With the 2010 midterm election over, the focus can now shift to 2012, a critical presidential election for the future of the country.

Seeing Obama in light of recent presidential electoral history, the conclusion can be drawn that he will be ousted in 2012 and the nation placed on a better course, if the Republican Party follows the historical model and plays its cards wisely.

By examining presidential elections in the 48 years from 1960 until 2008, we find a similar pattern emerging:

1961-1969 – JFK-LBJ          -  (D)  -   1993-2001 – Clinton

1969-1977 – Nixon-Ford     -  (R)  -   2001-2009  - Bush II

1977-1981 – Carter              -  (D)  -   2009-2013 – Obama

1981-1989 – Reagan          -  (R)  -                   ?

In 1961, the youthful, handsome John F. Kennedy assumed the presidency from the aged Dwight Eisenhower, announcing to the nation “the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans.”  Kennedy was the first president born in the 20^th century and the youngest ever elected.  Over the course of eight years, he and Lyndon Johnson embarked on an ambitious, leftwing agenda that saw the size and scope of government grow as it had not since the days of FDR.

Seen by many as a flaming liberal, Kennedy at least had some conservative ideas, such as an income tax cut to keep the economy humming and a strong national security policy, making him seem less progressive today.  While in the Senate, Kennedy had the temerity to harshly criticize President Eisenhower for cutting defense spending, the famous “missile gap,” and vowed to restore it once in the White House.  He flexed his military muscle in Cuba and again in Vietnam, pledging to take a strong stand against the monolithic nature of communism in the jungles of Southeast Asia.

Though civil rights legislation may be taken for granted today, in the early 1960s it was seen, even by many Northern liberals, as a path to be traveled lightly.  And for JFK, very lightly indeed.  Even though he started out slow, Kennedy eventually ordered thousands of U.S. troops into Oxford, Mississippi to enforce a court order, a radical step that does not comport with the spirit of the Constitution or Posse Comitatus.

When Lyndon Johnson became president in 1963, after Kennedy’s tragic assassination, he sensed that the nation had moved to the left and embarked on a far-reaching agenda that called for stronger civil rights legislation, welfare payments to end poverty, and literacy programs to stem the tide of ignorance.  For it would take a massive government effort to build a great society, Johnson told the country.

While most Americans believe that a great society consists of freedom, individual rights, and capitalism, Johnson thought differently and argued that government, and only government, could provide the means of crafting it.  Vowing that poverty could be wiped out with a few billion dollars, Johnson’s program flopped and poverty is still very much alive, even after pouring trillions of tax dollars into a seemingly infinite number of government programs.  It was the greatest wealth transfer in American history and a miserable failure.

Johnson left the nation weaker than he found it and more divided than it had been in a century.

The disastrous years of Kennedy-Johnson were followed by those of Nixon-Ford, from 1969 to 1977.  As the leader of the “conservative party,” Nixon was no conservative, nor was Jerry Ford.  Campaigning as a conservative and reaching out to the right, Nixon governed as a moderate-to-liberal president.  He gave the country the Environmental Protection Agency, increased welfare payments, wage and price controls, and an economy in stagnation.

In foreign affairs, the war in Vietnam was expanded to Cambodia, and nearly as many Americans died in Southeast Asia under Nixon than Johnson.  Rather than confront Soviet Communism, Nixon, along with Henry Kissinger, fashioned a policy of détente, meant to warm relations between the superpowers.  The policy did nothing but infuriate most conservatives.

After the ravages of Vietnam and its spawn, Watergate, Nixon left the presidency in disgrace.  Ford, though a decent man, made the crucial mistake of pardoning Nixon, which angered many Americans and most certainly killed any hopes of election in his own right.

The U.S. military was in a sad state after Vietnam and America looked pathetically weak to its enemies abroad.  When North Vietnamese communist forces overran the Republic of South Vietnam and U.S. personnel fled Saigon in humiliation, the ineffective Ford did nothing.

With the scandals and ineptness of the Nixon-Ford years, America was ready for a change and looked for something brand new.  And out of Georgia came a common man who had never served in Washington and had very little experience in government.  Jimmy Carter’s slim resume included just two terms in the Georgia state senate and one term as governor, before running for president in 1976.  Playing up his well-crafted image as a man of moral convictions, Carter provided a stark contrast to the corruption of the previous eight years.  In his victory, he returned most of the Solid South, except Virginia, to the Democratic column.

