Stromata Blog

Social Security: What Slick Barry Barely Knows

Senator Obama has offered his ideas on how to deal with Social Security’s looming deficit and, more broadly, with worries about the state of American retirement savings. The best that can be said about his panaceas is that they lack imagination. Since the accompanying statements show that the Democratic anointee has no grasp of how Social Security works or of what the government currently does to encourage savings by low-income workers, lack of imagination is a virtue. If he let his fancy run free, he’d likely come up with a contrivance as Rube Goldbergish as the Democratic suite for “rescuing” Medicare.

The Obama retirement savings policy has two major elements:

1. An additional 12.4 percent payroll tax, half withheld from the employee, half paid by the employer, would be imposed on wages above $250,000 a year. (People making less than that are declared to be “middle class”, a reference point worth preserving for the future.) This levy would raise the highest marginal tax bracket for earned income from 35 percent to 47.4 percent (or 41.2 percent, if one pretends that nobody bears the burden of the employer’s share), producing cash for Slick Barry’s array of new domestic spending initiatives. It would have no impact whatsoever on the long-term funding of the Social Security System. The new revenue stream will be spent as it is collected, not invested to meet future benefit obligations (a bad idea in any case, as I’ve discussed elsewhere). The benefits paid 20 years from now will have to be paid from revenues raised then. Past payroll tax surpluses will be of no help.

2. All workers would be enrolled in 401(k) plans (or a similar arrangement under a different name). Unless they opted out, a “small percentage” of their pay would be contributed automatically to their accounts, and the government would match 50 percent of the first $1,000 contributed. This proposal is an extremely modest expansion of what the Bush Administration has put into effect through the savers’ tax credit and the optional deposit of income tax refunds in IRA’s. Automatic 401(k) contributions, with the ability to opt out, have been allowed for years and were formalized by the Pension Protection Act of 2006. It’s nice that Senator Obama recognizes the virtues of these Bush innovations and wants to enhance them in a small way. He seems, however, to be under the impression that he has put forward something new and dramatic. (Curiously, he also seems to think that investing in the stock market is a bad idea, so maybe this part of the proposal is put on the table without enthusiasm.)

In summary, Senator Obama believes that the nation faces a retirement income crisis and wants to do nothing in particular about it.

There is, in sober fact, an argument for viewing Social Security without alarm. Compared to European systems, ours is in pretty decent shape. If everything continues on its present trajectory, the excess of benefit payouts over payroll taxes will rise over the next 30 years to roughly one percent of the GDP. That will be a substantial burden on the next generation, but not a catastrophe.

The reasons for concern are, first, that there is a wide range of uncertainty in these projections (aggravated by increases in life expectancy and a weak birth rate) and, second, that it is foolish to make a major portion of each generation’s retirement income dependent on the good will of the next.

Despite the “communitarian” blather that sometime insinuates itself into these debates – how sweet it is for children to care for their aging parents – I’ve never met an old person (a category into which I’m making my own transition) who didn’t prefer independence and his own investment portfolio. Senator Obama is evidently aware of this preference, for it is the rationale for his retention of the Bush retirement savings incentives, but not aware enough to take it seriously, for he would keep them at approximately the same limited level. He has not, for instance, picked up the President’s own proposal for greatly increasing retirement savings opportunities through “lifetime savings accounts” [last item]. That never went anywhere, because the Left denounced it as benefiting “the rich”. I’d be more inclined to think that this year’s Democratic candidate was something other than a tired old leftist if he displayed a tenth of W’s creativity and boldness.

Executive Pay for Dummies

Both presumptive Presidential candidates have decided to wax indignant about how much the top executives of major corporations are paid. I, too, think that it is unfortunate that the men responsible for the operation of multi-billion enterprises employing tens of thousands of workers and furnishing goods and services to hundreds of millions of people are compensated at their current level – for it is patently out of line with the extravagant sums showered on entertainers and sports stars and doesn’t reflect the huge jump in the magnitude and difficulty of executive tasks over the past half century. One of the mysteries that future economic historians will have to tackle is what factors so depressed the return on top-rank human capital in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. For the moment, though, I’ll leave that question to one side and look at the narrow issue of whether it is true that, as both Senator Obama and Senator McCain would have us believe, CEO’s are richly rewarded without regard to how well they carry out their duties.

Here we can, if we are so inclined, look at empirical evidence. The consulting firm Watson Wyatt compiles and annual survey of executive compensation. Its findings are so contrary to conventional foolishness that the 2007/8 report is bluntly and polemically titled, Debunking Executive Compensation Myths.

The executive pay model in the United States continues to help create remarkable economic growth, resulting in trillions of dollars in shareholder wealth, and substantial income and net worth for millions of employees and their families. The powerful incentive effects inherent in most executive pay packages are a major driver of these economic gains.

In spite of this robust economic growth and its societal benefits, lawmakers, regulators, investors and the media continue to scrutinize executive compensation. The current level of examination presumes a pervasive misalignment of pay and corporate performance, as evidenced by new SEC proxy disclosure rules and proposed “say-on-pay” legislation in Congress. Critics argue that this misalignment has been perpetuated by an inefficient labor market in which managers have too much influence concerning their own pay packages. We disagree. [emphasis in original]

The market for executive talent is, in fact, efficient and intensely competitive. Shareholders and their advisers put tremendous pressure on corporations to generate high returns while adhering to sound corporate governance principles, and boards frequently vote down or modify management proposals on pay matters. The increasing prominence of private equity funds has further intensified the demand for executive talent. What’s more telling is the willingness of these funds to lure executives from public companies with larger pay packages, which attests to the efficiency of the labor market, and provides an unbiased measure of the appropriate distribution of value creation between executives and shareholders.

Unlike most politicians’ comments on the subject, these conclusions are based on more than impressions and anecdotes:

The 2007/2008 Report on Executive Pay, conducted by Watson Wyatt, looked at 1,089 companies in the S&P Super 1500 that filed proxy statements before July 2007 and were listed in Equilar’s executive compensation database. The sample was limited to companies employing the same CEO for each of the prior three fiscal years. The median company revenue in our sample is approximately $1.6 billion, with a median market capitalization of $2.2 billion. Sample sizes vary depending on the type of analysis conducted.

What did statistical analysis of the data show?

At most companies pay and performance are aligned. In fact, CEOs of high-performing companies typically earn 75 percent more realizable pay than CEOs of low-performing companies. . . .

A CEO’s pay increases and decreases in relation to company performance. CEOs at low-performing companies experienced a 3 percent decrease in realizable total direct compensation compared with a 13 percent increase for their counterparts at high-performing companies.

In more detail (figures omitted):

There is a strong relation between cumulative realizable LTI [long-term incentive compensation] and shareholder returns during the three-year period from 2004 through 2006. In Figure 1, we see that the CEO of a typical high-performing company [in the upper half of the sample in terms of total shareholder return] earned three times as much realizable LTI ($5.2 million) as the CEO of a typical low-performing company ($1.7 million). In addition, CEOs at high-performing companies earned 75 percent more realizable total pay ($10.5 million) than CEOs at low-performing firms ($6.0 million). . . .

Figure 3 further illustrates the alignment of pay and performance. Executives at low-performing firms earned less than half (45 percent) of their LTI opportunity and less than 80 percent of their TDC [total direct compensation] opportunity. CEOs at high-performing companies, as measured by TRS [total shareholder return], earned realizable LTI and realizable TDC pay that exceeded the estimated opportunity at grant date.

This evidence demonstrates that, contrary to standard anti-business shibboleths, companies don’t set top executives’ pay at arbitrarily high levels without regard to value received. The relationship isn’t always perfect, just as it isn’t perfect anywhere else in life, (and Watson Wyatt does have suggestions for improvement). Grocery clerks, too, can be paid more than they’re worth. The important fact is that the arbiter of executive compensation is a free, competitive market. If the government interferes, it is more likely to produce government-quality executives than happy consumers, well-paid employees and satisfied shareholders.

“Moral Weight” on the Obama Scale

In his role as post-partisan savior, Barack Obama denounces inter alia “absolutists” on both sides of the abortion controversy. In his campaign book, The Audacity of Hope, he writes about what “a wrenching moral issue” abortion is, how it is “never a good thing”, that the unborn child’s claims to have “moral weight”. Sentiments like that bolster the theme that he is a new kind of liberal, not a dreary chanter of left-wing slogans.

And yet, on all particular points at issue, he comes down firmly on one of the absolutist sides. A hint of his attitude is that he refers to abortion as “reproductive justice”.

He has never supported any restriction on abortion, however mild and however generally acceptable even to most pro-abortionists. For example, he voted and spoke against bills in the Illinois legislature to protect children who survive abortions, asserting that they do not qualify as “persons” under the Fourteenth Amendment. It’s ironic that a black legislator should echo the Dred Scott decision. His stance is also about as far outside the “mainstream” as they come. The federal version of the same measure passed the Senate unanimously in 2002. Had Mr. Obama then been in the federal rather than the state Senate, he would have been the lone “nay”.

That “moral weight” must be a small fraction of a microgram.

A Post-Partisan Knave

Tony Rezko’s trial and conviction are, at heart, an indictment of Illinois’s major political parties. The most prominent politicians to whom he was attached were Democrats, Rod Blagojevich and Barack Obama, but, as the Chicago Tribune observes, his machinations were a scandal for both parties:

The trial also provided ample fodder for cynics who see Illinois politicians as members of a cozy club motivated more by greed than altruism or ideology.

Witnesses against Rezko claimed his alleged schemes involved a host of political insiders from both major parties. Among those whose names came up repeatedly during the trial were Chris Kelly, another top fundraiser for Blagojevich; William Cellini, a veteran Republican power broker; and Robert Kjellander, the longtime Republican national committeeman from Illinois.

Slick Barry’s reaction: “This isn’t the Tony Rezko I knew.” Just like the Jeremiah Wright and the Michael Pfleger he didn’t know.

As the elite media will remind us incessantly, Barack Obama was not accused of participating in any of the schemes for which Rezko was being tried. Rezko was, however, one of his earliest and most generous patrons, going so far as to help him buy his house. Fixers don’t do favors for young pols out of the goodness of their hearts. Politicians with any perceptiveness don’t accept them without realizing that repayment will be called for.

Still, Senator Obama ought not to suck up all the attention. The message the Republicans ought to get – and send – is that it is past time for the Illinois GOP to purge its Thompson-era leadership. If it continues to offer the voters nothing but a different set of knaves, they’ll continue to choose the familiar Democratic crew.

Further reading: John Kass, “Rezko Is Not Just Obama's Problem - He’s the GOP’s”

Petulant Egotism

The Democrats’ heir presumptive is already making his name for ignorance and gaffes. Now he has added a touch of petulant egotism. From his speech last night as he stumbled across the primary finish line:

In just a few short months, the Republican Party will arrive in St. Paul with a very different agenda. They will come here to nominate John McCain, a man who has served this country heroically. I honor that service, and I respect his many accomplishments, even if he chooses to deny mine [emphasis added].

The last clause would be obnoxious coming from someone with achievements to match his opponent’s. From thin-résuméed Barry, it’s near to pathetic. Power Line thoughtfully composed a speech that gives due recognition to all that the Illinois solon has done in public life:

Senator Obama, I honor your work in the private sector for a year or two after you graduated from college, and I honor your work for three years as a community organizer in Chicago. I understand that as a community organizer you pressured city authorities to remove asbestos from the Altgeld Gardens apartments in 1986 with at least partial success.

When the on-site manager of the apartments didn’t take action, you nudged the residents into confronting city housing officials in two angry public meetings downtown. These generated “a victory of sorts,” you said later, as workers soon began sealing the asbestos in the buildings, even if the project gradually ran out of steam and money and even if some tenants still have asbestos in their homes, according to current resident Linda Randle, who worked with you in the ’86 anti-asbestos campaign.

When you chose to quit organizing the South Side of Chicago after three years, your good deeds did not stop. You rendered valiant service by attending Harvard Law School and winning your first election as the president of the Harvard Law Review.

Your service to the Harvard Law Review did not bring an end to your remarkable benefactions. You returned to Chicago, where you won election to the Ilinois state legislature before the triumph that brought you to the Senate for the past three-and-a-half years. We all know your accomplishments in the Senate.

And last, but far from least, I honor your authorship of Dreams From My Father, a memoir that has spent many weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. You, sir, have served our country with uncommon distinction.

This is one of those cases where honest praise would be the cruelest mockery. Or are we expected to laud what Savior-President Obama is going to do?

As another Power Line post asked (rhetorically, of course) a couple of weeks ago, “Can someone explain why it is, exactly, that Barack Obama is not a laughingstock?”

Truman in a Hurry

Cowards, I know, would quit the fighting now
but the man who wants to make his mark in war
must stand his ground and brace for all he’s worth –
suffer his wounds or wound his man to death.

The Iliad, Book XI (Robert Fagels trans.)

Admirers of George W. Bush – not a numerous company but a stubborn one – like to anticipate that he eventually will take a place in history like Harry S Truman’s, a President who left office as a “failure” but is now widely praised for taking the first steps toward victory in the Cold War. It was not at all certain in the immediate aftermath of World War II that the United States would offer serious resistance to the advance of communism in Europe and Asia. We could have pulled back to our own hemisphere and let foreign nations take care of themselves. Similarly, the pro-Bush prediction is that his decision to treat terrorism as an act of war rather than a law enforcement concern, his espousal of the doctrine of defensive preemption, and his successes in Iraq and Afghanistan will set the West on course to suppress Islamofascism, however many detours may lengthen the way.

