Stromata Blog

The Obami Push On

We’re waist-deep in the Big Muddy,
And the old fool says, “Push on!”

– Vietnam era song lyric

At my age, one doesn’t give up seven-plus hours of one’s life lightly, so I didn’t watch the “bipartisan health care summit” last Thursday. Leaving aside a handful of outliers, the pundits who did watch agree that, if the President’s objective was to hold the Republican Party’s neanderthal tendencies up to the ridicule of the world, he failed.

Predictably, his and the Democratic Congressional leadership’s immediate reaction has not been to rethink their scheme for vastly expanding the government’s role in health care. No, they will push on in the teeth of negative public opinion and daunting legislative obstacles. Didn’t these guys ever learn about quagmires?

The motivation is, I suppose, expressed in another old lyric: “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.” The Democrats have placed themselves in what looks like a politically hopeless position. Either advance or retreat almost certainly dooms them in November. Having nothing left to lose, they are freed from the restraints of prudence.

The argument for advancing is, I suppose, that “something may turn up”. The bill might pass, which would be a fine progressive achievement, and then some fortuitous circumstance – a dramatic economic turnaround, decisive victories in the War on Terror, the discovery of John Boehner in Dick Cheney’s bed – might make the voters forget that they loathe the Democrats for having enacted it. Or the bill might fail but so inspire rank-and-file progressives that their unprecedented turnout at the polls holds Democratic losses to a minimum. Or the horse might learn to sing; that is, having had Obamacare rammed down its throat, the public might discover that mandates, taxes, deficits, price controls, shortages, rationing and bureaucracy taste great.

The real obstacle to the last prospect is that the horse’s teacher is tone-deaf. What Americans dislike about the current state of American health care is the seemingly inexorable rise in costs. There are lots of reasons for that: an aging population, market inefficiencies (because near-universal third-party payment makes consumers indifferent to price), an excess of “defensive medicine” impelled by the threat of malpractice suits, the decreasing attractiveness of careers in the medical profession, the inescapable fact that the most effective medical treatments often require the greatest expenditure of human, technological and intellectual resources. In brief, many factors collude to push the demand curve up and the supply curve down.

On the other hand, care is not made more expensive by the mere inability or unwillingness of a fraction of the population to obtain health insurance. Insurance is a hedge against risk (or, in the case of medical care, very often a method of pre-payment for routine services). Having car insurance doesn’t mean that a new car will cost less if your old one is totaled. An insured house that burns down can’t be replaced more cheaply than an uninsured dwelling. It is a petty fallacy to think that, because an insured patient pays only a small amount out of pocket, insurance “bends the cost curve downward”. The price is the same; only the payor changes.

Obamacare deals almost exclusively with the mechanics of paying doctors, nurses, hospitals and pharmaceutical companies, with the aim of making insurance companies (stigmatized as heartless ogres in Democratic rhetoric) a nearly universal conduit. Some of its provisions, such as banning policies that protect only against catastrophe, will increase demand. The measures that may dampen demand are secondary and chancy. It’s not impossible that panels of experts applying “evidence-based medicine” will expose and eliminate a plethora of expensive, ineffective treatments. It’s also quite possible that they will stifle innovation and metamorphose into arbiters of who is “worthy” of top-notch care.

Nothing at all in the Democrats’ plan even tries to make medical resources more abundant. Quite the contrary: As the terms of arrangements between patients and providers become more and more a matter of regulation, price signals will grow weaker and less effective. We will all have the right to cheap, abundant, high quality health care. Unfortunately, no one will have the duty to give it to us.

On the most optimistic view, all that Obamacare can accomplish is what, in objective fact, it aims to accomplish, namely, shift the burden of paying for medical care away from its immediate recipients. Beyond that, either costs will continue to rise, or the rise will be halted through price controls and rationing. Neither outcome is likely to lead to Barack Obama’s being remembered as a second FDR.

