Big Government

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.

This has put Thatcher critics in a froth of toxic bile, as the accolades continue to pour in from all over the world. Civility is always scarce in politics – it is, after all, a contact sport – but some of the rage in Old Blimey moves close to the edge of the charts.

A cartoon in the Guardian, a leading newspaper of the left, depicted the Iron Lady descending into hell, the front page of the Socialist Worker headlined her death with the single word "Rejoice," and a movie marquee in the tough neighborhood of Brixton paid its respects with the message "Margaret Thatchers Dead LOL," for "laugh out loud." The BBC called the song, "Ding, Dong, the Witch is Dead" tasteless and offensive, but played it to mark her death, anyway.

Sally Bercow, the wife of John Bercow, the speaker of the House of Commons, announced that she would not accompany her husband to the funeral Wednesday at St. Paul’s Cathedral. It wasn't clear whether she was making a feminist point or she's just eager to throw a brickbat at a womanly better. Or maybe she was just throwing a fit of wifely pique.

"As Commons speaker, John will be attending the funeral," she said, "and rightly so. But I'm not obliged to participate in my husband's public life – last time I looked this was the 21st century. John holds public office and an important position, not me."

Colleagues in the Commons rallied around her husband, as everyone usually will when a spouse makes a public spectacle. Said one fellow member: "John Bercow handled it brilliantly. He got just the right tone. As for Sally, as the old saying goes, 'she wants to be the bride at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral'."

Some of the "protests" of the honors for Mrs. Thatcher are reminiscent of the tasteless stunts of the Westboro Baptist Church, so called, at soldiers' funerals in America. There's a tradition in Britain, where good manners are otherwise prized, of mixing Bronx cheers (as they're called here) with accolades for prime minsters. They wouldn't do that for the queen or senior royals, says Robert Worcester, an American who founded Mori, one the Britain’s leading polling firms. Rude posters and placards are expected outside St. Paul's during the funeral. "Good riddance" will be among the kindest sentiments.

There's considerable affection for Mrs. Thatcher throughout England, but memories are short and the misery she inherited and largely put right are mostly forgotten, particularly among trade unionists. Mr. Worcester of Mori observes that it isn't likely, for example, that a Navy ship would be named for Mrs. Thatcher, more out of fear than custom. "Shipbuilders would put down their tools rather than honor a woman many trade unionists blame for taking their unions out of politics."

Robert McGeehan of the Institute for the Study of the Americas, a London think tank, observes that there was no public celebration of the death of Richard Nixon, though he was equally reviled on the stinky left. “This really shows the dissimilarity between the two countries,” he told The Associated Press. He couldn’t recall "anything remotely resembling the really crude approach we’ve seen here. There is a class ingredient here we simply don't have in America. They like to perpetuate this. The bitterness goes from father to son."

But not only in England. There’s no scarcity of pique and envy in America, too. Some critics on the left are trying to turn the Iron Lady into something made of lesser mettle. She wasn't really all that tough, and there was a liberal hiding among her convictions, gasping for air, writes Matt Latimer, briefly a speechwriter for George W. Bush, in the Washington Post. There's "something troubling in the Republican celebration of her political intransigence, and it is not just the fact that it's largely a myth."

There’s something frightening about a tough woman with courage and conviction, when all about her the Nancy men are trembling in their Gucci loafers. That "intransigence" might be expected of the men, too.

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.

The veep never fails to entertain, even when he’s trying not to, and this time his boss is probably not amused. Joe famously pushed President Obama to endorse same-sex marriage by sniffing the orange blossoms first, but if his advice for Americans to buy a shotgun to protect the homeplace was an attempt to convert the president to a Second Amendment aficionado, he’ll no doubt fail.

Joe’s endorsement of domestic mayhem in the cause of survival predictably infuriated those who are so terrified of guns that on certain playgrounds even little boys who make an imaginary gun with tiny thumb and forefinger risk having their hands seized, or at least a sentence to a trip to the principal’s office, followed by suspension.

Firing from the hip is always dangerous. When someone named “Kate” asked the veep, on a Facebook forum sponsored by Parents magazine, whether the president’s attempt to disarm America would make “law-abiding citizens become more of a target to criminals,” good old Joe’s working-class instincts from his origins overcame diplomacy, tact and discretion.

“Is this Parents magazine?” he asked in disbelief. “I have Parents magazine in my home, I’ve never heard anybody in Parents magazine ask these kinds of questions, but I’m delighted to answer them. Kate, if you want to protect yourself, get a double-barreled shotgun.

“I promise you: Whoever’s coming in is not going to [make it]. You don’t need an AR-15 [assault rifle], it’s harder to aim, it’s harder to use, and in fact you don’t need 30 rounds to protect yourself. Buy a shotgun. Buy a shotgun.”

