Michael Barone

More on the election's impact on the health care vote

As I noted Wednesday, Republican governor candidate Bob McDonnell won 62%, 61% and 55% of the vote in the three Virginia congressional districts in which a Democrats Glenn Nye, Tom Perriello and Gerry Connally, replaced Republicans in 2008, and McDonnell won 67% in the 9th district long represented by senior Democrat Rick Boucher. That’s got to make the health care vote a painful one for Nye, Perriello, Connally and Boucher. Looking at the http://www.nj.com/politics/map/ New Jersey returns by city, borough and township, I see that 3rd district Democrat John Adler, elected to replace a retiring Republican in 2008, faces the same situation, with his district clearly voting for...

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More thoughts on the oddyear election

In an opinion article in the Wall Street Journal this morning, I argue that labor union leaders were the biggest losers in Tuesday’s election results. In Virginia Republican nominee Bob McDonnell campaigned hard against the union leaders’ card check bill, while in New Jersey Democratic incumbent Jon Corzine had been a staunch supporter of the public employee unions (indeed he even had an affair with a woman who headed one of the biggest public employee unions). McDonnell won handily and Corzine lost. I’ll have more election analysis later, but for an intelligent take on the election results I recommend this memo from Republican pollster Ed Goeas and for a good...

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Lessons from the 2009 election results

My Wednesday Examiner column, written as the 2009 election returns were coming in, stands up pretty well. But let me add some observations written as the course of the elections became clearer. First, in the governor elections in Virginia and New Jersey, the Democratic candidate ran far behind Barack Obama’s percentages in 2008 and the Republican candidates ran ahead of George W. Bush’s percentages in 2004. The numbers are pretty daunting. In Virginia Creigh Deeds won 41% of the votes, way behind Barack Obama’s 53% in 2008. And in New Jersey Democratic incumbent Jon Corzine won 45% of the votes, way behind Obama’s 57% in 2008. In contrast, the Republican...

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Va., N.J. races show voters changing course

As the final votes were being counted, it was possible to draw some lessons from Republican Bob McDonnell's victory in Virginia and the close, three-way governor's race in New Jersey, never mind that White House press secretary Robert Gibbs has taken to saying that the elections don't mean much. The odd-year elections -- held in the first year of a presidency -- have been meaningful over the last two decades. In 1993 New Jersey voters rejected tax-raising Democratic Gov. James Florio, despite the best efforts of Bill Clinton's consultant James Carville -- a harbinger of the losses congressional Democrats suffered the next year after they raised taxes and supported, unavailingly, massive...

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Some political numbers to keep in mind on election night

The first set of political numbers come from pollster Scott Rasmussen, who reports that 45% of adults say they would be at least somewhat likely to vote to reelect Barack Obama, while 49% say they would be at least somewhat unlikely to do so. Obviously there are lots of caveats to be entered here. The presidential election is three years away. The question doesn’t take into account the nature of Obama’s opposition. And respondents’ predictions of what they will do in the future do not always turn out to be well founded. Having said all that, there is a contrast here with Obama’s job approval ratings, which continue to be above 50%. My sense is that majorities tend...

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Republicans should run against the center

That’s the advice I offered in one of my first Examiner columns in May. Key paragraph: “So I think Republicans today should be less interested in moving toward the center and more interested in running against the center. Here I mean a different ‘center,’ not a midpoint on an opinion spectrum, but rather the centralized government institutions being created and strengthened every day. This is a center that is taking over functions fulfilled in a decentralized way by private individuals, firms and markets. That’s the advice I think Republicans—or conservatives—have taken by (in the case of political leaders) endorsing Conservative nominee Doug...

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Looking ahead to the 2010 Senate races

Nate Silver, proprietor of the 538 blog, has updated his Senate race listings for November. He ranks them in order of likelihood of change of party control, according to his own estimates. For November, he has upgraded the likelihood of change in control in three states, two of them (Delaware and Nevada) now held by Democrats and one (Florida) now held by a Republican. What I find interesting is that four of his top six seats are now held by Democrats (Delaware, Nevada, Connecticut, Colorado), while just two are held by Republicans (Missouri, Ohio). In three of those four Democratic seats incumbents are running for reelection, while just one (Delaware) is an open seat. In contrast, both...

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Detroit: a vast enormous empty canvass?

Has my old home town of Detroit gone down so far, as I have suggested in a recent blogpost, that it has nowhere to go but up. That’s the view of blogger Aaron Renne (the Urbanophile), who does see a positive future for Detroit—although a future that looks very different from the city’s storied past. He quotes one writer who describes Detroit as “a vast enormous empty canvass,” and he calls for “urban shrinkage.” Interestingly, he argues that the ineffectiveness of Detroit’s current city government is an advantge—people who buy a home for $1,900 can do pretty much anything with it they want, and at least some of those things are...

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What happened to Obamamania?

Where have all those Obamenthusiasts who were so visible in 2008 been hiding this year? In this New Republic article Lydia DePillis seems to think that the problem is that Organizing For America has been run as a top-down organization, rather than as a bottom-up movement, giving the folks out there no sense of ownership. She asks, “Can a grassroots organization run in the top-down style of a political machine really accomplish much—let alone change the terms of debate on any given issue?” I think there’s something more going on here. Many Obamenthusiasts were thrilled by the idea of putting Obama in and getting George W. Bush out. They achieved their goal a year...

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Hold the champagne. Happy days aren't here again

The recession is over, we are told. The Commerce Department announced Thursday that the economy grew in the third quarter of 2009 by 3.5 percent. Great, huh? Maybe not. About half that growth came from the Cash for Clunkers program, which transferred into the third quarter auto sales that would have occurred later. The expiring tax credit of $8,000 for first-time homebuyers stimulated some house sales. Most of the effect of the $787 billion stimulus package, we are told by the Obama White House, has already been felt. "There were few signs in the new data," writes The Washington Post's Neil Irwin, "that the private sector will be able to sustain that growth once the...

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A bold suggestion for tactical voting

Patrick Ruffini, one of the smartest young strategists and web tacticians on the Republican side, has come up with an intriguing idea, based on the race in the New York 23 special election, on which I’ve blogged here and here: conservatives should back independent candidates in districts with weak or ideologically unacceptable Republican nominees. Ruffini notes that, depending on state election law, independent or third-party candidacies can be launched much later in the campaign cycle than major party candidacies, and so conservative independents, like Conservative party nominee Doug Hoffman in New York 23, will be subject to negative campaigns for only a short period of time....

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Whatever happened to Obamania?

Where have all those Obamenthusiasts who were so visible in 2008 been hiding this year? In this New Republic article Lydia DePillis seems to think that the problem is that Organizing For America has been run as a top-down organization, rather than as a bottom-up movement, giving the folks out there no sense of ownership. She asks, “Can a grassroots organization run in the top-down style of a political machine really accomplish much—let alone change the terms of debate on any given issue?” I think there’s something more going on--or not going on--here. Many Obamenthusiasts were thrilled by the idea of putting Obama in and getting George W. Bush out. They...

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Looks like a two-man race in New York 23

The special election in the 23rd congressional district of New York increasingly looks like a two-man race, with the woman candidate, Republican nominee Dede Scozzafava, skittering into third place. Yesterday I referenced Mark Blumenthal’s analysis of two polls, both commissioned by supporters of Conservative nominee Doug Hoffman, showing Hoffman ahead of Democratic nominee Bill Owens, with Scozzafava well behind. I agreed with Blumenthal’s conclusion that there was nothing indicating the polls were bogus, though polls in any special election, especially one with three candidates, need to be viewed with caution. Now comes a third poll which tends to confirm those two,...

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Detroit, R.I.P.

Two pieces illustrate the sad fate of my home town of Detroit. Reuters reports on the auction of houses and vacant lots in Detroit. Some are being snapped up by speculators, but many others seem to attract no buyers at all. Detroit was once America’s premier homeowner city. Now land in much of the city is literally worthless. Unfortunately, some people like the young would-be buyer in the Reuters piece, are looking for government to come to their aid. And, as this Detroit Free Press article makes clear, that’s not very likely. Detroit is a premier example of what happens when ordinary people depend on big units—big government, big business, big labor—for...

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Can we trust the New York 23 polls showing the Conservative ahead?

Mark Blumenthal, an experienced Democratic pollster, provides an exhaustive analysis of the poll in the New York 23 special election commissioned by the Club for Growth from Basswood Research. The poll shows Conservative party nominee Doug Hoffman with 31%, Democrat Bill Owens with 27% and Republican Dede Scozzafava with 20%. Similar results came, as Blumenthal notes, from a Neighborhood Research poll conducted for another pro-Hoffman group. Blumenthal starts off by noting Nate Silver’s suggestion that the results of the Basswood poll may be cooked. Blumenthal tends to disagree, but is also careful to note the limitations of polling in this kind of situation. Polling is an...

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Four races test the strength of Obama's majority

Six days from now the voters of New Jersey and Virginia will elect governors. Voters in the 23rd district of New York and the 10th district of California will elect new members of the House of Representatives to replace incumbents, a Republican and a Democrat, who were appointed to positions in the Obama Defense and State departments. All four of these constituencies voted for Barack Obama 51 weeks ago. Obama won 57 percent of the vote in New Jersey, 53 percent (his national average) in Virginia, 52 percent in New York 23 and 65 percent in California 10. Yet all of this territory was once Republican. Suburb-dominated New Jersey voted 56 percent for George H.W. Bush in 1988....

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Briton not sold on global warming alarmism

If, as I noted Friday, Americans increasingly are not sold on global warming alarmism, neither is Christopher Booker of the London Sunday Telegraph (and founding editor of Private Eye). His column provides an account in brief of the rise of global warming alarmism—and its thin scientific basis. He notes that the British House of Commons recently passed legislation mandatin reductions carbon emissions of more than 80% by 2050 that will cost the U.K. some £18 billion a year—at a time when it was snowing outside the Houses of Parliament, the first October snow there in 74 years. His conclusion: “Thanks to misreading the significance of a brief period of rising...

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Obama at odds with his own vision for the world

Barack Obama, who found time to go on a 24-hour jaunt to Copenhagen on Oct. 2 to seek the 2016 Olympics games for Chicago, apparently cannot find the time for a 24-hour trip to Berlin on Nov. 9 for a celebration of the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Well, we all have our priorities, and the president can't be everywhere at once, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will surely represent the United States ably in Berlin. Still, it seemed an odd decision to me -- until I went back and got the speech that candidate Obama delivered on July 24, 2008, to a crowd of 200,000 in the Tiergarten in Berlin. As I reread the text, it struck me that there would be an embarrassing...

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Americans increasingly skeptical of global warming alarmism

In my Wednesday Examiner column, I noted how Americans, historically distinctive in opinions from European elites, have become more so this year even though Barack Obama has opinions closer to those of European elites than any of his predecessors. More evidence of this has just come in from the most recent Pew poll on global warming. Is there solid evidence that the earth is warming? Agreement among Americans decline from 71% in April 2008 to 57% in October 2009. Is warming caused by human activity? Agreement declined from 47% to 36%. Is it a very serious problem? Agreement declined from 44% to 35%. Agreement that there is solid evidence that the earth is warming declined to 75% among...

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Senate Democrats wary of health care deficit spending

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid got rolled yesterday on Senator Debbie Stabenow’s proposal to increase Medicare payments to doctors by $247 billion over 10 years. Thirteen Democratic senators voted nay, while Reid said that he had been assured by the American Medical Association that the measure would get 27 Republican votes. Senate majority leaders are supposed to know how to count; Reid evidently was wrong about how 40 senators would vote—some kind of record, perhaps. The larger point is that 13 Democratic senators refused to support a measure that would vastly increase the federal budget deficit but that would not be counted in the Congressional Budget Office scoring...

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How Dede got the nod

How did the hapless Dede Scozzafava, whose travails my Examiner colleague Mark Tapscott has chronicled, get the Republican nomination in the special election in New York’s 23rd congressional district? Blogger and tea party activist Michael Patrick Leahy has the scoop. It’s an interesting example of how local political stumbling can affect a race of some national significance. Any of the other eight candidates would apparently have received the Conservative party nomination and probably would have won the special without too much trouble. But in a district narrowly carried 51%-47% by George W. Bush in 2004 and 52%-47% by Barack Obama in 2008, Democrat Bill Owens now has a...

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Obama hits opponents with Chicago brass knuckles

"His father was a great friend of my father." The reference to William Ayers' father was how Mayor Richard J. Daley began his defense of Barack Obama for his association with the unrepentant Weather Underground terrorist. Daley's father of course was Richard M. Daley, mayor of Chicago from 1955 until his death in 1976. Ayers' father was head of Commonwealth Edison, the Chicago-based utility, from 1964 to 1980. You bet they were great friends. That's governance, Chicago style. The head of government is friends with the heads of every big business, lobby and union, and together they make decisions on how everyone else will live. Those on the inside get what they want. Those on...

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Do voters really want government health insurance?

The headline on this morning’s Washington Post lead story, “Public Option Gains Support,” and the subhead, “CLEAR MAJORITY NOW BACKS PLAN,” would lead you to think that the answer to the above question is yes—and that the public has been moving in that direction. Like my Examiner colleagues Byron York and Chris Stirewalt, I think that’s misleading. When you look at the actual question wording and numbers in the ABC/Post poll, you find that the percentage supporting and opposing “the proposed changes in the health care system by (Congress) and (the Obama administration)—no, I don’t know what the parentheses mean either—was...

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Why are Democrats sticking with Charlie Rangel?

Why are Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the House Democratic leadership so stoutly resisting calls for ethically challenged Charles Rangel to step down as Chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, as recommended by an Examiner editorial? I can think of several reasons. One is that Rangel is personally popular and that many members have respect for a man who, however many hundreds of thousands of dollars of assets and income he failed to report on his disclosure forms, was a war hero in Korea. My instinct too is to cut him some slack for this; read the first two paragraphs of this Lexington piece in the Economist and see if you don’t agree. The second reason is that members of the...

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Unlike Obama, Americans reject European model

An interesting paradox. Last year America elected a president who, in attitudes and policies, is closer to the elites of Western Europe than any of his predecessors. Yet in the nine months that he has been in office ordinary Americans have been moving away from those attitudes and policies and have increasingly embraced positions that over the years have made Americans distinctive from those in other advanced Western democracies. Barack Obama's European tendencies aren't in doubt. His policies on government spending, taxation, health care and carbon emissions would all tend to bring America in line with European norms, to a far greater degree than any other president of the last 40 years...

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Don't reinflate the housing bubble

Our financial system broke down because we had, thanks to government policies, a housing bubble. So what is the response of Democratic policymakers? Inflate the housing bubble again. For intelligent descriptions and denunciations of this lunatic policy, read my American Enterprise Instutute colleague Peter Wallison’s October 16 piece in the Wall Street Journal, provocatively headlined, “Barney Frank, Predatory Lender,” and Charles Lane’s October 18 piece in the Washington Post, unprovocatively headlined “Doubling Down On the Wrong Housing Policy.” Wallison and Lane come from different points on the political spectrum; Wallison was a top aide in the...

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Great graphic: job gains and losses 2004-09

One of the pleasures of regularly reading University of Tennessee law professor Glenn Reynolds’s Instapundit blog is that he links to so many interesting webposts. Example: this great graphic on the geography of job gains and losses between 2004 and 2009. Just click on and enjoy. You’ll note that metro Detroit has been bleeding jobs the whole time; you’ll see the robust job creation in Texas in the middle years and its continuing job creation in 2008 (for a moment Texas was generating 80% of the nation’s job gains, mainly because so many metro areas elsewhere were losing jobs); watch the huge job gains and then huge job losses in Phoenix and Las Vegas and southern...

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Solved: who leaked the Carter debate briefing books?

Conservative publicist and author Craig Shirley has a new book coming out on the 1980 Reagan campaign, Rendezvous with Destiny: Ronald Reagan and the Campaign That Changed America (“rendezvous with destiny” was one of the many FDR tropes four-time Roosevelt voter Reagan gleefully purloined), and in an article in today’s Politico he reveals who leaked the Carter campaign debate briefing books to the Reagan campaign. The name will ring bells for political mavens of a certain age: Paul Corbin. As Shirley describes, Corbin was an aide to Robert Kennedy, an avid follower of and fixer for the Kennedys, who also was on friendly terms with certain conservatives, notably David...

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Democrat sees "huge unknowns" in health care bill

Tennessee Democrat Phil Bredesen has been, in my opinion, one of the best governors of this decade and, as this article by Fred Lucas in the Weekly Standard indicates, he’s an expert on health care policy. So it’s worthy of note that Bredesen is now saying that the Baucus health care bill could cost Tennessee state government far more than the $735 million over five years he had previously estimated, and could exceed $3 billion for the years 2014 to 2019. “There are huge unknowns for the states in this reform,” he said. Do Democratic members of Congress really want to be held responsible for how those “huge unknowns” turn out? There’s a...

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The trouble with health care is paying for it

The legislative process can also be a learning process, and as Congress considers health care legislation -- the latest act being the Senate Finance Committee's vote in favor of Chairman Max Baucus' bill, or "conceptual language" -- we have been learning something useful. It's that legislators would like to provide generous, even gold-plated health insurance coverage to almost all Americans, but that no one wants to pay for it. The learning process should have started last February, when Congressional Budget Office Director Douglas Elmendorf indicated that the CBO did not back the Obama administration's assertion that preventive care would save money. But it still came as a...

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Whiner-in-Chief

That’s what John Nichols of the left-wing Nation calls Barack Obama, citing the White House’s complaints about Fox News and left-wing bloggers who have criticized him on gay rights and other issues. Nichols’s article is full of good common sense; he cheerfully admits that Obama has had mostly positive press coverage, and he points out that a president can come out ahead by facing tough interviewers rather than boycotting them. This should be required reading at the White House, though I suspect it won’t...

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What should conservatives do?

Now that dreams of a 2010 victory are dancing like sugarplums in Republicans’ heads, and although they may turn out to be only dreams, it may be time for conservatives and Republicans to think more seriously about how they would govern if voters give them a chance. Food for thought comes from Britain, where the capital-C Conservatives are heavy favorites to win the general election that must be held by May 2010, and where, as Spectator editor and ace political analyst Matthew D’Ancona indicates, Conservative leader David Cameron has been doing some serious thinking along these lines. As we debate the Democrats’ health care bills and their economic policies, there are...

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Will our Nobel Prize winner stand by our friends?

