Monthly Archives: November 2012

The Outcome

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According to Fox News‘ exit polling and a Fox News interview (sorry about the lead-in ad) with Dick Morris (who had, the day prior to the election, predicted a Romney win at 9:1 odds), the American electorate has changed.  Morris had based his prediction on the electorate makeup of 2008 being an aberration; Tuesday’s results strongly imply that this is now the makeup of our electorate—2012 is not materially different from 2008.

In fact, the changes aren’t great in absolute terms; the black vote was 11% of the electorate in 2004, and the Hispanic vote roughly 8% then.  Those small changes, though, were enough to put Obama over the top, 51%-49% in the popular vote (the Electoral College outcome is a function of the discrete state by state allocation of those votes, despite the fundamental closeness of the popular votes in several states with large Electoral College contingents).

Here are the ethnic group numbers from that exit poll [the last column and row are added by me; numbers don’t sum to 100% due to rounding and because I omitted the 2% “Other” category]:

Are you:

Total

Obama

Romney

 % Total Electorate Voting Obama/Romney

White

72%

39%

59%

28%/42%

Black

13%

93%

6%

12%/2%

Hispanic/Latino

10%

71%

27%

7%/3%

Asian

3%

73%

26%

2%/<1%

Total Non-White % Voting Obama/Romney

21%/5%

 

With this breakout, the Democrats start out with a 4:1 advantage in the non-white demographic.  Even accounting for the black break-out being accentuated by the presence of a black candidate, it seems clear to me that the advantage is strongly for the Democratic Party—still nearly 4:1.

Morris suggests that the Republican Party needs to “change its positions” in order to reach these other folks; otherwise they’ll never win another election.

I disagree.  The conservative Republicans’ positions are sound.  What they need to do is a better job of communicating, a Republican weakness of long-standing.  They need actually to approach these groups and talk directly to them in their neighborhoods.  This is what the Democrats have been doing for years.

Mitt Romney made a speech to the NAACP, but neither he nor his representatives ever went into the local neighborhoods where blacks live.  He never talked directly to blacks.

Mitt Romney’s Spanish-speaking son made a few speeches to Hispanic organizations in Florida, but no one went into the neighborhoods there—or in Texas (which as a state went for Romney, but not the Hispanic population), or in Illinois, or in New York, or in California, or in…—to talk directly to Hispanics where they live.

Mitt Romney didn’t even pay lip service to the Asian demographic.

As I said, Republicans need to improve their communications skills, not alter what they stand for.  Those are sound principles, and they’ll draw all Americans, not just a select few.  Medicare, for instance, was painted as a huge vulnerability for the Republicans—their view that Medicare needed to be sharply revised in order to survive and their specific plan for achieving that revision were supposed to be Republicans’ undoing.  A look at the exit polling at the above link, though, shows the soundness of the Republican position: voters 65 and older went for Romney 56%-44%, and those 45-64—the group beginning to think about and to get serious about planning for retirement—went for Romney 51%-47%.

What are the Republican principles?  Christian Whiton offers a useful summary in a piece that also centers on communications:

…a society that wants to survive must not punish those who play by the rules or are successful.

…a private market allocates resources better than even smart Ivy Leaguers working for a government bureaucracy.

…the American century only ends when we decide we’re no longer exceptional in mankind’s history, and choose the European model of decadent decline over a destiny of freedom and self-reliance.

The principles are worth fighting for (or the United States is no longer that self-reliant, personally responsible, free market nation that it has been heretofore); the message needs to be brought to all of us, not just some.

Disaster Relief

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Government can’t do it.  This isn’t the fault of liberal government or conservative government—government can’t do it.  Only private enterprise and the community of individual volunteers can.

Look at the failures of government response to Katrina, including the failures of the governor of Louisiana and the mayor of New Orleans to do anything at all other than to cry out for Federal relief—and in the case of Governor Kathleen Blanco, a failure to do even that until it was too late for the Feds to be even a little useful.  Then there’s the failure of the Federal relief efforts.  There remain temporary homes in Louisiana depots unused because of bureaucratic failure to get them emplaced and allocated, just as one example.

