Betsy's Page

Cruising the Web

2012-02-01T06:23:00.003-05:00

In which Nancy Pelosi is proven, once again, that she is a fool who doesn't understand public policy.

Theodore Olson explains what is so corrosive about how the President and his allies have singled out the Koch brothers simply because the Kochs oppose the Democrats and fund their opponents. This demonization of people because of their political beliefs is damaging to our whole political system.

Victor Davis Hanson offers a campaign lexicon. Words don't seem to mean what their users think they mean.

Twitter wits come up with Secret Service code names for Mitt Romney who is about to get Secret Service protection.

Newt Gingrich can't control his anger even when it's clear that it loses him votes.

Do Obama supporters have anything stronger than their constant dog-whistle comments on supposed racism?

Are college students learning? How would we measure that?

A former Navy SEAL exposes how the Obama administration is endangering our special ops forces by using them for political purposes.

It is infuriating to see political gain put above the safety and security of our brave warriors and our long-term strategic goals. Loose lips sink ships.

Yes, but everything must be put to the purpose of reelecting The One.

Jay Cost identifies a geographic split among how conservatives are voting.

If conservatives are feeling glum about the seeming inevitability of a Romney nomination, they can turn to the Senate to elect strong conservatives there. That would be one way to keep a possible President Romney to a conservative path.

Jim Geraghty offers five take-aways from Florida's primary.

The Buffett Rule, in short, is a suitably meretricious proposal for a meretricious presidency.

Obama's Buffett rule is extremely bad and stupid policy. As Rich Lowry writes,

You can listen to Otto von Bismarck's voice in a recording made by Edison. Wow.

Revolutionary education reform

2012-01-31T06:26:00.003-05:00

Bobby Jindal is going all in to push education reform in Louisiana. Already, New Orleans has the most charter schools in the country with 80% of students enrolled in charter schools. The results have been a marked improvement in how students are doing and a narrowing of the racial gap in student achievement. Now Jindal wants to take those results statewide and he wants to use choice and limits on teacher tenure to totally reform the education system. He is proposing to offer vouchers (or as they're now being called "scholarships") to all low-income student whose school gets a C, D or F grade from state administrators. They could use those vouchers for "private or virtual schools, career-based programs or institutions of higher education" using money from what the state would normally spend on students.

Jindal would increase the number of charter schools statewide to follow the success of New Orleans. And he would take a whack at teacher tenure.

As for tenure, Mr. Jindal would grant it only to teachers who are rated "highly effective" five years in a row, meaning the top 10% of performers. And tenure wouldn't equal lifetime protection: A tenured teacher who rates in the bottom 10% ("ineffective") in any year would return to probationary status. Ineffective teachers would receive no pay raise. Louisiana would also ban the "last in, first out" practice under which younger teachers are dismissed first, regardless of performance.

Of course the teachers unions are all over this. But they're having a harder time trying to argue that parents shouldn't have choice in picking their children's education.

Louisiana Association of Educators leader Michael Walker Jones took to insulting Bayou State parents: "If I'm a parent in poverty I have no clue because I'm trying to struggle and live day to day," said Mr. Jones of parental choice. How's that for faith in self-government?

This just reeks of paternalism. Jindal's message is that parents care enough about their children to look for the schools that will provide the best opportunities for those children. Just watch any of the documentaries such as Waiting for Superman or The Lottery that have been done about the agonies that parents go through as they wait to see if their students will win the lottery to get out of the regular public schools and into a charter. And teachers will have to depend on their performance rather than seniority or tenure to maintain their jobs. What a revolutionary concept for education.

Governor Jindal is pushing for revolutionary education reform on the state level. If his bill passes, we will have a real-life laboratory of democracy to assess whether such reforms, which conservatives have been pushing for years, actually make a difference. The Republicans have majorities in both houses of the state legislature so we can hope that the reforms will pass. Then I imagine that researchers will be keeping their eyes on the results to assess if the reforms make any difference.

Here in my area we're witnessing a small example of how the education blob opposes change. Since the Republicans took over the North Carolina legislature, they loosened the limitations on charter schools. A good friend of mine is involved in the creation of a new charter school, Research Triangle High that sounds as if it will offer marvelous opportunities for students. It will be focused on STEM education, that is science, technology, engineering, and mathematics using experiential learning and giving students opportunities to intern with businesses in the area. The teachers will also be collaborating with teachers around the state to bring their educational techniques to schools that need help with teaching those subjects. It sounds very exciting and a great opportunity for area students. So of course, the existing school system, Durham Public Schools, is furiously trying to block the opening of the school.

“RTHS will function effectively as a de facto private school supported by taxpayers,” reads a draft of the board’s resolution.

Board member Natalie Beyer, who drafted the original resolution, said she’s particularly concerned by what she sees as barriers to low-income students attending the school: the need for at-home technology to utilize a “flipped learning” model in which students listen to lectures at home; a location “away from where students of need live”; and a requirement that students complete at least Algebra I by the end of their freshman year.

Board members are also concerned by what they see as small transportation and nutrition budgets, $22,200 and $16,650, respectively, for 160 students in the 2012-13 academic year.

....“We’ve yet to successfully create separate but equal. We’ve never been able to do that as a society, and that is what this is creating,” said board Vice Chairwoman Heidi Carter, noting that more than 75 percent of DPS students qualify for free or reduced-price meals. “We need [RTHS] to share the burden of educating children with social challenges.”

Board member Leigh Bordley said she’s heard concerns about RTHS from Durham County residents, dismayed by what they see as a re-segregation of schools unfolding in the Wake school system.

“I can’t count the number of people [who have said] if we allow things like this to go forward, we’re deepening the segregation of our own community,” she said.

Blizzard [who wrote the school's charter application] said diversity is important to RTHS and that she’s not worried about the potential for homogeny because “we’re working so hard to that the school is working to recruit from a really diverse and broad student population.”

She said the proposed school is interested in collaborating with DPS programmatically, noting that the Contemporary Science Center has long worked with DPS schools to enrich students’ education. Blizzard is also interested in partnering with DPS on resources, infrastructure and transportation, but she said she hasn’t had conversations with the district about a potential collaboration since the school’s application has yet to be approved.

Concerns about students having to take Algebra I by the end of the ninth grade aren’t valid, she said, noting that most North Carolina teenagers already take the course by that point.

Since Pamela Blizzard also helped found the school where I teach, Durham Public Schools is also upset about our school's success.

The school’s application was filed by Pamela Blizzard, executive director of the RTP-based Contemporary Science Center and a founder of Raleigh Charter High School – designated by the state as an Honor School of Excellence since 2005 and a fixture on national rankings like Newsweek’s America’s Best High Schools list.

But those accolades come at the cost of diversity, board members suggested. Data on the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools website shows that Raleigh Charter’s student population in 2010-11 was 73.1 percent white, 13.2 percent Asian, 6 percent black, 2.5 percent Latino and 5.2 percent other. That contrasts with demographics from the same year in the Wake County Public School System: 49.3 percent white, 6.3 percent Asian, 24.7 percent black, 15 percent Latino and 4.7 percent other.

Like all charters in our state, admission to our school is by a blind lottery. Siblings receive preference. The only requirement is that students be able to enter Algebra I in 9th grade which is the minimal goal of North Carolina's math curriculum.

What is striking to me is that the Durham Public Schools, instead of being happy to have an exciting public school opportunity offered for their students, all they can do is complain and try to block the reform. They could embrace the new school and try to work with it. They could encourage their middle school students to apply. Then they see about adopting successful methods. But they'd rather keep the status quo than try to see how experimental reform could offer new opportunities for their area's students.

The more that such reforms as this school or Louisiana's statewide plan, the more that the existing schools are challenged to change and improve. And they're being dragged kicking and screaming all the way.

Cruising the Web

2012-01-30T07:27:00.003-05:00

Warren Kozak explodes the myth that Americans are going hungry. There is no evidence of that. And he has some amazing statistics on the fraud going on in food stamps. He says that "two out of three lunches served in schools are free or nearly free." Obviously, that means that many lunches are going to people who are not really poor. Either that or middle class children aren't buying school lunches because the food is so nasty and it is mostly poor children who are getting it. Having had to do duty in school cafeterias, I can believe that.

Mary Anastasia O'Grady notes how the Castro regime clamps down so tightly on media reports out of the country that co-opted journalists will report on supposed reforms in the country but that there is a news blackout on the death of a brave dissident.

NBC might grump about a Romney ad that uses part of a Tom Brokaw broadcast, but they're legally obliged to run it.

The Democrats are so hopeless in their fight against the Keystone XL pipeline that all they seem to have left now is the possibility that the Koch brothers may benefit from the pipeline's construction even if there is no evidence that they have any financial stake in the matter. Just waving around their name seems to be enough for Henry Waxman. Meanwhile, Obama's new best friend, Warren Buffett stands to substantially benefit from the decision not to build the pipeline. Funny how that works.

Mark Steyn has a hilarious riff on Thomas Friedman's use of Castro's criticism of the GOP nomination fight to just slam Friedman's reach for Castro's imprimatur in making fun of the GOP candidates.

Thomas L Friedman, the Bedrock of the New York Times op-ed page, thought this was such a startlingly insightful observation that he opened this week’s drooling paean to globalization with it:
When Marxists are complaining that your party’s candidates are disconnected from today’s global realities, it’s generally not a good sign.
Aside from the minor detail that Marxists have been complaining about the disconnect between pro-market political parties and “global reality” since the original Marxist sat in the Reading Room of the British Library riffing on the internal contradictions of capitalism, I was struck by Mr Friedman’s sparkling way with words. I’m not a credentialed Professor of Prose Style at Columbia School of Journalism or anything, but, for the “it’s generally not a good sign”/”you know you’ve got a problem” cliche to work, doesn’t the bit before it have to be something unexpected or unwanted? “When Fidel Castro’s hailing the GOP platform as just the ticket, it’s generally not a good sign.” That sort of thing.

Instead, Friedman goes on to peddle his usual globalist soft-core erotica, none of which Castro would support and none of which his enslaved people have any access to.

Oh, well. When right-wing loons are complaining that your opening paragraph is entirely disconnected from the rest of the column, presumably Thomas L Friedman takes that as a good sign.

Sometimes, it's just too easy.

All you need to know about the Palestinians' real attitude toward peace with Israel is the fact that Palestinian TV aired praise of the two men who killed an Israeli family of five including two children and a three-month old baby.

Joe Scarborough tells a story about Newt Gingrich's leadership as Speaker that is quite similar to one that Tom Coburn told in his own book. The story isn't so much that Gingrich tried to intimidate some members of his caucus, but that he did so in service of increasing spending on congressional committees, not exactly the image he hopes to promote today.

Ross Douhat has a well-argued column today about the coercion used by the Obama administration against religious organizations requiring them to offer health insurance plans that cover procedures that they condemn.

Critics of the administration’s policy are framing this as a religious liberty issue, and rightly so. But what’s at stake here is bigger even than religious freedom. The Obama White House’s decision is a threat to any kind of voluntary community that doesn’t share the moral sensibilities of whichever party controls the health care bureaucracy.

The Catholic Church’s position on contraception is not widely appreciated, to put it mildly, and many liberals are inclined to see the White House’s decision as a blow for the progressive cause. They should think again. Once claimed, such powers tend to be used in ways that nobody quite anticipated, and the logic behind these regulations could be applied in equally punitive ways by administrations with very different values from this one.

The more the federal government becomes an instrument of culture war, the greater the incentive for both conservatives and liberals to expand its powers and turn them to ideological ends. It is Catholics hospitals today; it will be someone else tomorrow.

The White House attack on conscience is a vindication of health care reform’s critics, who saw exactly this kind of overreach coming. But it’s also an intimation of a darker American future, in which our voluntary communities wither away and government becomes the only word we have for the things we do together.

Here's a nice story about how the actress, Sonja Sohn, who played Kima on "The Wire" has been trying to give back the same sorts of young people depicted living in no-hope environments.

John J. Pitney, who is a conservative, explains why Newt Gingrich would lose in a debate with Obama.

George Will has a great column about how willing Barack Obama is to take a command approach to domestic affairs.

Obama, aspiring to command civilian life, has said that in reforming health care, he would have preferred an “elegant, academically approved” plan without “legislative fingerprints on it” but “unfortunately” he had to conduct “negotiations with a lot of different people.” His campaign mantra “We can’t wait!” expresses progressivism’s impatience with our constitutional system of concurrent majorities. To enact and execute federal laws under Madison’s institutional architecture requires three, and sometimes more, such majorities. There must be majorities in the House and Senate, each body having distinctive constituencies and electoral rhythms. The law must be affirmed by the president, who has a distinctive electoral base and election schedule. Supermajorities in both houses of Congress are required to override presidential vetoes. And a Supreme Court majority is required to sustain laws against constitutional challenges.

