Jennifer asks a good question that is more and more on the minds of citizens and the punditocracy alike. Obama is so smart and so eloquent, and yet he has not, at least yet, succeeded as president domestically or in foreign affairs.

One answer, perhaps, is that being a successful president requires skills and attributes that Obama simply does not possess. Being “smart” is not among those attributes. Everyone who gets elected president is smart, for anyone who wasn’t could never make it through the world’s longest and most difficult political obstacle course. George Romney — no dummy by a long shot — came a cropper with a single ill-considered remark about having been brainwashed regarding Vietnam.

But being “supersmart” is not only no help; it is, I think, often a hindrance. Six future presidents were elected to Phi Beta Kappa as college undergraduates: John Quincy Adams, Chester Arthur, Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, George H.W. Bush, and Bill Clinton. Of those six, only Roosevelt could be considered a great president. Three of them, Adams, Taft, and Bush, were defeated for re-election, and Arthur couldn’t even get nominated for a second term. (His presidential reputation has been improving of late, however.)

And intellectuals, of course, are all too capable of thinking themselves into disaster. Remember George Orwell’s famous crack about “an idea so stupid only an intellectual could have conceived it.”

One might think that engineers, trained to deal with real-world forces, might make better presidents. But the only two engineers to reach the White House were Herbert Hoover and Jimmy Carter, both terrible presidents.

So what makes for successful presidencies? It might be fruitful to compare what the two greatest presidents of the 20th century, Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan, had in common. Neither were intellectuals (Roosevelt hardly ever read a book as an adult), but both were very “savvy,” not the same thing as smart. Both were master politicians, able to assemble and maintain coalitions. Both had immense charm. Both were first-class orators. Both had a great sense of humor and loved to tell jokes. Both were comfortable in their own skins and not given to introspection. Both had an abundance of self-confidence but no trace of arrogance. In both, the inner man was inaccessible, and no one felt he really knew what made either man tick. And both had that indispensable handmaiden of greatness — luck.

How many of those attributes does Barack Obama have?

Robert Samuelson has a must-read Washington Post column on ObamaCare. Pointing out that the country’s fiscal situation is terrible right now, Samuelson writes that

a prudent society would embark on long-term policies to control health costs, reduce government spending, and curb massive future deficits. The administration estimates these at $9 trillion from 2010 to 2019. The president and all his top economic advisers proclaim the same cautionary message.

So, what do they do? Just the opposite.

The question, of course, is why? Why a massive overhaul of the American health-care system that anyone honest knows will cost far more than advertised, instead of concentrating on reviving the economy and lowering the deficit, which are the primary concerns of the people in poll after poll?

Why not make incremental improvements in the health-care system, such as 1) allowing people to buy insurance across state lines, 2) reforming tort law, 3) allowing small companies to band together to buy insurance at lower prices, and 4) requiring health-care providers to post prices for standard procedures? These actions would cost the government not a single red cent (and red they are, as they are all borrowed) and would greatly lower health-care costs at the same time, a political win-win if ever there was one.

It is hard not to draw the conclusion that Obama, Pelosi & Co. see this as a one-time opportunity to make socialized medicine inevitable. By destroying the current health-care system under the name of reform, they would make single-payer unavoidable. The fact that the majority of the American people, as measured in numerous polls, don’t want single-payer is, apparently, a matter to which they are indifferent. The fact that the fiscal situation can only sharply deteriorate in the process is likewise not something they seem to care about.

The analogy being drawn is with Franklin Roosevelt, who moved a deeply isolationist country toward war with the Axis powers before Pearl Harbor because he believed that it was in the interests of the American people, even though they opposed it at the time. But that is a false analogy. Foreign-policy situations can be irreversible and time-sensitive. Had Roosevelt not done what he did, Germany might easily have ended up supreme in Europe and thus in a position from which it would have directly menaced the United States while being exceedingly difficult to defeat (how do you invade Europe without Britain as a base?).

But if we don’t radically reform health care today, we can still do it two years or five years from now when the economy and the deficit are much improved. People will still be adequately, often splendidly, cared for in the meantime. With the incremental reforms listed above, we might well find out that the system doesn’t need much reform in five years.

That, of course, is exactly why Obama wants it done now. He is bent on sharply shifting power in the direction of the government, away from individuals and the free market, and is willing to defy both the public and fiscal sanity to achieve this goal.

Could someone in the Chief of Protocol’s Office at the State Department please tell Barack Obama that heads of state do not bow to other heads of state? And for the head of state of the country founded on the idea that “all men are created equal,” that goes double.