One element of the Truman-Bush parallel that no one has emphasized strongly is that President Truman started a process with meager short-term results. During his time in office, the Soviet Union swallowed Eastern Europe, Mao Tse-tung took control of mainland China, Stalin’s spies scored their most spectacular espionage feats, deterrence failed in Korea, and the accession of pro-communist governments in Western Europe remained a real possibility. Against those setbacks could be set the salvation of Greece and not much more. It would have been realistic to say in January 1953 that the “War on Communism” was a dismal failure. If either political party then had been like the Democrats now, it would have been said, and loudly, too.

A year ago, it wouldn’t have been excessively gloomy to foresee that President Bush would leave office with his Administration’s defining struggle in a similar state: Iraq would flounder into civil war and be abandoned by a President Clinton or Obama; Afghanistan would fall to resurgent Taliban; Pakistan would become a de facto terrorist ally; the mufsidun ideology, its prestige boosted by such victories, would come to define Islam; an emboldened Iran would emerge as a regional superpower. For every commentator who called the President steadfast in adversity, ten sneered that he was merely obstinate. The War on Terror was certainly not lost, but it looked to be as long as the Cold War.

Today, by startling contrast, it wouldn’t be utterly Pollyannish to say that George W. Bush will walk away a winner, leaving a devastated terrorist movement as his legacy.

About Iraq, the Washington Post’s editorial board (that’s Washington Post, not New York) says,

While Washington’s attention has been fixed elsewhere, military analysts have watched with astonishment as the Iraqi government and army have gained control for the first time of the port city of Basra and the sprawling Baghdad neighborhood of Sadr City, routing the Shiite militias that have ruled them for years and sending key militants scurrying to Iran. At the same time, Iraqi and U.S. forces have pushed forward with a long-promised offensive in Mosul, the last urban refuge of al-Qaeda. So many of its leaders have now been captured or killed that U.S. Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker, renowned for his cautious assessments, said that the terrorists have “never been closer to defeat than they are now.”

Iraq passed a turning point last fall when the U.S. counterinsurgency campaign launched in early 2007 produced a dramatic drop in violence and quelled the incipient sectarian war between Sunnis and Shiites. Now, another tipping point may be near, one that sees the Iraqi government and army restoring order in almost all of the country, dispersing both rival militias and the Iranian-trained “special groups” that have used them as cover to wage war against Americans. . . .

Gen. Petraeus pointed out that attacks in Iraq hit a four-year low in mid-May and that Iraqi forces were finally taking the lead in combat and on multiple fronts at once – something that was inconceivable a year ago. As a result the Iraqi government of Nouri al-Maliki now has “unparalleled” public support, as Gen. Petraeus put it, and U.S. casualties are dropping sharply. Eighteen American soldiers died in May, the lowest total of the war and an 86 percent drop from the 126 who died in May 2007.

The situation is looking good enough that Team Obama is pretending that Slick Barry never said, “We can send 15,000 more troops, 20,000 more troops, 30,000 more troops: I don’t know any expert on the region or any military officer that I’ve spoken to privately that believes that that is going to make a substantial difference on the situation on the ground.”

“Win the War? Yes, We Can!”

And in Afghanistan,

Missions by special forces and air strikes by unmanned drones have “decapitated” the Taliban and brought the war in Afghanistan to a “tipping point”, the commander of British forces has said.

The new “precise, surgical” tactics have killed scores of insurgent leaders and made it extremely difficult for Pakistan-based Taliban leaders to prosecute the campaign, according to Brig Mark Carleton-Smith.

In the past two years an estimated 7,000 Taliban have been killed, the majority in southern and eastern Afghanistan. But it is the “very effective targeted decapitation operations” that have removed “several echelons of commanders”. . . .

“We have seen increasing fissures of stress through the whole organisation that has led to internecine and fratricidal strife between competing groups.”

Taliban fighters are apparently becoming increasingly unpopular in Helmand, where they are reliant on the local population for food and water.

They have also been subjected to strikes by the RAF’s American-made Reaper unmanned aerial vehicle and the guided Royal Artillery missile system, which have both proved a major battlefield success.

“I can therefore judge the Taliban insurgency a failure at the moment,” said Brig Carleton-Smith. “We have reached the tipping point.”

Meanwhile, Iran’s economy is facing ruin from mismanagement and corruption. Nancy Pelosi’s notion that the mullarchy deserves the credit for the Iraqi government’s gains is a desperate anti-war fantasy, striving to put the worst face possible on victory, but suppose that it were true. Wouldn’t the President deserve kudos for either intimidating or charming the mullahs into a more cooperative frame of mind? As James Taranto says, “Who needs Barack Obama if the Bush administration is generating so much Iranian goodwill?”

And so it goes. Not that this good news amounts to an assured triumph. The enemy retains substantial resources and may be able to regroup. Worse, there is a danger that we will complacently relax the pressure too soon. Nonetheless, the President’s vindication may come much more rapidly than Truman’s, perhaps soon enough to embarrass the Bush haters mightily.

The Positive Case for John McCain

For lots of conservatives, John McCain’s redeeming political value lies in his not being Slick Barry or the Tin Lady. Judging by what the dexterosphere says about him, you’d think that he was barely distinguishable from Joe Lieberman: excellent on winning the War on Terror, a conventional liberal on every other issue.

Quin Hillyer makes the case for a more positive view: that Senator McCain is three-quarters of a loaf rather than a moldy slice of bread.

McCain is a curmudgeon’s curmudgeon – but still with much to offer his country. We all know, of course, why so many of us are so often so angry with McCain – his sometimes bizarre heresies from conservatism, his insulting language and hair-trigger temper toward conservatives who disagree with him – but we spend too little time acknowledging the man’s strengths. On those issues on which Goldwater was strongest, about which he cared most deeply and on which he was most identifiably conservative, McCain is as strong or stronger than any national leader in the past 20 years.

Consider the fight against outrageous government spending. No major party nominee since Goldwater, Reagan included, has been as consistently and bravely dedicated to fiscal discipline as has McCain. Last week he both made a superb campaign speech and penned a hard-hitting column for the Chicago Tribune blasting the bloated, irresponsible Farm Bill for which 80 percent of his colleagues were cravenly voting. Likewise, McCain’s longstanding record of opposing purely local pork barrel projects – “earmarks” – is well known, and utterly unmatched. McCain also consistently has opposed expansion of entitlement programs, which of course are the biggest long-term fiscal problems facing this nation. Indeed, entitlements collectively represent an absolutely deadly time bomb, and McCain might be the only man in American politics today with the will power, the moral standing, and the sheer cussedness needed to defuse it.

Similarly, McCain has proposed the most free-market-oriented health care reforms imaginable from a national party nominee during a contentious campaign. And on taxes, the fact remains that McCain has never, not once, supported an income-tax rate hike. He calls for corporate tax deductions and seems genuinely committed to fighting, really fighting, to make most of President Bush’s tax cuts permanent. . . .

Finally, nobody can doubt McCain’s love of country, his dedication to a strong defense, his concern for our military personnel, or his bedrock belief in American exceptionalism and commitment to victory for the United States over its many dangerous enemies.

For believers in the fantasy of four years of President Obama followed by a gigantic right-wing resurgence, none of that will be sufficient. “The worse, the better” originated as a leftist shibboleth, but it appeals to crypto-utopians of every stripe. Instead of comparing the candidates before us and throwing our efforts behind one who is right on most issues, they wait for the Hidden Imam of Conservatism. And wait. Waiting and whining are easier than securing what victories and we can and building on them for the future.

A Conspectus of Today’s Democratic Party

The fortunes of political parties bob up and down. The Republican Party seemed all but dead after the elections of 1936, 1964 and 1974. In 1946, 1952, 1980, 1994 and 2002, it seemed on the way to permanent majority status. Today it is “dead” again. An interesting indicator is that David Frum, a first rate political commentator, has just written his second book bemoaning GOP decrepitude and proffering prescriptions for its ailments. The first one, titled Dead Right, appearing in early 1994, argued that the party’s future was hopeless unless it broke decisively from its reliance on conservative dogma. That analysis turned out to be dead wrong – which doesn’t mean, of course, that Mr. Frum is unprophetic this time around. There’s no Newt Gingrich in sight – not even New Gingrich is New Gingrich any more – and the Republican ship has picked up lots of barnacles over the past decade.

The plight of Ronald Reagan’s epigonoi is a topic for another time. Here I want to examine the presumptive high rider, the contemporary Democratic Party, and to call attention to what are, I think, overlooked aspects of its ideological and sociological profile.

The Democrats’ electoral base has three pillars: unionized and government workers, blacks and Hispanics. Those are the groups from which the party receives the bulk of its votes. Others, such as feminists, college professors and (to a rapidly diminishing extent) Jews, may be similarly lopsided in their voting patterns, but they are not very big.

Strikingly different is the party’s intellectual leadership, which is overwhelmingly upper class, affluent well-educated, and contemptuous of hoi polloi who “cling to guns and religion”. In manners, morals and ideals, a great gulf is fixed between this intelligentsia and the average Democrat (including the average black or Hispanic Democrat). At times it must be bridged on an ad hoc basis, as when the party occulted its advocacy of gun control laws. Elsewhere, bridges can’t be built at all: Radical feminism, same-sex marriage and affirmative action are nearly as unpopular with the Democratic as with the Republican base, but they are too precious to the Democratic intelligentsia to be abandoned or compromised. The work-around has been to maneuver them into the judicial system, out of sight of the ballot box. Vide the California Supreme Court’s decision today overturning a ban on same-sex marriage that voters had approved overwhelmingly. Gun control nearly followed the same course, except that the courts balked at expansive theories of gun makers’ and sellers’ liability for everything done with their products.

The one major area in which left-wing ideological preferences overlap with the interests and desires of the Democratic base is personal economic security. Liberals believe that the government can guarantee good jobs at good wages to everyone and provide an effective shield against financial misfortune. Voters with relatively low incomes and little capital to fall back on in an emergency would like to believe that, too. There lies the appeal of the progressive agenda of government management of the national economy.

Beyond purely materialistic concerns, though, the Left does not want to venture. Their voters are the segment of the population most harmed by crime, low educational standards, family instability and other social maladies. Yet politicians supremely confident that the government that can mesh all the gears of a $12 trillion economy are not much concerned about keeping downtowns safe at night or seeing that children are raised by intact families. In Barack Obama’s world famous speech on race, he uttered not a word about black-on-black crime, the scourges of illegitimacy and abortion, or the role of radicals (mostly white) in rendering both problems next to insoluble.

The radical domination over the Democratic platform shows up yet more blatantly in foreign policy. The Soros-Kossack wing – numerous, rich and voluble – stigmatizes the United States as the most dangerous and malign country on the planet, or perhaps the second worst after Israel. To accommodate them, the party has settled on a position of practical isolation from the rest of the world. It differs from classic isolationism in one respect: Instead of scorning foreign elites, the Democrats endow them with a veto over American actions abroad. The upshot is the same as an official policy of inaction, since these European bellwethers never want to go anywhere. Talk is their first, last and only resort.

Aggravating diplomatic and military passivity is the Democrats’ newfound hostility toward the free flow of goods and services across national boundaries. Peculiar as it seems, they imagine that the friends we gain by taking a soft line toward Islamofascism won’t be lost by our sinking the economies of the rest of the world through a resurgence of protectionism.

Prima facie, a political party whose leaders are actively hostile to its rank-and-file on a broad range of issues looks like a loser. What accounts for its recent success? One obvious explanation is that the Republican Party has simply become weaker. A corollary of an entrenched two-party system is that red’s loss must be blue’s gain. Another explanation, complementary to the first, is that the elite media have become clamorously and one-sidedly partisan to an extent never before seen in our country’s history. That development is very likely a consequence of the erosion of their information oligopoly. Partisanship can be a business strategy. Whatever the reason, the MSM remains the principal news source for much of the public, including the historical blue collar Democratic base. Thus people who are accustomed to voting Democratic hear little but shrill indictments of Republicans and lavish praise of Democrats. Why should they change their behavior? And why should those who have deviated to the GOP on past occasions do so again? Ordinary Americans can see the force of conservative arguments, as Ronald Reagan proved, but not if those arguments never reach them.

Perhaps those explanations are sufficient, but we should also consider what aspects of the Democrats’ program have a positive appeal. We have already identified one: The promise of security against economic hardship is highly attractive, so long as one can convince oneself that it is fulfillable and won’t turn the state into an all-powerful master.

Also attractive is the security that comes from shrinking the boundaries of the world. America’s rise to superpower status once was exhilarating, but the world proved to be complicated, dangerous and hard to deal with. How relaxing it would be to take no action without advance approval of the spokesmen for world opinion. How reassuring to face no competition from workers overseas. Life would again be peaceable and quiet, at least until we found ourselves alone in a world that rejected old-fashioned notions like personal freedom, private enterprise and consent of the governed.