Barack Obama in his Friday comments on winning the Nobel Peace Prize, talked about ending the war in Iraq—but not achieving victory there. But in his hurry to assert his responsibilities as “commander-in-chief of a country that’s responsible for ending a war”—the “V” word seems to be banned in this White House and he did not utter the word “Iraq” in these remarks—he may be consigning some unfortunate individuals to a horrible fate. If you doubt that, read this moving article from the Boston Globe by Gary Morsch, a physician who served as an Army rerservist in Iraq, in the town of Ashraf, inhabited by Iranian dissidents who...

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A way out of the mess in Honduras

The United States is currently in the embarrassing position of refusing to recognize the government of Honduras which is supported by virtually all elements of civil society there and whose legal basis is supported by a report from the Law Library of Congress. Two excellent opinion articles in the Wall Street Journal describe the situation and point to a good exit strategy for the United States. One is by longtime Democratic strategist Lanny Davis and the other is by South Carolina Republican Jim DeMint. The solution is for the United States to recognize the elections scheduled for November 29. As both Davis and DeMint point out, there is no reason to doubt that these will be fair...

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'Conceptual language' hides health care's cost

Some of the headlines in recent days are not worthy of belief. No, I'm not referring to the headlines that Barack Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize, however odd that many seem to many (including, it seems, Obama himself). I'm referring to the headlines earlier in the week to the effect that the health care bill sponsored by Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus will cut the federal deficit by $81 billion over the next ten years. Yes, that is what the Congressional Budget Office estimated. But, as the CBO noted, there's no actual Baucus bill, just some "conceptual language." Actual language, the CBO noted, might result in "significant changes" in its estimates. No...

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Americans to Nobel winner: no health care bill

Just in case you had any doubts about Americans’ attitudes to the Democratic health care proposals, take a look at this graph of poll results from pollster.com. The admirable proprietors of the website provide the actual wording used in each poll, so you can draw your own conclusions about the results. But the trend is unmistakable. Most Americans don't want this legislation passed....

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Liberals astonished by Obama Nobel (continued)

Statements keep coming in from liberals astonished at the decision to award Barack Obama the Nobel Peace Prize. Here are some more, to add to those in my previous blogpost. ● Michael Tomasky in the Guardian (“this is so out of nowhere that it could almost be embarrassing to the White House”). ● Joe Klein of Time (“premature to the point of ridiculousness”). ● David Ignatius of the Washington Post (“so goofy—even if you’re a fan, you have to admit that he hasn’t really done much yet as a peacemaker”). ● Barack Obama (“to be honest, I do not feel that I deserve to be in the company of so many of the transformative...

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Liberals astonished by Obama Nobel

The awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Barack Obama is astonishing. The best grade even the most sympathetic grader could give him in this, his ninth month in office, is “Incomplete.” Predictably, many conservative commentators have reacted negatively to the Nobel committee’s decision. But, more interestingly, so have many liberals. Some juicy examples: ● Mickey Kaus (who calls on Obama to politely decline the honor). ● Peter Beinart, former editor of the New Republic (“this is a farce”). ● New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof (“very premature”). ● Ruth Marcus of the Washington Post (“ridiculous—embarrassing,...

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Republicans are energized, Democrats not

The Republican polling firm Public Opinion Strategies in its blog has highlighted some numbers which illuminate the current political scene: Republicans and, to a lesser extent, Independents are following the news much more closely than Democrats. They compare current numbers with those recorded in 2005, the last year-after-a-presidential-election, and note that 41% of Republicans are watching the news closely, while only 30% of Democrats are. You get the feeling that many Democrats, energized and enthusiastic during the 2008 campaign, have now returned back to their private lives, while Republicans, appalled at what they believe are the disastrous big government policies of the Obama...

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Weak himself, Obama draws strength from Bush

In trying to understand what is happening in the nation and world, we all employ narratives -- story lines that indicate where things are going and what is likely to happen next. We can check the validity of these narratives by observing whether events move in the indicated direction. If so, the narrative is confirmed. But if things seem to be moving in an entirely different direction, it's time to discard the narrative and look for another. When Barack Obama took office, most Americans and certainly most of the press had a narrative in mind. Call it Narrative A. The financial crisis and the ensuing deep recession had removed the blinkers from voters' eyes and moved Americans away from...

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Castle candidacy threatens Democrats' 60-seat supermajority

Congressman-at-Large Mike Castle has announced that he is running for the U.S. Senate seat held for 36 years by Vice President Joe Biden. The current incumbent, longtime Biden aide and Delaware political consultant Ted Kaufman, is not running in the 2010 election to fill the remaining four years of the term to which Biden was elected in 2008 by a 65%-35% margin. Castle has one of the least conservative voting records of House Republicans and has held elective office in Delaware since 1966, with one four-year hiatus. He was elected state representative in 1966, state senator in 1968 and 1972, lieutenant governor in 1980, governor in 1984 and 1988, and congressman-at-large in 1988,...

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Public employee unions: a continuing threat

Will public employee unions bankrupt America? Fred Siegel and Dan DiSalvo in an important article in the Examiner’s sister publication the Weekly Standard say that they may very well do so. In many though not all states—New York, New Jersey and California prime among them—public employee unions are already successfully practicing “spend and spend, tax and tax, elect and elect,” politics. In effect taxpayers are financing hugely effective lobbies that work against taxpayers’ interests—increasing tax burdens on the private sector economy and insulating public employees from accountability. Its’ a vicious cycle, and poised to continue...

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Can Obama hold together his top-and-bottom coalition?

In my Introduction to The Almanac of American Politics 2010, I noted that Barack Obama was elected by a top-and-bottom coalition: he carried voters with incomes below $50,000 and above $200,000 and lost among those in between. Tom Edsall, longtime political reporter for the Washington Post, has a fine piece in the New Republic blog on this phenomenon. He notes that low-income voters tend to like Democrats’ health insurance proposals but dislike their cap-and-trade proposals, while upper-income voters tend to take the opposite stand on each. It stands to reason that it’s harder to hold together a top-and-bottom coalition than it is one that is topheavy in the middle of the...

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Is Virginia blocking military personnel from voting?

Is Virginia denying military voters the chance to vote in its state election this November? That’s what I gather from this post from the Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder and this post from Republican blogger Soren Dayton. There’s some shabby history here. In 1944 Republicans and Southern Democrats in Congress ganged up to make it difficult for military personnel—about 12 million men at the time—to vote; Republicans believed that most G.I.s would vote for Franklin Roosevelt, and Southern Democrats feared that black G.I.s would vote and get into the habit of voting. In 2000 some Democrats in Florida tried to prevent military votes from being counted. They feared most...

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"Wars of choice" and cheap partisan rhetoric

In my Sunday Examiner column, I looked at Barack Obama’s apparent change of heart on Afghanistan. I took aim at his characterization, made as recently as August 17, of Afghanistan as a “war of necessity,” as compared to Iraq, which he and other Democrats have long characterized as a “war of choice.” A false distinction, I argued; all out wars have been, in one way or another, wars of choice. Recognizing that the case is hardest to make for World War II, since after all we were attacked at Pearl Harbor, I wrote: Franklin Roosevelt could have avoided provoking Nazi Germany and imperial Japan; eminences like Joseph P. Kennedy and Charles Lindbergh were...

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A war of necessity turns out not so necessary

"This is not a war of choice," Barack Obama told the Veterans of Foreign Wars on Aug. 17. "This is a war of necessity. Those who attacked America on 9/11 are plotting to do so again. If left unchecked, the Taliban insurgency will mean an even larger safe haven from which al Qaeda would plot to kill more Americans. So this is not only a war worth fighting. This is fundamental to the defense of our people." But that was nearly seven weeks ago. Now it appears that Obama is about to ignore the advice of Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal, whom he installed as commander in Afghanistan in May, after relieving his predecessor ahead of schedule. McChrystal, who came up as a Special...

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Brazil celebrates

If you had any doubts that Rio de Janeiro winning the 2016 Olympics would be big news in Brazil, you might want to check out the websites of two of its leading newspapers, O Globo and Folha de São Paulo. Or check out this picture of President Lula and soccer great...

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Obama's humiliating loss in Copenhagen

I thought Chicago politicians knew how to count. And knew how to scrape up extra votes when they needed them. But Barack Obama jetted off to Copenhagen to lobby the International Olympic Committee in behalf of Chicago’s bid for the 2016 Summer Olympics with, it appears, the faintest idea of the vote count. Chicago was eliminated in the first round of voting, with fewer votes than Tokyo (the next one to be eliminated), Madrid and (the ultimate winner) Rio de Janeiro. Where were those extra ballots from the river wards when you need them? Seriously, it does look like Obama and his staff had no realistic notion of how the voting would go. Working in Rio de Janeiro’s favor was...

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Remembering a great philanthropist

You probably don’t recognize the name Donald Fisher, co-founder of The Gap stores, who recently died. But if you care about educating disadvantaged children you should be grateful to him. Chester Finn of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, in this tribute, explains how Fisher and his wife Doris provided critical support, not just in money (some $60 million) but in creative stewardship, to the KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program) schools and enabled them to spread across the country. I think KIPP is one of the great institutions in America today. For more information, check out the KIPP website or buy and read Jay Mathews’s Work Hard. Be Nice, which tells how two young teachers,...

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What is really needed in Iran: regime change

Some points are so elementary that people tend to overlook them. Case in point: if we want to eliminate the danger of nuclear weapons in the hands of Iran’s mullah regime, the best way is to overthrow that regime. True, that’s much more easily said than done. But it might be easier than getting the mullahs to give up their nukes voluntarily. Anyway, the point is worth making, again and again, as it has been today by Michael Ledeen in the Wall Street Journal, Robert Kagan in the Washington Post. And and Rosemary Righter in the Times of London. This is something to keep in mind as U.S. representatives meet tomorrow with representatives from the mullah regime....

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America to Congress: put bills online!

Should legislation be posted online and available to the public before Congress votes on it? Pollster Scott Rasmussen asked voters this question, and found that 83% said yes and 6% no. This is one issue which has even more appeal to Independents than to partisans of either party: 85% of Republicans, 92% of Independents and 76% of Democrats said yes. As Rasmussen points out in his analysis, there is room for cynicism about House Republicans’ current support for such a measure; they could have put it into effect when they had a majority in the House, but didn’t. Nonetheless, I think this could be a significant campaign issue for the out-party. Rationalizations by in-party...

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Latin Americans don't favor the anti-democratic left

There’s a widespread assumption, to which I referred in my September 23 Examiner column, that “the people” in Latin America favor leftist regimes like that of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez or the Chavez imitator Manuel Zelaya whom Chavez and, alas, the United States are trying to reinstall as president of Honduras. Currently Zelaya is in the Brazilian Embassy in Honduras’s capital, Tegucigalpa, protected from arrest by the diplomatic immunity which the government of Honduras quite properly is respecting. But it seems that Brazil’s role in protecting Zelaya is not as popular at home as one might expect, at least according to this online poll in O Globo,...

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Democrats win lobbyists but lose basic reforms

As Sen. Max Baucus tries to squeeze a health care bill out of the Senate Finance Committee, and as Sens. Barbara Boxer and John Kerry let slip another deadline in their attempt to fashion a bill to reduce carbon dioxide, some Democrats wonder whether their congressional leaders and the president who has deferred to them have sought only limited changes rather than more fundamental reform on both health insurance and carbon emissions. On health care, the House committees and Baucus and Christopher Dodd in the Senate health committee decided to build a makeshift addition to the health insurance system that grew out of a tax law decision made during World War II. That decision was to give a...

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What did TR say?

In a recent blogpost, entitled "What would FDR say?", I commented on Barack Obama’s tendency to disparage his country in his speeches and, citing Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson, contrasted it with Franklin Roosevelt’s rhetoric. In my evening reading, I came across another example of talking about your country by the other President Roosevelt. The following passage is from TR’s The Winning of the West, published in 1889, the year he turned 31. It was not his first book, and it was published when he was younger than Barack Obama was when his first book was published. TR is writing about the way Americans settled and developed the West. Warning: he uses words...

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Can Republicans win the House (continued)?

The prospect of hanging, as Samuel Johnson said, greatly concentrates the mind, and the prospect of the 2010 elections may be concentrating the minds of Democratic House members, at least those elected (unlike most of the Democratic leaders and committee chairmen) from less than overwhelmingly Democratic seats. In a recent blogpost, I noted that commentators are taking seriously the possibility of Republicans recapturing a majority in the House—and much earlier in this cycle than they did in the 1994 cycle, the last time Republicans overturned a Democratic majority. But I added that in my view the Republicans’ chances of winning a majority are still well under 50%. Now comes...

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Germany's election results point to a big win for the center-right

The results are in on Sunday’s elections in Germany, and the big news is that it is a big win for the center-right. In the vote for proportional representation (Zweitstimme), Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats (the Christian Democratic Union and the Bavarian Christian Social Union, CDU/CSU) got 33.8% of the vote and the free-market Free Democrats (FDP), Merkel’s preferred coalition partner, got 14.6%, for a total of 48.4%. The Social Democrrats (SDP) got only 23.0%, their lowest share in history, while the Greens (Grüne) got 10.7% and the Left (Linke, more or less the former Communists) got 11.9%. The SDP has been willing to enter into a coalition with...

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What would FDR do?

In my Sunday Examiner column, I quoted from Barack Obama’s speech to the United Nations General Assembly last Wednesday, in a way that indicated a certain disapproval. In a Washington Post blogpost former George W. Bush chief speechwriter Michael Gerson is not so oblique as he issues a searing denunciation of Obama’s UN speech. My favorite paragraph: Twice in his United Nations speech, Obama dares to quote Franklin Roosevelt. I have read quite a bit of Roosevelt’s rhetoric. It is impossible to imagine him, under any circumstances, unfairly criticizing his own country in an international forum in order to make himself look better in comparison. He would have considered...

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With Obama, too much nuance, not enough power

"It is my deeply held belief," Barack Obama told the United Nations General Assembly, that "in the year 2009 -- more than at any point in human history -- the interests of nations and peoples are shared." That is of course the year Obama became president, and he wasn't shy about referring in his second paragraph to "the expectations that accompany my presidency around the world," though he assured us they "are not about me." Before Obama's speech, I wrote that he seems "stuck in a time warp in which the United States is the bad guy." Not any more, he seemed to say in his U.N. speech. He has ordered the closing of Guantanamo. He has...

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Obama rudely twists the lion's tale

Barack Obama, as my Examiner colleague Byron York has noted, has been snubbing British Prime Minister Gordon Brown. This strikes me as highly regrettable and foolish in the extreme. Does Obama have some gripe against the British related to his Kenyan colonial heritage? If so, it’s time to get over it. Britain has been by and large an exemplary ally. It is one of the few nations in the world with a significant out-of-area military capacity, it maintains constructive ties with its former colonies through the Commonwealth, it shares with us an Anglospheric heritage based on common law and individual freedom which is of priceless value. All that said, perhaps Obama is acting on the...

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Warsh: The Fed will cut back

Federal Reserve Board of Governors member Kevin Warsh had an important opinion article in Friday’s Wall Street Journal. As the Journal’s David Wessel points out in his book In Fed We Trust, Warsh has been a key member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors and is definitely in close touch with Chairman Ben Bernanke. It seems to me inconceivable that Warsh would have published this piece without Bernanke’s approval. Here’s what I thought was the key passage: “Nonetheless, I would hazard the view that prudent risk management indicates that policy likely will need to begin normalization before it is obvious that it is necessary, possibly with greater...

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Democrats seem to be losing the battle for enthusiasm

There’s a pretty good story in the Washington Post on how Democratic fundraising has plummeted this year. Reporter Paul Kane in his lead paragraph ascribes this to “complacency among their rank-and-file donors and a de facto boycott by many of their wealthiest givers.” Kane points out that individual contributions to the Democrats’ Senate campaign committee are down 40% as compared to this point in the 2007-08 cycle. I think “complacency” is not quite the right word. “Indifference” might be better. One of the key determinants of electoral outcomes in this decade has been the balance of enthusiasm, as I argued in my June 17 Examiner column....

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Saying it all in one sentence

From the Washington Post front page story by Michael Shear and Dan Balz on Barack Obama’s speech at the United Nations: “Eight months into his administration, clear foreign policy success has been...

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Back to the drawing board on carbon emissions?

The Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill passed the House in June by a 219-212 vote, with 44 Democrats voting no. It’s obviously not about to pass the Senate. Senator Barbara Boxer, who promised to present a similar bill before the August recess, postponed that to the opening of the session this month and then, with colleague John Kerry, postponed it again till the end of the month. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has said it’s unlikely the Senate can handle cap-and-trade legislation until after it deals with health care proposals—which could be a long, long time. President Barack Obama was embarrassed at the United Nations session by the Senate’s failure to pass...

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Can the Republicans win the House in 2010?

There’s starting to be some speculation that Republicans might recapture a majority in the House in 2010. That would require them to gain 40 seats—the exact number they needed to gain in 1994, the last time they recaptured a majority from the Democrats. Interestingly, I don’t recall anyone predicting the Republicans would win a majority, much less gain the 52 seats they actually did that year, until July 1994, when I wrote an article in U.S. News & World Report suggesting there was a serious possibility they would do so. One reason the commentariat was so late in making such a prediction was that almost no one had been around the last time the Republicans won a...

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Obama's time warp: The U.S. is still the bad guy

In the early 1980s, while planning a vacation in Latin America, I went to bookstores to find histories of the region. All I could find were Marxist tracts arguing that "the people" were exploited by greedy corporations and military dictators, all propped up by the United States. Available literature on Latin America today includes much more sensible accounts. But some people, including Barack Obama, whose college thesis written in those years has never been made public, seem stuck in a time warp in which the United States is the bad guy. That, at least, seems to explain Obama's latest foreign policy moves, starting with Honduras, where the president was ousted by the Supreme...

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Irving Kristol 1920-2009

Irving Kristol died last Friday and was buried today after a beautiful funeral s service at Adas Israel congregation in Washington. Irving was a prolific writer, thinker and patron of other writers and thinkers, a creator of institutions and the father of neoconservatism. I remember him as an always congenial companion, always ready with a gentle laugh at the folly of perfectionist social engineers and always confident of the ultimate good sense of the great mass of the American people. It is gratifying that he lived long enough this year to see Americans once again recoil against abstract schemes to enlarge government and strengthen its grasp on the rest of society. The Weekly...

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Interesting priorities

We learned yesterday that Barack Obama has had one meeting on General Stanley McChrystal’s August 30 report, as of September 20. But he has had time, we are told, to call former Virginia Governor and Richmond Mayor Douglas Wilder to ask him to endorse Democratic governor nominee Creigh Deeds. An interesting set of priorities for the Commander-in-Chief....