Why Bother Being America’s Friend?

On the one hand, the Obama Administration seeks to charm Syria out of the Iran/Hezbollah camp. The current Syrian tyrant’s only virtue is that he is a more selective murderer than the previous tyrant, his father. He responded to our “open hand” by holding a press conference with the president of Iran, during which the latter expostulated on his dream of a future Middle East “without Zionists and without colonialists”. There is no sign that our President regards this performance as a rebuff.

Meanwhile, the State Department has declared above-it-all neutrality regarding Argentina’s latest threat to the British-inhabited Falkland Islands. The Administration offers not a shred of diplomatic, moral or military support to the nation that has historically been our closest ally and is fighting at our side right now in Afghanistan. If the Argentine government contemplates bolstering its shaky domestic prestige through a quick conquest, as its predecessor tried to do in 1982, the U.S. has done nothing to deter it. The precedent set by President Reagan, who furnished both material support and military intelligence to the Prime Minister Thatcher’s forces, has been hypovehiculated.

Why? Is this another instance of outsourcing our Latin American policy to Hugo Chávez? A display of President Obama’s ill-disguised hostility toward Great Britain? A mere product of State Department lassitude?

For those governments inclined to draw morals, the one here is as clear as a first grade Sunday School lesson: Reversing the old Greek maxim, the present American disposition is to do harm to our friends and good to our enemies. If that lesson is taken to heart in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, President Ahmadinejad will see his dream come true.

Reading for Washington’s Birthday

Among today’s numerous tributes to our first President, I’d like to commend a post by Tara Ross and Joe Smith, co-authors of Under God: George Washington and the Question of Church and State, which is now available in paperback.

Actually, what I really want to commend is the book. Thomas Jefferson’s “wall of separation” metaphor has triumphed so thoroughly that hardly anyone realizes that it didn’t reflect the views of most of the other Founding Fathers, and especially not those of the most respected figure in the early Republic. Under God rescues from obscurity Washington’s concept of the proper role of religion in public life. While firmly opposed to denominational favoritism, he believed that a free nation could not endure without acknowledging and relying on Divine Providence. His words and conduct, both before and after the ratification of the First Amendment, were not at all consistent with the ACLU-approved orthodoxy.

The book also reprints almost every word that Washington wrote about Church-state relations. If nothing else, these selections demonstrate that the man was more than an untutored soldier. His writing is clear and cogent. Circumstances did not make him an intellectual, but there can be no doubt that he possessed a fine intellect.

There’s no chance, of course, that the Jeffersonian view will be abandoned, or very much modified, after so many years. It is useful, though, to be aware that other opinions existed at the Founding and that they were based on reasoning that should not be ignored even today. If George Washington knew much about founding a Republic, perhaps he knew something about keeping one, too.

A Whimper It Is

No one, I imagine, was shocked to learn that the White House’s “compromise” health reform plan is a compromise, as Grace-Marie Turner says, “between two bad bills that are hugely unpopular with the American people”. The new proposal – not formulated in enough detail for its costs to be evaluated by the Congressional Budget Office – borrows from both bills, adds nothing suggested by Republicans except for a few safeguards against Medicare fraud, and offers as its one new idea price controls for health insurance.

The price control proposal is the key evidence that the President has decided that Obamacare will go out with a whimper rather than a bang. No one can seriously argue that establishing a new federal regulatory agency is within the scope of the budget reconciliation process. Since non-germane amendments require 60 Senate votes, which the Democrats don’t have, price controls are won’t survive. As a legislative strategy, bringing them forward is pointless, which is a strong indicator that the President doesn’t expect a vote to take place.

This ploy is a transparent continuation of the Administration’s effort to shift attention from the Democrats’ unpopular health care schemes to that favorite populist target, greedy insurance companies. We’ll hear nonstop excoriations of the industry, inspired by the hope that the next election can be turned into a referendum on AIG, Anthem and Blue Cross rather than the pitiful ineptitude and radicalism of the Democratic Party.

