Michael Barone

Stimulate the economy: cut taxes!

Pollster Scott Rasmussen asked voters a straightforward question: what is the best way to stimulate the creation of more jobs, tax cuts or more government stimulus spending? The results are pretty unambiguous: 62% favor tax cuts while only 21% favor more stimulus spending. This would seem to be a pretty hearty endorsement of, for example, Stanford economist Michael Boskin’s proposal for cutting the payroll tax (something I advocated in my Sunday Examiner column) over Princeton economist Alan Blinder’s proposal for a public sector jobs program. Blinder also semi-endorses a tax credit for employers who create new jobs, but admits that the possibilities of gaming the system...

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You know politicians are in trouble . . .

. . . when they start saying that they need to get their message out better. We saw this with Republicans in 2006, 2007 and 2008, and we’re seeing it with Democrats now, as indicated in this article in Politico on how Democrats are alarmed by their poor ratings from Independent voters. “Quite frankly,” the chairwoman of the Colorado Democratic party is quoted as saying, “we’ve got to do a better job of messaging.” “This is what is particularly heartbreaking,” says the pollster for Democratic House of Delegates candidates in Virginia. “It’s a real problem for messaging for us.” “Quite frankly” is the sort of...

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A Jacksonian Republican sweep?

Sometimes a poll result slaps you in the face. That was the case for me when I saw Public Policy Polling’s results in the 2nd congressional district of Arkansas. PPP has the incumbent, Democrat Vic Snyder, leading three unknown Republicans (two-thirds to three-quarters of respondents could not describe their feelings toward them) by margins of 44%-43%, 44%-42% and 45%-42%. No, it doesn’t matter which Republican got the best score. The news here is that a seven-term Democratic incumbent, an intelligent man (he has earned an M.D.) with no disqualifying personal characteristics or accusations of scandal (so far as I know) is running significantly below 50% and is essentially tied...

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The nine nations of China

If you’re a demographics nut like I am, you’ll love this Atlantic article on “the nine nations of China.” (The title, as writer Patrick Chovanec explains, is based on my friend Joel Garreau’s 1982 classic http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=Joel+Garreau%2C+The+Nine+Nations+of+North+America&x=14&y=17 The Nine Nations of North America.) While I suspect there’s some margin of error in the statistics Chovanec presents, they show China’s enormous diversity. Incomes per capita range from $9,432 in The Straits (the province of Fujian and Taiwan) to $1,770 in Shangri-la (Yunnan, Guizhou, Guangxi), and...

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More bad Democratic numbers

Quinnipiac polls in Ohio and Connecticut have plenty of bad news for Democrats in two key 2010 Senate races. In Ohio Republican Rob Portman, former Congressman and OMB Director, leads Democratic Lieutenant Governor Lee Fisher 39%-36% and Democratic Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner 38%-34%. This is a reversal of the lead from previous Quinnipiac polls. Barack Obama’s job approval is negative, 40%-45%, down from 53%-42% in September. Ohio voters disapprove of Obama’s performance on the economy 42%-53% and on health care by a sizzling 36%-57%. These are singing numbers in a state Obama carried 52%-47% and George W. Bush carried 51%-49% in 2004. Quinnipiac also reported that...

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Another Republican victory last week?

Here’s a report, from Brian Faughnan, a committed partisan, of the apparent victory of Republican Edward Mangano over incumbent Nassau County Executive Tom Suozzi. Nassau County, just east of Queens, with 1.35 million people, is a major suburban jurisdiction, mostly affluent but with significant black and Hispanic communities, with an economy sputtering because of high taxes and utility rates. It voted 54%-45% for Barack Obama in 2008, one point more than his national average. Suozzi was elected eight years ago in response to discontent over the bloated government produced by the then-dominant Nassau County Republican machine; Faughnan says that Mangano argued that Suozzi failed to...

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More evidence that global warming alarmism is a religious cult

Every so often a sentence you read in a news story catches your eye. Consider this sentence in a November 6 Washington Post story headlined, “Environmental groups at odds over new tack in climate fight.” "It's a lack of faith in the American public," said Kieran Suckling of the Center for Biological Diversity, an Arizona nonprofit, talking about the light-on-climate ads used by bigger groups. "If the scientists, the environmentalists in our country do their jobs, and explain the test of climate change, the public will come along." “A lack of faith.” Faith is what religion asks of us. We have confidence in the practical application of scientific...

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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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...

 

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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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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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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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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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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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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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 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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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