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Obama going wobbly on Afghanistan?

Bob Woodward has written books on the foreign policy decisionmaking processes of the Clinton and Bush administrations, and it’s a good bet he’s working on a similar book about the Obama administration. In the past, the Washington Post has run articles by Woodward based on his book research, and this morning his byline appeared on a front page story headlined, “McChrystal: More Forces or ‘Mission Failure.’” We have read before accounts of the report prepared by General Stanley McChrystal, the general Obama and Defense Secretary Robert Gates installed to replace another general who under the normal rotation would have remained in charge for another...

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Strangers to dissent, liberals try to stifle it

It is an interesting phenomenon that the response of the left half of our political spectrum to criticism and argument is often to try to shut it down. Thus President Obama in his Sept. 9 speech to a joint session of Congress told us to stop "bickering," as if principled objections to major changes in public policy were just childish obstinacy, and chastised his critics for telling "lies," employing "scare tactics" and playing "games." Unlike his predecessor, he sought to use the prestige of his office to shut criticism down. Now, no one likes criticism very much, and most politicians would prefer to have their colleagues and constituents meekly...

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Post transmits--and undermines--Holder's attempt to cover himself on CIA prosecutions

In a front page story three Washington Post reporters write that Attorney General Eric Holder’s investigation of detainee abuse by CIA personnel will focus on “a very small number of cases.” The article doesn’t exactly bury the really startling news, announced on Friday and therefore not previously covered in the print Post, that seven former CIA directors wrote a letter urging President Barack Obama to call off Holder’s investigation. That’s mentioned, briefly, in the second and third paragraphs. And the article mentions as well that the seven directors served under presidents of both parties, but it denies the reader the information that the seven...

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A new Perotista movement?

One of the interesting things about the Tea Party movement and the demonstrators who thronged Pennsylvania Avenue, the Capitol and the Mall on September 12 is the disdain they express not only for Democratic politicians but for Republican politicians as well. - - - Continued...

 

Reflections on the ACORN story

Published: Sep 18, 2009

I posted my analysis of the 345-75 vote in the House to defund ACORN yesterday, and Byron York provides an excellent analysis of the issue today. But I have to say that I am still stunned by the conduct that filmmaker James O'Keefe and his sidekick Hannah Giles documented at several ACORN offices. Of course I was familiar with the plentiful charges of vote fraud by ACORN affiliates, documented by John Fund of the Wall Street Journal over the years, and National Review’s Jim Geraghty helpfully collects some past stories about ACORN employees’ illegal behavior in Ohio, Wisconsin and New Mexico—all target states in the 2004 and 2008 elections. Geraghty also notes that...

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Analysis of the House ACORN vote

Published: Sep 17, 2009

The House’s 345-75 vote to defund ACORN is indeed, as my Examiner colleague Byron York put it, extraordinary. Democrats voted 172-75 to defund ACORN; Republicans voted 173-0 to do so. This would not have occurred but for http://biggovernment.com/ the Big Government videos of ACORN employees encouraging tax evasion and prostitution. "Mainstream media" studiously ignored this big, big story, because it put Obama's political allies in ACORN in a bad light--such an egregious bit of biased coverage that it aroused derision and contempt from Jon Stewart on The Daily Show. But "mainstream media" couldn't cover up this scandal, as much as it wanted to. And once it was...

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Newsflash: lobbyists active on transportation bill

Published: Sep 17, 2009

The Center for Public Integrity has sent me a press release bemoaning the fact that 1,800 organizations are trying to influence Congress as it considers a new transportation bill (we used to call it the highway bill). These organizations, CPI tells us, are employing 2,100 lobbyists and spending $45 million on their lobbying efforts. CPI is setting up an interactive map showing who is hiring these lobbyists. I suppose this is interesting. But it’s hardly surprising that local governments, planning agencies, real estate firms and construction companies are hiring lobbyists when you consider, as CPI reports, that the transportation bill, if and when passed, is going to allocate...

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An Internet glitch?

Published: Sep 16, 2009

A funny thing happened yesterday afternoon as I was writing my column for today’s Examiner. My subject was the gloomy outlook for job creation, and I wanted to check out what my friend Bill Galston had to say about it. Galston, who was deputy domestic policy adviser in the Clinton White House, is one of the smartest people I know and one of the most intellectually honest people I have ever encountered in Washington (and, no, you Washington-bashers, that’s not intended as faint praise). So I went to the New Republic’s website, clicked on William Galston and found a very interesting blogpost dated September 15 and entitled “Unemployment Numbers May Put Democrats...

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Job-killing policies could doom Democrat hopes

Published: Sep 16, 2009

"The level of unemployment is unacceptably high. And will, by all forecasts, remain unacceptably high for a number of years." Who do you suppose said that? A Republican political operative? A Fox News political analyst? One of those Tea Partiers who assembled in many thousands in Washington on Sept. 12? No, it was Lawrence Summers, the director of President Obama's National Economic Council and, by common consent, one of the world's leading economists. Summers made this gloomy forecast in the course of arguing that our economy is headed to "sustained recovery." And though it sounds like self-protective political rhetoric, it is also in line with the thinking of...

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Bounceback on health care?

Published: Sep 15, 2009

Pollster Scott Rasmussen reports that voter opinion has bouned back to opposition to the Obama health care program. His tracking polls for September 12-13, reflecting opinion after Obama’s address to the joint session of Congress September 9, showed voters in support by a 51%-46% margin. The latest tracking, for September 13-14, shows 52%-45% opposition, very similar to the 53%-43% numbers before the speech. The latest results show greater volatility than one ordinarily sees in Rasmussen’s polls, which leads me to insert a note of caution: this could reflect one night’s aberrational results. Corroborating Rasmussen’s latest results are the finding in the...

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The response to the Obama health care speech

Published: Sep 14, 2009

“Reform opposition is high but easing,” reads the headline on the Washington Post’s story on the ABC/Post poll taken after Barack Obama’s speech last Wednesday night on health care. The numbers in the poll don’t really justify the headline. By a 46%-48% margin respondents opposed what the story describes as “the Democrats’ health care initiative”—not significantly different from the 45%-50% opposition in the ABC/Post mid-August poll. I think the better analysis is from ABC News’s George Stephanopoulos, headlined “Obama Speech No Game-Changer.” He notes that Obama job approval on health care is net zero (48%-48%)...

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Tough fiscal choices: advice from the left

Published: Sep 13, 2009

It appears that something like 1 million people came to Washington yesterday and participated in the Tea Party march that filled Pennsylvania Avenue from the Treasury to the Capitol and then went onto the Mall. Mainstream Media responded with typical inattention or derision, but from what I can tell the Tea Party protesters are motivated by their strong feelings on one of the most fundamental issues in politics: the size and scope of the state. This enormous and spontaneous movement has threatened to frustrate the efforts of the Obama administration and the Democratic leadership in Congress to increase the size and scope of the state, and perhaps it will give a boost to Republicans in...

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A switch from the campaign to 'Macaca' McDonnell?

Published: Sep 13, 2009

Those of us who have been on the alert for Washington Post news page stories “Macacaing” Virginia Republican governor candidate Bob McDonnell have suddenly encountered a fallow period. The Saturday Post’s print Metro section (at least in my D.C. edition) was devoid of stories on the governor race. Sunday’s Metro section included a page C1 story story headlined “Deeds Touts Himself as Heir to Kaine and Warner.” It’s something in the nature of an overview of much of the campaign, pegged to the appearance of both governor candidates as well as the Democratic and Republican candidates for lieutenant governor and attorney general at the Labor Day...

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New York Times columnist Tom Friedman hails China's one-party autocracy

Published: Sep 13, 2009

The dwindling number of readers of the New York Times were treated Wednesday to a column by Thomas Friedman extolling China's "one-party autocracy," which, he told us, "is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people." China's leaders, he reported, are "boosting gasoline prices" and "overtaking us in electric cars, solar power, energy efficiency, batteries, nuclear power and wind power." All, of course, in the cause of reducing carbon emissions, which so many luminaries assure us are bound to produce global warming and environmental catastrophe. As Jonah Goldberg, author of the scholarly best-seller "Liberal Fascism" notes, "This...

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Is the Post giving up its campaign to 'Macaca' McDonnell?

Published: Sep 11, 2009

Is it possible that the Washington Post’s news staff is giving up on its campaign to “Macaca” Virginia Republican governor candidate Bob McDonnell? The paper’s single story in today’s Metro page raises that possibility. It’s a pretty straightforward account of the positions McDonnell and his Democratic opponent Creigh Deeds have taken on health care issues, based on speeches and responses to questions by the two in separate speeches in Tysons Corner. Liberal readers may be dismayed by the complete absence of any mention of McDonnell’s 1989 Regent University thesis or his part in the reappointment hearings for a Newport News judge, which have...

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The latest on the Post's campaign to 'Macaca' McDonnell

Published: Sep 10, 2009

The Virginia governor’s race seems to have disappeared from today’s Washington Post print Metro section, though the paper’s Virginia Notebook blog has an article by Rosalind Helderman entitled “Learning New Steps for Doing the Macaca.” Prominently mentioned are the blogposts I have been writing. It quotes a bunch of Republicans criticizing the Post’s coverage (including Oliver North back in 1994), as if to say this is just standard partisan bellyaching. Helderman defends the Post’s 2006 coverage of George Allen but, at least so far as I can tell, doesn’t do much to defend as newsworthy or fair the stories I have been criticizing. Curious. An...

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The Post's campaign to 'Macaca' McDonnell takes a new tack

Published: Sep 09, 2009

The Washington Post Metro page, sputtering in its attempts to “Macaca” Bob McDonnell on the basis of his 1989 Regent University thesis, has shown the “considerable ingenuity” I predicted last week in getting issues related to the McDonnell thesis on the paper’s front page. Today’s front page story by Amy Gardner and its placement by Post editors on the front page is one of the most flagrant examples of electioneering by a paper’s news pages that I have ever seen. “Scrutiny Spreads to ’03 McDonnell Remarks,” the headline proclaims. The subhead reads, “’Homosexual Conduct’ Comments ‘Irrelevant’...

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The convenient fantasies of President Obama

Published: Sep 09, 2009

The resignation over the Labor Day weekend of White House "green jobs" czar Van Jones tells you some interesting things about the Obama administration. One of them is that a man who proclaimed himself a "communist" in the 1990s and signed 9/11 "truther" petitions suggesting Bush administration complicity in the Sept. 11 attacks was considered fit for a White House appointment. Liberal columnists have been attacking Republicans because some of their voters are "birthers," believers in the absurd charge that President Obama was not born in Hawaii and thus is not a natural-born U.S. citizen. But they have failed to identify any "birther" who...

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How many House Democrats will vote against the health care bill?

Published: Sep 08, 2009

The Hill has a story reporting that 23 House Democrats have said they vote against the health care bill; it doesn’t specify which bill, but presumably the reference is to the bill passed by the Energy and Commerce Committee before the August recess. Some of the Democrats quoted in the article seem a little slippery in their commitments; freshman Tom Perriello says he would vote against the bill now but hopes to vote for one in the future. I thought it would be interesting to look at the Obama and McCain percentages in the districts represented by these 23 Democrats. Somewhat to my surprise, they don’t all represent heavily anti-Obama districts. Five of them represent...

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The Post's sputtering campaign to 'Macaca' McDonnell

Published: Sep 08, 2009

The latest Washington Post news story on the Virginia governor campaign doesn’t mention Bob McDonnell’s 1989 Regent University thesis until the tenth paragraph of a generally balanced news stories on Republican McDonnell and Democrat Creigh Deeds and their campaigning on Labor Day. Here’s that paragraph: “Deeds has tried to sharpen contrasts with McDonnell by criticizing McDonnell's conservative record on social issues, including abortion. His campaign received a boost last month with the publication of McDonnell's 20-year-old graduate school thesis in which he wrote that working women, feminists and homosexuals were detrimental to the traditional family....

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Is the Post's campaign to 'Macaca' McDonnell sputtering?

Published: Sep 07, 2009

In my previous blogposts on the Washington Post news pages’ campaign to “Macaca” Virginia Republican governor nominee Bob McDonnell by running story after story on McDonnell’s 1989 Regent University thesis—Republican Governors Association operative Nick Ayers has noted 34 such pieces, including articles, blogposts, cartoons, editorials and on-line chats—I have purposely refrained from citing opinion articles, since after all opinion writers can legitimately try to influence readers and readers are on notice that this is so. But I’ll make an exception here for Metro columnist Robert McCartney’s Sunday analysis in which he argues,...

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Unions in trouble on Labor Day

Published: Sep 07, 2009

Byron York has already weighed in here on Gallup’s striking finding that labor unions are suddenly much less popular with Americans than they were a year or even nine months ago, right after the November 2008 election. The Gallup findings are unequivocal. Approval of labor unions is down from 59% to 48%. Among Independents, it’s down even more, from 63% to 44%. Do unions mostly help or hurt the companies where they represent workers? Mostly help, 45%; mostly hurt, 46%. How about the U.S. economy in general? Mostly help, 39%; mostly hurt, 51%. Ouch. By more than 2-1 Americans feel unions help union members, but by a similar margin they feel they...

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Obama cannot escape hard choices in September

Published: Sep 06, 2009

"Very active." That's what White House aides say Barack Obama is going to be this month. That's probably an understatement. Obama faces September deadlines on three issues, on each of which he could get himself in political trouble, not only with those on the Right and center but also those on the political Left. Only one of those issues is domestic: health care. Obama's speech to a joint session of Congress, scheduled rather hastily for Wednesday night, gives him a chance to turn around public opinion, which has been going against his policies, and to generate something like the enthusiasm his candidacy created last year. But he faces a binary choice: The president must either...

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Obama cannot escape hard choices in September

Published: Sep 06, 2009

"Very active.” That’s what White House aides say Barack Obama is going to be this month. That’s probably an understatement. Obama faces September deadlines on three issues, on each of which he could get himself in political trouble, not only with those on the Right and center but also those on the political Left. Only one of those issues is domestic: health care. Obama’s speech to a joint session of Congress, scheduled rather hastily for Wednesday night, gives him a chance to turn around public opinion, which has been going against his policies, and to generate something like the enthusiasm his candidacy created last year. But he faces a binary choice: The...

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Labor's missing issue: right to work

Published: Sep 04, 2009

The Weekly Standard’s Fred Barnes notes that organized labor, despite having spent something like $400 million to elect Barack Obama and congressional Democrats, is not seeking what was once its number one goal, repeal of Section 14(b) of the Taft-Hartley Act which allows states to pass right-to-work laws. Those laws bar unions and businesses from requiring that employees join a union. The Taft-Hartley Act, passed in 1947 by a Republican Congress over President Harry Truman’s veto, was the first attempt to limit the power and spread of labor unions and has proved to be successful and enduring legislation. Union membership had risen sharply under the Wagner...

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How not to soak the rich

Published: Sep 04, 2009

Illinois Comptroller Dan Hynes, running for governor against his fellow Democrat, incumbent Pat Quinn, is promising to raise taxes. What courage! He wants, unsurprisingly, to raise taxes on the rich, but is concentrating not just on raising the state’s 3% flat-rate income tax on high earners, but also wants to raise taxes on "'luxury' items, such as tanning salons, auto rentals, health clubs, pet grooming, limo services and dating services." Earth to Dan Hynes: Raising such taxes may take a few cents out of the hides of rich folks. But it will also put a dent in the businesses of people running and employed by tanning salons, auto rental firms, health clubs, pet...

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The Post's campaign to 'macaca' Bob McDonnell (continued)

Published: Sep 03, 2009

The Washington Post news pages’ attempts to “macaca” Republican governor nominee Bob McDonnell continue today, but is relegated to page B-4. The headline and the lead paragraph, as we have come to expect, focus on McDonnell’s 1989 Regent University thesis, and on the reaction to it of Democratic governor nominee Creigh Deeds. Surprise: Deeds, who has been trailing in polls, thinks it’s relevant because it “explains the social agenda that has apparently driven his legislative agenda during the years.” Deeds’s specific criticisms, as relayed by the Post, seem like pretty thin gruel. “Deeds said that as a delegate, McDonnell sponsored...

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Minor factual error

Published: Sep 02, 2009

In an interesting Slate article on what Barack Obama may deal on the health care issue, John Dickerson quotes Obama as saying, “The cost of health care now causes a bankruptcy in America every 30 seconds.” By my calculation, that’s 1,051,200 bankruptcies a year. The Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts reports that the total number of bankruptcy filings for calendar year 2008 was 1,117,771. Are we to believe that 94% of bankruptcies are caused by “the cost of health care”? Um, I don’t think so. Maybe someone would like to ask Obama or Robert Gibbs about where the president got this...

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The Post continues to 'Macaca' Bob McDonnell

Published: Sep 02, 2009

The Washington Post news pages’ campaign to “Macaca” Bob McDonnell, about which I posted yesterday, continues, but not on the paper’s front page. Instead, we get on the first page of the Metro section an article headlined, “McDonnell Tries to Salvage Women’s Votes,” which seems to assume that “women” are a single monolithic voting bloc, and on page B2 “Thesis Issue Builds, McDonnell Tries to Move On.” Largely missing from these stories is any information on what McDonnell's views might produce in public policy. My prediction: look for similar articles in tomorrow’s Metro section. Question for Post reporters and...

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New facts undercut old positions on immigration

Published: Sep 02, 2009

Before leaving for his vacation on Martha's Vineyard, Barack Obama said the next big item on his legislative agenda -- well, after health care, cap and trade, and maybe labor's bill to effectively abolish secret ballots in union elections -- was immigration reform. What he has in mind, apparently, is something like the comprehensive immigration bills that foundered in the House in 2006 and in the Senate in 2007. These featured guest-worker and enforcement provisions, as well as a path to legalization. The prospects for such legislation still seem iffy. Immigration bills have typically needed bipartisan support to pass, and the Republicans who took the lead on the Senate bills in 2006 and...

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Is the Washington Post trying to 'Macaca' Bob McDonnell?

Published: Sep 01, 2009

In the 2006 campaign season the Washington Post ran more than a dozen front-page stories on Senator George Allen’s reference, at an August 11 campaign stop almost 400 miles from Washington, to an opposition campaign staffer as “Macaca.” One of these stories, perhaps, had enough news value to be worthy of the front page; the others were placed there with the obvious intent of defeating Allen and electing his Democratic opponent Jim Webb, who did indeed win by a 50%-49% margin. Now there’s a campaign on for governor of Virginia, and the news editors of the Post seem to be using their front page once again to defeat the Republican candidate, Bob McDonnell, and...

