Secretaries Gone Wild

By Victor Davis Hanson

May 3, 2012 12:00 A.M.

We’ve had some unusual cabinet secretaries in past administrations –Earl Butz, John Mitchell, and James Watt come to mind — but never anything quite like the present bunch.

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has overseen some $5 trillion in new debt. To help pay for it, he wants the rich — the top 1 percent, which already contributes more in income taxes than does the bottom 90 percent — to pay more for what he calls “the privilege of being an American.” Geithner, whose department oversees the IRS, should have taken his own advice: As a rich American one-percenter, he once failed to pay his own self-employment taxes, and improperly claimed his children’s camp costs as a dependent-care deduction.
Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar has pulled off the near-impossible: At a time when the known gas and oil reserves of the United States on public lands have soared, he has cut back on federal leasing of them to just about 2 percent of available offshore lands and 6 percent of onshore. Meanwhile, huge new amounts of oil are being found on private lands despite, not because of, the Interior Department. When he was a U.S. senator, Salazar claimed that even $10-a-gallon gas would not change his mind about voting to increase offshore drilling. And although he controls the leases of the richest oil and gas reserves in the Western world, he recently shrugged that no one knew whether gas would hit $9 a gallon.
Then there is the even stranger case of Energy Secretary Steven Chu, whose department helped oversee millions in bad loans to green companies like Solyndra, First Solar, and Solar Trust of America — the Teapot Dome scandals of our times. Chu infamously quipped before assuming office that he wanted U.S. gas prices to reach European levels. Apparently Chu wanted to force a decrease in fossil-fuel burning — although he later confessed that he does not drive a car.
Chu also once warned that California’s Central Valley agriculture might disappear owing to global warming. True, it could decline, but that would more likely be due to the Obama administration’s decision to divert irrigation water in hopes of helping out the three-inch San Francisco Delta smelt. Chu should realize that private-sector California farmers create thousands of jobs, while his own cabinet’s Solyndra-like projects have done precisely the opposite.
Attorney General Eric Holder dropped charges against the New Black Panther Party for voter intimidation. That may explain why he said nothing when the same group put out a dead-or-alive bounty poster on George Zimmerman in the Trayvon Martin shooting case. Holder’s department is suing the state of Arizona for passing a law to enforce the largely unenforced federal immigration law. Holder suggested that the Arizona law was racially inspired even as he admitted that he had never read it. Holder has praised the race-baiting Al Sharpton for his “partnership” and called the country “cowards” for not holding a national conversation on race on his terms. The attorney general has referred to African-Americans as “my people,” and he has characterized congressional oversight of his office’s failure to rein in the Fast and Furious scandal as racially motivated attacks on himself.
Labor Secretary Hilda Solis just tried — and failed — to draft a proposal prohibiting kids under 18 from working “in the storing, marketing and transporting of farm product raw materials,” even on family farms. And she wanted to turn over some farm-training programs now run by the Future Farmers of America and 4-H to the government. Most Americans raised on a farm believe that the times spent doing chores with their parents, siblings, and neighbors were the most important and rewarding years of their lives.
Yet more worrisome, Solis is selective in her enforcement. She envisions new rules for businesses, but she first should have ensured that her family had followed old ones. When Solis was nominated, it was learned that her husband had several tax liens against his business, some of them 16 years old. And not long ago, Solis’s department posted a video advising illegal aliens to call her office if they felt they were treated unfairly by employers. Abusing workers is wrong, but then so is entering and residing in the United States illegally — as a cabinet official should know.
The common theme with these cabinet secretaries is loud, uninformed rhetoric; a lack of practical experience; a certain utopian zealotry — and an expectation that there are rules for government grandees and quite different ones for the rest of us.
— Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author most recently of The End of Sparta. You can reach him by e-mailing author@victorhanson.com.

Bad Policy, Winning Politics

By Thomas Sowell

A small headline in the second section of the Wall Street Journal last week told a bigger story than a lot of front-page banner headlines. It said, “U.S. Firms Add Jobs, but Mostly Overseas.”

