04.09.12
Posted in Uncategorized at 5:28 am by Administrator
After spending the last six months immersed in the world of The Third World War – and with the recent release of A Land War in Asia - I have a few thoughts that I’ve developed over that period of time.
The world system, as explored heavily in The Blast of War and expanded upon further in A Land War in Asia is a mess. We have a number of interlinked challenges:
1) China’s economic rise rests upon an insecure foundation:
China has severe demographic problems. First, there’s the obvious problem that the Chinese have a severe gender imbalance in its rising population as a result of the widespread practice of sex-selective abortions. This means that China has many more young men than it does young women, a proposition that always leads to political instability.
Second, China’s population is rapidly aging. Mark Steyn, as I am fond of quoting, likes to remind us that at current rates China will “grow old before it grows rich.”
Third, these factors mean that the existence of the present Chinese regime is dependent upon continued rapid economic growth. If the People’s Republic of China cannot generate the wealth to satisfy large cohorts of young men on one side and a growing population of geriatrics on the other then it will not be able to ensure the survival of the current government.
The government of the People’s Republic of China, having long ago abandoned any pretense of being founded upon any more solid ideological foundation than its ability to provide prosperity in exchange for freedom, is absolutely dependent upon continued economic expansion. When economic growth slows, stops, or reverses – as it must at some point – it will be a very dangerous moment for the world as the Chinese leaders must make a choice between attempting to sustain their own position through external aggression, internal repression, or some mix of the two.
In The Blast of War and A Land War in Asia it is China’s challenges that ultimately plunge the world into war. Faced with the choice between diving into the abyss of internal anarchy or hazarding the risks of war, China’s leaders choose the latter. I think that’s a reasonable calculation to expect that they would make under such conditions.
2) America’s greatest vulnerabilities are political:
Much as China’s greatest problems are demographic-economic-political, so are the vulnerabilities of the United States. Put simply, the American political system is broken. Not only in the endless deadlock between the parties in Washington, but in a deeper sense that the American people themselves are now very deeply divided by culture. The political chasm between Republican and Democrat, between Red and Blue, is increasingly divorced from ideology and instead resembles the partisan divisions between the Blues and Greens of the Eastern Roman Empire.
In terms of the Third World War, this has several deep implications. First, that the divisions within America weaken the United States in the eyes of the world and make it more likely that a potentially-aggressive power such as the People’s Republic of China will risk war with the United States under the assumption that America’s political leadership and the American people will be unable to sustain the level of unity necessary to fight a major conflict.
Even if, as in the Third World War, the nation were to have a President with the skill and the will to guide the nation into such a conflict, that means that the underlying divisions within the nation would create chasms that any foreign enemy would seek to exploit. Hence, in The Blast of War, the nation is kept from taking early action to avoid war by its own domestic distractions and in A Land War in Asia, the Chinese seek to exploit American disunity for military advantage.
The United States of today resembles less the end-stage of the Roman Empire than it does the late Roman Republic. The nation possess tremendous reserves of power that, for purely political reasons, it cannot fully access.
Is America’s spending addiction a problem? Absolutely. However, it’s something that could be addressed by a sufficiently resolute leader. Alone among the world’s nations, the United States possesses the technological capability to revolutionize warfare – which I have argued, both within the scope of my novels and elsewhere, is the best way to defeat the Chinese.
If the United States returns to its founding principles, than a limited-but-strong Federal Government in the Hamiltonian mode could ensure that this is a second American Century. If, on the other hand, the American Republic remains mired in bickering of the sort that is necessitated by the welfare state, then not only the United States but, indeed, the world itself is doomed.
3) Europe is irrelevant.
For some reason, when I look at Europe today, I recall the words of Stephen Vincent Benet in a very different context, “it is over, but they will not let it be over.”
As General MacArthur very wisely saw when he addressed the Congress some sixty-one years ago, the axis of the world has shifted to the Pacific and it will not be turning back anytime soon, if ever. Europe is incapable of seriously projecting power and the long project of European unification has turned the continent into an insular backwater. If China has a demographic problem, Europe has a demographic disaster. More than one European nation has fallen into a death spiral due to its tiny birth rates. If we accept that old bromide that the children are our future than the sad reality is that most of Europe has no real future. Instead, its a place where tiny bands of youngsters are going to expend their lives in the impossible task of attempting to care for an ever-increasing number of dependents. With one notable exception, I doubt if we will ever see Europe play a major role in global affairs in any of our lifetimes. Instead, perhaps, instead Europe will suffer the fate of the colonies that is surrendered and become a battlefield for other, stronger nations.
The sole exception I envision is Great Britain. This is, both for me and in practice, more a matter of sentiment than anything else. As the only European nation to have turned its colonies into something of real value, it seems possible that Britain will be able to survive the collapse of Europe by the residual goodwill that she holds among her former dominions, her position as a gateway to the rest of Europe, and the fact that she is the home of the global language. My hope – as laid out in the books – is that, once the European Union is dispensed with, a new union based upon shared heritage and language may be forged among the English-speaking peoples that would allow Britain to recover some of its former glory.
4) The Middle East can mess up your day:
One can make the case that the last ten years of war in the Middle East have distracted the United States from what may very well be an inevitable showdown with China. That is not my opinion, but I believe that it is one for which strong arguments can be marshaled.
However, as much as some days it is tempting to wish that entire region of the world out of our minds – a wish shared by almost every empire throughout history – the reality is that, while prolonged engagement there seems to only bring misery, to disengage from activity there seems to be to only invite the arrival of what Donald Rumsfeld called “unknown unknowns” – those sudden and utterly unexpected events that can really mess up your day.
I believe – and this will be explored further in book three – A Thousand Points of Light – and perhaps in a non-fiction companion work, that the best way to avoid a Third World War – and to win it quickly should it come – is for the United States to get the sort of political leadership that will allow it to bridge its domestic divisions and to access some of its latent power. This, of course, is a subject that merits its own essay and then some (I’m toying with writing a book on this subject alone), but what I will say is this: if we are to avoid disaster then we must be prepared to overcome our own prejudices and accept some historic truths about humanity. We need to accept the need to make military preparations in order to avoid war and, further, to internalize the basic truth that the destiny of man is forged by force. Further, we need to study and understand how a century of social engineering on a massive scale have created the social and demographic trends, both at home and abroad, that are driving us towards disaster. Though, as I’ve said, that’s going to be a subject for another day.
