Stromata Blog

Are We All Identicrats Now?

Exit polls, now more extensive and detailed than ever, make it easy for post-election analysts to focus on – whatever the exit polls happen to have asked about. That means, primarily, age, sex, race, ethnicity and income. There were a few questions about issues, too, but the average data digger thinks that Obama’s margin among Asian-Americans is far, far more important than the voters’ opinions on the size of government or the relative merits of tax increases and spending cuts.

As the data are sliced and diced mostly by “identity” categories, it’s not surprising that the explanations of the results and prescriptions for future strategy tend to emphasize questions like, How can Republicans get a bigger share of the Hispanic vote? What’s the best way to appeal to young, unmarried women? And so forth.

Yet, if one truly believes that the United States is a balkan-like patchwork of “identities”, more like the Hapsburg Empire than the melting pot, isn’t the most striking fact the inability of the Democratic Party to hold its own among non-Hispanic whites, who make up three-quarters of the electorate? White male voters, a group with whom President Obama fared particularly poorly, by themselves outnumber blacks, Hispanics and Asians combined. So do white Evangelical Christians, another non-Obama-voting bloc.

From the identicratic point of view, the Republican Party’s path to victory lies in carving off small segments of the pro-Democratic identities. Incongruously, most of those who follow this line wind up proposing to impel these minor changes in electoral preference through major changes to the GOP’s traditional positions: Support same-sex marriage, downplay the youth vote, raise taxes on the “rich”, back immigration reform, and so on.

Does that make any sense? Let’s look at immigration reform, an idea that I support. Done right, it’s good policy, on economic, humanitarian and national security grounds. But how many Hispanic voters are sticking with the Democratic Party solely because of the Republican stance on immigration (which is, let’s remember, the stance of only slightly over half the party; there are plenty of pro-immigration GOP’ers)? Hispanics who care strongly about immigration also overwhelmingly believe that big government will make their lives better. The DREAM Act or amnesty or a “path to citizenship” won’t win them over to the party that espouses the opposite opinion.

Might it not be more profitable to pursue the cadre of voters who agreed with Mitt Romney’s positions on the key issues but voted for Barack Obama nevertheless, without fixating on their race, sex, age or parents’ native tongue? If everyone who thinks that the federal government should do less or that spending cuts are a better cure for deficits than tax increases had chosen Romney, the election wouldn’t have been close. As to what kept those potential supporters away, the cross-tabs on the polls aren’t fine-grained enough to tell us. I suspect, though, that it had more to do with doubts about whether a President Romney would be vastly different from the incumbent than with concern over the legal status of same-sex unions.

How to Lose Tomorrow by Winning Today

When Republicans win elections, the theme of liberal commentators (that is, almost all of the elite media) is how the extremism of the victors will alienate moderates. When Republicans lose, the theme is the impending extinction of their party as its elderly white base dies off. Democrats enter the analysis only as the beneficiaries of the GOP’s purported death wish.

In a contrarian spirit, I’d like to focus my own post-2012 thoughts on the Democratic Party, now beating its chest in triumph after doing not too much worse than in 2008. A few points seem to be abundantly clear:

1. Presidential elections and mid-term elections are not comparable events. The most straightforward explanation of the contrast between 2010 and 2012 is not that lots of Americans changed their minds but that different Americans came to the polls. When the Presidency isn’t at stake, turnout depends more no enthusiasm and less on organization. There’s not much doubt – the size and energy of the candidates’ rallies is evidence enough – that Mitt Romney won a majority of enthusiastic voters. The Democrats, however, whipped in a larger proportion of their unenthusiastic ones, and a vote is a vote, whatever the degree of fervor behind it.

To win the mid-term contests, the Democrats must either have a record that generates enthusiasm or find a way to improve turnout in non-Presidential years. Neither is an easy task. The first is likely to be especially difficult for President Obama. He hasn’t put forward much of a second term agenda, and he’s just coming into the inheritance from his first two years in office, including all of the unpopular parts of Obamacare (the individual mandate, cuts in Medicare Advantage and in payments to providers, cuts in flexible spending accounts, a flurry of new taxes, IPAB, etc.), Dodd-Frank’s unintended (though readily foreseeable) consequences, national debt at 100 percent of GDP, a paralyzed business community, a stagnant work force, and a collapsing foreign policy. (It’s not just the Fiscal Cliff!) Forecasts for 2014 would be premature. I’m not, however, placing any big bets against the Tea Party.