Just as there is no free lunch, there is no free class warfare. Some people may be inspired by President Obama’s talk about making “the rich” pay their undefined “fair share” of taxes, or taking away corporations’ “tax breaks.” But talk is not always cheap. It can be very costly to those working people who are looking for jobs that the Obama administration’s anti-business policies are driving overseas.
According to the Wall Street Journal, “Thirty-five big U.S.-based multinational companies added jobs much faster than other U.S. employers in the past two years, but nearly three-fourths of those jobs were overseas.” All these companies have at least 50,000 employees, so we are talking about a lot of jobs for foreigners with American companies overseas.
If the Wall Street Journal can figure this out, it seems certain that the president of the United States has economic advisers who can figure out the same thing. But that does not mean that the president is interested in the same thing.
In this, as in so much else, Barack Obama is interested in Barack Obama. Whatever bad effects his policies may have for others, those policies have had a track record of political success for many politicians in many places.
To put it bluntly, killing the goose that lays the golden eggs is a viable political strategy, provided the goose doesn’t die before the next election. In this case, the goose simply lays its golden eggs somewhere else, so there is no political danger to President Obama.
Unemployment may remain a problem to many Americans, but that only provides another occasion for the Obama administration to show its “compassion” with extended unemployment benefits, more food stamps, and various interventions to save home buyers from mortgage foreclosure. This can easily be a winning political strategy.
Franklin D. Roosevelt won his biggest landslide victory after his first term in office, during which the unemployment rate was never less than twice what it has been under Barack Obama.
The “smart money” inside the Beltway says that a high unemployment rate spells doom at the polls for a president. But history says that people who are getting government handouts tend to vote for whoever is doing the handing out.
The Obama administration has turned this into a handout state that breaks all previous records. Lofty rhetoric about “stimulus,” “shovel-ready projects,” “green jobs,” or “investment” in “the industries of the future” all give political cover to what are plain old handouts to people who are likely to vote to reelect Obama.
At the local level as well, history shows that some of the most successful politicians have been people who ruined the local economy and chased job-creating businesses away. Mayor Coleman Young of Detroit in the 1970s and 1980s was not worried when affluent whites began moving out of the city in response to his policies, because they were people who were likely to vote against him if they stayed.
Of course they took their taxes, their investment money, and the jobs they created with them. But that was Detroit’s problem, not Coleman Young’s problem. Barack Obama may win reelection by turning the United States into Detroit writ large.
Something similar happened in earlier times, when James Michael Curley served four terms as mayor of Boston, and two terms in prison. As the non-Irish left the city in response to his policies, Curley’s likelihood of being reelected increased.
This kind of cynical politics is even more likely to succeed when political opponents fail to articulate their case to the public. And Republicans are notorious for neglecting articulation.
The phrase “tax cuts for the rich” has been repeated endlessly by Democrats without one Republican that I know of saying, “Folks, I don’t lie awake at night worrying about millionaires’ tax problems. Millionaires have lawyers and accountants who get paid to do that. But I do worry about jobs being lost to millions of American workers because we make the business climate here worse than in other countries. That’s a high price to pay for rhetoric.”
The case can be made. But somebody has to make it.
— Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. © 2011 Creators Syndicate, Inc.

Occupy’s Totalitarian Temptation

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Yesterday morning, I sauntered into Madison Square Park before many others had arrived. The “Free University” was still setting itself up, and it was a forlorn sight. Lonely red balloons flew at various points around the fountains, and bored policemen sat on benches looking bemused and coordinating their patrols with the Park Service. Dotted around the place were “professors” without students, waiting expectantly under signs that read “Open-Access Teach-In” and “Free Yoga,” and trying to catch the eyes of unimpressed commuters in the hope that they might stop and engage. (Students, it appears, will be no earlier to the revolution than they are to their classes.) One man with some sports equipment — presumably the “(Meta-)Physical Education” teacher — stood in the rain waiting in vain for takers. But on the north side of the park, next to the statue of David Glasgow Farragut, a circle had formed — what seemed to be a roundtable on climate change. I wandered over and stood quietly on its edge.

“Naomi Klein went to the Heartland Institute’s International Conference on Climate Change,” the speaker was saying, “which must have been an unpleasant experience.” (Snickers greeted this addition.) “And what she discovered was that the conservatives get it. She wrote about it in The Nation.” He picked up a piece of paper and read aloud: “Here’s what she said they think:

. . . climate change is a Trojan horse designed to abolish capitalism and replace it with some kind of eco-socialism. As conference speaker Larry Bell succinctly puts it in his new book Climate of Corruption, climate change “has little to do with the state of the environment and much to do with shackling capitalism and transforming the American way of life in the interests of global wealth redistribution.”