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04.04.12
Posted in Uncategorized at 6:48 am by Administrator
I’m not really one to pause and reflect. For myself, when I complete a task, the follow-up question is always: what’s next? Still, with A Land War in Asia now available on Amazon.com (indeed, someone managed to buy a copy before I could even buy one for myself) and with The Blast of War still selling well (and, as a way of promoting A Land War in Asia, temporarily free on Amazon.com), it’s worth taking a moment to speak on the process.
The first thing – the first question I always get – is whether I’m happy with the book. The short answer is that I don’t think I’ll ever be fully pleased with anything that I write. The longer answer is more complex. Here’s what I’ll say for both The Blast of War and A Land War in Asia: they’re not quite like anything else on the market today and, in my opinion, they’re better than any of the alternatives that I’ve read. Admittedly, I’m writing for a very narrow audience – I’m pretty sure that I own every “future history” book ever written and, combined, they take up about half of one shelf on my six double-stacked book cases. The truth be told, when the trilogy is finished – hopefully in the summer – with the release of A Thousand Points of Light I’ll have created a work that, when the combined paper edition is printed, will end up being a thousand-page Clancy-sized doorstop and I’ll have done it in a little less than a year while juggling many other things. I think that it’s a daring story – broader than pretty much anything I’ve ever read. If someone would pay me to to do it, it would probably take twenty years – by which time the projected events of the books would be in the distant past – to tell this story with the sort of detail that I’d like.
I don’t have the patience, I think, to follow someone like Robert Caro (who has spent thirty years writing his biography of Lyndon Johnson) or Shelby Foote (who spent about twenty creating his history of the Civil War). In general, when I go into a store and it appears that I’ll be waiting more than two minutes in the line, I’ll leave and shop somewhere else. The odds that I could maintain my focus while embarking upon a decade-long project is essentially zero.
Now, as to the second question – how’s business? Business is, in a word, fascinating. The Blast of War has moved a respectable number of copies for what it is and how it’s been marketed. One conclusion that I’ve come to from my experience with The Blast of War is that traditional marketing for e-books is pretty much futile. I’ve spent a little money on ads and the like and noticed pretty much no difference in sales figures. Instead, with an initial spike in sales when it was launched and another when I placed an article on the book in the American Thinker, it’s seen a slow-but-steady increase in its numbers. I think that it’s best to hold back exact sales figures, but I’ll say that the numbers haven’t been close to high enough to make a career of it, but they’re high enough to make me think through some tax planning stuff.
What’s next? Well, there’s the aforementioned A Thousand Points of Light to cap off this series. Having, really, gotten as much out of this format as I think I can, I’m looking to do something a little different next time around. However, alas, I’ve also realized that I don’t really do anything “small”. I have at least three fleshed-out concepts in my head:
The Martian Empire:
This would be military/political science fiction and, actually, might even be considered something of a distant sequel to my “Third World War” series. Where The Third World War was largely written in reaction to and out of frustration with military/political fiction where World War Three is narrowly avoided and the nukes don’t go off, the concept of the Martian Empire series is largely a reaction to the strange and pervasive idea that seems to be found in most science fiction that human unification of some sort is a prerequisite to major space travel. Yes, there are a few Baen books where different human “star nations” go to war with eachother but, in general, these (I’m thinking of the Honorverse and Starfire novels in particular here) tend to be far removed from the contemporary world. Also, I want to take a more realistic look at the long-term effects of technology and extended lifespans as well as some basic evolutionary questions.
The Martian Empire is probably something at least a little familiar to any good science fiction fan – it’s basically a single nation where the cultures and institutions of the English-speaking peoples have merged into a single political entity (the flag of Mars, as I imagine it, combines the Stars and Stripes with the Union Jack). Mars, however, is in conflict with much of Earth because Martians are descendants of colonists who have been genetically enhanced in various ways and who were, to begin with, exceptional people themselves. Martians believe themselves to be better than Terrans because, in an objective sense, the average Martian is smarter and stronger than the average Terran.
An opening book of this series, as I imagine it, sort of riffs on the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Iraq War, and sort of the First World War. I imagine a scenario where some Earth nation agrees to let an alien force station warships in Earth orbit, forcing Mars to invade the Earth to prevent alien forces from being positioned in a spot where they could threaten Mars, leaving Martians forces to attempt to occupy and reorganize the Earth.
King of Sparta:
The title is a pun. I don’t normally like puns, but I’m kind of enamored with this one. In fact, I might write this book simply because I like the title so much. This is about a twenty-something Army Captain who unexpectedly inherits his father’s fortune and decides to use it to “start the motor of the world.”
In other words, in a way that is entirely not meant to resemble any famous guy with a similar name, this is about a young billionaire forming a private army and trying to change the world for the better. Incidentally, he’s “King of Sparta” because his last name is King and he’s from a town named Sparta. I thought that was obvious but, often, I find that that isn’t the case.
I’m not sure where he’ll be using his private army. Originally I had planned to have the story be about my long-cherished dream of launching a coup in Equatorial Guinea, though increasingly I imagine it being set in my native British Columbia, if only because I have a concept for an opening title called “An Old Man in a Hurry.” In case you haven’t already noticed, I really like titles. That leads to my third concept.
The Memoirs of a Confederate Samurai:
This is really a case where it would all be on the cover: a Japanese guy, a disgraced Samurai, finds his way to antebellum Los Angeles, where he falls in with a group of soldiers in the local US Army garrison. When the Civil War breaks out, he decides that he is morally obligated to join the, and travels with them across Arizona and New Mexico to Texas, where he joins the Confederate Army.
I don’t have the whole story down – and I’d have to do a damned lot of research to have it done right – but I want to set it in the Western Theatre, which isn’t featured in Civil War fiction as much as it ought to be. I imagine him first being a personal friend of – and being directly advanced by – Albert Sidney Johnston. Then, after Shiloh, I imagine him winning the respect of and riding with Nathan Bedford Forrest until the end of the war.
This would be the hardest to write. And I’d really want to get this one right because, as I see it, it would have the potential to be a genuine bestseller. I’d just want to make sure that we really got the cover right.
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03.28.12
Posted in Uncategorized at 6:38 am by Administrator
Since I’m presently procrastinating from finishing what I hope to be the final editing of A Land War in Asia (the sequel to “The Blast of War”) by both reading about and watching television, I figured I’d take a few moments to put a few television-related thoughts into writing.