When Obama bowed to King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, the White House denied it: “It wasn’t a bow. He grasped his hand with two hands, and he’s taller than King Abdullah,” said one aide. As a commentator on CNN said, “Ray Charles could see that he bowed.” (h/t PowerLine)

Now he has bowed, extravagantly, to Emperor Akihito of Japan. The Los Angeles Times called it a “wow bow” in its headline and asked “How low will he go?”

President Obama goes abroad apologizing for the supposed sins of a country that defended and extended freedom around the world at a staggering cost in lives and treasure and then grovels before the man whose country has yet to apologize for the Rape of Nanking.

As my mother used to say, “Pardon me while I throw up.”

The New York Times this morning has a front-page story on the difficulty of balancing New York State’s budget, which is gushing red ink. The governor, David Paterson, called the legislature into session this week and delivered an address to both houses, asking — begging, really — for serious budget cuts to cover a $3 billion deficit in this year’s budget and far larger deficits in future years.

Good luck with that, governor. As the Times explains:

Gov. David A. Paterson is imploring the Legislature to finally reckon with the state’s ugly financial reality.

But first the governor must reckon with the likes of Senator Carl Kruger.

Mr. Kruger, a Brooklyn Democrat who is the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, has amassed a campaign war chest of $2.1 million, in part because of generous contributions from his labor union allies.

Despite a deficit of more than $3 billion, Mr. Kruger has threatened to block any significant cuts to health care and education, the biggest spending areas in the budget. He has presented his own budget plan, which has startled even Albany veterans for its reliance on one-time maneuvers and financial gimmickry.

Last week, the state’s most powerful union, 1199 SEIU United Healthcare Workers East, had a rally in Albany, with 2,000 people screaming for no cuts. The SEIU and other public-service unions don’t hesitate to launch aggressive TV-advertising campaigns against politicians who do not toe the union line, while donating generously to the campaign war chests of those who do, such as Senator Kruger. The taxpayers have no means to push back, since the legislature is thoroughly gerrymandered. As a result, politicians take the path of least resistance: like Kruger, they prefer to use creative accounting to get around the state constitution’s requirement that the expense budget be balanced, rather than face fiscal reality. This, of course, simply makes the problem worse in the future, as more and more of today’s budget is funded with tomorrow’s money.

The Times has finally woken up to the fact that gerrymandering is an affront to the very principle of democratic government. And unless it and the rest of the New York media world finally acknowledge that allowing politicians to keep the state’s books as they please guarantees gimmickry instead of hard choices, disaster is inevitable. Like every corporation in the country, governments need the discipline that comes from having to adhere to rigorous accounting principles, and relying on independent accountants to ensure that they do.

If you were developing a plan to make health insurance more affordable, would you use as a model the state whose laws have made health insurance the most expensive in the country? That’s what Nancy Pelosi and the Democratic majority in the House have done.

David Gratzer points out that PelosiCare will force insurance companies to cover orthotics. Unless you are a doctor or have foot problems, you probably don’t know even what orthotics are, but you’ll be covered for them if this bill becomes law. New York State also mandates the coverage of off-label drugs, chiropractors, in vitro fertilization, and a host of other services. Each additional mandate inescapably raises the premium.

Orthotics, of course, is hardly the only mandate in the 1,992-page PelosiCare bill.

Even worse, New York, with “guaranteed issue,” requires that health-insurance companies sell policies to anyone who asks for one and to cover pre-existing conditions. This is the equivalent of requiring fire-insurance companies to sell policies to people whose house burned down the day before — and then pay to rebuild the house. Naturally, premiums on the shmoes who carry health insurance when they are healthy must go up to cover the shnorrers who only begin paying premiums when they have claims.

PelosiCare will require guaranteed issue.

And New York severely limits the ability of insurance companies to charge the young, who have a very low risk of serious health issues, lower premiums than those charged to the not-so-young, who have a much higher risk. Since the young are wildly overcharged in order to subsidize seniors in New York, many decide not to buy health insurance, knowing that if they are very unlucky and get seriously sick, they can always buy the insurance then and be covered.

PelosiCare will do the same. To be sure, the bill calls for those who do not buy insurance to pay a fine of $2,000. As New Yorker Andrew R. Heinze writes, that’s about what he is currently paying just for the coverage of hospital care today, thanks to New York’s economic-reality-be-damned health-insurance laws. He plans to drop his insurance if PelosiCare becomes law and depend on good luck (and guaranteed issuance).

Residents of New York City pay about five times as much for health insurance as those who live in, say, Columbus, Ohio, because of these mandates, guaranteed issue, and restricted premium differentials. PelosiCare will make sure that those who live in Columbus will see their health-insurance bills soar. Or it will cause a collapse of the private health-insurance market, making a government takeover of health care inevitable.