The assembled Occupiers laughed nervously, and some nodded. “Yes!” smiled the speaker. “The Right gets it. They spread misinformation about the science, as they know that it means the end of how we’ve been living. And they’ll do anything to keep the system as it is.” At this, everyone nodded. “So,” he continued. “What can we do?” The group had a brief conversation about the importance of educating Americans in scientific truth — which will, no doubt, have raised a few hackles among those intent on relitigating the Science Wars — and an agreement that everybody needs to stop driving cars, and then moved on to more important things.
“Well,” the speaker said, “I want to move on a bit. A lot of people live in the suburbs and they have a few cars and they live in houses that they probably bought in the 1980s. We need to morally exclude those who don’t recognize the problem, and let them know that they have no place in a future America.” This sounded a bit off to my ears, so I waited until they were finished and then asked one of the friendlier-looking participants a question: “I understand that you think these people in the suburbs can’t continue their lifestyles. Where will they live if not there?”
“Where will they live? In a community!” she replied.
“They do live in a community,” I said.
She laughed nervously. “A different community. One that we’d all design together.”
“Forgive me,” I said. “But you just described America. This is a community that we all designed together. How would yours differ?”
After a while, we established that what she actually meant was that people who shared her views would need to design the parameters of others’ lives — for the “common good,” of course. She was very nice — more Tom Friedman than Mussolini — and would surely be horrified if I were to buy her a copy of Liberal Fascism and suggest that people like her are exactly what the book is about. But neither her basic decency nor her naïveté can change the fact that she and her fellow panelists have succumbed to the totalitarian temptation, and adopted wholesale the seductive idea that the future is just too important to be left to individuals and free institutions and must thus be bent to the will of experts who happen to look very much like them.
This group, discovered early in the morning before the cameras and microphones had arrived and the day’s message had become filtered through them, summed up what I recognized last year in Zuccotti Park, and what you will find rather quickly if you peruse the various websites that Occupy has been running for its May Day events and beyond: The people involved in the movement have managed somehow to confuse their conception of the “public good” with the American “general will.” (Rousseau deserves some of the blame for this conflation, one suspects.) Thus, in the imaginations of the Occupiers, the American people — 99 percent of them, at least — serve as an enormous human Rorschach test, onto which the hopes and fears of a small minority of progressives are projected, and by which universal authority is claimed. It is a clever trick, but it is one that runs contrary to the American system of government and to the maintenance of a free and virtuous people. And it is one that, ultimately, requires government by an enlightened class at the expense of the best elements of both American democracy and republicanism.
Thankfully, such people root their convictions in some remarkable wishful thinking. All day yesterday, vast majorities of pedestrians walked directly through the hearts of the May Day protests without stopping. They went to work, they visited the bank, maybe they went to the movies or had lunch in a restaurant. In short, they did everything that they had been told not to. Yesterday’s “General Strike,” Occupy Wall Street claimed, was called against “a system that does not work for us.” But the “us” was presumptive. No doubt there are many in this country who would like to see change. But they will want a say in how such change comes about, and, as long as the Occupiers so widely and openly indulge the totalitarian temptation, and so long as they seek to impose from the outside their vision for utopia, Occupy Wall Street is destined to remain what it has always been: a group on the fringe.

Demography, Destiny, and Delusion

By Grover G. Norquist

Liberals' focus on race ignores what really drives voter behavior.

The sluggish economy favors a Republican presidential win come November, but some on the left argue that votes from a growing minority population will put President Obama over the top in the race for 270 electoral-college votes. Further, as the argument goes, these long-term demographic shifts could usher in a permanent left-of-center majority.
Exhibit one in this argument is the recent Center for American Progress monograph, “The Path to 270: Demographics versus Economics in the 2012 Presidential Election.”
Authors Ruy Teixeira and John Halpin acknowledge that the Tea Party wave in the 2010 elections suggests that the American people reacted poorly to the explosion of spending, the loss of jobs, and the extremely weak recovery under Obama. But they argue nonetheless that the growing number of minority voters—and thus declining percentage of white voters—will allow Obama to win re-election.
The study looks at national numbers, but also at the 50 state-by-state electoral-college contests. Teixeira and Halpin write, “The heart of the Obama coalition is the minority  vote. In 2008, Obama received 80 percent support from communities of color, who made up 26 percent of all voters.” However, those numbers are changing:

The 2010 minority share of the population was 36 percent, up more than five percentage points over 2000. That’s a rate of increase of around half a point a year over the decade. Applying that rate to the four years between 2008 and 2012 indicates that the minority share of voters should be about 28 percent in 2012, up from 26 percent in 2008.