First, Mad Men. There’s a lot that’s already been said about the premiere and much more will be written as the season goes on. But I have one theory that doesn’t seem to have been raised in anything that I’ve written. Specifically, this deals with the story of Lane Pryce and the wallet.
Before I go on, it’s worth remembering that Mad Men’s favourite trope is to take a look at how attitudes about all sorts of social issues have shifted from the 1960’s to the present day.
Now, obviously, the picture of Delores that Lane finds in the wallet kindles some sort of infatuation in Lane and is meant to point us in the direction of a future adulterous relationship of some sort or thing along those lines. However, based upon a few clues, let me offer a prediction:
1) Many have already surmised, and I agree, that Delores is the “kept woman” of some kind of organized crime figure.
2) Based upon both the picture and the tone of her phone conversation with Lane, I suspect that Delores is going to turn out to be quite young… As in, if I were to guess, underage young.
3) I think that the name is significant – Delores. Specifically, I think that its meant to invoke Nabokov:
She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.
I don’t think – probably – that the show would go the route of having Lane have an affair with an underage girl. The show loves exploring contrasts between modern attitudes and 1960’s attitudes but, at the same time, I think that audiences would find that hard to get past. Instead, I think that they’ll explore it by having Lane attempt to rescue her from her current status to the general indifference of everyone else.
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Hulu is streaming the pilot episode of “Don’t Trust the B—- in Apartment 23” – yet another example of a show that a network green-lighted with the word “bitch” in the title and then chickened out on before the thing actually made it on the air. I’m not sure if we can really say that this is a positive cultural trend. It makes me think of the scene in Lisa’s Wedding where Marge in the “future” (in a scene that, thanks to the unbelievable longevity of The Simpsons is now set two years in the past) comments that “Fox turned into a hard-core sex channel so gradually I didn’t even notice.” At the rate things are going, one has to assume that in another year or two the big networks will pick up shows with “bitch” in the title and not back down and that, in five or so years we’ll find out at the upfronts that ABC has picked up a sitcom named “Fuck Off” and that CBS has picked up another suspiciously-similar show named “Fuck You.”
It’s a pity, really, that the show – given that it’s debuting in April with almost zero fanfare – is all-but-certain to be cancelled. It’s actually a fine showcase for Krysten Ritter (perhaps most memorable as “Jane” in the second season of Breaking Bad, but also a stand-out during arcs on Veronica Mars and the Gilmore Girls in addition to a number of minor film roles), who is one of those actresses (the other two who come immediately to the top of my mind are Judy Greer and Paula Marshall) who is great in all sorts of thigns but, for some reason, has never quite broken through.
With a cast that includes Dreama Walker, most notable as Becca (the ex-girlfriend of Alicia son’s) on The Good Wife and James Van Der Beek (who, for some reason, is playing himself), Don’t Trust the B—– in Apartment 23 vaguely resembles CBS’s Two Broke Girls insofar as it’s a show about two young roommates in New York City that at least nods to the prevailing economic circumstances of the day. In each case a straight-laced young blonde who is forced by economic circumstances (actually, now that I think about it, forced by a Madoff-type fraudster) to move in with a cynical and street-wise girl with darker hair. But where Two Broke Girls largely uses the concept as an excuse to make sex and ethnic jokes that tend to played with a weird sort of stagey showiness by star Kat Dennings, Apartment 23 is sharper and smarter. I strongly encourage you to watch it before it gets cancelled.
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03.06.12
Posted in Uncategorized at 12:17 am by Administrator
So, there’s yet another teacher’s strike in British Columbia. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’ve seen this movie several times before and I didn’t like it very much the first time. Watching the traditional ritual unfold once more – stalemated “negotiations” in which both sides talk past eachother, prolonged minor labour disruptions, back-to-work legislation, and finally a brief spasm of public rage on the part of the teachers – one cannot help but recall Marx’s remark, after the coup of Louis Napoleon, that history is damned to repeat itself first as tragedy and then as farce. It strains the mind to wonder what exactly it would take to ever bring to a close BC’s endless educational Battle of the Somme.
It astonishes me that no one on either side seems to have ever stopped to reflect upon the cause of this intractable struggle. The BCTF and its supporters appear to believe that the government has a bottomless well of money somewhere that it can reach into in order to produce practically any amount on demand. This government – like every other BC Government in my lifetime – just wants the thing to be over with as soon as possible one way or another. It seems to have occurred to neither that the cause of the conflict is that the system itself is utterly and irretrievably broken.
Our education system is a relic of older ages. The 9-3 school day. with schools open for about nine months out of the year, is an artifact of the rhythms of 19th Century agricultural life. The tightly organized system of rotating classes and bells was meant to train the next generation of assembly-line workers for factories. In an age where only a handful of the kids graduating from BC public schools are ever going to even visit a farm, let alone spend a lifetime working on one and where those who end up working in manufacturing are more likely to have a Master’s Degree than they are to get their jobs by showing up at the factory gates a week after they graduate the current system is an absurd anachronism.
Most of the kids attending our schools today are, when they enter the workforce, going to be asked to do jobs that will require them to creatively use their minds. Using the same methods to train knowledge workers as you would use to train factory workers is worse than useless. We need schools that encourage best and most authentic form of diversity: namely that of the intellectual sort. We need to be creating a generation of original thinkers and future entrapanuers. I can think of no greater disincentive to that sort of education than bitterly clinging to a system that hires, promotes, evaluates, and pays teachers using methods dreamed up to improve the lot of 19th Century miners.
I think that teachers are great. I am certain that there are some teachers in British Columbia who not only deserve a modest raise but who, in fact, ought to be paid double or more what they are being paid today. However, I am equally sure that there are also many teachers who ought to find other careers who are being shielded by a system that makes defending mediocrity a higher priority than creating excellence.
If we ever want to move past the endless deadlock that has characterized education in British Columbia for longer than I have been alive, than we need the government, the public, and – perhaps most important of all – everyday teachers to realize a simple fact: the BCTF doesn’t have the solution to this problem, the BCTF is the problem. Teachers are, as any teacher you meet will surely be quick to remind you, hard-working, dedicated, skilled, and highly (and expensively) educated professionals. Bargaining with them as if they spent their days doing repetitive, unskilled, and undistinguishable labour – acting as though one teacher is a cog randomly interchangeable with another – is an insult to their skills and professionalism. The only people it helps are the relative handful of below-average teachers who are thus shielded by the union and the rent-seeking bureaucrats and NDP politicians posing as teachers who hold positions within the organization.