When histories of our era are written, the modern Democratic Party will be a fascinating topic. It is a rare and paradoxical entity: a “party of the people” led by aristocrats and largely indifferent to popular concerns, a radical party whose primary attraction is the promise of peace, quiet and stagnation. Ultimately, I surmise, it will be seen as an experiment in persuading a majority to reverse the democratic ideal and freely return control of both state and society to a self-perpetuating, albeit non-hereditary and meritocratic, upper crust. Can government by mandarins become a reality in the modern West? If so, can it succeed? Those questions will be the stuff of a thousand learned tomes.

John Hagee: Just Like Jeremiah Wright?

The Rev. John Hagee, pastor of a huge Protestant church in San Antonio, has now apologized for his past denunciations of the Roman Catholic Church, though I’m sure that our Obama-venerating media will continue to link him to John McCain and insist that he is the right-wing counterpart to Jeremiah Wright.

Leaving aside the difference between receiving a political endorsement from a clergyman and being a faithful member of his congregation for almost all of one’s adult life, this exercise in moral equivalence has another curious aspect. Pastor Hagee is an outspoken philosemite who contributes generously to Jewish causes and defends the State of Israel against its detractors. His quarrel with the Church of Rome has been primarily over its alleged role in fostering antisemitism. In his letter of apology, he writes,

In my zeal to oppose anti-Semitism and bigotry in all its ugly forms, I have often emphasized the darkest chapters in the history of Catholics and Protestant relations with the Jews. In the process, I may have contributed to the mistaken impression that the anti-Jewish violence of the Crusades and the Inquisition defines the Catholic Church. It most certainly does not.

I have no comment on whether that retraction is adequate or sincere. What’s noteworthy is that the position retracted – that antisemitism is of the essence of the traditional Roman Catholic Church – is conventional wisdom on the Left. Witness James Carroll, reverently pro-Obama political columnist and also author of Constantine’s Sword, a screed that restates over hundreds of pages the same sentiments that earned Mr. Hagee the “anti-Catholic” label. He is hardly an isolated case. The Left denounces McCain supporter Hagee for having accepted the Left’s own view of the church.

Will demands that John McCain repudiate John Hagee be balanced by calls for Barack Obama to distance himself from James Carroll? Will anyone on the Left apologize for having “contributed to the mistaken impression that the anti-Jewish violence of the Crusades and the Inquisition defines the Catholic Church”?

It’s a pity that a remnant of Protestantism is still caught up in the idea of “whore of Babylon”, but their anti-Catholicism is a mote in the eye of the Right compared to the multiple beams in the eye of the Left.

War with Canada!

First, President-to-be Obama threatens to order the President of Canada to revise NAFTA. Then he repudiates an advisor who tries to reassure Ottawa that an Obama Administration won’t destroy the Canadian economy. Then he reveals his ambition to add seven new states to the Union, which is plausible only if we annex the western Canadian provinces.

It used to be conservatives who reviled the Canucks. But that has all changed; Barack Obama’s Borealophobia is no sign of his membership in the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy. As long ago as 2003, leftists had identified Canada as the font of neoconservative evil. Just recently, the loony left Guardian published an exposé of “Obama’s Canadian Enemies”. In the same publication’s even loonier comments section, we are informed that “It is striking how many neoconservatives are self-hating Canadian subjects of the Crown”.

Senator Obama may be impartial between both sides of the war on terror, but he knows a real enemy when he sees one! At least we can hope that he will talk to his enemies, as FDR did, before invading.

A Unilateral War

When General Petraeus told Congress that Iran is furnishing weapons and training to our enemies in Iraq, and is responsible for the deaths of “hundreds of American soldiers and thousands of Iraqi soldiers and civilians”, the anti-war Left yawned. To the extent that the pro-defeat crowd paid any attention, they dismissed such charges as more Bushitler lies, designed to stampede the public into war with the Mullarchy.

Yet just the other day, as Abe Greenwald points out, the Los Angeles Times, not often a conduit for Administration propaganda, quoted a Mahdi Army commander casually discussing his men’s receipt of arms shipments from Iran, including “bombs that can rip a hole in a U.S. tank and rockets that can pound Baghdad’s Green Zone”. He professes to “hate Iran”, and maybe he does, even as his pseudo-army’s nominal leader hides out in Tehran, but we ought to have learned by now that expectations that our enemies in the Middle East won’t cooperate with each other are delusory. Like Saddam Hussein before them, the mullahs are happy to arm and subsidize any species of anti-American mufsidun.

Does that matter at all to, say, Barack Obama? He insists that he’s not a pacifist; he’ll pour troops in Afghanistan and maybe Pakistan, too, to find Osama bin-Laden. Why? Because bin-Laden’s organization murdered Americans. Yet Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s organization has done the same, and the prospective Democratic President plans to invite him to a summit meeting – much as if President Roosevelt had proposed getting together with Hideki Tojo after Pearl Harbor.

Liberals scorn “unilateralism”, but only when America takes the offensive. Unilateral attacks against us, it seems, are not a cause for concern.

Quote of the Day

Abe Greenwald:

With Obama’s nomination a lock, there’s been increasing discussion of what his Presidency might produce. Time and again, conversation comes back to this question of a black president and America’s image abroad. Yet, no one can name a single country that isn’t ages behind the U.S. in terms of diversity and integration. The notion that there’s a soft and cuddly world just waiting for America to catch up is not “global consciousness” but the very opposite: it is an American fantasy born of prosperity and isolation. If neoconservatives are criticized for their arrogance in assuming the universality of American ideals, how will Obama supporters of this stripe answer similar charges?

Mr. Greenwald backs this generalization up with ample supporting data. Did you know that only one member of the French Chamber of Deputies belongs to a racial minority? Of course, as Michelle Obama will tell you, America’s leadership in racial integration is no reason to be proud of this country.

Barack Obama’s Fantasy Universe

Gateway Pundit calls our attention to this, well, remarkable bit from Slick Barry’s North Carolina victory speech:

The man I met in Pennsylvania who lost his job but can’t even afford the gas to drive around and look for a new one. He can’t afford four more years of an energy policy written by the oil companies and for the oil companies; a policy that is not only keeping gas at record prices but funding both sides of the war on terror and destroying our planet. . . . He needs us to take a permanent holiday from our addiction for oil by making automakers raise their fuel standards, corporations pay for their pollution and oil companies invest their record profits in a clean energy future. That’s the change we need.

GP fastened on the peculiar phrase “funding both sides of the war on terror”, wondering what rational meaning it could possibly have, and reaching no satisfactory conclusion. The answer to the riddle can be found, I believe, in the point that caught James Taranto’s eye (second item):

Of course we’re all unhappy that regimes like those in Saudi Arabia and Iran [and don’t forget Venezuela, Jim!] (but no longer Iraq, thanks to Congress and President Bush) are able to use oil revenues to fund terrorism.

But Obama finds fault with funding both sides – that is, he finds fault with funding our side. If Obama wants to stake out a position of neutrality in wartime, he should run for president of Switzerland, not America.

If one takes Senator Obama’s statement at face value, that is, as implying that America has no legitimate role in the War on Terror, “funding both sides” makes sense. The Iraqi government, on the “other side” from the terrorists, supports itself largely through oil profits. A President Obama evidently would adopt energy policies that would keep money away from Baghdad, as well as from its foes. Then he would be off to negotiate peace with Iran and other countries that feel threatened by the Bush Administration, just like FDR did with Hitler and Tojo. To put it another way, he would both withdraw military support from our erstwhile ally and seek to bankrupt it, much as the Democratic Congress in 1975 worked actively to enfeeble South Vietnam.

The rest of the Obama quote contains further layers of fantasy. Slick Barry wants to cut the price of gasoline for that unemployed Pennsylvanian. He also wants to cut the carbon dioxide emissions that are “destroying our planet”. The only way to do that in the short or medium run is to discourage driving by making gasoline more expensive. Consistent with that view, he opposes the modest price relief that would come from suspending the federal gasoline tax. So, does he want lower prices or higher? If lower, how does he propose to reduce the amount of driving that Americans do while making it less expensive to drive? Mileage rationing?

Nothing in the summary of the Obama energy agenda – “making automakers raise their fuel standards, corporations pay for their pollution and oil companies invest their record profits in a clean energy future” – will help the Pennsylvanian buy gas soon enough to aid his job search. Fuel economy standards are a long-term proposition, the economics of which, we know from other evidence, the Senator doesn’t fathom. Taxes on “corporate pollution” – whatever he may be thinking of there – aren’t obvious energy cost savers. Compelling oil companies to invest in “clean energy” will leave them less money to explore and drill for oil. Between 1992 and 2006 (the latest available data), the U.S. oil industry invested $1.25 trillion in those activities, four-thirds of its net income. An Obama Administration will put a stop to that.

Subjected to even mild scrutiny, Senator Obama’s statements about energy and the war are adolescent fantasizing. Superbama’s will of steel can bend logic with its bare thought and leap contradictions at a single bound. How long before this guy adopts a secret identity?

Operation Anointing

Rush Limbaugh has his Operation Chaos. The elite media have their opposing push, which I would dub “Operation Anointing”, the drive to settle the Democratic contest stat by clearing the path for Slick Barry.

The Lioness of Tuzla of course is an underdog (underfeline?) at this point, but an historical comparison brings out the extent to which reporters are mere spinmeisters. Per Jim Geraghty): “In 1980, Ted Kennedy came into the Democratic convention at Madison Square Garden in New York City with 1,225 delegates to President Carter's 1,981 and 122 uncommitted.” I don’t remember a media chorus demanding that he drop out in order to unite the Democratic Party against Ronald Reagan.

Similarly, in 1976 Gerald Ford had a majority of pledged delegates before the convention. The media were, however, delighted to see Governor Reagan fight on, thus boosting the Democratic candidate’s prospect.

If Senator Clinton were still a left-wing favorite, or if the cadre of faux reporters were neutral between the parties, her tenacity in an improbable, but not impossible, cause would draw no adverse comment. Since neither condition is even remotely true, Operation Anointing is in full swing. It’s useful to have the reminder that, if he didn’t have a dime of his own to spend, Slick Barry would have a full-fledged campaign juggernaut working in his behalf.

Further reading: John Tabin, “The Game Over Chorus”:

The race for the Democratic nomination is close to the end, and Hillary’s chance of victory is about one in ten. But that’s more than zero, and the eagerness of the talking heads to end the race prematurely is more than a little revealing. Political coverage, especially in primary season, is usually somewhat distorted by reporters’ bias in favor of viewing races as tighter than they are, which makes the job of reporting on politics more interesting. This tendency has been swamped by an overwhelming affinity in the press for Barack Obama. If he does prevail with the superdelegates, he will have as shameless a media cheering section as any nominee has ever had.

Hope from Across the Pond?

It would be easier to cheer heartily at the British Conservative Party’s electoral triumph last week if the party leader, that guy who demanded that W. H. Smith stop selling chocolate oranges, didn’t have approximately the gravitas of the Earl of Ickenham. Still, perhaps Iain Murray is correct in his assessment:

After Gordon Brown succeeded Tony Blair, in September and October last year he was riding high. If he’d called an election then, Brown would have seen Labour re-elected with a bigger majority than Tony Blair and he would have destroyed David Cameron’s claim to be a viable alternative. This concentrated the Conservative mind wonderfully. Starting at the party conference in October last year, the Tories started advancing genuinely conservative policies on tax, crime and education, for example. Yes, Brown proved to have a political ear as tinny as Al Gore’s, but the Tory decontamination of the brand (Cameron’s genuine acheivement) meant that people reacted well to Conservative policies for the first time in 15 years. Boris [Johnson, the new Mayor of London] is a solid conservative (with a small ‘c’) and Labour attempted to use this to paint him as the bastard son of Cruella de Ville and Lord Voldemort. It didn’t work. Nor did people turn to the Liberal Democrats. People are not just tuning out Labour, they are willing to listen to conservatives advancing conservative thought again. And about time, too.

The Wall Street Journal pinpoints as decisive the moment when Mr. Cameron forgot about oranges and remembered an old Conservative theme:

Mr. Cameron has been wary of Mrs. Thatcher’s legacy, and understandably needs to find his own identity. But some old Tory ideas, such as low taxes, are proven winners. When Mr. Cameron called for lower taxes at the party conference last fall, his polls shot up and Mr. Brown got cold feet about early elections. That was the beginning of this Tory comeback.

So let’s indulge in a jot and tittle of optimism. Europe has often been a leading indicator for our elections. Margaret Thatcher foreshadowed Ronald Reagan. Tony Blair’s slicing and dicing of Michael Howard’s Tories hinted at the GOP calamity in 2006. Now we have seen Nicolas Sarkozy and a reasonably conservative Droit sweep into power in France, Silvio Berlusconi return in Italy, and the Tories garner their biggest victory in local elections since recordkeeping began. More significantly, the Conservative turn-around in Britain took almost no time at all. Half a year ago, Labour was unbeatable; last Thursday, its share of the vote fell behind that of the comical Liberal Democrats.

It may seem like an overwhelming task to persuade American voters “to listen to conservatives advancing conservative thought again”, and it may be an impossible one. Unfortunately, many conservatives have been so demoralized that they haven’t been trying.

Just today, for instance, Slick Barry Obama once again declared that Iraq is hopeless and not worth saving: “If we cannot get the Iraqis to stand up in seven years, we are not going to get them to stand up in fourteen years or fifty-six years.” To that Jim Geraghty says nothing more than “I don’t like that answer, but I think it will resonate with many Americans.”