There’s a possibility that we’ll see a pattern: Democrats winning the Presidency, then suffering repudiation two years later, then winning again, and so on and on. That may, in fact, be the best the Dems can hope for.

2. The Democrats can depend only on their base. Mitt Romney carried independents by a solid margin, and there was very little Republican crossover vote to Obama. Democrats alone were sufficient to secure victory this year, but will that be true in the future? If Gallup’s and Rasmussen’s surveys are to be believed, party identification is at parity, and there’s no Law of Nature that gives Democrats a perpetual turnout advantage (or guarantees that the other side’s Get Out the Vote effort will be a fiasco). Without a strong appeal to independents, the Dems will be leaning heavily on organizational excellence (and, cynics who note the 99-plus percent turnouts in Philadelphia precincts where no Republican election judges were allowed in might say, vote fraud).

3. The Democratic base is a fragmented assemblage of incompatible interests. Labor unions, billionaires, celebrities, professors, public employees, left-wing clergy, unmarried women, under-30's, blacks, Latinos, Jews, homosexuals: That’s a hodgepodge, not a coalition.

Of course, a coalition by definition includes elements that don’t see eye-to-eye. This one, though, seems particularly friable, so that just a few major conflicts could dissolve it.

To take one possibility, when Obamacare’s individual mandate kicks in, young voters will face a choice between paying additional taxes or paying grossly inflated health insurance premiums. One of the system’s features is that premiums will be allowed to rise with age much less steeply than risks. Hence, young women will subsidize old men. Will they retain their enthusiasm for the architects of that arrangement?

4. And its numerical superiority is neither impressive nor growing. Although President Obama was reelected, his margin was closer to Bush 2004 than Obama 2008. Many of the Democrats’ Senate victories were similarly thin. The Obama coalition has a lot less heft than FDR’s or Reagan’s.

Notably, Obama was the first President since James Madison to be reelected with a significantly reduced majority from his first outing. According to the exit polls, his share of the vote fell among almost every group surveyed. Maybe that doesn’t really mean that the Democratic base is shrinking, but it certainly isn’t getting bigger.

The road to Democratic supremacy may be rockier than optimists on the Left and pessimists on the Right conceive. What’s more, this year’s Obama campaign, successful as it was in the short run, may have exacerbated his party’s long-run weaknesses. It was a “base election” in two senses: Obama won by getting out his base, and his rhetoric was tawdry, vicious and empty. “Not One of Us” and “Voting Is the Best Revenge” aren’t quite in a league with “Morning in America”.

Very significantly, there is no sign that the Obama campaign moved public opinion in the direction of his policies. As Ilya Somin observes, exit poll respondents favored repealing Obamacare and a smaller role for government in general. These figures suggest that a portion of the Obama vote was based purely on identity politics or anti-Republican animus (which the Obami worked hard to inflame).

Counting on votes from people who disagree with your main policies and principles is a risky strategy. Failing to make a real effort to convince them is suicidal. That’s why Obama’s reelection could be seen someday as the victory that paved the way to defeat.

Pop Quiz: When was the last time the United States had three two-term Presidents in a row?

Answer to be provided when I get around to my next post.

Who Built That?

As John Podhoretz suggests, Barack Obama may well have ended all electoral suspense with two sentences: “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made it happen.” Unless America is a vastly different country from the one I see, no candidate who espouses that sentiment is viable outside the Harvard or Yale faculty lounge.

Most of the ridicule directed at this puerile version of economics has focused on its ignorance of the role of entrepreneurship. What we reward businessmen for is taking what is already there – land, labor, capital – and making it more valuable. Obama’s buddy Elizabeth Warren would understand this if she possessed a molecule of self-awareness. She made a lot of money buying houses, fixing them up and selling them at a profit. She didn’t build the houses; she didn’t create the free market economy that let her flip them (she and her “Occupy” disciples would have destroyed it if they could); but she did make the properties worth more to purchasers than what she had paid for them, and it seems patently just that she be allowed to keep that increment rather than have it allocated to others by an omnipotent government.