Well, it’s a plan – and it delays the destruction of American medicine by at least another year.

Is “Intelligent Design” Un-Christian?

Writing in First Things, Stephen M. Barr, a physicist and a Christian (not so rare a combination), contends that the “Intelligent Design” alternative to Darwinian evolution is not only bad science but worse theology. His principal point is that ID is radically unlike the Argument from Design that has long been a staple of theism in general and Christian apologetics in particular.

The ID claim is that certain biological phenomena lie outside the ordinary course of nature. Aside from the fact that such a claim is, in practice, impossible to substantiate, it has the effect of pitting natural theology against science by asserting an incompetence of science. To be sure, there are questions that natural science is not competent to address, and too many scientists have lost all sense of the limitations of their disciplines, not to mention their own limitations. But the ID arguments effectively declare natural science incompetent even in what most would regard as its own proper sphere. Nothing could be better calculated to provoke the antagonism of the scientific community. This throwing down of the gauntlet to science explains not a little of the fervor of the scientific backlash against ID.

The older (and wiser) form of the design argument for the existence of God—one found implicitly in Scripture and in many early Christian writings—did not point to the naturally inexplicable or to effects outside the course of nature, but to nature itself and its ordinary operations—operations whose “power and working” were seen as reflecting the power and wisdom of God. . . .

The emphasis in early Christian writings was not on complexity, irreducible or otherwise, but on the beauty, order, lawfulness, and harmony found in the world that God had made. As science advances, it brings this beautiful order ever more clearly into view. . . .

But whereas the advance of science continually strengthens the broader and more traditional version of the design argument, the ID movement’s version is hostage to every advance in biological science. Science must fail for ID to succeed.

The nub of the ID theory is that violations of natural law are crucial to evolution. From a Christian perspective, that is a troubling hypothesis.

In Darwin’s Black Box, the ground-breaking ID work, Michael Behe identified a number of key microbiological phenomena that, he argued, could not have evolved naturally. The reason was that they were “irreducibly complex”: Elements A, B and C were all necessary to D, but none could develop until the others were already in place.

If irreducible complexity is a reality, a portion of evolution is inexplicable in Darwinian (or any other natural) terms. (Dr. Behe doesn’t deny that most evolution proceeds naturally, nor does he doubt that life is a billion or so years old or that human beings descend ultimately from protozoa.) To get past the non-Darwinian roadblocks, one has little choice but to posit what we may as well call “miracles” (though Dr. Behe doesn’t use that term). And miracles imply an intelligent being to perform them.

Some biologists, and a great many amateur blowhards of the Little Green Footballs stripe, grow very angry on encountering such ideas. Professor Barr has a smidgeon of sympathy for their dudgeon:

The ID movement has also rubbed a very raw wound in the relation between science and religion. For decades scientists have had to fend off the attempts by Young Earth creationists to promote their ideas as a valid alternative science. The scientific world’s exasperation with creationists is understandable. Imagine yourself a serious historian in a country where half the population believed in Afrocentric history, say, or a serious political scientist in a country where half the people believed that the world is run by the Bilderberg Group or the Rockefellers. It would get to you after a while, especially if there were constant attempts to insert these alternative theories into textbooks. So, when the ID movement came along and suggested that its ideas be taught in science classrooms, it touched a nerve. This is one reason that the New Atheists attracted such a huge audience.

For those who start by assuming the truth of atheism, irreducible complexity is of course nonsense. If some step in the evolution of sapient beings were naturally impossible, we simply wouldn’t be here. For Christians, the question is not so easy. Natural law cannot produce every imaginable creation. There are no 20 foot tall insects or thousand pound birds or fire-breathing dragons – not because they just happen not to have evolved but because the laws of nature render them impossible. On the other hand, God could make a dragon, just as He turned water into wine and revivified Lazarus.

