Stromata Blog

Is Barack Really “Slick Barry”?

Via Ann Althouse, we learn that Senator Obama will graciously co-sponsor a bill recognizing John McCain, born in the Canal Zone while his father served there in the Navy, as Constitutionally eligible to be President. Professor Althouse thinks little of this gesture, giving him backhanded credit for having “found the only possible low ground and made it look like high ground”. I won’t comment on whether that step was clever or too clever by half. What’s more significant is that it was taken by a man who frequently boasts of having taught Constitutional law at the University of Chicago. Obama the legislator has evidently forgotten some of the elementary points that Obama the teacher ought to have imparted.

The Constitution requires the President to be a “natural born citizen of the United States”, for reasons stemming from European history:

But the general propriety of the exclusion of foreigners, in common cases, will scarcely be doubted by any sound statesman. It cuts off all chances for ambitious foreigners, who might otherwise be intriguing for the office; and interposes a barrier against those corrupt interferences of foreign governments in executive elections, which have inflicted the most serious evils upon the elective monarchies of Europe. Germany, Poland, and even the pontificate of Rome, are sad, but instructive examples of the enduring mischiefs arising from this source. [Joseph Story, Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States, cap. XXXVI, §1473 (1833)]

The First Congress, in the first law that it enacted concerning citizenship, declared that “the children of citizens of the United States, that may be born beyond sea, or out of the limits of the United States, shall be considered as natural born citizens”, with the proviso that their fathers must have resided in the United States at some point. I Stat. 104 (1790). That is the closest that we have to a contemporary construction of the phrase “natural born citizen”. Since it is far from definitive, an ivory tower debate has jogged along for decades over whether persons born outside any state (that is, not citizens iure soli at common law) might be ineligible for the Presidency. Whenever the issue approaches being serious, the debate vanishes. No one except a few nutcases contended that Barry Goldwater (born in pre-statehood Arizona) or George Romney (born in Mexico) could not lawfully run for President.

Any ordinary lawyer – me, for instance – either knows these non-recondite facts or can dredge them up within minutes. Moreover, lawyers know that, if the Constitution really did limit the Presidency to citizens born on American soil, Congress couldn’t enact a law to make Senator McCain eligible, any more than it could do so for Arnold Schwarzenegger or Jennifer Grantholm or Margaret Thatcher. Either Barack Obama is incompetent at his profession, or he is ignoring what he knows about the law in order to gin up a phony cloud over his probable opponent. (What would you think if Senator McCain sponsored a joint resolution declaring that Senator Obama is not a Moslem? That he was being gracious and high-minded?)

This episode jibes all too well with a couple of others. First there was Senator Obama’s claim that American troops are so ill-supplied that they often must rely on captured enemy weapons, which was a blatant distortion of a less momentous and long out-of-date complaint that his staff had heard from an Army officer.

Then there is the reported attempt by his top economic advisor to reassure Canadian officials that candidate Obama’s demand for renegotiation of NAFTA was just cynical campaign rhetoric. Although Senator Obama flatly denies the report, neither the advisor nor the alleged Canadian interlocutor will go so far. There can’t be much real doubt that the conversation did occur or that it shows, at the very least, that someone who consults with the Senator regularly just assumes that he is two-faced on trade issues.

Bill Clinton and Barack Obama don’t look much alike, but maybe they have more in common that we thought.

Addendum: Life is strange. I came back from an afternoon walk to find I’d been Instalanched. My thanks to Professor Reynolds, and welcome to all (except maybe the fellow in the comments who thinks that Dick Cheney and GE are behind the Obama campaign).

Update (3/2/08): Very disturbing – both Clintonesque and clumsy – is an instance, highlighted by David Bernstein, where Senator Obama “lies pretty blatantly” about honors paid by his church to Louis Farrakhan:

I just caught the transcript of Obama’s meeting with Jewish community leaders in Cleveland last week. Unfortunately, Obama lies pretty blatantly, to wit (referring to the award his church’s magazine gave to Farrakhan): “An award was given to Farrakhan for his work on behalf of ex-offenders completely unrelated to his controversial statements.” As I’ve noted before, the honor for Farrakhan was for his dedication to “truth,” with no mention of ex-offenders. . . . Obama thus avoided addressing the real concern, which is that his church’s magazine and his spiritual mentor state that they honoring and praising Farrakhan precisely because of his stated political and racial views, which they claim are “honest” and reflect “truth.”

Time Travel! In Chicago!!

The Sun-Times, not at all the same paper since Conrad Black departed, buries the greatest scientific achievement of all time in its police blotter:

A man in his 40s who inhaled a powder that helps extinguish fires was hospitalized after a fire that police said was burning in an empty baby stroller in the vestibule of a North Side building early Wednesday.

The fire started about 1:20 a.m. in an empty baby stroller in the vestibule of a building in the 5000 block of North Western Avenue, according to a Lincoln District police sergeant.

Fire crews responded about 1:15 a.m. to a fire at 5037 N. Western Ave. where a man in his 40s inhaled a power substance that helps extinguish fires, according to Fire Media Affairs spokesman Richard Rosado. The man was taken in an unidentified condition to Weiss Memorial Hospital, according to Rosado. The man may have been trying to put the blaze out when he was injured, Rosado said.

Police Bomb & Arson Section Sgt. Joe Poland said the fire was under investigation.

A time the fire was extinguished was not known at 7:45 a.m. Wednesday.

I also wonder about the “powder” or “power substance” that extinguishes fires and leaves people “in an unidentified condition”. That could be an intrusion from the future – or just the latest street high. The authorities’ ignorance of when the fire was extinguished is presumably because it took (is taking? will take? will have taken?) place within a closed timelike loop.

(Thanx to Best of the Web Today (last item).)

A Man Who Made a Difference

If William F. Buckley, Jr., had never lived, conservatism in America might exist, but it would probably be a far different phenomenon: perhaps a rigidly ideological minority movement (or several of them), perhaps what Lionel Trilling called it in the middle of the last century: “a series of irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas”. Our country’s right-of-center political party – whichever one it might be – would be “conservative” only in the European sense: the party of class, wealth and privilege, happy to administer a dirigiste state.