Writes Mike Evans in Jimmy Carter: The Liberal Left and World Chaos, “The presidential election was a public sounding board for the much-touted failures of the Republican Party. He ran against a disgraced president and his policies; he ran in the aftermath of an unpopular war on the platform of ‘human rights;’ and he won. His thesis was ‘change,’ and that is what America and the world got. He kept his word, and change began. No, not Barack Obama, Jimmy Carter!”

Though portraying himself as a common sensical, moral moderate, and even a conservative on some issues, Carter governed as a liberal, much more so than his Democratic predecessors, particularly in the area of anti-Communism.  While Kennedy and Johnson were ardent foes of the Soviet Union, and at least took some aggressive postures against it, Carter seemed content to the let the Russians do whatever they wanted, wherever they wanted, whenever they wanted.  America was militarily inept under Carter and provided no resistance to the spread of Soviet Communism.

After Islamic radicals seized the U.S. embassy and kidnapped 52 American citizens, Carter did nothing but make speeches.  The hostage crisis dragged on for 444 days.  The U.S. government seemed totally paralyzed.

Carter also found himself unable to handle a multitude of economic policy calamities, everything from an energy crisis to high inflation and interest rates.  He seemed not to have a solution to any problem facing the nation, only to blame it all on the American people.  The misery index reached an all-time high under Carter, rising to nearly 22 percent in 1980.

It has been asked how Jimmy Carter could possibly have been elected.  The fact is he had the benefit of extraordinary luck.  America was disgusted with the Nixon-Ford administration and Carter provided the perfect contrast.  At any other time in American history, his candidacy would have been a joke.

But even with the mass problems that he was unable to handle, Carter recently told an interviewer that his biggest failure as president was not getting re-elected.  He left the presidency after four dismal years.  As the journalist Nathan Miller has noted, Carter “proved the White House is not the place for on-the-job training.”

During the mid-to-late 1970’s, in the wake of Watergate, the Republican Party was on the verge of collapse, with it’s polling at 22 percent and its bank accounts nearly empty.  But Ronald Reagan, a two-term governor of California, and a former actor, rebuilt, revitalized, and reformed the GOP into a strong, viable party once again.  Reagan lifted both the party and the nation.  Whereas Carter talked of America’s “malaise,” Reagan promoted American exceptionalism.  To Carter, America had done little right; to Reagan the nation had been a tremendous force for good in the world and could be again.

Conducting campaigns of unabashed conservatism and optimism, Reagan won two landslide victories in 1980 and 1984, and saw the election of his vice president, George H. W. Bush, to a “third term” in 1988, a rare feat in American politics.  Eisenhower failed to do it, as did Clinton.  This is owing to Reagan’s strong appeal across the vast American electorate.

Reagan brought a sharp contrast to Carter and liberal policies.  He did not try to move toward the Democrats in an effort to beat them but advocated sharp distinctions.  He vowed to “raise the banner of bold colors, not pale pastels.”

President Reagan came into office vowing to cut spending and slice tax rates.  His tax cut package, the largest in history, led to one of the greatest peacetime economic booms that nation had ever seen.  The misery index dropped to one of its lowest levels ever recorded.

His major foreign policy goals – ridding the world of the menace of Soviet communism, rather than appeasing it – was realized soon after he left office, owing entirely to the aggressive program he put in place.  Reagan rose to meet the challenges posed by America’s enemies, regardless of the opinions of his political foes.

In shades eerily similar to his idol John Kennedy, Bill Clinton emerged as a new, fresh leader in stark contrast to the elderly Reagan and George H. W. Bush.  He was the first president born after World War II, a baby boomer.  But Clinton realized that America did not trust the old Democratic label, so he fashioned himself as a “New Democrat,” campaigning on an economic agenda that might have been confused with conservatism.  He pledged not to raise taxes on the middle class and to keep the nation militarily strong, but instead Clinton passed the largest tax hike in the history of the Republic and gutted the armed forces, slicing in half the once powerful force Reagan had built.

