Informed Speculation

So says John Dickerson in Slate, regarding the much-ballyhooed kerfuffle over comments by Obama supporter David Geffen:

Let’s say you’re Barack Obama, and you’re building your campaign around a new, high-minded brand of politics, but then your rival takes a swipe at you. What do you do? A candidate who lets his opponent define him is a losing candidate, so you should respond quickly and sharply, because you don’t want voters to think you’re a weakling. But if you smack back, wouldn’t you be lowering yourself to your attacker’s level by practicing the old-style politics you rail against in every speech?

This thought experiment became a reality today for the Obama campaign. Maureen Dowd quoted former Clinton supporter David Geffen as saying a variety of unkind things about the former first couple. “Everybody in politics lies, but they [the Clintons] do it with such ease, it’s troubling,” said the media mogul, who hosted a fund-raiser for Obama Tuesday. (Here’s why he might be angry.)

The Clinton campaign immediately seized on the comments—as Obama had masterfully seized on comments by a Clinton supporter the week before. The Clintonites called for Obama to disavow Geffen’s remarks and return his money.

For Obama, this first major cut-and-thrust of the Democratic contest offered an opportunity to match his gallant and unconventional message with action. He could have ignored the ambush, picked up the phone to call Sen. Clinton, or disagreed with Geffen in public, saying that while Geffen was free to speak his mind, the public discourse doesn’t need anymore pollution. It would have been risky to gently rebuff a major donor, but it would have been in keeping with Obama’s high-minded stump speeches.

For the Clinton team, the Geffen remarks offered a chance to bait a trap. If they could goad Obama’s campaign into firing back, they could show that his soaring talk is just talk.

So, who won this round? Sen. Clinton. The Clinton team got exactly what they hoped for. Obama’s communications director, Robert Gibbs, responded sharply, alluding to the Lincoln Bedroom fund-raising controversies of Bill Clinton’s presidency. “We aren’t going to get in the middle of a disagreement between the Clintons and someone who was once one of their biggest supporters,” said Gibbs in a statement. “It is ironic that the Clintons had no problem with David Geffen when he was raising them $18 million and sleeping at their invitation in the Lincoln Bedroom.”

The Clinton campaign responded on cue. “I would have thought that a campaign trying to change our politics would have disavowed those comments and moved on,” said Clinton communications director Howard Wolfson.

Speaking of Obama, Thomas Sowell highlights some extremely troubling economic remarks by the young senator:

Senator Barack Obama recently said, “let’s allow our unions and their organizers to lift up this country’s middle class again.”

Ironically, he said it at a time when Detroit automakers have been laying off unionized workers by the tens of thousands, while Toyota has been hiring tens of thousands of non-union American automobile workers.

Labor unions, like the government, can change prices — in this case, the price of labor — but without changing the underlying reality that prices convey.

Neither unions nor minimum wage laws change the productivity of workers. All they can do is forbid the employer from paying less than what the government or the unions want the employer to pay.

When that is more than the labor in question produces, some workers who are perfectly capable become “unemployable” only because of wages set above the level of their productivity.

In the short run — which is what matters to politicians and to union leaders, who both get elected in the short run — workers who are already on the payroll may get a windfall gain before the market adjusts.

But, sooner or later, the chickens come home to roost. They have been coming home to roost big time in the automobile industry, where hundreds of thousands of jobs have been lost over the years.

It is not that people don’t want automobiles. Toyota is selling plenty of cars made in its American factories with non-union labor.

Some claim that it is automation, rather than union wages and benefits, that is responsible for declining employment among the Detroit auto workers.

But why are automobile companies buying expensive automated machinery, except that labor has been made expensive enough to make that their next best option?

Senator Obama is being hailed as the newest and freshest face on the American political scene. But he is advocating some of the oldest fallacies, just as if it was the 1960s again, or as if he has learned nothing and forgotten nothing since then.

He thinks higher teacher pay is the answer to the abysmal failures of our education system, which is already far more expensive than the education provided in countries whose students have for decades consistently outperformed ours on international tests.

Senator Obama is for making college “affordable,” as if he has never considered that government subsidies push up tuition, just as government subsidies push up agricultural prices, the price of medical care and other prices.

He is also for “alternative fuels,” without the slightest thought about the prices of those fuels or the implications of those prices. All this is the old liberal agenda from years past, old wine in new bottles, a new face with old ideas that have been tried and failed repeatedly over the past generation.

Senator Obama is not unique among politicians who want to control prices, as if that is controlling the underlying reality behind the prices.

Ye gads…the unions? As the savior of the economy? Holy guacamole, maybe it’s a good thing he’s running so far behind Hillary…