It’s hard not to think that the latter is exactly what they have in mind.

It’s not likely, but a huge embarrassment to Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama could be shaping up in the 23rd Congressional District of New York.

Doug Hoffman, the Conservative party candidate, conceded the race on election night when he was told that, with 93 percent of the vote counted, he was 5,300 votes behind and had barely carried his stronghold of Oswego County.

In fact he carried Oswego by 1,748 votes and, thanks to the recanvass, is now only 3,000 votes behind the Democratic candidate, Bill Owens. On election night, he was behind Owens by 300 votes in Jefferson County. He now leads there by over 400.

So it boils down to the absentee ballots that are yet to be counted. There were about 10,000 absentee ballots sent out. If half of them were returned — not an uncommon percentage — Hoffman would have to win over 80 percent of them to overturn Owens’s victory. Very unlikely, but not impossible.

If that were to happen, the political apparatchiks in the White House, who have been trying desperately to change the subject by saying that this election was the true test of national politics, not the governorships of Virginia and New Jersey, would have egg all over their faces. Worse, Nancy Pelosi would look like she played dirty by swearing in Bill Owns when there was no certificate of election from New York State. Each house is ”the Judge of the Elections, Returns and Qualifications of its own members,” but it is unusual not to wait for certification of the election by state election authorities. Pelosi didn’t in this case (or in the undisputed special House race in California), because she was desperate to have the two votes for the PelosiCare bill.

I haven’t the faintest idea if the vote of an improperly seated congressman counts (and it wouldn’t reverse the outcome in any case), but if Bill Owens was indeed improperly seated, it will be truly delicious.

It seems as though the Democratic leadership in the House doesn’t have the votes to pass the health-care bill tomorrow and it may have to be postponed until Sunday or even later. The longer the delay, the less the chance of its passing, so every delay is very good news.

As Jennifer pointed out, Nancy Pelosi has broken her pledge to have the final health bill posted on the Web for 72 hours before a vote. The Rules Committee has not yet produced a rule, which legislation in the House needs before it can move to the floor. The rule sets the terms of debate and what amendments can be brought forward for an up-or-down vote. This time, the rule itself is likely to contain a series of substantive amendments, which are automatically adopted if the rule itself is.

One can see why the Speaker has broken her word. The longer the time before her members vote, the more difficult it will be to force them to vote her way. The election returns on Tuesday and the unemployment figures just out this morning are very bad news for members who want to keep their jobs after next November.

But an even more important reason for Pelosi to rush the vote at all costs is the fact that more and more items, hidden in the 2,000 pages of the bill, are being revealed.

The latest is that neither the surtax on those with incomes above $500,000 nor the 8 percent payroll tax on companies that don’t provide health insurance to employees will be indexed for inflation.

Politicians love unindexed tax rates because as compensation rises to offset inflation, the taxes on that compensation rise even faster, thanks to the progressive income tax (another reason for a flat tax, of course). That gives the government more money — in real terms — to spend without members of Congress having to vote to raise taxes. Of course the public, not being stupid, caught on to this sleight of hand in the inflation-ridden 1970s, and Ronald Reagan rode the issue right into the White House.

So if the health-care bill passes as now written, the surcharge will hit not only the rich but also, like the nonindexed alternative minimum tax, slowly but surely more and more of the middle class. Meanwhile, the 8 percent payroll tax will hit everyone who works for firms that pay it, as that tax will be paid for with lower wages and fewer jobs created.

So it is not only Nancy Pelosi who is breaking her word to the American people but Barack Obama as well, who pledged that no one earning less than $250,000 a year would pay a dime in more taxes.

The House Republican Conference spent the weekend laboring over the unenviable task of reading the Pelosi health-care bill, all 1,990 pages of it. While they were at it, they noted the new federal boards, bureaucracies, commissions, and programs that the bill would establish. The number — are you sitting down? – is 111. These include everything from a “Telehealth Advisory Committee,” whatever that might be, to an “Independence at home demonstration program” to a “Comparative Effectiveness Research Trust Fund” to a “Public health workforce loan forgiveness program” to a “University centers for excellence in developmental disabilities education” and on and on and on and …

You can get the full list over at PowerLine.

The Republicans in the House are presenting their plan to reform health care. It could hardly be more different from the plan presented this week by Nancy Pelosi, which would reorganize health care in this country along what, as John Hinderacker at Power Line points out, are national socialist economic principles. At the heart of the Republican plan are four simple — not to mention obvious – reforms that would actually, well, reform how health care is paid for in this country and greatly reduce its cost, all without compromising care in any way. None of the four would cost the federal government one dime — probably one more reason these ideas are anathema to the Left, which measures “progress” by how much the federal budget is increased.