C’mon, Mr. Kerry Spot. Whether or not it resonates, Senator Obama’s insinuation is ridiculous. “Standing up” is what the Iraqi military has been doing in Basra and Sadr City, to an extent that surprises even its warmest sympathizers. That the likely Democratic Presidential candidate refuses to look at the facts on the ground is a measure of how tenaciously he and his party are committed to American impotence.

Given that the Bush Administration is strangely reticent about speaking up in its own defense, the rest of us should do out bit by vowing not to let Hill-Bama’s stale talking points pass by uncorrected. The history of the past eight years has become clouded by left-wing legendary, and the shrieking carriers of Bush Derangement Syndrome have drowned out rational discourse. Perhaps resistance is futile, but that’s no reason not to try. It wasn’t long ago that politics looked just as grim in the U.K.

Not Quite a Recession, But . . .

A couple of years from now, the National Bureau for Economic Research will apply its oracular hindsight to tell us when the Recession of 2008 began. For all we really know, the downturn may already have come and gone, or it may be an illusion. The last two recessions were grossly misapprehended while they were in progress. The elder President Bush’s, which sunk his reelection hopes, ended months before Bill Clinton declared the economy to be in its worst shape since the Great Depression. The recession that began during Clinton’s last half-year in office became visible after he left, giving the media the opportunity to assign blame to Bush the younger.

In light of those past misconceptions, we may want to be modest about pronouncing on the state of economic affairs. Still, it can’t be encouraging that growth has been extremely sluggish for two quarters in a row and that the buildup of inventories could foreshadow a contraction in the current quarter. Politicians and commentators will naturally show no reticence at all in portioning out blame and touting “solutions”, most of which will look extraordinarily like what they wanted to do anyway under any circumstances.

What makes recession-solving hard is that the only thing we know for sure about the business cycle is that we don’t understand it. Too many forces push economic activity up and down; too many of them are hard to measure; too many have effects whose causes are obscure. It isn’t too bold, however, to suggest that a big determinant of what entrepreneurs do today is what they expect in the future. That, in turn, depends to a large extent on the anticipated political climate. One reason why the recovery from the 1991 recession went so widely unnoticed was that it didn’t pick up steam until the Republican Congressional sweep in the 1994 elections. The slowdown in 2000 stemmed not just from doubts about whether the Internet guaranteed a permanent boom but also from uncertainty about the qualities of the Presidential candidates, both of whom looked, from some angles, like feckless political heirs.

Perhaps, then, it is significant that the current plateau follows the Democrats’ return to control of Congress, the collapse of popular support for the GOP and the widespread expectation that the next President will be a man (or woman) who firmly believes we can tax our way into prosperity. Does the prospect of a firmly liberal, pro-tax, anti-trade, pro-regulation government buck up businessmen’s animal spirits, so that they invest more capital and hire more workers to meet future demand?

It may be that this year’s electorate is so discontented that reasoning about the causes of its discontents will be futile. On the other hand, the American public isn’t immune to reason. Higher taxes, more government regulation, stiffer trade barriers (pace Lou Dobbs) and military weakness are rarely election winners. The Democratic Party’s stands in those areas may turn out, come November, to be more significant to voters than the Democratic Presidential candidate’s relations with Norman Hsu or Jeremiah Wright.

A Post-Pennsylvania Post

Jim Geraghty picked up a significant moment in Barack Obama’s concession declaration of moral victory speech:

Obama laments “The threat of terrorism to scare up votes” — ah-ha, a veiled gripe about Hillary’s ad that depicted Osama bin Laden. Because it’s just not fair to remind voters that the next president will still have to fight a war on terror.

What struck me about that gripe was this: Accusing someone of using a “threat” to “scare up votes” connotes that the threat isn’t real. If the Tin Lady had run an ad featuring mortgage foreclosures, Slick Barry might have had any of a number of responses, but one of them would not have been that his opponent was trying to “scare” people. More likely, he would have proclaimed that he thinks that threat is bigger and badder than a millionaire’s life partner can possibly imagine.

What, then, are we to make of the candidate’s statements that, as President, he would scuttle from Iraq in order to concentrate more fiercely on the “real war” against the al-Qa’eda leadership in Afghanistan? If terrorism is a contrived threat, why would President Obama want to pour blood and treasure into the mountains of Central Asia in pursuit of terrorists? Wouldn’t indictments and extradition proceedings be a more judicious – and certainly less costly – course?

Unless Senator Obama is simply muddled (not a top-ranking desirable quality in a President), I think he has let slip what he really believes about the War on Terror, which is just what elite leftists everywhere believe: The entire enterprise is a swindle to distract the masses from their economic misery and enrich multinational corporations. Or, as one of his friends put it recently:

Empire resurrected and unapologetic, war without end, an undefined enemy that’s supposed to be a rallying point for a new kind of energized jingoistic patriotism, unprecedented and unapologetic military expansion, white supremacy changing its form, but essentially intact, attacks on women and girls, violent attacks, growing surveillance in every sphere of our lives, on and on and on, the targeting of gay and lesbian people as a kind of a scapegoating gesture to keep our minds off of what’s really happening.

Turning to the other Democratic hopeful, I’m half-amused, half-appalled by the strange new respect Mrs. Clinton is suddenly receiving from certain quarters of the Right. That she won by 10 points in a state where she was up by 20 before her opponent wandered so far outside the mainstream he doesn’t know what water is, does not impress me. And I’m less impressed than that by her noisy hawkishness on Iran. Aside from the fact that she is more strident than ever about the urgent, peremptory need to embrace defeat in Iraq, her Iranian nuke-rattling tacitly admits that she has no intention or desire to take any measures to prevent the mullarchy from acquiring atomic weapons in the first place. Instead, she will hope that her words will be an adequate deterrent. Just like Bill Clinton hoped Osama bin-Laden would quietly go away.

On a happier note from Pennsylvania, it looked like John Murtha, the Pork King, would run for reelection unopposed this year, his operatives having managed to disqualify Republican Bill Russell’s nominating petitions. To get on the ballot, Colonel Russell needed 1,000 write-ins in the GOP primary – not an easy hurdle when all the dittoheads were reregistering as Democrats to take part in Operation Chaos. Nonetheless, Dave Freddoso reports, he got at least five times the bogey. Contributions can be made to Bill Russell for Congress. Think of it as an earmark offset.

A Long, Long While from May to November

In any competition – love, war, baseball, politics – it’s a fool’s strategy to count on your opponent’s ineptitude. It’s fun to watch Slick Barry and the Tin Lady maul each other and pleasant to fantasize that each will be successful in making the public aware of the other’s dishonesty, radicalism and callowness. Many Republicans have begun to take it for granted, I suspect, that the election will wind up as a formality, with Senator Obama losing by a Stevensonian, if not McGovern-like, margin. We can already relish the tide of Reagan Democrat defections in the blue states.

That’s a nice dream. On the other hand, the Democratic nomination brawl will end no later than August 27, 2008, come what may. “A week is a long time in politics”, and two months is quite adequate for the winner (presumably the Obamamessiah) to rally from any unpleasantness. He’ll have two months of celebrity media coverage, amplified by unlimited campaign funds. He’s raised a quarter of a billion dollars to date; if his direct campaign plus his Soros-funded allies don’t top a billion in expenditures, I’ll be surprised.

Moreover, whatever the real state of the economy next autumn, the majority of voters will perceive a recession – just as they did in 1992, when a brisk recovery was in fact under weigh from a very shallow downturn. Bill Clinton successfully labeled that “the worst economy since 1932”. This year’s Democratic candidate will follow suit and will meet with equal credulity. Slick Barry, at least, has already demonstrated that elementary honesty is beyond him when he talks about such matters.

To fight back, John McCain may have $84 million in federal funding, plus whatever pro-GOP groups can independently raise. I say “may”, because the Federal Election Commission currently lacks a quorum and cannot legally make disbursements. Perhaps the Senate Democrats will be sporting and move rapidly to confirm men to fill the vacancies. But perhaps not: Senator Obama has taken the lead in blocking action. It is not inconceivable that candidate McCain will arrive at Labor Day with no cash and no easy way to raise any.

The money gap is an epiphenomenon of the enthusiasm gap, which David Frum has summarized in a couple of statistics:

Number of views of Obama YouTube videos: 37 million
Number of views of McCain videos: 3 million

Obama funds raised from under $200 donations: $76 million
McCain funds raised from under $200 donations: $7.4 million

(Yes, Mr. Frum is a famous pessimist, who wrote a book in early 1994 about how dismal the Republican Party’s prospects were for the foreseeable future, but his facts in this case are incontrovertible.)

Some of the enthusiasm for Senator Obama arises from the fact that he is a novelty, and until recently seemed like a fresh, hopeful break from politics as usual. Still, he’s hardly the first such to appear on the American political scene, and none has ever before so dominated the landscape.

Is it truly plausible that the huge YouTube popularity and fund raising prowess are nothing but an affirmative endorsement of Barack Obama? Ask yourself whether John F. Kennedy or Ronald Reagan could have done as well, and you’ll have your answer. A large part of the Obama frenzy is clearly driven by the most conspicuous characteristic of the Democratic Party’s Moveon/Kos Kidz/Code Pink base, namely, irrational hatred of their numerous “enemies”. To their ears, “hope and change” do not suggest a soaring, Reaganesque confidence in America’s ability to surmount any challenge. Rather, they represent the chance to bring the “Bushitler regime” and its backers, that is, people like Dick Cheney, me and you, to revolutionary justice.

The last time we had an election in which one side was primarily motivated by hatred of the other, a shooting war came next. It would be unduly pessimistic to predict the same fate this time, but it’s hard to foresee a genuinely happy outcome. If the Democrats win, the animus that spurs their cadre cannot but seep into an Obama Administration and fatally distort its policies. The most left-wing President in our history, coupled with a core of vengeful underlings, is not a recipe for peace, prosperity and good will.

Yet a McCain Presidency will face grim prospects, too. The heart of the leftist opposition will add bitterness and frustration to the fury it already feels. The riots of the late 1960’s seem distant and quaint today. Most Americans are too young to remember them clearly. I do, and do not look forward to history repeating itself.

Bits and Pieces

■ First of all, let me recommend Robert Ferrigno’s portrayal of a future Bill Clinton’s interior monologue as he waits for the start of a gig at a high school gym in his new role as President Obama’s “Outreach Ambassador to the Heartland”, “Missing Rush Limbaugh”:

He stared at cheerleaders, the white one sawing away at the nails on his left hand, the black one working on the left. Their tight sweaters said Ruth Bader Ginsberg High School, class of 2012. The Tennessee Education Commission had renamed the school two years ago, changed it from Ronald Reagan High and the locals still hadn’t gotten over it. Part of the reason he had been sent down here to Mecklenburg for the grin and grab. Tomorrow he hit two Baptist church pancake breakfasts, a Rotary luncheon, and a Boy Scout banquet that evening. There was an election in November and the party needed every vote to be counted. . . .

The TV in the corner of the cramped, high school dressing room had the sound off, but he still flinched when Barry . . . President Obama and Michelle came onscreen. Follow Us to the Promised Land floated just below their smug faces. Their daily inspirational hour broadcast live to the American people. Michelle had taken a rolled-up newspaper to the FCC right after the inauguration and that had been that. . . .

Nothing on the tube but those two, and nothing on radio but Air America from sea to shining sea, the bad-news-and-it’s-your-fault radio network. Some girl in Salt Lake fell and skinned her knee, the American people and their past leaders had failed her, past leaders meaning him, Willie Boy, Elvis, the Big Him. Like he should have installed marshmallow sidewalks or given away bubble wrap pants. He absently rubbed the I’m Sorry button in his lapel. Well, he might be wearing the button, but he wasn’t sorry. . . .

Not that his job as Heartland Ambassador didn’t carry some risks. He patted his ample belly. Getting pretty jowly too. He had put on over 30 pounds since his appointment. Seems like every group he talked to served nothing but barbeque, mashed potatoes, and peach cobbler — his three favorite food groups. His cholesterol spiked higher every day, while the president and First Lady stayed sleek as minks, never missing a chance to flaunt themselves at the “Fat is More Dangerous than Terrorism” rallies that Nancy Pelosi organized. Which, as White House press secretary Chris Mathews put it, effectively made Bill the new Osama bin Laden. Ha ha. . . .

He pulled out his I-Phone, tried to catch Limbaugh’s latest on the web, but the new NASA filters were blocking it out. Dangit, he missed Rush. One time, Hillary had walked in on him in the Oval Office — no, not that time — and caught him listening to Rush. He had his feet up on the desk, smoking a stogie and just roaring as the Maha Rushy tore into the two of them. Funny stuff. If you can’t laugh at yourself . . . and, truth be told, the man was right about most of it, heck everyone knew that. Hillary though, she started screaming, why are you listening to that maniac? He tapped the ash off his cigar and turned the radio down a little as Rush took a call from Rita X. Just keeping track of the enemy, honeykins, he had said, and besides, you expect me to listen to NPR? Evidently she did.

■ For the Quote of the Day, here is Roger Clegg:

From an L.A. Times op-ed today, about why it’s racist to call Obama “elitist”: “`Elitist’ is another word for ‘arrogant,’ which is another word for ‘uppity,’ that old calumny applied to blacks who stood up for themselves.” Of course, “humble” is another word for “subservient,” which is another word for “slavish.” I guess it’s best not to say anything about Senator Obama, but isn’t ignoring someone because he’s black something that racists do, too?

