2010: Take Back America: The Battle Plan
by Dick Morris and Eileen McGann
Reviewed by Naomi Wolf
In `2010: Take Back America: The Battle Plan,’ Dick Morris and his wife and coauthor Eileen McGann, present a game plan for Republican victory in the upcoming Congressional elections, and, a putative libertarian manifesto against an alleged plan by Obama to take over the United States of America with a devious Socialist agenda.
The book is fascinating and troubling. Fascinating because Morris and McGann are brilliant political analysts. And they are adept at reading Americans’ true anxieties and crafting policy proposals and language that resonate emotionally and intellectually with them. (Disclosure: I worked informally on policy and message ideas with Morris during Bill Clinton’s 1996 Presidential campaign.) Such smart people, who write so clearly for a mass popular audience, could help Americans -- of all political parties -- better understand the core dynamics behind our moment in history.
But that is not Morris and McGann’s task. Their book is troubling because, in addition to providing important and well-documented insights into crucial issues such as the influence of lobbyists’ money on the voting records of representatives, the skyrocketing deficit and what it means for our economy, and the dangers of unchecked `bureaucratism’ (one of Morris and McGann’s less felicitous but still useful neologisms), `2010: Take Back America’ frames these trans-partisan issues in a fully partisan way and then intercuts its strong reasoning with heated sound-bites.
Take Back’s abiding idea is that America as we know it is ending under Obama’s stealth program to undermine everything that makes America healthy and free: `[T]hese elections will be the critical turning point for America’s future... On the one side is the America we know and love. On the other is a very different America: the dream of Barack Obama…His dream is our nightmare.’
Their overarching assertion is that Obama and a democratic-controlled Congress want to take over America and re-create it as a flat-out socialist system. And, to do this, so the story goes, Obama and co. have craftily deployed tactics such as excessive government intervention in medical care, Congressional Democrats’ enslavement to lobbyists, and increased governmental regulation of banks.
You don’t have to buy into the duo’s partisanship to grant that the issues they raise bear consideration. And the authors' track record for prescient observation reinforces their authority. Morris and McGann rightly note that, in their book, Fleeced, they forewarned readers of a stock market crash, and that, in Catastrophe, they cautioned that Obama would scale up the national debt. Many serious commentators agree with the team’s current predictions that inflation is likely to soar and the dollar will likely weaken -- forcing tax and interest rate hikes for all Americans.
The author’s substantive insights are marred by sloganeering. They skid quickly from serious warnings about unsustainable federal debt, to: `His strategic mantra is: REDISTRIBUTE! He plans to redistribute wealth, to redistribute access to health care, and to raise taxes until it no longer makes sense for productive people to keep working.’
The authors accuse Obama of having a `One World Strategy’ that seeks to subordinate US sovereignty to global intermediaries [`[H]e’ll try to place the entire US economy under the rule of the International Monetary Fund.’ Their analysis, which explores the effect on the US economy of IMF and the G-20 agreements proposed by Obama, is serious, but their rhetoric is extreme.
McGann and Morris range from a powerful discussion of the danger of losing doctors under Obama’s proposed medical care changes to demagoguery on the same issue: `Washington will set the standards of who gets lifesaving treatment or surgery…and who is left to die.’ They follow a sober assessment of the increase in the money supply, which people of all backgrounds are concerned about, with a footnote-less assertion that legislation the Administration proposed `would give the federal government the power to seize any business, fire its management, wipe out its investors, and run it as a government company for as long as it wanted, spending unlimited taxpayer money in the process…Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez have no broader powers!’
The authors supply a beautiful assessment of the risks to the Constitution of some unchecked interventions; for this liberal, their summary of the Heritage Foundation’s argument that “nowhere in the Constitution is Congress given the power to mandate that an individual enter into a contract with a private party to purchase a good or service and…no decision or doctrine of the Supreme Court justifies such a claim of power’ is extremely suggestive and sparked an interest in greater depth of understanding.
But then the authors undertake an extreme about-face and undermine their own constitutionalist arguments: they worry, for example, that Guantanamo isn’t tough enough to keep its prisoners off the battlefield once released, which nicely ignores the fact that the prisoners are both held and released without due process of law required by the same Constitution, or that they have been tortured, also forbidden in the Constitution.
