Monday Morning Quarterbacks: Monday, April 21, 2008

Wal-Mart has become the whipping boy for political demagogues, unions and anti-traders. I suggest that they have the wrong target. The correct target is revealed by answering the question: "Why does Wal-Mart exist and prosper?” Wal-Mart exists and prospers because tens of millions of Americans find Wal-Mart to be a suitable source of goods and services. Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, unions and anti-traders should direct their outrage and condemnation at the tens of millions of Americans who shop at Wal-Mart and keep it in business.

There's great angst over the loss of manufacturing jobs. The number of U.S. manufacturing jobs has fallen, and it's mainly a result of technological innovation, and it's a worldwide phenomenon. Daniel Drezner, professor of political science at the University of Chicago, in "The Outsourcing Bogeyman” (Foreign Affairs, May/June 2004), notes that U.S. manufacturing employment between 1995 and 2002 fell by 11 percent. Globally, manufacturing job loss averaged 11 percent. China lost 15 percent of its manufacturing jobs, 4.5 million manufacturing jobs compared with the loss of 3.1 million in the U.S. Job loss is the trend among the top 10 manufacturing countries who produce 75 percent of the world's manufacturing output.

But guess what — globally, manufacturing output rose by 30 percent in the same period. According to research by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, U.S. manufacturing output increased 100 percent between 1987 and today. Technological progress and innovation is the primary cause for the decrease in manufacturing jobs. Should we save manufacturing jobs by outlawing labor-saving equipment and technology?

— Walter Williams

Barack Obama is also part of a long tradition on the left of being for the working class in the abstract, or as people potentially useful for the purposes of the left, but having disdain or contempt for them as human beings.

Karl Marx said, "The working class is revolutionary or it is nothing.” In other words, they mattered only in so far as they were willing to carry out the Marxist agenda.

Fabian socialist George Bernard Shaw included the working class among the "detestable” people who "have no right to live.” He added: "I should despair if I did not know that they will all die presently, and that there is no need on earth why they should be replaced by people like themselves.”

Similar statements on the left go back as far as Rousseau in the 18th century and come forward into our own times.

It is understandable that young people are so strongly attracted to Obama. Youth is another name for inexperience — and experience is what is most needed when dealing with skillful and charismatic demagogues. Those of us old enough to have seen the type again and again over the years can no longer find them exciting. Instead, they are as tedious as they are dangerous.

— Thomas Sowell

Beware when politicians talk about "compassion,” especially when they hold a "Compassion Forum” to do it, which is what they did at the appropriately named Messiah College near Harrisburg, Pa. Politicians identify with the messianic because they think they are God's gift to America.

The forum attracted Democratic presidential candidates Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, but not Republican John McCain, who apparently saw it for what it was: an attempt by the Democrats to get back in the religion game.

You've got to hand it to Clinton and Obama. They did their Sunday school homework. They quoted Bible verses and told religious stories like it was testimony time at an old-fashioned revival meeting. "Yes indeed, brothers and sisters. We Democrats have seen the light. We once were blind secular humanists, but now we see into the electoral Promised Land! Vote for us and we will deliver you from the sin of ever having voted for a Republican!”

This is nothing new, of course. As recently as George W. Bush and as far back as the founding of the nation, politicians have invoked God in favor of their candidacy and policies. But God can't simultaneously approve of one political party or policy and its opposite. Abraham Lincoln gave us the best line on the idea of a schizophrenic deity when he said about Northern and Southern religious people in his second inaugural address: "Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other.”

— Cal Thomas

Looking back over recent months, there is a common thread in Barack Obama's response to both the Rev. Jeremiah Wright revelations and his "bitter” gaffe. In his Philadelphia speech on race, Obama talked of "the anger and the bitterness” of Wright's oppressed generation. He referred to "a similar anger” existing within "the white community” that politicians have routinely exploited on issues such as crime and welfare. America, in this view, is beset by anxiety and fear and resentment and racial stalemate, which can be overcome by Obama's broad understanding and audacious hope.

A part of me wants to believe. Racial discrimination is the poorly healed scar of American history, and Obama's election would be a happy arrival on a national journey that began with African-Americans considered only three-fifths of a person. But Obama's political approach is wearing poorly. Obamaism seems to consist of the belief that the candidate transcends the understandable but confused anger of black and white Americans. And so Obamaism requires an unfavorable comparison of the American people to Obama himself.

This message is inherently prideful: I understand your bitterness and confusion, but I don't reflect it. You know me. I'm better than that.

The problem is: We really don't know Obama very well.

— Michael Gerson

Excerpts from syndicated columns

The Bush and Clinton legacies, Barack Obama's "new” politics and race relations are all casualties of a wide-open election without incumbents. But the greatest casualty has been our inability to figure how to deal with looming crises.

Victor David Hanson