President Obama delivered his first official State of the Union Address on Wednesday. Cato experts offered live commentary on the address. You can read their comments below.

Terry Michael, former press secretary for the Democratic National Committee, has some advice for Democrats wondering what to do with a Democratic party that can’t win Massachusetts — Jeffersonian liberalism:

We have met the new center, and it is us, the sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll baby boomers and our younger Gen X siblings and children. Because of our advanced age, we are the “most likely voters” that pollsters and their political clients focus on.

That is precisely the opposite of what happened in the first year of the Obama administration.

The new center tilts liberal on social issues, like gay rights and abortion. It zigs left on national security, having seen two really bad elective wars in our lifetimes: Vietnam and Iraq. But it zags right on economic questions, empowered with the democratization of information, technology, and finance, eschewing one-size-fits-all fixes from Washington. The new center embraces individual choice in the marketplace.…

Democrats need to free themselves from the AFL-CIO, K Street, DuPont Circle, share-the-wealth wing of the party and run to the center on money matters, while passionately playing to their base on social issues and vigorously pursuing a non-interventionist foreign policy.

There’s an interesting echo there of something Michael Barone wrote today:

What Brooks has described as “the educated class” — shorthand for the elite, university-educated, often secular professionals who probably make up a larger share of the electorate in Massachusetts than in any other state — turned out in standard numbers and cast unenthusiastic votes for the Democrat.…

Members of “the educated class” are pleased by Obama’s decision to close Guantanamo and congressional Democrats’ bills addressing supposed global warming. They are puzzled by his reticence to advance gay rights but assume that in his heart he is on their side.

They support more tepidly the Democrats’ big government spending, higher taxes and health care bills as necessary to attract the votes of the less enlightened and well-off. For “the educated class,” such programs are, in the words of the late Sen. Pat Moynihan, “boob bait for the bubbas.”

Could it really be that a lot of Democratic voters don’t really like higher taxes and government-run health care, that they would respond favorably to a socially liberal, economically sensible program? We could only hope.

The New York Times editorial board must be baffled by this news story about a few dozen present and former corporate executives appealing to Congress to expand public funding of political campaigns.

The appeal comes one day after the Supreme Court re-extended (some) First Amendment rights to corporations in a move the editorial board branded a “blow to democracy” that will lead to corporations “overwhelm[ing] elections and intimidat[ing] elected officials.” But now some corporate executives want to be dispossessed of the keys to the kingdom immediately after SCOTUS returned them — say what?

The executives’ appeal makes sense if you’ve read this article by law professor Robert Sitkoff (then of Northwestern, now the John L. Gray Professor of Law at Harvard ). Sitkoff argues that the 1907 Tillman Act, which placed the first federal limits on corporate involvement in campaigns, was not adopted because elected officials wanted protection from corporations, but because corporations demanded protection from donation-seeking politicians like William McKinley and his bagman Mark Hanna. Now, in the wake of the Citizens United decision, corporations are asking for renewed protection — this time on the taxpayers’ dime.

As others have argued, corporations are subject to federal laws, regulations and taxation, just like citizens, and therefore should have First Amendment rights just like citizens. If corporations are afraid their regained rights will expose them to politicians’ demands for corporation-financed political ads, then corporate officers should follow their duty to shareholders and learn how to say no.

As for the New York Times Company’s concern about corporations having undue influence on democracy, there are a couple of things it can do to reduce that influence. For one, the New York Times Company can stop endorsing candidates for office — a practice that undermines newspapers’ claims of fair and objective reporting. For another, the New York Times Company can stop using its reporters to electioneer.

January 22, 2010 is a day that should live in infamy, at least among believers in limited government. On that day, the federal government added its 2,000th subsidy program for individuals, businesses, or state and local governments.

The number of federal subsidy programs soared 21 percent during the 1990s and 40 percent during the 2000s. The entire nation is jumping aboard Washington’s gravy train. My assistant, Amy Mandler, noticed the recent addition of two new Department of Justice programs, and that pushed us over the threshold to reach 2,001.

There is a federal subsidy program for every year that has passed since Emperor Augustus held sway in Rome. We’ve gone from bread and circuses to food stamps, the National Endowment for the Arts, and 1,999 other hand-out programs from the imperial city on the Potomac.

Figure 1 shows that the number of federal subsidy programs has almost doubled since the mid-1980s after some modest cutbacks under President Ronald Reagan.

Most people are aware that federal spending is soaring, but the federal government is also increasing the scope of its activities, intervening in many areas that used to be left to state governments, businesses, charities, and individuals. To measure the widening scope, Figure 1 uses the program count from current and past editions of the Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance. The CFDA is an official compilation of all federal aid programs, including grants, loans, insurance, scholarships, and other types of benefits.

Figure 2 shows the number of subsidy programs listed in the CFDA by federal department. It is a rough guide to the areas in society in which the government is most in violation of federalism—the constitutional principle that the federal government ought not to encroach on activities that are properly state, local, and private.

As the federal octopus extends its tentacles ever further, state governments are becoming no more than regional subdivisions of the national government, businesses and nonprofit groups are becoming tools of the state, and individualism is giving way to a more European desire for cradle-to-grave dependency.