“We can’t wait!” exclaims Obama, who makes recess appointments when the Senate is not in recess, multiplies “czars” to further nullify the Senate’s constitutional prerogative to advise and consent, and creates agencies (e.g., Obamacare’s Independent Payment Advisory Board and Dodd-Frank’s Consumer Financial Protection Bureau) untethered from legislative accountability.

Like other progressive presidents fond of military metaphors, he rejects the patience of politics required by the Constitution he has sworn to uphold.

No wonder progressives from Woodrow Wilson onwards have bemoaned the backwardness of the Constitution since it makes their attempt to impose whatever nostrums they decide are good for us.

Reuters is upset that they published a hit piece on Marco Rubio that turned out to be chockfull of inaccuracies and mistakes. The question is why they would have been interested in such an article in the first place. And why didn't they check with Rubio himself before they published it? It wasn't like this was breaking news that had to be rushed to press without time to check it. And the whole point of the article was supposed to be that Rubio couldn't be a VP nominee because he was behind on his mortgage, although that was one of the errors of the piece. Huh, that is supposed to be a disqualifier?

James Q. Wilson has a great essay about why we shouldn't be blaming the rich for income inequality.

In other words, the country has become more prosperous, as measured not by income but by consumption: In constant dollars, consumption by people in the lowest quintile rose by more than 40 percent over the past four decades.

Income as measured by the federal government is not a reliable indicator of well-being, but consumption is. Though poverty is a problem, it has become less of one.

The real story is the poor.

Poster boy for what the teacher unions have wrought

2012-01-30T07:08:00.004-05:00

The New York Post has a sadly believable story about how one New York city teacher has been raking in the big bucks even though he hasn't been allowed in a classroom for a decade.

Deemed a danger to kids, the typing teacher with a $10 million real estate portfolio hasn’t been allowed in a classroom for more than a decade, but still collects $100,049 a year in city salary — plus health benefits, a growing pension nest egg, vacation and sick pay.

Mayor Bloomberg and Gov. Cuomo can call for better teacher evaluations until they’re blue-faced, but Rosenfeld and six peers with similar gigs costing about $650,000 a year in total salaries are untouchable. Under a system shackled by protections for tenured teachers, they can’t be fired, the DOE says.

.... Since the DOE closed the teacher holding pens in June 2010, those facing disciplinary charges were scattered to offices and given tasks such as answering phones, filing and photocopying.

But Rosenfeld and six others whose cases have long been closed are “permanently reassigned.” Rosenfeld reports to the Division of School Facilities, which maintains DOE buildings, in a warehouse in Long Island City.

Asked what work he does, Rosenfeld laughingly told his friend, “Oh, I Xeroxed something the other day.”

Rosenfeld could have retired four years ago at 62, but his pension grows by $1,700 for each year he stays — even without teaching. If he quit today, his annual pension would total an estimated $85,400.

“Why not make it bigger?” the friend said.

Rosenfeld will also get paid for 100 unused sick days when he leaves.

New York has no mandatory retirement age for teachers.

Meanwhile, charter schools have the ability to get rid of bad teachers, not just those accused of inappropriate behavior with children, but those who can't teach. No wonder the teacher unions despise charters.

Good news on the Santorums' daughter

2012-01-30T06:59:00.001-05:00

Best wishes to the Santorum family for the continued recovery of their daughter Bella from pneumonia. It is amazing that she is even alive now considering that she was born with a genetic anomaly that usually means a baby won't survive more than a week. Having had a baby with a related condition who didn't last two days, my heart and admiration goes out to the Santorum family for their love and care for their daughter.

Live by the debate, die by the debate

2012-01-27T06:43:00.007-05:00

If the main argument for Newt Gingrich to win the GOP nomination so that he could paste Obama in the Fall debates, last night's debate in Florida blew a big hole in that argument. Newt was whiny, poorly informed about his own finances, angry, and overall just off his game. Mitt Romney scored several body blows when he was able to retaliate against Gingrich when Newt charged him with investing in Fannie and Freddie and Romney was able to take advantage of his oppo research and tell Gingrich that he had also invested the same way. Better than that, Romney was able to make a forceful defense of his wealth and investments. Of course, any time that Romney is talking about his millions and blind trust, it's not the best, but at least Romney didn't seem apologetic of his wealth and was able to give an explanation of the importance of investors.

Romney also won the immigration debate. Newt mysteriously kept focusing on grandmothers and Mitt shut him up by saying that our problem is not 11 million grandmothers. In fact, in answering Gingrich's attacks, Romney was able to give a full-throated argument in favor of legal immigration while contrasting those who want to come here legally with those who have bypassed the legal process. Romney succeeded in making the pro-legal immigration argument that so many conservatives seem to forget to make.

Granted, Romney seemed weak when he didn't know what was in his own attack ad. Not the best evidence of his executive leadership of his own campaign, but most people recognize that those ads are made and a loop of the candidate's voice saying he approved the ad is tacked on afterward. However, any discussion of whether or not Newt made a statement that could have been inferred to say that he considered Spanish the language of the ghetto is not good for Newt. And he did make that statement and later issued an apology in Spanish for what he said so the ad is mostly true.

And then we had about a ten-minute detour to talk about colonizing the Moon. And once again Gingrich's science-fiction-inspired aspirations seemed out of touch with the real concerns of people.

The real revelation of the debate was how well Santorum did. He totally nailed Romney on the similarities between Romneycare and Obamacare. And he made the connection to why this is important - Romney is going to be hobbled going against Obama in the general election in making the arguments against Obamacare when Romney enacted such a similar program.

That was one of Romney's weakest moments in all the debates. And then he told Santorum, "It’s not worth getting angry about," Well, a lot of people are extremely angry about Obamacare and Santorum is right to be angry even though I didn't think he sounded angry, but dynamic and right. And Romney didn't have an answer. In that exchange he reminded conservatives of why we've been suspicious of him the entire time.

Santorum was also great when he said that Wolf Blitzer should move on beyond the tit-for-tat arguing between Newt and Mitt. He came off as above-the-fray and more focused on the real issues people care about. Gingrich tried to take the lifeline, but Romney was able to taunt him to coming back to the same unappealing arguments. It made Gingrich look bad, but mostly it made Santorum look good.

The real question that raised was why Gingrich was the one who had risen to the top as the chief non-Mitt when Santorum is so much stronger. I wouldn't be surprised if Newt's numbers tumbled and Santorum's rose, but it's probably too little too late for Santorum. He might not have been my first choice, but it's a shame that he languished at the bottom while such candidates as Bachmann, Cain, Perry, and now Gingrich rose up in the Whack-a-Mole efforts to find a non-Mitt. Any surge by Santorum now would most likely help Mitt by once again dividing up the non-Mitt vote and Santorum doesn't have the money or organization to compete in the remaining states. Mostly, Santorum has been hurt by the image of being such a loser in his last Senate campaign. And having that big L over his head is not what voters are looking for in going against Obama.

Gingrich got his wish to have a debate with an audience that could react and cheer. Unfortunately for him, he delivered his worst debate performance in the entire long march of all these debates. He was defensive and whiny for most of the debate. Mostly, he just seemed angry that he was getting attacked. Does he think that Obama would be gentler on him than his fellow Republicans? He got better at the end, but by then it was too late.

He even tried his signature bombast against the media moderator and got posterized by Wolf Blitzer who fought back and told Gingrich he should be willing to stand by the attacks on Romney that he himself has been making on the campaign trail. Forget Gingrich's claims to be the master debater to go up against Obama; he lost to Wolf Blitzer. That can't be a good thing for a candidate whose main selling point is that he can vocalize conservatives' anger at the mainstream media.

Romney has gotten stronger in having to fight back attacks that Obama will certainly be making if Romney should win the nomination. It also probably raised his negatives, but that was going to happen anyway. And those candidates who have lost, except for Santorum, have come off looking worse than when they started campaigning. Perhaps that might be a salutary lesson for future possible candidates looking to raise their visibility by a hopeless run for the nomination.

Cruising the Web

2012-01-26T07:27:00.003-05:00

Thomas Sowell laments the "presumptuous ignorance" of those in government who think they know how to run a business.

John Taylor explains how important it is for us to have a stable long-term economic policy that would let business people know what to expect and to make plans within rules that follow principles of economic freedom.

Yuval Levin points out how the self-contradictions within Obama's State of the Union reveal how Obama doesn't really believe the moderate, even conservative platitudes, he uttered. Once again, he is putting on a mask to hide what he really believes. Instead of listening to him, look at what he has actually done. Veronique de Rugy has more on the self-contradictions and confusion in Obama's speech. For example, he excoriated the idea of government bailouts while touting the benefits of auto bailouts. And of course he was deceptive in his bragging on how well GM is now doing. And then he had the nerve to say that what was happening in Detroit could happen in other cities such as Pittsburgh or Raleigh. As a resident of Raleigh, I can say that we don't wish to emulate Detroit. For Obama, a government handout is not a handout if he's the one handing it out. For him, fairness is what he determines it to be instead of some objective standard.

What type of idiots work in the National Park Service who seem to believe that there is a First Amendment right to camp out on public land at public expense contrary to express laws that forbid such camping out?

Mona Charen is not happy with the message that South Carolina sent that nothing matters as much as a candidate's ability to bash the media.

This fierce antagonist of liberalism -- the roaring lion who tells John King and Juan Williams where to get off -- confessed that in meetings with Bill Clinton "I melt when I'm around him. After I get out, I need two hours to detoxify. My people are nervous about me going in there because of the way I deal with this."

"His people" ought to be even more nervous now. I know I am.

Here's a moment of history - Jane Addams' Hull House is closing and filing for bankruptcy. It has been around since 1889. We just studied this in my AP US history class. Of course, it operated much differently now than it did back in Addams' day. Today it depended on government spending for the services it provided and many of its workers are unionized.

John Hinderaker covers the story of a Democratic operative in Iowa who has been arrested for trying to pretend to be the Republican Secretary of State to falsely implicate him in supposed unethical behavior in office. It sounds like something very dirty was going on among Democratic operatives in Iowa.

Hugh Hewitt and Scott Johnson point to this story in the Orlando Sentinel about how the DNC and its union allies are running ads n Florida attacking Romney. Apparently, they've concluded that Gingrich would be a weaker opponent to face in the Fall so they're trying to help him out. The model for this could be Richard Nixon whose campaign committee worked to help George McGovern get the 1972 nomination. This tactic could rebound to help Romney portray himself as the one the Democrats fear most just as Newt Gingrich is probably helped by Nancy Pelosi slyly hinting that she knows something devastating about him that she's not telling us.

Newt Gingrich is now claiming that he "helped create 27 million jobs because he's taking credit for jobs created after the Reagan tax reform and the 1996 welfare reform. The man's hubris knows no bounds. I guess he shares the Obama idea that government is the entity that creates jobs.

Gingrich blasting Ronald Reagan

2012-01-25T15:27:00.003-05:00

Newt Gingrich likes to tote his Reagan street cred by talking about how he and Reagan and Jack Kemp instituted lower tax rates and helped build the economy in the 1980s. I guess this couldn't have been done with the support of a back-bencher in the House.

Eliot Abrams, who worked in the Reagan administration as an assistant secretary of state, has an eye-opening column about Gingrich's rhetoric at the time when speaking about Reagan's foreign policy. Gingrich didn't think that Reagan had been doing enough to fight communism and the Soviet Union and took to the floor of the Senate to blast the President.

But the most bitter battleground was often in Congress. Here at home, we faced vicious criticism from leading Democrats — Ted Kennedy, Christopher Dodd, Jim Wright, Tip O’Neill, and many more — who used every trick in the book to stop Reagan by denying authorities and funds to these efforts. On whom did we rely up on Capitol Hill? There were many stalwarts: Henry Hyde, elected in 1974; Dick Cheney, elected in 1978, the same year as Gingrich; Dan Burton and Connie Mack, elected in 1982; and Tom DeLay, elected in 1984, were among the leaders.

But not Newt Gingrich. He voted with the caucus, but his words should be remembered, for at the height of the bitter struggle with the Democratic leadership Gingrich chose to attack . . . Reagan.