Mr. Buckley didn’t claim to be a deep or original thinker. His skills lay, first, in presenting other men’s ideas persuasively and, second and more importantly, in prodding others into creating, refining and testing ideas. The conservatism inspired and fostered by National Review is that rarest of political movements: one that neither adheres to a unified ideology nor jettisons principles in favor of power seeking. Figuring out precisely how Frank S. Meyer, Russell Kirk and James Burnham, to select three of NR’s seminal contributors, fit together is a challenge for the intellectual historian. Without WFB’s influence, it’s doubtful that they would have. A bunch of small, purist conservatisms, resembling contemporary purist libertarianism, might have developed and even flourished. They would not have provided the intellectual heft needed to have a measurable impact on American politics.

The Buckley touch was likewise vital to lopping away from the Right those branches that needed lopping: fascist fellow travelers, unreconstructed racists, irrational subversive hunters, antisemites, pseudo-Nietzschean individualists and the like. Largely thanks to his efforts, the right-wing counterparts to Moveon.org and Daily Kos exist on the margins of politics; they aren’t the prime source of energy for their half of the spectrum.

Many conservatives are downhearted these days, as they look at the irrationalities (talk about “irritable mental gestures”) of a Democrat-controlled Congress and the more than negligible prospect of a left-wing demagogue as our next President. Bill Buckley knew what it was like to be truly in the political wilderness. If he wasn’t discouraged from standing athwart history yelling, “Stop!”, why should we be? If he could start with a handful of derided dreamers and see a Ronald Reagan inaugurated less than 30 years later, shouldn’t we be embarrassed at the triviality of our own ambitions?

Almost a Prophet

Months ago, I titled a post “Exit Hillary?”, where I quoted an article about Carl Bernstein’s then forthcoming book on the Tin Lady. One of Mr. Bernstein’s revelations was that she “has suffered serious bouts of depression”. If that was true – and the sources were, uncharacteristically, on the record – the Clinton campaign might, I suggested, come to an untimely end.

No one, however, gave the former co-slayer of Richard Milhouse Nixon much notice. Democratic sophoi did not read his book and conclude that their party would do better to locate a less fragile candidate. Nonetheless, the exit that I muzzily forecast is looking more and more imminent, largely, one might say (as Larry Kudlow does), for reasons inferable from the Bernstein narrative. Ever since her campaign ran into serious opposition, Senator Clinton has acted like someone who can’t cope with the burden life has placed upon her. That doesn’t mean that she is “mentally ill”, of course. Running for President is a project that can easily overwhelm people of merely sound mind, though the stresses are minuscule compared to those of actually being President.

We should, then, be grateful to Barack Obama, and even to Obamamessianism. It’s better that Senator Clinton’s inadequacies show up now, before she holds the world’s most powerful position. Now that I think of it, she should be grateful, too.

Our Feckless Libertarian Friends

Now and then I’m reminded why libertarians so often strike me as faintly risible. Like Trollope’s Mr. Finespun, many (most?) of them have a habit of starting with a sensible idea and fixating on it until it turns into nonsense. With Finespun, the cause of causes was the removal of duties on French wines. With Megan McArdle, currently one of the Instapundit subs, it is the evils of the McCain-Feingold Act. She writes,

I might not vote for Obama; I will not vote for McCain. There are some things more important than the economy, and free speech is among them. Yes, I don’t like Obama’s stance on the Second Amendment, but the difference is, the president has little wiggle room right now on the second, while McCain might do serious further damage to the first, or the fourth. I dislike the steps Obama is willing to take in order to achieve his goals of economic equality. But these are as nothing to the notion that citizens have to be protected from information because Big Daddy John thinks we’ll get bad ideas in our heads.

I can spend happy hours reading denunciations of the ridiculous election laws that Senator McCain co-fathered. One of my daydreams is that I will someday have the opportunity to disobey them. When the Senator is trapped in the coils of his own creation – did he hypothesize or hypothecate? – my schadenfreude overflows. And I’ll stipulate that free speech is “more important than the economy” (albeit I doubt that free speech, or any other personal freedom, can survive under a dirigiste economic regime).

But a Presidential election is not about flogging John McCain for his past follies. It is about picking a national leader from the choices offered to us. To say “A is responsible for a terrible law, so I’m going to vote (or half-vote, by abstaining) for B” is a political temper tantrum, not a rational judgement.

It’s even more of a tantrum when, on the particular terrible law in question, B’s position is no better than A’s. If Senator Obama has ever said an unkind word about McCain-Feingold, much less advocated its repeal or promised to appoint Federal Election Commissioners who will gut it administratively, I’ve missed the news. Nor have I heard him rebuke that anti-free speech views that proliferate so widely in his party these days. He didn’t dissent from the Democratic candidates’ refusal to debate on Fox News. Has he ever criticized a campus speech code? Did he break with Democratic leaders, such as his staunch supporter Dick Durbin, on proposals to revive the Fairness Doctrine?

You’d think that a libertarian would be concerned about such questions. Unfortunately, the cold rationality that underlies the libertarian philosophy seems to vanish whenever it is needed most.

Sometimes It’s Cleverest to Keep Your Sources Secret

During last night’s debate, Barack Obama launched an explosive anecdote against the man whom he hopes to succeed:

OBAMA: You know, I’ve heard from an Army captain who was the head of a rifle platoon — supposed to have 39 men in a rifle platoon. Ended up being sent to Afghanistan with 24 because 15 of those soldiers had been sent to Iraq.

And as a consequence, they didn’t have enough ammunition, they didn’t have enough Humvees. They were actually capturing Taliban weapons, because it was easier to get Taliban weapons than it was for them to get properly equipped by our current commander in chief.

By this morning, several platoons of military men had denounced this story in terms ranging from unlikely aberration to out-and-out f*****g lie. Among other oddities –

• Captains don’t command platoons. That’s a job for a second lieutenant.

• Platoons aren’t split between theaters.