Unlike some politicians faking an appreciation of guns and the Second Amendment, good old Joe makes a persuasive case that in his heart he’s a good ol’ boy. He owns two shotguns and a handgun, a Beretta.

The advice he gave to “Kate” and to his wife, Jill, about when and how to use a shotgun, was actually not so good. If Mrs. Biden hears a bad guy in the woods outside their home, he told her, “fire two blasts outside the house.” Firing inside the house is not a good idea unless you mean really serious business.

The veep and his missus aren’t likely to hear anything suspicious in the back yard, either at the official residence on Massachusetts Avenue or at their own house in Delaware. The Secret Service patrols around the properties are ample and adequate. The peril in firing a Beretta off the porch in Washington is that she might hit a passing car, bicyclist or even the pope’s ambassador at the Vatican embassy across the street.

However, the veep’s instructions about how to use a shotgun, to “fire two blasts outside the house,” go athwart common gun sense. Shotguns are not ideal for firing warning shots because once both barrels are fired there’s nothing left for a second round short of fumbling for two more shells. A shotgun is meant to kill, and one advantage of the weapon is that it isn’t necessary to take careful aim.

If the veep really wants his wife to use a shotgun to protect herself he should give her a sawed-off shotgun. They’re illegal in the District of Columbia, and indeed in most jurisdictions, just because they’re so lethal. (If a television host waving an illegal ammunition clip on camera can get a pass from the District cops, surely a vice president can, too.) The shortened barrel reduces the gun’s range, but scatters the shot in a wide arc. The blasts from a sawed-off model can usually dispense with an entire roomful of bad guys.

Though forbidden to civilians, sawed-off shotguns are often used by the mob (particularly movie mobsters), police swat teams and the military. Sawed-off shotguns were a weapon of choice for Confederate cavalrymen in the Civil War, prized supplements to saber and carbine in close combat. Sicilian farmers used them for varmint hunting in the Nineteenth Century, and when their progeny came to America, they brought sawed-off shotguns with them. Hell’s Kitchen and the streets of Chicago soon echoed with deadly noise.

Bonnie and Clyde loved their shotguns. Clyde shortened the barrel of his Browning A-5 by 6 inches to make it easy to conceal and get to – he called the gun his “Whippit” because he could easily “whip it out” – and the sight of Clyde whipping it out terrified hundreds of bank customers in the ‘30’s.

Clyde and his shotgun wouldn’t have frightened good ol’ Joe. The veep would have cracked a gaffe and Clyde would have fallen down laughing until the sheriff arrived.

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.

It’s not pretty: Higher taxes, reduced public services, cuts in money for schools, crumbling bridges and highways, all the ills endemic to out-of-control welfare states.

Californians are still besotted with the dream of living off the lotus, though growing numbers of them are concluding that the game will be up soon. Thousands continue to flee California every year. Texas, Nevada, Arizona, Oregon and Washington are collecting most of the disillusioned emigrants, though thousands have made it to Georgia and South Carolina. There’s no John Steinbeck to tell a story of a trek very different from the journey taken in the opposite direction by the Joads of Oklahoma, but a study by the Manhattan Institute finds prosperous Californians fleeing dramatically higher taxes, tightening regulations, union power that pushes up high labor costs, more expensive electricity and ever more costly housing and commercial real estate. California is not quite the golden state it used to be.

The escape is not new; more Californians have left the state than newcomers have arrived every year since 2005. What is new is the accelerating trend. More than 4 million new residents arrived here in the go-go years between 1960 and 1990, attracted by mild and sunny weather, a lush and varied geography, and most of all by the fervent belief of nearly everyone that “anything goes” and “everything’s possible.” The future looked to bear no limit.

Now the future is here. Persuaded by Gov. Jerry Brown, Californians have adopted a number of new tax initiatives, including Proposition 30, which would raise the state sales tax to 8.25 percent, and an increase in the state income tax on taxpayers earning more than $250,000. Resistance to cutting entitlement to the lotus is great.

California has become radioactive in much of the West. You can still see an occasional frayed bumpersticker on the back roads of Colorado, pleading “Don’t Californicate Colorado.” The state’s politics would hardly be recognizable to Howard Jarvis, a perennial candidate for various offices whose Proposition 13, slashing property taxes by nearly 60 percent, set off the national tax revolt in 1978. Prop 13, opposed by most of the politicians and the big newspapers, was enacted in a landslide.

But lately Californians have returned to a diet of the lotus, the fruit in Greek mythology that delivers dreamy contentment and idle forgetfulness. The lotus is the unofficial state fruit. A new study by the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Foundation blames the remarkably generous pay and pensions of state employes for California’s budget problems, now speeding toward terminal. The per capita salary of state employes, including benefits, is about twice the per capita salary of everybody else.

Nevertheless, Californians eagerly approved the $6 billion dollar bundle of tax increases in November, sold to voters as politicians from City Hall to the White House always sell taxes, as the only way to avoid closing the orphanages and throwing little match girls into the street.

