The Pacific Research Institute held its annual Baroness Margaret Thatcher Orange County (California) Dinner last week.\u00a0 The site was the Island Hotel in the coastal town of Newport Beach.\u00a0 The honoree was former California gubernatorial candidate Bill Simon.\u00a0 The main speaker was syndicated columnist and Fox News commentator Charles Krauthammer.<\/p>\n
A dour man on camera, Krauthammer on stage is as funny as a comedy star, but a comedy star with a bite \u2013- hilariously ferocious.\u00a0 He once wrote speeches for then Vice President Walter Mondale.\u00a0 \u201cPeople ask, how did I go from writing for Mondale to the conservative I am now?\u201d he said.\u00a0 \u201cSimple.\u00a0 I was young once.\u201d<\/p>\n
But written speeches for a senior government official left Krauthammer with one of his defining strengths: he takes political oratory seriously.\u00a0 He looks carefully at what political figures say \u2013 particularly presidents of the United States and those who aspire to the position \u2013 and draws out the assumption and implications that infuse their rhetoric.<\/p>\n
At the PRI dinner, he recalled Barack Obama\u2019s first State of the Union address.\u00a0 It was the statement not of a traditional liberal but of a radical social democrat.<\/p>\n
A liberal, Krauthammer joked, doesn\u2019t care what you do so long as it is mandatory.<\/p>\n
In that 2009 State of the Union address, the new president made clear that he intended to bring fundamental change to three areas of national life: health care, education and energy policy \u2013 the commanding heights of the economy and society.<\/p>\n
Noting he was a psychiatrist before he was a pundit, Krauthammer told his audience, in one of his best lines of the evening, the occupations are very similar.\u00a0 In both you\u2019re dealing with people full of paranoia and delusions of grandeur.\u00a0 The difference is, only one has access to nuclear weapons.<\/p>\n
He recalled from his days in medicine how simple changes in nurse assignments on a ward floor could throw an entire department into chaos \u2014 one unintended consequence after another.\u00a0 Now after a campaign for Obamacare\u2019s passage that we now know was full of deceptions, the administration is with breathtaking arrogance upending the entire healthcare sector.<\/p>\n
So what are we seeing?\u00a0 An utterly predictable and ruinous cascading of unintended consequences.\u00a0 And how is the administration coping?\u00a0 With thirty-two extensions that are both cynical and lawless.<\/p>\n
The president, Krauthammer said, is something we have not had in that office before \u2014 a true man of the left.\u00a0 He has forced on the country a great debate: equality v. liberty; the primacy of the citizen v. the state; the overturning of American exceptionalism.<\/p>\n
After the speech, I found myself reflecting that Krauthammer\u2019s laugh line about liberal politicians and delusions of grandeur was as serious as it was funny, and that it came right out of one of the great political philosophers of modern times. \u00a0A pivotal insight of Nobel Prize economist Frederick Hayek concerned the limits of knowledge.\u00a0 The fatal conceit of the left, Hayek argued, was that central planners could never have sufficient knowledge to override the spontaneous order of society and have things turn out well.\u00a0 Only through all of the people following price signals and making their own individual and incremental adjustments \u2013 taking their own individual and incremental chances \u2014 could society make progress.\u00a0 Centrally mandated behavior would lead only to ashes.<\/p>\n
Krauthammer was saying exactly that about Obamacare and the other excesses of the administration and its enablers in Congress.\u00a0 And since not one Congressional Republican voted for Obamacare and only a handful of Congressional Democrats voted against it, the issue here is not just Washington versus the country.\u00a0 Ideas matter and the parties are divided along intellectual lines as clearly as any time in our history.<\/p>\n
There may indeed be, as some have argued, a ruling party and a country party in the United States today.\u00a0 But the country party has allies inside the capital city walls.\u00a0 One key to its ultimate success will be to recognize those friends.\u00a0 At last week\u2019s PRI dinner it was clear that Charles Krauthammer is among them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Pacific Research Institute held its annual Baroness Margaret Thatcher Orange County (California) Dinner last week.\u00a0 The site was the Island Hotel in the coastal town of Newport Beach.\u00a0 The honoree was former California gubernatorial candidate Bill Simon.\u00a0 The main speaker was syndicated columnist and Fox News commentator Charles Krauthammer. A dour man on camera, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[45,50,12,60,64],"class_list":["post-1725","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-political-commentary-general","tag-democrats","tag-gop","tag-hugh-hewitt","tag-obama","tag-obamacare"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1725","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1725"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1725\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1726,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1725\/revisions\/1726"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1725"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1725"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1725"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}