The best examples come from a famous floor statement Gingrich made on March 21, 1986. This was right in the middle of the fight over funding for the Nicaraguan contras; the money had been cut off by Congress in 1985, though Reagan got $100 million for this cause in 1986. Here is Gingrich: “Measured against the scale and momentum of the Soviet empire’s challenge, the Reagan administration has failed, is failing, and without a dramatic change in strategy will continue to fail. . . . President Reagan is clearly failing.” Why? This was due partly to “his administration’s weak policies, which are inadequate and will ultimately fail”; partly to CIA, State, and Defense, which “have no strategies to defeat the empire.” But of course “the burden of this failure frankly must be placed first on President Reagan.” Our efforts against the Communists in the Third World were “pathetically incompetent,” so those anti-Communist members of Congress who questioned the $100 million Reagan sought for the Nicaraguan “contra” rebels “are fundamentally right.” Such was Gingrich’s faith in President Reagan that in 1985, he called Reagan’s meeting with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev “the most dangerous summit for the West since Adolf Hitler met with Neville Chamberlain in 1938 in Munich.”

Gingrich scorned Reagan’s speeches, which moved a party and then a nation, because “the president of the United States cannot discipline himself to use the correct language.” In Afghanistan, Reagan’s policy was marked by “impotence [and] incompetence.” Thus Gingrich concluded as he surveyed five years of Reagan in power that “we have been losing the struggle with the Soviet empire.” Reagan did not know what he was doing, and “it is precisely at the vision and strategy levels that the Soviet empire today is superior to the free world.”

Whoa. Gingrich has been criticizing Mitt Romney for saying that he wasn't a Reagan man when he ran for the Senate in Massachusetts in 1994. That is a troubling quote. But going to the floor of the House to call Reagan had "failed" and that our efforts against Communists were “pathetically incompetent,” and comparing Reagan to Neville Chamberlain is pretty strong stuff. And he was kicking Reagan at a time when Reagan was getting knocked around by many Europeans as well as the Democrats. Talk about giving cover to the enemy. Rather like how Gingrich's criticisms of Paul Ryan's reform plans for Medicare or Romney's work at Bain, now that I think about it.

As Abrams writes,

There are two things to be said about these remarks. The first is that as a visionary, Gingrich does not have a very impressive record. The Soviet Union was beginning to collapse, just as Reagan had believed it must. The expansion of its empire had been thwarted. The policies Gingrich thought so weak and indeed “pathetic” worked, and Ronald Reagan turned out to be a far better student of history and politics than Gingrich.

The second point to make is that Gingrich made these assaults on the Reagan administration just as Democratic attacks were heating up unmercifully. Far from becoming a reliable voice for Reagan policy and the struggle against the Soviets, Gingrich took on Reagan and his administration.

If the Romney people are smart, they will be feeding these quotes from Gingrich to their candidate so Mitt can unleash them in a debate.

And Abrams reminds us of what Newt was saying when George W. Bush was fighting critics for the surge in Iraq.

Here again Gingrich provided no support for his party’s embattled president, testifying as a private citizen in 2007 that the strategy was “inadequate,” contained “breathtaking” gaps, lacked “synergism” (whatever that means), and was “very disappointing.” What did Gingrich propose? Among other things, a 50 percent increase in the budget of the State Department.

Presidents should not get automatic support, not even from members of their own party, but they have a right to that support when they are under a vicious partisan assault. Today it is fair to look back and ask who had it right: Gingrich, who backed away from and criticized Republican presidents, or those chief executives, who were making difficult and consequential decisions on national security. Bush on the surge and Reagan on the Soviet empire were tough, courageous — and right. Newt Gingrich in retrospect seems less the visionary than the politician who refused the party’s leader loyal support on grounds that history has proved were simply wrong.

Maybe that was the time period when Newt was cozying up to inside-the-Beltway poohbahs so that he could get on TV and earn favorable press. Rather like sitting on a couch to make an ad with Nancy Pelosi.

Expect to see these points in some ads in Florida. I wonder how bashing Reagan's approach to the Soviet Union and Communists in Latin America would go down among Cuban-Americans in Florida. It will tarnish Gingrich's attempts to pretend that he is the only true conservative in the race. And using his own words against him is especially sweet since that is what people are attracted to right now - Newt's words and his claim to be a conservative visionary.

Facts and the President

2012-01-25T15:24:00.002-05:00

President Obama is not getting much fact-checker love from such right-wingers as the Washington Post or the Associated Press. In fact this AP headline can't make the White House happy.

FACT CHECK: Obama pushes plans that flopped before

But hey, what do facts matter when there's an election to win and demagoguing to be done?

It's all very discouraging

2012-01-25T06:31:00.006-05:00

Conservatives may delight in pointing out that President Obama's speech last year was full of small-bore policy proposals and ignored the signature achievement of his presidency - health care reform. They can point out that his pleas for increasing taxes on the rich wouldn't do much at all to address our looming debt problems and that the only solution will be to deeply increase taxes on those middle class Americans Obama pretends to want to do so much to protect. Conservatives can point out how he painted a rosy picture of the state of the economy today and took undeserved credit for any glimmerings of economic growth. They can laugh at his deliberate politicking of pointing to individuals from swing states who have supposedly benefited from Obama policies. This is what conservatives can say today. John Podhoretz is typical of this reaction from conservatives.

The candidate who suggested his victory in the Texas primary would be remembered as the moment at which the waters of the ocean would literally begin to recede has entirely lost his capacity to inspire — or to frighten his rivals — by his oratorical gifts alone.

Without that force, and without much of a record to run on, he instead turned the classic State of the Union laundry list into his own personal Amazon.com gift registry. If Congress wants to be nice to him and to the American people, he said, it will send him various bills with lots of goodies in them, and when they arrive, all he’ll have to do is sign for them.

Please. The president knows the horrifying reality of the mounting deficit and the unprecedented debt, and the nightmarish charts showing the public sector eating up the entirety of the national GDP over the next two decades. Even if he succeeds in ending the Bush tax cuts at the end of this year, the windfall to the Treasury will be eaten up instantly by existing demands.

And yet, he proposed no fewer than six new federal projects in the first half-hour of the speech. You get the sense that even the liberal congressmen and senators standing and applauding have no real expectation that any of those proposals will ever, or could ever, become law.

The president whose signature pieces of legislation will cost the Treasury more than $2 trillion — and who did not succeed in creating an explosion of economic growth — is in a terrible position to propose new spending plans. He already tried it last September in his “pass this bill now” speech, and that effort was stillborn.

Rich Lowry sounds the same note.

Don't worry, America. There's nothing that ails this country that can't be made right by a catalogue of piddling proposals that will be forgotten tomorrow--and oh yeah, more taxes on the rich. Such was the message of President Obama's State of the Union address.

It made Bill Clinton's notoriously endless lists of poll-tested banalities look like artistry by comparison. It was light and forgettable, so insubstantial it could have floated off the teleprompter. It was spend more here, create a new program there, carve out a new subsidy in the tax code over there--and repeat as necessary, for over an hour.

The president steered clear of some of the nation's gravest domestic questions. You would never know we are accumulating debt at a $1.3 trillion annual clip. You would never know that health care costs are soaring and a vast political and constitutional fight is ongoing over his health care law (mentioned once, only very briefly, in passing). You would never know that Medicare and Social Security will soon be groaning under the coming wave of baby boomer retirements. You would never know the tax code is a hideously complex, economically inefficient monstrosity.

All of that was left aside, so the president could strike an uplifting, inoffensive tone proposing a raft of superficially unobjectionable new government actions. It was one thing for Bill Clinton to take this tack in the late 90s when the economy was roaring. It was evasive and irresponsible for President Obama to do it now in our current straits.

But I think all those points, while extremely valid, may not matter. I tried to listen to Obama as a swing voter would. I always assign my Government and Politics students to watch the State of the Union and I tried to watch it through their eyes. They might be mostly 10th graders, but they're smart and interested in learning about how the government works. In a way, they are proxies for swing voters who don't know or understand much about public policy but will vote and will vote based on their impressions rather than any actual understanding of the long-term impact of what politicians do. And I just bet that they will have been impressed by Obama's speech.

He sounds plausible when he talks about his proposals. And he delivers a set speech very well. His demonization of the wealthy is appealing. People don't understand the impact of those proposed policies on the economy such as helping homeowners refinance their homes; they just hear that they're going to save money because of Obama. They won't notice that he didn't do any bragging about Obamacare. When he chides Republicans for partisanship and gridlock, they will forget that he had a filibuster-proof Senate for the first two years of his presidency and passed through everything he wanted. When he talks about signing off on fewer regulations, they won't think about how it isn't the number of regulations, but the impact of those regulations he signed and how they've contributed to making this the slowest recovery from a recession since the Great Depression. Just compare the rate of recovery from the recession that Ronald Reagan inherited and that which Obama encountered.

All of the criticisms are true. But conservatives need a good standard bearer to make those arguments. And in Mitch Daniels, we saw someone who could do that. His response was a full-throated defense of a conservative approach to building the economy without turning everything over to the government. Daniels acknowledged all that Obama avoided about the reality of what we're facing. He was able to explain how the very policies Obama is so proud of are what is holding the economy back from recovery. Daniels was my first choice of a wished-for candidate and listening to him last night just got me more depressed about those who are in the race instead of all the better candidates who decided to sit this race out.

I can't see Mitt Romney being successful at making conservative arguments when he hasn't been able to do so in the five years he's been running for president. Newt Gingrich can make the arguments, but I still find him too undependable and erratic to wish to see him as our candidate against Obama. Gingrich may be full of braggadocio of how he'd demolish Obama in debates but then he goes and whines about the audience not being allowed to whoop and cheer during the debates as if that were a freedom of speech issue. No, it's the same policy that will hold in the presidential debates in the general election. Is Gingrich admitting that he can't perform as well in the exact same format that will be in any debate between the Republican candidate and Obama? And while I think Santorum can make those arguments, I think a Santorum candidacy would become all about social issues instead of Obama's record.

So I'm feeling very discouraged today. I fear that Obama will snooker enough people to win reelection and we'll have another four years of his disastrous policies and sanctimonious self-praise. Conservatives warned against what an Obama presidency would mean and it's been worse than we predicted yet that was insufficient in 2008. I am scared that, despite having lived through the reality of what a President Obama had done, he'll be able to snooker enough of those swing voters who don't pay close attention and just hear his soaring rhetoric and forget what that rhetoric has bought us in the past three years.

UPDATE: Even if the Republican candidates are a discouraging group, the folks at the RNC do a find job of taking it to the President. They just issued this short clip to show how Obama has been using the same rhetoric and making the same proposals in his State of the Union speeches. It's rather startling how he repeats himself.

Well, if first you don't succeed...

Cruising the Web

2012-01-24T07:13:00.002-05:00

John Hinderaker has the story of a former CIA official and Democratic Senate staffer who released to the press classified information including the name of the CIA agent who interrogated Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and Abu Zubaydah. Despite pleas from that agent and the CIA, the New York Times published that agent's name thus endangering the life of that agent and his family. This should be a much bigger scandal than it is.

Stan Liebowitz, a University of Texas economist, exposes the damages that online piracy has done tot he recording industry. We may not have liked the law that Congress has ready to vote on, but such piracy is harming our creative industries.

The Supreme Court issued another important unanimous decision ruling that installing GPS devices without a warrant to follow a suspect's car violated the Fourth Amendment. Once again, the Obama administration was on the wrong side of a unanimous ruling.

Larry Sabato looks at the history of endorsements. It's unclear if they do all that much to help candidates, but non-endorsements also play a role. Ike's non-endorsement of Richard Nixon sure hurt him in 1960. And it's rather telling that only 11 congressmen are endorsing Newt this election.

Here's a sweet video of how one violinist responded when his performance was interrupted by a phone ring tone.

Newt's weaknesses exposed

2012-01-24T06:09:00.006-05:00

Newt Gingrich released a report yesterday to try to show that he was not a lobbyist for Freddie Mac. He's relying on a technicality that he never registered as a lobbyist.

But the witness that he had testify for him, as Timothy Carney pointed out, was the head of Freddie Mac's lobbying operations.

pecifically, the Freddie Mac executive who hired Gingrich was not the CEO, nor the VP for operations, nor the VP for communications, but Craig Thomas, the VP for Public Policy -- that is, the head of Freddie Mac's lobbying operations. Thomas was a registered lobbyist at the time.

So, Gingrich may or may not have made lobbying contacts on Freddie's behalf, but it appears he was being paid to aid Freddie Mac's lobbying agenda. Say Gingrich was providing memos to Thomas on how to lobby (and given Thomas's job as top lobbyist, what else would he be helping Thomas with?), that counts as "Lobbying Activity" according to the law.

So why was he being hired by Freddie Mac's chief lobbyist if he weren't assisting in lobbying.

I guess it all depends on what the meaning of lobbying is. And Gingrich is too Clintonian by half. In fact, Rich Lowry sees a strong parallel between Gingrich and Clinton following Gingrich's rise in the polls in South Carolina by attacking Brian Williams and ABC for the Marianne Gingrich story about his adultery in his second marriage.