The way to improve education in British Columbia is to embrace the opportunities created by a century of technological change. We can find ways to use our schools year-round, instead of a third of the day for two-thirds of the year. We can embrace new methods of delivering instruction and free up teenagers to learn trades and gain other specialized knowledge. We can give both parents and kids an authentic choice about what sort of learning environment works best for each student. We can do all of those things, but we won’t do any of them so long as the BCTF is allowed to stand in the way.
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03.03.12
Posted in Uncategorized at 7:03 am by Administrator
The Liberal Party and its allies are, as of this writing, touting the fact that Elections Canada has reportedly received over 31,000 complaints related to so-called “Robocalls” during the 2011 General Election. I mention the Liberal Party specifically in this context because I first learned of this new number thanks to an e-mail from the leader of that party touting the number that contained a helpful link to a website where I could add to that number by filing my own claim.
I find the flood of complaints interesting because, according to Elections Canada’s own post-election report, it actually received fewer complaints in the immediate post-election period in 2011 than it did after the 2008 election. Surely I cannot be the only person who finds it highly convenient that no one seems to have noticed this massive and dark conspiracy, which if we assume that all 31,000 complaints to date are credible must have involved calls being made to hundreds of thousands or perhaps millions of Canadians, for fully nine months after the election actually took place. Communications don’t travel by horse or wooden ship in this day and age – I have a hard time imagining that if hundreds of thousands or however many Canadians had received these supposedly obviously-malignant calls on election day that it wouldn’t have ended up being a trending topic on Twitter on election day itself. It seems impossible to believe that the opposition, with tens of thousands of campaign workers and supporters scattered all across this broad land, would only notice so massive and public a fraud nearly a year after the fact.
Of course, memory is a funny thing.
For around a decade, spanning from the mid-1980’s through the mid-1990’s, the public was shocked by sensational cases where day-care providers across the world were accused of abusing children in truly bizarre and sadistic ways. Prosecutors brought charges against daycare workers alleging, in multiple cases, that they had molested children while flying in hot air balloons and that they had committed other grotesque acts of abuse against children in the service of Satan. This didn’t happen just in a single place or on a single occasion – such cases were brought in Saskatchewan, North Carolina, Massachusetts, New Zealand, England, California, and Brazil.
What happened? Did the spirit of the Devil, for a period during the 1980’s and 1990’s, suddenly decide to stalk the world’s daycares, inspiring otherwise-normal adults to sexually abuse children with butcher knives while using his dark powers to ensure that the abuse did not leave a shred of physical evidence? Or did, as happens from time to time, otherwise-sane people, their senses overwhelmed by shocking accusations that they couldn’t cope with, simply lose their reason? I will leave the final judgement on that matter to you but, to prosecutors and jurors at the time, the charges seemed real and serious enough to convict multiple people and to send those people to prison for multiple lifetimes.
Almost all of the evidence in these trials came in the form of testimony by the children themselves. Most of these children were totally unaware that they had been allegedly abused until they were heavily interrogated by police officers and child psychologists who helped them to “recover” and “reconstruct” their memories. It was during these intensive sessions that the most wild allegations, such as hot air balloon molestation, were developed. Later, after many lives were thereby destroyed, courts would decide that these methods were pseudo-science and that almost everyone accused in the dozens of trials was innocent.
I would ask everyone watching the unfolding media coverage of this pseudo-scandal to pause for a moment and reflect. Which is more plausible: that a coordinated effort was made to phone and misdirect hundreds of thousands of Canadians and no one noticed for the better part of a year or that tens of thousands of partisan left-wingers, faced with overwhelming media coverage of a micro-incident, and bombarded with hysterical and hyperbolic commentary on the same from every available social media outlet suddenly “recovered” memories of ordinary phone calls that took on a malignant tone only after time, distance, and all of the other vagaries of memory took effect?
I am against any sort of “public inquiry” into this matter until some actual evidence – and the hyper-ventilation of Bob Rae does not constitute such – of actual wrongdoing comes forward. It would seem to me that if anything is worthy of further investigation here it is the conduct of certain opposition politicians, in particular the Interim Leader of the Liberal Party, who – being better educated as to the facts than the media-saturated general population – may be knowingly wasting public resources by encouraging the public to file malicious, false, and frivolous complaints with Elections Canada.
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02.22.12
Posted in Uncategorized at 10:50 pm by Administrator
As someone who has been a supporter of Premier Christy Clark ever since she was my local MLA and I was a teenager it greatly pains me to say this: unless some immediate and drastic changes are made the NDP will form British Columbia’s next government. Yet it appears to me today, as it has for some days recently, that the present government has fundamentally misread the contours of the battlefield and is instead determined to maintain a steady heading on a course that can only lead to defeat.
Before we get into how the government can recover its bearings, we need to pause for a brief history lesson.
42.1, 41.5, 21.5, 39.5, 40.7, and 42.6 – those are the percentages of the vote won by the NDP in every provincial election in my lifetime. With the exception of the disastrous 2001 General Election, the NDP have won between 40-42% of the vote every time British Columbians have gone to the polls in the last three decades. The three times that the NDP have formed a government in this province they’ve done it with roughly 40% of the vote. In other words, there is a substantial portion of the BC electorate that is willing to vote for socialism but there has never, in the history of this Province, been a majority for it. This seems to carry over to the present day. In the most recent poll the NDP has a large lead over the government. What are the NDP polling? They’re polling at 42%.
If roughly two in five British Columbians are for socialism, what are the rest for? Most of the rest, leaving aside a tiny ultra-radical minority, are for the free market to some degree or another. We have plenty of Federal Liberals and we have an abundance of Federal Conservatives. In a lot of places there are still many old-time SoCreds. BC’s free market coalition has always been a discordant and dissonant group but, throughout its history, a common bond has united us all: the desire to, pace WAC Bennett, turn back the socialist barbarians at the gate.