What they would also not do is turn control of health insurance over to the federal government, which has shown itself utterly incompetent in managinh such an enterprise. See here and here.

Number one: let families and businesses buy health insurance across state lines. Number two: allow individuals, small businesses, and trade associations to pool together and acquire health insurance at lower prices, the same way large corporations and labor unions do. Number three: give states the tools to create their own innovative reforms that lower health-care costs. Number four: end junk lawsuits that by increasing the number of tests and procedures that physicians sometimes order not because they think it’s good medicine, but because they are afraid of being sued, contribute to higher health-care costs.

I would add one more: require health-care providers to publicly post prices for standard services, procedures, tests, etc. This is already beginning to happen but it needs to be standardized in ways that allow easy comparisons. This would force health-care providers to simplify what are often incredibly complex pricing systems, allow easy comparisons between providers, and force prices to converge towards the low end of the range. (If hospital A will do a particular procedure for $900, why go to hospital B and pay $3,200? Such price spreads are possible only because prices are not easily determined.)

As Bill Kristol writes, the Pelosi plan may well collapse of its own weight. If it does, the Republicans are now ready with a cheap, easy, and economically logical alternative.

Have you ever gotten a call or an e-mail from a credit-card company asking if a recent charge on your account was legitimate? Credit-card companies are on the hook for fraudulent charges for amounts over $50, even if the customer doesn’t report the fraud. So it is in their powerful self-interest to spot phony charges quickly. That’s why they have programmed computers to alert the company to charges that are out of pattern. Say your American Express bill usually runs between $400 and $600 a month, with the usual bump at Christmas time. Suddenly there is a spate of charges for expensive clothes, electronic equipment, airplane trips, etc. You can bet you’ll be getting a jingle from Amex to make sure things are on the up and up.

If they are not, they cancel the card, send you one with a different account number, and try their best to track down the bad guys.

Such obvious precautions, it seems, are beyond the capacity of Medicare, which pays out half a trillion dollars a year to medical-service providers. At least $60 billion — one dollar in eight — of that is paid out for claims that are not legitimate. CBS’s 60 Minutes, not exactly a member of the vast right-wing conspiracy, ran a story on it last Sunday that you can find here (h/t Instapundit). The reporter, Steve Kroft, warns that the report will raise your blood pressure. That it certainly will.

As the report shows, Medicare fraud is ridiculously easy to carry off, little effort is put into preventing it, and few resources are committed to catching suspected attempts at it. All you need is a physical address, a list of Medicare recipients (available on the black market for about $10 a name), and a list of Medicare billing codes. Medicare is required by law to pay these claims within 30 days. Every few months you shut down the ABC Medical Supply Company and open up the DEF Medical Supply Company at a different address. Medicare direct deposits the money you bill them right into your bank account — none of those annoying $100 bills to launder — and you don’t have to worry about being gunned down in a parking lot by a rival criminal. No wonder the FBI thinks it is now a larger criminal enterprise in South Florida — where the report was filmed — than cocaine-trafficking.

How bad is it? One woman interviewed says that she has been reporting an endless stream of false charges on her Medicare statement for six years. Medicare keeps saying they’ll look into it, and the phony charges just keep coming and just keep being paid. A retired federal judge who has his God-given arms, reports that Medicare was billed for two artificial ones for him at the same time. Medicare paid the bill without question, despite the fact that losing two arms simultaneously is, to put it mildly, a rare medical event.

And this is the model for ObamaCare. The mind boggles.

In the September 24 article on the Honduran matter, the New York Times wrote: “Norma C. Gutierrez, an international law specialist who prepared a legal analysis for American lawmakers last month, criticized both sides. Her bottom line: the case against Mr. Zelaya was rooted in constitutional and statutory law. His removal from the country was not.”

This morning, reporting on the agreement, the Times writes, “Mr. Zelaya was ousted in a military coup on June 28 and flown to Costa Rica.”

As near as I can tell, the only coup in Honduras happened today, when a group of diplomatic thugs, led by the United States State Department and the OAS, offered the legal government of Honduras a deal they couldn’t refuse, forcing it to restore to power a man who had been legally removed from office (and, perhaps, illegally sent into exile instead of legally sent to jail).