• Having fewer men than called for by organizational charts is a routine condition. As one soldier put it, “Rifle platoons are not at full strength, war or peace, ever. The TO&E (Table of Organization and Equipment) may call for a certain number of soldiers, but you never have all of them. It just doesn’t happen, and on the odd chance it does, it only means you’re days, or even hours, away from being understrength. The natural strength of a platoon is understrength.

• Soldiers currently serving in Afghanistan asserted that our troops have no shortage of weapons or ammunition. According to an Army captain with two tours there,

  During my last deployment with 2-87 Infantry (3D BCT, 10th MTN DIV) that took place from January 2006 until May of 2007, every soldier in our task force was equipped with state of the art equipment, and plentiful amounts of it. We fired veritable mountains of ammunition during combat operations, and always had more on hand. Vehicles were plentiful, as were the resources required to maintain (the REAL challenge!) them. . . .

  What do we do with captured Taliban/Al-Qaeda/Haqqani/Waziri equipment? We turn some of it over to the Afghan police (what is serviceable, which usually isn’t much) and Afghan army units, but the majority is destroyed.

If the matter had rested there – left-wing Senator makes statement, right-wing blogs question it – it would have been a stalemate. Declarations of implausibility aren’t the same as proof of falsity, and the community-based reality of the sinistrosphere would have delightedly retailed the sad plight of the weapon-deprived U.S. troops from now till election day.

Then a left-wing journalist forgot the maxim, “If it’s too good to check, don’t.” Annoyed by all this right-wing noise, Jake Tapper called the Obama campaign and asked for its source. The campaign identified him, and Mr. Tapper gave him a call, which satisfied him that “Obama’s anecdote checks out”.

Well, for very small values of checking out. The candidate took a smattering of facts and twisted them into a factoid so distorted that it is indistinguishable from outright invention:

1. The captain (then a lieutenant, explaining one of the discrepancies) was deployed in Afghanistan “from the Summer of 2003 through Spring 2004”. So his information is four years old, telling us nothing much about the current state of affairs.

2. He told Mr. Tapper that his platoon was at full strength when he took command at Fort Drum but that 15 men were reassigned “in ones and twos” before it went to Afghanistan. That is consistent with Senator Obama’s statement but isn’t proof that the demands of Iraq led to troop shortages elsewhere. Not only do platoons hardly ever remain at full strength (as noted above), but the fact that Lieutenant X’s platoon was under TO&E doesn’t indicate that the force sent to the theater had too little manpower. One can send three 24-man in lieu of two 39-man platoons without any loss of combat effectiveness (perhaps with a gain, since the larger number of units improves tactical flexibility, and the force has the benefit of three platoons’ worth of automatic rifles and machine guns).

3. “Getting parts or ammunition for their standard rifles was not a problem.” The captain’s complaints centered on MK-19 automatic grenade launcher and the M2 heavy machine gun, neither of which is a platoon-level weapon. An infantry platoon has two M240B machine guns. There’s no mention of any problem with supplying those. Given our military’s immense firepower advantage over the mufsidun irregulars, the MK-19 and M2 difficulties, if real and still present, are hardly likely to be a significant detriment.

4. “Not enough Humvees” turns out to mean “two or three” instead of the standard four. Vehicles were nonetheless available: “‘To get the rest of the platoon to the fight,’ he says, ‘we would use Toyota Hilux pickup trucks or unarmored flatbed humvees.’ Sometimes with sandbags, sometimes without.” Against an enemy that has little heavy armament and was not yet, in 2003–04, making much use of IED’s, that doesn’t look like much of a handicap. The shortage of Humvees during that period, caused by inadequate domestic armor production capacity, is well known and has since been surmounted.

5. As for the most shocking of Senator Obama’s revelations – “They were actually capturing Taliban weapons, because it was easier to get Taliban weapons than it was for them to get properly equipped” – there is no corroboration from the supposed source:

   “The purpose of going after the Taliban was not to get their weapons,” he said, but on occasion they used Taliban weapons. Sometimes AK-47s, and they also mounted a Soviet-model DShK (or "Dishka") on one of their humvees instead of their 50 cal.

   There’s no hint that this occasional, opportunistic use of enemy equipment was born of necessity. Many soldiers like to have an extra weapon at hand (it’s no fun if your M16 jams during a firefight), and the AK-47 has a high reputation for reliability and stopping power.

I don’t see how anybody can honestly think that Senator Obama made intelligent or accurate use of the information that he was provided. He evidently worked up this story, as shown by his knowing the full complement of a platoon (not a fact that many life-long civilians have ready to hand) and the exact number of his captain’s actual muster roll, but he didn’t bother to stick to the facts. It would have been better for his credibility if his informant, like the soldiers who supposedly vouched for Scott Beauchamp’s stories, had remained unknown.

Further reading: Christian Lowe, “Obama and His Captain”
Stuart Koehl, “The Captain Tells a Different Story”:

Jake Tapper may think the captain “backs up Obama’s story.” Not really – if the “story” is the story as told by Obama. His version is misleading as a reporting of what the captain said. More fundamentally, it was intended as an indictment of our management of the war. But in this respect it’s silly. In fact, the “story” here merely shows the operation of “real war,” as opposed to “war on paper.” That a presidential candidate would make something of it either shows a cynical attempt to score political points, or an appalling ignorance of military realities.

A Dog That Refuses to Bark

As her Presidential campaign sinks, the Tin Lady has been flailing for talking points to pull Democrats back from the Obamamessiah: He’s a plagiarist. He wanted to be President when he was in kindergarten. His health care proposals aren’t totalitarian enough. He doesn’t have her vast fund of experience. All of those seem to be failing.

Meanwhile, a giant, juicy issue sits there, waiting to be whacked. Barack Obama has disconcertingly close relations with people who think very ill of Israel, America’s principal ally in the Middle East. Some of them have made statements that verge on raw antisemitism. For the evidence, see Ed Lasky’s series of articles (“Barack Obama and Israel”, “Barack Obama’s Middle East Expert”, “The Audacity of Questioning Obama’s Commitment to Israel”, “Samantha Power and Obama’s Foreign Policy Team”), Caroline Glick’s “The Audacity of Truth”, or Power Line’s numerous posts on the topic (e. g., “Audacity We Can Do Without”, “Obama Tries His Hand at Damage Control – And Pandering”, “Soft Power”).