This Province is incredibly rich in resources: natural, human, and geographic. We don’t need a government to create prosperity in British Columbia, we just need a government that is willing to get out of the way and let prosperity create itself. In recognition of this fact we have a long tradition, stretching back to the Second World War, of coalition governments that represent the interests of all factions who support free enterprise. Those who have served in these governments have represented different parties at different times, but, for the most part, they have done a workmanlike job of conducting our affairs and ensuring that business remans the business of British Columbia.
Every once and a while this coalition has a tendency to splinter just a little bit. That’s when the NDP gets into power in Victoria and makes messes that take forever to clean up. Forget talking about what the NDP did when they were in power in the 1990’s – much of the nonsense that they got up to when they ran things in the 1970’s, such as ICBC, haunts us still. As much as I am quite substantially to the right of the Premier I, for one, am ready to forgive a great deal so long as she keeps the New Democrats from running Victoria.
That is why this week’s budget is such a tragically lost opportunity for the Premier. If this government is to keep the coalition together is cannot tack to the centre: the NDP aren’t winning more votes than they have in any recent ordinary election and, conversely, the odds of getting any substantial number of people who voted for the NDP in 2009, 2005, 1996, 1991, and 1986 to vote for the Liberals next time around are essentially nil. If the Premier is to be re-elected she must tack to the right and win back those disillusioned supporters of the coalition who have defected to the nascent Conservatives.
To secure re-election this government ought to adopt a three-pronged strategy:
First, a major effort needs to be made to win over right-wing voters. This means more than hiring Federal Conservatives as staffers. It means new policies – tax cuts, reduction in the size of the government, and new privatization initiatives – to appeal to the right.
Second, the government would do well to recall another popular element of the historic platform of our coalition: building British Columbia. Our ever-growing Province still needs more infrastructure and a continued commitment to major construction projects will give the government a positive agenda to tout.
Third, it’s long past time to take the gloves off and go after Adrian Dix in the same fashion that the Harper Conservative shredded Dion and Ignatieff. Throw a million dollars at ads talking about the memo that Dix forged to try and cover up the misdeeds of Glen Clark and the late-night shenanigans involving bags of cash at the NDP headquarters that made Dix the leader. That’ll get people talking.
Something – anything, really – must be done and done quickly to ensure that the government comes to appreciate the gravity of the situation. Hundreds of thousands of disillusioned members of the coalition may still be rallied to the cause and we might be safe still – but the window is closing.
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02.09.12
Posted in Uncategorized at 6:08 am by Administrator
Like many supporters of the Republican Party, I remain agnostic as to the matter of who shall be the party’s nominee for President. While I am on the record as believing that Mitt Romney would make a capable President and, while he remains the probable nominee, I am also friendly towards the other serious candidates for the nomination. I believe that Newt Gingrich has the best ideas of any of the contenders and I believe that Rick Santorum has the ability to win over the sort of blue-collar voters that the GOP desperately needs. Yet I also recognize that, for all of their virtues, all of our choices are also flawed. Romney has been, to put it mildly, an inconstant conservative. Gingrich’s personal life is a liability and his judgement has sometimes proven to be unsound. Santorum embraces a form of social conservatism that will turn off some voters who might otherwise turn to the Republican Party in the face of the failures of President Obama. I wish that we could create a hybrid creature who possessed Romney’s executive experience, Gingrich’s intellect, and Santorum’s fighting spirit.
Frankly, I don’t know if we even possess a potential candidate who could please everyone. Chris Christie would face the same questions about his conservatism as Mitt Romney faces today. Mitch Daniels lacks charisma and the personal issues that kept him out of the race last year are the last thing that we want to be talking about in September and October. Sarah Palin is too controversial and could not possibly be elected. Marco Rubio is too new and inexperienced. As satisfying as I would find it to shove Jeb Bush down the throats of the left, I think that there’s a sizable faction within the Republican Party who would rebel at the idea of a third President Bush in the space of twenty years. I like Paul Ryan and believe that he has the right ideas to save the country but, at the same time, I’m not sure whether he – as a young man who has never run a statewide race – is prepared for a Presidential campaign yet.
The truth is that, while there are many fine and admirable individuals within the Republican Party who could plausibly be the President of the United States, none of them have jumped out of the pack yet. What I would say to that is this: there’s still time. It’s February. Presidents are not produced overnight.
I do not believe that the Republican Party has anything to fear from an extended nominating process. Indeed, I believe that the opposite may very well be the case. If we can get this campaign to a place where it is being waged in the realm of ideas – if we can keep the sort of nasty personal clashes that have characterized the Gingrich-Romney fight at points to a minimum – than we may very well benefit from an extended process that sees the fight for the Republican nomination go all the way to the convention at Tampa.
A long and spirited fight, waged all of the way to the convention, might very well energize the party and prepare it for the tremendous battle that the fall campaign surely will be. The fortuitous action of the Supreme Court, in paring back campaign finance laws, means that the money for a General Election campaign will be able to be speedily obtained. If Republicans can – as I believe that they shall – find unity in the fall through our common opposition to everything that President Obama and his party stand for, then there is little to be feared in a long and hard-fought battle. How many times, after all, has the team that finished first in the regular season been upended by some upstart who had to scratch their way into the playoffs?
Consider the fate of three recent defeated nominees for the Presidency – John McCain, John Kerry, Bob Dole – all of them secured their own nomination early and suffered as a result of long periods of inactivity before the General Election campaign kicked off in full. In many ways, the Republican Party overall would benefit from being able to dominate news cycles throughout the spring and summer, instead of having a disliked nominee trudging through the back pages. A long primary campaign and uncertainty as to the eventual nominee would also frustrate any effort by the Obama campaign to use its initial financial advantage to conduct an early assault against the Republican nominee of the sort that President Clinton effectively employed versus Bob Dole in 1996.
An open convention would be the political event of a lifetime. The last time that an American party went into its convention without knowing who the nominee would be was before I was born, in 1976. The last time that one went into a convention with a real possibility of dark horse being nominated was in 1952, just a few days after my father was born. It would be fascinating, thrilling, and be likely to be the most intense television and social media event in recent memory.
It could go quite badly, of course. But it could also go right in an amazing way. One ought not to discount the value of a spectacle. It would allow the Republican Party a chance to showcase all of its stars with the entire world watching. If the GOP could ensure its ultimate focus was on the vital objective of making Barack Obama a one-term President, it could be a uniquely unifying event. That might, of course, require any and perhaps all of the existing candidates to, in a supreme spirit of patriotism, sacrifice their own ambitions for the sake of the Republic.
