Monica Crowley is the author of the new book What the (Bleep) Just Happened? The Happy Warrior’s Guide to the Great American Comeback and talks about it with National Review Online’s Kathryn Jean Lopez.
KATHRYN JEAN LOPEZ: What are you doing with a book with that title?
MONICA CROWLEY: I was going to call it Fifty Shades of Obama but then thought better of it.
One day last summer, I was having dinner with a good friend. I told her that I wanted to write another book but wasn’t quite sure as to what its focus should be. We then started talking about how epically weird the last few years under Obama have been. Every day, we were getting hit with a new piece of social engineering or some new policy to take down American power or prestige abroad. Our enemies were getting olive branches, our allies were getting dissed, and millions of Americans were being moved into government dependency at home. “What the (bleep) just happened?” I sighed. She looked at me and said, “That’s your title.” And so it came to be. Of course, I used an actual unprintable word. I thought I’d let each reader supply his or her own favorite profanity.
LOPEZ: What the bleep did the Supreme Court just do?
CROWLEY: The one-man Supreme Court decision on Obamacare sums up the very essence of my book. Socialized medicine in America, the land of the free? And upheld by the final gatekeeper of the Constitution? What. The. Bleep. The book traces all of the Obama-era leftist insanity, constitutional abuses, and assaults on our individual and economic freedoms, of which Obamacare was the most epic. President Obama and his wingmen in Congress quickly passed the nearly $1 trillion stimulus so they could then focus solely on their health-care scheme, for one major reason: If the government controls your health care, the government controls you. Obamacare was never about health care. It was about government power, dependency, and control. And now, thanks to the intellectually incoherent decision by Chief Justice John Roberts, we’re not only stuck with this grotesque attack on the Constitution, the Tax Man will now be “enforcing” your health care.
LOPEZ: You’re a Ph.D. Why would you call John Kerry a “kept woman”?
CROWLEY: It’s the most vivid — and accurate — description of the senior senator from Massachusetts I could think of.
LOPEZ: What’s your fascination with the word “kook,” as in Axelrod and friends, as in “Big Kookuna” to describe the man who would become our current president?
CROWLEY: As I describe in the book, this is not your father’s or grandfather’s Democratic party. Barack Obama isn’t Harry Truman or John Kennedy or Henry “Scoop” Jackson — responsible, pro-growth supporters of a strong America, economically, militarily, politically, culturally. The current band of leftists taking the country off the cliff are what I call the Far-Left kooks. They come out of the progressive ideology (socialism, Communism, liberalism, statism — the label doesn’t even matter much) that calls for redistributive policies at home as a way to enforce “equality,” and retrenchment and apologias abroad as a way to atone for being a nefarious force in the world. Once the kooks took over the modern Democratic party in 1968, they nominated kook after kook for president, but it wasn’t until they found their perfect marriage of man and mission in Barack Obama that they were able to grab the brass ring. And in the first two years of the Kook Presidency (with big kook majorities in Congress), they were able to effect their most deeply held plans: massive Keynesian spending sprees, elevating the federal-spending baseline to a staggering 25.2 percent from about 19.6 percent, socialized medicine, and turning America from global leader into just another country “leading from behind.” The objective of the kooks has always been to expand government dependency, thereby creating a permanent Democratic voting majority, and taking America down a notch or two. And in three and a half short years, they have gone far to achieve it.
LOPEZ: But “kooks”? These are public servants, right? They deserve some respect, even if we might disagree with them?
CROWLEY: They are no “public servants” in the traditional sense. They are servants of a wholly anti-American ideology, and their mission is not to tinker here and there with policy within the broad confines of our foundational principles. Their objective is to, in the words of Obama himself, “remake America” — top to bottom — as a full-blown statist, redistributionist enterprise. They are not productive “public servants.” They are a deliberate and deeply committed “wrecking crew.”
LOPEZ: You observe the “cult of personality” that helped Barack Obama become President Obama. Can he rely on any of those elements — his personal story and the racial component, for instance — in his reelection bid?