Yes, it is. Are you wearing your “I’m Sorry” button, Roger?

■ The ABC moderators in last night’s Hillary-Obama 12-rounder asked somewhat tougher questions than, f’rinstance, Slick Barry faced at last week’s Associated Press annual meeting, including mirabile dictu one pointing out that, “in each instance, when the [capital gains tax] rate dropped, revenues from the tax increased; the government took in more money. And in the 1980s, when the tax was increased to 28 percent, the revenues went down.”

But Senator Obama has higher priorities than government revenues. He responded, “Well, Charlie, what I’ve said is that I would look at raising the capital gains tax for purposes of fairness.” He then proceeded to rant about how much hedge fund managers get paid. He could have shortened his answer by reciting Huey Long’s little ditty:

Every man can be a king,
Every man a millionaire.
There is money everywhere,
If only they would share!

Both candidates pledged that taxes will go up for anyone earning over $250,000 a year. That is just a tad higher than what Barack and Michelle Obama were making before book royalties for him and a big raise for her sent their fortunes skyrocketing. Let’s recall that Michelle Obama laments how hard it was to make ends meet on $240,000 a year. Yet $10,000 above that is the plateau of the idle, milkable rich.

■ I’ll take good news where I find it and thus am delighted that Barack Obama has killed federal campaign finance regulation. Since January, the Federal Election Commission has had two members and four vacancies. Without a quorum, it can’t do anything. President Bush nominated two new commissioners last year: one Democrat and one Republican, as required by law. Senator Obama has blocked a vote on the Republican, on the ground that, when he held a post in the Justice Department, he defended the constitutionality of laws requiring voters to show identification at the polls. (Having spent his political career in squeaky clean Chicago, the Senator believes that vote fraud is a myth.)

On Monday, the Democratic nominee withdrew, saying that he couldn’t wait any longer for confirmation. The Democratic Senate leader promptly announced that finding a replacement will take “several months”, which means that the FEC is all but certain to remain hors de combat until after the Presidential election.

Yes, this is a misfortune for Senator McCain, who now won’t be able to get public financing for his campaign even if he wants it. (A two-member FEC can’t release funds.) But we can hope that, instead of indulging in schadenfreude over the ironic legacy of McCain-Feingold, conservatives will decide that digging into their wallets for campaign contributions is better than four years of higher taxes at home and national humiliation abroad. And maybe President McCain will thereafter see his handiwork in a less sunny light.

■ Finally, everybody should read Michael Totten’s “Hope for Iraq’s Meanest City”, telling how, after a long, hard struggle, American and Iraqi forces have broken the mufsidun stranglehold on Fallujah. It’s not a tale of brilliant plans brilliantly executed but of persistence in the face of adversity, of learning from mistakes, trying again and never giving up – the qualities that are essential to winning any war, especially one against an enemy for whom atrocities are the weapon of choice and whose chief hope of victory lies in our unwillingness to keep going when the going isn’t smooth.

What Slick Barry Really Meant

So the wingnuts are making a big deal out of this:

You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. So it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

How silly to think that Senator Obama is condescending toward his inferiors in small town America or suggesting that religion is a bad thing to which bitter people cling! We know from the Senator’s own mouth that religion is one of the most important forces in his own life, that he supports gunowners’ rights, that he refuses to turn his back on Jeremiah Wright and others who express “antipathy to people who aren't like them” , and that he is against free trade. What he is really saying is that all of those are right and proper sentiments that everyone ought to feel. In a dystopia like the contemporary U.S. of K.K.K.A., can we be bitterer than Hillary and McCain and other typical white people?

Yes, we can!

Slick Barry: A New Clinton Moment

It’s only fair to point out that Barack Obama’s surprising statement –

Had the reverend [Jeremiah Wright] not retired, and had he not acknowledged that what he had said had deeply offended people and was inappropriate and mischaracterized what I believe is the greatness of this country, for all its flaws, then I wouldn’t have felt comfortable staying at the church.

– is ambiguous. The dexterosphere takes it to mean that two conditions were necessary for the candidate to remain affiliated with (or at least to feel comfortable at) Trinity United Church of Christ: Pastor Wright had to both retire and acknowledge that his anti-American sermons were wrong. He hasn’t done the second, so the Right accuses him of fibbing.

There is, however, an alternative interpretation, which is now the official stance of the Obama campaign: If the pastor had not retired, then, but only then, he would have had to apologize in order to remain in his famous parishioner’s good graces.

What a delightfully Clintonesque statement Slick Barry made to Barbara Walters. He has a first rate command of English rhetoric, so he must have been aware that virtually every viewer would take away the impression that the Rev. Mr. Wright had in fact “acknowledged that what he had said had deeply offended people and was inappropriate and mischaracterized what I believe is the greatness of this country”. Very few of that audience read right-of-center blogs, so the impression would have been left uncorrected. The hoped-for “take-away” was, “Obama’s preacher made some dubious statements, but he said he was sorry, so why are the Republicans making such a big deal out of it?” At the same time, the campaign had a cover story in case the media reported that Pastor Wright had not recanted: No, that bit was hypothetical, what I would have demanded of him if he were still preaching.

Of course, the cover story contradicts the tenor of the Senator’s speech last week. Its implication is that, after twenty years, he was just about to confront a man who had repeatedly maligned America, Jews and white people. But, as luck would have it, the opportunity to “turn his back” disappeared, because the demagogic clergyman slipped away into retirement. What a pity.

If that had been the overt line, nobody would have bought it. As a cover, though, it will likely work just fine. Watch how the elite media scold the “right wing” for its inability to grasp the finer nuances of Senator Obama’s language.

Barack and Taxes

In my Utopia, candidates for office would not be pressured, or allowed, to make their income tax returns public. In fact, the returns would self-destruct the day the statute of limitations ran out. I’m surprised that noisy advocates of privacy, who have cultivated the jungles of HIPAA and its ilk, never get excited about the publication of individuals’ intimate financial information (not to mention that the knowledge that one’s Form 1040 may someday wind up on the Internet cannot promote honesty in tax preparation).

Therefore, I deplore the fact that Barack Obama felt compelled to release his and his wife’s returns for the years 2000 through 2006. His demand that Hillary Clinton do the same reduces the level at which I deplore, but only slightly. Be that as it may, the documents can now be read by anybody with a Web browser, so I won’t be so highminded as to ignore them.

Almost all the commentary that I’ve seen so far has picked out the Obamas’ charitable contributions as the main point of interest, which is just silly. Generosity to section 501(c)(3) organizations may be pertinent to a candidate for sainthood, but the Presidency is a merely secular magistracy. If it were otherwise, Mitt Romney would be the odds-on favorite.

What I find fascinating is a comparison of the couple’s taxes in 2000 and 2003, that is, before and after the Bush tax cuts that Senator Obama reviles and vows to repeal.

In both years, the Obamas fell into the “rich” tier of taxpayers for whom liberals routinely evince no sympathy. Their adjusted gross income in 2000 was $240,505, in 2003 $238,327. Their itemized deductions totaled $20,281 in the earlier year, $24,030 in the later. They had one more child in 2003, adding $2,318 (after the phase-out for being high-income taxpayers) to their personal exemptions. The combined effect of lower AGI and higher deductions was that their net taxable income was almost exactly $10,000 less in 2003 than in 2000. Their income tax liability was also less – by $11,756. To put it another way, the 2001 tax reductions saved them about as much as the dance, music and sports lessons for their daughters that Mrs. Obama has bemoaned as such a costly burden. If Malia and Natasha grow up to be Broadway stars, they can thank George W. Bush, their cousin Dick Cheney and the Republican 107th Congress.

Lots of conservatives have scoffed at Michelle Obama’s tales of financial anxiety, and it’s true that her family’s income was, even before the book royalties began rolling in, far above the national average. She and Barack were the sort of people whose wealth tax hikers want to take, but I believe she speaks truthfully when she says she worried about how to get by from paycheck to paycheck. In 2000, the Obamas might be taking in gross income of $20,000 a month, but $5,000 of that went out immediately in income taxes, nearly $1,000 more to FICA/HI tax and at least the same sum in state income and sales taxes. After that, they could pay their mortgage, buy food and clothing, keep up two automobiles, pay medical expenses, repay student loans, take an occasional trip, put $20 a week on the collection tray at church, and try to save a bit toward retirement. That’s not a life of penury, but it ain’t luxury either.

When Senator Obama cheerily promises to raise taxes on “the rich”, he means on people like the Obamas of five years ago. It’s a pity he has forgotten them.

Time for Comic Relief

Enough about Barack Obama! It’s time for comedy, albeit the laughs are furnished by an Obama zealot eager to demonstrate that Hillary Clinton has “unsavory religious affiliations”, too.

According to Barbara Ehrenreich, who is, I understand, regarded by the Left as an intellectual, Bill Clinton’s life partner belongs to a “fascist-leaning” Christian group that she (Ehrenreich) portentously calls “the Family”. On the surface, it does nothing more ominous than sponsor the “blandly innocuous National Prayer Breakfast, held every February in Washington”. Behind the scenes, however, it is “the sinister heart of the international right”,

knitting together international networks of right-wing leaders, most of them ostensibly Christian. In the 1940s, The Family reached out to former and not-so-former Nazis, and its fascination with that exemplary leader, Adolf Hitler, has continued, along with ties to a whole bestiary of murderous thugs.

The plotters are exposed in a forthcoming book that sounds like a cross between None Dare Call It Conspiracy and The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk. It should be hilarious reading. Meanwhile, Miz Ehrenreich’s hyperventilations remind us of what a funhouse the Looney Left truly is.

Senator Obama’s Grandmother

The “Grandmother issue”, while perhaps intrinsically minor, may prove to be the gravest embarrassment of Barack Obama’s Presidential campaign, maybe even a decisive embarrassment. In his Philadelphia speech, he said:

I can no more disown [the Rev. Mr. Wright] than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother – a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.

That was bad enough. Disclosing the embarrassing secret of an 85-year old woman, who has told the media that she is too infirm to give interviews, and suggesting that she is a bigot – we no longer have the vocabulary. The word “cad” was invented for such conduct. (For more extended outrage, vide Melanie Phillips, “Trashing Grandma, Yet”, and hundreds of others.)

Then we see that Senator Obama’s autobiography told a different story. The book doesn’t say that Grandmother Dunham “once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street”. Rather, on one occasion her husband, just after a heated marital argument, accused her of wanting to avoid the risk of encountering an aggressive panhandler because “the fella was black”. Conceivably, though the book doesn’t say so, that incident generated an emotional fear of young black males, but her grandson is either uncandid or psychologically obtuse if he sees any comparison between that reaction and Pastor Wright’s anti-white invective.

But the worst comes today, when the candidate, perhaps thinking that he could soften the insult to “a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world”, said that her alleged wariness was just like “a typical white person”. What’s wrong with that statement?

1. On a factual level, it is untrue. Here I have a bit of personal experience. After being mugged for the third time during my residence in New York City (well before the Giuliani Renaissance), I did for a time shy away from any black man under about age 40. The impulse was subconscious and uncontrollable. It lasted for a couple of months, then faded away, never to return. Of course, I exercise prudence and don’t wander into the vicinity of people who look like hoodlums, whatever their race, but blackness in and of itself doesn’t arouse any discomfort or apprehension. I think it highly unlikely that I am, in this regard, anything other than “a typical white person”.

2. Assuming arguendo that Mrs. Dunham really did suffer the mild phobia that Senator Obama describes and that those feelings are “typical” of white Americans, can anyone regard them as worse than a venial offense? Shouldn’t a frank discussion of race relations in America have pointed out that the phobia is fully explained the high black male crime rate? The presumption of bigotry is itself bigoted.

3. The Senator’s rhetorical trope – I can no more disown Pastor Wright, who has “expressed a profoundly distorted view of this country” than I can disown my grandmother who – depends upon the grandmother’s fault being morally comparable to the preacher’s. Otherwise, the comparison falls flat. “My grandmother who gossiped about the neighbors” won’t fill the bill. Therefore, unless this skilled and highly educated orator didn’t think about what he was saying, he believes that using one’s pulpit to damn America is more or less on a level with fearing strange black males. Moreover, the “a typical white person” is guilty of the latter. The only logical conclusion is that the average, ordinary white man or woman is on a moral plane with a race-baiting demagogue.

4. We see now a couple of strange contradictions. Senator Obama professes an “unyielding faith in the decency and generosity of the American people”, yet implies that whites are mostly imbued with a racism similar to Pastor Wright’s. He also stated yesterday that it is wrong for whites to be “told that their fears about crime in urban neighborhoods are somehow prejudiced”, while today he rebukes them for those same fears. Is this a clear, analytical thinker?

If Barack Obama does not win the Democratic Presidential nomination, I’m pretty sure that historians will single out his words about Madelyn Dunham as the turning point. “Gaffe” is too pale a word.