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Comparative effectiveness research and junk science

Published: Aug 31, 2009

Employing comparative effectiveness research—determining which medical treatments are most effective—is one of the means the Obama administration says government can reduce health care spending. If government pays only for treatments that are most effective, the theory goes, then it will save money. I’ve been skeptical about comparative effectiveness research. In my July 12 Examiner column, I wrote, “But comparative effectiveness research is, if not junk science, not a fully developed intellectual exercise. Medicine is an art as well as a science, and comparative effectiveness research may too often compare apples and oranges.” In response,...

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Enhanced interrogation techniques worked

Published: Aug 30, 2009

On the Weekly Standard’s website Stephen Hayes draws the unavoidable conclusion from the report of and a subsequent interview with CIA Inspector General John Helgerson: the enhanced interrogation techniques, including but not limited to waterboarding, worked. They produced valuable intelligence that enabled U.S. authorities to prevent future attacks. The political left is trying to argue that we can’t really know whether this is so or not—that just because Khalid Sheikh Mohammed refused to give any significant information before being subjected to EITs and then did so after being subjected to those techniques, that EITs may not have been the reason for...

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The Kennedys: The end of America's experiment with royalty

Published: Aug 30, 2009

Edward Kennedy was buried Saturday, the last son of Joseph and Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, the longest-serving member of the only royal political family our democratic republic has ever produced. Those who remember the 1960s understand viscerally, even if they do not share themselves, the almost mystical devotion the Kennedys inspired. Those who do not find it harder to understand, and those who come after us may find it utterly mystifying. But it was real. Other political families -- the Adamses, the Harrisons, the Tafts -- produced multiple generations of national politicians but generated nothing like mass enthusiasm. The sons of Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt set out on political...

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The president can fire the attorney general

Published: Aug 28, 2009

Obama administration spokesmen are portraying the president as unable to overrule Attorney General Eric Holder’s decision to have a special prosecutor determine whether to prosecute CIA interrogators who were cleared by Department of Justice career attorneys back in 2004. “This was not something the White House allowed, this was something the AG decided,” a White House spokesman said. Utter nonsense. The attorney general serves at the pleasure of the president, and the president can determine that a prosecution would undermine the national security—a subject on which he has a wider perspective and a greater responsibility than...

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Liberal journalist shocked teacher unions shield incompetence

Published: Aug 28, 2009

I’ve long been fascinated between the divide between the elite supporters of the Democratic party and the institutional supporters of the Democratic party....

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Sometimes you can't count on your uncle

Published: Aug 27, 2009

Here’s an amusing item from the Weekly Standard: it seems that one of Barack Obama’s maternal great uncles is not quite on board on Democratic health care plans. Those of us who remember Thanksgiving and Christmas dinner table political debates between members of our extended families—between Aunt Lucille the socialist and Uncle Bob the paleoconservative—will have a certain sympathy for the president on this. His Kansas-bred grandparents and his free-spirited mother seem to have been well to the political left, but their relatives who never joined them in Hawaii seem to have quite different views. File under: American families....

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Obama's lyrical Left struggles with liberalism

Published: Aug 26, 2009

As it becomes clear that a large percentage of Americans are rebelling against the prospect of a larger, more intrusive government, including many who Democratic politicians assume would see themselves as beneficiaries of government spending and activity, debate among supporters of the Democratic agenda has focused on tactics. Should the Democrats have depicted their health care program as providing security rather than cutting costs? Should Barack Obama insist that the "government option" is essential, or should he let that provision drop by the wayside? Was it a mistake to whip the cap-and-trade bill through the House in June rather than focus on health care? Should the...

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Obama was wise to reappoint Ben Bernanke to the Fed

Published: Aug 25, 2009

Barack Obama has announced that he will reappoint Ben Bernanke to a second term as Federal Reserve Chairman. This is an important appointment Obama will make during his entire administration, and the statement he made it announcing it on Martha’s Vineyard was thoughtful and statesmanlike. “Ben approach a financial system on the verge of collapse with calm and wisdom,” he said, “with bold action and out-of-the-box thinking that has helped put the brakes on our economic freefall. Almost none of the decisions he or any of us made has been easy.” This looks, on the whole, like a good decision by the president. As I wrote last month, Bernanke clearly has been...

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Doubling the national debt

Published: Aug 24, 2009

The Obama administration late last week, in classic late Friday afternoon attention-dodging mode, released its midsession budget review. The good news: the federal deficit for this year will be only $1,600,000,000,000 rather than $1,800,000,000,000. The bad news, which will be released officially Tuesday: the projected federal deficit for the next ten years is projected to increase to $9,000,000,000,000 from $7,000,000,000,000. That’s an extra $547,000 per day every day for the next 10 years. As Harvard economist Greg Mankiw points out, this means that the national debt is on it way to more than doubling over the next ten years. As I wrote in my August 12 Examiner column,...

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Late August heat: No letup for Obama

Published: Aug 23, 2009

The tide of opinion seems to continue to run against Barack Obama and the Democrats’ health care bills. This seems apparent, for example, in this excellent article by Jonathan Martin in Politico on Congressman Allen Boyd’s town meetings. It is apparent in pollster Scott Rasmussen’s daily tracking, which shows 27% strongly approving Obama’s performance and 41% strongly disapproving. And note these very negative responses on an aol.com online poll: 78% say they do not believe Obama will make the right decisions for the country and 66% rate his job performance as poor, with another 15% fair. Obviously this is not representative of the general public. But so far as I...

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Democrats' Colorado gold rush turns into a bust

Published: Aug 23, 2009

Colorado, where the Great Plains meet the Rocky Mountains, has some claim to be on the leading edge of American politics. It produced anti-war, pro-environment Democrats like Sen. Gary Hart in the 1970s, Reaganite Republicans like Sen. Bill Armstrong even before Ronald Reagan won in 1980, Clintonesque Democrats like Gov. Roy Romer in the 1980s and National Review's favorite Republican governor, Bill Owens, in the 1990s. In this decade, a group of liberal multimillionaires -- Tim Gill, Rutt Bridges, Jared Polis and Pat Stryker -- developed "the Colorado model," not only funding candidates, but setting up think tanks, advocacy groups and public relations operations designed to...

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Weak Democratic numbers in Colorado and Florida

Published: Aug 21, 2009

Colorado and Florida were two big breakthrough states for Barack Obama in 2008. Now they’re not looking so good for Democrats in 2009. Obama’s latest approval numbers in http://www.pollster.com/blogs/ppp_approval_obama_birth_ppp_8.php Colorado and http://www.pollster.com/blogs/situation_report_florida.php Florida are unimpressive, to say the least. Democratic http://realclearpolitics.blogs.time.com/2009/08/20/co-gov-poll-ritter-vulnerable/ Colorado Governor Bill Ritter is running behind his best-known opponent and (appointed) http://realclearpolitics.blogs.time.com/2009/08/18/co-sen-poll-low-numbers-for-bennet/ Senator Michael Bennet continues to have weak numbers. In Florida...

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No cash for clunkers?

Published: Aug 20, 2009

The government doesn’t seem to be doing a very good job of compensating car dealers for the $4,500 or $3,500 rebates they’re extending to buyers in the cash for clunkers program. The intrepid Instapundit, Glenn Reynolds, links to the following stories: New York dealers have been reimbursed on only 2% of deals; New Mexico dealers have collected $14,000 of $3,600,000 claimed, or 0.4%. “But, don’t worry,” Reynolds writes. “Government healthcare will work perfectly.” Right....

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Whipsaw on health care?

Published: Aug 19, 2009

Pollster Scott Rasmussen reports that support for Democratic health care bills declines when the “government option” health insurance provision is removed. Essentially, this repels some Democrats without attracting significant numbers of Republicans and Independents. I think this strengthens the position of the 60 or so left House Democrats who threaten to oppose any health care bill without a government option. Speaker Nancy Pelosi, out of both conviction and calculation I think, has stated that any bill that passes the House will have include the government option. But even so the Senate is not likely to pass a bill with the government option. This could set up a standoff...

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The netroots put winning ahead of convictions

Published: Aug 19, 2009

"I am a pessimist by nature, which is why I have spent my life as a journalist instead of trying to be a leader, which requires optimism." So wrote Robert Novak, who died yesterday, in his 2007 autobiography, "The Prince of Darkness." Novak's voice was mostly stilled after he was diagnosed with brain cancer in July 2008 -- he seemed to adhere to his longstanding practice of never writing a column in which he did not break news -- but he surely anticipated the problems now facing Barack Obama and Democratic congressional leaders, optimists all. Not that Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid are the only optimists who have been flummoxed by the obviously spontaneous...

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Robert Novak's books will live on

Published: Aug 18, 2009

Robert Novak, who died today, wrote thousands of news stories and columns in his 50-plus years as a Washington journalist. In each one, he said, he broke news. That is a staggering achievement. But journalism can be ephemeral and books, even in the digital age, live on. And here Novak also made a singular contribution. His best known book to today’s readers is his 2007 autobiography The Prince of Darkness, which I had the honor to review in the Weekly Standard. It’s a superb and unflinchingly self-revealing piece of work. For those who want to understand Washington politics and journalism over the past half-century, it is part of the very small shelf of books I would...

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Hiding from Nevadans

Published: Aug 18, 2009

Bill McGurn points out in his Wall Street Journal column today that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, having called those who are protesting Democratic health care bills as “evil mongers,” is not going to conduct in-person town meetings in Nevada during the August recess. Instead he’ll hold a tele-town hall next week. Reid’s transparent excuse is that he can reach more constituents that way. This is nonsense. Some 72% of Nevada’s population live in Las Vegas and surrounding Clark County and another 20% in the Reno area (Washoe and Douglas Counties and Carson City). Plenty of meeting sites could be found in Las Vegas and Reno which would be...

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Talking to terrorists isn't enough

Published: Aug 17, 2009

Some would have you believe that if governments talk to terrorists, they will eventually renounce violence and agree to democratic norms. Often Northern Ireland is cited as an example of this. But it’s not so simple, as John Bew, Martyn Frampton and Inigo Gurruchaga make clear in Talking to Terrorists: Making Peace in Northern Ireland and the Basque Country. The Northern Ireland talks succeeded only after the British security forced infiltrated the IRA organization and it became clear thagt the terrorists could not succeed. Then talking worked. For a good description of the book, see Gary Schmitt’s Weekly Standard review. For a more detailed account up to...

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Public to Democats; just say no

Published: Aug 17, 2009

Pollster Scott Rasmussen reports that only 35% of voters favor passage of Democratic health care plans, while 54% prefer that Congress do nothing. Barack Obama has tried to persuade Americans that doing nothing would be worse than passing a possibly imperfect bill. So far he doesn’t seem to have succeeded. Maybe opinion will shift, but this seems pretty devastating....

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Young voters should take another look at Obama

Published: Aug 16, 2009

Dear Young Obama Voter, Congratulations. You have truly changed America. Those of you under 30 voted 66 percent to 32 percent for Barack Obama, an unprecedented margin. Your elders 30 and over voted for him too, but only by a 50-to-49 percent margin. You converted a 2000-like margin to a solid majority and added significant numbers to the Democratic majorities in Congress. You voted, as your candidate and our president said, for hope and change. But I ask you to consider whether the policies which the president has proposed and in some cases pushed through really amount to that. I ask you to examine them through the prism of a book published in 1999, when most of you were too young to...

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Pennsylvania earthquake: Toomey more popular than Specter

Published: Aug 13, 2009

I’m not aware that Pennsylvania has ever been struck by a major natural earthquake. But the state has evidently been the scene of a major political earthquake over this past month. Pollster Scott Rasmussen reports that Pennsylvania voters now prefer Republican Pat Toomey over Democrat Arlen Specter for the Senate seat Specter has held for 29 years by a 48%-36% margin. Last month Rasmussen showed Specter leading 50%-39%. Rasmussen also now shows 54% with unfavorable ratings of Specter and 53% opposed to Democratic health care plans. Let me enter here all the usual and appropriate caveats. This is one poll; others may not show similar movement. Rasmussen’s likely voter screen...

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Michigan madness

Published: Aug 11, 2009

Things are pretty bad in my native state of Michigan, which has the nation’s highest unemployment rate and is the headquarters of government- and union-owned General Motors and Chrysler. Conditions are so bad that they seen to have sent some Michiganians (we used to say Michiganders when I was growing up) over the bend. Case in point: Democratic State Chairman Mark Brewer. Ordinarily a pretty savvy political operator, Brewer is now suggesting five ballot propositions for the 2010 ballot. Their aim apparently is to improve the lot of Michigan citizens. But the result, as anyone with an iota of sense can see, would be to inflict horrifying damage on an already staggering state...

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Big government becomes the battle-line issue

Published: Aug 12, 2009

As the battle over the Democrats' various health care bills takes place in town hall meetings across the country, or as elected Democrats hide from protesters who refuse to accept the purported "facts" justifying their bills, it's becoming clear that the focus of our politics has changed utterly in the first seven months of the Obama administration. In the decade from 1995 to 2005 we were a 49 percent nation, with Republicans winning between 49 and 51 percent of the vote for House of Representatives, Democratic presidential candidates receiving 48 or 49 percent of the vote, and their opponents (including Ross Perot in 1996) receiving between 49 and 51 percent. During that time...

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Obamacare dropping like a stone in polls

Published: Aug 11, 2009

Support for the congressional health care plans is dropping like a stone. Pollster Scott Rasmussen reports this morning that 42% of voters support congressional health care plans while 53% oppose them. That’s compared to 50% support and 45% opposition back in late June, when House Democrats wrapped up their cap-and-trade bill and before the Obama White House and congressional leaders began their push for health care legislation. Currently 26% strongly favor the legislation and 44% are strongly opposed. This reflects the fact that young voters who favor Democrats’ bills tend not to have strong feelings and older voters who oppose them tend to have strong feelings. An...

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Democrats flummoxed by health care protests

Published: Aug 10, 2009

This morning we were treated to a smug USA Today opinion article by Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer. “Drowning out opposing views is simply un-American,” they write. Actually, drowning out a speaker—by the boos some Democratic members of Congress have been greeted with or by the loud cheering that greeted Barack Obama so often during the 2008 campaign season—is not un-American or illegitimate. Preventing someone from speaking altogether—drowning them out permanently—is rude, boorish and often self-defeating; but not un-American. But the more interesting part of the article is not the headline quote, but the oozing condescension toward so many American...

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How Obama polarizes the electorate

Published: Aug 10, 2009

Barack Obama’s support seems to be disproportionately concentrated in a relatively small number of states. That’s the conclusion I drew when I took a look at Gallup’s midyear Obama job approval numbers by state, cited in my Examiner colleague Byron York’s Beltway Confidential blogpost. Overall Gallup showed Obama approval at 63% nationally in midyear, presumably in dates around June 30 and July 1. We can confidently assume that it’s somewhat lower now, so to get some perspective I counted up the electoral votes of the states in which his approval is above 63%, those in which it is exactly 63% and those in which it’s under 63%. The result is shown in...

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Deeds' focus on abortion is a desperation move

Published: Aug 09, 2009

Virginia Democratic gubernatorial nominee Creigh Deeds is going to use the abortion issue against his Republican opponent Bob McDonnell. I think this is a desperation tactic. It contradicts Deeds’s statement in a debate two weeks ago that he would not emphasize social issues, but that’s almost beside the point. The main thing is that 2009 is a year of economic distress, and voters’ minds are mostly on economic issues. McDonnell has been campaigning on jobs and economic growth, and in the process has emphasized his opposition to national Democrats’ position on the unions’ card check bill and the various Democratic health care plans. This has evidently been...

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Video proof: Obama wants a single-payer system

Published: Aug 09, 2009

One video is worth a thousand words (or, as in this column, about 730). The video in question, put together by a group called Verum Serum, shows public statements by three advocates of single-payer (government monopoly) health insurance explaining that a health care bill with a “government option” would move America toward a single-payer government health care system. You may not have heard of the first two, Rep. Jan Schakowsky and professor Jacob Hacker. But you have heard of the third, President Barack Obama. Schakowsky is a left-wing Democrat from the north side of Chicago and adjacent suburbs and, as chief deputy whip, part of the House Democratic leadership. The video...

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Jeb Bush for senator

Published: Aug 07, 2009

Now that Florida Senator Mel Martinez is resigning, Governor Charlie Crist must appoint a senator to serve out the rest of his term. Martinez had already announced that he would not run for reelection in 2010, and Crist has announced that he will run for the seat instead of seeking a second term as governor. Another Republican, former state House Speaker Marco Rubio, is also running for the seat, despite calls to leave the race when the much better known and widely popular Crist got in. Here are a couple of suggestions for Governor Crist. Number one. Appoint Florida’s best known Republican, your predecessor as governor, Jeb Bush,...

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The presidential power of persuasion

Published: Aug 07, 2009

The bully pulpit has long been considered one of the great political assets of the presidency. But it doesn’t seem to be working out so well for Barack Obama, at least on health care. Pollster.com has a nice graphic showing the trend in poll results in Obama’s job approval on health care. Note when net approval turns to disapproval—where the two lines on the graph cross. It’s right about on July 22, the date of his prime time evening press conference on health care (and the stupidity of the Cambridge police). And this reaclearpolitics.com chart of presidential approval ratings generally from realclearpolitics.com shows a similar trend. On July 22,...

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Hope and change--and children's books

Published: Aug 06, 2009

One of the unanticipated effects of the 2008 Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act is that you won’t be able to buy children’s books published before 1985. Among those lamenting that fact are the Atlantic’s Megan McArdle, overlawyereed.com’s Walter Olson and radio talk show host/Orange County lawyer Hugh Hewitt. Olson and Hewitt have been all over this story. How did Congress come to ban pre-1985 children’s books? Well, it’s simple. The CPSIA banned all products aimed at children under 12 which contain even trace amounts of lead. Children’s books printed before 1978. Books printed before 1985 may have been printed with lead in their...

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Voters nix health care proposals

Published: Aug 05, 2009

Some fascinating numbers from a Quinnipiac national poll on Democratic health care plans. By a 55%-35% margin, voters are more worried that Congress will add to the deficit than that it will fail to pass a health care bill. By a 57%-37% margin, voters oppose passing a health care bill if it adds “significantly” to the federal budget deficit. By an overwhelming 72%-21% margin, voters believe Barack Obama won’t keep his promise to reform health care without adding to the deficit. And they disapprove by a 52%-39% margin of Obama’s performance on health care, a reversal of their 46%-42% approval in a July 1 Quinnipiac poll. By a 36%-21% margin they believe a Democratic...