Now, then, if we decide that an open convention is in the best interests of the party, the question of how best to achieve it remains. I think that, if the we wish to prolong the contest and leave open the option of nominating a dark horse for the Presidency, the best option is to revive another very old and now mostly-forgotten tradition: the “favorite son” candidate for the Presidency.
A favorite son is a candidate who secures the backing of their home state delegation for the Presidency in advance of the national convention. The intention of such a campaign is not to see this individual nominated for the Presidency but, rather, to preserve the independence of a state’s delegation at the national convention. This was once a common practice but, in the modern era, has been dispensed with. However, I believe that in view of the short time remaining, the lack of a single alternative candidate who can unify the party, and the fairly limited resources of Gingrich and Santorum as alternatives to Romney, the best option available for creating the possibility of an open convention is to swiftly organize campaigns by favorite sons (or daughters, of course) in states where they can be found and where local law makes such candidacies feasible.
California, I believe, is the most promising target. A Republican seeking to be placed on the ballot for the California Presidential Primary would need to gather just over 50,000 signatures by March 23rd – logistically challenging but hardly impossible – and the California Republican Party has repeatedly shown itself to be much more conservative than the state of California as a whole. Also, this is a closed primary. It is also, of course, the largest primary and, while it is not a winner-take-all contest is is nevertheless one in which the winner – especially if they were to win by a large margin – would receive the overwhelming majority of delegates.
I’m not sure who might take on the role of a California favorite son. Congressman Tom McClintock – a strong conservative who has taken a publicly contrarian role before – is the first name to jump into my mind. I am certain that there are other possibilities.
No one needs to be reminded how vitally important this election is. For my own part, I am indifferent as to who the candidate we end up with so long as they are prepared to defeat Barack Obama. I recall what Abraham Lincoln once wrote of the Civil War:
“If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that.”
Pragmatism must be our guiding star in this quest. Whether the final ticket is Romney-Santorum, Ryan-Rubio, or whatever it may be – we must take care to ensure that we have the best possible team with which to defeat President Obama. All other considerations – ego, ideology, and pride – must be secondary to our supreme objective in this fight.
Adam Yoshida is a the author of “The Blast of War.”
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01.26.12
Posted in Uncategorized at 7:08 pm by Administrator
In his recent State of the Union address, President Obama advocated measures that would attempt to create more high school graduates by forcing all Americans to remain in High School until either they graduate or until they turn eighteen. In the same speech, he also lamented the increasing cost of post-secondary education and called for measures to be taken to bring those costs under control. Lamentably, given the man’s supposed brilliance and insight, he gave no indication that he saw any connection between the two notions. The truth is that much of our education system has been ruined and billions upon billions of dollars have been wasted because well-intentioned people, such as the President, have failed to grasp the elementary statistical principle that correlation and causation are not the same thing and, proceeding from this error, have implemented over the course of decades a number of wrong-headed policies that have both debased the value of most levels of educational attainment and radically inflated its cost.
People often complain – with much justification – that today one is required to get a Bachelor’s Degree (and often, these days, a Master’s Degree) to get jobs that, a generation ago, would have been given to people with some mix of a high school diploma plus work experience. This is because, a few decades ago, some well-meaning but not very clear-thinking people looked at some statistics and drew a poorly-considered inference. They saw that people who graduated from high school had, on average, better outcomes in life than those who did not. Based upon this observation they concluded that if more people were induced to graduate from high school then they would have better lives also. No one ever seems to have considered the possibility that it was the traits that allowed the original cohorts to graduate under unaltered conditions – notably work ethic and intelligence – that resulted in them having better lives.
So, armed with this notion that improving high school graduation rates would improve lives, the social engineers set out to get more people to graduate from high school. What they seem to have failed to consider at the outset – perhaps out of a naive faith in the goodness of people – was that it was a lot easier to reduce the standards of performance and behavior that people would have to meet in order to graduate than it would be to make kids who would otherwise have failed to graduate smarter, harder working, and better behaved. As a result of this the high school diploma, previously a useful credential, became basically worthless.
The social engineers committed an error akin to that of the twelve year-old would-be economist who concludes that we could solve poverty by simply printing enough money to hand everyone $1 Million. Certainly, the government has the physical capacity to decree whatever changes on paper that it wishes but it lacks the capacity to alter the innate value of anything. In handing out at a lower (or no) cost something that was previously dearly attained they sapped that thing of its value.
Rather than learning the correct lesson from their errors, the government and its friends in the rest of society responded to the progressive devaluation of primary and secondary education by placing a great emphasis on post-secondary education. The new goal became to make sure that every single child in America could go to college – a goal that, of course, negates the entire point of college in the first place. While it is absolutely true that universities have a very useful role to play in the life of our civilization, it is also true that we only require so many doctors, lawyers, accountants, biologists, physicists, and the like and it is equally the case that we only have so many people capable of living up to the demands of those professions.
Yet still, because we devalued the high school diploma (and, I will also note though this is a topic that could fill another essay, standardized testing), more and more employers were demanding a Bachelor’s Degree as a test of basic literacy and competence since the high school diploma was no longer a trustworthy measure of those things. As a result more and more kids were sent off to college without any particularly learning attainment in mind. They were sent to learn… something. Demand for college came to greatly exceed the supply and, as a result, the prices that could be charged soared.
This is one of the most basic economic laws: when demand is higher than supply it will put upwards pressure on prices. Yet, at the same time, earlier ill-considered actions had made it vitally necessary that people, for the sake of their own futures, go to college. It hardly seemed fair, under the circumstances, that mere economics ought to prevent poor kids from going while rich ones paid their tuition fees with the change from their couches. Once again the government felt compelled to intervene, stepping in to guarantee loans to children in amounts so large that they would have been enough for the young adults of previous generations to buy modest homes.
Essentially the government, through student loan and grant programs, decided to hand kids black American Express cards to pour whatever amount of notional money they felt like into an area where the demand already exceeded the supply. The result was a vicious cycle where more and more kids were encouraged to borrow vast amounts of money to go to college at higher prices which, in turn, forced other kids to go to college lest they be at a competitive disadvantage that resulted in them borrowing more money to get into the system which, in turn, resulted in the original kids borrowing yet more money to pay yet higher prices and so forth.
