Bear witness to a listless and ineffective leader who is beatable.  Carter Redux.

Americans have grown weary of the flailing Obama economy.  So potent is the public’s displeasure, the President’s support is fast eroding.  Most notably, among key constituencies he will need for 2012. 

With the polling sugar high of Bin Laden’s death all but gone, and perpetually poor economic data to boot, even an unnamed Republican opponent defeats the President in two of three surveys released this month.    

For a GOP field that is routinely derided as weak and unexciting — a leftist narrative — these polls, if anything, remind us that Americans are looking for a competent alterative, and that the race will be competitive. 

A Republican candidate who offers a fiscally sound, pro-growth, jobs-centric agenda will provide a sharp contrast to this White House.  With a clear articulation of substantive ideas, Conservatives should press their case.

The President’s job approval, once as high as 76%, continues to trend downward.  It stands now at 47.7% in the Real Clear Politics average of polls.  Significantly, Obama is losing ground among Hispanics, a key group he carried overwhelmingly in 2008.  And, among women, an AP poll found that only 48% believe he deserves reelection, a drop of nearly 10 points from AP’s polling just last month.       

More, Independent voters are abandoning Obama in droves.  This vital voting bloc has long since lost faith in the President’s chosen course heading, one that will transform our nation into a ghost ship of centralization.        

A recent Bloomberg national poll clearly reflects this drop.  Less than one-fourth of Independents, only 23%, said they would vote for Obama in 2012.  The same poll found that just 30% of all voters were “certain” to support his reelection; 66% said the country was on the wrong track. 

An unconscionable lack of presidential leadership, bad policy, ballooning debt, and a sputtering economy best explain such widespread pessimism.  For many, America is fast becoming a nation unrecognizable. 

Indeed, nearly 60% of Americans currently disapprove of this Administration’s handling of the economy.  More specifically, on jobs, the national debt and the federal deficit, voter reproach is rising.  These three key issues register above, or near, 60% disapproval.  Moreover, 80% of voters say “the economy is in poor shape.”  An unhealthy condition that is intolerable.

Despite these numbers, Americans have yet to see the President take a more active role, most recently in the debt limit negotiations that have now stalled.  Rep. James Clyburn (D-SC) says Obama doesn’t have the “time” to go these meetings. 

But now, he has no choice.  In fact, negotiations for a final debt deal have already forced Obama into the fray.  Voters, however, are skeptical about just what impact that will have on reducing debt. 

Sixty-two percent believe that the spending cuts agreed upon will be insufficient.  Their cynicism, of course, is warranted.  The profligate spending continues apace, while Democrats blame President Bush for the current debt crisis.  But does anyone think the voters will buy the left’s deflection of responsibility using Bush as a scapegoat, a bogeyman?

Our national debt is up 35% since Obama took office and Democrats have been the loudest cheerleaders for deficit spending.  And this, the public knows. 

Congressman Clyburn, you may recall, once remarked that America had to spend its way out of recession — Keynesian hogwash that fiscally conscious Americans reject.  The rising debt accumulated under this misguided scheme has weighed down what our economy needs most: job growth.    

It’s not surprising, then, that for those for whom job creation is a key concern, Bloomberg found Republicans with a sizable 12-point advantage in “voter intensity.”  As the jobs picture grows ever more perilous and our economic outlook more grim, the “intensity” gap should widen further, and with it, calls for a new direction. 

Note: 86% of voters are very concerned about unemployment, a level not seen since before the November 2010 elections.  

Incidentally, it is worth mentioning that administration loyalists will read these polls as mere snapshots with the presidential race still more than a year away.  This is wishful thinking. Voters have roundly rendered their dissatisfaction…consistently, and for some time.  The White House has no one to blame but itself.  

The President does not have a cogent message on the economy, if he ever did, and our position abroad erodes further without a definable foreign policy.  As one of his advisors infamously put it, Obama is right at home “leading from behind.”

With unpopular policies and few results, even his signature “accomplishment,” ObamaCare, is loathed.  Most Americans want to be rid of it.  The most recent poll shows that 53% of Americans favor repeal of this monstrosity.  Less than 1/3 believe it will be beneficial to the country.        

For the left-minded, our nation’s sick economic condition is cause for deep political unease.  They ought to be worried.  As Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) recently conceded, liberals know that Obama’s economic policies “will be held accountable” by voters. 