His radical agenda, including the infamous “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy regarding gays in the military and his two leftwing appointments to the Supreme Court made many Americans uneasy.  He also attempted to take over the entire health care industry, putting the government in charge of one-seventh of the national economy.  Desiring to emulate his hero, Clinton created the AmeriCorps, a version of JKF’s Peace Corps.

His far-reaching programs led to the takeover of Congress by the GOP, the first time the House was led by Republicans in forty years.  The conservative presence in Congress for Clinton’s final six years at the helm kept the Democrats from raiding the treasury and destroying the economy.

The setback caused Clinton to moderate his policies and move to the right.  Like Kennedy, Clinton embraced conservative ideas, like welfare reform, a capital gains tax cut that helped stimulated economic growth, and a balanced budget plan.  But unlike JFK, Clinton did it for purely political reasons.  He even flexed his military muscle in Iraq and in the Balkans, though also for the wrong reasons.

During his 1996 State of the Union address, Clinton announced that “the era of big government is over,” a campaign tactic in an election year that sounded great but had little meaning.

And though Clinton did not get the nation into a war the way LBJ did, we were already at war with Al-Qaeda but apparently didn’t know it.  The seeds of 9/11 were sown under Clinton; Bush II reaped the rotten fruit.

George W. Bush parallels the Nixon-Ford years quite nicely.  Masquerading as the next Reagan, the Right’s “knight in shining armor,” Bush ran to the left once in office, approving massive government spending unrelated to 9/11 or the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.  A prescription drug benefit for Medicare, No Child Left Behind, bank bailouts, and numerous earmark-laden bills, doubled the national debt to over $10 trillion by January 2009, with an annual deficit of over $1 trillion.

Though Bush didn’t have any personal scandals to speak of, like Nixon his war policies, and the manner in which the Iraq war began, served as a strong equivalent, leading to Democratic calls to investigate alleged crimes during his administration.  His second term popularity poll numbers were among the lowest in presidential history.

Nearly eight years of war had worn down U.S. forces.  And though Bush campaigned that he would “rebuild our military,” restoring devastating cuts imposed by Clinton, he made no moves to increase its size and scope, at a time when it was desperately needed.

As the scandal-ridden Nixon-Ford years led to Carter, without Bush’s bungling, Obama would have remained the most popular man in Illinois.  But the well-crafted campaign of “Change We Can Believe In” provided the perfect contrast to the Bush years.  And while the country saw Ford as a continuation of Nixon, McCain was seen as Bush’s third term.

Now in office, Obama seems to be following in the footsteps of Carter perfectly.  As McCain joked during the campaign, Obama “is running for Jimmy Carter’s second term.”  And from what we have seen thus far, his analysis is right on point.

Obama has followed Carter’s model of national security ineptitude, cutting important weapon systems, capitulating to our enemies, and placing us in a more precarious state.  The military, already in decline, will now shrink further.  A new administration will have to follow Reagan’s example and spend trillions to rebuild it, at a time when spending is at an all-time high and revenues are scarce.

Obama has placed America at fault for much of the world’s ills, apologizing every chance he gets.  He has also taken to bowing to foreign heads of state, which no previous president has ever done.  Like Carter, Obama is bringing the presidency, as well as American prestige, to a new low.

Obama also seems utterly incapable of handling an economy in crisis.  His only plans appear to be more taxes, more spending, more deficits, and more debt.  If he succeeds, America faces the very real possibility of a major debt crisis and bankruptcy if serious steps are not taken soon.

Now that the nation finds itself enduring a second Carter administration, we must hope that history can, once again, repeat itself, or at least rhyme.  It can with a new Reagan to lead the GOP, someone not ashamed to advance conservatism in its original purity.

If the party does not try to “re-craft” its image, to “re-make” or “re-brand” itself, and embraces true conservative principles and solutions to give the American people a true choice, then the current experiment in ultra-liberalism will soon be at an end.

Just as Reagan Conservatism left Carter’s Liberalism on “the ash heap of history,” 2012 can be the year when Republicans do likewise to Obama.

The question is can we find the right candidate?

