Economy

Deep in the bowels of the Senate and House Office Buildings, secreted away where there will be no distractions, Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives, have put aside partisan differences to work for the common weal. This particular weal has never had it so good.

The issue at hand transcends taxes, immigration reform, the war on terrorism, even war and peace (if any). The hush-hush conversations, involving House Speaker John Boehner and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, are about how to exempt Congress and all the little grunions who attend every need of the congresspersons from . . . Obamacare, the health care monstrosity that we were told would be so good for us.

Discussions started months ago, when it suddenly dawned on these worthies that the Affordable Health Care Act would not be affordable for these highly paid daytime residents of Capitol Hill, and they must be exempt from the requirements that will bankrupt everybody else. Democrats and Republicans alike are aware of the “acute sensitivity” of embracing public hypocrisy with such enthusiasm, and the sticking point is whether Democrats can persuade Speaker Boehner and Sen. Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader in the Senate, to commit hari-kari with them. A source close to the talks tells Politico, the Capitol Hill political daily, “everyone has to hold hands on this and jump, or nothing is going to get done.”

The alternative is to reach deep into savings or borrow the cash to pay for Obamacare in the insurance exchanges, just like everyone else, as mandated by the president’s health-care scheme, and joined with such glee by congressional Democrats, and sanctified by Chief Justice John Roberts. If Congress and its go-fers, the aides who pamper, coddle and on occasion even go to the bathroom for the members, are to be treated like the rest of us, a lot of them will have to retire to K Street’s lobbying shops or go home to find honest work as florists, dog walkers, bicycle mechanics - or rest on the kindness of indulgent kin. “This could lead to a real brain drain,” says one congressional aide, “with the nation losing the counsel and wisdom of many of the best and brightest.” (Brains on the Hill. Who knew?)

These worthies are shameless, as we all know, and they’re all hiding in fear in broom closets, little-used toilets or whatever they can find in the shadows under the elms. Harry Reid’s office won’t talk about it. Steny Hoyer, the House minority whip, sent out an aide to say that he was looking for a way to implement Obamacare in a way that’s workable for everyone, “including members and staff.” John Boehner’s mouthpiece said his boss wants to spare everyone pain. “If the speaker has the opportunity to save anyone from Obamacare, he will.” First the speaker and his aides, of course.

Sen. Richard Burr of North Carolina, who led the Republican opposition to Obamacare in the Senate, thinks exempting anyone, even a member of Congress, is a bad idea. “I think if this is going to be a disaster, which I think it’s going to be, we ought to enjoy it together with our constituents.” Perhaps Congress could hire out-of-work musicians to play “Nearer My God to Thee” on election eve next November, like the violinists who bucked up the spirits of the doomed on the deck of the unsinkable Titanic as the great ship sank.

Obamacare could be the gift to the Republicans that keeps on giving, as President Obama himself knew it would be when he arranged to have it become effective only after he was safely re-elected to a second term. Democrats are terrified that the full reality of the disaster will become apparent to all just in time for the 2014 congressional elections. They’re being particularly nice to their Republican colleagues, because they must have bipartisan cover.

Republicans, being Republicans, are likely to give it to them. The health-care “reform” is tailor-made as a Republican talking point – no need to shout – and nobody knows this better than a Democratic congressman. The prospect of hanging, as Dr. Johnson famously said, “focuses the mind wonderfully.” So, too, the delicious prospect of a congressman having to endure the punishment he devised for someone else.

Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.

President Obama and his liege man have been crying from the rooftops for weeks that if he doesn’t get to further plunder taxpayer pockets, airplanes will fall from the sky, classrooms will empty, fire and brimstone will ruin every hearth because there won’t be anybody at the firehouse to answer the telephone, crooks and criminals will roam the land doing all manner of evil because the cops will be on furlough, babies will cry in vain for milk, men will join breadlines like we haven’t seen since the '30s, and women will weep tears of bitter reproach, tsunamis will rise from the river, bayou and creek, locusts will devour failing crops, and we’ll all be dead by the Fourth of July (if not Memorial Day). Woe is definitely us.

With Judgment Day at hand, the only thing left for the White House to do is to kill, or at least grievously wound, as many bearers of bad news as the president’s men can find. Blaming the press is always popular, because the press deserves whatever abuse it gets. When the president read in the Washington Post, of all places, that he was being called out by the most famous reporter in the land for his fibs and stretchers (a president would never actually tell a lie) about who should be blamed for sequestration hysteria, he could hardly believe it. There, before his very own eyes and in black and white, Bob Woodward was citing chapter and verse with the proof that the sequester originated under Barack Obama’s roof. Truth will out, but it’s not supposed to will out in the president’s own house.