Yet recent election results indicate that Americans may be starting to wake up and fight back. Whether we are more successful than Cicero and Cato the Younger in battling to retain our limited-government republic remains to be seen.

Today, Politico Arena asks:

What is it about the word “populist”? (these days)

My response:

“Populist” (or “populism”), in its American usage, invokes the “common man,” yet the idea’s origins — in “the people” or “the polis” — can be traced to ancient Greek democracy and, in particular, to political demagoguery. Both Plato and Aristotle had reservations about democracy as a system of government precisely because it was susceptible to corruption by populist appeals to superstition and error. In America, populism has had a long and varied history, but it is most often associated with the Populist Party that was formed in 1891 and, in particular, with the fiery speeches of the Democratic Party candidate for president in 1896 and 1900, William Jennings Bryan, and his famous “cross of gold” speech at the 1896 Democratic National Convention.

Thus, in a fundamental way, populism stands opposed to elitism, yet it’s more complicated than that. On one hand, the populism of the late 19th and early 20th centuries contrasted with the Progressivism of the era, which held that society should be organized and run by “professionals” trained at the best schools. (Thus, the emergence of political “science,” as distinct from the older tradition of political philosophy.) But on the other hand, Progressives themselves purported to speak for “the people,” even if in practice they were often contemptuous of the people’s capacity to govern themselves, susceptible as the people were to the appeals of demagogues.

At the end of the day, therefore, populism is a double-edged sword. Used pejoratively, it stands for the idea that politicians, to obtain or preserve political power, will appeal to base popular sentiments or mistaken (often economic or legal) ideas. A good example is Obama’s reaction last week to the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, rooted in the First Amendment’s guarantee of political speech: He called it “a major victory for big oil, Wall Street banks, health insurance companies and the other powerful interests that marshal their power every day in Washington to drown out the voices of everyday Americans.” There is an element of truth to that sentiment, of course, because the system of government that has evolved in America under the influence of Progressive “professionals” has endowed those professionals (read: the governing class, in all its reaches) with unprecedented power over “the people,” who often feel powerless as a result. But demagogic appeals like that or like others we’ve heard lately from Obama will only exacerbate that problem. By contrast, a “populist” appeal that seeks to return power to people (N.B.: I did not say, as in the ’60s, “power to the people”) — power to run their own lives, free from unwarranted government regulation or dependency — is a side of the idea we hear too seldom. Yet it’s what our founding documents are about. They established not simply popular government but limited popular government — ensuring the right of the people to govern themselves, not mainly through government but individually or in voluntary association with others. It is that liberty that Progressive elitists who “knew better” — the folks in Cambridge who voted 84 to 15 against Scott Brown — have gradually extinguished.

This new video from the Center for Freedom and Prosperity explains how last year’s so-called stimulus was a flop — and also reveals why politicians are pushing for another big-government spending bill.

Interestingly, since last year’s stimulus was such a disaster, the redistributionists in Washington are calling their new proposal a “jobs bill.” But as I say in the video, this is akin to putting perfume on a hog.

For further background, here is a video explaining why Keynesian economics is wrong and another predicting (in advance!) that last year’s stimulus would be a mistake. And just in case anyone actually wants the economy to grow faster, here’s one about policies that actually increase prosperity.

In a profile of the poetry-reading chief of staff to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I‑VT), the Washington Post calls Sanders not only “the only socialist in the U.S. Congress,” but also “surely [the Senate’s] most liberal [member].” Surely. I mean, he’s a socialist, right? (And by the way, that isn’t a label that Sanders rejects.)

Well, maybe not. According to the National Taxpayers Union, 42 senators in 2008 voted to spend more tax dollars than socialist Bernie Sanders. They include his neighbor Pat Leahy; Californians Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein, who just can’t understand why their home state is in fiscal trouble; and the Eastern Seaboard anti-taxpayer Murderers’ Row of Kerry, Dodd, Lieberman, Clinton, Schumer, Lautenberg, Menendez, Carper, Biden, Cardin, and Mikulski. Don’t carry cash on Amtrak! Not to mention Blanche Lambert Lincoln and Mark Pryor of Arkansas, who apparently think Arkansans don’t pay taxes so federal spending is free. Sen. Barack Obama didn’t vote often enough to get a rating in 2008, but in 2007 he managed to be one of the 11 senators who voted for more spending than the socialist senator.

Meanwhile, the American Conservative Union rated 11 senators more liberal than Sanders in 2008, including Biden, Boxer, Feinstein, and again the georgraphically confused Mark Pryor. The Republican Liberty Caucus declared 14 senators, including Sanders, to have voted 100 percent anti-economic freedom in 2008, though Sanders voted better than 31 colleagues in support of personal liberties. The liberal Americans for Democratic Action provides more support for the Post’s claim, rating Sanders 100 percent liberal. Most raters, though, don’t see it that way. In this compilation of ratings from left-leaning interest groups, 17 senators get higher scores than Sanders.

It almost seems that an avowed socialist is middle-of-the-road among Senate Democrats.