- 1/21: "The central battle in our time is over political primacy.
In 1962, President John F. Kennedy planted the seeds that grew the modern Democratic Party. That year, JFK signed executive order 10988 allowing the unionization of the federal work force.
- This changed everything in the American political system. Kennedy's order swung open the door for the inexorable rise of a unionized public work force in many states and cities.
This in turn led to the fantastic growth in membership of the public employee unions—The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and the teachers' National Education Association.
- They broke the public's bank. More than that,
they entrenched a system of taking money from members' dues and spending it on political campaigns. Over time, this transformed the Democratic Party into a public-sector dependency.
- They became different than the party of FDR, Truman, Meany and Reuther. That party was allied with the fading industrial unions, which in turn
- were tethered to a real world of profit and loss.
The states in the North and on the coasts turned blue because blue is the color of the public-sector unions. This tax-and-spend milieu became the training ground for their politicians.
- Until the Obama exception, the only recent Democrats electable into the presidency had to be centrist Southerners little known to the country. Every post-Kennedy liberal who tried, failed, including Teddy.
What an irony it is that in the same week the Kennedy labor legacy hit the wall in Massachusetts, the NEA approved a $1 million donation from the union's contingency fund to the Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the United States Senate.
- It is this Kennedy legacy, the public union tax and spend machine, that drove blue
- Massachusetts into revolt Tuesday.
Yes, health care was ground zero, but Massachusetts—like New Jersey, like California, like New York—has been building toward this explosion for years....
- But here's the party's self-destroying kicker: Feeding the public unions' wage demands starved other government responsibilities.
- It ruined our ability to have a useful debate about any other public functions.
Massachusetts' spending fell for mental health, the environment, housing and higher education.
- The physical infrastructure in blue states is literally falling apart.
- But look at those public wage and pension-related outlays. Ever upward.
Enter the Obama administration, the first one born and raised inside this public bubble, with zero private-sector Cabinet members.
- Act one: a $787 billion stimulus bill, which they brag mainly saved state and local jobs. Then came the six-month odyssey for Obama's $1 trillion health-care bill,
- dripping with taxes.
- Independent voters felt like everything was being sucked into a public-sector vortex.
This is why New Jersey's Chris Christie won running on nothing.
- It's why in California Carly Fiorina is within three points of Sen. Barbara Boxer. It's why the party JFK enabled, "the machine," is hitting the wall.
There's no way out for these Democrats. They made a Faustian bargain 40 years ago with the public unions. For the outlays alone, they'll get some version of the Obama health-care bill. They'll also go to the same old "populist anger" well.
- Scott Brown's victory has given the GOP a rare, narrow chance to align itself with an electorate that understands its anger.
Now the GOP has to find a way to disconnect from a political legacy that smothered governments at all levels
- and is now smothering the Democratic Party."
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