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Obama would stifle military and medical creativity

Published: Aug 05, 2009

We Americans tend to take the great strengths of our country for granted. In the hubbub of political debate, we concentrate on things that are allegedly wrong with America and lose sight of our great achievements. We make up only 4 percent of the world’s population. Yet we lead the world in many ways, and the rest of the world — or that part of it not in the thrall of evil regimes — depends on us for many of the things necessary to the good life. Cases in point: Most people in the rest of the world are free riders on the productivity and ingenuity of the American military and American medicine. They get the benefits of American military protection and American medical...

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How much cash for a clunker? Congress had no clue

Published: Aug 04, 2009

Government is not very good at price discovery. That’s one lesson, I think, of the cash for clunkers program. Whoever set the rebate at $3,500 and $4,500 (let’s average it to $4,000 for illustrative purposes) evidently calculated that 250,000 car owners would trade in their vehicles for new cars that get at least four miles per gallon more between July and November. That calculation proved to be hilariously wrong. Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz asks the question, “Also, isn’t is apparent that the $4,500 payments for older gas-guzzlers was extremely generous? That’s a huge chunk of change to spur people who probably would have bought a new car...

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The prospect of losing your health insurance . . .

Published: Aug 03, 2009

The prospect of hanging, Samuel Johnson famously said, concentrates the mind. So, it seems, does the prospect of losing your health insurance and being forced into a government plan—the unstated and indeed denied, but also obvious intention of the Democratic “government option” health care bills. Or so I conclude from pollster Scott Rasmussen’s report that 48% of likely voters now consider the American health care system excellent or good. That’s a big increase from May, when only 35% rated it so highly. Also, 80% of those with health insurance rated it as excellent or good, up from 70% in May. As I pointed out in my Sunday Examiner column, our current health...

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Beware the high cost of unintended consequences

Published: Aug 03, 2009

A teachable moment last Thursday night. No, I'm not referring to the beer-in-the-garden session featuring professor Henry Gates and Sgt. James Crowley and the shirt-sleeved president and vice president. We didn't learn anything more about the Gatesgate controversy except that only the least experienced of these four men — Crowley — was the only one willing to speak at length before the cameras. The teachable moment came at midnight Thursday when the government decided to suspend the less-than-four-weeks old Cash for Clunkers program. Congress scheduled it to last until November. But many more car owners than predicted walked into dealers to qualify for the $3,500 or $4,500...

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Cash for Clunkers: not the first time

Published: Jul 31, 2009

Ah, the perils of innovative legislation. A law intended to save the planet can end up costing the government zillions of dollars more than projected. The Cash-for-Clunkers program passed by Congress earlier this year is on the verge of running out of money—after four days! CfC pays $3,500 to $4,500 for consumers who trade in a car which qualifies, on the basis of age and gas mileage, as a clunker for a car which gets at least 4 miles per gallon more. The legislation authorized $1,000,000,000 in spending, and about $850,000,000 of that was toted up in four days. House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer is talking about transferring $2 billion of stimulus money to finance CfC; my Examiner...

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Gatesgate political fallout

Published: Jul 30, 2009

A little bit of dispute over at the Washington Post. Chris Cillizza, proprietor of the political Fix blog, seems to think Barack Obama won’t take much of a political hit over his statement that the Cambridge police “acted stupidly” in the Henry Gates case. At least in the long run—though, reading between the lines, I sense that Tad Devine, who is usually careful not to contradict the party line, sounds worried that he might. Howard Kurtz, the Post’s media critic, seems a little more concerned; the experts he quotes seem to be saying that Obama seems to be an elitist, contemptuous of ordinary people. Obama’s acolytes love to say that this case is a...

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Corzine in trouble with Hispanics?

Published: Jul 29, 2009

Some interesting figures from the Democratic firm Public Policy Polling on the governor’s race in New Jersey. PPP shows Republican challenger Christopher Christie leading Democratic incumbent Jon Corzine by a 50%-36% margin, which is pretty much in line with other firms’ top line results; the realclearpolitics.com average of recent polls is a 51%-39% Christie lead. The first thing I found interesting is that PPP stratifies its results by area code. The area code lines run pretty close to the county lines, so it’s possible to compare the Corzine-Christie numbers with the actual numbers in the 2005 governor race in which Corzine beat Republican Doug Forester by a 53%-43%...

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Obama has aura but doesn't know how to legislate

Published: Jul 29, 2009

Aura dazzles, but argument gets things done. Consider the debate on the Democrats' health care bill and the increasingly negative response to Barack Obama's performance. Democrats have the numbers to pass a health care bill -- 256 votes in the House, 38 more than the 218 majority; 60 votes in the Senate, enough to defeat a filibuster. But they haven't come up with the arguments, at least yet, to put those numbers on the board. It's something not many predicted that bright January inauguration morning. We knew that day that Obama was good at aura, at generating enthusiasm for the prospect of hope and change. His inspiring speeches -- the Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner in Des Moines, the...

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A close Senate race in California?

Published: Jul 27, 2009

Pollster Scott Rasmussen reports that California Senator Barbara Boxer leads possible Republican challenger Carly Fiorina, the former Hewlett Packard CEO and 2008 campaigner for John McCain, by only 45%-41%. That’s a pretty stunning result. The only other public poll conducted pairing these two, conducted by Field in February, showed Boxer leading 55%-25%. That looks a lot like Boxer’s 2004 58%-38% victory over Republican Bill Jones. The Rasmussen result looks more like Boxer’s 1992 48%-43% victory over Republican Bruce Herschensohn or her California colleague Dianne Feinstein’s 1994 47%-45% victory over Michael Huffington. Caveats should be entered. This is...

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Are the Blue Dogs doomed? A reply to Nate Silver

Published: Jul 27, 2009

Nate Silver, proprietor of the fascinating 538.com blog, takes me to task for suggesting in my July 22 Examiner column that, in his words, “health care reform is not very popular in the Blue Dog districts.” I think his quarrel here is not with me, but with the Blue Dogs and/or their constituents. He cites polling data that suggests that three-quarters of non-liberal Democrats agree with the statement, “it’s the government’s responsibility to make sure that everyone in the United States has adequate health care.” As I think Silver would acknowledge, it’s a jump from these polling numbers to the proposition that three-quarters of this segment...

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Public to Obama on Gatesgate: not what we had in mind

Published: Jul 26, 2009

From pollster Scott Rasmussen comes evidence that Barack Obama’s comment that the Cambridge police “acted stupidly” in the arrest of Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates has had some political cost. Rasmussen reports that 26% of likely voters think Obama’s response to Lynn Sweet’s press conference question was excellent or good, while 46% rated it as poor. There was a clear racial divide in the responses: blacks considered it excellent or good as opposed to poor by a 71% to 5% margin; whites considered it poor as opposed to excellent or good by a 53% to 22% margin. In addition, the press conference seems to have increased...

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Stumbling governors signal trouble for Dems

Published: Jul 26, 2009

With polls showing a drop in Barack Obama's job rating and sinking support for the Democrats' health care plans, there is evidence of collateral damage where you might not expect to find it, in the standing of Democratic governors. Pennsylvania's Ed Rendell is suddenly getting negative job ratings in both the Quinnipiac and the Franklin and Marshall polls -- his lowest marks in seven years as governor. Ohio's Ted Strickland, who has spent most of his first term working amicably with Republican legislators, scores under 50 percent in the latest Quinnipiac poll and has only tenuous leads over two Republicans, John Kasich and Mike DeWine, who may run against him next year. In the two...

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Jersey press bias

Published: Jul 24, 2009

Many of us have noticed the tendency of mainstream media reporters, when writing stories on politicians caught up in scandal, to identify Republicans as Republicans and to identify Democrats as—well, they often just leave their party identification to the reader’s imagination. Case in point: the Star Ledger’s early web story yesterday on the arrest of multiple New Jersey politicians on corruption charges. Note that the first one mentioned is identified as a Republican. No party identification is given for the rest, though National Review’s Jim Geraghty with some intrepid reporting ferrets it out: most of them are Democrats. Guess the nj.com writer...

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No health bill till fall

Published: Jul 23, 2009

Well, the verdict is in on Barack Obama’s press conference last night. Democratic congressional leaders are conceding that they won’t pass a health care bill in either house before they go into recess early in August. Here’s the story from Politico and here it is from The Hill. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has explicitly conceded that the Senate won’t act. Speaker Nancy Pelosi, while insisting still that there are enough votes to pass the bill on the floor, is saying that it’s not so important to pass it before the recess. She tried to suggest that she fearful that members will encounter negative reaction over the recess by saying, “I’m not...

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Brookings economist disses Obama health care tax

Published: Jul 23, 2009

In his press conference last night, Barack Obama said he would accept higher taxes on high earners as part of a health care bill. Brookings Institution economist William Gale disagrees. He makes a strong argument against the Democrats’ plans to finance their health care bill by increasing taxes on the rich, which is, he writes, “bad economic policy, bad health policy, bad budget policy and poor leadership.” A pretty searing assessment from a scholar who notes that he is not against making the tax code more progressive for other reasons. I wonder if his piece has come to the attention of former Brookings scholars like OMB Director Peter Orszag,...

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Comparative effectiveness research is junk science

Published: Jul 23, 2009

Or so an email correspondent says, contrary to my assertion in my July 12 Examiner column. I thought his email was interesting, and pass it along with his permission. It begins by quoting the column, presents an anecdotes and then some more general thoughts. “’But comparative effectiveness research is, if not junk science, not a fully developed intellectual enterprise. Medicine is an art as well as a science, and comparative effectiveness research may too often compare apples and oranges.’ It’s worse than junk science—it’s inherently deceptive. A personal anecdote: I’ve a dear friend who just passed her 5 year...

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The critical votes on health care

Published: Jul 22, 2009

Chairman Henry Waxman has now cancelled markup hearings of the House Energy and Commerce Committee for the health care bill two days in a row. That’s a clear signal he doesn’t have the votes in committee. In my Examiner column today, I noted that 57 House Democrats have signed either the July 9 Blue Dog letter or the July 16 Jared Polis letter opposing the House health care bills on various grounds. Since there are 256 Democrats in the House and 218 votes are needed for a majority, the Democratic leadership cannot pass a bill without either some Republican votes (very unlikely) or the votes of about one-third of the 57 Democrats who signed one or both letters....

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Pulling the TARP over taxpayers' eyes

Published: Jul 22, 2009

There is still no evidence that the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) rammed through a Democratic Congress last October by a lame duck Republican president actually averted a credit crisis by stimulating lending. This is because the Treasury Department under a Democratic president refuses to make public the needed data. But thanks to Neil Barofsky, the TARP inspector-general, there is evidence that banks are instead hoarding funds rather than lending them to businesses that desperately need working capital. When asked by House Oversight and Reform Committee member Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-OH, yesterday whether the Federal Reserve was "paying banks high interest rates to keep funds...

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A month of gloomy Thursdays for health care plan

Published: Jul 22, 2009

Thursday is the day things tend to come to a boil on Capitol Hill. Members of Congress have been in town for three or four days, they're planning their exits on Friday to meet other commitments, they've had a chance to talk and meet with each other and sample the mood of their colleagues. This month, Thursdays have been very bad days for the Obama administration's attempt to pass health care bills concocted by House and Senate committee chairmen. On the first Thursday after Congress got back in session, July 9, 40 members of the Democratic Blue Dogs Coalition sent House Speaker Nancy Pelosi a letter opposing any health care bill that increases the federal deficit, fails to reform...

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Second term, please

Published: Jul 21, 2009

That’s how I interpret Ben Bernanke’s opinion article in the Tuesday Wall Street Journal. Bernanke explains carefully and clearly how the Federal Reserve has expanded the money supply. More important, he describes the mechanisms by which the Fed can contract the money supply when the velocity of money increases and the danger of inflation rises. Message to Barack Obama, who must decide by next February whether to reappoint Bernanke to another four-year term or to appoint someone else: the markets will trust me to put on the brakes when necessary. Anyone else you appoint—even as justifiably esteemed an economist as Larry Summers—could be seen by the markets as a...

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Health care: details, details

Published: Jul 21, 2009

Interesting details about the Democrats’ health care bills keep emerging. Examples: According to the Red State blog, Section 1233 of the House bill requires senior citizens to meetat least every five years with a doctor or nurse practitioner to discuss dying with dignity, living wills, durable health care powers of attorney, hospice care and the like. Red State’s Eric Erickson sees this as a step toward encouraging euthanasia. “Government,” writes Erickson, “wants seniors to make sure seniors know it is time to commit suicide to save the system money.” Blogger Suzanna Logan (hat tip to Instapundit) reports that the Senate HELP Committee bill gives the...

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The revolt of the affluent

Published: Jul 20, 2009

Last Friday in the Beltway Confidential blog I called attention to the letter signed by Democratic Congressman Jared Polis and 20 other Democrats, 19 freshmen and one sophomore, opposing the $554 billion supertax on high earners included in the House Democrats’ health care bill. That letter is featured prominently in the lead story in today’s Wall Street Journal, headlined “The Democrats’ New Worry: Their Own Rich Voters.” Here’s something to keep in mind. Barack Obama’s winning 2008 majority was a top-and-bottom coalition. According to the Edison-Mitofsky exit poll, Obama carried voters with incomes under $50,000 and over $200,000. He lost among...

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A liberal critique of Obamanomics

Published: Jul 19, 2009

William Galston has provided on his New Republic blog a searing critique of the Obama administration’s economic policies. He bases it on a close reading of Congressional Budget Office Director Douglas Elmendorf’s testimony last week. The headline story from Elmendorf’s appearance was his response to Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad’s question on whether any of the Democrats’ health care bills will “bend the long-term cost curve” on health care: a big no. But Galston drills down farther into Elmendorf’s analysis and concludes that the long-term fiscal problem goes beyond health care. His conclusion:...

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Britain, U.S. go in different directions

Published: Jul 19, 2009

Once upon a time, British and American politics seemed to operate in tandem. Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan came to office, both supposedly little-experienced and out of the mainstream, at about the same time. Tony Blair shaped his New Labor politics with the New Democrat approach of Bill Clinton very much in mind. But today British and American politics today are moving in very different directions. One reason is that changes of government, from one party to another, have become very infrequent in Britain. The only one the last 30 years, since Thatcher’s victory in 1979, was Blair’s in 1997. Indeed, the interval was the longest since Britain developed modern political...

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When the cat barks, pay attention

Published: Jul 17, 2009

It was predictable that House Blue Dog Democrats might have a problem with the Democratic leadership’s humungous health care bill. But I find it even more interesting that Colorado Democrat Jared Polis is circulating a letter among his fellow freshman Democrats opposing the $554 billion supertax on high earners. Polis is from a heavily Democratic district centered on the university and extreme spots center town of Boulder; he is one of the wealthy liberal entrepreneurs who have worked successfully for Democratic victories in Colorado in 2006 and 2008. But evidently he’s still something of a free market guy. The economy-killing potential of the supertax is obvious; it is...

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Why send money to community colleges?

Published: Jul 15, 2009

In Michigan Barack Obama announced a $12 billion spending program for community colleges. But how effective are they? My American Enterprise Institute colleague is skeptical that the money will do much good. Hess argues that community colleges are mid-twentieth century institutions and that, while some do a lot of good, they tend not to represent the cutting edge of non-elite higher education in the age of the Internet and private higher education institutions like the University of Phoenix. My own suspicion is that pumping money into community colleges is just another attempt to insulate public employees from the effects of the recession....

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The price of leaving the stimulus to Congress

Published: Jul 15, 2009

"Never let a crisis go to waste," Barack Obama's Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel said last November. The crisis he referred to was economic: the financial collapse and the rapidly deepening recession. The opportunity it presented, for Obama and Emanuel, was to vastly expand the size and scope of the federal government through cap-and-trade and health care legislation. The administration has arguably handled the financial collapse competently: Banks are operating and the financial markets have been unfrozen. It has had less success in addressing the recession. The $787 billion stimulus package passed in February, we were told, would hold unemployment down to 8 percent. It reached...

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Only once in 30 years

Published: Jul 14, 2009

I’m in London for a couple of days of research, and the political scene is quite different in Britain. For one thing Britain has had a change of government, from one party to another, only once in the last four years. The United States has had four changes of government at the presidential level during that time. But since the election of Margaret Thatcher’s Conservatives in May 1979, the only change in government here was the election of Tony Blair’s New Labour in May 1997. Now almost everyone here expects that the next election will produce a victory for David Cameron’s (New?) Conservatives, who are far ahead in the polls....

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Who's afraid of global warming?

Published: Jul 12, 2009

Back in the 1970s we were told that overpopulation and global cooling were going to destroy the world. Turns out they haven’t. Population growth has slowed way down almost everywhere and the problem, we’re told now, by governmental, universal, media and corporate elites, is global warming or, rather, man-made global warming. But despite the cries from the likes of Al Gore and friends that we cease debate about whether global warming is occurring and will occur—not a very scientific attitude is it?—some dissenting and persuasive voices are being heard. Two examples: this piece by Christopher Booker in the Sunday Telegraph and this interview of Australian geologist...

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Clarence Thomas biography timeline

Published: Jul 12, 2009

-Born: Pin Point, Ga., June 23, 1948, a descendant of slaves. -Moved in with grandparents Myers and Christine Anderson, Savannah, Ga., 1955. -Attended St. John Vianney’s Minor Seminary in Savannah and Conception Seminary College, Conception, Mo., 1964-68. -Married Kathy Grace Ambush, 1971; separated 1981, divorced 1984. -Graduated cum laude, College of the Holy Cross, 1971 -Graduated Yale Law School, 1974 -Assistant attorney general, state of Missouri, 1974-77 -Lawyer, Monsanto Co., St. Louis, 1977-79 -Legislative assistant, Sen. John Danforth, 1979-81 -Assistant secretary of education for the Office of Civil Rights, 1981-82 -Chairman, U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity...

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A sociable man in a lonely business

Published: Jul 12, 2009

Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes is supposed to have said that his colleagues were never so close after the Supreme Court building, which opened in 1923, provided separate bathrooms for each justice. By all recent accounts, the personal relations among the nine justices are cordial and respectful, if somewhat distant. Justice Clarence Thomas has written that after he was confirmed by the Senate, he was greeted warmly by his new colleagues and enjoyed a two-hour chat with his predecessor, Thurgood Marshall. He privately took umbrage when publication of former Justice Harry Blackmun’s papers revealed memos in which his law clerks referred sarcastically to other justices —...