But I’d like to call attention to a different point. There’s a half truth in what the President said, half of a truth whose whole is one of the fundamental conservative tenets. The markets on which entrepreneurs make their fortunes (or suffer their losses) would not exist without a stable, lawful civil society, which in turn would not exist without virtuous habits. It is not from the generosity of the baker that we get our bread. But if bakers could not by and large count on the honesty, industry and other good qualities of their fellow men, they wouldn’t be able to bake. As James Madison put it, “To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people is a chimerical idea.”

Building a successful business is very difficult without “virtue in the people”. It would be reasonable to conclude that successful businessmen have a moral duty to promote virtue, to be good examples themselves and, in Charles Murray’s words, “to preach what they practice”. Somehow, though, I don’t think that’s what Barack Obama had in mind.

Presidential Trivia

Question: Fifteen elected Presidents have won reelection (not counting Grover Cleveland, who lost before he won again). How many of them did worse in their second than their first elections?

Answer: One – James Madison (122 out of 176 electoral votes in 1808, 128 out of 218 in 1812; the popular vote meant little in that era and isn’t reliably known). Woodrow Wilson could arguably be another: He improved his share of the popular vote between 1912 and 1916 but, with the Republican vote no longer split, did much less well in the Electoral College. All of the rest bettered their first results, sometimes by a smidgeon (Jackson, George W. Bush), sometimes hugely (Jefferson, Lincoln, Nixon, Clinton). Most common have been comfortable victories followed by waltzes to a second term (Washington, Monroe, Grant, McKinley, FDR, Eisenhower, Reagan).

It will be a vast surprise if the President is able to come very close to the 53% of the popular vote and 365 electoral votes that he garnered in 2008. In fact, I have yet to see a credible projection that forecasts more than about 300 electoral votes for him, while polls put him well south of 53%. An Obama victory with, say, 280 electoral votes and 50.5% of the popular vote would have no precedent more recent than Madison. The desperate flailing of the Obami – it’s awfully early to be accusing your opponent of a “felony” – suggests that they worry that their man will join the ranks of those Presidents (Van Buren, Hoover, George H. W. Bush) who won solidly the first time out and were unable to repeat.

No doubt this history has already been recounted somewhere on the Internet, but I don’t happen to have run across it.

The President’s Super PAC

For over a year, and as recently as Super Bowl Sunday, Barack Obama has been excoriating the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision (which held that Americans don’t lose their right to free speech when they associate as a corporation) and the ensuing phenomenon of “Super PAC’s”, vehicles designed to engage in corporate speech. Now his reelection campaign is promoting a pro-Obama Super PAC, headed by two former White House staffers and blessed by the campaign’s blog.

The Constitution protects everybody, even those who want to cut back Constitutional liberties, so I have no objection to the President’s willingness to utilize instruments that he has described as “a threat to democracy”. I won’t even chide him for hypocrisy, that most over-denounced of political vices. It isn’t unreasonable for his campaign manager to plead that Democrats shouldn’t be expected to “unilaterally disarm”. (Unilateral disarmament is only for the U.S. military.)

What this development ought to do is put paid to the assumption that the Obama campaign can raise a billion dollars for the reelection effort. Until just recently, everybody took it for granted that cash would pour in the way it did in 2008. If the President’s men still believed that, they would have kept to what they regard as the moral high ground and at least pretended to have no desire for Super PAC support, which they would scarcely have needed. Instead, they are making a high profile pitch – as high as legally allowed – for donations.

Evidently, the myriads of small donors who gave in 2008, many of whom have since become un- or underemployed, aren’t expected to be as generous this year. Or perhaps there is a fear that Federal Election Commission this time will insist that Internet transactions be screened to eliminate foreign and other illegal contributions (as was not done last time, when Obama received money from, among others, Palestinians in the Gaza Strip). In any event, it’s time to look to corporate cronies, the real base of today’s Democratic Party.

Sources: Alana Goodman, “Obama Campaign Embraces Super PACs”
Associated Press, “Obama Reverses Course on Super PACs, Seeks Support”
Jennifer Rubin, “Obama: Did I Reallly Say I Didn’t Like Super PACs?”
Andrew Stiles, “Serial Hy-PAC-risy: Obama’s Reversal Comes as No Surprise”

While I Was Dozing

During my vacation from blogging, the political world moved along and clarified itself. We now know, with as much certainty as one can reasonably expect in politics (that is, less than a whole lot), that the Republican Party will nominate Mitt Romney for President and Barack Obama will campaign for reelection as a full-bore left-wing demagogue. The guy who deplored the split between Red America and Blue America now strives desperately to exacerbate it and rally the Blues to a titanic battle against the forces of darkness.