This destroyed Mr. Obama’s No. 1 talking point, that the sequester is a Republican ploy. This could not stand. Soon Bob Woodward got a blistering telephone call from an enraged Obama aide, followed by an e-mail from “a very senior person,” telling him that he would “regret doing this.” He didn’t say who the “very senior person” was, being polite and eager to protect an undeserving source, but the aide was later identified as Gene Sperling, the director of the National Economic Council.

Reporters, even famous reporters, get into tiffs with official sources all the time; it comes with the territory. But threats like this come from unusual territory. A president would never dispatch someone to Cleveland to hire a hit man, nor even call in a drone, but he can make good on such threats in harsh and anonymous ways. If he could do it to the most famous reporter and editor at one of the most famous newspapers, he could do it at will to anyone else.

Richard Nixon kept an “enemies list,” and it was taken as the threat the White House meant it to be. Everyone immediately thinks of an IRS audit. John F. Kennedy once canceled a subscription to the late New York Herald-Tribune, which was a nominally Republican newspaper, because he didn’t like something he read there. For several days there was quite a row in all the newspapers.

The Obama White House gets particularly exercised by grunions of the cult who dare question or criticize the messiah from Chicago. When Lanny Davis, a senior aide to President Clinton and a loyal Democrat, summoned the courage to needle the Obama administration early on in a column in The Washington Times, the newspaper got a call suggesting that it should print no more op-ed contributions from Mr. Davis if it knew what was good for him, and it. The Times told the White House, as any serious newspaper would, that the newspaper and not the White House, any White House, decides when and what to print.

Most presidents come with thin skins, and Mr. Obama’s skin is only thinner than most. He seems to take his authority as messiah as seriously as the members of the cult do. The reporters and correspondents who trail obediently in his wake are mostly too young to remember JFK, but they yearn for the restoration of Camelot, even a cheap cut-rate copy of the original.

Unless he can make the earth move, the Mississippi run backwards and call down thunderbolts from a darkling sky, the president will be exposed over the next few days, weeks and maybe months as the president who cried “wolf” -- and the wolf stayed home. It should be a good show. The rest of us are entitled to enjoy it. We’re paying for it.

Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.

Franklin D. Roosevelt proposed the Four Freedoms in 1941, arguing that people “everywhere in the world” ought to enjoy freedom of worship, freedom of speech, freedom from want and freedom from fear. Four years later, he proposed a second Bill of Rights, arguing that the first attempt neglected a government guarantee of equality in “the pursuit of happiness.”

Sometimes the “something memorable” was something everybody later would like to forget, such as Lyndon B. Johnson’s “War on Poverty,” which he introduced in 1964. That war was subsequently lost but we’ve been paying for it since.

George W. Bush used his State of the Union speech in 2002 to identify three authentic enemies of the United States at that time, North Korea, Iran and Iraq – “states like these and their terrorist allies constitute an ‘axis of evil,’ arming to threaten the peace of the world.” He took considerable flak from the frightened nursemaids and nervous Nellies for saying it, though recent history has since treated his formulation with a certain sympathy, if not kindness.

Since then State of the Union orations have devolved into mere laundry lists and presidential letters to Santa, bearing little relevance to anything likely to happen.

FDR should have proclaimed a fifth freedom, the freedom from another State of the Union speech. It would have been an empty promise, but making expensive and expansive promises is what most presidents do.

Nobody expands his promises with expensive abandon quite like Barack Obama. His State of the Union this week was a classic of its kind, delivering nothing of substance, something of value only to the pundits who recycle nothing with greater skill than even the politicians they celebrate. One of them, Dana Milbank of The Washington Post, took note of the coincidence that Mr. Obama’s speech fell on the last night of Mardi Gras.

The noisy spendthrift carnival in Washington, unlike the harmless if not always innocent street festival in New Orleans, “is a display of wretched excess,” he wrote, “when giddy and rowdy participants give in to reckless and irresponsible behavior . . . The standoff gives new meaning to Fat Tuesday. The nation’s finances are a mess, but . . . let’s have another round.”