Conceivably, then, there are points at which the continuance of evolution was impossible by natural means, and God miraculously kept it going. What I find less conceivable is that these miracles were needed again and again. Darwin’s Black Box discusses five biochemical systems that Dr. Behe regards as instances of irreducible complexity, and he presumably didn’t have the time or resources to explore the full sweep of microbiology. If there are five miracles among the phenomena he is familiar with, one would reasonably assume that further research would uncover many more.

Such a proliferation of miracles scarcely comports with the Christian view that God created a universe that operates lawfully, in whose workings He seldom intervenes. How much “beauty, order, lawfulness, and harmony” are to be found in an edifice that needs to be shored up at such frequent intervals? As theology, Intelligent Design veers toward “occasionalism”, the belief, widespread in Islamic philosophy, that the laws of nature are an illusion and that God’s continuous remaking of the universe is beyond the grasp of what humans call “reason”.

The ID approach also, oddly enough, accepts a fundamental tenet of the New Atheists: that the regularity of natural law disproves the existence of God. Because Richard Dawkins fills his books with accounts of non-miraculous biological transformations, the Discovery Institute strives to refute him by finding ones that can’t be explained.

Whether or not that effort succeeds as science, it has no bearing on Christianity. The only miracle that is essential to the Christian faith is the Resurrection. That God has performed other miracles is, Christians believe, a fact of history, not a necessary condition for bringing about the present order of the world. The line of descent from the first organism to the manifold life around us is astonishingly beautiful, orderly, lawful and harmonious, the more so if there are no gaps that must be bridged by ad hoc divine interventions.

Ron Paul and the CPAC Straw Poll

Before anybody gets depressed (or enthused) by Ron Paul’s victory in the Conservative Political Action Conference’s Presidential straw poll, it would be a good idea to look at the internals.

Rep. Paul finished comfortably in front, with 31% of the vote, compared to Mitt Romney’s 22% and everybody else’s single digits. The voters were not, however, anywhere near a representative sample of conservatives. Over half (56%) were under age 25; only a quarter (24%) were over 40. Two-thirds (64%) were male.

Those are far from the demographics of conservatism or any other political tendency. What the poll shows is that Ron Paul is still very adept at winning polls with self-selected respondents. During the 2008 primaries, he never translated that skill into more than a negligible share of real votes in real elections. This year, he doesn’t show up as even a blip in polls such Rasmussen. He has as good a chance of rising to, say, 10% as Barack Obama has of sweeping Utah.

A Bang or a Whimper?

After Massachusetts elected a new Senator whose main campaign plank was a promise to be the decisive vote against Obamacare, the scheme seemed destined to end with a whimper. The President would “pivot” to “jobs, jobs, jobs”, and a government takeover of health care would be put off until after some future election.

Now the whisper goes that the Obami want to end with a bang. Next Thursday comes a “health care summit” that, judging by present indicators, will be designed to showcase a new bill negotiated in secret by Congressional Democrats and the White House. After Republicans refuse to go along, the Dems will proceed to try to push the measure through via “reconciliation”.

If that is really the Democrats’ strategy, it shows all the acumen of the Charge of the Light Brigade. First, at a time when, as John Fund puts it, “Democratic incumbents are running scared and the fear factor is only intensifying”, the chances of again rallying a House majority behind highly unpopular legislation aren’t very promising.

Second, passing the bill and signing it into law won’t automatically make it popular. Turning public opinion around wouldn’t be impossible, but the bill’s proponents start about 12 runs behind in the ninth inning.

The reconciliation gambit, if played, would be a desperate move by a President who has no reason to be desperate. No matter how often the White House repeats “health care crisis”, there is only a health care problem, one that has arisen over a period of decades, will be only slightly worse tomorrow than it is today, and does not necessitate emergency measures. One might contrast Iraq in late 2006, when it appeared that the American public’s patience with the war was on the verge of collapse. President Bush had to either act boldly and rapidly or acquiesce in an American defeat. President Obama can leave health care for his second term without dire consequences.