Private enterprise—Wal*Mart (food, clothing donations, delivery truck capacity), Home Depot (support centers for providing reconstruction materials), Ford Motor (160 used trucks, vans and SUVs for use in the relief effort)—arrived promptly with its own relief effort in progress by the time the Feds arrived.

Private charity and NGO—The American Red Cross, Feeding America (then America’s Second Harvest), Southern Baptist Convention, Salvation Army, Oxfam, Common Ground Collective, Emergency Communities, Habitat for Humanity, Catholic Charities, Service International, “A River of Hope”, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and many others charitable organizations had major roles in the relief effort.

Individual volunteers with expertise—electrical power restoral, flood relief and water damage repair—flowed in from out of the disaster area.

Look at the manifest failures of the governor of New York, the mayor of New York City, and the Federal government with Sandy.  There are lots of photo ops, many tours of the disaster areas, an initial attempt to divert massive police, sanitation, etc resources from relief effort and residential neighborhood security to support a marathon race.  And millions of Americans in New York and New Jersey still are without power, heat, clear roads, fuel for their transportation, even homes.

On the other hand, Verizon, for instance, had 95% of its cell service back up and running within 24 hours of Sandy’s landfall in the affected areas.  AT&T, et al., weren’t far behind.  Home Depot (those guys again) has activated its Disaster Response Command Center and is coordinating merchandise movement and working with the Red Cross (those guys again) for relief effort.  Wal*Mart, by last weekend alone, had donated 60 pallets of dry food and beverages and nearly 6,000 cases of cleaning supplies.

Private charity and NGO—all those listed above—are active in their own roles.

Volunteer utility workers have flowed in to help with power restoral, marathon runners, with their contest cancelled, switched to doing their own resupply efforts to beleaguered neighborhoods, relying on shank’s mare to get supplies in where motorized delivery couldn’t go.

William McGurn, writing in Monday’s Wall Street Journal, argues that these failures demonstrate the failures of liberal government.  From this conservative’s perspective, McGurn makes some good points:

…the great vulnerability of 21st-century American liberalism: an inability to set the priorities necessary for good government.  As a result, government grows both bigger and less capable, especially for people who do not have the resources to fund other options.

He’s right as far as he goes, but as I opened this post, this isn’t a failure of liberal government alone—it’s a failure of government.  This isn’t because the wrong people have the wrong ideas, but because the idea is wrong.  Government cannot do disaster recovery.

Government has an important role to play in disaster recovery, but that role is coordination; assistance in allocation of effort and resources; short-term, stop-gap, hand up funding.  It is not the doing itself.  As I wrote here,

Government didn’t build anything; it just acted as middle man for a small part of all that private building.

Disaster relief is just a subset of that building.

Europe Misunderstands

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As I write this, election day is beginning, and the Spiegel Online International article on which I’m commenting has already been published (the day prior, in fact).  Nevertheless, this is the European mindset with which we must deal.

The article begins with a number of valid points—our decaying infrastructure, our decaying educational system, our decaying economy.  But then it proceeds to lay display that broad misunderstanding of America and of the factors involved in this decay.  I’ll only describe a few; RTWT.

The hatred of big government has reached a level in the United States that threatens the country’s very existence. Americans everywhere may vow allegiance to the nation and its proud Stars and Stripes, but when it comes time to pay the bills and distribute costs, and when solidarity is needed, all sense of community evaporates.

No, small and limited government are at the center of our founding ideals—which are as valid today, if lost to too much of our national consciousness and conscience, as they were at our founding.  It is today’s big government that lies near the center of our straits.  It redistributes wealth without regard to validity of the redistribution and without regard to the will of its bosses, the Sovereign people.  Indeed, out government, from its size, has ceased to be responsible to us; it has become nearly impossible to control at all.