A Historian’s Reply to Bill Maher

Left-wing bomb-thrower, failed actor, and wannabe comedian Bill Maher recently attacked Tea Partiers and Christians in a rant on his less-than successful HBO television show, the only channel that would air such drivel.

Tea Party viewpoints are “antithetical” to the Founders, according to Maher.  He classifies not the Founders but the “teabaggers” as “a group of exclusively white men who live in a bygone century, have bad teeth and think of blacks as three-fifths of a person.”

His rant continues: “I want you teabaggers out there to understand one thing, while you idolize the Founding Fathers and dress up like them and smell like them, I think its pretty clear that the Founding Fathers would have hated your guts!  And what’s more, you would have hated them.  They were everything you despise.  They studied science, read Plato, hung out in Paris, and thought the Bible was mostly bullsh*t!”  All to uproarious laughter.

The Founders disagreed on many things, Maher reminds us, but one thing they did agree on was that political power must stay in the hands of the smartest people “and out of the hands of the dumbest loudmouths slowing down the checkout line at Home Depot.”

The Founders were not the common man of their day, Maher proudly exclaims, they were super-smart philosophers and learned men, unlike today’s “teabaggers.”

It’s Maher and his ilk that should be running the country, not us dumb ole commoners.

He also used his episode to bash Christianity, a favorite sport of his.  He attacked the “super religious guy Glenn Beck” for dressing up as Thomas Paine, who Maher points out was “an atheist who said churches were human inventions set up to terrify and enslave mankind.”

John Adams, he continued, “said this would be ‘the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it.’  Which is not to say the Founders didn’t have a moral code.  Of course they did.  They just didn’t get it from the Bible.”

But Maher’s leftwing, atheistic views have no basis in historical fact.

Thomas Paine was indeed an atheist, who disliked Christianity.  His pamphlet Common Sense was enormously successful in providing a moral boost to the American cause.  But Paine should not be considered a Founding Father.  A revolutionary, he only came to America from England in 1774 to participate in a revolution that many saw as inevitable.  He was never a member of the Continental Congress, did not sign the Declaration of Independence, nor help form the Constitution.

Maher took Adams’ quote completely out of its context.  Adams had been reading books on different religious viewpoints, and had grown tired of the back-and-forth bickering from the different authors.  He wrote to Thomas Jefferson of his frustration.  “Twenty times in the course of my late reading have I been on the point of breaking out, ‘This would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it!!!’ But in this exclamation I would have been as fanatical as Bryant or Cleverly. Without religion this world would be something not fit to be mentioned in polite company, I mean Hell.”

So you see, Adams did NOT believe the world could exist without religion, and that it would be Hell on earth if there were none.

The Founders did not think the Bible was “bullsh*t.”  In fact, many of the Founders were Christians and read the Bible religiously, contrary to the teachings in our leftwing schools.

“The Bible contains the most profound Philosophy, the most perfect Morality, and the most refined Policy, that ever was conceived upon earth,” wrote John Adams.  “It is the most Republican Book in the World, and therefore I will still revere it.”

According to David Barton, 34 percent of the more than 3,000 quotes used in all founding documents came from the Bible.  That sacred book was the most widely-used source, not Plato.  And of those quotes, most came from the Book of Deuteronomy, the laws of Moses.

The Ivy League schools, today hotbeds of liberalism and anti-Christian fervor, were all originally created to train missionaries to spread the Gospel.  They were not secular institutions.

Harvard College’s “Rules and Precepts” in 1642 contained the following:

“Let every Student be plainly instructed, and earnestly pressed to consider well, the maine end of his life and studies is, to know God and Jesus Christ which is eternal life, John 17:3, and therefore to lay Christ in the bottome, as the only foundation of all found knowledge and Learning.”

Such an enunciation would be enough to get one fired from Harvard today!

Most of the Founders themselves were devout followers of Christianity.  They were deeply religious men and were not Deists, an Enlightenment religion consisting of a creator god uninterested in the plight of mankind.

Dr. Benjamin Rush, a very influential Founder, established the first Bible Society in America, the purpose of which was to print Bibles and distribute them.  He also founded the concept of Sunday School in America.

James Wilson, who signed both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, established the first law school in America and required the use of the Bible in the curriculum.