Since the “bang” is so patently foolish, my guess is that we will see a “whimper”. That will leave unexplained why the President’s men have been talking up reconciliation. Do they have a cunning plan, possibly involving provoking a split with the Angry Left and a post-Obamacare flurry of triangulation? Or, yet more cunning, does the President hope to lose control of Congress and be free to campaign against Republican “obstructionists” for the two years leading up to his reelection bid? Or are the Obami just delusional? We shall see.

Law Professors Say the Darndest Things

Jeffrey Rosen is a genuine professor of law at a real law school. His opinions, while sometimes a trifle unusual, are well received by the elite media, and he is among their favorite legal commentators. Several years ago, for instance, he was given many pages in the New York Times Magazine to “expose” a mostly imaginary “Constitution in Exile” movement that supposedly dominates legal conservatism. This week he offers another flight of fancy, an essay in the Washington Post lauding Barack Obama as an ideal Supreme Court Justice.

The piece is too earnest to be intentional satire, but how can anyone with the slightest knowledge of what the Supreme Court does, and the difficulty of that work, take it seriously? Sure, Barack Obama is an intelligent man and a Harvard Law School graduate, and he lectured at the University of Chicago Law School. I’d have no hesitation about ranking him among the 25,000 Americans best qualified for the Court – but not in a high percentile of that group. His experience in the practice of law is negligible. His legal publication record consists of a law review student note. His few years as a state and federal legislator were spent running for higher offices rather than dealing with the complexities of law making. Next to him, Harriet Miers is a jurisprudential giant.

As every lawyer knows, a freshly minted J.D. knows nothing about the law beyond the barest rudiments. Becoming skilled in the profession takes years of exacting labor. Professor Rosen directly compares Mr. Obama to “the greatest liberal justice of the 20th century, Louis Brandeis, another community organizer with a background in politics”, so let’s consider their respective qualifications. Prior to his appointment, Justice Brandeis had practiced law for nearly 40 years. He was recognized as one of the most eminent members of the legal community, had extensive experience as a labor mediator (a role that he pioneered), had co-authored one of the most influential law review articles in history (on “The Right to Privacy” (1890)), and had won impressive victories before the Supreme Court. As a lawyer, Barack Obama has – Look! There’s a squirrel!

Professor Rosen knows all this, of course, and knows that an alleged “even temper and low [sic] boiling point” are no more a substitute for deep understanding of legal principles than a pitcher’s sense of humor makes up for lack of a fastball. What leads him, then, to expound such drivel?

One explanation is that he is groping toward the next stage of Obama worship. The quasi-messiah who was going to remake America in accordance with the progressive vision has fiddled with his teleprompter while the vision went up in smoke. The accusation of “incompetence” that progressives leveled so relentlessly against George W. Bush now looks like anticipatory projection. The congregation will not, however, admit that its idol is mere clay.

Along side the claim that America has become ungovernable, I expect to see more proclamations like Professor Rosen’s: that the President is too pure, too good, too intellectual for the crass populus. The panegyrics may be far-fetched, but the agony of apostasy would be worse.

On a hopeful note, next to the essay is an on-line poll asking for what office Mr. Obama is best suited: President, Senator, Justice or “None of the Above”. As I write – and remember that this is a poll of Washington Post readers, not Instapundit afficionados – the tally stands at 84 percent for the last option.

A Living Will

This e-mail, forwarded by a friend, has been making the usual rounds:

Last night, my adult kids and I were sitting in the living room and I said to them, “I never want to live in a vegetative state, dependent on some machine and fluids from a bottle. If that ever happens, just pull the plug.”

They got up, unplugged the computer, and threw out my wine.

Air Superiority Lost?

