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GOP Lifeless, Commissars Lively

By John Batchelor on October 25, 2009 at 10:30 AM in Current Affairs

23rd NY Disaster.  

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John Bussey, WSJ, reports that the Republicans are showing energy on fund-raising in the latest report by the party. The Democrats remain ahead overall, more in the bank, but there is clearly a burst of giving to the GOP. Why?

A possible explanation is the Obama administration’s whimsical spending binge since the $1 trillion mark is now the fashion in DC. Another explanation is that the party has put in a bottom.

The depth of the grave is now six feet. There is no good news in the GOP. The 23rd NY continues to look like a black eye. The naive and aimless conservative/libertarian mouthpiece candidate Doug Hoffman, a creature of media attention and the Club for Growth, shows enough strength either to split the dominantly Republican vote in a legacy GOP district on the Canadian border or else surge past the lackluster and also aimless GOP candidate Dede Scozzfava (a Pataki choice) and go to Congress as an independent Know-Nothing. In sum, the GOP is fragmented, listless and about to lose another seat in the House.

This is not a signal of party sturdiness. Instead, argues a trusted correspondent, it points to the fact that the Ross Perot phenomenon of disgust with all government is back in force.  Two decades after the original, it is more accurate to say that the Perot boom was not a Republican renewal but rather a facile, vain, ignorant lurch off the tracks by the alienated that permitted the unknown Bill Clinton to rise to the occasion.  The Perotistas will burn out again, but not before 2010 and maybe not until after 2012. The GOP professionals are dismayed and resigned.  POTUS and the White House Politburo are lucky to have the Sons of Perotistas in the field.  Tea Party pours hallucinatory molasses on the dopey GOP head.  

A poll by ABC/Washington Post shows the GOP identification down to 20%.  It isn’t zero, but it is a dead-looking pachyderm.  (That is a very bouyant TR standing with elephant gun in hand, 1910).

Commissars of Captured Capitalism.   

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What may provide entertainment over the next weeks is the sudden news that the Obama adminstration has discovered a new way to torment a dead business — by mandating reduction of compensation to the point that presidents of major corporations that perished in the Crash of ‘08 will now be paid slightly better than a member of Congress. This is rudely funny.

Ken Feinberg, the so-called Pay Czar, has published a list of mandated reductions that transform POTUS and his Politburo into Commissars of Captured Capitalism.

Is it a good thing that dead banks get to pay their dead bankers billions of dollars? No.

Is it a good thing that the White House orders people to give up their private compensation arrangements with private enterprises? No.

Is it fun to laugh at the rich as they whine and maneuver?  Yes.

Will members of Congress receive many heated phone calls from expensively paid head-hunters who are looking to fill the soon to be abandoned ranks of the zombie banker jobs?  Perhaps.  Why work at Citibank, with a bonus ceiling, when you can work at HSBC and live large?