A lot of conservatives are agonizing about Governor Romney’s sincerity. Once inaugurated, will he be most at home with “moderates” whose moderation consists largely in leaving hard decisions to the next guy? The pessimistic view is that the “real Mitt” is the RINO who ran against Ted Kennedy and invented the prototypes of Obamacare and cap-and-tax; the optimistic, that he adapted conservative principles as best he could to the highly hostile environment of Massachusetts and is now free to say what he truly believes.

My own hypothesis is that he brings to politics the mentality of a CEO, meaning that he conforms to the demands of the marketplace. The head of a business may have absolutely firm principles. He may, for instance, hate pepperoni. But he’ll sell pepperoni pizzas if that’s what his customers want. Governor Romney saw that the people who had elected him wanted government action to control health care costs and prevent the climate from changing. As CEO of Massachusetts, he set himself to implement those directives as effectively as possible.

The results weren’t very impressive, because the projects were misconceived. The governor would have done his state a favor if he had resisted them. CEO Romney didn’t see resistance to the “shareholders” as his job.

I’m not commending that view of a politician’s role, and I’m certainly not saying that every businessman-turned-politico thinks that way. Herman Cain is, after all, the perfect counterexample, the man who seems determined to eschew every trace of executive suite thinking. When he was running Godfather’s Mr. Cain would have devoted more analysis to a pizza crust recipe than he evidently has to “9-9-9” (and in principle I like his tax ideas).

My suggestion isn’t that Governor Romney is well-advised to be an ideological chameleon but that his CEO instincts may work out very well for conservatism and the country. If the demand is for entitlement reform, tax reform, foreign policy vigor and a rollback of regulatory excesses, President Romney will, so far as one can divine from his record, get busy working on those objectives. Also, if the objectives are feasible, he has shown in the past the energy, intelligence and administrative skills needed to accomplish them.

Mitt Romney isn’t Ronald Reagan. The argument in his favor is that the country, after the 2012 election, won’t need Ronald Reagan. Or, I should say, won’t need all of Ronald Reagan. President Reagan was both a thoughtful, committed, persuasive conservative and a top-notch executive. Post-2012 (unless current trends change markedly), the legislative branch won’t have to be talked into enacting conservative ideas. What will be required is a President able to do the difficult work of carrying them out.

This is not to say that Mitt Romney is the candidate of my dreams, only that he ought not to be the one of any conservative’s nightmares.

Is Barack Obama Still President?

I wonder.

He’s openly and enthusiastically a candidate for President, but every day we see less and less energy in the performance of the duties of his office.

His first budget proposal was turned down by the Senate 97 to nil. His second version remains, weeks after it was presented, no more than a set of talking points. When he met with House Republicans to discuss budgetary matters, he spoke vaguely about the need for more federal spending.

This lackadaisical stance might be fine if the economy were soaring. When you’re rich, you don’t need a budget. (Has the President gotten so used to personal wealth that he no longer remembers having to balance income and outgo?) But right now we’re soaring like a brick-laden, xenon-filled balloon. After two years of the most “stimulative” fiscal and monetary policy in our nation’s history, the GDP is barely growing, unemployment is rising, and the stock and housing markets are sinking. It ought to be obvious to the meanest intelligence that history’s most thorough experiment in liberal economic orthodoxy has solidly disconfirmed its tenets. Priming the pump does no good if nobody’s willing to pump it, and printing dollars accomplishes nothing if there are no productive uses for them.

The President responds by raising money for his next campaign. Exactly what a non-incumbent seeking to throw the rascals out ought to do.

Further reading: The Wall Street Journal, “‘Bumps in the Road’”:

At this stage in the Reagan expansion, after a comparably deep 1981-82 recession, the economy was growing by 7% a year and the jobless rate was plunging. This time the economy is growing by less than 2%, and we still have 6.8 million fewer jobs than when the recession began in late 2007. . . .

The same economists and pundits who promoted the economic policies of the last four years are now lamenting the jobs bust and demanding that Washington double down: More stimulus spending, more Federal Reserve easing, more temporary tax rebates. They can’t explain why these policies have failed to date, but we are supposed to rinse and repeat.