It’s true that some demographic changes are baked into the cake. And just as one cannot step twice into the same stream, candidates must be prepared to appeal to a new electorate every two, four, and six years.
Republicans interested in winning elections have noticed that Hispanics have grown from 3.8 percent of voters in 1992, to 5.4 percent in 2000, and 7.4 percent in 2008. Of the 4 million children born in the United States last year, fully 25 percent were Hispanic. (Which means that 17 years from now, a quarter of newly eligible voters will be Hispanic.)
But the demographics that truly matter are those that drive voting decisions, and, unlike race, many of them are mutable. Indeed they can be changed by politicians changing laws. One can, over time, recreate the electorate one faces each election year.
Second Amendment Voters: Half of American households own guns. Almost 20 million Americans hunt. Since 1987, when Florida passed its “shall issue” concealed carry law, which bars the government from withholding carry permits from individuals who meet the requirements, fully 41 states have adopted similar rules. As a result, an estimated 7 million Americans now have concealed carry permits. Concealed carry laws have changed the electorate and created more voters—gun voters—who are increasingly sensitive of their Second Amendment rights.
The left understood this process years ago. They passed restrictions on hunting that have driven a decline in the number of hunters with each generation. The NRA response has been to push for legislation making it easier for first time hunters and expanding hunting opportunities. Each team understands it is struggling to create an electorate in its image years and decades from now.
Home-Schoolers: Twenty years ago home-schooling was illegal almost everywhere, but today it is legal and mainstream in all 50 states. Mike Farris, who helped organize this grassroots movement through the Home School Legal Defense Association and the Parental Rights Organization, estimates there are 2.5 million home-schooled children and 1.4 million home-schooling parents. Over the past 20 years, about 4 million parents have home-schooled some portion of their kids’ educations. Ten million voting adults were home-schooled at some point.
Just like concealed carry, the home-schooling movement needed, first, legal recognition and protection and, second, peer approval to grow. The more Americans who know a friend or family member who has home-schooled, the more likely they are to do so as well.
Charter Schoolers: The parents of the 10 percent of American students who attend private schools or charter schools know that the Democrat party is owned by the public-school teachers unions. No surprise then that one of President Obama’s first acts was to destroy the fledgling school-choice voucher system used by 3,000 students in Washington, D.C. While he sent his two daughters to the fancy and expensive ($32,000 a year) Sidwell Friends School, he crushed the law passed by Republicans that allowed low-income, predominantly black parents in the district to leave the failing—and expensive to taxpayers ($27,000 per year)—public schools.
It is no coincidence, comrade, that states with Republican governors and legislators are, step by step, expanding parental choice. A handful of states have programs that allow businesses and individuals to receive tax credits for funding school-choice scholarships, which now benefit tens of thousands of students. Direct vouchers are available, though limited in terms of family eligibility, in 11 states. Last year, Indiana’s Mitch Daniels signed into law the nation’s largest voucher program, making around 55 percent of Hoosiers eligible. The number of vouchers is limited to 7,500 the first year, and 15,000 the second, but the limit is completely removed in year three. Also last year, Wisconsin increased the cap on its voucher program in Milwaukee and extended it to Racine.
In March, the Arizona legislature approved the expansion of its education savings accounts—currently available to special-needs students—to those in failing public schools, children of U.S. military members, and gifted students. Meanwhile, the Louisiana House passed Gov. Bobby Jindal’s proposal establishing a voucher program for low- and middle-income families in underperforming public schools—fully 70 percent of all public schools. It is expected to pass the Senate, and might have done so already by the time you are reading this magazine.
School choice changes the interests of parents, teachers, and, over time, young voters freed from state control. Every private-school teacher hired is one fewer public-school teacher forced to pay union dues and subject to political pressure every day in the same direction.
Entrepreneurs and the Self-Employed: Obama and the Democrats have intensified their efforts to reduce the number of new small businesses and entrepreneurs. Yes, they demonize them in word. But their teeth show in their tax increases on “the rich,” which are deliberately targeted at the 30 million small businesses that pay not the corporate income tax, but the personal income tax: subchapter S corporations, partnerships, and the self-employed.
In June 2007, there were 10 million self-employed Americans. That number was driven down to 8.6 million in July 2011. And things are getting worse. The tsunami of new regulations, Obamacare, and threatened tax hikes mean that Americans, per capita, are starting new businesses with employees just half as fast as they did 30 years ago. Looking at raw numbers: Americans started 563,324 businesses with employees in 1977 and only 403,765 in 2009.
Fewer small businesses, fewer entrepreneurs…fewer Republicans. This is no accident, comrade.
Government Workers: Rasmussen polling data show government workers are more likely to vote Democrat, and as their pay and length of tenure increase, so does that party loyalty. Not surprisingly, the stimulus packages passed by Obama and Reid used federal tax dollars to subsidize union-dues-paying, Democrat-voting, state and local government employees.
Investors: Rasmussen polling also shows that Americans who have at least $5,000 invested in the stock market through, for instance, Individual Retirement Accounts or defined-benefit pension plans, are 18 percent more likely to vote Republican. Utah’s state senator Dan Liljenquist wrote and won passage of legislation that requires all state and local government employees hired after July 1, 2011, to have a defined-contribution plan. The state will contribute 10 percent of the employee’s income to a 401(k), or 12 percent for police and firemen, and there will therefore be no newly created unfunded liabilities. (And fewer newly created Democrats; personal savings breeds Republicans.)
No surprise that Obama pushes higher taxes on saving and investment, and the confiscation of half your estate through the death tax.
Ineligible and Dead Voters: One can also change the electorate by expanding it to include the departed: both those who have moved to other jurisdictions but whose names remain on voter lists, and those who have actually died and yet can cast ballots through the living, if no one is watching. Republicans have enacted voter ID laws in several states to limit opportunities for voter fraud, but Obama’s “Justice Department” is working hard to overturn them. Voter integrity efforts change the nature of the electorate in one direction; voter fraud moves it in the other.
Following the ideologically embarrassing workers’ revolt against the East German paradise in 1953, Bertolt Brecht recommended that the Communists elect themselves a new people. In free societies, over time elected officials can in fact create an electorate more sympathetic to their views. The smart Republican and Democrat leaders have been doing this for years.
The 2012 elections will determine not only the direction of America, but the very nature of its people.