The `Obama-as-Socialist Dictator’ meme gets a workout in this book, sometimes on very persuasive arguments about a power grab and sometimes on evidence that is much slighter: `[E]ver since President Obama came to Washington, his near-hysterical criticism of Fox news and anyone else who doesn’t toe his line have us worrying that we may be in the first stages of an attempt to roll back our democracy and inhibit freedom of speech. Remember: all dictatorships begin with increasingly strident criticism of the news media.’ Rather, as Jefferson knew, all democracies begin amidst increasingly strident criticism of the news media. (Indeed Jefferson and Adams, when in Washington as Presidents themselves, spent a great deal of time criticizing, sometimes stridently, the contemporary news media.) Dictatorships begin with increasingly tough restrictions on the news media and penal or other actual punishments for critical speech. Big difference.
Despite my reservations, and, my efforts to read with eyes wide open, I came away from 2001: Take Back America with a valuable -- if dismaying -- understanding of how liberties might, theoretically be subverted from the left. And, horribly enough, I also came away with an unwelcome and rather appalling insight about liberty in America and how to protect it: if Bush modeled from the right, as I argued in The End of America, a ten-step program for taking excessive power – and, as I argued myself in my conclusion, future leaders of any party are likely to be tempted to replicate those tactics because power grabs work and serve anyone in office – why should I be surprised by a book that basically proves that my prediction has in some ways come true? This administration may have had a learning curve derived from the previous administration. They too may be making broad, possibly threatening assertions of unchecked power; they too have seen that doing so works.
Every book that warns America is at risk ought to include discussion of ordinary citizens and what they can do to protect our country. Let me write this so it can’t be taken our of context: I do not support most of Morris and McGann’s partisan agenda, they offer exciting, sound, energizing and practical ideas about how citizens can take the power of political change into their own hands. They offer good, useful suggestions about social media and how to use it to; these, and other tips for citizen action, are predicated on the idea that citizens need not leave matters to the elites or the experts but can use social media to raise political questions, start grassroots campaigns, and otherwise make change themselves. This is invaluable, as is the author’s populist message. It would have been even more valuable if aimed at energizing our democracy for any concerned citizen, whether of the left or the right.
McGann and Morris are Republican consultants. So perhaps it is naïve to wish their clear concern for country expressed in this book could be rephrased in trans-partisan terms. But, now more than ever, we need leaders and spokespeople willing to empower citizens to defend liberty in a trans-partisan context.
This may be the moment at which we most need to collapse the paradigms of the left and right in order to save liberties in ways on which Americans -- that those on Morris and McGann and my side of the spectrum – can agree.
How can a traditional liberal trust autonomous government to build a social safety net, when the government is no longer run by the people at all, but rather by corporate interests, and so government is actually enmeshed within business? And how can a traditional conservative trust a presumably autonomous free market, if free market autonomy has been compromised by the way big business has become enmeshed within government? The new, ungainly monster-merger of government and corporate interests arrayed against the people -- whether urban hippie activists or small-town businessmen and women. Getting rid of the usual labels might be a good way to begin to fight back.
In this fight, it truly is us, the people – of all political persuasions – against the government/corporate nexus that serves its own endlessly self-replicating agenda.
2010: Take Back America raises important points for a right wing critique of threats to liberty from the democratic `brand’ of this Leviathan. But it is incomplete because a dualistic left-right worldview, in this historical moment, is incomplete.
I hope McGann and Morris can be persuaded to make use of their next book, and their analytical and predictive powers, to craft a trans-partisan game plan for liberty that takes aim at oligarchs on both sides of the aisle, and by doing so addresses all of us.
There would have been a great value in this book as a critique of threats to liberty from a democratic administration – to bookend other works that analyze threats to liberty from the right -- if it had been written with a goal that transcended partisanship. For the truth is that there can be threats to liberty from excessive power grabs from the left or the right; from an unchecked, dictatorial representative of private sector interests, as I argued Bush sought to be, to interests that come from the left that seek overweening power through other tactics, such as excessive government controls of private life. And history shows that damage to liberty has come in both costumes and from both strategies.