The real “bumps on the road” to recovery are these policies and the larger climate of hostility toward job creators that still prevails in Washington. A National Labor Relations Board that wants to stop businesses from moving plants; a $20 billion political raid on banks over foreclosures; hundreds of major new regulations from ObamaCare, Dodd-Frank and the EPA’s war on carbon energy; federal deficits that Mr. Obama says require higher taxes; near-zero interest rates for 30 months that have sent commodity prices soaring, and so much more.

The economy doesn’t need more of this. It needs a return to the growth agenda that created the long post-1982 boom.

Nile Gardiner, “After 29 Months of the Most Left-Wing Presidency in US History, the American Superpower Is Heading Towards the Economic Abyss”:

Years of profligate spending, massive bailouts and useless stimulus measures have made America poorer, not richer, and threaten the long-term economic foundations of this great country. President Obama’s big government experiment has been a dangerous failure, only further proof that the deadening hand of federal intervention is the last thing America needs at this time. The United States needs more economic freedom, less government regulation and spending, and lower taxes if it is to create jobs, wealth and prosperity, a message that seems to have been lost on the Obama presidency as it drives the United States towards the financial abyss.

No Huck to Kick Around Any More

His heart having said “no”, Mike Huckabee is out of the 2012 Presidential race, joining six billion other human beings and leaving only – what, half a billion? – potential Republican nominees. (BTW, I’m declaring my non-candidacy, too.)

I still think that it’s too early to be picking contenders for an election that’s a year and a half away – even worse than the French, who have a July filing deadline for a contest whose first round will take place on April 22, 2012. Nonetheless, I’m going to offer two thoughts.

Number one is that, while any plausible Republican candidate will be better than the hapless Obama, what the country urgently needs is a capable manager. Conservatism is part of capability, naturally; it isn’t the whole. For the moment, I’m putting on the lower shelf all those prospects who have never run anything bigger than their own campaigns. It’s not inconceivable that Michele Bachmann or Jim DeMint has fantastic governing talents. I’d rather not bet the country on it. This is the cycle to look closely at governors and businessmen, not guys/gals with beautiful ideas and no experience implementing them.

Number two is an interesting result I noticed in what is, concededly, an unscientific Internet straw poll. An outfit called “The Liberty Lab” (never heard of them before) bombards my e-inbox with requests to vote in their poll. You’ve probably gotten those solicitations, too (sent via proxies – Red State, Human Events, etc.). It looks like they draw a large response, no doubt heavily weighted to people ranging from myself rightward. Their methodology is a series of random one-to-one matchups among 30 imaginable candidates: Do you prefer Newt Gingrich or Jeb Bush, Jon Huntsman or Paul Ryan, Herman Cain or Donald Trump, George Pataki or Rand Paul, Ron Paul or Hillary Clinton (aarggh! – that was one of my dichotomies), and so on. They then record each prospect’s won-lost percentage.

At the moment when I captured the results (approximately 8:00 p.m. CDT this evening), the top seven places were occupied by figures who either won’t run or have no hope: Paul Ryan (77%), Chris Christie (76%), Michele Bachmann (73%), Jim DeMint (71%), Allen West (68%), Scott Walker (68%), Sarah Palin (67%). Then came, at 66%, Tim Pawlenty, the guy whom polls put in the low single digits. The next best performer among real candidates was Newt ("Win the Future") Gingrich (59%). Figures like Rick Santorum (56%), Mitch Daniels (53%), Ron Paul (47% – amazing that the Paulites haven’t figured out how to spam this poll), Gary Johnson (45%), Mitt Romney (43%), Donald Trump (42%), Jon Huntsman (38%) and Barack Obama (2%, showing that two percent of any group is for anything) trailed behind.

Governor Pawlenty is the only “top-tier” candidate already seeking the GOP nomination, and the principal effect of his efforts so far has been to move him closer to the also-rans. Is it possible that he isn’t quite so weak as he looks?

The Silences of the President

As many have observed, this year’s State of the Union address surprisingly scanted both foreign affairs and “climate change”. The former is one of any President’s principal responsibilities, and it’s not as if the rest of the world were currently in repose; the latter was among this President’s signature issues. Recall that on the day he clinched the nomination, the oceans were supposed to stop rising.