CROWLEY: Voting is as much an emotional act as it is an intellectual one. Many people are still emotionally invested in the first biracial president with the electric smile. But unlike the last time he ran for president, this time he has an actual record to defend. He cannot run on it, because normal Americans believe it to be disastrous. He and the kooks, of course, believe it to be a wild success in terms of achieving their goal of growing dependency while growing government. But he knows that if he spoke the truth about that, most Americans would run screaming into the street. So he can no longer rely on his cult of personality or his record, so he must run a scorched-earth campaign against Governor Romney and the Republicans. His problem is that that approach runs totally counter to the “hope and change” guy who was going to transcend that kind of petty politicking and sit above it. His “kill Romney” strategy has him hip-deep in the mud, and that’s not good for the Obama brand. Of course, the Obama brand was bogus to begin with.
LOPEZ: How do you defend a statement like “Regular Americans are his targets,” writing about the president of the United States?
CROWLEY: I am referring to Obama’s attitude toward tax revenue and how to squeeze it out of the American people. One of the hallmarks of his presidency has been the epic class warfare in which he’s been relentlessly engaged. He has constantly pounded “millionaires and billionaires,” the “1 percent,” “private-jet owners,” and “the wealthiest” as a way to stir populist resentments and a clamor for more socialist (er, “equalizing”) policies. (Set aside the hypocrisy in the fact that he’s more than happy to cash the fundraising checks from those evil capitalists, while cashing his own tax refund instead of sending it back to the U.S. Treasury.) When Obama talks about taxes, the dirty little secret is that he’s not interested in Warren Buffett’s money or Bill Gates’s money. Sure, he needs their money, but he also knows that if he were to confiscate 100 percent of their wealth, it would fund the federal government for a couple of weeks, max. He needs to go after the middle class, because that’s where the real money is. This is why he just said that he wants to raise the top marginal rate but is willing to extend the Bush tax rates for everyone else — for just one more year. After that, he intends to raise everyone’s rates, hitting the middle class with massive tax increases (not to mention the huge tax hikes coming with Obamacare that will disproportionately clobber the middle class). That’s where the true big money is, and he knows it. Hence, “real Americans are his targets.”
LOPEZ: Speaking of targets, can’t you give him a little credit for finding Osama bin Laden? He is our commander-in-chief, like him or not.
CROWLEY: Is it a good thing that Osama bin Laden is dead? Yes. But the whole self-styled Obama meme that it was a “gutsy” call is ridiculous. First, we hire presidents to make “gutsy” calls. He acts like he’s the first president to have to make tough decisions. As he himself has said, by the time issues get to his desk, they are inherently difficult or someone at a lower level would have already dealt with them.
Second, Obama has spun this Camelot-like narrative that giving the go-ahead to the mission was a politically tough call (note that once again, it was all about him). He and his team want America to believe that the analogy here was Jimmy Carter, who sent operatives into Iran to rescue the hostages only to have the operation crash and burn — leaving his presidency crippled.
Actually, the analogy isn’t Jimmy Carter. It’s Bill Clinton. Clinton had OBL in his sights multiple times and refused to pull the trigger. Because Clinton left office before the September 11 attacks, the political damage to him was limited. Obama would not have that luxury. Enough people in the intelligence and military communities knew what Obama knew about the whereabouts of OBL. If it were revealed that he had reliable intel about OBL’s location and didn’t act, his presidency would have been over. Therefore, he had no real choice but to pull the trigger. “Gutsy?” Meh.
LOPEZ: Speaking of credit: “We now know what constitutes the Obama Doctrine. It’s called the Bush Doctrine.” Doesn’t that bring you some comfort?
CROWLEY: President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Secretary Rumsfeld, and the others who so carefully designed our counter-terrorism strategies must feel tremendous vindication. Both Cheney and Rumsfeld have indicated as much to me. Keeping the Guantanamo Bay and Bagram detainee facilities open and functioning; restarting military tribunals at Gitmo; maintaining third-country black sites, terrorist surveillance, and data mining — all are indications that President Obama saw the dangers of the real world in ways Candidate Obama did not. He has further expanded drone strikes, killing terrorists on the battlefield without so much as a quick reading of the Geneva Convention. Interesting: During the Vietnam War, the Left attacked President Nixon for “expanding” the war into third countries by bombing enemy supply lines in Laos and Cambodia. And yet, Obama sends drones flying into the sovereign airspace of Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and elsewhere to take out terrorists without due process, and the Left is silent.
