I take minor issue with Daniel Henninger.
Calvin Coolidge once said, "The chief business of the American people is business." The Democrats just lost America because they forgot that.
Democrats did not forget. Democrats deplore the American propensity for business, but they'll tolerate it, well regulated of course, for the sake of the campaign contribution and post-congressional career opportunity. Business is a distasteful necessity that pays their way -- crass but necessary. No, Democrats did not forget. They just misjudged the resilience of American business.
Mr. Henninger offers Exhibit B as evidence of liberal absentmindedness.
Exhibit B: The Obama ban on offshore oil drilling. It floated out of the White House, Energy Department and EPA without anyone thinking: "Whoa, this is going to kill hundreds of working-class guys and their families."
But his own Wall Street Journal contradicts the notion that the Obama administration was oblivious to the hardship a drilling ban would impose. The administration really did think about how this was going to kill jobs, but not hundreds of jobs. Thousands.
A federal judge who in June threw out an earlier six-month moratorium faulted the administration for playing down the economic effects.
After his action, administration officials considered alternatives and weighed the economic costs, the newly released documents show. The Justice Department filed them in a New Orleans court this week, in response to the latest round of litigation over the moratorium.
Spanning more than 27,000 pages, they provide an unusually detailed look at the debate about how to respond to legal and political opposition to the moratorium.
They show the new top regulator or offshore oil exploration, Michael Bromwich, told Interior Secretary Ken Salazar that a six-month deepwater-drilling halt would result in "lost direct employment" affecting approximately 9,450 workers and "lost jobs from indirect and induced effects" affecting about 13,797 more. The July 10 memo cited an analysis by Mr. Bromwich's agency that assumed direct employment on affected rigs would "resume normally once the rigs resume operations."
So there's my small quibble, but there's no argument with Mr. Henninger's conclusion.
Many activist Democrats don't want their party to do business with business until the terms of engagement change. They think once the ObamaCare entitlement flows through the veins of the private sector, its workers also will be the party's brides. What's left of the private "impulses of our life" to create industries will be sopped up with permanent public subsidies to alternative-energy entrepreneurs. With luck, this new "low-growth" economy will produce enough tax revenue to keep the party's watermills going for another generation.
There it was, the impetus for health care reform. The plan was to harness vulgar old business for the betterment of Americans, through progressive reform. It's a neat trick because progressive reform is inevitably an attack on the capitalist system -- business. And now the economy won't grow. Progressive Democrats are at a loss. Bush is to blame, they say. Yeah, that's it.
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