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Clarence Thomas: The courage of his convictions

Published: Jul 12, 2009

Justice Clarence Thomas has now served on the Supreme Court for 18 years, longer than most of the other 109 men and women who have sat on that high bench. Yet he remains an enigma to many. In the court’s open hearings he sits mute while most of his colleagues pepper counsel with questions. Yet he can be seen trading quips with his seatmate, Justice Stephen Breyer — a hint of the gregarious Clarence Thomas whose close friends describe him as a man with a wide-ranging intellect and gutsy sense of humor that takes flight in what they call “The Laugh.” He is a man who says he does not read newspapers and seldom if ever watches newscasts. If true, it’s probably a...

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Chaos on Capitol Hill: All politics is loco

Published: Jul 12, 2009

Disarray. That's one word to describe the status of the Obama administration's legislative program as Congress heads into its final four weeks of work before the August recess. A watered-down cap-and-trade bill passed the House narrowly last month, but Sen. Barbara Boxer has decided not to bring up her version in the upper chamber until September. Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus, who promised a health care bill last month, still isn't delivering, and neither is the health committee's Christopher Dodd. They're both trying to nibble down cost estimates from the Congressional Budget Office, which has put the price tag at a trillion or more. But their latest ploys -- broad-based tax...

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The courage of his convictions

Published: Jul 12, 2009

In standing firm for his beliefs, Clarence Thomas has surprised both admirers and critics -- and left a clear stamp on the Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has now served on the Supreme Court for 18 years, longer than most of the other 109 men and women who have sat on that high bench. Yet he remains an enigma to many. In the court's open hearings he sits mute while most of his colleagues pepper counsel with questions. Yet he can be seen trading quips with his seatmate, Justice Stephen Breyer -- a hint of the gregarious Clarence Thomas whose close friends describe him as a man with a wide-ranging intellect and gutsy sense of humor that takes flight in what they call "The...

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A sociable man in a lonely business

Published: Jul 09, 2009

Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes is supposed to have said that his colleagues were never so close after the Supreme Court building, which opened in 1923, provided separate bathrooms for each justice. By all recent accounts, the personal relations among the nine justices are cordial and respectful, if somewhat distant. Justice Clarence Thomas has written that after he was confirmed by the Senate he was greeted warmly by his new colleagues, and enjoyed a two-hour chat with his predecessor, Thurgood Marshall. He privately took umbrage when publication of former Justice Harry Blackmun's papers revealed memos in which his law clerks referred sarcastically to other justices -- something Thomas...

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The definitive piece on Palin and the press

Published: Jul 10, 2009

Carl Cannon has written the definitive piece on the press and its unfair treatment of Sarah Palin in Politics Daily. I’ve known Carl for many years. As he says in this piece, he is not a Republican or a conservative; I think he’s a little more liberal than conservative, but with various views on various issues, many not predictable. But most of all he’s a reporter. He doesn’t like lies and he doesn’t like b.s.; he tries to understand what he’s covering and to report it accurately and fairly, whatever the consequences. His passion for reporting accurately and fairly comes out in this piece. It’s a damning...

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Good numbers mean good recruiting for Republicans

Published: Jul 09, 2009

Politico’s Ben Smith has followed up my Wednesday Examiner column and Beltway Confidential blogpost with a story providing more detail about how Independent voters have been trending away from Barack Obama and the Democrats and provides some interesting reporting on how this is affecting this year’s gubernatorial races in Virginia and New Jersey. This shift in opinion is happening at a very inconvenient time for Democrats, not only because their congressional leaders are grappling with the difficult task of putting together health care legislation but also because this is recruiting season for the 2010 congressional elections. And the Republicans suddenly seem to be doing...

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Economy has always driven U.S. family dynamics

Published: Jul 09, 2009

Over the long run of history, young Americans as they have grown more affluent have moved out of their parents' households. A century ago, that meant when they got married, but marriage was postponed until a man could support a family: The median age for marriage in 1890 was 26 for men, and in 1900 15 percent of men and 10 percent of women over 30 had never been married -- far higher than today. Households typically included bachelor uncles and maiden aunts, with children doubled or tripled up in bedrooms. This changed slowly in the early 20th century, but change was halted by the Depression of the 1930s. Marriages were postponed or put off forever; young people were content to stay put...

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Independents dissing Obama?

Published: Jul 08, 2009

In my Examiner column today, I argued that American voters are recoiling against the big government programs of the Obama administration and congressional Democrats. I noted particularly that Independent voters, who responded much more like Democrats than Republicans when George W. Bush was in the White House, are responding much more like Republicans than Democrats now that Obama is there. I am pointed toward additional evidence for this last proposition by blogger Fred Bauer, who cites polls in Minnesota, Missouri, New Mexico, New York, Ohio, Oregon and Virginia, all of which he carried in November 2008. Also, Public Policy Polling, an outfit run by North Carolina Democrats, documents...

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A way forward on campaign finance

Published: Jul 08, 2009

“Barack Obama could preside over the demise of modern campaign finance,” reads the breathless headline in a story in today’s Politico. The Supreme Court took the rare step on June 30 by ordering reargument on September 9—before the usual start of the Court’s term in October—of the Citizens United case and calling for the parties to submit briefs on the constitutionality of the McCain-Feingold’s ban on corporation-paid political advertising. This suggests that the Court is ready to overturn recent precedents upholding these restrictions—precedents in which former Justice Sandra Day O’Connor voted to uphold the law but which her successor...

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Americans are getting cold feet over Democratic proposals

Published: Jul 08, 2009

The financial system collapsed. Housing prices cratered. Unemployment is at a record high for the last quarter-century. The Democratic president has a solidly positive job rating. And yet we Americans have not suddenly become collectivists. The economic distress of the 1930s led Americans to favor less reliance on markets and more on government. The economic distress of the 1970s led Americans to favor less reliance on government and more on markets. It doesn't seem unreasonable to expect, as many political liberals have been predicting, that the economic distress of the late 2000s will produce a shift in the 1930s direction. But it doesn't seem to have happened yet. Or so the polling...

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Some surprising numbers from Ohio

Published: Jul 07, 2009

The latest Quinnipiac poll from Ohio shows Barack Obama’s job rating at just 49%-44% positive, down sharply from 62%-31% in early May. That’s a sharp and surprising drop. In the race for the Senate seat left open by Republican George Voinovich, Republican Rob Portman is running better than in previous Quinnipiac polls. He now trails Lieutenant Governor Lee Fisher 37%-33% and Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner 35%-34%. In three previous Quinnipiac polls this year Portman trailed both of them by an average of 39%-31%, so this is also a significant change. Other previous polls showed similar results. What to make of this? This is just one poll, and thus a possible outlier. But...

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Democratic pollster says Palin base formidable

Published: Jul 07, 2009

Mark Blumenthal, the Democratic pollster who runs pollster.com, has an interesting post on Sarah Palin. He argues, on the one hand, that Palin has a base of admirers among Republican voters as formidable as the base of admirers Barack Obama had among Democratic voters three or four years ago. Then, on the other hand, he argues that Palin has not shown the political surefootedness that Obama did—or Ronald Reagan before him. As one has come to expect from Blumenthal, it’s a thoughtful post, based solidly on data, by a thoughtful and clearminded observer.

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Palin resignation: color me flabbergasted

Published: Jul 05, 2009

I was astonished by Sarah Palin’s announcement that she is going to resign as Governor of Alaska. I’ve read over her “point guard” explanation for doing so, and I still don’t get it. She’s says he going to advance the causes she believes in by leaving public office? She will evidently leave office with only 16 months to go in her term (she says she’ll resign July 26 and Alaska governors take office in December); why not serve out the 16 months? It’s not that long a time. It’s hard to realize that Palin has been an important national figure for only 10 months. Through that time I have thought it unfair that her personal life has...

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The dangerous dream of a zero-risk America

Published: Jul 05, 2009

One policy of the Obama administration that has understandably attracted little public attention is its proposal to make the Federal Reserve a “systemic risk regulator.” It’s a well-intentioned attempt to prevent the kind of financial crisis that struck the nation last year and ended an unprecedented period of 25 years of low-inflation economic growth. But it’s nonetheless deeply misguided, and it’s heartening that both Democratic and Republican members of Congress have voiced intelligent skepticism. For one thing, it’s not clear that anyone can be expected to reliably identify “systemic risk.” Financial institutions that invested in...

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Americans have doubts about Government Motors

Published: Jul 03, 2009

Pollster Scott Rasmussen has the specifics: 80% want the government to sell its majority share of General Motors as soon as possible, 64% favor a law requiring it to be sold within a year—not exactly the government’s timetable, which shows it holding the shares until as late as 2018. Only 26% say the GM bankruptcy deal was a good thing. As Rasmussen notes, GM sales slumped more than expected in June, while Ford sales slumped less than expected. On this Fourth of July weekend, it appears that most Americans do not at all like the idea of the government owning and running a major auto company. Yes, I know that President Obama said he has no...

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Recommended Summer Reading

Published: Jul 02, 2009

For those who like to read fascinating, well-written books in the summer, rather than airheaded potboilers, I have two books to recommend, both written by authors who once worked for me. I’m in the middle of both, and look forward to reading more. In historical order, the first is War on the Run: The Epic Story of Richard Rogers and the Conquest of America’s First Frontiers, by John F. Ross. It’s the story of Richard Rogers, the ranger scout whom I had never heard of, who led daring attacks on the French during the French and Indian Wars, and whose rules for rangers have continuing relevance for special forces today. John worked for me more than 25 years ago,...

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Firefighter case shows seamy side of racial politics

Published: Jul 01, 2009

The Supreme Court's decision in Ricci v. DeStefano, the case of the New Haven, Conn., firefighters, was a ringing endorsement of the Civil Rights Act of 1964's ban on racial discrimination and a repudiation of Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor's decision in the Second Circuit Appeals Court. While five justices flatly rejected Sotomayor's ruling, even the four dissenters wouldn't have let stand her ruling allowing the results of a promotion exam to be set aside because no black firefighter had a top score. Ricci is also something else: a riveting lesson in political sociology, thanks to the concurring opinion by Justice Samuel Alito. It shows how a combination of vote-hungry...

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Attention, Second Circuit: Experts say Chrysler bankruptcy could be a terrible precedent

Published: Jun 30, 2009

Bankruptcy experts Mark Roe and David Skeel, law professors at Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania, have written a paper assessing the Chrysler bankruptcy—very negatively. It hasn’t been published yet, but it’s available here to Social Science Research Network subscribers; I’m working off an emailed copy. The paper tends to support my view that the government bludgeoned Chrysler’s secured creditors to give up property rights that they would normally have had in bankruptcy in favor of an unsecured creditor, the UAW’s retiree health plan funda—although they don’t go as far as I did in my May 6 Examiner column when I called this...

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One more thought on the anatomy of the cap-and-trade vote

Published: Jun 29, 2009

An added note to my weekend Beltway Confidential blogpost Anatomy of the House cap-and-trade roll call. If you take a look at the map of states whose House delegations voted for and against the House bill (no state’s delegation was evenly divided, as it happens), it looks more like the map of the 2004 presidential election than of the 2008 presidential election. You can find such a map in this article by Jay Cost in realclearpolitics.com. George W. Bush in 2004 carried 27 of the 28 states whose House delegations voted against cap-and-trade; the exception was PA (21 electoral votes). John Kerry in 2004 carried 18 of the 22 states whose House delegations voted for cap-and-trade; he...

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Obama doesn't care about the details

Published: Jun 29, 2009

Clive Crook in the Financial Times this morning is making a point I made in my June 21 Examiner column on the three rules of Obama: the President doesn’t care much about the details of public policy. Relevant excerpt: "[H]e does not seem to care much about the details of policy. He subcontracted the stimulus package to congressional appropriators, the cap-and-trade legislation to Henry Waxman and Edward Markey, and his health care program to Max Baucus. The result is incoherent public policy: Indefensible pork barrel projects, a carbon emissions bill that doesn’t limit carbon emissions from politically connected industries, and a health care program...

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Anatomy of the House cap-and-trade roll call

Published: Jun 28, 2009

The House Democratic leadership succeeded in passing the Waxman-Markey cap and trade bill by a 219-212 margin. In all, 44 Democrats voted against the bill, and 8 Republicans voted for it. It’s always interesting to examine the roll call on a close vote on an important issue—when members are voting for keeps and when some significant number of members cross party lines. And House roll call votes provide useful clues in gauging the legislation’s possible fate in the Senate. This bill was passed by the votes of one-third of the nation—the Northeast (New England, NY, NJ, DE, MD) and the Pacific coast (CA, OR, WA, HI), as the following table shows. Just over half the...

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No excuse for Democrats’ sticker shock on health care

Published: Jun 28, 2009

Democrats’ plans to pass major health care legislation have been stymied, at least for the moment, by the Congressional Budget Office’s cost estimates. To the consternation and the apparent surprise of leading Democrats, the CBO scored Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus’ latest offering at $1.6 trillion over 10 years, while it scored the completed sections of Sen. Christopher Dodd’s bill at $1 trillion. Presumably, the incomplete sections would cost more. The senators and the Obama administration might not have been so unpleasantly surprised had they paid closer attention to CBO Director Douglas Elmendorf’s testimony to Baucus’ committee delivered back...

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Will Ben get a second term?

Published: Jun 26, 2009

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke faced a tough grilling yesterday in a hearing of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, as indicated by the coverage here in the Washington Examiner and in the Wall Street Journal. He was pressed hard on his interactions in December and January with Bank of America CEO Ken Lewis over the issue of whether BofA should follow through on its commitment to buy Merrill Lynch. The reviews were not all positive. The invaluable Megan McArdle, a Bernanke fan for the most part, wrote that she got the impression he was lying. McArdle also expressed the fear that Bernanke won’t be reappointed Chairman when...

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All the news not (at least yet) fit to print

Published: Jun 26, 2009

Detroit City Council President Pro Tem Monica Conyers has pleaded guilty of conspiring to commit bribery and faces up to five years in prison. Naturally this is big news in the Detroit papers. The charges arise out of a slude hauling contract which was approved by the Council by a 5-4 vote after Conyers switched her vote. But it’s also a national story, since Conyers’s husband, John Conyers, Jr., the second most senior member of the U.S. House of Representatives, is Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. But I can’t find any mention of it on the websites of the New York Times or the Washington Post. Well, it’s on The Washington Examiner...

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Mark Sanford's sin doesn't mean ruin for Republicans

Published: Jun 25, 2009

The point is being made that the Republican party is in terrible trouble because two Republican presidential candidates have been felled in two weeks by admissions of adultery. Well, yes, to a point. Mark Sanford had the potential to be an interesting presidential candidate, though given his aversion to standard political tactics most likely not a successful one. John Ensign on the other hand was never more than a very unlikely candidate. He is not hugely articulate, he has no particular ties to any important constituency in Republican presidential politics, he has not sponsored major legislation. He may have been traveling to Iowa, but it seems almost certain that his presidential...

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The good old days weren't

Published: Jun 24, 2009

Brink Lindsey of the Cato Institute has an excellent article in this month’s Reason responding to liberals like Paul Krugman who are nostalgic about the economically more egalitarian midcentury America in which they grew up. Lindsey looks back at the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s and finds “a combination of in-group solidarity and out-group hostility” which most Americans, including most liberals, would be uncomfortable with today. Racism and sexism were not only rampant but also important defining characteristics of midcentury America; so were restraints on competition, cultural conformism and the stultifying effects of what William Whyte described in his...

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The adolescent angst of Barack Obama

Published: Jun 24, 2009

There is a tendency for newly installed presidents, like adolescents suddenly liberated from adult supervision, to do the exact opposite of what their predecessors did. Presidents of both parties indulge in this behavior, though Democrats who campaign as candidates of hope and change are more likely to do so. Some of this is a legitimate response to the political process: Voters tend to elect presidents who seem to possess qualities and views they thought lacking in their predecessors. But some of it, and especially in the case of Barack Obama, seems to come from an adolescentlike confidence that everything done by those who came before is (insert your own generation’s expletive...

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Whose side is the New York Times on?

Published: Jun 22, 2009

The New York Times has revealed that its reporter David Rohde was kidnapped and held by terrorists in Afghanistan for seven months and that it and, at its request, other media refrained from reporting this to protect Rohde’s safety. The story has come out only after Rohde was rescued by American forces. Here is the Times’s explanation for covering up this story. “From the early days of this ordeal, the prevailing view among David’s family, experts in kidnapping cases, officials of several governments and others we consulted was that going public could increase the danger to David and the other hostages. The kidnappers initially said as...

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Dodge facts, skip details, govern Chicago-style

Published: Jun 21, 2009

We pundits like to analyze our presidents and so, as Barack Obama deals with difficult problems ranging from health care legislation to upheaval in Iran, let me offer my Three Rules of Obama. First, Obama likes to execute long-range strategies but suffers from cognitive dissonance when new facts render them inappropriate. His 2008 campaign was a largely flawless execution of a smart strategy, but he was flummoxed momentarily when the Russians invaded Georgia and when John McCain picked Sarah Palin as his running mate. On domestic policy, he has been executing his long-range strategy of vastly expanding government, but may be encountering problems as voters show unease at huge increases...

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Dodge facts, skip details, govern Chicago-style

Published: Jun 21, 2009

We pundits like to analyze our presidents and so, as Barack Obama deals with difficult problems ranging from health care legislation to upheaval in Iran, let me offer my Three Rules of Obama. First, Obama likes to execute long-range strategies but suffers from cognitive dissonance when new facts render them inappropriate. His 2008 campaign was a largely flawless execution of a smart strategy, but he was flummoxed momentarily when the Russians invaded Georgia and when John McCain picked Sarah Palin as his running mate. On domestic policy, he has been executing his long-range strategy of vastly expanding government, but may be encountering problems as voters show unease at huge increases...

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No, Obama can't govern like FDR in 1933

Published: Jun 18, 2009

In a blogpost entitled “Is comprehensive health care reform dead?” the always incisive and charming (especially when she’s, in my view, wrong) Megan McArdle makes the following good points: But this is not 1932, and Obama is not FDR. FDR came into office with 20+% unemployment and a banking crisis that was wiping out peoples' life savings every day. FDR also came into office with a trivial national debt, and a Federal government that consumed less than 4% of GDP. He had a lot of run room. Maybe more importantly, he came into office without the kinds of institutional arrangements that made it politically difficult to pass his policies. There are a lot of these, but...

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Public wary of Obama policies: NBC/WSJ and CBS/NYT polls

Published: Jun 18, 2009

For all the favorable coverage he’s gotten on mainstream media, Barack Obama seems to be having a hard time selling the American public on his policies. That’s the message that comes through loud and clear from the NBC/Wall Street Journal and CBS/New York Times polls made public today. Obama’s job approval is still high, though it’s down 5% from previous levels in both these polls. And on some policies he’s got majority or near-majority support. But consider these findings from the NBC/Wall Street Journal poll: ● 69% say they have a great deal or quite a bit of concern about government ownership of General Motors and a 56%-35% majority opposes government...