One of the keys to American military supremacy is our mastery of the air. The qualitative and qualitative advantages of the U.S. Air Force over the rest of the world are so immense that the Obama Administration regarded them last year as “big enough” and decided to shut down production of the fifth generation F-22 Raptor fighter. The Secretary of Defense explained at the time why the F-22 would merely gild over gold:

Consider that by 2020, the United States is projected to have nearly 2,500 manned combat aircraft of all kinds. Of those, nearly 1,100 will be the most advanced fifth generation F-35s and F-22s. China, by contrast, is projected to have no fifth generation aircraft by 2020. And by 2025, the gap only widens. The U.S. will have approximately 1,700 of the most advanced fifth generation fighters versus a handful of comparable aircraft for the Chinese.

Nine months later, that forecast looks shaky. According to Air Power Australia, a Russian prototype is at least equal to the F-22 and easily outclasses the F-35, which the Administration has picked as our front-line fighter.

The available evidence demonstrates at this time that a mature production PAK-FA design has the potential to compete with the F-22A Raptor in VLO performance from key aspects, and will outperform the F-22A Raptor aerodynamically and kinematically. Therefore, from a technological strategy perspective, the PAK-FA renders all legacy US fighter aircraft, and the F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter, strategically irrelevant and non-viable after the PAK-FA achieves IOC in 2015. . . .

Once the PAK-FA is deployed within a theatre of operations, especially if it is supported robustly by counter-VLO capable ISR systems, the United States will no longer have the capability to rapidly impose air superiority, or possibly even achieve air superiority. This will not only deny the United States access to an opponent's defended airspace, it also presents the prospect of United States forces being unable to reliably defend in-theatre basing and lines of resupply. Should this occur, in-theatre basing and surface assets become exposed to air attack by aircraft armed with a wide range of accurate and highly lethal Precision Guided Munitions, with the potential for very high loss of life and equipment deployed in-theatre. . . .

Should the United States continue along the force structure path for TACAIR mapped out by OSD policy definition of the last three years [i. e., relying primarily on the F-35], it will be denied access to any operational theatre into which credible numbers of the PAK-FA are deployed by an opponent. In turn, the United States will be deterred from the use of conventional forces in such a scenario. The consequence of this, in turn, is that significant pressure will be placed upon a future President to threaten the use of, or operationally use, tactical nuclear weapons.

Whether Russia’s tottering economy can sustain a world class air force is doubtful, but Red China surely can. If the PAK-FA lives up to Air Power Australia’s expectations (far from a certainty, but how lucky do we feel?), the design will be available within a few years (before the end of a hypothetical second Obama term) for purchase or pirating by Peking. Its extensive deployment would put the United States and its Asian allies in the position of spear-armed natives facing Gatling guns, effectively turning the region into a new, Chinese-dominated version of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere (albeit probably without much prosperity).

There is still time to revive the F-22 program, as Air Power Australia urges:

In basic grand strategy terms, the arrival of the PAK-FA leaves the United States with only one viable option if it intends to remain viable in the global air power game – build enough F-22 Raptors to replace most of the US legacy fighter fleet, and terminate the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter as soon as possible, as the F-35 will no longer be a usable combat aircraft for roles other than Counter Insurgency (COIN), though more cost effective and more appropriate solutions already exist for this role.

Keeping the F-22 assembly lines running would even “save or create” jobs. The alternative is to scrimp now and suffer later.

The Lesson of the “Stimulus”

On this first anniversary of the signing of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (“ARRA”, pronounced “error”), the Administration is loudly proclaiming that, without this massive borrow-and-spend scheme, the economy would be much worse today, probably in the throes of a depression. The quantitative assertion is that 2,000,000 more Americans would be jobless, lifting the unemployment rate to about 11 percent.

No one knows, or can know, what happened in the parallel universe where the “stimulus” bill was hooted down. What we can and do know is that the Administration’s estimates of ARRA’s positive effects are based on its economists’ computer models. Those are, so far as I know, the same models that said the “stimulus” would keep unemployment under 8 percent of the labor force.