Rational disagreement is possible on the question of how determinedly hostile to Israel the candidate and his advisors really are. (For a benign view, heavy on bromides and whitewash, vide Eli Lake, “Obama’s Brain Trust Taking Shape”.) It’s undeniable, though, that there is a great deal of smoke and little reason to doubt the presence of at least a few flames.

So what has Team Hillary, in its desperation, done with this opportunity to cast doubt on her opponent’s willingness to continue our historic alliance with Israel, which happens to be overwhelmingly popular among the American public?

Nothing at all.

Now, the Tin Lady’s strategists have committed some blunders this primary season, but they undoubtedly understand the psychology of their party very well. There’s a simple explanation of why they have loaded their rhetorical guns with piffling charges of copying applause lines while leaving truly serious ammo locked away: They don’t think that most Democratic voters care much about the fate of Israel or are badly shocked by anti-Jewish attitudes. A poll taken shortly before the last election found that a majority of Democrats favored neutrality between Israel and the terrorist organization Hezbollah. That isn’t a promising audience for denunciations of anti-Israeli or antisemitic views. Better to quibble about whose health care mandate has the most shackles. That a campaign would choose that course tells us much about the contemporary Democratic Party.

A Scandal at the Times

The New York Times endorsed John McCain for the Republican Presidential nomination. Now, just a few weeks later, it insinuates that Senator McCain had an affair – well, not an affair, as no one alleges that, but a friendship that political enemies could have insinuated was an affair – with a female lobbyist. Others have noted how thinly sourced and unscandalous this revelation is. The Times obviously regards it as worthy of being recounted on the front page, above the fold.

I’ll let the rest of the blogosphere argue about the truth value of the Times’ innuendos. (The McCain camp has issued a detailed denial.) Maybe there is a real McCain scandal lurking somewhere; what there definitely is is a media scandal, at least if accurate, honest, alert journalism is the standard.

The impetus for the Times’ suspicions is the public conduct of Senator McCain and Vicki Iseman in 1999. They were seen together a lot at the kind of events where legislators and lobbyists tend to congregate. If their actions, readily observable by reporters, were suspicious, why weren’t suspicions aroused back then? Why was the Times oblivious to this possible relationship until November 2007, when it was tipped off by a former, now “disillusioned” McCain “associate”? Either it was incurious eight years ago about one of its then-favorite politicians, or there was nothing to see.

According to credible sources (and also The New Republic), the Times did almost all of its substantive investigating last year. The paper’s editors apparently knew as much in December as they do today. Having that information in hand, they gave their GOP Presidential endorsement to Senator McCain. It’s a reasonable inference that they regarded the McCain-Iseman “news” as either untrue or unimportant. So why it is now on the front page? What has made it truer or more important in the intervening month and a half?

BTW, The New Republic’s strategy of stonewalling the Scott Beauchamp affair has paid off. Its account of the Times’s editorial processes (linked above) has been widely accepted as factual, just as if TNR were a paragon of journalistic integrity instead of a fiction periodical with interspersed political content.

Further reading: Stephen F. Hayes, “The New York Times vs. John McCain”

America Disgruntlement Syndrome

We all know there are people who believe that all the bad in the world that can’t be attributed to mosquitos, rats and lice oozes forth from America (or “Amerikkka”). Then there is a less virulent set, who, without demonizing the U.S.A., proclaim it to be a place “where lobbyists write check after check and Exxon turns record profits”, that “forces parents to compete with their teenagers to work for minimum wage at Wal-Mart” while opening “a wider and wider gap between the few who are rich and the rest who struggle to keep pace”. In this dystopia, one regularly encounters the man who “lies awake at night wondering how he’s going to pay the bills”, the woman who “works the night shift after a full day of college and still can’t afford health care for a sister who’s ill”, the retiree “who lost his pension when the company he gave his life to went bankrupt”, “the teacher who works at Dunkin’ Donuts after school just to make ends meet” and the rest of the cast of a contemporary Les Miserables.

Some of these detractors are themselves Americans, “feeling so alone” in “frustration and disappointment” that they find no occasion to feel “really proud of my country”, at least not until it bids fair to select the speaker’s favorite relative as its next leader.

Over the years I’ve learned that America Disgruntlement Syndrome, like the more vitriolic Bush Derangement Syndrome, is resistant to reason. Sufferers will never be converted by rational argument, so I see little reason to waste breath demonstrating the glaringly obvious truths that the United States is the most benevolent, prosperous and compassionate superpower in the history of the world, as well as the one most eager to correct whatever faults it discovers in the course of frequent self-critical examination. Even less, however, can I see a reason to let the dyspeptics have a go at running the country.

I’m not looking for President Pollyanna. A touch of the tragic sense of life would be welcome. The trouble with the Obamas, whom I have quoted above, isn’t their pessimism per se but the way that pessimism distorts their vision, so that they “see” phantom problems and are blind to real ones. That is the root cause of the substanceless nature of the Obama Presidential campaign. The candidate has shown that disgruntlement can inspire eloquence. It is otherwise a rather useless emotion.

Further reading: John Podhoretz, “She Said What?”

The Folly of Mail-In Voting: Another Demonstration

A couple of days ago, two weeks after its primary, New Mexico finished counting Democratic ballots and awarded the Tin Lady a narrow victory over the Obamamessiah. Less publicized is the fact, noted by OpinionJournal Political Diary (a $3.95/month bargain) that –

California still has almost one million votes uncounted from its Feb. 5 Super Tuesday primary.

What is taking so long? In California, almost half the state now votes by absentee ballot – a form of voting that requires far more processing than regular ballots. . . .

Imagine the nightmare if a vast ocean of uncounted absentee ballots in several key states delays the resolution of a close presidential contest. Florida’s disastrous 2000 vote recount could appear trivial by comparison. There’s a lesson here. Perhaps the “convenience” of casting absentee ballots ought to be weighed against the inconvenience of having to count them by laborious means, creating delays and uncertainty and distrust in the outcome of elections.