About the Author

Grover G. Norquist is the president of Americans for Tax Reform.

America's Useful Idiots

By Steve McCann

Many years ago, a phrase was coined by the leaders of the Soviet Union to describe those in the West who naively promoted the cause of Russian Communism when in reality they were held in contempt and were being cynically used by the Soviet hierarchy.  The term "useful idiot" more than ever applies to a vast swath of citizens in the United States who have been cynically used by the hardcore left for a cause they are unwilling to understand. 
Among the mysteries confronting those of us who have immigrated to the United States from countries that have experienced the devastating outcome of socialist/Marxist ideology is why seemingly successful and educated people could be so easily swayed to support those whose end-game is to transform the country into a socialist "utopia" and to control the day-to-day lives of all Americans.  Among these "useful idiots" are a seeming majority of the Jewish population as well as many in business, and nearly all in entertainment and the media.
The answer appears to be that despite the hardcore left accounting for less than 20% of the population, their influence extends far beyond thanks to the apparent inability of their peripheral supporters to use any modicum of reasoning -- as the left in the United States has been able to identify and manipulate those susceptible to emotional arguments. 
Traditionally, the age-old Marxist strategy of fomenting class warfare and demonizing capitalism has been an effective tactic with those in the lower-income and education strata, who can be easily swayed to blame others for their perceived misfortune.  However, in a nation, such as the United States, which has experienced great peace and prosperity for nearly seven decades and whose population is overwhelmingly middle-class, this argument alone cannot sway a sufficient number to support the ascension of those dedicated to socialist/Marxist ideology.
Therefore, while still using the class-warfare dialog to keep the lower classes stirred up, the left has, beginning in the 1930s but accelerating in the 1960s, combined class warfare with the promotion of guilt for one's success and falsely portraying their ideological enemies as being intolerant extremists whose single-minded determination is to limit and control everyone's lifestyle, and who are at their core virulent racists.  Yet leftists are just what they accuse their opponents of being.
The tactic of fomenting guilt for one's success is a codicil to overt class warfare.  The argument begins with the benign assertion that in a nation this wealthy, surely everyone can be guaranteed a minimal level of support at the taxpayers' expense.  Particularly wealthy taxpayers should be willing to part with a "fair share" of their income (as defined by the left) in order to assuage their guilt for living in a country that "facilitated" their becoming rich.  Not desiring to be branded as insensitive or evil, many simply acquiesced to this not-so-subtle extortion.  Further, in an attempt to buy peace, many contributed vast sums of money to the Democratic Party -- now dominated by the far left.
The management of many large corporations as well as numerous successful business owners, entrepreneurs, and inheritors of wealth refused to understand that as in all protection rackets, there is never an end to the demand for payment.  Additionally, these dupes were funding a political party whose end-game was to destroy the system that made them successful in the first place.  All the while the money being siphoned out of the economy by the government in order to establish a so-called "safety net" was being used to create an ever-expanding dependent class who would vote to keep the left in power.
The Obama administration represents the culmination of this process, as leftists have, through an avalanche of mandates, regulations, and laws, begun weaving a suffocating web around the American free market, as they assume complete control of the economy.  Firmly in their clutches will be those who fall into the ever-changing definition of rich and successful.
In the 1960s, America experienced a social revolution against historical and societal norms.  An era of peace and prosperity unprecedented in the history of mankind was underway, allowing a new generation to focus on hedonistic pursuits, self-aggrandizement, and a search for so-called "meaning" in their lives.  Traditions, based on the religious foundation of the country and the societal mores that sprang from them, came to be viewed as standing in the way of allowing the population to experience absolute freedom. 
