Democrats Disillusioned

The president’s cynicism on racial issues is beginning to bother members of his own party.

You expect Republican politicians to criticize Democratic administrations and vice versa. But when Democrats start criticizing Democratic administrations, that is news. Someone once said that the headline “Dog bites man” is not news, but “Man bites dog” is. We are now starting to get “Democrat bites Democrat” news.

Longtime Democratic pollsters Patrick Caddell and Douglas Schoen last week took on one of Pres. Barack Obama’s most bitter betrayals of his campaign rhetoric and the high hopes of people who voted for him.

Their op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal dealt with race, and it pulled no punches: “Rather than being a unifier, Mr. Obama has divided America on the basis of race, class and partisanship. Moreover, his cynical approach to governance has encouraged his allies to pursue a similar strategy of racially divisive politics on his behalf.”

Cynical? This man with the lofty rhetoric and sermonizing style? Only if you follow his deeds instead of merely his words.

Part of the polarization that Barack Obama has caused among the American public has been due to the fact that some people do not look behind rhetoric and symbolism. Such people are prime candidates to become part of the Obama cult. Those who look only at deeds tend to become critics. But those who closely follow both his words and his deeds are the most outraged of all, because of the gross contradictions between those words and those deeds.

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This one is also great:

The Obama Administration’s Real Bottom Line

It’s political, not budgetary, and the CBO is calling them on it.

Rumors of congressional Democrats privately expressing disapproval of the Obama administration’s actions and policies have been given more credence by such things as Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s public criticism of White House spokesman Robert Gibbs. But when two longtime Democratic pollsters, Patrick Caddell and Douglas Schoen, called President Obama “cynical” and “racially divisive,” that was a dramatic statement. It was like saying that the emperor has no clothes.

A much more rhetorically subdued but nevertheless devastating implicit criticism of current government spending policies came from an even more unlikely source: the Congressional Budget Office, whose director is a Democrat.

Without naming names or making political charges, the Congressional Budget Office last week issued a report titled “Federal Debt and the Risk of a Fiscal Crisis.” The report’s dry, measured words paint a painfully bleak picture of the long-run dangers from current runaway government deficits.

The CBO report points out that the national debt, which was 36 percent of GDP three years ago, is now projected to be 62 percent of GDP at the end of fiscal year 2010 — and to rise in future years.

Tracing the history of the national debt back to the beginning of the country, the CBO finds that the national debt did not exceed 50 percent of GDP even when the country was fighting the Civil War, World War I, or any other war except World War II. Moreover, a graph in the CBO report shows the national debt going down sharply after World War II as the nation began paying off its wartime debt when the war was over.

By contrast, our current national debt is still going up and may end up in “unfamiliar territory,” according to the CBO, reaching “unsustainable levels.” They spell out the economic consequences — and it is not a pretty picture.

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One of the most ominous developments of our time has been the multicultural dogma that all cultures are equal. It is one of the many unsubstantiated assertions that have become fashionable among self-congratulatory elites, with hard evidence being neither asked for nor offered.

But, however much such assertions minister to the egos of the intelligentsia and the careers of politicians and race hustlers, the multicultural dogma is a huge barrier to the advancement of groups who are lagging economically, educationally, and otherwise.

Once you have said that the various economic, educational, and other “gaps” and “disparities” of lagging groups are not due to either genes or cultures, what is left but the sins of other people?

Sins are never hard to find among any group of human beings. But whether that actually helps those who are lagging or just leads them into the blind alley of resentment is another question.

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Thomas Sowell writes:

A woman with a petition went among the crowds attending a state fair, asking people to sign her petition demanding the banning of dihydroxymonoxide. She said it was in our lakes and streams, and now it was in our sweat and urine and tears.

She collected hundreds of signatures to ban dihydroxymonoxide — a fancy chemical name for water. [...] Much of the stupidity we see today is induced by our educational system, from the elementary schools to the universities. In a high-tech age that has seen the creation of artificial intelligence by computers, we are also seeing the creation of artificial stupidity by people who call themselves educators.