The principal objection to voting by mail is, of course, that it makes ballot secrecy optional. The privacy of the voting booth is a check on bribery and intimidation, for there is no way to be sure that bought or browbeaten votes will be cast as directed. It’s hard to believe that Americans are willing to dispense casually with that bulwark of democracy, but if it really doesn’t matter any more, shouldn’t we at least pause before running the risk that a Presidential election may someday turn on votes that aren’t counted until weeks after the fact?

Quote of the Day

James Bowman:

The other week, Barack Obama came up with what he doubtless saw as a snappy comeback in answer to Hillary Clinton’s oft-repeated boast that she would have the experience to be ready to govern “on Day One” by saying that “it is important to be right on Day One.” I hold no brief for either of these candidates, but this, clearly, is exactly wrong, and a reinforcement of Mrs. Clinton’s attempts to portray Mr. Obama as callow and inexperienced rather than an answer to them. For being “right” is no more an option for a president than it is for anyone else. Doubtless he will be right sometimes, but he will also be wrong a lot of the time. That is not something he can promise to be without appearing either to be a fool himself or to be fooling the electorate. It is tantamount to a promise not to make mistakes. How can we take a man seriously as a potential president who would make such an unwise – indeed, mistaken – promise? . . .

That he has not been laughed off the national stage for such foolish presumption is one measure of the eagerness in his party to welcome a political savior, a fantasy figure and superhero who can put everything right. My impression is that this eagerness, this willingness to see a one-term senator from Illinois as an object of veneration, as if he had accomplished some great deed instead of just promising “change,” exists not just on the media fringe but among people who would once have scorned such childishness. Oh how certain sorts of Democrats want to believe in their infallible superman! It’s the closet utopian in them who desperately need to believe that if you’re smart enough – as, in effect, Barack Obama is promising them he will be – they won’t have to fight anybody! They believe, as utopians of all descriptions have always believed, that peace and prosperity will come at the bidding of the smart. That’s why they have to denigrate the President’s intelligence at the same time that they are willing naively to believe in the omnicompetence of Senator Obama’s.

The Exile-and-Return Strategy

While many conservatives are rallying behind John McCain, others would rather the country elected an unabashed leftist than a self-identified, but not wholly reliable, conservative. Their strategy is reculer pour mieux sauter, pull back in order to leap farther. In the words of its blondest proponent, “If Hillary is elected president, we’ll have a four-year disaster, with Republicans ferociously opposing her, followed by Republicans zooming back into power, as we did in 1980 and 1994, and 2000.” A couple of years of exile will be followed by a glorious return.

I don’t see how anyone who looks forward gleefully to “a four-year disaster” for her country can be regarded as either patriotic or honorable. Isn’t that the mirror image of the Krazy Kossack Kidz’ lust for defeat in Iraq? But let’s waive that point and descend to the level of practicalities. That Bill Clinton’s wife or Tony Rezko’s dear friend would perform poorly as President seems to me highly likely, yet we should keep in mind that a Democratic President and Congress can do a great deal to cement partisan hegemony without governing well. Here are three simple ways in which victorious Democrats could raise huge obstacles to a GOP comeback:

First, they could enhance the strength of labor unions. Organized labor long ago lost out in the marketplace; it now represents less than a tenth of private sector workers. In response, unions have, quite rationally, looked for a different product, and their choice has fallen on left-wing activism. The shrunken remnant of the labor movement is still able to extract large sums of money and large numbers of political foot soldiers from its diminished ranks, all deployed for the benefit of the Democratic Party. The Democrats have returned the favor by cutting the budget of the Department of Labor unit that examines union finances (openness about money is anathema to many unions) and, more boldly, trying to abolish secret ballots in organizing elections. The latter effort failed. It might not in a more favorable environment the next time around.

Second, election laws can be “reformed” to facilitate fraud and intimidation. Nobody favors those openly, of course, but Bill Clinton was indifferent to them when he pushed the “motor voter” law through Congress. The Democratic Party vigorously opposes requiring identification at polling places and just as vigorously supports mail-in ballots, which, lacking any assurance of secrecy, make it easy to bribe, browbeat or impersonate voters.

I might note that here in Cook County, where the Democratic Party has untrammeled control, the secret ballot has become optional even at polling places. The ballot is now the size of a pillow case, and how it is marked can be seen easily by any attentive observer. Voters who take the effort can cover theirs up; those who have been paid for their votes or warned of the consequences of voting wrongly have an easy way to demonstrate that they’ve kept their bargains.

Third, plenty of liberals loudly favor stifling talk radio, Fox News and other perceived right-wing outlets through a revival of the Fairness Doctrine. We can anticipate a big push to turn words into laws when and if Democrats control all three branches of the government.

At least the first two of these three measures are near certainties if Senator Clinton or Obama wins a sweeping victory. Any of them will make the path back from exile more arduous than optimistic Republicans currently envision.

Immigration and Exit Polls

Tomorrow’s Wall Street Journal will highlight an interesting datum gleaned from exit polls in the “Super-Duper Tuesday” primaries:

Some 29% of Republicans [in California] did indeed say immigration was the most important issue facing the country. Yet according to the exit poll, some 25% of those who cared most about immigration favored Mr. McCain, compared to 45% for Mr. Romney. Either those voters thought other issues counted for more in electing a President, or they preferred Mr. McCain’s position.

The exit poll also asked Republicans to choose among three immigration policy options. About six in 10 voters said illegal aliens should either be allowed to apply for U.S. citizenship or to stay as temporary workers. Those voters went for Mr. McCain comfortably. A minority of 38% favored deportation, which is closer to Mr. Romney’s position, but the Senator won even 29% of those voters.

Exit surveys conducted across 14 other states – Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Connecticut, Delaware, Georgia, Illinois, Massachusetts, Missouri, New Jersey, New York, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Utah – also show that a clear majority of Republican voters (55%) favor a guest-worker program or path to citizenship for the estimated 12 million illegals in the U.S.