Blowing terrorists to smithereens is gratifying. But it would be helpful to have a coherent detention and interrogation strategy to gain contemporaneous intelligence.
LOPEZ: “In Obama’s hands,” America’s “decline” is “irreversible”? So why bother voting?
CROWLEY: If Obama is reelected, America’s decline will be irreversible. The nation is at the proverbial fork in the road. One path will lead us to Obama’s ultimate vision of Orwellian statism. The other path will lead us back to what made us exceptional from the start: individual freedom and economic liberty. If we choose the Obama path, it will spell the end of America as we’ve always known it.
Once the tentacles of redistributionism wrap themselves tightly around every part of the economy — and around our psyches — they can never be unwound. Once the majority is dependent on government in significant ways, we will have passed the tipping point. America as an economic dynamo will be no more, America as an international superpower will be no more, and America as an exceptional nation will be no more. It’s not too late to save her. The choice is still before us, but time is running out. This is why we vote. This is why we fight.
LOPEZ: Why does where Obama came from ideologically matter so much? Isn’t this election about his actual record as president?
CROWLEY: In order to understand where he has taken the country and where he’s taking it, we must understand the ideology in which he’s been steeped throughout his life.
Obama doesn’t run around wearing a Carrie Bradshaw-esque nameplate necklace that says, “Socialist.” But his policies, actions, words, background, and associations speak louder than any ID necklace ever could. As a technical matter, economic fascism (government control of the means of production without ownership) more accurately describes what Obama is carrying out than socialism (government ownership of those means of production), but “fascism” and “socialism” are highly charged words — and arguments over the labels often obfuscate the reality of the policies. Obama has engaged in extreme government-directed redistributionism to undermine the free market, generate widespread dependency, and further centralize state power.
In the end, the term matters less than his policies and their effects. This is a man who spent his formative years learning at the knees of assorted Communists, from his mentor Frank Marshall Davis to the Marxist professors and sundry socialists he admitted he sought out while in school to the self-avowed Communists (Van Jones, “green jobs” czar), Mao admirers (Anita Dunn, communications director) and radical redistributionists (Cass Sunstein, regulatory czar) he appointed as president. He spent a good deal of time mastering the art of Saul Alinsky’s tactics for advancing the socialist revolution. In 2007, he said of his years learning Alinsky’s methods, “It was that education that was seared into my brain. It was the best education I ever had, better than anything I got at Harvard Law School.” Indeed.
He employed those revolutionary tactics as a Chicago community organizer and then moved on to pull more formal levers of power. Once he seized the brass ring in 2008, it was “Katie, bar the door.” He immediately put the redistributionism of Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson on steroids: He spent trillions of dollars — particularly on “stimulus” and other spending projects that stimulated nothing but government, added an unprecedented $5 trillion to the national debt, and engaged in massive social engineering in every major part of the U.S. economy (the financial sector, the industrial base, the energy sector, and health care).
He moved to divide Americans based on class, race, and gender; after all, if Americans are pitted against each other, they are too distracted to focus on what he’s doing. He has deliberately and quickly moved the United States toward a European-style social-democratic state, despite the fact that those nations are currently imploding from decades of socialist redistributionism. Obama’s intent is to expand government dependency in order to ultimately create a permanent Democratic voting majority. Any other American president would’ve been flipping his lid over the kind of chronically high unemployment we’ve suffered. Not Obama. The more folks unemployed, the more dependency being created. And if this were allowed to go on, supported by the redistributionist agenda, America would be truly altered. (This is, by the way, what he meant when he spoke about “change.”)
This is why Obama has had to move with such dispatch: He had to slam as much of the redistributionist agenda into the first two years, before the American people got wise to what he was doing and began to put a stop to it, as they started to in 2010. When Obama spoke in 2008 of “fundamentally transforming” the nation, many people assigned an innocuous meaning to that statement. We now know what he really meant. And again, this is why we fight.
LOPEZ: Why is Solyndra important and how can people better understand it?