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Thoughts on Obama and Iran

Published: Jun 17, 2009

For one who has been cautiously optimistic about some of Barack Obama’s important foreign policy decisions—for his refusal to withdraw from Iraq, for his stepping up our efforts in Afghanistan—I have to say I am dismayed by his policy toward Iran. Bloggers on the left as well as the right have been cheering on the Iranians demonstrating not only in protest of what they consider the rigged reelection of Mahmoud Ahmedinejad but against the fundamental features of the mullah regime. But Obama has been hesitant to comment and has only expressed “deep concern” and then promised not to “meddle” in Iranian internal affairs. This toothless response is...

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All politics is turnout — and enthusiasm is key

Published: Jun 17, 2009

Many psephologists — derived from the word for pebbles, which the ancient Greeks used as ballots — study who wins and loses elections. Lately I’ve been looking more closely at turnout. For we live, though most psephologists haven’t stopped to notice it lately, in a decade of vastly increased voter turnout. Turnout in our presidential elections has risen from 105 million in 2000 to 122 million in 2004 and 131 million in 2008, an increase of 25 percent when population went up only 8 percent. Turnout in off-year elections has increased too. The total vote for House elections has gone from 66 million in 1998 to 73 million in 2002 and 80 million in 2006, an increase of...

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When detainees get rights they don’t deserve

Published: Jun 12, 2009

It shouldn’t come as a complete surprise that, as Stephen Hayes reported in the Weekly Standard, detainees in Afghanistan are now being advised of their Miranda rights by American interrogators — that they have a right to be silent, a right to a lawyer, a right to have that lawyer paid for, etc. This is, after all, a logical extension of Bush administration critics’ insistence that such detainees — though unlawful combatants under the Geneva Conventions — must be given every jot and tittle of the rights civilian Americans enjoy on American soil. It’s nonetheless news, if only because Barack Obama on the campaign trail said that “of course”...

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Behind the numbers: What Virginia voters were telling us

Published: Jun 10, 2009

Looking at the returns from the Virginia Democratic gubernatorial primary, with 99.8% of the precincts reporting, I think the most interesting figures are about turnout. Yes, the results tell us that the late polls showing state Senator Creigh Deeds jumping out ahead of former Democratic National Chairman Terry McAuliffe and former Delegate Brian Moran were pretty much right on the mark. Deeds won with 50%, almost enough to avoid runoff if Virginia were a state requiring an absolute majority to win a party’s nomination (it isn’t a state but a commonwealth and it doesn’t have runoffs), to 26% for McAuliffe and 24% for Moran. It was apparent going into the primary that...

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Qualms and questions about Obama’s health plan

Published: Jun 10, 2009

Barack Obama has said he wants to pass a national health care bill this year, with a government insurance policy option. Democratic congressional leaders have called for passage of such a bill before the beginning of the August congressional recess. What they want more than anything else is a government insurance program that will tend over the next few years to crowd out private insurance. We are told that a government insurance plan reduces the amounts spent on health care by using “comparative effectiveness research” — in other words, by rationing care and limiting options through use of statistics. Unfortunately, statistics are constantly in flux and do not capture...

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Capital punishment for "global warming deniers"

Published: Jun 09, 2009

I have compared global warming alarmism as a kind of religion, complete with its own versions of sin, repentance, atonement, ritual (kids go through recycling drills) and indulgence (purchase carbon offsets to compensate for your private jet travel). Now it turns out that there’s another element: a desire to kill heretics. Here’s a collection of calls for executions of “global warming deniers.” I don’t see any specifics on what method should be used. Burning at the stake, an old favorite, might produce too much in the way of carbon emissions. Lethal injection might require use of petrochemicals produced from carbon-emitting fossile fuels....

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An end to immigration?

Published: Jun 08, 2009

Are we seeing a end to large-scale immigration? That’s the implication in this June 6 story in the Wall Street Journal. Key sentence: “Emigration from Mexico to the U.S. dropped 13% in the first quarter of this year compared to the same period last year, with more Mexicans leaving the U.S. than coming in.” There are more details farther down in the story. “Data released this week by the Mexican government shows emigration to the U.S. dropped 13% in the first quarter of 2009. In the same period, more people returned to Mexico than left Mexico for the U.S., about 139,000 and 137,000 respectively.” My initial assumption is that Mexican statistics here are more...

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Obama needs to brush up on Middle East history

Published: Jun 07, 2009

For a man of his impressive educational credentials, Barack Obama has sometimes shown a surprising ignorance of history. During the 2008 campaign, when challenged on his pledge to meet with foreign tyrants without preconditions, he said that presidents from Franklin D. Roosevelt on had met with leaders of enemy nations. Funny thing, but in my books on World War II, I haven’t been able to find the chapters on the Roosevelt-Hitler and Roosevelt-Tojo summits. In his speech in the Tiergarten last summer, he told us that the Berlin Wall came down thanks to “a world that stands as one.” My recollection is that the world was standing as two, and one side wanted to keep the wall...

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The numbers just don't add up

Published: Jun 03, 2009

That’s the conclusion, as I read him, of Bill Galston in his New Republic blog. The trajectory of ever-increasing budget deficits from 2013 on will not likely be broken by health care savings, he concludes. From a brilliant and sympathetic observer of the Obama administration, this is damning indeed. But don’t take my word for it; read Galston yourself....

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Advancing civil rights by overturning old laws

Published: Jun 03, 2009

Two cases likely to be decided this month by the Supreme Court — one of them an appeal in a Connecticut case decided by a panel including Supreme Court nominee Judge Sonia Sotomayor — could result in significant changes in our civil rights laws. One case involves a utility district in Texas that is challenging the Voting Rights Act requirement that any changes in its election procedures receive approval — “preclearance” is the technical term — from the Justice Department. The other involves the city of New Haven, Conn.’s refusal to promote several white firefighters and one Hispanic after they passed a promotion test but no black firefighters did....

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The road not taken on GM

Published: Jun 02, 2009

In a blistering article, NYU Law School scholar Michael Levine show what could have happened if General Motors had gone through something much more closely resembling ordinary bankruptcy proceedings, starting late last year. Here’s part of his counterfactual: What would have been the government’s role in this scenario? Providing bridge financing and a DIP [debtor in possession] loan, and setting a much shorter deadline for filing than was ultimately adopted. The deadline would have forced all parties to negotiate as much “prepackaging” as possible, because unions and unsecured creditors would not have wanted to take their chances on a filing, and the secured...

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Some questions for Judge Sotomayor.

Published: Jun 02, 2009

“I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived this life.” So spoke Judge Sonia Sotomayor back in 2001. Now White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs is suggesting that she misspoke. That’s not credible. She was speaking from a prepared text which was published as a law review article. She had every chance to choose her words carefully, and her educational credentials and her written judicial opinions both suggest strongly that she is fully capable of writing exactly what she means. Some suggested questions for Judge Sotomayor: Would you hope that...

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Why do people persist in voting Republican?

Published: May 31, 2009

I happened to read University of Virginia Psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s thoughtful essay on what makes people vote Republican, by following links on George Mason University economist Tyler Cowen’s always interesting Marginal Revolution blog. Interestingly enough, he portrays himself as being able to enter into a sympathetic understanding of American conservatives only after entering into a sympathetic understanding of Hindus while doing field work in India. Sample quotes: I would say that the second rule of moral psychology is that morality is not just about how we treat each other (as most liberals think); it is also about binding groups together, supporting essential...

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GOP should run against the power of the center

Published: May 31, 2009

Move to the center. That’s the advice Republicans are getting from quarters friendly and otherwise. It seems to make a certain amount of sense. If opinion is arrayed along a single-dimension, left-to-right spectrum and clustered in the middle in a bell-curve pattern, then a party on the right needs only to move a few steps toward the center or just beyond to convert itself from minority to majority status. But the world is a lot more complicated than that. Opinion is not arrayed on a single dimension, but flies all over the place in two or three or even four dimensions (which is to say it changes over time). New issues crop up, and old issues appear in a different light. Success in...

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A wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences

Published: May 30, 2009

We’ve been reading a lot about Sonia Sotomayor growing up in a public housing project in The Bronx. That’s true, but it’s only part of the truth. According to the Associated Press, she also spent most of her teen years in a middle class neighborhood and attended a Catholic private school. But of course she and the various White House spokesmen didn’t emphasize that. I am sympathetic to their presentation. I like to tell people that I grew up in a working class neighborhood in Detroit and that my father made his living with his hands. Both statements are true, but not the whole truth. When I was 11, we moved to Bloomfield Township (a high income suburb) and my...

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Will 'Government Motors' ever make money?

Published: May 30, 2009

A reading of David von Drehle’s Time article on Government Motors—er, General Motors—suggests that the new GM may never make money. In which case it’s hard to see how the government can sell its majority share. The lead story in the Washington Post this morning, begins, “The United States would recover most of its planned $50 billion investment in General Motors within five years, according to a preliminary Treasury Department estimate that foresees the company, now on the brink of bankruptcy, rebounding over that time to become a strapping global competitor.” But as you get into the story, you get the idea that this is a very rosy scenario....

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Judge Sotomayor's temperment

Published: May 29, 2009

There’s a surprisingly tough story in the New York Times today on Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s temperament. It echoes Jeffrey Rosen’s New Republic article which I referred to in my Wednesday Examiner column on Sotomayor. She evidently asks a lot of tough and abrasive questions from the bench, and sometimes cuts off counsel in mid-sentence. Which reminds me of an observation I made some time ago. The most persistent questioners on the current Supreme Court are the two justices who grew up in New York City, Antonin Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Sotomayor would be the third justice to grow up in New York City. All three are products of the outer boroughs: Justice Scalia grew...

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Massively higher U.S. spending driving up government’s interest rate

Published: May 28, 2009

In the first years of the Clinton administration, James Carville famously said, “I used to think if there was reincarnation, I wanted to come back as the president or the pope or a .400 baseball hitter. But now I want to come back as the bond market. You can intimidate anyone.” Well, it seems like the bond market is intimidating everyone once again, or should be. There’s been a sharp increase in the interest rate the government must pay on the bonds it’s selling this week, which has prompted expressions of concern from the Wall Street Journal and the Atlantic’s Megan McArdle. John Taylor, former deputy Treasury secretary, fears the big increase in the...

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Will Sotomayor’s style blunt her liberal views?

Published: May 27, 2009

Barack Obama has named his nominee for the Supreme Court, Judge Sonia Sotomayor of the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals. What’s the likely fallout, politically and judicially? Politically, Obama gets a plus for naming the first Hispanic justice (unless one counts Benjamin Cardozo, nominated in 1932, a descendant of Portuguese Jews). Sotomayor has an appealing biography: She grew up the daughter of Puerto Rican parents in the Bronx, had a fine academic record at Princeton and Yale Law School, served in the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Manhattan, and practiced commercial law. Republicans delayed her confirmation for the appeals court in the 1990s for the same reason that Democrats...

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Chrysler bailout is a recipe for failure

Published: May 24, 2009

The invaluable conventional-wisdom-bubble-burster Mickey Kaus makes a point that seems obvious once you read it, but which has been missing from most mainstream media stories on the subject: the Chrysler deal the Obama White House is shoving through the bankruptcy court isn't going to work. At least, if by work you mean "the company will some day operate profitably without government subsidy." Here's an example of Mickey's analysis: As for Chrysler's "chance for long-term success," it appears vanishingly small. Italian manufacturer FIAT is supposed to save Chrysler with new products, but according to a recent Automotive News article, "four of the six new vehicles...

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No time for tea-and-crumpet interrogations

Published: May 24, 2009

When former Vice President Dan Quayle scheduled a big speech, President Bill Clinton didn’t hop in and schedule one for the hour before. When former Vice President Al Gore scheduled a big speech, President George W. Bush didn’t hop in and schedule one for the hour before. But when former Vice President Dick Cheney scheduled a big speech for 10:30 a.m. last week at the American Enterprise Institute, where I am a research fellow, President Barack Obama hopped in and scheduled a speech for 10 a.m. that day at the National Archives. A little defensive, no? Cheney spoke in defense of the Bush administration’s terrorist interrogation policies and of the Guantanamo detention...

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Should the Feds bailout California?

Published: May 22, 2009

Yes, says Joe Mathews, former Los Angeles Times reporter and a biographer of Arnold Schwarzenegger. No, say 66% of voters, according to pollster Scott Rasmussen. Mathews is a friends and his parents have been wonderful friends of mine since college, but I think it´s going to be tough to persuade Americans to bail out one of our richest states. But, hey, they voted the right way last November . . . ....

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Pawlenty fights Minn. Dems tax increases

Published: May 21, 2009

While Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger was trying to get California voters to approve tax increases, Governor Tim Pawlenty has prevented them in Minnesota. His veto of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor legislature’s tax increase was sustained, at which point he used line-item veto and “unallotment” powers to balance the two-year budget. The story is told by Pawlenty fan John Hinderaker on the Power Line blog. Pawlenty has been mentioned as a possible presidential candidate. This brilliant stroke will undoubtedly make him more attractive to Republican voters and quite possibly to voters generally. Schwarzenegger, I suspect, does not have the same powers under the California...

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Why the U.S. should listen to India’s voters

Published: May 20, 2009

Last November 131, million Americans voted, and the whole world took notice. Over the last month, about 700 million Indians voted, and most Americans, like most of the world, didn’t much notice. To be sure, American elections are more important to people all over the world than those in any other country. But the election in India is more important to Americans than most of us realize. Including, perhaps, our president. This was not always so. During the Cold War, India was something of a de facto ally of the Soviet Union. This was due in part to our alliance with its rival neighbor Pakistan, but also to a feeling of solidarity with the U.S.S.R. on the part of the ruling Congress...

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High taxes drive people away

Published: May 18, 2009

As the state government ponder how to deal with budget shortfalls, and a day before Californians vote on ballot propositions that will, among other things, ratify tax increases, it’s worth teaching an old lesson: High taxes drive people away. In the Wall Street Journal http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124260067214828295.html Arthur Laffer and Stephen Moore make the case persuasively. Let me add just a couple of illuminating data points. New York has long been a high tax state, with the nation’s highest state income tax rate (and in New York City the nation’s highest city income tax rate) for most of the last two generations. Texas is a low tax state with no state income...

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Where the Foreclosures are

Published: May 17, 2009

You might suppose, now that the economy has been officially in rececssion for nearly 18 months, that we would start to see very high foreclosure rates in states heavily hit by unemployment. But if you supposed that, you would be wrong. The April 2009 foreclosure statistics from RealtyTrac, show that foreclosures are still heavily concentrated in the four “sand states,” California, Nevada, Arizona and Florida. Together they account for 193,659 of the 342,038 foreclosure filings in the United States, 57% of the total. At the opposite extreme are Vermont and South Dakota, where there were 2 and 17 foreclosure filings in April (those are whole numbers, not percentages). No other...

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Faced with hard choice, Obama puts nation first

Published: May 17, 2009

Step by step Barack Obama has been reversing himself on anti-terrorist policy. Last month, following a federal court decision, he announced that the government would release photographs of terrorist interrogations. This was in line with his decision to release on April 16 four memoranda prepared by the Bush administration Justice Department on that subject. Obama apparently hoped this would put an end to the political debate over enhanced interrogation techniques, or what critics call “torture.” Instead, the debate heated up. Former Vice President Dick Cheney demanded the release of memoranda showing whether the interrogations had produced intelligence that saved American...

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Universal Pre-K Scam

Published: May 15, 2009

Here’s a fine article by Chester Finn of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation on the Obama administration’s plan to spend more on preschool and why it’s a bad idea. I remember watching a few years ago as the Republicans, then in the majority in Congress, tried to revamp the Head Start program. They made the point, which Finn makes here, that Head Start doesn’t provide kids with much in the way of cognitive advantages; that famous study that showed it improving kids’ performance in later grades in Ypsilanti was done years ago, in ideal and unusual circumstances, and hasn’t been replicated anywhere. The Republicans wanted to require Head Start providers to...

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Notre Dame students plan peaceful protest of Obama

Published: May 14, 2009

University of Notre Dame students who plan to protest the school's awarding of an honorary degree to President Barack Obama on campus during commencement Sunday are calling for a peaceful, prayerful approach. "We believe a lot more can be accomplished through prayerful, respectful witness than can be accomplished in angry protest," said Michele Sagala, a graduating senior and member of ND Response, a coalition of student groups who oppose the school's decision to award an honorary degree to Obama because of his support of abortion rights and embryonic stem-cell research. Not all those who plan to be on campus Sunday, though, intend to honor the request by ND Response that...

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Bill Lockyer is California dreaming

Published: May 14, 2009

California state Treasurer Bill Lockyer wants Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner to give TARP money to the state so it can pay its short-term bills. Oh, and he’d also like money sent to “other financially strapped states and local governments which face a severe cash flow crunch.” California may have the biggest congressional delegation of any state, but he’d like a little more support on Capitol Hill from, say, New York or New Jersey. If you don’t send the money, Lockyer says, “there could be devastating impacts on the ability of the State or other governments to provide essential services for our citizens.” Fires won’t be put out, schools...

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Undercutting cap-and-trade?

Published: May 13, 2009

The Obama administration is planning to use the Environmental Protection Agency’s finding the public health is endangered by carbon dioxide emissions which it can therefore regulate as a sledgehammer to get Congress to pass cap-and-trade legislation. If you don’t pass a bill, the threat is, EPA will impose much harsher regulation than you would like. That threat, however, is at least somewhat undercut by this memorandum from the Office of Management and Budget, labeled “DELIBERATIVE—ATTORNEY CLIENT PRIVILEGE” which has made its way into the public domain. The memorandum is studded with acronyms which may puzzle some readers, but it makes a strong argument...

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California seems determined to vote 'no' on new taxes

Published: May 13, 2009

SurveyUSA has the five tax-raising propositions on the California ballot May 19—1A, 1B, 1C, 1D—going down to defeat. This is in line with other recent polls. The lineup on opinion here looks a lot like that in the October 2003 recall election. Independents look very much like Republicans, and very much unlike Democrats. The only region going for higher taxes is the San Francisco Bay Area; Los Angeles County, heavily Democratic these days in most partisan elections, votes about the same as the Inland Empire, which gave a small margin to Barack Obama in 2008 after giving a small margin to George W. Bush in 2004. It’s interesting that Arnold Schwarzenegger, the...