In other words, full-throated immigration restrictionism isn’t a majority position among Republicans, much less the electorate as a whole. Some prominent conservatives favor it vociferously, but I can’t help suspecting that a portion of their passion springs from the illusion that it’s a political trump card. It isn’t. It also is not, by any sane yardstick, “the most important issue facing the country”. It isn’t trivial, owing to the danger that terrorists will enter the country by the same routes as illegal lettuce pickers, but trying to wall off a 2,000 mile border isn’t necessarily the best strategy for keeping terrorists out. These matters deserve calm, rational debate. Emulating the Angry Left is the wrong way to go.

Getting Used to John McCain

Hilaire Belloc (or somebody like him) once described the difference between French and English politics: A Frenchman will call an opponent “a traitor, a scoundrel, fit only to be guillotined”. An Englishman will “suggest that the honorable gentlemen has fallen into error”. But they both will mean about the same thing.

Talk radio and the blogosphere tend toward the French model. Conservatives have lambasted John McCain for his opinions on free speech, tax cuts, Guantanamo, global warming, embryonic stem cell research, pharmaceutical companies, the “Gang of 14” deal, immigration, etc. Many of those are fair and reasonable criticisms. I’ve voiced some of them myself. Nonetheless, Republican voters preferred Senator McCain as our party’s candidate over any of his declared rivals. It is time, then, for non-McCainiac conservatives to evaluate a McCain candidacy dispassionately. Our choice in November, after all, will be between a man who wasn’t our first choice and a woman (or man) who can hardly be other than our last.

Let’s take it as a given that John McCain is not the reincarnation of Ronald Reagan. Does he have any virtues that might make him not simply the lesser of two evils but a positive good?

Consider these:

• He is firmly committed to winning the War on Terror. The tactical point on which he differs from most conservatives, his ACLU-like view of the “rights” of captured terrorists, is significant, but it is no more than a matter of tactics. Furthermore, it does not extend to other key intelligence issues, particularly FISA reform, which he strongly backed in his CPAC speech. There is very little in Senator McCain’s foreign policy manifesto that will be welcome at the State Department – definitely a plus.

• He is one of the leading Senatorial advocates of cutting spending and eliminating earmarks.

• He is the only remaining candidate, in either party, who supports free trade. (Vide David Ranson, “The Candidates and Trade”.)

• He has a solid pro-life voting record.

• He vocally backed the nominations of John Roberts and Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court and has identified them as models that his own appointments would seek to emulate. Some critics are sure that he is insincere, but the evidence for skepticism is gossamer-like. The real danger is one that all GOP Presidents face: that the procedure for ranking potential judges will be inadequate. Fred Thompson or Mitt Romney would have faced the same challenge.

• Despite his declarations about the need to “stop Global Warming”, he is the only Presidential candidate in living memory to denounce ethanol subsidies in Iowa, a stand that is not only politically courageous but also suggests that he realizes that the war against climate change is not one in which human beings should be asked to “pay any price”.

Against these virtues, one must weight a number of faults. The Associated Press has compiled a list of the ten “Main Reasons Conservatives Oppose McCain”. Despite its source, it looks reasonably accurate (as Rush Limbaugh seems to agree). Looking it over, I see only two items that are unequivocally non-conservative, viz., the Senator’s sponsorship of the McCain-Feingold anti-free speech law and his enthusiasm for statist “solutions” to Global Warming. (I would add his support for legalizing drug reimportation, which, however, probably won’t work, as other countries will find that it is in their own interest to forbid exports to the more lucrative U.S. market.) As for the rest,

Immigration. McCain has been a vocal supporter of a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants, although he now says he understands the border between the U.S. and Mexico must be sealed first.

Immigration is an issue about which conservatives genuinely disagree. Plenty of those on the Right believe that restrictionism is bad economics and dubious politics, or has the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page become a voice of liberalism? In fact, Ronald Reagan was an “open borders” guy. In some people’s eyes, I know, halting illegal immigration (and frequently legal immigration, too) has become the number one national priority. By any reasonable standard, it is they who have moved away from traditional conservative principle and John McCain who has remained steadfast.

Tax cuts. McCain twice voted against President Bush’s tax cuts, saying in 2001 they helped the wealthy at the expense of the middle class and in 2003 that there should be no tax relief until the cost of the Iraq war was known. But he now wants to extend the tax cuts.

Well, he was wrong and recognizes that fact. Moreover, unlike most self-styled budget hawks, he has never proposed tax increases as a “solution” to deficit spending. He hasn’t shown much enthusiasm, it’s true, for tax reductions, but the first principle is that taxes at the federal level should never increase. On that point, he appears to be sound.

Gay Marriage. McCain refuses to support a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage.

So do quite a few other conservatives. Whether one should deal with cultural issues by amending the Constitution is a tactical question. On the substance, Senator McCain has never said a favorable word – nor even, I think, a neutral one – about same-sex marriage.

Stem cell research. McCain would relax restrictions on federal dollars for embryonic stem cell research, which critics consider tantamount to abortion.

This is the sole blot on an otherwise flawless pro-life record, a blot that he shares, alas, with many other pro-lifers. Providentially, medical research bids fair to remove any “need” for the cultivation and destruction of embryos, rendering this particular controversy obsolete.

“Gang of 14” member. One of seven Republicans and seven Democrats who averted a Senate showdown over whether filibusters could be used against Bush judicial nominees.

Whether the “Gang of 14” deal was a brilliant stroke or an abject snatching of defeat from the jaws of victory is another question that divides conservatives. I’m not a fan of it, but, if Senator McCain was wrong, he misjudged the best way to promote the confirmation of conservative judges. Anybody who claims that his purpose was to impede them is evidence that there really is a McCain Derangement Syndrome.

Kerry veep. McCain was approached by the Democratic presidential nominee in 2004, Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry, about being his running mate. McCain talked with Kerry but rejected the offer.

This bit of historical trivia keeps being recycled in more and more lurid forms. There’s isn’t a scintilla of evidence that Senator McCain ever considered joining the Kerry ticket or that the “talk” amounted to more than his saying “no”.