Moreover, that big government and that dependency on it for “welfare” is destroying the “sense of community” that Speigel so plainly misunderstands.  That community is purely local, neighbors and friends helping neighbors and friends.  Private charities and churches helping locally.  There is no community in redistributing Texas’ citizens’ wealth to bankrupt and spendthrift California.  There is no community in redistributing bankrupt New York’s wealth, such as it is, to bankrupt Illinois.  There is no community in redistributing such wealth as California, New York, or Illinois have to Texas, or to Georgia, or to South Carolina.  Yet this is what the Big Government social welfare programs do.

The country has forgotten the days when former President Franklin D. Roosevelt courageously told his fellow Americans that a collectively supported social welfare system didn’t translate into socialism but freedom, a “New Deal” that would strengthen America in the long term.

In fact, we’re living out the failure of FDR’s attempt at even his small form of socialism.  Social Security, with its add-on Medicare, are abject failures, wholly bankrupt.  These were borne of a premise that it was appropriate to take the hard-earned wages of a New Yorker and redistribute them to a current retiree in California—or Texas.  Even were the concept of such a mandate valid, the redistribution aspect prevents that New Yorker—and that Californian and Texan—from putting that confiscated money by for his own future retirement, or his own family’s current or future needs.

Underlying these failures, also, are demographics, of which FDR’s minions surely were aware.  Today’s retiree lives some three times longer in retirement than did FDR’s retiree, and he is supported by only 2-3 workers today against nearly 7 for FDR.  Now it’s true that FDR and his staff could not have predicted the hard numbers that would be realized in only four generations, but they certainly were aware that the demographics would not be static, that the demographics would evolve.

Here is the crux of Europe’s lack of understanding.

Naturally, an opposition party’s role must be to fight the government’s policies.

The United States is not Europe.  This may be the role of an “opposition party” there, but in the end, there are no opposition parties in our government.  There are parties that oppose each other, to be sure, but their role is not defined by who is in power and so who must, knee-jerk, oppose simply because of who is not in power, but by the ideals and principles for which each party stands.  And by the moral requirement of each legislator to represent his constituency—who are his boss.

Some details also illustrate Europe’s lack of understanding.

Instead, the more Obama sought to accommodate the Republicans, the more extreme their positions and the more hysterical their criticism became, eliminating any prospect of compromise. The three most important pieces of legislation Obama pushed through Congress since his inauguration in January 2009 were achieved with the votes of his fellow Democrats, even though they incorporated key Republican demands.

Obama opened the discussion by admonishing House Minority Leader (at the time) Eric Cantor (R, VA), when the latter demurred from Obamacare prior to its passage, “Eric, I won [the election].”  At a later summit concerning that same package, Obama repeated his jibe to Senator John McCain (R, AZ).

Obama’s biggest economic stimulus package, which provided for government investments of $787 billion, contained substantial tax cuts that the Republicans had demanded and to which the Democrats were in fact opposed, and yet only three Republicans in the Senate and none in the House of Representatives voted for the legislation. All Republicans in both houses of Congress rejected the healthcare reform that will be viewed as a historic achievement one day. And the financial reform legislation, which turned out to be far more moderate than the Democrats had hoped, received the votes of only three Republicans in each house of Congress.

Carefully elided here is the fact that the “stimulus” package also contained ruinous spending.  This was included even after the empirical evidence that Keynesian stimulus spending not wasn’t necessary, it was destructive rather than constructive.  One has only to review the economic responses to the Depression of the 1920-1921, in which the government did little, and the Great Depression of 1930-1942 in which the government did much.  FDR’s own Treasury Secretary ultimately realized the folly, but he lacked the courage to say so out loud, confining his lament to his diary:

We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work.  I want to see this country prosper.  I want to see people get a job.  I want to see people get enough to eat.  We have never made good on our promises.  I say after eight years of this administration, we have just as much unemployment as when we started.  And enormous debt to boot.