The Commerce Department reported this morning that the economy rebounded in the third quarter of 2009, growing at a 3.5 percent annual rate. That is the first quarter of growth since the second quarter of last year and so may signal the end of the Great Recession, especially if the fourth quarter continues the trend. To be sure, a considerable part of that growth was from the cash-for-clunkers program, which helped drive up durable-goods purchases by an astounding 22.3 percent last quarter. It will be interesting to see how much of that automobile-buying was borrowed from the future by the federal subsidies, retarding growth in the current quarter and the first quarter of 2010.

What is unlikely to rebound is employment, which is always a lagging indicator. Worse, as I explained here, the rebound in employment has been taking longer and longer after each recession, as the microprocessor revolution rolls on. It is, perhaps, lucky for the Democrats that preliminary quarterly GDP figures are released on the last Thursday of the month following the end of the quarter and that monthly unemployment figures are released on the first Friday of the next month. Because of the vagaries of the calendar this fall, that means that the good news on GDP was released five days before the election and the likely bad news on unemployment will be released three days after the election.

No, really, they should. At least they should listen to what he has to say in one sentence of a blog post from 10 days ago.

In the post, Krugman sees no “wave election” on the horizon for next year. That, to be sure, is partly wishful thinking and partly ahistorical argumentation. He writes, for instance, that the election of 1994, when the decades-old Democratic status as the majority party crashed and burned, came about because “back in 1994, slogans about free markets, get government off peoples’ [sic] backs, etc. still had some popular resonance.”

They still do. But what turned 1994 from an ordinary off-year election, in which the party in the White House usually loses seats, into an election in which Democrats in Congress, governorships, and state legislatures from Maine to Hawaii got creamed, was the Contract with America. In it, the Republicans promised specific reforms of government. Those reforms entailed real limits on the powers of Congress members, such as term limits for committee chairmen, and of Congress itself, including giving a line-item veto to a Democratic president to help control spending.

Today, Krugman points out, “Republicans don’t have anything positive to sell.” That is all too true. They are against the health-care bill, cap-and-trade, card-check, etc. So is much of the country, and for the same reasons: we can’t afford them, and unions are a major cause of the government’s fiscal irresponsibility already.

What should Republicans be for? How about running on a platform that thoroughly reforms the budget process in specific ways; abolishes earmarks; takes the power to cook the federal books away from politicians and forces honest accounting; limits increases in federal salaries and benefits until they are, once again, in line with the private sector; and ends gerrymandering?

This would greatly limit the power of the members of the political class — of the Left and Right, Democratic and Republican, liberal and conservative — to ensure their own re-elections in the future. It could also produce a wave election that would make Paul Krugman weep.

Oh, and by the way, it would ensure American economic power and prosperity for the foreseeable future by ending the threat of the fiscal train wreck that has been looming ever nearer and is now — if the Obama administration gets it way — but a few election cycles away.

According to a story — unconfirmed by me — a reporter was interviewing Albert Einstein shortly after Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier in 1947. In the course of the conversation, the reporter asked Einstein what the speed of sound was at sea level. The physicist said he was sorry, but he couldn’t remember exactly. The reporter expressed surprise that the world’s greatest scientist didn’t know something like that. Einstein looked at him balefully over the top of his reading glasses and said, “I know where I can look it up.”

It’s amazing how many people seem not to know where to look information up, or perhaps don’t care, as they have things other than accuracy on their agenda. Take Rocco Landesman, the new head of the National Endowment of the Arts. In a speech in Brooklyn last week, he said of Barack Obama, “This is the first president that actually writes his own books since Teddy Roosevelt and arguably the first to write them really well since Lincoln.”

Oh, dear, where do I begin? Well, let’s start with grammar. It’s “the first president who,” not “the first president that.”

Second, he implicitly accuses Presidents Clinton, Bush 41, Reagan, Carter, Ford, Nixon, Johnson, Kennedy, Eisenhower, Truman, Hoover, Coolidge, and Wilson of having had their memoirs, autobiographies, and other works ghosted. Many of them received research assistance (one could hardly write a modern presidential memoir without it), and many, no doubt, also received a good deal of editing. Presidents are not usually professional writers. But research and editorial assistance is by no means the same thing as resorting to a ghost writer. I can’t imagine Harry Truman using a ghost writer. Herbert Hoover wrote sixteen books in his life, including Fishing for Fun — and to Wash Your Soul, published three years after his death, and a translation (with his wife) from the Latin of De re Metallica. Just a guess, but I don’t think there are many ghosted 640-page translations around.

Woodrow Wilson was a college professor and president before entering politics.  Congressional Government: A Study in American Politics, his best known work and one that ran through many editions, was not ghost written.