Convincing the public that conditions are improving — when most know they are not — will be a steep challenge.  Make ready the teleprompter.

Brendon S. Peck holds a Master of Arts in history and political science from the College of Saint Rose and has completed graduate work at Columbia University.  He is a freelance writer.  Reach him at bshawnp@gmail.com.

When we think of espionage we tend to think in terms of Europe, Central Europe in particular, the bleak, dark cityscapes of Berlin and Vienna, the border cities of the Cold War. The Wall, Checkpoint Charlie, clandestine meets in the shadow of the Prater or the Brandenburg Gate.

David Wise thinks we desperately need to add an Eastern perspective to our thinking on espionage. Judging from the evidence presented in his new book, Tiger Trap:America’s Secret Spy War with China, he’s far from mistaken.

China is undoubtedly the biggest espionage threat this country now faces. The Chinese, for cultural and historical reasons, don’t view espionage, either purpose or technique, the way we do.  Whereas Americans (and Russians too) think in terms of targets against which distinct operations are planned and carried out, the Chinese, according to Wise, view the process as putting together a mosaic, of gathering small pieces of information to construct an overall picture.  What the Chinese do is send out thousands of tourists, officials, and agents to pick up whatever they can (Wise compares the process to analyzing the sands of a beach — each returns to China with a single grain of sand).  

Needless to say, the PRC does not overlook ethnic Chinese who have settled in foreign countries, particularly the United States.  The Chinese Ministry of State Security (MSS) constantly recruits in overseas Chinese communities, often pleading with potential recruits to “help” the mother country, which remains poor and vulnerable.  These requests often don’t match our preconceptions concerning “espionage” as such, comprising as they do the search for that one single sand-grain of information that will fill out the overall mosaic.

Misunderstanding of the Chinese intelligence mindset has led to serious failings in U.S. counterintelligence efforts. Wise recounts disaster after disaster in the recent decades.

• In operation Tiger Trap, which give the book its title, both of the FBI’s leading West Coast counterintelligence agents were sleeping with one of China’s major U.S. assets, Katrina Leung, who provided massive amounts of information to China while also building a lucrative personal financial empire. She effectively walked when a judge — a Clinton appointee, naturally enough — chose to interpret a badly-drafted plea-bargaining passage as “prosecutorial misconduct”. (Wise strongly implies — though he does not state outright — that at least one of the FBI agents was cooperating fully with Leung. He walked too.)
• The Wen Ho Lee case, probably the only name most readers will readily recognize, in which Lee’s life was disrupted and his career virtually destroyed before it was discovered that the classified material in question — concerning the W-88 Trident warhead — didn’t come from his workplace at Los Alamos at all but very likely from within the Pentagon.
• The Jeff Wang case, in which a bogus tip resulted in the perfectly innocent Wang being targeted as a Chinese agent. Although he was at last cleared, the case also resulted in the firing of the one of the FBI’s most promising Chinese-American agents, Denise Woo, a family friend of Wang’s who saw that he was innocent and tried to persuade her superiors of the fact. (It turned out that Wang had been targeted by a leading Chinese informant, a relative of Wang’s who wanted revenge for a family misunderstanding. The Chinese community tends to be very tightly knit.)
• The Anubis case, involving Wen Ning, a Chinese diplomat who had served the FBI well for years as an agent-in-place. After he settled in the U.S., it developed that Wen and his wife had a business on the side — smuggling advanced computer chips to the PRC. Technically, this is not a case involving a double agent as much as a man who seen his opportunities and took ‘em.

That’s only the beginning — the sad stories go on and on. The best that can be said about most of these operations is that they are not the FBI’s finest hour. (Though to be fair, we do get to see a few successful operations – but by no means enough.)

This is scarcely acceptable.  China is certain to be our major adversary for a good long period of the upcoming century. We have a lot to learn about China’s plans, goals, and its methods of achieving them. Tiger Trap serves as a fine introduction. Reading it is a recommended first step.

As a side note, I find the book’s structure very interesting. Rather than a strict chronological account, Wise uses the Leung saga as a framework, telling the story in alternate chapters while devoting the other  chapters to background and related or contemporary incidents. It’s an original and illuminating technique, of a kind that’s rarely encountered in non-fiction. I’d like to see more of this kind of thing.