Only one other politician in America could have played the victim card so expertly when confronted by the story of a wronged woman. Only one other politician would have thrown out so many obfuscating “facts,” or turned his lavish anger on and off so quickly. Only one other politician would have dared hope to turn such an embarrassing imbroglio to his advantage. If he was watching the debate somewhere, Bill Clinton must have chuckled in admiration and thought, “Well played, my friend. Well played.”

Newt is the Republican Clinton — shameless, needy, hopelessly egotistical. The two former adversaries and tentative partners have largely the same set of faults and talents. They are self-indulgent, prone to disregard rules inconvenient to them, and consumed by ambition. They are glib, knowledgeable, and imaginative. They are baby boomers who hadn’t fully grown up even when they occupied two of the most powerful offices in the land.

The technicality that Gingrich might be hiding under is that he was also doing other things so he didn't have to register as a lobbyist.

But to be forced to register under the federal Lobbying Disclosure Act and to lobby aren't the same thing. The LDA merely requires that anyone who spends more than 20% of his or her time on "lobbying activities" register.

The LDA defines “lobbying activity” as “any efforts in support of such contacts, including preparation or planning activities, research and other background work that is intended, at the time of its preparation, for use in contacts and coordination with the lobbying activities of others.”

Many of Gingrich's activities -- producing public reports, testifying on behalf of policies -- amount to lobbying; they may not have consumed 20% of his time.

And the reason you bring in an expert on the complicated law isn't to avoid influence-peddling. It's to avoid having to register.

As Maggie Haberman points out, calling on an expert on lobbying to explain his contract tells us something about what Gingrich was doing.

Gingrich — adamant that he wasn't a lobbyist as he explained why he only released one year of his Freddie Mac contract, which dated to 1999 (he uttered something about going through a confidentiality process) — volunteered that at his firm, they brought in a "lobbying expert" to explain to his team what qualified as lobbying and what didn't.

That expert "is prepared to testify," Gingrich said.

Romney didn't pounce. But why one would hire a "lobbying expert" other than to explain to staff how to walk up to the "bright line" Gingrich described, but not legally cross it, was not clear.

This is going to be a problem for Newt Gingrich. He tried to get away with claiming that he was being hired as a "historian" for Freddie Mac. That was laughable. But it was also indicative that he knew that having worked to advance the interests of Freddie Mac was going to hurt him among Republican voters. And, as John Podhoretz writes, Romney demonstrated that he was willing and able to take on the man who just embarrassed him in South Carolina on Newt's past.

Did Gingrich lobby for Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored mortgage business that paid him $1.6 million as it was helping to destroy the housing market? If not, why did Freddie Mac pay him $1.6 million? Gingrich denied it huffily, but had no answer when Romney pointed out that the money was actually paid to Gingrich by Freddie Mac’s chief lobbyist.

And then Romney charged that Gingrich had to resign in disgrace. Newt tried to deny that, but his excuses were exposed by Ron Paul who pointed out the exact truth that Gingrich had to resign as Speaker because he had lost the confidence of the Republicans in the House and knew he wouldn't be reelected as Speaker. He resigned rather than facing that humiliation. John Pitney reminds us of that history. Gingrich wanted to be reelected Speaker after the 1998 elections revealed that the GOP had lost seats, but retained control of the House. It wasn't until later that week in 1998 that it became clear that he didn't have the votes to be reelected Speaker. Ron Paul knew it and anyone who was following politics back in 1998 remembers that. It tells us a lot about his leadership in the House that his own co-workers, who should have been his strongest supporters, didn't want him to be their leader any more.

One of Rick Santorum's strongest reasons not to support Newt is that, if he were the nominee, the general election campaign would be about him, not Obama. That is true, to some extent about any GOP candidate. The Democrats know that they can't win an election that is about Obama and his record. They'll try to turn everything to be about whomever the Republican nominee is. It's just that, with Newt, they have such a rich storehouse to draw from. We're seeing now what happens when Newt is being attacked from the right. When the general starts, we'll revisit how the Democrats took him apart when he was Speaker. And he helped them. The man who said he "melted" when around Bill Clinton doesn't deserve to claim that he is the only one who can lead the conservative charge against Obama.

Quin Hillyer explains why he thinks that Newt Gingrich is "the Bill Clinton of the right with half the charm and twice the abrasiveness." Rick Santorum was right that Newt Gingrich is taking too much credit for the victories of the Republicans in 1994. Yes, he did play a big role in recruiting candidates and setting the goal of winning back the House. But few historians think it was the Contract with America that did the job. Mostly, it was the unpopularity of Clinton's first two years plus the House Banking scandal that opened voters' eyes to the corruption that had accompanied the Democrats' 40-year control of the House. And Newt wasn't the leader using the Banking scandal to bring down the Democrats, because he had his own history of bouncing big checks on the House bank. The GOP also benefited from the redistricting that had been done after the 1990's census when a lot of minority-majority districts were created according to the way the Voting Rights Act had required when it was renewed in 1982. Such districts packed minority voters into districts to create a majority of minorities. That worked to accomplish its goal, but it also diluted surrounding districts of Democratic voters. That helped Republicans in both 1992 and especially 1994 when they weren't being dragged down by an unpopular incumbent George H.W. Bush.

As Hillyer outlines, Newt doesn't deserve all the credit he's claiming for conservative successes in the 1990s. In some instances, he weakened that success.

Meanwhile, Gingrich consistently claims far too much credit for conservative successes, especially in the Reagan years. As Mitt Romney noted in the debate last night, Reagan barely knew who Gingrich was. He was a back bencher.

The joke going around in the late 1980s was that the NRCC had a whole room full of file Cabinets, with every drawer in the room labeled "Newt's ideas." Well, every drawer but one. The drawer in the bottom corner of the dingiest file Cabinet was labeled "Newt's good ideas."

As for his role in gaining the majority for the GOP in 1994, it was of course significant. I was there; I will always credit him for that. Alas, he claims TOO much credit. The Contract with America, for instance, was more the brainchild of Kerry Knott (Armey's aide, who came up with the first version of it while on a weekend clear-his-mind getaway at Morton Blackwell's country house) than anybody else. The insistence on passing welfare reform (rather than giving up on it after two vetoes and using it as a campaign issue instead) came from the bottom up, with folks like Santorum, John Kasich, Bill Archer, and Clay Shaw deserving more of the credit than Gingrich.

As for Appropriations, Bob Livingston went beyond what Newt even asked in pursuit of a balanced budget, and so did Kasich. But Gingrich almost ruined the whole thing by agreeing with Bill Thomas to include an unnecessary Medicare provision into the "shutdown" battle, thus giving fodder to Clinton and muddying the waters. Gingrich's foot-in-mouth-itis clearly helped cost conservatives both in the PR department and in the 1996 presidential race; his conduct of the impeachment inquiry turned it, politically, into a major met minus instead of the net plus it should have been; and his utter capitulation on spending in the fall of 1998 (in order to buy off moderates for what turned out to be irrelevant demands for the actual shape of the impeachment inquiry) blew the lid off the spending progress made in the previous three years and set the scene for the Bush spendathon.

Ramesh Ponnuru examines how some of Newt's proposals collapse once they're exposed. His ideas for Social Security would increase the government's cost in both the short and long run. His proposals on immigration have holes in them and would lead to problems with his brainstorm about local community boards deciding which long-time immigrants could stay here. And then there are his ideas on the courts. He takes conservative anger at liberal courts and proposes a very non-conservative solution, one that could be turned around if Democrats had control of the Congress.

Consider, finally, Gingrich’s much-discussed desire to weaken the federal courts. The view that the courts have much more power than they used to have, and that this change is mostly unfortunate, is a respectable one. The view that Congress and the president should respond on occasion by limiting the courts’ jurisdiction, as Gingrich wants, ought to be respectable, too.

But Gingrich cannot, of course, stop there. He also has to call for Congress to summon judges to explain their decisions, which would be both pointless (they already write opinions), and wrong (congressmen have no constitutional power to hector judges). And he wants to abolish liberal circuit courts and replace them with conservative ones, which is an obvious attempt to ignore the Constitution’s grant of life tenure to judges.

Anyone who proposes that judicial power should be checked arouses the suspicion that what he really wants is freedom from the constraints of the law. Gingrich’s solution to this problem is to confirm the charge instantaneously.

Gingrich has more original ideas than most of us. But for a president, what’s much more important is the ability to tell the good ones from the bad -- an ability called judgment.

Gosh knows that Mitt Romney is no conservative prize. I distinctly regard him as the lesser of evils. That's usually whom I have to settle voting for. There are plenty of Republicans I would have been enthusiastic about voting for this year, but they didn't run. Tonight we'll see my preferred candidate, Mitch Daniels, give the response to Obama's State of the Union. I expect to be depressed that he is not in the race and we're stuck with those who are. But wishing it were so, won't make it so. We're not going to have some deus ex machina come in save us from Mitt at the convention. John Hood sums up how I feel about the choice before us.

Santorum’s Blistering Attack
By John Hood
January 23, 2012 10:44 P.M.
Comments
3

Santorum’s attacks on Romney and Gingrich regarding their apostasies on bailouts and ObamaCare may be uncomfortable, and may make him look mean, but he is telling an important truth. Neither of the frontrunners has been stalwart in defense of free enterprise and constitutional government. Ron Paul has, but his foreign policy is foolish and unpopular, and Santorum almost has, but he lacks the personal and financial resources to win this race.

The best thing one can say here is that conservatives desperately want to replace President Obama, and swing voters are very disappointed in his performance. The race remains winnable. But if you are a conservative looking for a hero, read some fiction. The reality of 2012 is messier. To non-political junkies, these four guys look like a weenie, a wimp, a weasel, and a wacko. Unfair? Perhaps. But let’s not fool ourselves about the stature gap here.

I'm not even sure who is whom in that description, but it's just about how I feel about the whole lot of them.

I'd be thrilled if it happened and a Daniels or a Chris Christie or Bobby Jindal or Marco Rubio or a Paul Ryan rose from the smoke of the closed rooms at the convention, but that's just a pipe dream. And conservatives shouldn't be holding out for the pipe dream. We go to the polls with the candidates we have. And Newt Gingrich is not the answer.

Cruising the Web

2012-01-23T06:55:00.002-05:00

The WSJ outlines how President Obama was deliberately disregarding the law as he signed it in December that included the rider mandating a decision on the Keystone XL pipeline which mandated the government not require any new environmental impact statement.

The Washington Post gives three Pinocchios to Obama's use of one of their columns in an ad.

Here's a nice profile of Bret Baier and his rise to prominence at Fox News. I still, however, miss Brit Hume.

California's own analysis of Jerry Brown's budget warns against depending on increased taxes on the wealthy to fix California's budgetary mess. Since those individuals' incomes tend to rise and fall, Brown would be tying California's economic future to a very uncertain source.

Despite his loss on Saturday in SC, the structure of the GOP nomination calendar and delegate rules favor Romney's candidacy. Of course, a lot of that could evaporate if Newt finds a way to translate his victory in SC into more money and better organization going forward.

Watch for unions to try to target the Super Bowl in their protests over the efforts to pass Right to Work laws in Indiana. The Democratic legislators are fleeing their jobs rather than allow the legislature to have a quorum so they can pass such a bill.

Ross Douhat has an interesting column looking at the three characteristics he believes are necessary in a successful candidate and explains how rare it is to find a candidate who has all three.

Nate Silver looks at the evidence that this year will be different from the paradigm that other nomination battles have fallen into. It's still too early to tell. Once again, the eyes of political watchers are all on Florida, the state that went rogue in order to move up his primary in contravention of the party rules. They wanted to have more influence and now is their chance to exercise that influence.

Romney's task going forward

2012-01-23T06:31:00.001-05:00

Well, I was certainly wrong in my predictions that SC voters would perceive Gingrich as less electable after Marianne Gingrich's interview. Apparently, they found him more electable than Romney. I think that's just ridiculous, myself. All the reasons that Gingrich tanked after he first rose in the polls in December are still true. He's a Democratic Party oppo dream. Yes, Romney has his own problems and he handled the attacks on Bain and the question of his taxes quite ineptly, but he doesn't have a lifetime mixture of wacky ideas and pompous self-regard that repels people the more they get to know him. As Conn Carroll points out, Gingrich has much higher negatives than either Romney or Obama. He might thrill conservative voters looking to recapture the glory days of 1994, but the rest of the public is less enamored.