Third, Landesman implicitly accuses Theodore Roosevelt of being, unlike Barack Obama, a second-rate writer. Roosevelt wrote a total of 38 books in his life (not to mention countless magazine articles and thousands of letters, all while holding a day job and living only sixty years). His first, The Naval War of 1812, written when he was 23, is considered a basic historical text on that subject and is still both highly readable and in print. Will The Audacity of Hope be in print a 125 years after it was published?

Fourth, Landesman seems ignorant of even the existence of The Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant. They were written in the last months of Grant’s life (he died in agony from throat cancer three days after he finished the manuscript). They are universally regarded as the greatest military memoirs since Caesar’s Commentaries, and among the genuine masterpieces of American literature. Perhaps Mr. Landesman should give them a try if he doesn’t object to reading memoirs written by someone who had actually done something (like — you know — save the Union) before writing them.

Fifth, Lincoln never wrote a book.

What is it about Barack Obama that causes such cringe-inducing butt-kissing?

On October 11, Anita Dunn, White House interim communications director, declared war on Fox News. “Let’s not pretend they’re a news network the way CNN is,” she said. David Axelrod and Rahm Emanuel promptly chimed in on the Sunday talk shows (but not, of course, on Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace, which is being boycotted). “Other news organizations like yours ought not to treat them that way,” Axelrod told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos. “We’re not going to treat them that way.” The president doesn’t want “the CNNs and the others in the world [to] basically be led in following Fox” said Emanuel to CNN.

So, how’s the war on Fox working out for the White House? Not too good it seems. It didn’t work with the news media. When the administration tried to freeze Fox out of a pool interview with Kenneth Feinberg, the other networks refused to go along.

And it sure didn’t work with the public. The ratings of FNC are up nearly 10 percent in the past two weeks. Among the 25-to-54-year-old demographic that advertisers love, it’s up 14 percent. Fox has the top 11 shows in that demographic, and the top 13 shows in all demographics. Glenn Beck, a particular bête noire of the Obama White House, is in the No. 2 slot, despite being on at 5:00 p.m. instead of in prime time.

This rather reminds me of the old Catholic Legion of Decency, which used to rate films for their moral content. At first (the group was formed in 1934) a C rating (C for “condemned”) could hurt a film, as many Catholics pledged not to attend such films and not to patronize movie theaters that showed such films. But by the 1950s, with people less likely to automatically defer to authority, the disapprobation of the Legion could actually help at the box office. People wanted to see what the fuss was about and make up their own mind. By the 1970s, the Legion had faded away.

Perhaps the War on Fox is another example of just how retro this White House actually is.

Washington is consumed right now with health-care reform. But the population at large is far more concerned with the budget deficit. Indeed, a recent Rasmussen poll found that while 38 percent of the country thought cutting the budget deficit in half in the next four years should be the country’s top priority, only 23 percent thought health-care reform should be.

Of course, health-care reform involves spending (other people’s) money, while cutting the budget deficit involves making tough choices and making enemies. So it’s not surprising that Washington’s priorities are exactly the reverse of the country’s. As the California state politician Jesse Unruh famously explained, “Money is the mother’s milk of politics.”

There is not much, constitutionally, that we can do about this on the federal level. But there are many states that allow initiatives and referendums, and two of them, on opposite coasts, are holding referendums on limiting increases in state spending. Both Maine and Washington State are Blue States — Obama carried each of them by 17-point margins–but both are holding referendums that would freeze state spending per capita in real terms. (In other words, state spending could only increase to reflect population growth and inflation.) Any tax increase would have to be presented to the people in a referendum.

As the Wall Street Journal’s inimitable John Fund explains, the politicians and public employee unions are fighting these referendums tooth and nail, but both seem to be ahead in the polls (with, however, large undecided votes).

If both should pass, it would be as politically significant as the governor’s races in New Jersey and Virginia. Another Rasmussen poll shows that only 15 percent of Republican voters think their Republican representatives in Congress are doing a good job and 73 percent think they have lost touch with the Republican base. A win for both referendums in these two deep blue states would get their attention big time.

President Obama has a habit of letting Congress shape legislation, and the result has not been pretty. The stimulus bill turned into a liberal wish list that stimulated only the national debt. Cap-and-trade is stalled. And the health bills (there are, I think, five at the moment) are a mess, with no clear way to enactment (which is, of course, just fine with me).

This is reminiscent of one of the great legislative disasters in American history. In 1928, as Herbert Hoover was running for president, farm prices were low and going lower, and rural depression was deepening. He promised American farmers protection from foreign competition. Keeping his promise, he asked Congress to raise tariffs on farm products. Farm-state congressmen and senators were, naturally, all for this. But Congress works by log-rolling (I’ll vote for what you want if you’ll vote for what I want), and the Smoot-Hawley tariff bill (named for its chief sponsors, Sen. Reed Smoot of Utah and Rep. Willis Hawley of Oregon) soon turned into a special-interest feeding frenzy.