Exactly why should we believe them this time?

What we’ve learned in the past 12 months is that the Obami are about as good at economic forecasting as my local astrologer.

The Wrong Arguments for NASA

Last week Charles Krauthammer strongly criticized the Obama Administration’s new direction for the space program. Today the Administration responded in a surprisingly high-profile fashion, with a letter to the Washington Post co-signed by the President’s science advisor and the administrator of NASA. Maybe this is part of the White House’s recently disclosed “more and faster cowbell” PR strategy. In any event, the rebuttal was pathetic.

Mr. Krauthammer proffered two objections to the Obama plan. The first and narrower was to the axing of the next generation of launch vehicles. From now on, NASA will hire rockets, from Russia for now, later (we hope) from the private sector:

Our absence from low-Earth orbit was meant to last a few years, the interval between the retirement of the fatally fragile space shuttle and its replacement with the Constellation program (Ares booster, Orion capsule, Altair lunar lander) to take astronauts more cheaply and safely back to space.

But the Obama 2011 budget kills Constellation. Instead, we shall have nothing. For the first time since John Glenn flew in 1962, the United States will have no access of its own for humans into space – and no prospect of getting there in the foreseeable future. . . .

It would be swell for private companies to take over launching astronauts. But they cannot do it. It’s too expensive. It’s too experimental. And the safety standards for getting people up and down reliably are just unreachably high.

Sure, decades from now there will be a robust private space-travel industry. But that is a long time. In the interim, space will be owned by Russia and then China. The president waxes seriously nationalist at the thought of China or India surpassing us in speculative “clean energy.” Yet he is quite prepared to gratuitously give up our spectacular lead in human space exploration.

The broader concern is that the Administration has shown no genuine interest in a space program that looks beyond the Earth’s near environs:

When John F. Kennedy pledged to go to the moon, he meant it. He had an intense personal commitment to the enterprise. He delivered speeches remembered to this day. He dedicated astronomical sums to make it happen. . . .

As for President Obama’s commitment to beyond-lunar space: Has he given a single speech, devoted an iota of political capital to it?

Obama’s NASA budget perfectly captures the difference in spirit between Kennedy’s liberalism and Obama’s. Kennedy’s was an expansive, bold, outward-looking summons. Obama’s is a constricted, inward-looking call to retreat.

Fifty years ago, Kennedy opened the New Frontier. Obama has just shut it.

Though Mr. Krauthammer doesn’t make it explicit, his points are closely connected. Without an ambitious vision, space exploration and exploitation will stagnate at its present level. There will never be a privately built equivalent of Constellation – not because private enterprise can’t do the job better than a government agency, but because there will be precious little demand for boosters, and that demand can be met by Russia’s subsidized products. When something more is needed, does anyone imagine that Red China’s lunar program will look to Boeing or Lockheed or Space-X for transport?

So how does the Administration respond? By denouncing George W. Bush! The first two paragraphs declare that “the Bush plan, not the Obama plan, would have left the United States a loser in space” and “President George W. Bush’s Constellation program would not have been able to send astronauts to the international space station until two years after the station had crashed into the ocean” and “the last administration’s target of [returning to the Moon] by 2020 [is] by now unachievable under any budget”.

The Krauthammer column never mentioned George W. Bush. Its gravamen was that Barack Obama is too little like liberal hero John F. Kennedy.

Okay, so the Obama space policy is Not Bush. What is it? The balance of the Administration’s letter consists of rah-rah boilerplate, the only specific point being that $6 billion has been added to NASA’s five-year projected budget, which thus will average about $18 billion a year rather than $17 billion. In constant dollars, NASA spending was almost twice that high in the mid-1960’s. In saying that a return to the Moon is “unachievable under any budget”, the Administration apparently means “unachievable with half the budget of the Apollo program”.