Omitting Global Warming from the speech was particularly strange in view of the enthusiastic endorsement of carbon-free energy and high-speed rail lines. The only arguable justification for those economically deleterious projects is their possibly beneficial impact on future temperatures. Otherwise, they’re as wasteful as building greenhouses in Alaska to free the locals from their dependence on Lower 48 agriculture.

These silences are the opposite of pregnant. They are barren silences, the one suggesting that the President has chosen to be irrelevant to the turmoil around the globe, the other that his call for new “investments” has no coherent rationale. Why has this widely praised orator lost his voice?

The simplest answer is that the Obama Administration has, in just two years, reached the state of exhaustion that typically overtakes Presidents in their sixth or seventh year. The office drains its holder’s energy; his ablest and most enthusiastic lieutenants depart; friction steadily slows the gears of government; morale fades as bright dreams vanish into the political mists. Speaking last night, Barack Obama looked twenty years older than a year ago. It was fitting that many of his themes were plagiarized recycled from his predecessors. His big slogan, “Win the Future”, was borrowed from – of all sources! – Newt Gingrich, while “Sputnik moment” was stale – in fact, had lapsed into irony – before young Barack was old enough to vote. Then there’s the unattributed paraphrase of – worse than Gingrich! – Richard Nixon. BHO: “We will move forward together, or not at all.” RMN: “To go forward at all is to go forward together.”

The secondhand rhetoric can be blamed on speech writers, but a vigorous President attracts writers who can put fresh prose into his mouth. It’s near the end of the line that hacks take over.

There is, however, an alternative explanations that would relieve Mr. Obama of the burden of premature senility.

It may be that neither he nor his writers could craft an account of the Administration’s foreign policy that wouldn’t be self-discrediting. In the preceding week, after all, negotiations between Israel and Palestine reached the point of visible collapse (having effectively collapsed long ago), Iran laughed off the latest pleas to restrain, or even talk about restraining, its nuclear program, Hezbollah took control of the government in Lebanon, Red China insulted America at a state dinner, and the State Department found itself tongue-tied about the popular uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt. Maybe the U.S. looked like it was floundering because the flounders really are in charge, and no one could figure out a way to portray them as smart barracudas.

As for “climate change”, perhaps somebody in the inner circle pays enough attention to public opinion to realize that the alarmist clichés of yesteryear have lost their force and appeal. Better no rationale at all for anti-carbon initiatives than one that will draw sarcastic chuckles from living rooms around the country.

Given these unwelcome realities, the President could have decided to withdraw from the debate. That doesn’t mean that he won’t pursue his foreign and environmental agendas, only that he won’t bother to defend them. That would be a risky strategy for the leader of a democracy, but it’s not necessarily doomed to failure. The President needs only a modicum of Congressional and popular support to act abroad, and his administrative discretion at home, though not unfettered, is vast, especially in matters involving the environment, where the courts have already struck down most of the barriers to overreaching regulation.

Barack Obama is nothing if not self-confident. It’s easy to imagine him plowing forward without concern for public indignation. He can do a great deal unilaterally. Will he destroy his reelection chances in the process? Maybe, but (i) he may not care, (ii) he may not believe that mere mortals can defeat him, and (iii) there’s no certainty that a fractious Republican Party will put up a stronger candidate in 2012 than it did in 2008.

Retweeting Smears

One of the most despicable tactics of certain proponents of the homosexual rights agenda is the insinuation that those who disagree are themselves secret homosexuals. That was the line taken the other day by Tammy Bruce, a lesbian radio commentator, when she tweeted, regarding opponents of the repeal of the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” mandate, “Enuf already-the more someone complains about the homos the more we should look under their bed.” Nothing like a gracious winner.

Not many people would care about anything that Tammy Bruce says in 140 characters or less. The remark got attention when Sarah Palin passed it along (“retweeted” it). Most of the comments that I’ve seen have tried to divine whether this act was a cryptic condemnation of DADT by a potential Republican Presidential candidate. I don’t much care one way or the other; this isn’t going to be a pressing issue two years from now. What I do find noteworthy is that Governor Palin would casually spread an anti-conservative smear. Does she agree with it? Does somebody else run her Twitter account? Was she unable to fathom what Miz Bruce meant? Did she not read the message she propagated?