No fewer than 20,000 products, including tombstones (who knew that imported tombstones were a threat to American prosperity?), had their tariffs raised, and the overall level set by the new tariff was the highest in American history. Economists knew this was economic lunacy, and more than 1,000 signed a petition asking for a presidential veto. So did the international banking industry. Thomas Lamont of J.P. Morgan and Co. wrote: “I almost went down on my knees to beg Herbert Hoover to veto the asinine Hawley-Smoot Tariff. That Act intensified nationalism all over the world.”

It sure did. Other countries immediately slapped on retaliatory tariffs, and world trade began to collapse. It was $36 billion in 1929. In 1932, it was $12 billion. American exports declined 78 percent between 1929 and 1933, falling below the 1896 level if inflation is factored in.

The Smoot-Hawley Tariff was one of the three big government mistakes that converted an ordinary recession and stock-market crash into the economic catastrophe of the Great Depression, now forever linked to Herbert Hoover’s historical reputation.

One has to wonder why President Obama seems to have chosen Hoover as his role model. Wouldn’t Lyndon Johnson have been a better choice?

As an addendum to Jennifer’s post regarding New Jersey’s governor’s race, I was struck by something on Fox News Sunday, at the end of Chris Wallace’s interview with Terry McAuliffe and Karl Rove. The interview was essentially over, but McAuliffe and Rove were engaging in some good-natured banter, and lost in the crosstalk were two predictions regarding that race. McAuliffe said Corzine by 7. Rove responded with Christie by 2.

We’ll see.

If you need an example of how deeply embedded the spending culture of Washington is, just consider the administration’s latest proposal.

A recent Fox News Poll reveals that more than three-quarters of Americans think the national debt is so high that it endangers the future of the country. Even 65 percent of Democrats agree with that. The majority has some powerful facts on their side. Fiscal year 2009, which ended on September 30th, had an official (translation: phony bookkeeping) budget deficit of $1.42 trillion, equal to ten percent of the economy. But the national debt actually increased by $1.80 trillion, which is over twelve percent of GDP. You have to go back to World War II to find such figures. The Congressional Budget Office expects the debt to double over the next five years and possibly triple over the next ten, even if the proposed health-care reform doesn’t add to it (which is about as likely as the sun rising in the west tomorrow morning).

The one bright spot in these dismal figures is that, because there was a slight deflation in fiscal 2009, no cost-of-living increase is needed this year for Social Security recipients to have their real income remain constant. Indeed, because of the deflation, they are better off today than they were a year ago, as cost-of-living adjustments only ratchet up, not down.

So how has the administration handled this rare piece of fiscal good news? It has suggested sending everyone on Social Security a check for $250 to compensate them for there being no cost-of-living increase. That would add another $13 billion to the national debt. To be sure, that is a mere bagatelle compared to the rate at which the national debt is increasing. It rose by twice $13 billion just in the first 15 days of this month. But, to update Senator Everett Dirksen’s famous dictum, $13 billion here, $13 billion there, and the first thing you know is you’re talking about real money.

The fact that the Social Security cost-of-living increase this year would be negligible if not nonexistent has been obvious for months. It would not have taken a PR genius to present this as the good news it is and note that it helps reduce the growth of the national debt. It’s amazing how well people react when you tell them the truth.

Instead, the Obama administration has proposed sending seniors their grandchildren’s money.

As Jennifer points out, the liberal spinners are having trouble dealing with the fact that “we’ve lost millions of new jobs since January, and unemployment is at a 26-year high.”

If you’d like to see just how bad it is, try this remarkable graph showing how employment has grown and shrunk since January 2004. Republican spinners should have no trouble making devastating TV ads out of animated graphs like this one, which allow the instant comprehension of complex data over time.  As Glenn Reynolds points out, the last few months look “like some sort of nuclear-war animation.”

Ronald Reagan won the White House by asking, over and over, the simple question “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?” With the new technology of animated graphs, it is now possible to pound the answer home as never before.

Jennifer refers to the New York Times lead article this morning on a brewing civil war among Congressional Democrats as they struggle to get a health-care reform bill through the legislative process. This, of course, is what happens when you promise, as President Obama has repeatedly, to put in place a new health-care system that covers more people, costs less money, provides more services, and allows all who like the status quo to continue with what they have.