The letter’s conspicuous silence is its non-response to Mr. Krauthammer’s major argument: that the President has put forth “a constricted, inward-looking call to retreat”. While we are promised “R&D for game-changing technologies to take Americans to deep-space destinations faster”, there is no hint at what those destinations might be or what the time frame might be for going there. The idea sounds very much like “fly before you can walk”. “Game-changing technologies” are more likely, I expect, to emerge from an active lunar program than a bye-and-bye mission to somewhere to be named later.

The government working as it does, we can be sure that John Holdren and Charles Bolden didn’t write, or perhaps even read, what appears over their names. The probable author is some hack in Robert Gibbs’ shop who based his screed on a five-minute briefing. I imagine that General Bolden, at least, has interesting and worthwhile ideas about what games technology can and should change. They can’t, unfortunately, be heard over the clanging of the cowbell.

A Vindication of Federalist No. 10

All of a sudden, a great many progressives have begun opining that America is “ungovernable”. The “proof” is that the Democratic Party, having won the Presidency and huge majorities in Congress, hasn’t been able to enact health care reform, restrictions on carbon emissions, or the elimination of secret ballots in union organizing elections. When those who hold all the levers of power can’t get them to operate, hasn’t the government become dysfunctional?

The oddity of that question is that all of the failed initiatives are highly unpopular with the American public. The sticky levers, one could reasonably say, have made it possible for the “will of the people” to prevail over the fancies of a narrow group of D.C. insiders. There are, no doubt, circumstances in which the government should act contrary to public opinion; our country isn’t a plebiscitary democracy, and we don’t elect Presidents and Congressmen to be ventriloquists’ dummies for their constituents’ untutored whims. Still, defying a strong popular majority ought to be hard work.

The so-called impasse in contemporary Washington is, in fact, a vindication of James Madison’s wisdom in the tenth Federalist Paper. There Madison considered how the Constitution would moderate the power of transient majorities. The principal safeguard, as he saw it, was the extension of the federal government over a wide territory containing a variety of local interests and factions. Enacting sweeping changes would require assembling a broad coalition out of disparate materials – no easy task unless support for the changes was truly widespread.

The smaller the society, the fewer probably will be the distinct parties and interests composing it; the fewer the distinct parties and interests, the more frequently will a majority be found of the same party; and the smaller the number of individuals composing a majority, and the smaller the compass within which they are placed, the more easily will they concert and execute their plans of oppression. Extend the sphere, and you take in a greater variety of parties and interests; you make it less probable that a majority of the whole will have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens; or if such a common motive exists, it will be more difficult for all who feel it to discover their own strength, and to act in unison with each other.

While Madison did not foresee the Senate filibuster, the inherent nature of the system established by the Constitution is the chief obstacle to the Obama agenda. Consider the trajectory of health care reform. The Congressional majority has certainly found it difficult “to act in unison”. Two widely different bills have emerged, between which there is no visible median. A major factor in that divergence has been the heterogeneity of the Legislature, which is the product of a large and heterogenous republic. What appeals to California is less palatable to Nebraska.

The filibuster threat has been of secondary importance. If there were agreement on a proposal that the public approved, is it likely that moderate Republicans would be staunchly opposed? Getting 60 Senate votes for a bill that polled 60 percent would be within even Harry Reid’s leadership abilities.

Having instead to shepherd through a 40 percent bill, Senator Reid had no choice but to resort to appeasing particular interests. Hence the “Louisiana Purchase” and “Cornhusker Kickback”, which in turn upset other interests and further deepened the measure’s unpopularity.

The Federalist foresaw such dynamics and regarded them as a salutary check on momentary passions. Would progressives prefer that winning a single landslide election enable a political party to turn into law whatever its leadership wanted? Hmm, I suspect I know the answer to that question. At least the answer that progressives would give today. Yesterday and tomorrow are another matter.