Works with Democrats. See all of the above.

The fear, lurking in some quarters, that President McCain would ally with Congressional Democrats to push through liberal legislation is silly in light of the few points of agreement between them. One suspects, too, that any existing good will that he feels toward his colleagues on the Left will be dispelled in the course of the election campaign. The Democratic National Committee already has its first smear ready. It will no doubt be the mildest.

Belligerence. McCain can be acerbic toward his critics, such as when he labeled televangelists Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson “agents of intolerance.” He reconciled with Falwell in 2006. Conservative James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family, said in a statement on the morning of the Super Tuesday primaries that he would not vote for McCain, citing among other things his “legendary temper” and that he “often uses foul and obscene language.”

See the first paragraph of this post, and savor the irony that James Dobson is so outraged by a “legendary temper” that he throws a temper tantrum in reply.

In sum, the Republican nominee-presumptive is a generally solid conservative who is wrong on a handful of issues. Since those don’t include the war, taxes, spending or judicial appointments, I’d rather spend my time and energy polemicizing against the Democratic contenders, either of whom would be the most ill-prepared and radically leftist President in our nation’s history, than complain endlessly that Fate has not sent a second Reagan to carry our banner.

Health Care’s Art of the Impossible

Commenting last week on the shelving of Governor Schwarzenegger’s health care “reform” plan, the Wall Street Journal called a system based on mandatory health insurance “the art of the impossible”. The reference was chiefly to the political chasms that couldn’t be bridged, but the label is accurate in a wider sense: Even if the concept can be got up and running, it won’t deliver better, cheaper or more nearly universal medical services.

The fundamental flaw is that the aborted California plan, like the stillbirths in Pennsylvania, Illinois and Wisconsin and the infant struggling to be born in Massachusetts, didn’t envision insurance in the true sense of the word, where persons facing the risk of a catastrophic loss contribute to a pool that will pay whichever of them is unlucky enough to be the victim, proportioning their contributions to their individual risks. This was not a mere matter of mislabeling; it entailed a serious misreading of markets and incentives.

All homeowners buy fire insurance, because fire is a universal danger and the cost of replacing a home is usually overwhelming. We don’t buy home repair insurance; if we can’t bear those costs out of cash flow, we should rent, not own.

Similarly, owners of inland houses rarely buy flood insurance. Certainly, no one would expect them to pay the same premiums as owners of beach front properties on the Gulf Coast.

Health care coverage in the United States has evolved away from insurance principles, to the point where it could be better described as a combination of prepayment and cross-subsidization. Policyholders are reimbursed for minor, recurring expenses, and individuals in very different states of health are charged identical premiums (often mandated by law under “community rating” schemes). Both direct and indirect disincentives to overconsumption are weak. The upshot is elementary economics: The marginal cost of health care is trifling, which increases demand, which increases prices.

To the extent that this system is private and voluntary, there are constraints on these effects. Higher prices make it necessary for insurers to increase premiums, which induces low consumers of care to drop out. Those who remain in the risk pool must either pay more or accept more limited coverage. Left free of government controls, the market would tend toward the fire insurance model, where insurance is a recourse for major illnesses and injuries. For treatment of lesser ills, we would pay the doctor out of pocket, just as we pay the plumber to fix a leaky faucet or the veterinarian to treat our pets’ diseases.

A government-mandated insurance plan could be set up along those lines, but why? Private enterprise is obviously capable of devising and marketing the same thing. (In most states, it can’t, thanks to an array of mandatory coverages, but that is a topic for another day.) In any event, true insurance isn’t what the reformers want. Their goal is to spread everybody’s expenses over the entire population. Making insurance compulsory aims at that goal but eliminates the possibility that market forces will ameliorate the consequences.

Having insurance isn’t a guarantee that a doctor, nurse or hospital will be at hand when one gets sick. Universal, mandatory insurance is sure to increase demand. The immediate market response will be price increases. Since insured patients pay only a small portion of what they are nominally billed, those increases can equalize demand to supply only if they are very large. As prices rise, premiums must rise, too. Soon they become unaffordable for lower income individuals, and taxpayers must bail the system out.

At least, high prices will attract increased resources to the medical field, which will ease price rises in the long run. Well before that point, though, politicians are almost certain to impose price controls. Prices below the market-clearing level create shortages today and drive away resources in the future. Unless the state starts conscripting medical professionals, the trend will be toward a steadily shrinking cadre trying to meet steadily increasing wants and needs.

This fact – not such secondary matters as the strong-arm measures needed to force everybody to buy insurance – is the root reason why proposals like Mrs. Bill Clinton’s and, truth to tell, Mitt Romney’s can’t deliver what they promise. Generating demand while suppressing supply is a hopeless prescription, no matter how fervently the patient wishes for a miracle and the witch doctor promises one.

A Return to Islamic America – And a Visit to Its Rival

Two years ago, Robert Ferrigno published Prayers for the Assassin, a novel set in a Moslem-dominated United States a few decades from now. To summarize the plot may be a thought crime in Canada, so, lest I be forbidden to attend next year’s World Science Fiction Convention, I’ll just say that the book was a political thriller whose hero, in true thriller fashion, battled a shadowy, globe girdling conspiracy, the full extent of which became evident only at the climax. Also in thriller fashion, the villain, temporarily thwarted, escaped to plot again in the sequel. That sequel, Sins of the Assassin, has just gone on sale. A third volume will, the author tells us, complete the story.

In Sins, the scene of the action moves from the Islamic Republic to the “Bible Belt”, the section of the former U.S.A., roughly coterminous with the “red” Southern states, that resisted the Moslem advance. As the nickname suggests, it is modeled on liberal shibboleths about Christian fundamentalism, though the model is subtly subversive of left-wing conventional wisdom. Individualistic hyper-piety can lead to many bad things, but it is a poor foundation for an effective theocracy.