J.R. Dunn is consulting editor of American Thinker. He is the author of Death by Liberalism, dismissed by Frank Rich as a “demented right wing screed.”

Over the next week, we’re going to hear a lot, good or bad but not indifferent, about the Wisconsin recall elections.  To recapitulate: the climax of last winter’s wild and lengthy campaign against Gov. Scott Walker’s public-employee reforms was a threat to recall a number of state representatives who had voted in favor of the bill.  The Wisconsin left carried out the threat and now the day of reckoning is at hand.  (A smaller number of Democrats who fled to Illinois to deprive the state Senate of a quorum were also hit with recall petitions.)

The question of the public employee bill was settled permanently by the State Supreme Court last week in a decision that overthrew Judge Maryann Sumi’s attempt to interfere with implementation of Walker’s reform plan.  But the recall elections are still hanging over Wisconsin’s politicians.  The left-liberals have got themselves a new political weapon.

Democrat inability to prevail at the ballot box has led to tactics of desperation.  Falling numbers of Democratic voters (the number of registered Democrats stands at just over 43% today, scarcely a plurality) have loosened the hold of Democratic political machines across the country, letting light and air into districts that have not been part of the country’s culture of democracy for generations.  As a result, we have seen the introduction of all sorts of novel electoral tactics, usually backroom stuff that would be familiar to Boss Tweed and Frank Hague: endless recounts spiced up by ballots appearing out of quantum black holes, opponents being denied places on the ballot by legal action (a Cook County special strongly endorsed by none other than Barack Obama), voting by felons and illegal immigrants.  Frivolous recall elections are simply the latest of these.

A recall election is one of those things in which the perpetrators win even if they lose.  An incumbent surviving a recall has wasted money, time, and energy, has suffered diversion from his actual work, and must deal with the bad publicity inevitably arising from the effort.  Recall elections have no apparent downside for the left; it’s a wonder they haven’t been using them all along.

If successful in Wisconsin, we can expect hundreds if not thousands of attempted recalls across the country, on any pretext or none.  It will become a standard part of the electoral cycle, much the same as accusations of fraud and frivolous lawsuits have since the 2000 presidential election.  Fraud accusations, legal action, and demands for recounts that can be manipulated each have had some success, but each has limitations as well.  With the bogus recall, leftists are obviously hoping to have found a political neutron bomb that can be used at will with no damage to them.

Current such efforts are not limited to Wisconsin.  In New Mexico, a campaign to recall Russell Pearce, the worst enemy of illegal immigration in this country, has been kicked off with some success.  Pearce is the man who stood up to both the illegals and their enablers on this side of the border — not forgetting the ones in the White House.  He is close to being the indispensable man on this issue.  And that’s the point: recalls can be used to target key figures who are otherwise invulnerable, from Michele Bachmann to Chris Christie.  It’s evident we’re in the Spanish Civil War phase of this particular development cycle, in which the new weapons are tried out and perfected.  Soon enough — perhaps in 2012 — our friends on the left will set out to invade Poland.

So what is our team doing about it?  Not very much at all, it seems.  The Republican National Committee has shown no sign of even being aware of the threat.  The Northeast conservatives, evidently considering it to be some sort of Midwestern problem beneath their notice, are busily handicapping the 2012 election and have no time for lesser issues.  It’s all quite typical of the conservative establishment: look the other way until the ceiling falls in, then panic, then write policy papers telling somebody else what to do.

But what can be done?  Wisconsin Republicans have hit on one solution: threatening Democratic pols with recalls of their own.  The one thing that liberals have overlooked (they always overlook something) is that abusing the recall system creates a hostage situation as regards their own people.  The left has forgotten that the political system on its most basic level operates on the principle of reciprocity — you stick with the rules because if you break them, something will come straight through the hole you made and get you.  This is a lesson that needs to be reiterated, by means of actual demonstration, as often as necessary.  If you break out the nukes in a snowball fight, you will be made to pay for it.  The Democrats have been flouting this truism since Bush v. Gore, if not earlier.  They need their attention concentrated.  Wisconsin’s method is as good as any.

The Republican House is flinching on passing the simplest and most symbolic piece of legislation this term: repeal of the incandescent light bulb phase out.  Amidst great fanfare and promises to restore limited government, the new majority is proving it isn’t much different than the old majority.