Coupled with the Johnson administration's mishandling of the Vietnam War, a broad movement began.  The true believers of the left promptly injected themselves into this landscape, proclaiming to the gullible that not only was the United States waging an unjust war, but the U.S. was by its nature a repressive country.  The siren song of a society wherein all are treated fairly and there are no absolutes found eager ears.
In short order, the left began to portray their political adversaries as intolerant religious zealots whose primary objective was to deny personal freedom and cast a beady eye toward whatever was happening in the bedroom.  An unfettered lifestyle as well as being part of the in-crowd is of paramount importance to not only the vast majority of those in the entertainment and media arena, but also many in the general population.  They were willing cast aside any disbelief and wholeheartedly swallow the premise that only the political left or the "progressives" could protect them from this narrow-minded right-wing horde.
This attitude was further entrenched when many conservatives and the religious community began to organize and rightly object to abortion on demand and the concomitant coarsening of the culture.  The left now had a virtual stranglehold on the self-centered, whose personal pleasure and egocentrism were the primary driving forces in their lives.  They were now completely in the thrall of the left, but what has this blind loyalty wrought?
A cursory examination of those nations that fell under the control of socialist/Marxist ideology reveals that among the first actions the new regimes institute is to put in place laws to greatly limit personal freedom as a prerequisite in subjugating the populace.  
The passage of ObamaCare is not a health care plan; rather, it is a blueprint to allow the government to control the day-to-day lives of all Americans, and under the guise of budgetary expediency, the bureaucrats in Washington can and eventually will declare any behavior they choose unacceptable.  Meanwhile, Barack Obama and his administration have been busily issuing edicts and regulations aimed at telling the American people what food they can eat, what medicines they can take, what cars they can drive, what houses they can live in, and in due course what they can do in their bedrooms.
One of the most consistent supporters of the Democratic Party is the Jewish population, as the Party has been portrayed over many decades as the defender of the downtrodden and in recent years a bulwark against the supposed racist fanatics on the right.  However, this is a party now dominated and controlled by hardcore leftists, many of whom are virulently anti-Semitic and opposed to the state of Israel.  A hallmark of all socialist/Marxist regimes is discrimination against and persecution of minorities, in particular the Jews.
That history coupled with the policies of the Obama administration in the Middle East, the Democrats' class-warfare tactics, the past and present associates of the president, and the anti-Semitic rhetoric of many on the left should alarm the American Jewish citizenry and cause them to cast a wary eye toward the party they have blindly supported over many decades.  Unfortunately, the desire to believe that the worst could never happen seems to have permeated the psyche of a people whose history should serve as a cautionary tale as they continue to vote for and financially support a party that views them with disdain.
Barack Obama would not be occupying the Oval Office if it were not for the people over the past sixty years who have blindly supported those who have lied to them.  The overriding stratagem of socialism/Marxism is "the ends justify the means" -- thus, no lie is too big to tell, no promise too outrageous to promote, and no tactic out of bounds.  The overall strategy of the Obama re-election team confirms this mindset as it conducts a demagogic campaign based solely on emotional appeals to that part of the population its operatives consider "useful idiots."
Those who thoughtlessly supported the left in America over the years are beginning to reap what they have sown.  Unfortunately so is the rest of the population.