I refuse to think that GOP voters overall will be so convinced that some snappy comebacks against journalists are the main qualification we're looking for in our nominee. He's had good moments in the debates when he defends conservative principles, but that isn't enough. Even if Gingrich were to be elected, I'd never be confident that he wouldn't go off on some loopy idea that he has convinced himself is worthy of his role as the definer of civilization.

Jay Cost notices something about Newt Gingrich's proposal that students act as janitors to learn job skills and responsibility. Whatever you might think of the idea, and I have no philosophical objection to that, it is not a conservative proposal for a presidential race.

There are two ways to look at this proposal. Perhaps Gingrich is offering a federal government takeover of New York sanitation workers, so as to generate something close to full employment. From that perspective, this is certainly the most liberal policy proposal ever to be offered at a Republican debate! Alternatively, perhaps Gingrich was offering a suggestion to Mayor Michael Bloomberg on how to get more kids to work. From that perspective, it is a non sequitur, at least in the context of a presidential debate, as Gingrich does not need to be president to make the recommendation.

Gingrich has an idea like that a minute. And some of them are truly bizarre and poorly thought through. Take his idea that we have panels like WWII draft boards to decide if illegal immigrants who have been here 25 years or more should be allowed to stay. What happens when one community has very expansive decisions on who gets to stay compared to another? Immigrants can flock to that area, get their citizenship, and there will be nothing any other community could do about it? Whatever decision we make about such long-term immigrants, it must be a uniform standard, not an ad hoc decision by a different groups around the country.

Gingrich is at his most appealing when he's forcefully defending conservative principles. That is a practice that Romney should adopt forthwith. As Byron York writes, SC voters saw Gingrich as the man who could most strongly take Obama on during debates. Romney needs to demonstrate that he too can use conservative ideas to challenge Obama. Larry Kudlow was correct that Romney's strongest moment in the debates last week was this answer.

“You’ve got to stop the spread of crony capitalism. [Obama] gives General Motors to the UAW. He takes $500 million and sticks it into Solyndra. He stacks the labor stooges on the NLRB so they can say no to Boeing and take care of their friends in the labor movement. . . . He has to bow to the most extreme members of the environmental movement. He turns down the Keystone pipeline, which would bring energy and jobs to America.

“My view is capitalism works. Free enterprise works. . . . There’s nothing wrong with profit, by the way. That profit went to pension funds, to charities. It went to a wide array of institutions. . . . And by the way, as enterprises become more profitable, they can hire more people. I’m someone who believes in free enterprise. I think Adam Smith was right. And I’m gonna stand and defend capitalism across this country, throughout this campaign. I know we’re going to get hit hard from President Obama, but we’re gonna stuff it down his throat and point out that it is capitalism and freedom that makes America strong.”

Romney then needs to connect these attacks to his own policy proposals. He has to stop simply stating that he has executive and private sector experience, but prove that he has proposals to put that experience into practice if he were to win the presidency. When my students write their essays, I end up writing over and over in the margin that they need to provide evidence to back up their assertions. That's what I feel like writing on Romney's test papers. And when he tells us about those proposals, I'd also like to hear him personalize them demonstrating what such policies would do for individuals.

One reason he doesn't connect with voters is because his speeches are filled with platitudes and references to his experiences without enough of a link between those platitudes and that experience and what he proposes to do as president. I bet that if he were interviewing to be the CEO of a company, he'd come into the interview armed with more than he gives us in his speeches and debate performances. If it's not in his personality to talk like that, perhaps one of his aides or speechwriters can sit him down and show him how to do it. He's smart enough to be able to then go into a debate and give us more than his stump speech. He might not have Gingrich's natural off-the-cuff skills, but he's got to be showing us more than he did last week. Mark Steyn is exactly right about the blah stuff that Romney churns out in some of his speeches.

Why is the stump speech so awful? “I believe in an America where millions of Americans believe in an America that’s the America millions of Americans believe in. That’s the America I love.” Mitt paid some guy to write this insipid pap. And he paid others to approve it. Not only is it bland and generic, it’s lethal to him in a way that it wouldn’t be to Gingrich or Perry or Bachmann or Paul because it plays to his caricature – as a synthetic, stage-managed hollow man of no fixed beliefs. And, when Ron Paul’s going on about “fiat money” and Newt’s brimming with specifics on everything (he was great on the pipeline last night), Mitt’s generalities are awfully condescending: The finely calibrated inoffensiveness is kind of offensive.

And what’s with the wind up? The “shining city on the hill”? That’s another guy’s line – a guy with whom you have had hitherto little connection other than your public repudiation of him back in the Nineties. Can’t any of his highly paid honchos write him a campaign slogan that’s his own and doesn’t sound in his mouth so cheesily anodyne, as if some guy ran a focus-group and this phrase came up with the lowest negatives?

And Steyn is also right that he needs to get some consultants who can recognize when he's going to be torn up by questions on Bain or his taxes or similar attacks and have him ready to answer them. It's inexcusable that he was so flat-footed on a totally predictable question about his taxes.

Mitt has a ton of consultants, and not one of them thought he needed a credible answer on Bain or taxes? For a guy running as a chief exec applying proven private-sector solutions, his campaign looks awfully like an unreformable government bureaucracy: big, bloated, overstaffed, burning money, slow to react, and all but impossible to change.

His prevent defense hasn't worked and he needs to demonstrate that he's flexible and can adjust. Isn't that what a talented CEO would do?

And voters have to realize that there is more to winning an election than chastising the media. Michael Barone reminds us that an "Annoy the Media" approach didn't work in 1992 and won't be enough now.

Cruising the Web

2012-01-20T07:41:00.001-05:00

With all the malarkey coming out of the OWS movement and fuss about Romney's taxes, it's time for some straight talk about who actually pays federal taxes. The WSJ lays out the facts, but you can study this chart and realize that things aren't exactly what the demagoguery would have you believe.

Charles Krauthammer is right that some Republicans have been helping the Democrats by talking about Romney's Bain experience. Instead the focus should be on this one question from Rick Perry: “Are you better off today than you were $4 trillion ago?” Keep the focus on Obama and his policies. That's why I think that Romney's best answer last night was to the question that John King asked about what the candidates wished they'd done differently during the campaign. Romney was the only one who gave a substantive answer. He said that he wishes that, instead of attacking his fellow Republican candidates, he'd spent the time attacking Obama.

Here is a salutary lesson for Wisconsin voters facing a recall of Governor Walker. Contrast their economic situation with that of Illinois whose state debt has just been downgraded by Moody's to lowest of all the 50 states by following the sorts of policies that the SEIU wish Wisconsin would follow.

In contrast to the Illinois downgrade, Moody's has praised Mr. Walker's budget as "credit positive for Wisconsin," adding that the money-saving reforms bring "the state's finances closer to a structural budgetary balance." As a result, Wisconsin jumped in Chief Executive magazine's 2011 ranking of each state's business climate—moving to 17th from 41st. Illinois dropped to 48th from 45th as ranked by the nation's top CEOs.

Illinois is getting what they voted for. Wisconsin citizens should be glad that they are also getting what they voted for.

Thomas Sowell expounds on another disparity that doesn't get much attention.

The semi-literate sloganizing of our own Occupy Wall Street mobs recalls the distinction that Milton Friedman often made between those who are educated and those who have simply been in schools. Generating more such people, in the name of expanding education, may serve the interests of the Obama administration but hardly the interests of America.

Robert Samuelson calls Obama's decision on the Keystone XL pipeline is "an acto of insanity." No, it's an act of cold political calculation. And it's a sign of Obama's weakness that he felt he had to mollify his environmentalist supporters rather than making a win-win-win decision for jobs, energy security, and better relations with a good ally.

By law, Obama’s decision was supposed to reflect “the national interest.” His standard was his political interest. The State Department had spent three years evaluating Keystone and appeared ready to approve the project by year-end 2011. Then the administration, citing opposition to the pipeline’s route in Nebraska, reversed course and postponed a decision to 2013 — after the election.

One way in which the world of "Downton Abbey" is more democratic than today.

When you hear that the Democrats and unions have gotten the votes they need to launch a recall effort against Gov. Scott Walker in Wisconsin, just look a little more deeply into how they have happily and proudly used fraud in gaining those signatures.

So Iowa has lost the votes from several precincts and so can't certify the caucus results with any certitude. Now there's an argument as to why Iowa deserves to be the first state in the election process.

Whatever your position is on felon voting, the bill that Rick Santorum voted for and talked about during Monday's debate was unconstitutional.

More hypocrisy from Newt: he took money to give a speech praising the very sort of private equity firms that now he's bashing Romney about.

Steve Kaplan at AEI explains why private equity firms are so valuable in our economy. It's a good primer if you don't understand what they do and how they earn their profits. When Gingrich and the Democrats complain about Bain Capital, they either are ignorant or just demagoguing. Or both.

Last night's debate

2012-01-20T07:03:00.003-05:00

A lot of observers were commenting on Twitter and elsewhere last night that Gingrich won the debate last night in the first five minutes by blasting John King for asking about the ABC interview with his ex-wife. Sure, a candidate can always win applause from Republicans by bashing the media. But fiercely attacking the media is not a qualification for the presidency. Whatever anyone thinks about the Marianne Gingrich interview and the timing of the story, I suspect that people will be a bit queasy about voting for a candidate who cheated on his wife, wanted an open marriage, and asked for a divorce right after she'd been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.

Overall, I think that Santorum was the clear winner of last night's debate. He summed up the problem with Gingrich in one sentence,

“Grandiosity has never been a problem with Newt Gingrich, he handles it very well.”

Gingrich responded that this was a grandiose country. Nope. We're a grand country, but not grandiose. For one who prides himself on his rhetoric, Gingrich should know what the word means.

characterized by affectation of grandeur or splendor or by absurd exaggeration

Yup, that's Newt. And Santorum knew whereof he spoke.

“I served with him. I was there,” he said. “It was an idea a minute. No discipline, no ability to be able to pull things together.”

Santorum was strong in attacking the three other candidates. Romney did as well as he usually does, but the story will be his waffling about releasing his tax returns. It's still surprising that he was not ready with a better answer. All he's doing is building the story up. Any benefit that goes to Santorum will probably come from Newt's support and that helps Romney.

Gingrich has been improving in the polls and the movement seems in his favor. He could well win tomorrow in South Carolina. He is doing better now that debates are back on the agenda. But anger at the media will not be enough to carry him through the rest of the states. Don't Republicans want more from their potential nominee? And that anger was totally manufactured as was clear by the end of the debate when Newt was praising John King for his handling of the debate.

If Gingrich is the candidate, the entire campaign would be about him. The GOP needs a candidate who can keep the focus on Obama, not his own grandiosity.

Cruising the Web

2012-01-19T07:55:00.001-05:00

The LA Times can't figure out what's wrong with collective bargaining rights for public employees. They must have missed the problems with their own state's budget.

Somehow, Obama doesn't feel the fierce urgency of now when it comes to creating actual jobs with the Keystone XL pipeline. If the problem is Nebraska, why didn't he exercise some presidential leadership and get them to figure out an alternate route months ago instead of dragging this out? In one fell swoop, Obama has acted against creating new jobs, furthering our energy independence from the Middle East, and offended a faithful ally. Good job, Obama. Even the Washington Post is disgusted. And meanwhile, China is developing Cuban oil off the coast of Florida and Iran is cozying up to Chavez in Venezuela. As Michael Barone points out, it is not a great approach to foreign policy to treat our enemies as friends and our friends as enemies.

Meanwhile, the House GOP would like to take the decision out of the hands of the State Department and Obama administration and give it to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

Employees at Bain have given more money to Democrats than to Republicans, including Romney.

Matthew Cooper explains why Romney's new ad using Susan Molinari is so devastating.

James Taranto explains Obama's passive-aggressive approach to policy.

Why Chris Christie has a better reelection story to tell than Barack Obama ever will.

Joe Queenan suggests applying the NBA's amnesty clause to all sorts of dead wood in public life. If only....

Plan your parties now. You can now rent out the Parthenon and throw quite a bash.

Gingrich is right about Obama and food stamps. And Bush and the GOP agricultural bill of 2002 helped out.

Some students were very upset about Wikipedia being down yesterday.

The argument Romney should be making

2012-01-19T07:18:00.001-05:00

Daniel Henninger explains how the Decade of Greed, with Bain Capital as an exemplar, are what saved American capitalism from going down the road that European businesses have gone down.

"When large-scale hostile takeovers appeared in the 1980s," Messrs. Holmstrom and Kaplan write, "many voiced the opinion that they were driven by investor greed; the robber barons of Wall Street had returned to raid innocent corporations. Today, it is widely accepted that the takeovers of the 1980s had a beneficial effect on the corporate sector and that efficiency gains, rather than redistributions from stakeholders to shareholders, explain why they appeared."