CROWLEY: I describe the Solyndra scandal in detail in the book. This was an epic example of Obama and the kooks carrying out social engineering in the energy sector: waging war on traditional sources of energy while pouring half a billion dollars of taxpayer money into a shaky “green energy” company that could not compete in the free market. Solyndra was the most notorious “green energy” disaster, but there were many others that imploded, leaving taxpayers on the hook for billions of dollars. Team Obama and the Democrats love to use the euphemism “invest,” as in “investing” in “green jobs.” I don’t know of any sentient human being who would trust these leftist clowns with their personal money to “invest,” given their abysmal track record of massive losses. But the kooks love to carry out their redistributionist dreams with other people’s money, already confiscated by the IRS, and directed to their cronies’ companies. It’s not crony capitalism. It’s crony socialism.
LOPEZ: How about Fast and Furious?
CROWLEY: This scandal would have had another president spending his time defending himself in impeachment proceedings by now. An American administration sends thousands of guns across an international border, resulting in the deaths of two American heroes — Border Patrol agent Brian Terry and ICE agent Jaime Zapata — and hundreds of Mexicans, and yet nobody in said administration knows nothin’ about no stinkin’ guns. Not the commander-in-chief, not the attorney general, not the secretary of state, not the secretary of homeland security. The attorney general was just held in contempt of Congress for withholding thousands of documents. So much for the “most transparent administration” in history.” The stonewalling, the obstruction, the lies, the dead U.S. agents . . . it all stinks to high heaven. Corruption in the extreme. We must demand answers about who knew what and when from this White House, and why the operation was hatched and continued. We must demand answers for the Terry and Zapata families, and because this government works for and answers to us, not the other way around.
LOPEZ: What’s your reaction to David Axelrod’s accusing Mitt Romney of being one of “the most secretive candidates that we’ve seen, frankly, since Richard Nixon?”
CROWLEY: That’s rich, coming from Obama, Axelrod, et al. — the masters of obfuscation, deception, and projection.
LOPEZ: What have been the most practical enduring lessons you learned from working with Richard Nixon?
CROWLEY: Working for President Nixon was the most extraordinary professional experience of my life. He was endlessly fascinating: brilliant, visionary, kind, generous, warm, funny — and yes, a good man. I learned so much from him, particularly how the real world works: from American politics to the media to the international power game. I learned that emotional intelligence is just as critical for a leader as intellectual intelligence; he often said that the most effective leaders have the full trifecta of “head, heart, and guts.” He also came from nothing to reach the pinnacle of success, a journey complete with great highs and desperate lows. The power of that example — that quintessentially American life — has never left me.
LOPEZ: In what ways do you consider yourself a Happy Warrior? Who are the Happy Warriors you see on the political stage?
CROWLEY: In the book, I list the ten keys to the Happy Warrior. The first is that we recognize that we are, in fact, in a war: We’re in an ideological war against leftism, an economic war against the forces of radical redistributionism, and a war with Islamism in all its forms. The Happy Warrior understands that we must fight these wars, because our opponents are certainly waging the battle relentlessly, and that fighting them will require some pain and dislocation as a necessary consequence.
But above all, the Happy Warrior is, in fact, happy. Two famous happy warriors — Reagan and his political soulmate, British prime minister Margaret Thatcher — knew they were fighting their own ideological and external wars. But they did so with the sunny dispositions and positive outlooks of those who knew they were on the right side of history. And so it must be with us.
Congressman Paul Ryan, Governor Scott Walker, former governor Sarah Palin, Governor Rick Perry, Congressman Allen West . . . they are great modern examples of happy warriors. They know they’re in the fight and they take it seriously. But they go about it with joy and confidence in the mission.
We must take the Reaganesque happy-warrior brand, revive and update it, and turn it into our political and attitudinal anthem for bringing America back.
LOPEZ: If there is one point from your book people walk into November with, what would you hope it would be?
CROWLEY: I wrote this book for many reasons, but primarily to rally the American people out of this socialist torpor and to the notion that this nation can be saved — and that she is worth saving. Obama may be doing his best to turn America the Exceptional into America the Also-Ran, but he didn’t count on us running a great defense — and doing it as new Happy Warriors who still believe that America isn’t simply a great country, but a good one for which we must all fight.
— Kathryn Jean Lopez is editor-at-large of National Review Online.