The incandescent phase out required under the so-called Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 starts with banning regular 100 watt light bulbs on Jan 1, 2012. 75 watters will be banned a year later.  60 watters  fade in 2014. 

Some of us still cling to a quaint notion that federal legislation ought to pass constitutional muster while fixing a problem serious enough to fix and do so while providing more benefits than the costs to implement.  The light bulb ban fails to achieve all three:

1) it is unconstitutional (see my previous screed on this aspect);

2) is a solution without a problem; and

3) bears costs far in excess of any benefits.

The light bulb ban was inspired by environmental and energy conservation zealots spooked by the global warming lobby.  And those economic rent-seeking players in the lighting industry who could benefit from legislated self-interest, were happy to join as co-conspirators. Those companies who were less enthused about the light bulb ban found resisting futile, in the end happy enough to delay the effective dates to allow for more orderly close down of factories and job eliminations.

So, what have learned since 2007?  For starters, the global warming agenda has collapsed, polluted with data manipulation scandals.  And where the data haven’t been tainted by hyper-partisans, independent measurements are proving that global warming predictions are as useful as pre-season college football polls.

We have also learned that coal fired power plants, the leading villain in the light bulb ban morality play, haven’t been affected one whit by energy conservation mandates for households.  In fact not a single coal fired power plant has been taken off-line as a result of the steady conversion from household incandescents to CFLs in the past 5 years, and none ever will be.  Those hyper-partisans from the likes of the Natural Resources Defense Council predicting that 30 coal fired plants would be eliminated due to the light bulb ban have never been challenged to name one.   Name one,  just one.  Coal fired plants may get the axe from draconian EPA regs, but not from household light bulbs.

Defenders of the light bulb ban have failed to provide a single rationale why the government should meddle with consumer light bulbs.  Do they present a safety hazard?  No, certainly unlike the most prevalent replacement, the CFL laden with mercury.  Do they present a performance or quality scam?  Of course not, light output and reliability from incandescent light bulbs for household use has been the gold standard perfected over 75 years.  And compared with any other light source that contains no hazardous components, incandescent light bulbs are still the cheapest product on the shelf.

The last remaining defense for the federal light bulb ban coming from NEMA, the National Electrical Manufacturers Association, the trade group for the light bulb industry, is the pre-emption defense.  Because several states, notably California, were poised to enact their own consumer light bulb statutes — all different — the feds had to step in to create harmony.  This is the bureaucrat’s defense, devoid of principle, arguing that bad legislation is better than something worse.  If individual states want to enact different product standards, let the marketplace decide whether manufacturers will produce such versions and let those states bear the higher costs for their commercial isolationism.

No doubt Congressional Republicans who aided and abetted the 2007 light bulb ban, are now feeling sheepish, unwilling to admit they were bumfuzzled and bamboozled.  Rather than admit a mistake having negligible consequences in confessing, they would rather persist in a supporting a law that completely contradicts the Republicans’ new agenda — less government interference, fewer regulations, moratoria on cost burdens passed on to businesses and consumers, and restored liberties to the people.

There is no downside for any Republican, and even many conservative Democrats, to vote yes on the light bulb ban repeal. Who would be harmed by a repeal?  Workers facing layoffs or those already unemployed?  Consumers facing fewer, more expensive and less effective choices on retail shelves?  Retailers faced with ultra-life lightbulb substitutes seeing less traffic in their housewares aisles? Environmentalists and parents of young children who now have to cope with broad spectrum mercury contamination from kitchens and bedrooms to landfills?

What is the upside to vote upholding the light bulb ban?  Is there any?

Who else would benefit from the repeal? Anyone in Congress who wants to get re-elected.   And in addition to workers, consumers, retailers and environmentalists, the Republicans would benefit from proving their bona fides.  The Republicans were swept into power by the force of the limited government agenda.  Repealing the light bulb ban would at least be a symbolic victory, perhaps paving the way for more ambitious reversals. 

Will the Republicans deliver the simplest legislative win on the path to stopping government interference in our daily lives — a task as easy as naming a post office? If not, there is no hope for repealing ObamaCare, reforming entitlements, reversing the EPA, enacting a balanced budget, or restoring the principles of limited government to this nation.