....Thousands of Mitt Romneys allied with huge pension funds representing colleges, unions and the like, plus a rising cadre of institutional money managers, to force corporate America to reboot. In the 1980s almost half of major U.S. corporations got takeover offers.

Singling out this or that Bain case study amid the jostling and bumping is pointless. This was a historic and necessary cleansing of the Augean stables of the American economy. It caused a positive revolution in U.S. management, financial analysis, incentives, governance and market-based discipline. It led directly to the 1990s boom years. And it gave the U.S. two decades of breathing room while Europe, with some exceptions, choked.

Now if only Romney could passionately and succinctly make that same point. Just repeating over and over again that he has private sector experience and so knows how to create jobs, yadda, yadda, is not enough.

One of his aides should clip this column and get Mitt to memorize it.

It doesn't matter what Marianne Gingrich says

2012-01-19T06:43:00.004-05:00

The WSJ publishes teacher evaluations from Gingrich's time as a young professor at West Georgia College. He was ambitious enough to apply to be college president his first year as a professor. I guess he was just a "definer of civilization" in training back then. They also have uploaded a load of the college's files back then. It's all a bit interesting, but won't hold public attention in comparison with whatever his second wife is going to say on Nightline. You can get a feel for how bitter she is from reading the Esquire interview. It's not a pretty picture, but then does one expect a cheated-on ex-wife to say anything positive about her former husband?

Having her say these sorts of ugly things on camera will have an impact that a old print interview just couldn't have. Even if she just repeats the same things she told Esquire and people discount everything because she is so clearly bitter, Republican voters will be so skittish about how such stories would hurt a candidate in the general election that they'll shy away from Gingrich. It doesn't matter how many slam dunks he makes in tonight's debate, GOP voters don't want to risk such personal vulnerabilities in the candidate that they'll be putting up against Obama. People could decide to ignore his messy personal life before, but it will just be different when their faces are rubbed in it. Video is so much more powerful than text.

And this whole story certainly shifts the storyline of the campaign away from Mitt's taxes or Bain. Perhaps Santorum will be the one to benefit just as he was the last non-Mitt standing a couple of weeks ago in Iowa. And the final vote from Iowa is supposed to be released today. Santorum might get a tiny bubble of news if it turns out that he got a few more votes than Romney there.

In our family, we've often thought that this quote was one of the dumbest things Gingrich has said, but the competition is tight as one reads through the set of quotes on the Gingrich Wiki page..

"If combat means living in a ditch, females have biological problems staying in a ditch for thirty days because they get infections and they don't have upper body strength. I mean, some do, but they're relatively rare. On the other hand, men are basically little piglets, you drop them in the ditch, they roll around in it, doesn't matter, you know. These things are very real. On the other hand, if combat means being on an Aegis-class cruiser managing the computer controls for twelve ships and their rockets, a female may be again dramatically better than a male who gets very, very frustrated sitting in a chair all the time because males are biologically driven to go out and hunt giraffes."

When oppo can be done on Wikipedia, it's not a good thing for a potential candidate no matter how many conservative soft spots he can stroke in debates.

His hubris in telling Santorum to drop out of the race so that Newt can take on Romney alone when Santorum has beaten Gingrich in the two states that have already voted will come back to taunt Gingrich just as his boasts a couple of months ago that he was going to be the nominee. Pundits might argue that everyone knew all this anyway and it will just be taken as bitter comments from the wife he cheated on. I think they overestimate how much the casual voter, the one who makes his mind up in the last few days, knew about Gingrich's personal baggage. And even if they did and they totally disbelieve what she says, the important thing in every Republican's mind is beating Obama and they just don't want to take a chance on a guy with this sort of luggage in his past.

Cruising the Web

2012-01-18T07:40:00.002-05:00

Over at Red State, they're having some fun photoshopping their own Newsweek covers. This is my favorite.

Meanwhile, Niles Gardiner flips Andrew Sullivan's story title and asks "Why are Obama's Critics So Smart?"

Along the same lines, over at the NYT, Thomas Edsall talks to some liberal academics and intellectuals to ask them what they like about conservative thought. And Andy Stern even has some nice things to say. It almost makes one hopeful about finding common ground. Of course, there is a big difference between what an academic is willing to concede and what a politician will acknowledge.

And with Romney admitting that he probably pays a 15% rate on his taxes, we know now the basic information we'd get from his releasing his tax forms. But is the real scandal that Romney takes advantage of the tax laws since most of his income is in capital gains or that we have those loopholes in the first place? Would you expect a smart man not to take advantage of what the law provides?

Thomas Sowell reminds us of the sorts of disparities that don't seem to earn public attention and national whining as the disparities in wealth do.

Investors still aren't investing. Unfortunately, the Democrats don't realize how their policies discourage the very sorts of investment that we need for the economy to come back fully. If those policies were to change, we'd see an amazing jump-start to the economy once investors take their money out from their mattresses.

So the new guy that Obama just put in as the head of the OMB once worked for Bain. That sorta clutters up the whole demonization of Bain that the Obama campaign is gearing up to unleash.

It's embarrassing that Canada is going so ahead of us when it comes to the economic growth possible from exploiting energy resources.

John Steele Gordon gives us a short history of private equity investment and how such firms have been intricately involved in our nation's history going back to the join-stock companies that helped fund the Jamestown and Massachusetts Bay colonies.

Jonah Goldberg recommends having some fun with kids today as Wikipedia goes dark.

Jay Cost analyzes the recent uptick in Obama's polls. Most of it is coming from Democrats liking him more now than they did a couple of months ago. That makes sense. He's campaigning for their affections. And they are seeing him in contrast to the Republicans and their criticisms of Obama. No surprise that they're rallying around their guy. But while Obama consolidates his support in his own party, he's still underwater among independents. That is his real problem.

Victor Davis Hanson has a great essay on the Obamas' racial politics. For a politician who was supposed to be a post-racial candidate, he and his allies certainly do spend a lot of time emphasizing race. The list of those sorts of racial appeals that Obama has made go on and on. Expect more and more as the campaign unfolds.

This is nice: Spud Webb can still dunk a ball at age 47.

Oh, the irony

2012-01-18T07:06:00.003-05:00

Presidents who don't want to do something, but seek to seem like they're doing something, like to establish commissions and advisory councils to investigate policy questions. They roll out these blue ribbon groups with a lot of fanfare and then proceed to ignore them except when they need to answer a question about what they're doing to approach that policy question. Exhibit A was Obama's debt commission. They worked hard and came up with bipartisan proposals. Obama ignored them. That was, to me, one of the most telling signs that he had no interest in decreasing the debt.

Another one of his blue-ribbon groups is his Council on Jobs and Competitiveness. They rolled out their final report yesterday and guess what they're recommending?

“[W]e should allow more access to oil, natural gas and coal opportunities on federal lands,” states the year-end report released Tuesday by the President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness.

The report does not specifically mention the Keystone XL oil pipeline, but it endorses moving forward quickly with projects that “deliver electricity and fuel,” including pipelines.

“The Council recognizes the important safety and environmental concerns surrounding these types of projects, but now more than ever, the jobs and economic and energy security benefits of these energy projects require us to tackle the issues head-on and to expeditiously, though cautiously, move forward on projects that can support hundreds of thousands of jobs,” the report says.

Although the report doesn't mention the Keystone XL pipeline directly, it's clear what their approach would be.

“The Council recognizes that providing access to more areas for drilling, mining and renewable energy development is controversial, but, given the current economic situation, we believe it’s necessary to tap America’s assets in a safe and responsible manner,” the report says.

“Additionally, policies that facilitate the safe, thoughtful and timely development of pipeline, transmission and distribution projects are necessary to facilitate the delivery of America’s fuel and electricity and maintain the reliability of our nation’s energy system.”

Stakeholders should work together to develop “best practices” aimed at ensuring safety, while also expediting energy projects, according to the report.

“[R]egulatory and permitting obstacles that could threaten the development of some energy projects negatively impact jobs and weaken our energy infrastructure need to be addressed,” the report says. “Speedy adoption of best practice standards would allow government officials to reduce regulatory and permitting obstacles to important energy projects.”

By February 21, Obama is supposed to come up with a final decision on the XL pipeline. What do you want to bet that he'll ignore his own council's recommendations and cater to his environmentalist base?

Cruising the Web

2012-01-17T06:21:00.004-05:00

Here's an argument for striking down the power of the FCC to penalize TV broadcasters for obscenity and nudity. The Supreme Court is currently hearing a case on the issue.

And here's an argument for establishing undergraduate law degrees from which students could take the bar exam and then spend the three years they might have spent in an expensive law school in a paid internship really learning their profession. Law schools could remain for graduate degrees. It sounds like a great idea to lower the cost of legal education and then legal fees.

The subject that people in my neighborhood are talking about is Roy Williams taking his team off the floor in the blowout against FSU and leaving his walk-ons alone on the floor. Now his story is that he didn't mean to leave those five walk-ons alone but that he had intended for the game to be called with 14 seconds left to play. He just didn't notice that his players were still playing the game. Sorry, that's just no excuse. He led them off the floor instead of waiting to see that all his players had left. He claims that he didn't know that they kept playing until he watched the game tape. Can't he count the number of guys in the locker room? If he stayed with his team instead of hurrying to be the first off the floor, he could have shepherded everyone off. And coaches shouldn't just surrender a blowout. It just isn't professional. Sports radio is debating to call this The Great Walk-off, Walk-offgate, or No Walk-on Left Behind.

If the GOP redistricting in North Carolina is upheld in the courts, two Democratic representatives, David Price and Brad Miller, have now been packed into the same, very liberal district. They purport to be friends, but their friendship is already fraying as they prepare to run against each other in the primary. It serves Miller right. He got into the House because he was the chairman of the committee that designed the district after the 2000 census that he eventually won.

Eric Holder is so obviously playing politics by trying to gin up African-American votes with his action against South Carolina's law requiring a photo ID to vote. He somehow missed the 900 dead people who voted in the 2010 election.

Jed Babbin watched Gingrich's Super PAC attack video, "King of Bain," and pronounces it "comprehensively vile." And Gingrich's line in the debates that he's just raising necessary questions about Romney is not all that believable. And Rick Perry's formulation that South Carolina is "at war with this federal government" was unfortunate. We all remember what happened the last time South Carolina was at war with the federal government.

Newsweek demonstrates why it is going out of business. But their gratuitous attack on Rick Santorum's wife and her pre-marital history is particularly distasteful.

SEIU is going beyond standard union activities and are now planning to "occupy" every entity that they consider their opposition from government to bank buildings. Meanwhile Occupy DC is not going gently into that good night. As Jim Treacher writes, "Occupy DC won’t be driven from their filthy, rat-infested encampments, you fascists."

Romney might be able to get away with saying he'll "probably" release his tax returns in April, but he sure sounded weak on that. It's clear that he doesn't want to release them until he's wrapped up the nomination. In the meantime, we're just supposed to take his word for it that there is nothing damaging in there. Perhaps not damaging, but embarrassing. His stalling on releasing them just ensure that there will be more hype when he eventually does.

Well, duh! Teachers are starting to realize that building self esteem doesn't happen with empty, unearned praise.

What the Democrats really feel about government and the public

2012-01-16T12:28:00.003-05:00

Mona Charen discusses the worst part of Obamacare. And it's not the individual mandate. And, as Charen says, it should stand as a monument to the type of monstrosity that the Democrats will pass when they have uncontested control of the government.

What is notable is how they wrote the bill to create an unelected board, the Independent Payment Advisory Board or IPAB, with little possible oversight possible from elected leaders.

IPAB is a new thing in American government. Unlike most other boards and commissions, the panel’s 15 members (appointed by the president and approved by the Senate) need not be bipartisan. Also unlike other boards, commissions, and federal agencies, the IPAB’s decisions are virtually unreviewable. IPAB doesn’t have to adhere to the notice and comment rules of federal agencies, which permit citizens to respond to proposed rule-makings. IPAB dictates automatically become law unless Congress itself intervenes. Ah, but they’ve thought of that and made it virtually impossible. The law prescribes that Congress has a limited period of time in which it can modify IPAB rulings and then it must do so by a three-fifths majority. Even ratifying treaties and proposing amendments to the Constitution require only two-thirds majorities. As for the courts, forget it. The judiciary is forbidden to review IPAB decisions.

Charen quotes Clint Bolick of the Goldwater Institute about the peculiar limitations placed on Congress's ability to repeal IPAB.

Under the statute, any bill to repeal IPAB must be introduced within the one-month period between January 1 and February 1, 2017. If introduced, it must be enacted by a three-fifths super-majority no later than August 15, 2017. If passed, the IPAB repeal will not become effective until 2020 — leaving an out-of-control agency in operation for three years after Congress votes to abolish it.