“I know a lot of people had some doubts and some questions,” the governor told an election-night rally, “‘Can you really go to the people and ask them to vote for a tax?’ Here we are. We have a vote of the people. I think we are the only state in the country that says, ‘Let’s raise our taxes, for our kids, for our schools, and for our California dream.’”

The cost of delivering state services exceeds by a wide margin the per-worker costs in other highly unionized states, including New York, New Jersey and Illinois. In one remarkable case, an Afghanistan-educated psychiatrist arrived in California six years ago and got a state job paying $90,682 a year. Now he’s making $822,302 a year. He worked weekends and even performed some of his duties from home. The state is investigating how he piled up so much pay. “I’ve been put on leave for working too hard,” he told an interviewer.

California’s unemployment rate, above 10 percent for most of this year, is one of the highest in the nation, and the state has lost 855,200 private-sector jobs since 2008. Living here can still be golden indeed. The lush farms in the San Joaquin Valley can feed half the nation, the Napa and Sonoma vineyards produce some of the world’s best wines, and the high-tech corridor is thriving. A gulch will be a gruesome substitute.

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.

But the presidential candidates themselves spend their time mostly elsewhere.

California, with its 45 electoral votes, has become irrelevant to presidential politics. Neither a Democrat nor a Republican wants to waste his time here.

There’s a lot going wrong in California, and it looks a lot like what’s going wrong in the rest of the country. The state is broke. Unemployment is up, standing at 11 percent. California is running an annual deficit of $16 billion and by some estimates 2,000 wealthy Californians leave every week to find new homes where taxes and regulations aren’t so onerous. This ought to be a recipe for Republican opportunity.

But it’s not. The latest Field Poll, the yardstick by which election prospects have been measured since 1947, shows Barack Obama leading Mitt Romney by 18 points, 55 percent to 37 percent. Field finds that a majority of Californians think the country is moving in the wrong direction, but a larger majority think the president is doing a good job nonetheless.

Not so long ago, California was a battleground state, with both presidential candidates criss-crossing its length (770 miles) and breadth (250 miles). No more. California is so blue that both candidates come here mostly to mine for money, making only perfunctory appeals for votes. Democrats regularly strike oil in Beverly Hills. Both parties understand that California is almost as blue as the District of Columbia. Why waste time?

The state’s Republican party has shrunk almost to irrelevancy, too. There’s no Republican holding a statewide office and Democrats control both houses of the state legislature, and by wide margins. One Republican consultant says the party has become a cult.

“It’s no longer a statewide party,” Allan Hoffenblum, who has consulted with Republican candidates for 30 years, tells the Los Angeles Times. “They’re down to 30 percent [of the state electorate], which makes it impossible to win a statewide election. You just can’t get enough crossover voters.”

The good news for the national Republican party is that, 45 electoral votes or not, rabidly blue California is no longer necessary to put together the 270 votes needed to win the White House. This is due in part to the South, once the keystone of a Democratic campaign, becoming the Solid South once more, this time for the Republicans. It’s a conservative counterweight to the left and right coasts.

There are two Californias, too. In fact, argues Victor Davis Hanson, the columnist, historian and classics scholar at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, “California” is a misnomer. There is no such state, but two cultures, each dysfunctional in different ways. “Apart they are unworldly, together a disaster.”

Coastal California, outwardly prosperous, carefree and where the dreamy lotus of Greek legend grows in utopian abundance, runs north along the Pacific from San Diego to San Francisco. Crippling regulations that curb timber, oil, gas and farm production have turned an inland empire into a vast hinterland of poverty and despair. While the state’s population grew by 10 million in the two decades after 1980, the number of Californians on Medicaid grew by 7 million. A third of all Americans on welfare now live in California. Unemployment has soared above 15 percent. If you would see the future, come to California’s Central Valley. If coastal California is the south of France, interior California is impoverished Greece.

“In the Never-Never Land of Apple, Facebook, Google, Hollywood and the wine country,” says Mr. Hanson, “millions live in idyllic paradise. Coastal Californians can afford to worry about trivia – and so their legislators seek to outlaw foie gras, shut down irrigation projects in order to save the three-inch Delta smelt, and allow children to have legally recognized multiple parents. .. coastal utopians have little idea where the fuel for their imported cars comes from, or how the redwood is cut for their decks, or who grows the ingredients for their Mediterranean lunches of arugula, olive oil and pasta.”

The elites are not only drunk on their feel-good good life, but they’re reaching for a little hair of the dog. Gov. Jerry Brown, the “Governor Moonbeam” of yesteryear, is popular along the coast because he prescribes more of what has sickened California. He’s pushing a fanciful high-speed train that is accelerating toward $100 billion and runs along routes already served by bankrupt Amtrak.

If you were running for president, you wouldn’t want to campaign here, either. Just take the money and run, somewhere else.

Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.