Judging Oratory by Its Fruits

Because I believe in being fair and balanced, let me now focus on (or, one might say, cherry pick) the agreeable parts of what Senator Obama said yesterday. One paragraph stands out and has been responsible, I think, for much of the positive reaction from commentators who don’t ordinarily have much patience with left-wing sloganeering (e. g., John McWhorter, Charles Murray and, to a lesser extent, Ross Douthat [more Douthat]):

But the remarks that have caused this recent firestorm weren’t simply controversial. They weren’t simply a religious leader’s effort to speak out against perceived injustice. Instead, they expressed a profoundly distorted view of this country – a view that sees white racism as endemic, and that elevates what is wrong with America above all that we know is right with America; a view that sees the conflicts in the Middle East as rooted primarily in the actions of stalwart allies like Israel, instead of emanating from the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam.

Had the text consisted of an elaboration of that paragraph, Senator Obama would not only have been intellectually correct, but he would have done a great deal of good. He would have been saying to the black community, “Stop equating America today with Mississippi half a century ago. Stop being angry about past wrongs, and start remembering how much your white brothers and sisters have done to change racial attitudes and promote equal opportunity. Stop paralyzing yourselves by imagining that you are the victims of vast conspiracies. Stop sympathizing with tyrants who denounce your country, and start showing appreciation for our foreign allies.”

Coming from the first black candidate with a real shot at winning the Presidency, those sentiments might well have undone much of the harm that years of hatemongering by the Rev. Mr. Wright (and others) have wrought. At least, it would have become more difficult to stigmatize pro-Americanism as “middleclassedness” and “thinking white”.

One paragraph, alas, does not make a speech. Surrounding its sharp observations was a mass of soft, cushioning “context”. Tout comprehendre c’est tout pardonner, and many paragraphs were devoted to “understanding” why blacks in general, and Jeremiah Wright in particular, are justified in being angry at America, and why their anger ought to be seen in a forgiving light.

Judging by the audience reactions that Byron York sampled, the speech reinforced, instead of undermining, the attitude that blacks face a malevolent, white-dominated world. If the candidate had the intentions that the optimists attribute to him, he failed as an orator, at least with his immediate hearers. We’ll see whether he has better luck among those who read his remarks or learn about them through second hand reports. Will blacks who were inclined to agree with Pastor Wright begin criticizing the “profoundly distorted” opinions uttered from the Trinity Church pulpit? Or will they declare that white critics have traduced a prophetic truth teller?

To borrow a quotation that Senator Obama must have heard during his two decades of church attendance, “By their fruits ye shall know them.” If his Philadelphia speech bears no good fruit except praise from people who already agree with an anti-racist message, its seed will have been sown in vain.

Change, Hope, Unity and – Grievances

Barack Obama didn’t follow any of my suggestions for his “major address on racism and religion”; not that I expected him to. What he did say has drawn enthusiastic applause from people who wanted him to wash away whatever doubts may have been raised by his 20 years of close association with a racist crank. My own reaction is, I fear, rather less positive. Maybe it is churlish to say so, but the speech revealed to me, beneath a fine flow of words, an ideology that is fundamentally inconsistent with our country’s founding ideals. While Senator Obama invokes “self reliance”, he calls on us to nurture our grievances and seek redress from a government powerful enough to give us all we want.

His picture of a land of misery, oppression and squalor has never before been laid out so starkly. He describes not a nation that leads the world in prosperity and freedom, the most popular destination for emigrants, but a wasteland of “crumbling schools”, emergency rooms filled with people “who do not have health care” (one wonders what they are receiving in the ER), “shuttered mills” and “stagnant wages”. The America Senator Obama sees is wracked by cynicism, bigotry and “a corporate culture rife with inside dealing, questionable accounting practices, and short-term greed; a Washington dominated by lobbyists and special interests; economic policies that favor the few over the many”.

Senator Obama’s America is also burdened by a history so heavy and malignant that slavery, abolished 140 years ago, and Jim Crow laws, never prevalent outside one region and gone for over 40 years, still determine the fate of a majority of black Americans and instill in them a legacy of unappeased anger. He believes, or at least says, that his “mentor”, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, “came of age in the late fifties and early sixties, a time when segregation was still the law of the land and opportunity was systematically constricted”. That is an outright falsehood. Neither in Philadelphia, where Jeremiah Wright grew up, nor in most of the rest of the United States, was segregation then “the law of the land”, and, while opportunities for blacks were less abundant than they are today, no one was constricting them “systematically”. This was, after all, the period when an all-white Supreme Court held that segregated schools were unconstitutional, and an overwhelmingly white Congress passed the Civil Rights Acts of 1957, 1964 and 1965 with huge bipartisan majorities. Uninterested in any kind of balanced view, Senator Obama sounds exactly like a classic European nationalist, decrying the historic ills inflicted upon his own volk, blaming all of their problems on the crimes of others, denying that anyone has ever done them a good turn, and implicitly justifying a mood of revanchism.

So far, the Senator follows Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. His novel, and politically clever, move is to invite people of every race and ethnicity to join the grievance parade. White conservatives, he informs us, support welfare reform, anti-crime initiatives and racial neutrality in hiring and education not because they believe those policies to be good for all Americans, but out of “resentment” of efforts that have been made to help blacks.

Like the anger within the black community, these resentments aren’t always expressed in polite company. But they have helped shape the political landscape for at least a generation. Anger over welfare and affirmative action helped forge the Reagan Coalition. Politicians routinely exploited fears of crime for their own electoral ends. Talk show hosts and conservative commentators built entire careers unmasking bogus claims of racism while dismissing legitimate discussions of racial injustice and inequality as mere political correctness or reverse racism.

The opening paragraphs of the speech praised “a Constitution that had at is very core the ideal of equal citizenship under the law; a Constitution that promised its people liberty, and justice, and a union that could be and should be perfected over time”. Yet the ensuing summary of America’s unsatisfactory past and dismal present suggests that fidelity to the Constitution’s ideals has been the possession of only a small minority, which has extracted homeopathic doses of liberty and justice from the majority “through protests and struggle, on the streets and in the courts, through a civil war and civil disobedience and always at great risk”. It’s no surprise that he finds little decency in the majority of his countrymen throughout the majority of our history. If practically everyone is motivated by anger or resentment, what is to be expected?

Now that it has been established that subrational emotions stand in the way of perfecting the Union envisioned by the Constitution, one might expect to hear a plea for putting anger and resentment aside. But Senator Obama calls for the opposite: channeling them toward different enemies, toward the shadowy powers that oppress us all (apparently without being part of “us”) and, once the “special interests” are overthrown, enacting governmental programs that will provide quality education, abundant health care, high paying jobs and all the other desirable things. Missing is an iota of confidence in the creative powers of free individuals or any recognition that the areas where complaints about the status quo are most justified, such as education and health care, are where the government’s hand is already most heavily felt.

Ultimately, according to Senator Obama, the key difference between Jeremiah Wright and himself is simply that the pastor sees a “static” world, rather than one where a sense of grievance can unite Americans to effect change. The clergyman’s diagnosis is correct: This is a racist society governed by a malevolent power elite. But he doesn’t realize that a doctor and a cure have been found. The doctor is Barack Obama. The cure is bigger and better government.

Other reactions: Investor’s Business Daily, “Obama Merely Changes the Subject”
Mickey Kaus, “Can’t We Ignore Race? Please?”
Victor Davis Hanson, “An Elegant Farce”
Stanley Kurtz, “MoveOn MoveIn”
NRO Symposium, “Philadelphia Story: Obama on Race
Byron York, “Obama and His Audience”
The Wall Street Journal, “Discovering Obama
Rand Simberg, “Will Obama Be a Genius?”
James Taranto, “Obama and His ‘White Grandmother’”

And more: Thomas Sowell, “Wright Bound”
Dean Barnett, “Obama the Ditherer”
Jonah Goldberg, “Yesterday’s Baggage”
Michael Meyers, “Obama Blew It”
Peter Wehner, “The Wright Stand”
Charles Krauthammer, “Justifying a Scandalous Dereliction”

What Senator Obama Could Say

I understand that the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s best known parishioner will deliver “a major address on race and religion” tomorrow. I’m probably not his target audience, but here are some statements he could make to demonstrate that his mentalité is not at all like that of his “mentor”:

• “Over the past several years, and particularly since the tragic events of 9/11, many members of Trinity, including myself, have been gravely concerned about Pastor Wright’s anti-white and anti-American rhetoric. That is why we worked behind to compel his early retirement and his replacement by Pastor Otis Mills, who firmly repudiates any and all claims that America is to this day an unjust and racist society.”
• “When I was a confused young man, unsure of my identity, Pastor Wright’s hyperbole attracted me. I came to realize, however, that the attraction was a dangerous fraud. Therefore, I have repeated urged the pastor to embrace the loving spirit of Martin Luther King, who followed Jesus’s admonition to love our neighbors, even those neighbors with whom we have sharp disagreements, as ourselves. Jesus loved Samaritans and tax collectors. There is no scope for us to hate any of our fellow Americans. I am sorry that my words had so little visible effect on Pastor Wright, but I pray that in time they will.”
• “At one time it was possible for me to nod when others charged my country with racism and oppression. I was, I am afraid, a brain-dead radical. Then came the horror of September 11, 2001, and I realized that the faults of America shrink to insignificance next to the crimes of the terrorists who have attacked us. Since then, I have devoted my every effort to calling every American, whatever his color, whatever his religion or ethnic background, to unite around our common values and overcome the forces of cynicism and hatred that would tear us apart. While doing that, I confess that I have paid too little attention to my own backyard. Pastor Wright, I am saddened to say, has made unwarranted attacks that contradict everything my message is intended to convey. For that reason, I have today withdrawn from membership in Trinity United Church of Christ. Until and unless the church’s leadership completely changes course and, in particular, renounces the racist theology that Pastor Wright has endorsed, I shall not return.”
• “For twenty years I have been a blind fool and have been a passive but willing accomplice to sin. It is presumptuous of me to seek the most powerful office in the world before purging myself of these profound failures of good judgment. Today I announce that I am abandoning my campaign and resigning my Senate seat. I have volunteered for the United Church of Christ’s mission to Africa, where I hope, through service to God in Jesus’ s name to atone for having fostered hatred and division. Whether I will return to public service at some future time is in God’s hands.”

We shall see.

Further reading: Shelby Steele, “The Obama Bargain”
Thomas Sowell, “Double Life of Barack Obama”

The Two Obamas

When the Rev. Jeremiah Wright came to the reluctant attention of the elite media (Mrs. Clinton’s flacks are still earning their keep, even if they have to work harder these days), my first thought was that there are probably a hundred conservative Congressmen whose ministers preach Loony Left sermons on a regular basis. What David Mamet terms “brain-dead liberalism” is the default political stance for contemporary Christian leaders. From what clerical acquaintances tell me, it’s no easier to be a Republican at a church conference than in Hollywood.

Upon closer examination, the Rev. Mr. Wright’s looniness appears to be more conscious and ingrained than the average Protestant clergyman’s. “God damn America”, sympathy for Saddam Hussein and Muammar Qaddafi, declarations that America deserved 9/11 and dark hints that its government created the AIDS virus go a bit beyond what one ordinarily hears from the pulpits of the Religious Left. A sympathetic profile published last year in the Chicago Tribune emphasized how far Pastor Wright’s Trinity United Church of Christ is to the left of both a generally very leftish denomination and other black Protestant churches. The Wright ministry began with a political stance and shaped a theology around it. It metastasized into a lesson in why that is the wrong order of priorities. The political starting point, a call for full civil rights for black Americans, was admirable, but putting politics first led to a spurious distinction between “African” and “white” Christianity and eventually to the demonization of white America, “the U.S. of KKK A”.

That a leading Presidential candidate finds such a figure attractive ought to be a cause for worry. It would be a different matter if Pastor Wright were primarily a spiritual counselor. Many men who are wise, even saintly, in the affairs of God have talked foolishly about mundane politics. In the Orthodox Church, we have examples like St. John of Kronstadt, an inspiring preacher, organizer of charitable enterprises and member of the Black Hundred. But Fr. John was a secular naïf, to whom the Cross, the Holy Sacraments and a life of prayer were vastly more important than the City of Man. Jeremiah Wright is the opposite, so far as we can judge by appearances. (I make no judgement about what is in his heart and wish him nothing but the peace and mercy of Our Lord.)

If Barack Obama were a private citizen, or merely one percent of the United States Senate, his close association with Trinity UCC – praise for his “mentor” Pastor Wright, 20 years of active membership, sizeable donations – would be more a personal than a political matter. If he concurred in his church’s radically racist and anti-American ideology, his sentiments could do only minimal harm and would (rightly) be shielded from close scrutiny by our reluctance to pry into other people’s religious beliefs.

The President is on a different plane. One holding Pastor Wright’s views could do immense damage to the country. Am I convinced that Senator Obama sings “God damn America” in the shower? Certainly not. I wouldn’t rate the likelihood as high as 50 percent. On the other hand, it can’t help being significantly above zero, especially after we factor Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn, Michelle Obama and Tony Rezko into the equation. That friends and ideological soul mates describe the Senator as “most comfortable in the domain of policy and detail” is reassuring only to those who forget that policy wonks can be extremists, too.

Which is the real Obama? The transcender of racial divisions or the faithful acolyte of a radical hatemonger? How much of a chance can we take on getting the answer right?

Democrats and liberals decried George W. Bush’s “risky schemes” (tax cuts, Social Security reform, etc.), urge the “precautionary principle” as the only guide to environmental policy, and express fear that civil liberties will collapse if telecommunications companies can cooperate with government surveillance without a risk of liability. Men of such timid mien really ought to hesitate before gambling their nation on the hope that Barack Obama’s affinity with Pastor Wright is only accidental rather than elective.