President Obama’s letter to Santa Claus is even greedier than usual. He wants a $9-an-hour minimum wage as a stimulus to the sagging economy, though if a $9 minimum will produce prosperity, why not make it $20? (That may be for next year.) He proposes stricter gun control, universal kindergarten for 4-year-olds, and a swift rewrite of U.S. immigration law. He promises to cool the globe, or warm the globe, depending on what the White House climatologists are calling changes in the weather this week.

The Obama solution will cost the usual billions, though Congress could accomplish just as much as he could by merely adopting a resolution instructing the weather to behave, and it wouldn’t cost anything.

“Minimum wage won’t pass the House,” said Sen. John Thune of South Dakota on the morning after the president’s exercise in Daniel Webster oratory. “Climate-change won’t pass the House. Those are things he could probably have a hard time getting a lot of Democrats to vote for.” He notes that six of his Democratic colleagues are up for re-election next year in states that Mitt Romney carried “and they’re going to be hard-pressed to vote for [tax increases].”

The Constitution requires the president to make a report to Congress, but it doesn’t require the empty bombast that accompanies the modern State of the Union. With the precise and economic language of the era, the Constitution says of the president only that “He shall from time to time give to Congress information of the State of the Union and recommend to their Consideration such measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient.”

The rest comes from mere “tradition.” This stuff is catching, too. Now across the land there are speeches about the State of the State, the State of the City and even the State of the County. This week, Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York applies his golden oratory to a demand that Gotham abolish Styrofoam coffee cups. Next year it could be something actually useful, such as a requirement that everybody wash his socks and change his underwear once a week.

Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.

When the George W. Bush tax cuts expire at midnight on New Year’s Eve, with the rest of us singing a tearful adieu to Auld Lang Syne, the president will be popping corks. He’ll have his higher taxes. The joke will be on us, but nobody at the bottom of the cliff will be laughing.

Barack Obama’s goal is to raise taxes, and how he does that is of small consequence. He is determined not to cut spending. This has become clear enough to all. He will have redeemed FDR’s famous mantra – “Tax and tax, spend and spend, elect and elect” – in a way that Mr. Roosevelt could never have imagined. Mitt Romney’s infamous “47 percent,” the Americans who get a monthly government check, will balloon toward a hundred percent. Cuts, reforms, restraints, disciplines of any kind will be silly notions of the past. Dependency will be enthroned.

Once this is understood, there’s no mystery about why the “negotiations” between the Democrats and the Republicans have never amounted to very much. Mr. Obama reads the November 6 election result as a landslide, though 51 to 49 is far from a landslide. Nevertheless he is bold, and acting as if it were. He, and even a lot of timid and fearful Republicans, never absorbed the home truth that nothing recedes like success.

For now, everything is going his way. Mr. Obama’s vision of America is one he learned in his community-organizing days. Americans have to give up the idea that America is, in Lincoln’s memorable formulation, the exceptional nation, and learn to be miserable in solidarity with both Upper and Lower Slobbovia.

The president’s intelligence chiefs have given him the “good news” that by the year 2030, only 18 years from now, the United States will no longer be the world’s great superpower. “In terms of the indices of overall power – Gross Domestic Product (GDP), population size, military spending and technological investment – Asia will surpass North America and Europe combined,” reports the National Intelligence Council of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. That mouthful of titles and capital letters comprise the president’s own intelligence gurus.

With rapid rise of other countries,” the report goes on, “the ‘unipolar moment’ is over and no country – whether the U.S., China or any other country – will be a hegemonic power. The United States’ relative economic decline vis-à-vis the rising states is inevitable . . . ”

These are only opinions, of course, but the intelligence agencies are occasionally correct in their estimates and appraisals. But there is in the assessment a noticeable whiff of barely suppressed glee, and a suggestion that this could be the good news the president has been waiting for. Mr. Obama, a happy native of Hawaii, is nevertheless a man of the third-world attitudes and sensibilities inherited by birth, nurtured when he grew up in Indonesia, and it’s just these sensibilities that endear him to sordid allies on the left who dream of a world liberated from American example and influence.

Preaching the angry exploitation of the “rich,” as he defines “rich,” comes naturally to him and the Democratic left. Envy and covetousness are powerful emotions, easily manipulated, and Mr. Obama is a master of manipulation. Demonizing a neighbor in a bigger house who drives a new car is easy work. A new Battleground Poll finds that 60 percent of Americans polled now think raising taxes on households – not individuals but households – making more than $250,000 a year is a good idea. The president has done a splendid job of portraying these taxpayers as big-bellied plutocrats who summer in France, winter in St. Moritz, and dine on roast swan.