This is a minute incident, but it certainly isn’t going to raise the esteem in which the former governor of Alaska is held by social conservatives in her party.

Further Observations

Continuing my year-end meandering. . . .

■ Yes, it’s amusing to see leftists urging President Obama to ask Hawaii to release his original birth record and the state’s incoming Dem governor promising to put the faux-issue to rest. Next comes the concerted effort to prove that the moon landings weren’t faked.

Wittingly or not, these left-wing calls for a deeper investigation into birtherism are a threat to the President. Not because there’s any possibility that he’ll turn out to have been born in Kenya (the publicly available electronic record, which no one had a motive to tamper with in Barack Obama’s behalf at the time when it was created, is a precis of the paper record), but for two other reasons:

1. The demise of birtherism would remove one of the President’s important political assets, namely, the existence of an irrational opposition whose views can be imputed to all Administration critics. In the coming months, distractions from the substance of the conservative critique will become more and more vital to the President’s reelection hopes.

2. Authorizing the release of the innocuous birth record would risk putting the President on a slippery slope toward disclosures about his youth, college and law school career, and early years in the radical matrix of community organizing. Stanley Kurtz’s Radical-in-Chief covers some of that background, but Dr. Kurtz could work only with documents that happen to be accessible, often only after much digging, in public repositories. What he has put together shows that young Barack Obama was no run-of-the-mill liberal but the protegé of unapologetic socialists and an active member of the semi-open socialist network. The President has worked hard to keep that part of his life in the shadows. Does it matter? Maybe not; no man should be condemned at 50 for what he believed when he was 20. On the other hand, the most powerful man in the world ought not to have a secret biography. If he does, it’s not unreasonable to wonder why. Latter day revelations might well convince many an on-the-fence voter that the President hasn’t been candid about where he wants to take the country.

If the White House is alert, it is now cautioning its friends against disturbing the birther status quo, and nothing more will happen. One must not, however, misoverestimate the President’s men.

■ There’ll be Republican Presidential debates as early as next Spring?!? Leaving aside all the reasons why that is way too early, what sort of “debate” can it be? If the entire unwinnowed field is on stage, each candidate might get four minutes of speaking time. The event will be no more than a competition to slip in the most slogans and shibboleths.

If we must have these early outings, I propose this: Interview all of the prospects separately, asking them identical questions, for half an hour or so, then broadcast one or two interviews each evening. It wouldn’t be Lincoln-Douglas, but it might be informative, at least by comparison with what passes for political debate now.

■ Moreover, discussions about possible Republican nominees should focus on who can do what the next President will need to accomplish. All of the plausible contenders (I’m not looking at you, Ron Paul and Alan Keyes and Gary Johnson and Randall Terry) are in broad agreement about policy. At home, we must shrink government spending, particularly entitlement programs and government employment (the only way that other countries have successfully clawed their way back from the brink of insolvency, as a superlative analysis in today’s Wall Street Journal explains), while avoiding increases in the tax burden and repealing the Obamacare monstrosity. Abroad, we must confront the dangers of Islamic supremacism, Red Chinese expansionism and Russian mischief making, without the illusion that they can be wished away through “smart diplomacy”. The central question is who can win the election and implement the GOP agenda in the face of predictably intransigent opposition.

The situation today is both like and unlike 1980. Then, the country was in dire straits, suffering from stagflation, retreating before the advance of Soviet power and seemingly incapable of humbling such second rate enemies as Iran. There was not, however, much consensus within the Republican Party about what to do. That’s why the candidate with the most impressive record and appealing personality – Ronald Reagan, of course – had to struggle to win the nomination. Plenty of Republicans thought that supply side theories were “voodoo economics” and that a weakened America had no alternative to detente with the Soviet Union.

As 2012 approaches, we have policy concord but no Ronald Reagan. The candidate pool does, it is true, include a plethora of men (and a woman) who, like Reagan, have served as governors. Some have been remarkably successful in that position (Tim Pawlenty, Mitch Daniels, Haley Barbour, Jeb Bush, Rick Perry); some are promising but not far into their tenure (Chris Christie, Bob McDonnell, Bobby Jindal); some have records that, while not necessarily discreditable, rouse unease for one reason or another (Sarah Palin, Mike Huckabee, Mitt Romney, George Pataki).