The end result of all of this is that we have an education system that costs a lot of money and supports a lot of unionized jobs but which doesn’t do a very good job of teaching anyone anything. Rather than focusing on reducing the cost and increasing the quality of the product offered, educational institutions have instead focused on raw increased in quantity. This has, hardly unexpectedly, also had the ill-effect of reducing the original value of a Bachelor’s Degree, resulting in the same phenomenon that sent more and more people to college in the first place now sending those same people off in the pursuit of Master’s Degrees of no specific value.
We need to do much more to fix the education system. The most important step in doing this will be to communicate to the public that the one thing that our schools do not need today is more money. For year after year the public has had the message pounded into them, primarily by politicians who prefer spending money as a substitute to substantive thought and by government bureaucrats and unionized employees who stand to benefit financially from the arrangement, this bizarre notion that all that is required to improve our public services is to shovel more money into the furnace. I have never been successful in getting an answer from a sincerely committed advocate of this approach as to what level of funding would be satisfactory. Deep down, I suspect that if we were to devote every single dollar in existence to the funding of public schools their most committed advocates would still lament the “under-funding” of education and recommend that we develop the technology necessary to cross into parallel universes in order to loot their taxpayers for the sake of our children. Money is not the problem. We have spent more money every single year for decades and our results have gotten steadily worse. What is required now is innovative thinking.
The entire education system that exists today, in terms of how it is funded, structured, and operated was designed to meet the needs of the 20th Century. We take kids and put them into groups of thirty or so and have them move according to the bells from one classroom to another at a regular schedule while they maintain a daytime schedule from monday through friday. This is a system designed to produce the next generation of assembly-line workers, not leaders and innovators.
Our future depends upon our talents. What we require is an education system that uses modern technology to offer maximum flexibility. What is required of us now is not a doubling-down upon a failed system whose roots lie in a distant past to which we shall never return but, instead, that we fully embrace the revolutionary potential of technology in order to assist in the education of a generation that will lead us into an unlimited future.
This is a revolutionary moment, not an evolutionary one. While ideas such as school vouchers, charter schools, and home schooling are all preferable to the stale conformity and expensive time-sink of the public education system all of them are still tethered to aged paradigms that no longer apply in this century.
Industrial-era systems of organization not only are no longer necessary in the information age, they simply no longer work. What we require is an education system that sets certain basic standards – in terms of English, math, science, and history – and beyond which sets people free to develop their talents and interests to whatever degree they wish and are capable. If everyone cannot, by education or other means, be made equally good at everything it is certainly true that almost everyone will, given the opportunity, discover that they are good at and truly love something. The question should not be whether we need smaller or larger class sizes but whether, in this century, we require classes at all. In the age of the internet, streaming video, and the tablet why do we require 100,000 different teachers to deliver basic math lectures? Does it not seem to be the case that most people would be better served by the availability of individual tutors and mentors.
If anything, given the fearful ratio of workers-to-dependents that we face towards the middle of the century, doesn’t it make more sense to get more people into the workforce earlier and to keep them there for longer, rather than keeping people indefinitely and expensively in schools in order to satiate a seemingly endless public appetite for meaningless credentials?
For that matter, if we are going to lavish tens of thousands – in many cases more than a hundred thousand dollars – on teenagers and people in their early 20’s, would it not be far more productively used as venture capital investments in new businesses and concepts than in earning them degrees in Art History? The speed of change, after all, is increasing – not slowing. Of the companies that make up the Dow Jones Industrial Average today there is just a single one – General Electric – that was there a century ago.
Conservatives have too often allowed themselves to be tagged as being “anti-education” by those who simplistically believe that endless funding of the wildest education fantasies of public sector unions is the only “pro-education” position that exists. In truth, there are no greater opponents of real education in the world today than those who believe in imposing one-size-fits-all command and control-based solutions to problems that require highly individualistic solutions. If we really want to fix education than what we need is to embrace free market solutions that allow for individuals to learn according to the best of their own desires and abilities, not government-driven meddling where every single patch creates another bug which requires another expensive patch. After all, we would do well to remember, that when we tamper with education and thereby create an endless cycle of escalation in its cost and complexity we are not only taking away people’s money but we are also wasting years of their lives.
Adam Yoshida is a commentator and the author of “The Blast of War.”
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01.24.12
Posted in Uncategorized at 6:00 am by Administrator
During a recent visit to Austin, TX I had the singular pleasure of seeing a film at an Alamo Drafthouse theatre. Not only could I enjoy seeing The Ides of March in a comfortable setting, but I was able to order a beer and some freshly-baked chocolate chip cookies and have them delivered to my seat during the movie. If you think that sounds great – and it certainly was – your next thought is probably to wonder why you can’t do the same right here at home. It seems like a natural business idea: I’d certainly be willing to invest some of my money in someone who wanted to introduce the concept to British Columbia. The answer, as is so often the case when we ask ourselves why we can’t have awesome things here, is that it’s all the government’s fault.
Now, to be clear, this isn’t really the fault of the current government or Premier Christy Clark, at least not in the sense that they’re the ones who passed the laws in question. In fact, before the election of the first modern BC Liberal Government in 2001 and a subsequent modernization of our Province’s absurdly-antiquated liquor laws it was actually illegal here to walk from one table to another in a restaurant while carrying your own drink – a server would have to come to your table and collect your drinks-in-progress and move them to your destination for you, lest the establishment be fined. However, even after the modernization that took place shortly after the turn of the century (which also allowed a moderate expansion of private alcohol sales), we still have a liquor control regime that is excessive restrictive and which hurts both consumers and businesses.
The latest example of a good business struggling under the dictates of these ancient laws is the Rio Theatre on Broadway. The Rio, an older single-screen theatre that has traditionally shown a mix of first-run movies and older fare applied for a received a liquor license so that it could also function as a venue for live events. However, current laws prevent the theatre from continuing to screen movies, even on a part-time basis, while it also holds a liquor license. This is, in a word, stupid. The Provincial Government has the power to change the law in order to fix this idiocy. It should do exactly that.
This would be good public policy. What is a free enterprise government for if it isn’t going to help clear away useless regulations and laws that stand in the way of consumer choice and the success of business? Can anyone explain what public good is being upheld by laws which restrict people’s ability to purchase and consume alcohol in private venues? This is just some prohibition-era hangover.