But nearly 70 percent in the Battleground Poll think raising taxes on small-businesses earning more than $250,000 is a bad idea. Republicans have done a lousy job of explaining that many, perhaps most, of the “rich” Americans and these small businesses are one and the same. That’s why abusing small businesses is likely to send the country reeling into another recession at the bottom of the cliff. This one won’t be George W.’s fault.

Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.

The latest Republican gimmick is to split the difference on income-tax rates between the current rate of 35 percent and the Clinton-era rate of 39.6 – and with substantial cuts in government spending. This is the solution the pilots of an earlier generation might call “coming home on a wing and a prayer.”

There’s no indication that President Obama will bite, nor is there any reason why, from his point of view, he should. He has read the fear in Republican eyes and he’s willing – maybe eager – to jump off the cliff in the sure and certain confidence that with the compliant mainstream media at his back, he can successfully pin the blame on the Republicans for the consequences.

He can even promise spending cuts, secure in the knowledge that he won’t have to actually make them. Promises are a sucker’s game, and there’s no shortage of suckers. Mr. Obama clearly wants to humiliate the Republicans – re-election was not enough – and he and his Democratic allies think his victory on Nov. 6 arms him with a mandate to do as he pleases.

There’s no longer an argument over whether to raise taxes, only by how much. Some of the Republicans eager to cave now and get the details of surrender out of the way talk bravely of demanding spending cuts as the price of higher taxes to finance the president’s big-spending schemes, but they know in their hearts that actual spending cuts are a pipe dream. Raising taxes first, cut spending later, is a scheme that has never worked. Republican presidents played that shell game, too.

But Rep. David Camp of Michigan, the Republican chairman of the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee, tells Politico, the political daily, that he is “reserving judgment” on such a scheme. “It depends on the entire package,” he says. “What are the spending [cuts] going to be? You can’t consider that on its own without looking at all the other factors that might go into it.” We can take that as a probable yes, as soon as everybody indulges in a little more big talk.

Rep. Nan Hayworth of New York sounds ready to quit now, with a few goodbye clichés. “There’s certainly a movement among us to accept that we indeed may have to not let perfect be the enemy of the good. If we can truly get a visionary plan, then I think we will certainly be happy to give that the most thoughtful consideration.”

The Republicans, including the speaker, are negotiating as if they actually believe that President Obama is negotiating in good faith. The speaker’s offer of $800 billion in new taxes sank without a salute. The president insists on soaking “the rich,” even though the most thorough soaking wouldn’t yield enough to make a sizable dent in either debt or deficit. But it satisfies Mr. Obama’s cult of covetousness, cupidity and spite, which dreams of a scorched-earth class war, and would redeem all his speeches from the president’s community-organizing days.

Mr. Obama called in the Business Roundtable this week for a little charm offensive. He told them that he’s rooting for the success of big business because when big business does well, “then small businesses and medium-sized businesses up and down the chain are doing well.” Someone should explain to the president that a strong economy is based on the jobs generated by small business, not big.

He repeated his mantra that only he holds the key to recovery. “What’s holding us back right now,” he told the assembled CEOs, “is a lot of stuff that is going on in this town. And I know that many of you have come here to try to see, is there any way we can break through this logjam. Nobody wants to get this done more than me.”

Just do it his way. Rep. Eric Cantor, the House majority leader, seems unimpressed. “An obsession to raise taxes isn’t going to solve the problem. We can’t just keep borrowing money and raising taxes and expecting the problem to go away. That is our point to the president.”

That’s precisely beside the president’s point. He has bigger plans at Fiscal Cliff.

Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.

The giants of Congress when Congress was respected – and, more important, feared – by nearly everyone, were mostly Democrats, and Southern Democrats besides.

So there’s no surprise now that Barack Obama, armed with a well-fitting suit, well-shined shoes, a gift of gab and a unique skill at hijacking America for extended guilt trips, is about to roll the Republicans at the lip of Fiscal Cliff.

Several Republicans who were breathing fire (or at least an occasional puff of smoke) only yesterday, loudly proclaiming themselves warrior heroes in the war on irresponsible spending and the evils of big government, are searching now for something white to run up the regimental flagstaff.

Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Bob Corker of Tennessee and Saxby Chambliss of Georgia – what passes now for stalwart Republicans – have signaled to the White House that now that they’ve got the speechifying off their chests, they’re ready to do what they said they would never do. They want to relieve the president of any notion that he’ll have to offer something in return for their help to raise taxes. A pat on the head would be nice, but not necessary.

Republicans are brought up to believe that it’s always easier to switch than fight, and better manners besides. Making noise, even to call a lifeguard when someone is drowning, is a breach of pool-side etiquette.

Nearly everyone understands that something must be done about the national debt and the mortgage on America held by China, lest Barack Obama and the Democrats turn America into Greece without the garlic. This might even require a combination of selected tax increases and deep cuts in spending, particularly cuts in the entitlements that have reduced large swaths of the population – Mitt Romney’s “47 percent” – to waiting for government checks, drawn on the public’s bank account.

But a surrender before negotiations begin is a craven and silly strategy. The November election results have frightened many Republican politicians who read daily prescriptions for Republican recovery in the New York Times and the Washington Post and conclude that the only strategy for winning like Democrats must be sex-change surgery.

Saxby Chambliss, for one prominent example, led the flight from the sound of the guns, renouncing his no-new-taxes pledge even before hearing an Obama promise to cut spending. In the past, such Democratic promises haven’t been worth much. Mr. Chambliss is an experienced sunshine soldier.

He took military deferments during the Vietnam war, and never served; in an earlier, more robust America, this would have been called “draft-dodging.” Running later against Sen. Max Cleland, who left several arms and legs on the Vietnam battlefield, Mr. Chambliss suggested in one campaign commercial that the amputee warrior was a soulmate of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein simply because he was skeptical of the creation of the Homeland Security Administration.

The campaign commercial, over the line or not, was clever, one Republican strategist said, because it worked. John McCain, who had proved a thing or two about patriotism and raw courage in a prison cell at the notorious Hanoi Hilton, called the Chambliss commercial “worse than disgraceful, it’s reprehensible.”

But even Mr. McCain sometimes has trouble with what the Marines call “fire discipline,” shooting when the shooter later wishes he hadn’t. A fortnight ago, he warned President Obama not to appoint Susan Rice, the ambassador to the United Nations, as secretary of state because she led the White House cover-up of what happened in Benghazi. But now he and Miss Rice are blowing kisses at each other. Lindsey Graham, who had romped when Mr. McCain stomped, now says she only should be held “accountable” for whatever it was that she did, if she did.

Second thoughts may be better than no thoughts at all, but politicians who succeed at flying by the seat of their pants know that the climb-down from brave talk never feels as good as blowing hard in the first place.

Republicans tempted to renounce their no-tax pledges in return for a few nice words from the Democratic media should keep in mind what happened to President George Bush the elder. He invited one and all to “read my lips, no new taxes.” One and all did just that. The rest is history, about what happens to faithless politicians.

Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.

Twinkie, a true American icon, is much maligned by nutritionists, chefs, nannies, the likes of Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York City and especially parents catching their kids sneaking off to the corner grocery to wolf down the spongy imperishable, which is reckoned to survive a nuclear fallout. How bad for you can a concoction of white flour, corn syrup, oil and yellow No. 5 food coloring be? Pretty bad, probably, but some people devour anchovies and liver, and survive.

Twinkie, in fact, even has a special place in American jurisprudence, cited in proceedings of the U.S. Supreme Court. No lettuce leaf, carrot strip or stalk of celery can make that claim.

This being America, the near-death of Twinkie naturally becomes a matter of politics. Democrats blame the company, Republicans blame the unions. (Next slur up: Twinkie is racist, since it has a white filling.) Gov. Chris Christie, our stoutest national politician since William Howard Taft, is smart enough to keep his mouth shut for once. “I’m not answering questions on Twinkies,” he told reporters, and was plainly irritated that someone asked the question. “It’s bad that I even said the word ‘Twinkies’ from behind this microphone.”

There’s even a petition – perhaps not a serious one, but who can tell? – seeking support on the Internet to nationalize Twinkie: “We the undersigned hereby request Barack Obama to immediately nationalize the Twinkie industry and prevent our nation from losing her sweet, creamy center.” If a bailout is good for General Motors, Wall Street and banks too big to fail, why not? Twinkie may be no more entitled to survival than the Pontiac, but a Twinkie still weighs in at only 150 calories.

