Surprise, Surprise

Today at PJ Media, Richard Fernandez declaims on the failure of the "blue model:"

The chief problem with money, as Walter Russell Mead observes, is that the Blue Model is running out of it. Once upon a time the money was just out there. The dollars were mooing and lowing like the buffalo on the Great Plains. The only problem was divvying it up. But now that it’s getting harder to come by a whole host of professions based on the dollar hunting and skinning business is becoming endangered.

No, really? Did anyone with three functioning brain cells expect any other result from the dilute socialism of the promise-borrow-spend "blue model?" But wait: there's more!

The marketing department has been particularly hard-hit. Al Gore’s Current Network was paying Keith Olbermann $50 million to attract viewers they hoped to have. Olbermann was supposed to be its primary liberal voice. But the New York Times explained that Olbermann wasn’t attracting anybody, even though he acted like he was:

In his 40 weeks on Current TV, he had an average of 177,000 viewers at 8 p.m., down from the roughly one million that he had each night on MSNBC. Just 57,000 of those viewers on any given night were between the ages of 25 and 54, the coveted advertising demographic for cable news.

Talking Points Memo quoted a source which said “Olbermann failed to show up for work without authorization, missing almost half of his working days in the months of January and February. Olbermann asked for a vacation day on March 5, the night before Super Tuesday, according to the source. He was told it would be a breach if he took the vacation, which Olbermann did.” For his part, Olbermann said he would sue Gore. In the end, perhaps, they both needed and deserved each other.

...Olbermann was a reprise of the recent fall of Rosie O’Donnell. Early this March the “Oprah Winfrey Network issued a press release announcing The Rosie Show had been canceled, following six months of humiliating ratings … What went wrong? Multiple insiders interviewed for this story say that both Ro and O are to blame; the network never fit O’Donnell, and O’Donnell wasn’t able to make the splash she was supposed to.”

Becoming a “liberal voice” was once where the money was. The jack. A lot guys still believed that. And boy were they wrong.

The failure reaches all the way to the campaigns of left-liberal politicians:

Last July, President Obama's campaign announced that it had raised an average of $29 million in each of the previous three months for itself and the Democratic National Committee (DNC). I was only mildly impressed. After all, that was well below the $50 million a month needed to reach the campaign's goal of a $1 billion war chest for the 2012 race.

Seven months later, I'm even less impressed. Through January, the president has raised an average of $24 million a month for his campaign and the DNC. Next week, the Obama campaign will release its February numbers, but the president is on track to be hundreds of millions of dollars shy of his original goal.

It's not for lack of trying. Mr. Obama has already attended 103 fund-raisers, roughly one every three days since he kicked off his campaign last April (twice his predecessor's pace)....

This perhaps explains why the White House told congressional Democrats last week not to expect a single dime for their campaign efforts from the Democratic National Committee this year. All the DNC's funds will be needed for the president's re-election.

His campaign's financial situation also may explain why Mr. Obama has embraced Super PACs after decrying them as a "threat to democracy" in the midterm elections.

None of this should come as any surprise to one who understands the vital importance of absolute respect for individuals' rights to social and political stability:

Wealth and freedom severed from their rightful owner draw looters and thieves, as a body severed from life draws vultures and flies. ["John Galt," Dreams Come Due: Government and Economics as if Freedom Mattered ]

The vaunted "blue model" was always based on the blatant invasion of private persons' property rights, in particular their rights to the fruits of their labors. The consequences were foreordained; the only aspect of the thing that was uncertain was how long it would take for the looters to empty the treasury.

We who claimed to know better indulged the looters for far too long, forgetting that our treasury has Constitutional authorization to sink us into debt. The whole country, not just the beneficiaries of the "blue model," will pay for our inanition.