Thomas Jefferson, himself accused of being a deist and an outright atheist, began church services in the U.S. Capitol building in which he personally attended.  He signed all his presidential documents “In the Year of Our Lord Christ.”  He also drew up a list of books for the curriculum in the Washington, D.C. public schools.   On that list was the Bible.

Benjamin Franklin, also accused of being a deist, stopped the proceedings of the Constitutional Convention and called for a prayer to seek guidance.  Not something a deist would have done!

For it was not the smartest people the Founders wanted in public service, but Christians.  John Adams stated in his only Inaugural Address that “A veneration for the religion of a people who profess and call themselves Christians, and a fixed resolution to consider a decent respect for Christianity among the best recommendations for the public service.”

John Jay, an author of the Federalist Papers and the first Chief Justice of the United States, believed that “Providence has given to our people the choice of their rulers, and it is the duty as well as the privilege and interest of our Christian nation to select and prefer Christians for their rulers.”

When a call was made for the Constitutional Convention, Christians dominated its proceedings.  James Madison, the Father of the Constitution, and a Christian, stated that “The best & purest religion, the Christian Religion itself.”

He was not alone in his religious beliefs.

Christian Delegates to the Constitutional Convention

Abraham Baldwin – Congregationalist

Richard Bassett – Methodist

Gunning Bedford – Presbyterian

John Blair – Episcopalian

William Blount – Presbyterian

David Brearly – Episcopalian

Jacob Broom – Lutheran

Pierce Butler – Episcopalian

Daniel Carroll – Catholic

George Clymer – Quaker/Episcopalian

William Richardson Davie – Presbyterian

Jonathan Dayton – Episcopalian

John Dickinson – Quaker/Episcopalian

Oliver Ellsworth – Congregationalist

William Few – Methodist

Thomas FitzSimons – Catholic

Elbridge Gerry – Episcopalian

Nicholas Gilman – Congregationalist

Nathaniel Gorham – Congregationalist

Alexander Hamilton – Episcopalian

William Churchill Houston – Presbyterian

William Houstoun – Episcopalian

Jared Ingersoll – Presbyterian

Daniel Jenifer – Episcopalian

William Samuel Johnson – Anglican

Rufus King – Episcopalian

John Langdon – Congregationalist

John Lansing – Dutch Reformed Church

William Livingston – Presbyterian

James Madison – Episcopalian

Alexander Martin – Episcopalian

Luther Martin – Episcopalian

George Mason – Episcopalian

John McHenry – Presbyterian

John Francis Mercer – Episcopalian

Thomas Mifflin – Quaker/Lutheran

Gouverneur Morris – Episcopalian

Robert Morris – Episcopalian

William Paterson – Presbyterian

William Pierce – Episcopalian

Charles Cotesworth Pinckney – Episcopalian

Charles Pinckney III – Episcopalian

Edmund Jennings Randolph – Episcopalian

George Read – Episcopalian

John Rutledge – Episcopalian

Roger Sherman – Congregationalist

Richard Dobbs Spaight – Episcopalian

Caleb Strong – Congregationalist

George Washington – Episcopalian

Hugh Williamson – Presbyterian

James Wilson – Episcopalian

George Wythe – Episcopalian

Robert Yates – Dutch Reformed Church

Bill Maher holds a history degree from Cornell but he is not using history for its true purposes – the pursuit of fact – only abusing it in order to attempt to destroy that which he despises. When the left can’t find evidence to support their flawed thinking, they simply distort it, ignore it, or make it up.

Maher should stop accusing Tea Partiers, Christians, and Conservatives of complete ignorance and stupidity, when he himself is guilty of a far more serious offense – outright deception.  But then again, you can’t be a successful liberal without lying!

A Short History of Depressions

“Recessions are common; depressions are rare,” writes Nobel Prize-wining economist Paul Krugman in a recent New York Times column.

Though historians judge otherwise, Krugman believes, “as far as I can tell,” that there have only been two depressions in American history, “the years of deflation and instability that followed the Panic of 1873 and the years of mass unemployment that followed the financial crisis of 1929-1931.”  Current conditions, he notes, might just bring on the “third depression.”

Krugman may be an economist of note, but a historian he is not.  He certainly cannot tell very much.