This is why I like engineers more than I like politicians. Engineers live in the real world. What they design has to actually function as advertised. So they don’t promise an airplane that is extremely fast, extremely fuel efficient, extremely quiet, and extremely safe. Those goals, each desirable individually, are mutually incompatible given the laws of physics. Politicians live in the political world and need only make sure that the bridges they build and the aircraft they design don’t crash in ruins before the next election. So they blithely ignore the laws of economics and human nature in designing programs. The political press corps equally pretends these laws don’t exist.

But sometimes they slip up and allow a glimpse of the truth to peek through. The Times article, for instance, notes that,

The tax [on "Cadillac health plans"], a provision of the bill to be voted on Tuesday by the Senate Finance Committee, is one of the few remaining proposals under consideration by Congress that budget experts say could lead directly to a reduction in health care spending over the long term . . .

If one of the “few remaining proposals” that would actually help reduce spending is eliminated, what will reduce spending? Nothing to see here, folks, just move along. Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain . . .

Lawrence Kadish has a good article in today’s Wall Street Journal, pointing out that the national debt is on an unsustainable path. Interest payments already consume more than 18 percent of federal revenues, and if the debt rises as predicted by the Congressional Budget Office (which has invariably underpredicted in the past), it will consume a lot more than that. And that’s assuming investors don’t require higher rates to compensate for a perceived increased risk of a default and/or an induced inflation. During the great inflation of the 1970s, the government had to pay as much as 15 percent interest to get investors to buy its longer-term paper. Rates even half that high would be disastrous.

Mr. Kadish makes one error. He writes that “except for a few years in the late 1990s, for decades Washington has spent more than it has taken in each year and borrowed the rest.” Alas, it borrowed in those years, too. Those were the years between 1998 and 2001, when the government ran “surpluses” totaling $559.3 billion. And yet the national debt increased every one of those years, for a total of $400 billion.

How does your income exceed your outgo (the definition of “surplus”) by $559.3 billion, and yet your net indebtedness increases by $400 billion? Simple: You cook the books. The money was taken from various trusts funds operating in surplus, principally Social Security, and replaced with federal bonds. But the money received was counted as “income” for budget purposes. There are former corporate executives playing volleyball this very minute at Club Fed for less than that.

There can be no long-term cure for Washington’s spending addiction until the politicians have taken away from them the power to keep the government’s books as they please, just as corporate management had it taken away more than a century ago. That won’t be easy because the politicians — aided and abetted by their water bearers in the media — will fight it tooth and nail, and because most people regard accounting as a boring, even an eye-glazing subject.

Watching the United States go the way of 17th-century Spain, with its power to defend its interests crippled by debts it can’t pay and its enemies emboldened by its weakness, won’t be boring. It will, however, be tragic for all mankind.

The winners of the Nobel Prize in economics were announced today. They are two Americans, Elinor Ostrom of Indiana University and Oliver Williamson of UC Berkeley.

So now that all the 2009 prizes have been awarded, let’s recap: The Nobel in medicine went to three Americans. The Nobel in physics went to three Americans. The Nobel in chemistry went to two Americans and one Israeli. The Nobel in literature went to a German. The Nobel Peace Prize went to an American, and now the Nobel in economics has gone to two Americans.

Thus, of the 13 winners this year, 11 are Americans. A country with 4 percent of the world’s population produced 85 percent of the winners. To be sure, we are to some extent playing with numbers here. After all, Israel, with .08 percent of the world’s population, produced 7 percent of the winners. But over the 108 years they have been handing out Nobel Prizes, the number won by American citizens is exceptionally large.

I wonder if that fact embarrasses this year’s Nobel Peace Prize winner.

The Times of London gets it exactly right, I think.

. . . the prize risks looking preposterous in its claims, patronizing in its intentions and demeaning in its attempt to build up a man who has barely begun his period in office, let alone achieved any tangible outcome for peace.

Two previous sitting presidents have won the Nobel Peace Prize. Theodore Roosevelt won it in 1906 for brokering the peace treaty that ended the Russo-Japanese War, and Woodrow Wilson in 1919 for struggling so hard — if unavailingly — to build a lasting peace after World War I. Wilson spent six months in Europe, sailing on December 8, 1918, and leaving for home on June 28, 1919, the day after the Versailles Treaty was signed. Returning for only two weeks in February, it was by far the longest time an American president has ever been out of the country.

Now a third sitting president has won it for . . . what? For “capturing the world’s attention.” As the Times says, “The achievements of all previous winners have been diminished.”

I agree with Noah Pollak that Obama would be wise to respectfully decline the prize, pointing out that the prize should be given for achievements, not aspirations. But that, alas, would be an even bigger surprise than his being awarded it in the first place.