Hostess Brands, which practically invented the cupcake, was done in by both sad-sack management and a greedy union, the Bakery, Confectionary, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union. That’s a mouthful as indigestible as a blob of soft, creamy, vanilla-flavored goo. A bankruptcy court in White Plains, N.Y., which had challenged Hostess and the union to try one more time to save Twinkie the Kid, King Ding Dong, Captain Cup Cake and Happy Ho Ho for the sweet dreams of youth (and a considerable number of grown-ups as well), this week gave up.

Hostess won final permission to close and liquidate 33 bakeries, 565 distribution centers with 5,500 delivery routes, 570 bakery centers and 18,500 jobs. Forbes magazine observed earlier this year that Hostess “is saddled with 372 collective bargaining agreements, 80 different health and pension benefit plans and workers’ compensation costs that last year hit $52 million, which works out to over $2,700 for each of its [18,500] employes.”

Many Hostess employes, desperate to keep their jobs, had crossed picket lines to keep the bakeries humming. There were just not enough of them. Union officials, however, will not lose their jobs, which should console laid-off workers when baby needs a new pair of shoes.

When the assets of Hostess, believed to be worth up to $2.4 billion, are auctioned later, Twinkie is likely to survive. Recipes, like cash, are fungible. Bake it, and they will come.

Twinkie leaves an indelible mark on the law, having lent its name to the improbable legal defense of Dan White, a onetime cop who murdered the mayor of San Francisco and a gay city supervisor in 1979. A psychiatrist called in his defense testified that White suffered clinical depression, perhaps aggravated by eating junk food and indulging sugar highs. White’s lawyers persuaded the jury that White thus suffered “diminished capacity” and was incapable of premeditated murder.

He was acquitted of murder and convicted of voluntary manslaughter, thus saved from the gas chamber. A columnist called it “the Twinkie defense.” Twinkies had never been mentioned in the court room, but the label stuck.

A quarter of a century later, in an unrelated case, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, citing a defendant’s right to a lawyer of his own choosing, observed that defendants “want a lawyer who will invent the Twinkie defense.” Mr. Justice Scalia, who appreciates a phrase with a warm, creamy center, thus dispatched a national icon to the archives. Yum, yum.

Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.

The economy is in the dumpster, the Middle East is ablaze with hatred for America, and the president keeps busy making it worse. He’s about to preside over the expansion of nuclear weapons into the hands of Islamic mad men. The bill of particulars is a long one and bears repeating for the big audience. The president tries to console us with reassurance from Alfred E. Neuman: “What? Me worry?”

Mitt Romney, nobody’s idea of FDR, Harry Truman or Ronald Reagan, gets his last best chance Wednesday night to abandon the game plan of feckless establishment Republicans who are happiest when they join Democrats in trashing imperfect Republican candidates. This time their tattered slogan, “We’re not as bad as you think,” isn't working.

Mr. Romney has a presidential profile that looks as if it belongs on Mount Rushmore, but he has to offer more than that, even to saps. We’re told that voters want him to be someone they could have a beer with, as absurd as that would have sounded to earlier American grown-ups. Being “not Barack Obama” is a powerful qualification, and maybe the most important, but not this year. He can’t be a lovable ol’ lug – we’ve already got one of those – so he might as well run like a Democrat, and go after his opponent with mail and chain. Hammer and tongs won’t do it.

Respectfully, of course. Remember to say a few nice things about the president, such as “we all think he’s a man with a good heart.” But remember to add that “it’s not where his heart is, but where his head is.” (Keep the body parts straight.) Above all, keep the focus on the economy. That’s the one subject above all that the president and the Democrats are desperate not to talk about. Be prepared for the media critics to call you a racist, a bigot, a bounder, a cad and an ignorant jasper. Be prepared as well to hear some imaginative stretchers (be careful not to call them “lies”).

When Bob Schieffer of CBS News reminded Bill Clinton the other day that unemployment is higher than when the president took office, the economy is still in the dump and a lot of people say that’s reason enough to change presidents, Bubba replied that he didn't know “a single serious economist” who thought four years was long enough to “heal” the land. If Mr. Obama pulls that on you remind him that Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and a clutch of his own economists – as well as himself – told us that, “serious” or not, Barack Obama could and would heal what ails us.