It is questionable if such limitations on the ability of Congress to pass a law repealing another law are constitutional. The Constitution is clear on how a law should be passed and then signed by the president to become law. Adding in a one-month window for passage and a three-fifths majority requirement adds in another requirement beyond the Constitution. The law is being challenged by the Goldwater Institute. We'll see if the same Court that struck down term limit laws, the line-item veto power, and the legislative veto are going to accept this delegation of power beyond what is in the Constitution.

And why is the IPAB so terrible? If it works as described, it will totally destroy our health care system.

Starting in 2014, the board will make recommendations to control Medicare spending, but the law prohibits IPAB from recommending (1) rationing of health care, (2) increases in premiums, (3) increases in co-pays or deductibles, or (4) changing eligibility requirements or benefits. What’s left? Reducing payments to doctors and hospitals. This sets up the obvious problem that is already plaguing Medicaid — when doctors and hospitals receive reduced reimbursement, they become less likely to accept Medicare patients. So Medicare patients will find it harder to get treatment, which is, in effect, a form of rationing.

The Democrats knew how terrible this was and how people would hate it; why otherwise go outside the Constitution to craft the panel and try to make sure it couldn't be removed?

Clint Bolick explains why this is contrary to how our government should work.

By limiting its repeal, Congress unconstitutionally “entrenched” IPAB, preventing members of Congress from effectively representing their constituents. As Thomas Jefferson explained, were a legislature to “pass any act, and declare it shall be irrevocable by subsequent assemblies, the declaration is merely void, and the act repealable, as other acts are.” The Supreme Court affirmed Jefferson’s admonition in an 1879 case, proclaiming, “It is vital to the public welfare that each [legislature] should be able at all times to do whatever the varying circumstances and present exigencies touching the subject involved may require. A different result would be fraught with evil.”

The Goldwater Institute’s lawsuit challenges IPAB’s very existence as an unlawful delegation of congressional power. Although most of the legal challenges to Obamacare have focused on the individual mandate to purchase government-prescribed health insurance, IPAB is no less central to the overall regulatory scheme. Many members of Congress voted for Obamacare only when convinced of the dubious premise that the law would constrain health-care costs. If IPAB is removed, the flimsy cost-containment rationale will disappear as well.

Just remember this story when you hear the Democrats and Obama tell the public how concerned they are about what the public wants. They were so concerned that they worked hard and pulled out all the stops to make sure that an elected branch of government couldn't stop their unelected panel once it got going. They didn't want Congress, the President, or the judiciary to have any control over the agency. How democratic does that sound to you?

Cruising the Web

2012-01-16T12:09:00.003-05:00

The New York Post looks at the history of New York City's gun laws. It might not be what you'd have imagined.

Jimmy Carter has been mouthing off again about how happy he is to see the Muslim Brotherhood come to power in Egypt. And he says the Obama administration is also happy. They have no comment.

CBS News reports on the other Solyndras in Obama's energy policies. The companies are now going out of business. But the Department of Energy knew that they were fragile companies and invested the government's money anyway.

Powerline has an amusing exchange between the Deputy Editor of The New Yorker and the director of communications at Koch Companies. Koch has them dead-to-rights, but The New Yorker refuses to admit that they made a mistake. Typical.

This is too funny. Gingrich supporters are alleging that the vote was rigged at that Evangelical gathering over the weekend to pick their anti-Romney choice. But these were evangelical leaders; surely they couldn't have been guilty of stuffing ballot boxes.

How The Charlotte Observer gulled its readers so that it could run a hit piece on Romney and paint him as the candidate of Wall Street and bankers, while ignoring how Obama has raised so much more money from those sources.

The facts and stats are in: this is the worst economic recovery since the Great Depression.

I guess third place in New Hampshire wasn't a ticket to ride after all. BuzzFeed has the inside story on how hiring John McCain's campaign director, and former Democratic campaign adviser just wasn't a smart move. Hint to future candidates: running on your contempt for your party and its voters is just not a good strategy.

Barack Obama is campaigning on his will to act if Congress won't. Unfortunately, that's just not the way our government is supposed to act. As Michael Barone points out, Barack Obama doesn't think much of asserting that his way is better than the Framers of the Constitution.

Cruising the Web

2012-01-15T11:51:00.000-05:00

Will the Supreme Court take up a case against New York City's rent control law?

Vladimir Putin vows to end police repression in Russia. Yeah, that's a likely campaign promise to be kept.

George Will has a great column on how absurdly long it is taking to get approval to deepen Charleston harbor five feet in order for it to be ready for bigger container ships. This will be crucial as the Panama Canal is being widened to allow such ships through and then there will be a need for US harbors to accommodate those ships. But the approval process today takes longer than the time it took to construct the original Panama Canal. Such absurdity leads Steven Hayward to call for a new Laffer Curve to analyze the effects of regulation.

Merecedes Benz is now apologizing using the image of Che Guevara to sell its cars as "revolutionary" and they just thought Che's face was just the image to sell their luxury cars. And now they're surprised that people were offended. Geesh!

John Hinderaker mines a report from Club for Growth on Romney's term as governor of Massachusetts to provide evidence that Romney's administration was a lot more conservative than might have been imagined. And then he explains more carefully what happened with the South Carolina firm that was owned by a company that Bain was involved in. It was first opened by the Bain-backed company and built up to hiring 150 employees, but was then closed four years later.

Here are the top ten revelations about the Obamas from Jodi Kantor's new book. It will save you time and money from reading it. I didn't see anything terribly shocking. sure, they held an over-the-top Halloween Party and made sure the press didn't find out about it. Big whoop. I find this book's revelation much more damaging - that President Obama got sick of taking pictures with the troops when he made a visit to Baghdad. That anecdote is much more revealing of his suitability to being president than ten Halloween Party-type exposes.

No surprise: focus group audiences hated Jon Huntsman's use of Mandarin in the GOP debate. It's not that people dislike that he knows how to speak Mandarin, it's his pretentious arrogance in showing off in the middle of a debate.

This is a good analysis of what we can learn from political ad campaigns. It's not what you might imagine.

Some minorities rate more than others

2012-01-12T06:51:00.003-05:00

Mona Charen notes something that I'd been thinking about. We usually see celebrations any time we see a member of a minority group become the first to do something. But now we're on the brink of seeing a member of a religious minority to perhaps be the first to appear on a major party ticket and the only notice we see of it is some in the media wondering if Mormons are just too alien to win mainstream votes.

The Washington Post proclaimed in a recent headline another historic "first" for the United States — the first female usher-in-chief at the White House. Stop the presses! The accompanying story reveals that the nominee hails from Jamaica, so it's probably a two-fer. Oh, boy.

The Post and other liberal organs are obsessed with firsts. The first female letter carrier to handle the Capitol Hill route will get a mention in the press. The first African-American anything is guaranteed at least a nod. You don't even have to be first to get "first" treatment. The last two Supreme Court nominees have been women, joining a court that had already seated two women (one retired). Nevertheless, the femininity of the candidates was cheerily chatted up. When Barack Obama became the first black nominee of a major party and then the elected president, dignified notice of an historical milestone would have been appropriate. But you know what happened — the media went on an inebriated, extravagant first binge.

Funny how the first-effect only works for some. If Mitt Romney is nominated and elected, he will be the first member of a highly persecuted American minority group to be so honored. Yet no one is celebrating the possibility of the first Mormon president. Anti-Mormon bias, which has proved remarkably persistent over decades, is scarcely ever condemned.

Of course, Mormons tend to be conservative so they don't count.

Mormons are obviously the wrong kind of minority. Oh, they've been persecuted. But through a strong work ethic, self-discipline, traditional morality (Yes, there's an irony there, but get over it.) and group cohesion, they have triumphed for themselves and for the country. The first Mormon president would be a milestone. But don't hold your breath for the applause.

Cruising the Web

2012-01-12T06:37:00.002-05:00

Hmmm, does banning profanity on network TV in the "Family Hour" violate freedom of speech in the age of cable? If the argument is that most people nowadays have cable TV, why do we still need to fund public TV?

The Supreme Court got one right yesterday and they did it unanimously when they recognized the ministerial exception to government regulations that might affect religious entities. The scary thing is that the Obama administration thought otherwise. They apparently believe that the government should be able to tell churches who qualifies as a minister. What is there about religious liberty that they don't understand?

Cool. A species of tortoise in the Galapagos at least since Darwin visited there that was thought to be extinct is apparently alive and doing well.

Dana Milbank reveals secrets of journalists converging on a state like New Hampshire for the primary. There just wasn't that much to report on.

Michael Tanner has a great piece exploding the nonsense about income inequality these days. It all counts what they count as income.

People are already talking about whom Mitt should possible vice-presidential candidates for Romney. Josh Kraushaar makes the case for Chris Christie.

This is why it is ludicrous to listen to Gingrich's attacks on Romney's Bain experience.

Conservatives ranging from Rush Limbaugh to Ron Paul have lashed out at Gingrich for his anti-Bain demagoguery, but his assault on Romney's profit is actually less egregious than his defense of his own profit-making efforts. While most of Gingrich's post-speaker income has come from selling books and movies, he has made millions by lobbying for corporate welfare. Gingrich denies he was a lobbyist, but only because he didn't register as one, a transparent dodge.

While being paid by drug companies, Gingrich convinced Republican lawmakers to expand Medicare so that it would subsidize prescription drugs. While being paid by ethanol companies, Gingrich argued in favor of federal subsidies for ethanol. Also, while paid by government-sponsored, housing-bubble-inflator Freddie Mac, Gingrich lauded exactly this model of government-sponsored enterprises steering the economy. Gingrich made money by pushing for bigger government to benefit his clients.

Indirectly, he was pocketing taxpayer dollars, but he described this as "free enterprise." Anyone who criticized Gingrich's efforts to profit off of making government bigger showed "a socialist bias that you shouldn't earn money," Gingrich told USA Today.

In Gingrich's mind, lobbying the federal government is private enterprise. What a joke he reveals himself to be. The only surprising thing is how quickly Good Newt disappeared and Bad Newt made his appearance.

Now these are people who should have been fired, but they weren't.

Listen for the crickets from the left as Obama exceeds the use of executive authority that Bush used.

Cruising the Web

2012-01-11T06:51:00.001-05:00

Mona Charen has an explanation of why Mitt Romney comes across as so scripted.

However, Romney does sometimes demonstrate that he can be spontaneous. This time he seems to be channeling what he learned from campaigning with Chris Christie. These are lessons well worth Romney learning.

Josh Marshall has a theory as to why Romney isn't releasing his tax returns - he has a Warren Buffett problem. If Romney is going to win the nomination, I predict that he'll wait to some time after he wraps it up to release them and hope that they get swallowed by some other story. But it's still going to add up to the Gordon Gekko profile the Democrats are planning to pin on him.

Jon Stewart has a lot of fun ridiculing the Republicans who criticize class-warfare arguments of the Democrats and then turn around and blast Mitt Romney for being rich and working for Bain Capital. It's the only time you'll hear Mitt Romney referred to as the Kracken.

The Daily Show
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

Just imagine this: Laurence Tribe is a complete hypocrite when it comes to his arguments in favor of President Obama's ability to make recess appointments even when the Senate is not in recess. Adam J. White points out that Tribe wrote a legal brief in 2004 against President Bush's recess appointments and how dangerous and unjustified by the Constitution they were. Now he's written an op-ed in the NYT arguing the exact opposite point when it comes to Obama's appointments. I know that a lawyer is supposed to be able to argue both sides of an issue, but they shouldn't be doing that in newspaper op-eds.

William Kristol makes a good point about Mitt Romney's claims to be more qualified for the presidency because he worked in the private sector.

One assumes Mitt Romney would agree that Chris Christie is a better chief executive of New Jersey than Jon Corzine, and that Rudy Giuliani was a better mayor of New York than Mike Bloomberg. But Romney’s biography looks a lot more like Bloomberg's or Corzine's (leaving aside Corzine's recent misadventures) than like that of Giuliani (pre-mayoralty) or Christie.

That's why I'd recommend that Romney drop that argument. He's made it often enough that it's just a rhetorical tic by now. Instead he could give specifics about what he learned from that experience that he would expect to apply to a potential presidency.

Jon Huntsman says he has a ticket to ride out of New Hampshire. If he couldn't come in higher than third in the state he's been camped out in for weeks, how is he going to do any better in other states? He'll never win a Republican primary by being Democrats' favorite program; those Democrats who voted for him today wouldn't vote for him if he were running against a real Democrat so it's a mystery as to what he thinks his real political appeal is. For this he left being governor of Utah or ambassador in Beijing?