The argument for a governor, especially a seasoned one, is straightforward: He would contrast starkly with Barack Obama’s minor league bumbling and, once elected, would possess the skills required for an arduous legislative process. Governors who have coped with unfriendly legislatures, most notably Pawlenty, but also Christie, Huckabee, Romney and Pataki) get extra credit in this category. (Note, too, that the RINO-ish reputations of the last three owe much to Republican legislative weakness, which probably won’t be an obstacle in the post-2012 Congress.)

Contrasting with the governors are the “idea guys”: Newt Gingrich, Paul Ryan, Mike Pence, John Bolton. (Rick Santorum may fit into this niche, too.) If the primary voters want to split intellectual hairs, one or more from this group may rise to the top of the heap. Unfortunately for them, the ideological rifts aren’t very wide, and their ideas can be coopted by others. (Sarah Palin has already begun touting Ryan’s “road map”, and she’s virtually a carbon copy of Bolton in foreign affairs.)

Then there are Senators: John Thune, Jim DeMint, Judd Gregg, Rick Santorum; others may opportunistically join the fray. I’ll boldly predict that all of these nascent candidacies will shrivel before New Hampshire. The GOP isn’t inclined to nominate Senators, and none of those named has either administrative experience or intellectual flair (except Santorum, for whose electability it’s hard to make a case).

Rounding out the dark horses are David Petraeus (unlikely to retire while commanding in a war zone) and Herman Cain (a fine fellow with an impressive business background, but what’s his name recognition?).

Jennifer Rubin thinks this is a “weak field”. My impression is that it suffers from too many choices. There’s no chance for anyone to stand out.

■ Haley Barbour never struck me as a leading Presidential prospect. Though he is in reality a sharp thinker and fine administrator, he looks like the stereotype of the old-time Southern politico, the species that gave way decades ago to the Carters and Clintons and Gingriches and Jindals. His very name seems lifted from Robert Penn Warren. It’s annoying, though, that whatever dreams of higher office he may harbor have been pretty much smashed by a minor deviation from historical orthodoxy.

As all political junkies now know, Governor Barbour thinks that the White Citizens Council in his home town of Yazoo City, Mississippi, was largely responsible for the lack of violence there when the city’s public schools were desegregated. The Councils, he averred, were a less malign force than the Ku Klux Klan.

From the reaction, you would think that he had endorsed the reimposition of segregation, or perhaps slavery. Both liberals and conservatives expatiated on the Councils’ racism and their role in “massive resistance”. Not much attention was paid to whether the governor’s narrow description of one Council’s role in one city was factually accurate. It was ideologically wrong and therefore outside the bounds of acceptable discourse.

This attitude turns history into a branch of contemporary politics, or even contemporary propaganda. It also forecloses large areas of inquiry. What is the “proper” way to respond to a question about Yazoo City’s relative calm in the Haley Barbour’s youth if all references to the local white power structure must be uniformly denigratory? Should the credit go to Martin Luther King, Jr.?

There are, of course, noxious historical opinions. What marks them as noxious is their distortion of the past to advance present day causes. The Holocaust revisionists deny history’s best documented atrocity, because they want to undermine what they see as “Zionist” domination of the West. Russian apologists for Stalin hope to make Tsar Vladimir’s authoritarian rule respectable. When President Obama attributed the fall of the Berlin Wall to international cooperation, with no mention of America’s role, he wished to discourage unilateral action on our country’s part. On a much more trivial level, J. Thomas Looney, the inventor of the theory that the 17th Earl of Oxenford wrote the works of Shakespeare, was motivated by a deep distaste for modern egalitarianism (a little known fact reported in Jame Shapiro’s Contested Will. By contrast, Governor Barbour simply tried to explain a rather surprising historical event by drawing on his own memory. Possibly his memory was mistaken, but the mistake, if any, does not imply racial animus or lend support to resegregation.

(For the record, let me add that there’s nothing wrong with bringing honest history to bear on today’s controversies. For example, the revisionist historians of Reconstruction, whose work began at the same time as the civil rights movement, drew a lesson from their new picture: that racially integrated governments could act responsibly, even when many of their leaders were meagerly educated and otherwise ill-prepared for public office. For quite a few of the historians, that was a congenial conclusion, but it was founded not on abstract ideology but on the careful, albeit occasionally controversial, study of events in the Southern states between 1865 and 1877.)

More yet to come.

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.