The Bible Belt that we see through the eyes of Rakkim Epps, a Moslem “shadow warrior” assigned to penetrate the top secret project of a charismatic warlord, is weak, backward, fragmented, superstitious, corrupt and in thrall to foreign powers, yet it is also freer, more tolerant and more hopeful than its Islamic counterpart. This difference is not exactly an ostentatious theme. It is never emphasized, and the hero doesn’t notice it. The reader must observe and ponder for himself. If the author’s intention was propagandistic, it is propaganda of the only kind suitable for fiction, where we are shown a variation on our own world and must tease out the implications for ourselves.

Regardless of the background, the thriller is the foreground. I’m not a great afficionado of the genre, but, so far as I can judge, this is a first rate exemplar. The plot moves twistily and rapidly. The hero receives a little supernatural aid but none from sheer good luck. The characters, while not realistic, are interesting and multi-dimensional. Even the secondary ones have memorable touches, like the grotesque pride that an end-times cult leader takes in having once been a tenured university professor. When the hidden hand of the archvillain is at last disclosed, the form that it takes is characteristic but unexpected. The prose is clear and energetic, albeit more telegraphic than I like. (Did the publisher ration the word “and”?)

From what one might call the Alexandre Dumas perspective, Sins is, I think, more successful than Prayers. It isn’t quite perfect for two reasons. First, and less importantly, the Big Secret proves to be a macguffin. Maybe Mr. Ferrigno will surprise us, but I don’t see how it can be of any actual use to the parties that have so desperately sought it. (Also, unless he springs a second surprise, it is scientifically absurd.)

Second, as the middle volume of a trilogy, the novel doesn’t come to a real end. True, the plot lines are tied up, which is better than many middles do, but the villains are left in a position of strength, from which the world needs to be rescued. Rakkim’s mission has ended in, at best, a draw. Meanwhile, the secondary narrative thread concludes with an effective, though invisible, coup d’etat against the Islamic Republic’s moderate governing authorities. Prayers ended more satisfactorily. While it left room for a sequel, none was urgently demanded. Sins, by contrast, will be less than half a book until the next volume appears.

The upside is that volume three, if Mr. Ferrigno goes on as he has begun, will be worth waiting for.

Confused Leftist Reporters Denounce Corporate Do-Gooders

If one wishes to stay informed about pension issues, not reading the Wall Street Journal’s Ellen Schultz and Theo Francis is a must. They aren’t merely left-wing; they are astonishingly ignorant of their subject matter. It’s as if sports reporting were assigned to a couple of guys who can’t tell home runs from touchdowns.

The pair’s latest piece [link probably for subscribers only] is, even by their standards, a classic. It editorializes about Revenue Ruling 2008-7, released last Friday, which addresses two issues that arise when a traditional pension plan is converted into a cash balance plan. The first is whether a technique known as “wearaway” is (or, to be precise, was – the law was recently changed to prescribe a different preservation method for conversions occurring after June 29, 2005) a proper method for preserving benefits that accrued before the conversion. The second is whether a plan may offer participants the better of a cash balance or a traditional benefit formula.

Issue one isn’t very controversial, except in the minds of a few leftists, like the Schultz-Francis duo, who really and truly hate cash balance plans, and would like to punish companies that install them. The ruling needs only a couple of paragraphs to dispose of the legal objections that have been raised against wearaway, agreeing with the court decisions that have rejected such arguments (and go unmentioned by Schultz and Francis; Register v. PNC Financial Services Group, Inc., 477 F.3d 56 (3d Cir., Jan. 30, 2007) and Custer v. Southern New England Telephone Co., 2008 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 5067 (D. Conn., Jan. 24, 2008)).

Issue two is trickier. A great many converted plans allow some or all of the employees who were participants at the time of the conversion to take advantage of either the cash balance or the traditional formula, whichever produces the higher pension at the time of retirement. For a young participant, the cash balance accrual is ordinarily faster. As he ages, the gap diminishes until it reaches a crossover point, after which the traditional formula is superior. The “greater-of” technique adjusts benefits upward for participants who start on one side of the crossover and work long enough to reach the other.

Owing to a glitch in the regulations under section 411(b) (commonly called the “backloading” rules), this benign practice is legally dubious. The IRS noticed the problem last year when it began reviewing cash balance plans’ determination letter applications, which had been in limbo for several years awaiting legislative action on various politically delicate issues. Over a thousand plans were threatened with disqualification on this ground. Revenue Ruling 2008-7 outlines the basis of the IRS’s position (which is, much as I hate to admit it, entirely cogent), then announces its intention to amend the regulations to eliminate the problem.

Schultz-Francis seem unaware that the two issues are not identical. Instead, they describe wearaway (intelligibly, though not with complete accuracy), then claim that it was the target of the IRS’s displeasure. They treat the new ruling as a reversal of front in response to “a volley of lobbying, enlisting more than two dozen lawmakers to ask the agency to back off”. The volley was real, but it related only to “greater-of” formulas, not to wearaway.

So these two veteran pinkos lambaste the IRS for letting employers adopt a technique that can only increase workers’ pensions. The reason may be simple ignorance, but isn’t there also likely to be a smidgeon of reflexive left-wing anger: If Big Business wants this, it must be evil. Never mind the facts.

Sad News from New Haven

When I arrived in New Haven yesterday for the festivities surrounding the Yale Tory Party’s annual banquet, I leaned of the closing of the Yankee Doodle. A little later, Instapundit posted the story. Like many beloved traditions, this one gets attention only as it passes away.

When I was a Yale undergraduate, pigs-in-a-blanket from the Doodle were standard fare for late night Yale Political Union cabals. Nowadays, I suppose, health conscious students favor bean sprouts and tofu.

I may as well mention that last night the Tories debated, “Resolved, that the best things in life are free”, which was agreed to, at nearly one o’clock in the morning, by a vote of 17 to 13. Somehow a pro-Ron Paul resolution had also slipped onto the agenda (“Resolved, that this house prefers Ron Paul to John McCain”). Perhaps there had been an Internet poll? Whencever it arose, it was soundly crushed, 6 to 23 with one abstention.

Tonight is the Banquet itself, always a jolly occasion. A pity that there will be melancholy strains in the background.