Somebody is Doing Something Right

By John Ballard

Plowing through the headlines, if we look past the complaining of disappointed fair-weather Obamatons, now getting wet because his umbrella is not big enough to keep them dry, we find hard, cold cash aimed at destroying Obama's party and policies. This indicates to me he is doing something right.

When someone as ditzy as Christine O'Donnell attracts millions to run against a decent, if colorless, career civil servant (Coons) whose party loyalty, old-fashioned decency and willingness to stay on point during a debate are unquestioned, something important is happening. No doubt there are crowds of Tea Party insurgents contributing their widows mites to the O'Donnell campaign, but added together those contributions don't come close to a handful of super-flush donors now sweetening the O'Donnell pie.

The same can be said of fat fortunes being plopped into Republican governors' war chests.

The donations, itemized in a 268-page report filed with the Internal Revenue Service, seemed to encapsulate the Republican Party�s success this year in collecting huge checks from conservative donors and corporations through third-party groups, thanks to a favorable political environment and the Supreme Court�s easing of restrictions on corporate political spending.

The association, led by its chairman, Gov. Haley Barbour of Mississippi, out-raised its Democratic counterpart by more than three to one from July 1 to Sept. 30. With $31.5 million in the bank, the group had more than twice as much cash available for the final stretch of the midterm campaign.

In sharp contrast to the party-affiliated committees in the House and Senate, the governors associations are set up as so-called 527s, able to accept contributions of unlimited size from individuals and corporations. It is in the realm of these large, unrestricted donations that Republicans have built a huge advantage this year in terms of independent group spending.

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The Republican Governors Association�s success stood in marked contrast to the advantage enjoyed by Democratic Party-affiliated committees in House and Senate races. Unlike the governors associations, however, the Congressional groups are bound by contribution limits.

[Both House and Senate campaign committees report an advantage for Democrats, but...]

The financial advantage of the Democratic Party committees, however, could be rendered moot this year by the avalanche of money, much of it anonymous, going to Republican-oriented third-party groups.

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Despite trailing badly in polls, the Republican Senate candidate in Delaware, Christine O�Donnell, reported raising about $3.8 million between late August and the end of September alone, ending the quarter with $2.6 million left to spend. Her Democratic opponent, Chris Coons, had roughly $1.3 million left in the bank on Sept. 30.

When big money is being spent trying to elect the O'Donnells and Angles of this world, people with money to waste are seriously pissed for some reason. When that kind of money starts cutting into duck hunting, vacation homes and sailing budgets something important is getting the attention of those with large fortunes they think might be at risk.

I watched a bit of the O-Donnell/Coons encounter on CNN yesterday and was again struck by the contrast betwen the two. She may be an air-head, drifting off topic and bubbling with empty sound bites, but she has a pretty smile and knows how to talk like a teen. Poor Coons, short, bald and looking like a clerk at the DMV, comes across as a professional civil servant (which he is) at a time when throw-the-bums-out is all the rage. 

In Thursday's WSJ Daniel Henninger's Capitalism Saved the Miners seized upon last week's dramatic rescue of 33 Chilean miners to launch a bit of political spinning. (He had plenty of time to polish the story because had the drama ended in failure it would have been unpublishable. Come to think of it, a failure would have been just as compelling since so many non-capitalist players were involved. Either way he saw a good chance to make the same ideological argument.)

If those miners had been trapped a half-mile down like this 25 years ago anywhere on earth, they would be dead. What happened over the past 25 years that meant the difference between life and death for those men?

Short answer: the Center Rock drill bit.

This is the miracle bit that drilled down to the trapped miners. Center Rock Inc. is a private company in Berlin, Pa. It has 74 employees. The drill's rig came from Schramm Inc. in West Chester, Pa. Seeing the disaster, Center Rock's president, Brandon Fisher, called the Chileans to offer his drill. Chile accepted. The miners are alive.

Longer answer: The Center Rock drill, heretofore not featured on websites like Engadget or Gizmodo, is in fact a piece of tough technology developed by a small company in it for the money, for profit. That's why they innovated hammer drilling. If they make money, they can do more innovation.

Sounds okay and plays well with all this talk about how Socialism, taxes and heavy-handed regulations are crippling the free market. I can imagine readers nodding sagely in agreement and trying to decide which misguided Left-leaning contacts in their email should be getting a link.

Not so fast, Mr. Hanninger.  Steve Rendell in 'Capitalism Saved the Miners'? Only in Wonder Land wipes the floor with another view.

Henninger's real motive seemed to be to use the miners' rescue to rebut a bit of Obama campaign rhetoric in which the president had sarcastically dismissed notion of unqualified faith in markets:

=>The basic idea is that if we put our blind faith in the market and we let corporations do whatever they want and we leave everybody else to fend for themselves, then America somehow automatically is going to grow and prosper.

Henninger�s response to Obama's remark:

=>Uh, yeah. That's a caricature of the basic idea, but basically that's right. Ask the miners.

I'm sure the miners are thankful for the heroic drill bit, but their opinion of the role of capitalism in their debacle might be less breathless than Henninger's. Indeed, most of the miners have weighed in on the central capitalist actor in the story: At least 29 of the 33 miners' families have filed lawsuits against San Esteban.

Also inconvenient for Henninger's argument: The rescue was run by the Chilean government and its relevant ministries, not by the capitalist company. Oh, and the U.S. government's space agency, NASA, also played a crucial role, designing the rescue capsule and consulting on safety issues.

Moreover, it's worth noting that, while Chile's larger, government-owned mines have relatively good safety records, the same cannot be said for its smaller, capitalist-run mines, such as San Esteban's.

What we are witnessing is fundamental to any political contest,  a struggle to control the narrative. Smart campaign managers know that narrative matters even more than facts or content. Whoever controls the narrative has a good chance at controling the outcome of any contest. (That's how an executive blow job vanishes in a larger narrative, one which also reduced presidential impeachment to a mere footnote.) 

Controlling the narrative is tough, but keeping it simple is the key to success. My favorite was "It's the economy, stupid!" but that one's no longer effective.  The one I wanted two years ago was "The Reagan Revolution is over" but a myopic administration has been so preoccupied with party politics they lost sight of that big picture. When Reagan said "government IS the problem" he was dead wrong. Obama's most effective narrative would have been "BAD govenment is the problem." Twin train wrecks -- the economy and health care inflation -- are both the result, not of government, but lazy government allowing the marketplace to run amock. No one in his right mihd, even a Republican, thinks the US government will ever get any smaller. Reagan himself knew that but the Great Communicator knew what to say to get voters to buy what he was selling.

I want to believe the administration can capture and hold the narrrative long enough to finsish out the next two years with enough notches on the belt to make it into a second term for Obama. I am as disappointed as anyone that health care reform didn't come out of the sausage grinder with a public option, the stimulus package fell short of expectations, and the economy ahead still looks like forty miles of bumpy road. But when I let myeslf imagine what the Republican alternatives might be it scares the fool out of me.

As I said when I started, all this money being poured into opposing to the administration is a good sign, not a bad one, that those with the most money -- and we know who they are and how few they number -- feel threatened by the direction the country is moving under Obama's leadership. I heard a line last week attribued to Mario Cuomo who said that politicians campaign in peotry and govern in prose.  We have learned how true that observation proved to be. We now know that the poetry of the Great Communicator ended in several prosaic train wrecks. Barack Obama's job is now to spin epic poetry into prosaic corrections, hoping that sometime before he leaves office leaves behind one or two prosaic success stories.