Major economic depressions, called “panics” in the 19th and early 20th centuries, occurred in approximate 20-year intervals throughout American history – 1819, 1837, 1857, 1873, 1893, 1907, and 1929.  There have also been numerous recessions on a much smaller scale, especially in the 20th century.

Why do we have periodic panics and economic disruptions?  They are simply economic storms, not unlike meteorological ones.

In a borrowed line from the Hollywood film, The Day After Tomorrow, Dennis Quaid’s character, Professor Jack Hall, explains the workings of a physical storm:  “The basic rule of storms is that they continue until the imbalance that created them is corrected.”  A great line that can accurately explain economic tempests. 

Most of the depressions in our history have been caused by imbalances in the currency.

Too much cheap money and lax credit have been the chief faults in causing many economic storms, as is the case with our current mess.  Too much money and too much credit cause reckless speculation, which leads to over-expansion and over-valuation.  The economy can only take so much.  Eventually the bubble will burst, as it did in the fall of 2008 with land and home values, causing millions to go under.

Two 19th century panics, in 1837 and 1893, can also be attributed to imbalances in the currency.

A massive panic struck in 1837, the first year of Martin Van Buren’s presidency.  Andrew Jackson had waged war on the Bank of the United States, killing the renewal of its re-charter in 1832.  To further weaken the bank, the president withdrew the government’s deposits, placing them in smaller state banks, called “pet banks.”  These banks, flush with substantial amounts of cash, began loaning it to businesses and individuals as fast as possible.  All the new money, along with cheap credit, led to wild speculation, mainly in land, causing the values to soar.  When the bubble popped in 1837, it sent the economy crashing.

Van Buren faced mounting pressure by his Whig opponents to raise tariffs and taxes, as well as federal spending, particularly for internal improvements projects like roads and harbors.  The president resisted and, instead, cut expenditures by 21 percent.  The economy recovered, though not quite in time for Van Buren to be re-elected.

In 1893, the nation suffered the worst panic up to that time.  The government, in 1890, had passed a law to purchase all of the domestic silver supply each year, up to 4.5 million ounces.  To make the buy, the Treasury issued new Greenback notes, redeemable in gold.  The new paper notes, along with all the new cheaper silver, flooded the country.  The money caused a massive boom period that saw unemployment drop to just 3 percent.  Every sector of the economy seemed to be doing well, even farmers. 

With the over-expansion, namely in railroad building, the bubble popped in 1893, and by 1894 the unemployment rate reached 18.5 percent and the economy had contracted by nearly 10 percent.

But within two years of the economy bottoming out, President Grover Cleveland, called “the Ron Paul of his day” by economist Tom DiLorenzo, employed conservative policies and oversaw an economic expansion.  By 1897, the year he left office, the economy had grown by 20 percent and the unemployment rate had been slashed to 14.5.

In both cases, 1837 and 1893, the federal government stayed out of the storm and allowed the economy to correct itself, making the crisis short-lived.  This is the reason Krugman does not include 1837 and 1893 in his analysis of depressions.  They were so short that they could not possibly qualify, at least in his way of thinking. 

But the reason earlier depressions did not last long is because the president overseeing them did not use a Paul Krugman remedy – massive government spending.  Krugman, a Keynesian economist, is so convinced that using government spending as an effective economic stimulus that he criticized Obama’s spending plan as too small.  Krugman wanted a stimulus bill twice as large as the $787 billion plan passed in the early part of 2009 and is, even today, pushing for more government spending.

Earlier Americans believed in using laissez faire methods rather than spending.  President Martin Van Buren used retrenchment – the cutting of taxes and spending.  President Grover Cleveland, in 1893, stopped the inflation, reduced tariffs, and sliced expenditures.

By contrast, FDR used the Krugman solution, and as a result, the depression worsened and lasted until the 1940s.  In fact, the Great Depression did not abate until after the war.  It was not until Congress cut personal and corporate taxes in 1945, and discontinued price controls in 1946 that the economy revived.  True economic growth began producing surpluses, which had not happened since 1930, and brought unemployment down to less than 4 percent.

The nation faces two choices – the Roosevelt-Krugman-Obama remedy, or the policy of Van Buren-Cleveland-Ron Paul.  Let history be the judge.