While they’re at it, the Premier and the Government ought to look closely at all of our liquor laws.
It’s absurd to me that we, as British Columbians, often end up paying double for alcohol versus what we would pay in, for example, Washington State. There’s no good reason why, for example, a 750ml bottle of Grey Goose vodka in the United States should only be $2 more than a 375ml bottle costs in British Columbia or that a premium Scotch like Johnnie Walker Blue Label should be $289 here and $149 from some sellers in the United States.
Along similar lines, it’s crazy that we retain an antiquated system where most liquor continues to be sold through government-controlled stores, rather than simply allowing us to buy whatever we want from the local grocery store, as is the case in much of the rest of the world.
Some will argue that the Liquor Control Board generates revenue for the government – and that’s certainly true. But it’s also true that BC Liquor Stores are a costly and top-heavy operation, as is the case for pretty much all government-run entities. The government could sell all of its alcohol-related operations and allow the cost of alcohol to consumers to come down while still reaping plenty of money. Why not? That’s how most of the rest of the planet does this stuff.
This is one of those rare occasions when a good policy also makes for good politics. I have long argued that there is a need to communicate to the rising generation the case that can be made for conservative politics. The young, at least this generation, is reflexively ideologically libertarian – hostile to government control, in favor of individual liberty, and skeptical of the claims made by those who claim to represent the interests of the underclass – but votes overwhelmingly for the left as a result of decades of political programming at the hands of the culture and the schools. Too often they have been raised to believe that those of us on the right are otherworldly ogres when, in fact, most of us are just people who believe that we all have a universal human right to make our own choices and use our own resources however we see fit so long as it does not infringe upon the rights of others. Certainly, I will be infringing on no one’s right if I am able to buy a bottle of Whisky at Safeway or if I decide that I would like to enjoy an Old Fashioned while watching Doctor Strangelove on a big screen. This is a teachable moment where we can show people how the right stands for freedom not only in the abstract sense but also in practical ways.
What I would say to the Premier is this: as things stand right now, given the long duration of the present government and the bizarre resurrection of the BC Conservatives it is more likely than not that her government will be defeated at the next election. A safe strategy in these perilous days is likely to lead to nothing any better than a respectable defeat. What is required now is a year of reform – a vivid demonstration that this government still has energy, spirit, and vision. This seems to be as good a place to start as any.
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12.19.11
Posted in Uncategorized at 7:00 pm by Administrator
Earlier this year I raised the ire of some by predicting that Mitt Romney would, based upon an examination of history, be the Republican nominee for President. Six months later I feel that I must, with some reluctance, recommit myself to that prediction. With the latest polling showing that then intense negative attacks on Newt Gingrich have eroded his chances of winning in Iowa the last realistic chance of stopping a Romney nomination has evaporated.
Let’s look at the latest polls. Ron Paul’s fanatical supporters are busy cheering the fact that they show their candidate with a statistically insignificant lead. However, their real importance is that they show Gingrich declining and Romney rising. Ron Paul is anathema to the overwhelming majority of the Republican Party. Paul’s rise in Iowa is extremely helpful to Romney because it will cause, especially if polls in the final days of the race show Paul in the lead, voters to trickle away from other candidates to Romney in order to prevent the embarrassment that a win by the clownish Ron Paul would represent.
The latest national polls likewise show that the slow decline of Gingrich’s numbers is allowing Romney to finally climb higher than the low-20’s cap on his support that we’ve previously seen. Having to write about the fact that the chances of Speaker Gingrich being nominated for President are declining pains me – it is certainly not without a basis in reality that I have previously been referred to as the “Asian Newt Gingrich” and I certainly have a long-term affection for the Speaker and agree with him on almost every issue of national and international importance. Indeed, I still think – all other things being equal – that of all of those campaigning to be President that Gingrich has the most obvious potential to be a great and transformational President. However, from where I am sitting it seems to me that the massive deployment of money and resources against Gingrich in Iowa have blunted his advance there and that overcoming such a reverse would require a lot of money or time and, alas, Gingrich has neither at this point. Without Iowa the chances of the Speaker winning the nomination rest upon winning South Carolina and then Florida and then defeating Romney over a marathon-length campaign and I just, from where we are standing today, don’t see where either the money or the institutional support for such an endeavor would come from.
Thus, without something like another miracle for the Speaker (something that I wouldn’t say is impossible, given that it took one for him to get to where he is today), Mitt Romney will be the Republican nominee for President.
The reasons I enumerated in June for predicting Romney’s nomination remain, in my view, sound. The Republican Party has a long history of eschewing politicians who excite the party’s base in favor of nominating the early frontrunner who is typically the runner-up from the previous contest for the nomination. The only Republican nominees in that period to truly defy this pattern were Dwight Eisenhower (a World War Two hero who only barely won the nomination from the pattern candidate, Robert Taft), Barry Goldwater (who defeated Nelson Rockefellar scandal tarred his campaign) and George W. Bush (who was the son of a former President and was running four years after a weak cycle in which no genuine runner-up emerged). Well, I suppose that Gerald Ford might also qualify here but, insofar as he was an incumbent President running under unique circumstances he can be considered anything other than an outlier.
Mitt Romney meets both historical criteria. He was the runner-up in 2008 and he has consistently managed to regain a narrow lead in national polls even as one candidate after another has briefly managed to overtake him.
The truth is, as I have said before, that we could do worse than have Mitt Romney as President. While it may not thrill many hearts to hear a man described, as I would Romney, as having a record of competence in the public and private sectors and moral rectitude in his personal life, it’s definitely not bad. The Presidency is so singular and unique a job that no one really knows with certainty how one will live up to it until they actually get started.
I will say this for Governor Romney – I believe that he can do the job. He reminds me a great deal of Canada’s Prime Minister, Stephen Harper. I believe that, like Harper, Romney is a careful politician of basically conservative instincts who has repeatedly compromised to navigate the hazards of a liberal electorate. Yet I retain hope that a President Romney, like Prime Minister Harper, will, especially if he has the aid of a Republican-controlled and Tea Party-oriented Congress, prove to be a capable steward of the nation’s affairs and be able to use his basic solidity as an asset in leading a careful and steady rightward march. It may be infuriating at times to fire-breathing conservatives such as myself, but it absolutely could be made to work.
Adam Yoshida is a the author of The Blast of War.
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