The same question would arise if a Christian Reconstructionist were to become a leading Presidential candidate. Could someone who called R. J. Rushdoony or Gary North his mentor, worshiped with Reconstructionists, and gave money to the Chalcedon Foundation reassure us of his non-radicalism by the simple tactic of likening Reconstructionist opinions to those of an eccentric uncle and claiming not to be aware of the most outrageous ones? The fellow might indeed be an utter innocent, attracted solely by postmillennialism and theological explorations of the relation between the Old and New Testaments, with no desire to outlaw heresy or stone adulterers. Nonetheless, it would be elementary prudence, not “guilt by association”, not to make him the most powerful person on Earth.

Democrats Discover Vote Fraud

For years, Democratic politicians have insisted that worries over fraudulent ballots are a right-wing myth and that the only purpose of security measures is to “suppress voter turnout”. Now it looks increasingly likely that Florida or Michigan will restage their Democratic primaries. The only affordable way to do that, since the states are unlikely to pay for the process, is an all-mail election. Suddenly, the Wall Street Journal’s Political Diary (free this week, normally a mere $3.95/month) notes, some Dems sound a lot like worrywart, vote-suppressing Republicans:

Senator Carl Levin of Michigan told ABC News that there is a “security issue” with a mail-in ballot. “How do you make sure that hundreds of thousands, perhaps a million or more ballots can be properly counted and that duplicate ballots can be avoided?” Mr. Levin has vivid memories of how absentee ballots have routinely been abused in Detroit and other cities by unscrupulous candidates.

In Florida, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Miami has her own issues with a mail-in ballot. “It’s fraught with problems and now is not the time to be experimenting when we’re talking about stakes this high,” she says. “We still have very raw nerves from the 2000 recount.”

Senator Levin and Rep. Schultz might also wish to ponder how easy it will be, in a race that has been marked by feverish emotions and a soupçon of violence, for over-the-top backers of either candidate to threaten or bribe. The insoluble “security issue” is the absence of any way to guarantee that ballots will be secret.

Let me confess that I’ll come near to bursting with glee if the Florida Supreme Court has to resolve Clinton v. Obama. Even if that never happens, it is enlightening to hear about Senator Levin’s “vivid memories of how absentee ballots have routinely been abused in Detroit and other cities by unscrupulous candidates”. Perhaps those memories will stick with him the next time a bill to crack down on vote fraud appears on the Congressional agenda?

What the Economy Needs Now

After a delightful day of Spitzenfreude, abetted by a Fed attempt to cushion the landing for overstretched lenders, the stock market has wandered back to its downward track. It ought by now to be obvious to the meanest intellect that pushing on the money supply string will not alleviate what may be a recession and is unquestionably a slowdown. Nor is there much hope that the $600 stimulus handout will have more than a slight ripple of impact. What, then, is to be done?

First let’s ask, what’s wrong? Why have animal spirits so conspicuously deserted our country’s entrepreneurial class? The economy doesn’t run on subprime mortgages, and the rising prices of oil and other commodities are less a cause of economic ills than an effect of Dr. Bernanke’s remedies. Maybe the reason for the developing malaise is the one in plain sight: that next year threatens to bring huge increases in taxes and government spending. That’s what both Democratic Presidential candidates advocate and the House Democratic budget proposal would lock into place. The Heritage Foundation has put together a chart of the costs. Liberals won’t mind the tax hikes and will doubt Heritage’s projections of job and income losses, but the folks who invest and create jobs have good reason to be worried, and very, very cautious.

The great macroeconomic lesson of the past three decades is that lowering taxes, as under Presidents Reagan and Bush fils, or keeping government spending under control, as resulted from the Clinton-GOP standoff, promotes prosperity. Doing neither (Carter, Bush père and the first two Clinton years) has the opposite effect. The Democratic Party is now committed to neither-squared.

The present moment, before recession takes hold, is the ideal time for tax cuts. It is a just a bit earlier in the cycle than the 2001 cuts that lifted the economy out of the late-term Clinton recession; there’s no reason to think that waiting a few months will be beneficial. Unhappily, as the Wall Street Journal gloomily opined last week,

Those jobs numbers suggest that first quarter economic growth will be meager, if not negative. We’d like to offer some policy remedy, but the politicians already think they’ve done their part with their “stimulus” rebates set to land in voter pockets this summer. But at best this will provide a temporary fillip to consumer spending. A tax cut aimed at lifting incentives to invest has no major backers -- which is another reason to worry.

That means everyone is putting all of their hopes on the Fed and easier money. This is a dangerous way to live. This expectation is weakening the dollar and thus lifting dollar-denominated prices, especially in commodities. Rising food and energy prices, in turn, are stealing much of the discretionary income from the very consumers the rebate checks are supposed to motivate to spend more.

But I have a hopeful thought. If the impediment to economic activity is the prospect of a tax and spending avalanche, whatever makes that prospect more remote will have the effect of a dose of real economic stimulus. Therefore, an unambiguous Republican commitment to making the 2001 tax cuts permanent and reducing nondefense spending growth to no more than the rate of increase of the GDP (preferably a little less) can, all by itself, reduce the chances of a long or painful contraction. Naturally, this strategy will work only if businessmen think that the commitment is sincere, a matter than Senator McCain and other Republican candidates must attend to. Nonetheless, as an instance of combining personal and public interest, it has few peers and offers a hope of limiting the damage that the Reid-Pelosi duo can inflict on the rest of us.

Another Restrictionist Loses

Yesterday, the Republicans lost the Congressional seat in Illinois’ 14th District, an area that probably hasn’t gone Democratic since Abe Lincoln was a babe in arms. This is, of course, a difficult year for the GOP, but one factor leaps out in this particular race. The Republican candidate, a rich and so far unsuccessful political dilettante named Jim Oberweis, built much of his campaign around the allegedly urgent need to restrict immigration. In the minds of the restrictionists, that’s the issue that will fire up the demoralized Republican “base” and offset the Democrats’ fervor for defeat in Iraq. It didn’t work that way. Like its cousin protectionism, immigration restrictionism polls well, but for some reason its supporters are like the famous “Obama girl”; they talk loudly but never get around to casting votes.

Further reading: The Wall Street Journal, “Lose and Learn”:

Republicans such as Mr. Oberweis remain convinced that illegal immigration is a winning issue. And if the electorate were comprised mostly of Internet screechers and cable news anchors, they might be right. But the fact that Mr. McCain, the Presidential candidate most closely associated with immigration tolerance, has outlasted Mitt Romney, Rudy Giuliani, Mike Huckabee and other immigration hardliners, should be an indication that other issues are foremost in the minds of even GOP voters.

The Best Reason Not to Elect Slick Barry

Michelle Obama is 44 years old. If Barack Obama is elected President, serves for two terms and doesn’t depart the office with a reputation of Jimmy Carter-like proportions, Mrs. Obama, only 52 at that point, will have little trouble stepping into the Senate seat her husband once held and thereafter following in the footsteps of Hillary Rodham Clinton. Judging by what was intended as a puff piece in the New Yorker (summarized and dissected by Jim Geraghty), her whining dyspepsia and self-righteous victimhood will make us look back on the Tin Lady with fond nostalgia.

The four times I heard her give the speech—in a ballroom at the University of South Carolina, from the pulpit of Pee Dee Union, at an art gallery in Charleston, and in the auditorium of St. Norbert College, in De Pere, Wisconsin—its content was admirably consistent, with few of the politician’s customary tweaks and nods to the demographic predilections, or prejudices, of a particular audience.

Obama begins with a broad assessment of life in America in 2008, and life is not good: we’re a divided country, we’re a country that is “just downright mean,” we are “guided by fear,” we’re a nation of cynics, sloths, and complacents. “We have become a nation of struggling folks who are barely making it every day,” she said, as heads bobbed in the pews. “Folks are just jammed up, and it’s gotten worse over my lifetime. And, doggone it, I’m young. Forty-four!”

From these bleak generalities, Obama moves into specific complaints. Used to be, she will say, that you could count on a decent education in the neighborhood. But now there are all these charter schools and magnet schools that you have to “finagle” to get into. (Obama herself attended a magnet school, but never mind.) Health care is out of reach (“Let me tell you, don’t get sick in America”), pensions are disappearing, college is too expensive, and even if you can figure out a way to go to college you won’t be able to recoup the cost of the degree in many of the professions for which you needed it in the first place. “You’re looking at a young couple that’s just a few years out of debt,” Obama said. “See, because, we went to those good schools, and we didn’t have trust funds. I’m still waiting for Barack’s trust fund. Especially after I heard that Dick Cheney was s’posed to be a relative or something. Give us something here!”

BTW, Dick Cheney’s father was a soil conservation agent for the Department of Agriculture, not exactly a “trust fund” background.

First Ladies have traditionally gravitated toward happy topics like roadside flower beds, so it comes as a surprise that Obama’s speech is such an unrelenting downer. Obama acknowledged to me that some advisers have lobbied her to take a sunnier tone, with little success. “For me,” she said, “you can talk about policies and plans and experience and all that. We usually get bogged down in that in a Presidential campaign, over the stuff that I think doesn’t matter. . . . I mean, I guess I could go into Barack’s policies and rattle them off. But that’s what he’s for.” In Cheraw, Obama belittled the idea that the Clinton years were ones of opportunity and prosperity: “The life that I’m talking about that most people are living has gotten progressively worse since I was a little girl. . . . So if you want to pretend like there was some point over the last couple of decades when your lives were easy, I want to meet you!”

How long do we want to have to listen to that? There are other reasons not to vote for Barack Obama, but this one, to my mind, will suffice.

Another Obamanian Inexactitude

Maybe it was inevitable that, once the Obama campaign had been caught in one verbal inexactitude (“NAFTAquiddick”), other instances would sprout like weeds. Jeffrey Lord presents another. His article is over-long and overwrought, so let me boil it down to the interesting facts.

On June 23, 2007, Senator Obama delivered an address to the annual meeting of the General Synod of the United Church of Christ. The church’s Web site announced the event thus:

Obama’s Synod speech will be his “first major address on faith and politics as presidential candidate.”

Joshua DuBois, the Obama campaign’s director of religious affairs, said the senator’s Synod speech on Saturday will be his first major address on faith and politics as a presidential candidate. The address, DuBois said, will combine personal details about Obama’s religious experiences with prescriptions for how religious Americans might put their faith into action.

The speech itself included passages like this one:

It’s been several months now since I announced I was running for president. In that time, I’ve had the chance to talk with Americans all across this country. And I’ve found that no matter where I am, or who I’m talking to, there’s a common theme that emerges. It’s that folks are hungry for change – they’re hungry for something new. They’re ready to turn the page on the old politics and the old policies – whether it’s the war in Iraq or the health care crisis we’re in, or a school system that’s leaving too many kids behind despite the slogans.

And this:

I have made a solemn pledge that I will sign a universal health care bill into law by the end of my first term as president that will cover every American and cut the cost of a typical family’s premiums by up to $2,500 a year.

Nothing remarkable there. He’s doubtless uttered the same words from hundreds of stumps. Nor was it remarkable that Obama campaign workers manned tables at the entrance to the convention center where he was speaking. Unfortunately, the IRS became interested in whether the UCC, by hosting a campaign event by a Presidential candidate, had violated the conditions for its tax-exempt status.

It will be a surprise if the UCC suffers any adverse consequences beyond a stern admonition, though its legal fees have apparently been painfully large. What is not, alas, a surprise is how the Obama campaign responded – by denying the obvious:

Amy Brundage, an Obama spokeswoman, insisted that the speech was not a campaign event. In the address, Obama spoke about his personal spiritual journey and had said that faith had been misused in the past to divide Americans, partly because of the Christian right.

A nationalized health care bill is part of a “personal spiritual journey”?

The moment was, of course, embarrassing for the campaign, since it and the UCC had been trapped by absurd rules that try to purify churches from all political activity (and are most often used against “conservative” denominations). But the best reaction to embarrassment is honesty, or at least silence, not Clintonian discourse.

The Audacity of Evasion

Glancing at the Internet during my lunch break, I see that Byron York is listening to an Obama campaign conference call, in which the Senator’s campaign manager first declares, regarding the now-famous Goolsbee-Rioux tête à tête, “This conversation has been discredited by the Canadian government, it has been discredited by our campaign, it is a conversation that simply did not happen.”

Then, perhaps realizing that the nonexistent conversation was memorialized contemporaneously by the Canadian participant, he explains what “not” means:

He concedes that Goolsbee did talk to someone in the Canadian government, but insists the two were “essentially having some casual conversation, and the reports of the conversation are simply not accurate.” Plouffe says Goolsbee was not speaking as a representative of the Obama campaign and that allegations that “somehow this was an official meeting” are not true.

“This is just a conversation that did not happen in terms of any suggestion of softening of [Sen. Obama’s] position,” Plouffe said. “This was not a formal conversation. It was not a request that came through the campaign…It was not a discussion with the Canadian government about Sen. Obama’s position on NAFTA.”

So it doesn’t matter whether Senator Obama’s top economic advisor thinks his candidate is disingenuous on trade issues? So long as that sentiment is not officially conveyed to the “president” of Canada, reports about it are “discredited”?