Concede that he inherited a bad economy, but you could remind him (and the audience) how he made it worse. We’re not only not completely out of the Great Recession, but most economists think another one is on the way. The average growth of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in the first 12 quarters of recoveries since World War II has been 15 percent. The economy grew at an annual rate of nearly 19 percent in the Reagan recovery, but a weak 7 percent in the Obama recovery.

Government spending, he promised when he moved into the White House, would unleash a robust recovery, leading to “an economy built to last.” White House economists promised that the stimulus would by now bring the unemployment rate down to 5.6 percent. The rate today is actually 8.1 percent. He promised to have cut the deficit in half by now; instead it’s more than $1 trillion (that’s with a ‘t’) and counting, twice what it was when he took office.

The only natural advantage President Obama takes into these debates is his voice. Since almost nobody has ever heard oratory or even great preachers they’re susceptible to Mr. Obama’s black pulpit eloquence.

It’s not that the president is a man of bad faith. He no doubt believes some of the stuff he shovels into our ears. It’s that he believes in a lot of things that just ain’t true. Mitt Romney can’t let him get away with it.

Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.

The results of a referendum on whether to recall Gov. Scott Walker will say whether it’s possible for a politician to confront greedy government unions, to make the cuts in government services that the economists (and common sense) say are inevitable, and live to tell a survivor’s tale.

The governor, a Republican, angered labor bosses by eliminating the collective-bargaining rights of the government unions to bargain with the state – in effect, eliminating the right to sit on both sides of the table and bargain with themselves.

Mr. Walker and Tom Barrett, the Democratic mayor of Milwaukee, are on the ballot against each other in this unusual race. If Mr. Walker wins nothing changes. If Mr. Barrett wins he will be the new governor (and safe from a reprisal recall for a year). The latest polls make Mr. Walker a slight favorite to keep his job.

Nearly all the wiseheads in Washington, eager to translate a local race into something about the presidential campaign, argue that the prospects of both Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, if not the men themselves, are on the ballot, too. If Mr. Walker prevails and the recall fails, it’s more bad news for the president. The governor will become an overnight rock star for a Republican future.

Many of the wiseheads, including lots of reporters and pundits, have decamped to Milwaukee and Madison for the big night. The usual carnival barkers are here, too: the Rev. Jesse Jackson arrived in Milwaukee for a rally in a lawdy-how-gaudy two-car caravan, a Mercedes S550 for himself ($125,000 at a dealer near you) and a Cadillac Escalade ESV (only $80,000) for his fetchers and go-fers. Bill Clinton, just in from his smash appearance with stars of the porn epic, “Farm Girls Gone Bad,” in Monte Carlo, dropped in last week for a riverfront rally with plainer folk in Milwaukee to tell Cheeseheads that the recall is “about much more than the state of Wisconsin and what’s best for them.”

America is watching, he said, and the states recovering from the Obama recession have embraced something he calls “creative co-operation,” not the “constant conflict” that Mr. Walker delivered to Wisconsin with his elimination of collective bargaining for public employes.

Bubba is the nearest thing to the heavy hitter that Mr. Barrett and the Democrats yearned for, though his track record since his White House days in converting charisma to actual results is not good. President Obama, sensing more bad news after last week’s “horrible days of hell,” has been the notable no-show. He actually got within five miles of Wisconsin last week, but too bad for the Democrats he passed over, five miles above the battleground where he could lounge comfortably in Air Force One on his way to a rally in quieter, happier Minnesota.

The bang and clatter of politics has become as high-decibel elevator music in Wisconsin. “Protests. Lawsuits. Recalls. More lawsuits. More recalls,” complains the Madison State Journal. “Is this the ‘new normal’ for state politics?" In fact, yes. The governor is not even the only target of the recall. The Republican lieutenant governor and four Republican state senators, all paired against Democratic challengers, are also subject to recall. If the Democrats win only one of the state Senate seats they’ll regain the majority and the ability to obstruct the Walker agenda, presuming he wins.

Jimmy Carter, who has mercifully all but disappeared down the memory hole, called the U.S. tax code “a disgrace to the human race.” Hitler, cancer, and the designated hitter follow closely, but we take Mr. Jimmy’s point. How the government confiscates our money, like a root canal without anything to kill the pain, is not very nice. But like a village dentist armed with only a pair of greasy pliers, the government gets the job done.

This is not a good year for a taxpayer to cut corners in calculating how much he owes, because the new director of the Internal Revenue Service decreed no more Mr. Nice Guy.