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Obama offers security at the expense of liberty

Published: May 13, 2009

Republicans and conservatives are trying to grapple with the Obama administration’s $3,600,000,000,000 federal budget — let’s include the zeroes rather than use the trivializing abbreviation $3.6 trillion — and the larger-than-previously-projected $1,841,000,000,000 budget deficit. Political arguments are usually won not by numbers but by moral principles. And conservatives, banished by voters from high office, are having a hard time agreeing on a moral case. The always thoughtful David Brooks complains in his New York Times column that Republicans learned the wrong lessons from John Ford’s classic Western movies. They should not be “the party of...

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Shifting sands in Florida's Senate Race

Published: May 12, 2009

Florida’s Republican Governor Charlie Crist has announced that he is running for the Senate seat being vacated, after one term, by Republican Mel Martinez. In his three-plus years as governor, Crist has had high job ratings, not just from Republicans but from Independents and Democrats. He enters the race as a heavy favorite against either of the two Democrats who have announced, Congressman Kendrick Meek and state Senator Dan Gelber. A Quinnipiac April poll shows him with 66% job approval, 66% among Democrats and 68% among Independents and Republicans (how that averages out to 66% is unclear to me, but those are Quinnipiac’s numbers). Crist had been thought to be unbeatable...

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Men hit hardest by unemployment

Published: May 11, 2009

There’s an old joke running around in conservative circles. The headline in the New York Times is “World Destroyed by Nuclear War.” The subhead reads, “Women, Minorities Hardest Hit.” If there were no double standard, the subhead on last week’s 25-year record high unemployment should have been “Men Hardest Hit.” The unemployment rate among men is 10%, among women 7.6%. If you take a closer look at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, you find some interesting things. Women make up 47% of the work force and 47% of people 20 and over with jobs. That looks like an enormously high percentage to someone who grew up in the 1950s. In 1950 only 27% of...

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Is California going broke?

Published: May 11, 2009

From the Sacramento Bee, I learn that California’s Legislative Analysis Office is projecting that California state government will have to borrow $20 billion at the beginning of its fiscal year in July in order to pay day-to-day bills. Evidently some such borrowing, in the form of revenue anticipation notes, is standard operating procedure for an entity that has to pay out money more or less constantly but tends to collect it in big hunks at tax deadlines. But the amount here is extraordinary; only a month ago the cash needed was projected at $13 billion. Plus, the LAO argues that if the six ballot propositions are defeated on May 19, the state will need to borrow “well over...

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On guns and climate, the elites are out of touch

Published: May 10, 2009

Many years ago political scientists came up with a theory that elites lead public opinion. And on some issues they clearly do. But on some issues they don’t. Two examples of the latter phenomenon are conspicuous at a time when Barack Obama enjoys the approval of more than 60 percent of Americans and Democrats have won thumping majorities in two elections in a row. One is global warming. The other is gun control. On both issues, the elites of academe, the media and big business have been solidly on one side for years. But on both, the American public has been moving in the other direction. Over the last decade, the Gallup organization has been asking Americans whether the...

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FDR would have winced at the Chrysler deal

Published: May 09, 2009

One of the benefits of being associated with the American Enterprise Institute is that I get to learn things from people who know a lot more about them than I do. A case in point is this article by University of Pennsylvania Law Professor David Skeel. He points out that in the first third of the twentieth century bankrupt corporations did not go into Chapter 11 bankruptcy but instead went into “equity receiverships” in the debtor and the investment banks representing stockholders and bondholders restructured the company. This was criticized by many New Dealers, who regarded such deals as one-bid auctions which were “a mockery and a sham,” in the words of Jerome...

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Public opinion favors Israel over Iran

Published: May 08, 2009

Pollster Scott Rasmussen reports that Americans by a 49% to 37% margin believe that the United States should help Israel if it attacks Iran. Not if Iran attacks Israel, notice, but if Israel attacks Iran, presumably to take out its nuclear weapons program that threatens Israel with annihilation. There’s a tension here between public opinon on the one hand and, on the other hand, Assistant Secretary of State Rose Gottemoeller’s call, reported by Eli Lake, that Israel should join the Non-Proliferation Treaty, which might threaten the existence of Israel’s nuclear deterrent and would change an American policy which has been in place for three or four...

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Steve Rattner and 'Gangster Government'

Published: May 08, 2009

I’ve gotten quite a few hits on the web version of my Examiner column Wednesday on the Chrysler deal in which I said we were seeing an episode of Gangster Government. Another thought on this has occurred to me. Remember that bondholder lawyer Tom Lauria said that an Obama administration official threatened that the White House press corps would destroy his client’s reputation unless it agreed to the White House Chrysler deal. The threat sounds just a tad bit bizarre: most members of the White House press corps may be pussycats for the Obama administration, but it’s not very likely they’re going to go out of their way to investigate and blacken the name of a...

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John Edwards was never an appealing candidate

Published: May 07, 2009

The liberal columnist Marie Cocco has written an excellent column on John Edwards. “I never understood John Edwards’ appeal,” she begins, and asks why the media took Edwards seriously as a presidential candidate in both the 2004 and 2008 cycles. She points out that Edwards had an exceedingly thin record in public office and that, as the Democratic vice presidential nominee, he did not carry his home state for his ticket in 2004. I think I have an answer for her. Reporters were transfixed because they believed Edwards was a good speaker. They watched him addressing crowds in Iowa and New Hampshire, noted that he spoke fervently and kept his audiences transfixed. Their...

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Senate lineup for 2010

Published: May 06, 2009

Coming out of the 2008 election, the lineup of Senate seats up in 2010 seemed very favorable to the Democrats. With the announcements of the retirements (or likely retirements) of Senators Judd Gregg (NH), Christopher Bond (MO) and George Voinovich (OH) it looked even more favorable. All three of those states went for George W. Bush in 2000, but in 2008 Barack Obama won two of them and came within an eyelash of winning the third (MO). But now as the political coffeepot percolates, the lineup is suddenly looking less unfavorable to Republicans. Yes, they’ve still got seven seats at high risk. FL: Incumbent Mel Martinez, not a strong candidate, is retiring. Republican Governor...

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White House puts UAW ahead of property rights

Published: May 06, 2009

Last Friday, the day after Chrysler filed for bankruptcy, I drove past the company’s headquarters on Interstate 75 in Auburn Hills, Mich. As I glanced at the pentagram logo I felt myself tearing up a little bit. Anyone who grew up in the Detroit area, as I did, can’t help but be sad to see a once great company fail. But my sadness turned to anger later when I heard what bankruptcy lawyer Tom Lauria said on a WJR talk show that morning. “One of my clients,” Lauria told host Frank Beckmann, “was directly threatened by the White House and in essence compelled to withdraw its opposition to the deal under threat that the full force of the White House press corps...

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The Specter of defeat in PA

Published: May 05, 2009

Pollsters have been busy in Pennsylvania the week after Senator Arlen Specter’s second party switch (the first one took place in 1966). The results are interesting. Quinnipiac finds that Specter as a Democrat leads Pat Toomey, the former congressman who held him to a 51%-49% victory in the 2004 Republican primary, by a very big 53%-33% margin. But Specter leads former Governor and Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge by a statistically insignificant 46%-43% margin. A poll conducted for the PEG Political Action Committee, a pro-business group, has somewhat different numbers. It shows Ridge edging Specter 39%-38% and Specter leading Toomey by only 42%-36%. Note that there are about...

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Beware of mandatory arbitration in Card Check

Published: May 03, 2009

In his statement explaining his decision to switch from the Republican to the Democratic Party, Sen. Arlen Specter assured his listeners that “my position on Employees Free Choice [Card Check] will not change.” In later statements Specter was explicit in opposing both major provisions of the bill — the effective abolition of the secret ballot in unionization elections and mandatory federal arbitration — and said he would not vote for cloture. Whether or not Specter maintains his current stand, he has spotlighted an interesting issue. The labor unions’ drive for the full Card Check bill seems to have foundered. Specter enters a Democratic caucus where a half...

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Beware of mandatory arbitration in card check

Published: May 03, 2009

In his statement explaining his decision to switch from the Republican to the Democratic Party, Senator Arlen Specter assured his listeners that “my position on Employees Free Choice [card check] will not change.” In later statements Specter was explicit in opposing both major provisions of the bill -- the effective abolition of the secret ballot in unionization elections and mandatory federal arbitration -- and said he would not vote for cloture. Whether or not Specter maintains his current stand, he has spotlighted an interesting issue. The labor unions' drive for the full card check bill seems to have foundered. Specter enters a Democratic caucus where a half dozen or more...

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The NYC plane scare was sheer stupidity from White House Military Office

Published: Apr 29, 2009

Why did the White House Military Office insist that everyone informed about the flight of the Air Force One backup plane over New York on Monday keep it secret? The only answer that occurs to me is sheer stupidity: the idea that you can fly a 747 with a fighter jet trailing on a low altitude over New York City and no one will notice it is mind-boggingly idiotic. Senator Charles Schumer hits the nail on the head. “To say that it should not be made public that it might scare people, it’s just confounding,” said Schumer to WCBS-TV, his grammar scrambled but his outrage showing. “It’s what gives Washington and government a bad name. It’s sheer...

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Specter’s party switch is all about winning

Published: Apr 29, 2009

Only his most sycophantic admirers might compare Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter with Winston Churchill, but the two do have something in common. Both had long and turbulent political careers, and both switched parties twice. Churchill crossed aisles from the Conservatives to the Liberals in 1904 and from the Liberals to the Conservatives in 1924. Specter switched to the Republican Party in 1966 after he was elected district attorney of Philadelphia County, and Tuesday he returned to the Democratic Party in hopes of winning re-election to his sixth term in the Senate next year. Specter’s crossover tells us interesting things about Specter and about the state of the Republican...

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Like JFK, Obama brings fresh style

Published: Apr 28, 2009

Political analysts try to quantify public opinion, but one thing they have a hard time putting into numbers is style. Yet it matters — a lot. In his first 99 days as president, Barack Obama has impressed his toughest critics with his verbal dexterity, cool demeanor and 100-watt smile. Even some normally jaded analysts rate him the best natural politician in the White House in their lifetimes. To find a comparable phenomenon, one must go back almost half a century to the presidency of John F. Kennedy. Kennedy was then, as Obama is today, young, articulate, charming, physically graceful, with an attractive young family. Like Obama, Kennedy was a trailblazer. Just as Obama is the...

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U.S. moving toward Europe, but do Americans want to go?

Published: Apr 28, 2009

Ninety-nine days in, with 1,362 days to go, and we can see with some clarity the trajectory on which Barack Obama wants to take the United States. To put it in geographical terms, he wants to move us some considerable distance toward Europe. This is apparent in the budget he has presented for the next fiscal year and its projections for the years to come. Government spending is scheduled to rise as a percentage of the economy. This will be accomplished by raising taxes and, even more, by borrowing that will double the national debt in five years and nearly triple it in 10 years. This trajectory can be altered in the future, but much of it is set in stone by the $3 trillion-plus deficit...

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The re-elect question

Published: Apr 27, 2009

For more than 20 years pollsters have asked voters whether they would reelect some officeholder, vote against him or consider someone else. Two decades ago, the responses were pretty good indicators of how an incumbent would do in an election: if less than 50% said they would reelect him, he was in trouble. Partisan spinners still use this argument. But voters seem to be responding to this question in this decade differently from how they did in the past. Case in point, from Mark Blumenthal’s excellent www.pollster.com blog a poll by the Republican firm Public Opinion Strategies asked this question about Barack Obama. The results: 42% would reelect, 24% would vote to replace and...

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An immigrant stimulus?

Published: Apr 27, 2009

In today’s Wall Street Journal, Gordon Crovitz calls for an immigrant stimulus. He wants to see a comprehensive immigration bill, with legalization and guest worker as well as enforcement provisions. This is in line with the Journal’s longstanding position and with Barack Obama’s call on Congress to pass such an immigration bill. Crovitz makes strong arguments for increasing the number of skilled immigrants. Currently thousands of high-skill would-be immigrants are prevented from coming to the United States by our immigration laws. In contrast, Canada and Australia have immigration laws that give a preferred place to high-skill immigrants; our laws, since the 1965 act...

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The riskiness of trying to eliminate all risk

Published: Apr 24, 2009

For someone who grew up and spent some early adult years in Michigan, this story makes unhappy reading. It quotes Chrysler retirees about their prospects in the years ahead. They had been “guaranteed,” many by UAW contracts, generous pensions. Now, assuming Chrysler goes into bankruptcy, they’ll get considerably less. That will presumably come from the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, a government-sponsored entity. My American Enterprise Institute colleague Alex Pollock tells me that the man who first called for creation of the PBGC was a UAW staffer back in the 1950s. The bottom line is that the 928,000 people—that’s a big, big number—covered by...

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Tedisco is toast

Published: Apr 23, 2009

The count of absentee votes has made it pretty plain that Democrat Scott Murphy will be declared the winner and Republican James Tedisco the loser of the New York 20th congressional district special election, and rightly so. In my previous blogging at U.S. News & World Report, I expressed skepticism about both Democrats’ and Republicans’ claims that their side would come out ahead when the absentees were counted. It depended, I thought, on which side did a better job of organizing absentee ballot voting. Now we have the answer: the Democrats did. In addition, I suggested that, whatever the outcome, there was more reason for satisfaction for Democrats than Republicans in...

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Where the foreclosures are

Published: Apr 23, 2009

Nearly 60% of foreclosures are concentrated in four states, according to the latest report from h, RealtyTrac. The states, you should not be surprised to learn, are California, Nevada, Arizona and Florida. Together they contain 21% of the nation’s population but had 55% of the foreclosures. The numbers are quite striking. Here are the numbers of foreclosures in the top 10 states, plus the rate of foreclosures per ten thousand houses: USA 803,489 63 California 230,915 172 Florida 119,220 137 Arizona 49,119 185 Nevada 41,296 370 Illinois 38,996 74 Michigan 33,184 74 Ohio...

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Colorado Conundrum

Published: Apr 22, 2009

Conservatives might want to take comfort from this Public Policy Polling poll in Colorado, but I would advise some caution. It shows Barack Obama’s job approval at only 49%-45% positive, and freshman Senator Mark Udall (but senior senator by 16 days over appointee Michael Bennet) with 41%-46% negative job approval. By party identification the sample is 38% Republican and 36% Democratic, not too much different a balance from the the 30% Republican and 31% Democratic in the 2008 exit poll. PPP has Obama at 46% approval from Independents, lower than the 54% who voted for him according to the exit poll. But I think something here does not quite add up. I had not heard of PPP, a...

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Earth Day musings

Published: Apr 22, 2009

On this Earth Day all our thoughts are supposed to be directed at saving the planet. Some think we can do this by passing cap-and-trade legislation designed to reduce carbon emissions, but as I point out in passing in my Examiner column today, with the Obama administration leaving the task of writing legislation to Congress, such legislation is highly unlikely to pass, for the very good reason that it will impose sharply higher increases in electricity rates for half the country than for the other. It’s going to be hard to get members of Congress from the first half to vote for it. In the meantime, with the Obama administration pressing General Motors bondholders to take 15 cents...

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Obama lets Congress — and lobbyists — do the work

Published: Apr 22, 2009

The balance between the executive and legislative branches in writing laws has changed over the centuries. In the 19th century, Sen. Stephen Douglas wrote the Kansas-Nebraska Act, with President Franklin Pierce just an interested bystander. In the 20th century, President Lyndon Johnson reportedly insisted that Congress change not one word of the Great Society legislation he sent down from the White House. The first presidents of the 21st century have taken approaches between those two extremes. Under George W. Bush, the White House pretty much drafted the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts and negotiated the numbers with members who cast the critical votes. On the No Child Left Behind Act and the...

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The knowledgeable public

Published: Apr 20, 2009

We’re used to assuming that most Americans don’t know a whole lot about government and public policy. Over the years I’ve been inclined to think that those of us in the commentariat tend to be overly cynical about this. Voters often can’t explain their opinions very clearly and often have a hard time getting the answers to quiz questions right, but they operate off a higher level of knowledge than we often give them credit for. Many of the sneering comments about the participants in last week’s hundreds of tea parties across the nation were premised on the idea that these people didn’t know much about public policy. The hostile CNN reporter (Rush...

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Back to the future: Obama’s foreign policy

Published: Apr 19, 2009

As Barack Obama finishes up his second major foreign tour, a pattern in his approach to foreign policy seems to be emerging. On pressing matters of obvious importance, he has made responsible decisions that have not been far out of line with the policies of his predecessor and current necessities. But when it comes to seting priorities for the future, he has chosen to emphasize initiatives that seem more appropriate to situations America faced in his college years, the late 1970s and early 1980s, than to the threats America faces today. Candidate Obama campaigned as the man who would lead us out of Iraq. President Obama, admitting belatedly and begrudgingly the success of George W....

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Have I got a deal for you

Published: Apr 17, 2009

Let’s see if I can get this story from the Washington Post straight. The banks that have received federal TARP funds—some unwillingly—were told by government car czat Steven Rattner that they must accept 15 cents on the dollar on some $7 billion (face value) of Chrysler bonds. They professed shock and refused. The story quotes freshman Michigan Congressman Gary Peters as saying that the banks ought to take the loss “to get the American economy moving again and maintain American jobs.” The last two words are the clue to the three big letters that the Post leaves out of the story but which explain what’s actually going on: UAW. Chrysler has been given...

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Notes on two upcoming races

Published: Apr 16, 2009

The largest state that’s likely to see a seriously contested U.S. Senate race in 2010 is Florida. Democrats Barbara Boxer and Charles Schumer seem safe in California and New York, and neither Texas seat is up. Unless, that is, Republican Governor Charlie Crist runs, an option he has left open. The latest Quinnipiac Florida poll shows Crist’s popularity running high not only among his fellow Republicans but among Independents and Democrats as well. But there’s a note of caution: a significant 42%-26% plurality of voters would rather see Crist run for reelection as governor. In addition, former state House Speaker Marco Rubio, a Republican, has indicated he’ll run...

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The Balance Of Enthusiasm

Published: Apr 15, 2009

How to explain the contrast, highlighted in yesterday's Examiner editorial, between the big turnout for tea parties around the country today and the pathetically low turnout at the “New Way Forward” rallies organized by backers of Obama administration policies? The left has been attempting to write off the tea parties as “astroturf” promoted by right-wing organizations and Fox News. But, as Instapundit (Glenn Reynolds) explains in the Wall Street Journal, that explanation just doesn't cut it. As Reynolds, who's been keeping in touch with tea party organizers since February, explains, the tea parties ( here's a Google map, which shows how widespread they are, and...

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