Professor Goolsbee, incidentally, has his own Clintonesque take (in the article linked above) on what he really told the Canadians. “He said he responded [when asked about protectionism] that Obama is not a protectionist, but that the Illinois senator tries to strike a balance between the economic struggles of working Americans and recognizing that free trade is good for the economy.” That is, of course, a standard bit of protectionist evasion. If Prof. Goolsbee had really uttered it, his interlocutor’s account would have sounded loud notes of alarm, not purred reassuringly “that this messaging should not be taken out of context and should be viewed as more about political positioning than a clear articulation of policy plans”.

Further reading: Lee Cary, “Obama’s Language Games”

Also fascinating is this insight into what Mr. Obama said he believed before he became a Senator.

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.”

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?”

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.

Obama’s Retrograde Future

The appealing element in Barack Obama’s oratory is his call for putting aside the obsolescent quarrels of the past. Plenty of Americans are unhappy with the increasing bitterness of national politics and frustrated by the political class’s rote invocation of tired nostrums. Senator Obama tells us that he wants to soar above all of that. As often happens, however, there is some incongruity between rhetoric and reality:

Last night during the State of the Union address, Barack Obama sat next to liberal lion Ted Kennedy who had endorsed him earlier in the day. The seating arrangement highlighted the merger of Camelot and Obama. . . .

The Kennedy/Obama merger surely has energized a bunch of wheezing Baby Boom gasbags who never cease pining for a return to the glory days of their past. But precisely therein lies the problem. Obama is putting forth a new kind of politics, and yet is oddly wallowing in the imprimatur bestowed on him from one of the dinosaurs of the past. Obama preaches a politics of national unity, while there hasn’t been a more deliberately divisive political leader (not named Clinton) than Ted Kennedy over the past forty years. . . .

Without exaggeration, Ted Kennedy's style of liberalism was exhausted while Obama was still in high school. What's more, Kennedy has always made a less-than-entirely reputable champion for his brand of politics. One of the exciting things about the Obama campaign is the way it offers hope that a new kind of politics might emerge. It's hard to see how Obama benefits by embracing the worst of the old kind of politics that so much of the country is so eager to leave behind.

Has Senator Obama ever interspersed his exaltation of “change” and denunciation of “cynicism” with a single idea that wasn’t a tired liberal cliche? Has he extended – I won’t ask for a hand; how about a finger? – to the opponents whom his party has demonized since the beginning of the Clinton Administration? Has he said a negative word about Bush Derangement Syndrome? Stood just once against the tide of Democratic partisanship? Consulted with any policy analysts who don’t come from well to the left of center?

Talking about a “new politics” is easy. The phrases trip off the tongue. But didn’t there used to be a line about “walking the walk”?

Quote of the Day

One of Mark Steyn’s readers submits an “all-purpose stump speech for this primary season”:

My friends, we live in the greatest nation in the history of the world. I hope you’ll join with me as we try to change it.

The Candidates We Have

With the easy option of Fred Thompson gone, I suppose that I must ponder the relative merits of Messrs. Giuliani, McCain and Romney.

The Democratic contenders are out of the question. One is nice guy but short on experience and conventionally left-wing. He also needs to get much further away from his days of being buddies with the likes of Tony Rezko. There are occasional signs that he may develop into a different kind of Democrat, but right now that is all hope and potential, not reality.

The other two Democrats left in contention (one only barely, I realize) represent a “small and angry fringe” (to borrow a term that the New York Times, in a revealing burst of psychological projection, applies to President Bush). Even if I agreed with their policy positions, I wouldn’t want either in a position to thwart the “conspiracies” of her or his abundant “enemies”.

Anyway, regardless of their personal qualities, all three Dems promise higher taxes, more government spending, energy policies that discourage production, a surge of racial and sexual preferences, and a suspicious attitude toward freedom of speech. Most importantly, none of them shows much interest in the continuing war against Islamofascism. The last bout of insouciance, during the administration of the Tin Lady’s husband, led to 9/11. Why should we expect the next to have a happier outcome?

It would be pleasant to be able to declare that one of the Republican candidates was ideal, but the political world isn’t the realm of the ideal. Ronald Reagan was a principled, thoughtful, capable, eloquent and likable conservative. One can’t give full marks in every category to many other men, past or present. As someone has inevitably said, you go into an election with the candidates you have.

So we have a field of two lightweights and three middleweights. To dismiss the former first, Mike Huckabee is the Republican Barack Obama: pleasant, intelligent, full of potential, but quite out of his shallows and a bit too close to a corrupt political culture. Ron Paul is our Dennis Kucinich, without the flying saucers but with the dubious background in conspiracy theorizing fever swamps. It’s amusing to see his fans, such as poor, demented Andrew Sullivan and the usually non-demented John Derbyshire, straining to excuse or explain away his paper trail of racist, antisemitic and simply nutty effusions. If libertarians would shut Rep. Paul away in the cellar where conservatives keep the John Birch Society and Pat Buchanan’s rag, their movement would have a future. One of the hardest and most essential tasks in politics is to divest oneself of crazy allies. Neither libertarianism nor liberalism is doing a good job on that score.

That brings us to the three GOP front runners, one of whom will, barring a tidal wave, be nominated for President in Minneapolis seven months from now. Commentary in the dexterosphere has concentrated on their shortcomings. “None of the above” is not, however, an option. Moreover, many criticisms center on areas where the President can’t do much (abortion and same-sex marriage, for instance) or will have to row upriver to depart from his party’s consensus (e. g., immigration). We need to look most closely at the areas of maximum Presidential autonomy – foreign policy, economic policy and judicial appointments – as well as, of course, electability, without which the most sterling Presidential qualities will be wasted.

Let’s start with the last, where many commentators make an elementary mistake: They look at polls matching this Republican against that Democrat today and project them to next November, declaring, for example, that John McCain is the strongest GOP prospect because he currently matches up best (or least badly) against Senator Obama or Mrs. Bill Clinton. Does no one recall the February polls from elections past, the ones that showed Ronald Reagan hopelessly behind Jimmy Carter or Mike Dukakis overwhelming George Bush père? Except in the marginal and obvious cases, polls at this point measure transient breezes of sentiment and familiarity with the candidates. They tell us almost nothing more.

Instead of relying on surveys indicating what the candidates look like now, let’s consider how they’ll appear after their strengths and weaknesses have been hashed over for several months. Bear in mind that the Tin Lady will certainly repeat her husband’s 1996 tactic of early and intense negative advertising. If Senator McCain is her opponent, the negative themes are obvious: age, temperament and Liberty Savings & Loan. The picture of a man of the past – a bit out of touch, a bit too hair-triggered, a bit too gullible to slick operators – will be easy to paint. It would, in fact, not be a lot different from the caricature of Bob Dole that worked so well for Bill Clinton.

The attacks that can be crafted against Rudy Giuliani or Mitt Romney are not insubstantial but are, on the whole, less compelling. The mayor has led a colorful life, and the Left has a litany of denunciations of his governance of New York City. The governor is a Mormon, a successful businessman (which means that he has taken actions that can be portrayed as “heartless”) and a “flip-flopper”.

While there’s a danger that those messages will sink in, they differ from the anti-McCain shibboleths in a crucial respect: They can’t help but give an opening for counter-messages. Hillary Clinton’s biography is as spotted as Rudy Giuliani’s, and his failings are venial sins of appetite with no taint of corruption (no quick cattle future profits, no “lost” billing records, no Whitewater). His record as mayor is widely admired; it’s hard to cavil at the man who cleaned up Times Square and suppressed the squeegee guys. As for Governor Romney, innuendos centered on religion and wealth have never worked well in American politics, and his changes of position have been quite gradual and unspectacular compared to the Tin Lady’s Iraqi somersault.

Moreover, both Giuliani and Romney have won races in very liberal electorates, which implies some talent for campaigning, more perhaps than it takes to win as a right-of-center Republican in Arizona. Weighing negatives and positives, I think that either or them will run more strongly than McCain.

The next question is, assuming that they can be elected, how well can we expect each of them to perform as President?

On foreign policy, there is little difference in expressed positions. The most important exception is Senator McCain’s tendency to conceive of the War on Terror in primarily military terms. He thus is willing to hamper intelligence gathering efforts by taking an ACLU-ish view of the human rights of captured terrorists. I worry that “lawfare” will blossom on his watch.

Governor Romney has said the right things about the war, but softly and perhaps reticently. One wonders how strong his opinions really are, and how readily they might be influenced by the bureaucracy’s phalanx of pacifist-minded “experts”.

Mayor Giuliani is clearly the best acquainted with foreign policy issues, most opinionated (in the right way) and the most likely to listen to sound advice. He also has experience at circumventing or overruling out-of-sympathy bureaucrats. One can’t be certain, naturally, but I’m willing to take a chance that a Giuliani Administration would be persistent and consistent in confronting our enemies and succoring our friends. My expectations for his rivals are decidedly more mixed.

On economic matters, Senator McCain is again the outlier. Yes, he now backs the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, but he didn’t when he had a chance to vote on them, and his objections were much like those that Democrats make to tax cuts: They “help the wealthy” and “increase the deficit”. He may no longer believe that. Nonetheless, his persuasiveness as an advocate of making the cuts permanent is open to doubt. Elsewhere, it looks like he won’t so much as argue for conservative alternatives to the liberal orthodoxy. On global warming, expanded oil drilling and the supposed evils of pharmaceutical companies, he sounds a lot like John Edwards.

There isn’t, to my eye, a lot to distinguish the Giuliani from the Romney economic program. Governor Romney doubtless has a deeper understanding of the subject, which might enable him to argue his policy’s merits more persuasively (or might just make him incomprehensible to laymen).

Finally, judicial appointments are a vital consideration. The next President will almost certainly name at least two Supreme Court Justices. Justice Stevens is nearly 90; Justice Ginsburg is 75 and infirm; Justices Kennedy and Scalia have entered their 70’s, and Justice Souter soon will. There are also more than the usual number of vacancies in the lower courts. In an ideal world, judges wouldn’t be society’s decision makers, and who they were would be a secondary election issue. That isn’t the world we live in.

All three Republican candidates promise the same thing: the appointment of “strict constructionists” in the mold of Justices Scalia, Thomas, Roberts and Alito. History demonstrates, though, that good intentions aren’t enough. Without a first rate judicial vetting operation, such as President Reagan had, right-of-center Presidents find themselves responsible for Earl Warrens, William Brennans and David Souters. (Even first rate screening can produce an Anthony Kennedy; there are no sure things.) The best Presidential candidate is the one who best understands this truth. I can’t evaluate them on that score, but it is certainly a point in Rudy Giuliani’s favor that his leading advisor on legal issues is Reagan veteran Theodore Olson.

Those are my thoughts so far. I suppose that they lean toward Rudy, but the Illinois primary is still a couple of weeks off, and I don’t yet have to make up my mind. We’ll see whether further cogitation has any effect.

Bye-ku for Dennis Kucinich

Why should Taranto have a monopoly on this exercise?

He could have gone far
if that saucer had landed
little green voters.

Isn’t it an odd coincidence that the two candidates with cute wives dropped out within a few days of each other?

Against Malaise

James Taranto’s bye-ku for Fred Thompson was, uncharacteristically, neither gracious nor funny. (Contrast his send-off for Duncan Hunter.) Though I’m no pro at this game, let me suggest,

“I’m running,” Fred said,
and conservatives tingled,
but he only walked.

Senator Thompson’s withdrawal will no doubt deepen the malaise that seems to be spreading on the Right. Self-criticism is no vice. On the other hand, self-pitying gloom is no virtue. Most of today’s conservatives can’t remember the days when things looked truly hopeless, nor what we did about it.

We now think of Barry Goldwater’s run for the Presidency as the springboard of modern conservatism, and in many ways it was. Yet the Right’s prospects were, by any objective measure, far worse in its aftermath than they are today. The Republican Party was a remnant in both Houses of Congress, and conservatives were far from dominant within that minority. Leading GOP Senators included such figures as Tom Kuchel, Clifford Case, Jacob Javits, Kenneth Keating and Hugh Scott. After the legendary Everett Dirksen’s death, Senator Scott succeeded as minority leader. The desperate straits of the conservative contingent are shown by the fact that its candidate was Howard Baker.

Four years after the Goldwater defeat, the three leading candidates for the Republican Presidential nomination came from the party’s center-left: Richard Nixon, George Romney and Nelson Rockefeller. Ronald Reagan was trounced in every primary he entered (21% in Nebraska, 20% in Oregon, 10% in Wisconsin).

How did conservatism recover? If it had followed the path that many of its leading lights recommend now, we would have looked for principles to jettison and gimmicks to adopt, on the assumption that traditional right-wing views had proven permanently unattractive. Instead, the conservatives of the day concentrated on developing and expounding their “discredited” opinions. New ideas, most notably supply side economics, turned up, but not among those who were most frantic to remodel the old ideology.

If the American public decides that it wants to offer limp resistance to Islamofascism, raise taxes, expand entitlements, ignore the long-term financial problems of Social Security and Medicare, watch passively as the marriage and the family fade away, put more decision making authority int the hands of activist judges and liberal bureaucrats, and solidify a spoils system based on race and gender, it won’t be because some historical force has rendered opposition futile. There’s nothing compelling about the retrograde progressivism of the Democratic Party. If it prevails, the blame will go primarily to the navel-gazing and backbiting on our side of the spectrum.