Obamacare wasn’t just passed over Republican opposition, it was passed against the explicit instructions of Congress’ and Obama’s bosses in the American system of governance—the American people.  It remains opposed today by the Sovereign.  The financial “reform” legislation has hindered business with an explosion of regulation, and it has created a small board of bureaucrats that will determine the flow of money in the private sector on no other say-so than their own.  Worse, its budget is unlimited; not even the people’s elected representatives—that Congress—can control its funding.

Many bills were never even put to a vote in Congress, because the Republicans, more frequently than ever before, threatened to use or did in fact deploy the so-called filibuster….

Carefully elided here, too, are the 30+ House-passed jobs-related bills and two budgets that the Democrats in the Senate refused even to be discussed, much less be brought to the floor for a vote.

But this is the environment in which our newly elected government must operate in its dealings with the Old World.

Union Above Public Welfare

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The Daily Caller, in a weekend article, reported [emphasis added]

In a two-page Oct 29 contract, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) local 1049 demanded union dues, pay hikes and benefit contributions from Florida electric utilities before its workers would be permitted to help reconnect power to Long Island communities.  The demand came as Hurricane Sandy was bearing down on the Northeastern United States, stranding tens of millions without electricity.

That…contract…was sent to Florida’s nonunion power companies; it can be found at the above link and here.  Below are some of the eleven different financial “demands” the local required as a precondition to allowing these volunteer, and non-union, workers to help the Long Islanders devastated by Sandy.  Never mind the welfare of those residents.  They’re just useful hostages for the collection of the union’s vig.

  • UTILITY shall contribute 22 ½ % of each employee’s gross salary into the “IBEW Local 1049 Craft Annuity Fund”
  • UTILITY shall contribute 3% of each employee’s gross salary into the “IBEW Local 1049 Craft Division Skill Improvement Fund”
  • UTILITY shall contribute 3% of each employee’s gross salary to the local collection agent for the “National Electrical Benefit Fund”
  • UTILITY shall contribute 0.5% of each employee’s gross salary to the “National Electrical Industry Fund.”
  • UTILITY shall contribute 1% of each employee’s gross salary to the “Northeastern Joint Apprenticeship and Training Trust.”

Notice that—just these money grabs alone would have forced the UTILITY(s) to pay into union coffers nearly 30% of these volunteers’ (post-raise) pay, beyond that pay itself.  Taking into account all the money demands,

TheDC calculated that for a nonunion crew foreman normally earning $40 per hour in Florida, the mandated higher wages [also demanded in the “contract”] plus union contributions and dues would force a utility to pay $67.74 per hour for each worker completing power restoration tasks in New York.

For work performed on weekends or after 4:00 pm on weekdays, that overall rate would jump to $70.38.

All so these Florida volunteers could have the privilege of being Good Samaritans and trying to help out fellow Americans in their hour of need.

Florida Municipal Electric Association Executive Director Brent Moline said

The word we were getting all week was that New York was short by hundreds of [electric] linemen.  Well, okay.  We’ve got them.  Florida is two days away, so you need a head start.

No thanks, said the IBEW.  Only union workers are needed.

Moline added,

[I]t was only in New York where the union had to give their blessing.  It just made me sick that you’ve got people who have no power and you hear about a lot of people dying.

Finally, one of thirteen clauses in the “contract” specified its overall period of effect—29 Oct to 29 Nov.  Eleven of the clauses dealt with money for the union.  There wasn’t even anything in document about work conditions, worker safety, and so on.  Just that money for the union.

Only after the hue and cry did the union say it had withdrawn the demand letter.

Isn’t this display of union greed, using the citizens of Long Island as hostages for the collection, reason enough to pass a right to work law in New York?  Governor Cuomo (D)?  President of the Senate Duffy (D)?  Speaker of the Assembly Silver (D)?

As and aside, if this is what the IBEW charges its local UTILITYs, no wonder LIPA’s electricity rates are so high (the lowest non-Household Assistance rate Long Islanders pay—water and home heating by other means than electricity and assuming no more than 250 KWh of use in a month—is 51.9¢/KWh, which compares with 10¢/KWh where I live in northern Texas—and I heat, and air condition, my home with electricity, for which LIPA would charge a higher price).