Over at the Other League

Every now and then we avert our eyes from the desultory Republican primaries and check in on what the Democrats are up to, just as we’ll occasionally glance at the National League standings now that major league baseball is at least underway, but what we find over on the senior circuit of politics is no more heartening.

The putative front-runner in the two-person race, former First Lady and Senator and Secretary of State and long-presumed First Woman President Hillary Clinton, is on a six-game losing streak that includes some embarrassing blow-outs, and all the kids seem to dig her pesky rival, the self-described socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders from the hippie retirement village of Vermont. That’s before the Federal Bureau of Investigation concludes its criminal investigation of Clinton’s well-worthy-of-investigating e-mailing and charity fund-raising activities, which cannot end well not matter what, but it looks as if the fix is in just like one of those phony-baloney professional wrestling matches that the putative Republican front-runner used to perform. None of this is at all heartening when you suddenly recall that this isn’t mere sports, or “sports entertainment,” as the lawyers of professional wrestling like to call their “sport,” and that one of these awful people will likely enter the general election with a realistic chance of becoming president.

The game is played differently over on the Democratic side, too, and in ways that are even more egregious than forcing pitchers to be humiliated at the plate instead of letting a more competent designated hitter take the plate. There’s an unsettling preoccupation with racial and other political identity grievances, for one thing, and it’s lately been the big story. Both campaigns have been hectored by the “Black Lives Matter” movement that is the latest rage among the outsized portion of the Democratic primary electorate that is black, but Clinton’s husband, who was once the first First Black President, and has thus far endowed his frequently betrayed wife with all the political good will of that achievement. The self-described socialists’ promises of perfect economic justice and lots of free stuff is starting to resonate in the “Black Lives Matter” movement, though, and the first First Black President’s welfare reform and tough-on-crime measures are no longer fashionable, and it does make for an interesting situation. Clinton’s husband, who still somehow looms larger than his frequently betrayed yet putatively front-running wife, decided to make a full-troated defense of his past policies, albeit with less throat than his former McDonald’s-fueled from once had, and he threw in some factual stuff about how black folks generally had fared better during his administration than during the first seven-and-a-half years of the First Black President’s administration.

Oddly enough, we found ourselves rooting for the fellow, even if the sorry old son-of-a-bitch is still everything we loathe about the senior circuit. That welfare reform bill he signed really did reduce poverty by forcing people into gainful employment, the tough-on-crime stuff really did save a lot of black lives, which truly do matter, and even though he was forced on both policies by his equally sleazy advisor Dick Morris and the almost as sleazy Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich and a whole of Republican voters we hope aren’t so sleazy, we see no reason he should apologize for any of these less famous matters. Then again, we’re not rooting for his awful wife, who until recently had been running against her frequently betraying husband to keep those “Black Lives Matter” people on her side.

Still, we can believe that the fix is in and none of this matters, and that it will come down to whether our league can put up a worthy challenger.

— Bud Norman

Welfare and the General Welfare

We were only somewhat surprised to see that President Obama has decided to more or less single-handedly repeal the welfare reform law of ’96 by allowing states to dispense with the requirement that able-bodied adults work, seek work, take classes, or undergo drug and alcohol counseling in order to receive money from the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program.

It is not surprising that Obama would favor such a policy, as the more doctrinaire liberals have always hated the welfare reform law, especially the work requirements at the heart of it, and we can’t think of many liberals more doctrinaire than Obama. The undisputed fact that the law led to a decline in welfare dependency only exacerbated the disdain of liberals such as Obama, apparently because they prefer having an ever-expanding constituency of voters dependent on some form of government assistance or another.

It is surprising, though, that Obama would announce such a policy at this point in what looks to be a difficult re-election campaign. Aside from the move being bad policy, and of dubious legality, it seems to be horrible politics.

The welfare reform law is quite popular, after all, and somehow the underlying New Testament notion that those who will not work shall not eat also retains a widespread appeal. Although President Bill Clinton twice vetoed the bill before being bullied by Dick Morris’ polling into signing it, he now happily takes credit for its many positive outcomes and most people regard it as one of the great accomplishments of his supposedly golden age of governance. Because the welfare rolls declined dramatically without a commensurate increase in Charles Dickensesque stories of children starving in the streets, the bill has become one of the few things to come out of Washington that is generally regarded as a success.

Worse yet, so far as the political implications for Obama are concerned, the new policy can only bolster his reputation as a “food stamp president” intent on making an electoral majority of Americans dependent on the government. Unless Obama can achieve that goal by November, which may or may not be possible, the voters picking up the tab will likely be hard to woo.

Perhaps Obama figured that the Friday announcement of the new policy would be largely overlooked, and that a compliant press would prefer to focus on some 20-year-old documents that Bain Capital filed with the SEC, but his recent behavior suggests that he doesn’t much care if people do notice. His campaign is increasingly blatant in its appeal to class resentments and more unabashedly liberal in its rhetoric, so the new policy might be part of a deliberate strategy based on the assumption that a welfare state is what the country wants.

He might even be right. If so, the country is in even worse shape than mere statistics can tell.

— Bud Norman