Among the foremost threats to individual freedom in America is the abusive and oftentimes lawless behavior…
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More Legal Shenanigans from the Biden Administration’s Department of Education

Among the foremost threats to individual freedom in America is the abusive and oftentimes lawless behavior of federal administrative agencies, whose vast armies of overpaid bureaucrats remain unaccountable for their excesses.

Among the most familiar examples of that bureaucratic abuse is the Department of Education (DOE).  Recall, for instance, the United States Supreme Court’s humiliating rebuke last year of the Biden DOE’s effort to shift hundreds of billions of dollars of student debt from the people who actually owed them onto the backs of American taxpayers.

Even now, despite that rebuke, the Biden DOE launched an alternative scheme last month in an end-around effort to achieve that same result.

Well, the Biden DOE is now attempting to shift tens of millions of dollars of…[more]

March 19, 2024 • 08:35 AM

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Obama to the Working Class: Go Away Print
By Troy Senik
Wednesday, November 30 2011
While Obama can offer ideology to liberals and biography to minorities, nothing in his background betrays the slightest sympathy for the working class.

This is not a good moment for Barack Obama. Now less than a year away from the election that will decide whether he is destined to become a one-term president – and thus endure one of the sharpest declines in public esteem in American history – he is at record lows in public favor.
 
Tuesday’s iteration of Gallup’s daily presidential job approval index found the Commander-in-Chief winning the affections of only 43 percent of the American public, a number that sets an all-time low for a president one year away from reelection, putting him eight points beneath the hapless Jimmy Carter and one point beneath a Vietnam-enveloped Lyndon Johnson.
 
He has overseen the largest debt increase in American history and presided over nine percent unemployment. Fifty-three percent of the American people favor repeal of health care reform, the signature domestic accomplishment of his first term. Abroad, he is facing a collapsing European economy and a soon-to-be nuclear Iran. And as the Republican presidential season switches into high gear, he faces the likely prospect of facing either former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney or former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, both formidable opponents, in next year’s election.
 
It was against this backdrop that Ruy Teixeira and John Halpin of the liberal Center for American Progress released “The Path to 270: Demographics versus Economics in the 2012 Presidential Election," an election white paper of sorts in which they argue that the president must reimagine the political coalition that will be necessary to elevate him to a second term (270 refers to the number of votes required to win the electoral college and thus the presidency).
 
The gist of Teixeira and Halpin’s analysis is that, in an election where Obama has few plausible strategies for getting over the top, he’d be best served by avoiding attempts to win over blue-collar white voters and focusing instead on college-educated whites and on minorities.
 
Look beyond the electoral math and this is a telling calculus. Why is the president struggling with the white working class? While there’s some truth to the fact that Republicans have done increasingly well with that demographic because of their social values, that analysis unnecessarily elevates the abstract over the concrete. It’s not that Obama can’t win them over as a matter of metaphysics. Rather, it’s that he can’t even begin that conversation because they have been so dispossessed by the nation’s current economic contraction.
 
They are the ones who saw endless reports of federal stimulus on television without realizing any real change in their economic standing. They are the ones left uncertain by the still amorphous contours of ObamaCare. And they are the ones for whom the president’s rhetorical sweet nothings have never been as salient as his abject failure on the merits.
 
In light of that inconvenient truth, it has become fashionable for Democrats to treat this bloc of voters as a lost cause, imagining that there is no intelligible way by which they could be brought back into the fold. But Democratic presidents from Franklin Roosevelt to Bill Clinton have always owed their success with the broader electorate to the perception that they were stalwart allies of the working class (the group that Clinton famously characterized as those who “worked hard and played by the rules”). 
 
Contra Teixeira and Halpin, this is a development that has just as much to do with culture as it does with demographics.
 
Obama is a natural ally of elite whites who share his cosseted liberal worldview – imagining that economic growth is a natural law, that taxes don’t influence the productive capacities of a society, and that a group of progressive sentinels are required to protect capitalism from excesses ranging from carbon dioxide to insufficient vegetable supplies in urban grocery stores.
 
As for minority voters, they’ve allowed themselves to be bought too cheaply, primarily on the basis of Obama’s heritage. If they came to grips with the dismal reality of the Obama years – Hispanic unemployment is at 11.4 percent, while black unemployment is at 15.1 percent – they would realize that they’ve abetted their own economic regression and vote accordingly next year.
 
But while Obama can offer ideology to liberals and biography to minorities, nothing in his background betrays the slightest sympathy for the working class. As a community organizer, a legal lecturer and a politician, the president has never worked a job that necessitated the formation of a callus. That hardening, however, does seem to have taken root in his heart, judging by the workers he prevented from mounting oil rigs in the Gulf Coast, the Boeing employees he seeks to fire in South Carolina and the tax he sought to impose on the purchase of Christmas trees. This is a president for whom manual labor is the product of unseen others, a hardship to be overcome rather than an accomplishment to be trumpeted.
 
If the president’s inability to appeal to the working class is inevitable, it’s not because of who he is but because of what he believes. Voters tend to disdain candidates who categorically dismiss their aspirations. The working class, after all, seems to have a fondness for … well, working.

Notable Quote   
 
Happy Easter!…[more]
 
 
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