Why is Newt Gingrich holding a rally in South Carolina with Jim Clyburn, Democratic House leader? Its not enough that he's handing the Democrats attack lines to use against Romney? He might as well go back to sitting on the couch with Pelosi.

Though this did allow Drudge to have this great juxtaposition that Ed Driscoll notices.

* PAPER: NEWT TO RALLY WITH DEMOCRAT IN SC…
* FLASHBACK: Rep. Clyburn: Gingrich Will Say ‘Almost Anything’…

Charles Lane has some good advice for Barack Obama on California's silly high-speed rail project: follow his own criteria for public policy.

In announcing the appointment of a new economic adviser last summer, President Obama emphasized his commitment to fact-based policymaking. It’s “more important than ever,” he said, to get “recommendations not based on politics, not based on narrow interests, but based on the best evidence, based on what’s going to do the most good for the most people in this country.”

If only the president and his political ally, California Gov. Jerry Brown (D), would follow that advice regarding their pet project for the Golden State: high-speed rail. No matter how many times they tout the mega-project as the job-creating wave of the future, they can’t change the mountain of evidence that high-speed rail is, in fact, a boondoggle.

Sorry, those were just words.

While not endorsing anyone, Jim DeMint is sounding a lot more bullish on Romney than you might expect. He didn't like all the Bain-bashing.

Holman Jenkins does a masterful job of exploding the phony statistical analysis that the Justice Department uses when it brings disparate impact racial cases.

Noemie Emery dispels the myth that the Republican base is united against Romney. To the contrary, they're divided up among unappealing opponents, none of whom can put together a winning coalition to dominate the rest of the crowd.

And, if they could fuse, merge or settle on one single figure, no one could give him a charisma transplant, an eloquence implant, a transfusion of vision, or the je ne sais quoi that adds up to leadership, an ephemeral essence on which the current contenders draw blanks.

If a strong man existed among them, he would have emerged on his own long ago.

The problem for the Republican base is less that it is divided than whom it is divided among, which is five different people unfit to be president. This is their fault, and not that of Romney. Not all of the GOP's problems can be traced to or blamed upon Romney.

Read more at the Washington Examiner: http://washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columnists/2012/01/lets-dispense-gop-unity-myth/2081361#ixzz1j9PimMzO

Here's an interesting history of political endorsements that back-stabbed a former ally.

How Romney can shine a light on his problem

2012-01-11T06:31:00.005-05:00

Last night, in his victory speech in New Hampshire, Mitt Romney called out his opponents who have adopted the Democrats' message.

President Obama wants to put free enterprise on trial. In the last few days, we have seen some desperate Republicans join forces with him. This is such a mistake for our Party and for our nation. This country already has a leader who divides us with the bitter politics of envy. We must offer an alternative vision. I stand ready to lead us down a different path, where we are lifted up by our desire to succeed, not dragged down by a resentment of success. In these difficult times, we cannot abandon the core values that define us as unique — We are One Nation, Under God.

Make no mistake, in this campaign, I will offer the American ideals of economic freedom a clear and unapologetic defense.

That is good for a victory speech and he does well to join his Republican critics with Obama. But he can do more and the WSJ has laid out the arguments and data for him. He could do worse than adopting their pitch.

We have our policy differences with Mr. Romney, but by any reasonable measure Bain Capital has been a net job and wealth creator. Founded in 1984 as an offshoot of the Bain consulting company, Bain Capital's business is a combination of private equity and venture capital. The latter means taking a flyer on start-ups that may or may not pan out, something that neither Mr. Gingrich nor Mr. Obama seem to find offensive when those investments are made by Silicon Valley firms in "clean energy."

One Bain investment during Mr. Romney's tenure was to back an entrepreneur named Tom Stemberg, who was convinced he could provide savings for small-business owners if they were willing to shop at a store instead of taking deliveries. Today, the Staples chain of business-supply stores employs 90,000 people.

Bain also backed a start-up called Bright Horizons that now manages child-care centers for more than 700 corporate clients around the world. Many other venture bets failed, but that's capitalism, which is supposed to be a profit and loss system.

The loss part is what seems to trouble the Gingrich-Perry-Obama critics, especially in Bain's private-equity business. Like some 2,300 other such U.S. equity firms, Bain looks to buy companies that are underperforming or undervalued and turn them around.

Far from "looting," this is a vital contribution to capitalism and corporate governance. One of the persistent gripes of the left is that too many CEOs make too much money even as their companies flounder. Private-equity firms target such companies or subsidiaries, replace their management, and try to unlock the underlying value in the enterprise.

Private equity helps to promote dynamic capitalism that creates wealth, rather than dinosaur capitalism of the kind that prevails in Europe and futilely tries to prevent failure. Sometimes this means closing parts of the company and laying off employees, but the overriding goal is to create value, not destroy it.

A Wall Street Journal news story this week reported that Bain in the Romney era differed from many equity firms in buying more young and thus riskier companies. This contributed to a higher rate of bankruptcy or closure—22%—for companies held by Bain after eight years.

Bain disputes the Journal's calculations, but one test of overall success is whether investors keep entrusting a firm with their money. Mr. Romney and his colleagues raised $37 million for their first fund in 1984. Today, Bain Capital manages roughly $66 billion. Its investors include college endowments and public pension funds that have increased their investments in private equity to get larger returns than stocks and bonds provide. The people who benefit from those returns thus include average workers.

There are several dynamic stories of companies that they backed or rebuilt to make fine profits and employ many more people. However, there are counter examples and those are the ones that his enemies will single out and turn into moving ads excoriating Romney. But these stories need to be put in context.

The tougher questions for Mr. Romney involve the cases in which Bain took early payouts in dividends and management fees after purchasing existing businesses that ultimately went bankrupt. There are several in this category, including another steel company called GSI, though its hundreds of job losses were far fewer than the jobs created at Steel Dynamics.

The medical-equipment maker once known as Dade International is now much larger than it was when Bain bought it in the 1990s. But Mr. Romney's company later sold its stake, and heavy debts taken on during the Bain years forced Dade to spend two months in bankruptcy in 2002 and cost 2,000 jobs. The company later resumed its rapid growth, and Siemens bought it in 2007 for $7 billion.

Certainly Bain Capital made sure that its investment partners were paid first, but the larger truth is that the invisible hand worked pretty well. Notice that because the overall job statistics for Bain investments are by all accounts positive, many critics attack the Romney record with claims about private equity in general. The left is cheering a study commissioned by the Census Bureau that found that companies bought by private-equity firms suffer more job losses soon after a buy-out than similar firms that didn't experience buy-outs.

But this is hardly surprising since the companies were acquired in part because they were underperforming. The critics also don't mention that the Census study found that firms acquired in private-equity transactions created more new jobs in the ensuing decade. Imagine what might have happened if Chrysler or GM had been bought by private equity two or three decades ago. They might have been turned around much earlier, at far less pain to fewer workers, and without any taxpayer cost.

Romney can make this argument and he has the record to back it up. He can challenge Newt Gingrich who is using the millions of his casino-owner pal to run his ads against Romney's Bain experience as if making your millions off of a casino is somehow more moral than risking capital to help build up businesses that would have gone out of business without Bain's investment. As Ross Kaminsky writes,

If Gingrich's claim is that making money should be done with zero negative impact on others, it is, if you'll pardon the pun, particularly rich that the Super PAC about to attack Romney is being funded by a $5 million donation from Sheldon Adelson, Chairman and CEO of the Las Vegas Sands Corporation. Las Vegas Sands, which owns and operates casinos in the U.S., Macau, and Singapore, reported 2010 revenue of $6.85 billion and net income of $599 million -- all generously received from gamblers big and small. If there were ever a business likely to do financial harm to its customers, it's the casino business.

Kaminsky goes on to show how Gingrich got three strikes on one pitch in his attacks on Romney's business past. Read his entire post; it's very good.

Newt is on his own self-destructive path determined to take Romney down with him. But, in so doing, he is giving Romney the opportunity to turn his weaknesses into a strength. Certainly, the Democrats would make this argument if Romney is the nominee. Better that he get this message out now and gets adept at delivering it now than later. The media will still love the story, but Romney can seize this opportunity and help inoculate himself for the rest of the campaign.

Cruising the Web

2012-01-10T06:37:00.003-05:00

Why Obama won't succeed trying to rerun Truman's 1948 campaign. And why the common story of the campaign in 1948 is not what actually happened.

Rick Perry compares his efforts in South Carolina to the Alamo. That didn't end so well for the Texans. Better to draw the comparison to the battle of San Jacinto.

This is how to answer a Diane Sawyer question.

The Republicans can learn from the ABC and NBC debates this weekend how to deal with the questions that they get from the liberal media. Think of it as "The Stephanopoulos Standard."

While we concentrate on a few hundred thousand voters in New Hampshire, the Supreme Court heard a case yesterday that could have a strong effect redistricting across the country.

Hmmm, what does it say about Obama's supposed reset after the 2010 elections that the person personifying that reset has left the White House? And check out this whopper from William Daley's successor.

While people get their panties all in a knot over Romney's experience at Bain Capital, let's remember who the men are who Obama has hired.

It's a bad sign when the non-Romneys go all OWS on us.

President Obama's first chief of staff Rahm Emanuel once sat on the board of troubled federal mortgage giant Freddie Mac. Bill Daley, the president's chief of staff whose departure was announced today, was previously a top executive at financial firm J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. So of course there should be little surprise that Obama's latest chief of staff, announced today by the president himself, also has deep ties to the financial industry himself.

From 2006-2008, Jack Lew was chief operating officer of Citibank's alternative investments division. And it was his division that made billions of dollars betting "U.S. homeowners would not be able to make their mortgage payments," as the Huffington Post reported.

The piece also reported: “Lew made millions at Citi, including a bonus of nearly $950,000 in 2009 just a few months after the bank received billions of dollars in a taxpayer rescue, according to disclosure forms filed with the federal government. The bank is still partly owned by taxpayers.”

Michael Barone looks at the history of Massachusetts candidates in New Hampshire.

Obama's overreach on executive powers is proving John Locke right.

The English philosopher John Locke, who so influenced our Founding Fathers, wrote that a "good prince" is more dangerous than a bad one because the people are less vigilant to protect against the aggrandizement of power when they perceive the ruler as beneficent.

I fear many Democrats are falling into this trap. They like President Obama and his policies, and they are willing to look the other way when it comes to constitutional niceties. The problem is that checks and balances are important, precedents created by one administration will be exploited by the next, and not all princes are good.

Romney needs to address the Bain attacks

2012-01-10T05:59:00.005-05:00

As is clear, Romney's GOP opponents are engaging in a pile-on using Romney's time at Bain Capital to attack him for Bain's raiding companies and sometimes leaving them worse off than before. They are previewing the sorts of attacks that the Democrats plan to use if Romney is the nominee.

Democrats have signaled that they intend to make Mr. Romney’s history at Bain a central part of their case against him if he wins the Republican nomination. But Bain has also emerged as an issue in the Republican primary, despite the party’s free market stance and business-friendly policies, reflecting the depth of public anger about the economy. At an appearance here on Sunday, Mr. Gingrich suggested that Bain’s approach was to carry out “clever legal ways to loot a company.”

It's totally legitimate for his opponents to launch these sorts of attacks. Romney has made his time working for Bain as his signature argument as to why he is the man who can help turn this economy around and some of the stories that the media has been running don't paint his work there in a good light.

The best story is the one that the WSJ had Monday examining the totality of the companies that Bain took over during Romney's time there. Their conclusion is rather equivocal.

The Journal's findings could provide fodder for both critics and supporters of Mr. Romney's presidential ambitions and of his role at Bain. Some experts, while conceding that available studies don't provide a direct comparison, said the rate at which the firms Bain invested in ran into trouble appears to be higher than experienced by some rival buyout firms during the era.

That notion could undermine a central thrust of Mr. Romney's campaign message: that his private-sector experience building companies makes him the best candidate to turn around the ailing U.S. economy.

The numbers, however, also reflect Bain's investing style, which, particularly during the firm's early years, was focused on smaller and sometimes troubled companies that Bain hoped to fix or build.

Bain was investing in "riskier deals," said Steven N. Kaplan, a finance professor at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business. "For every one that went bankrupt, they had one that was a screaming success. The overall effect was terrific performance" for the firm's investors.

But that will be countered with stories of people who lost jobs after Bain took over. And everyone of those people is a negative ad in the making.

The DNC is already paying for someone who lost his job in one of the factories that Bain took over to trail around behind Romney and tell his story and criticize Romney. And you know that reporters will love to interview this man and put his face in front of as many voters as possible.

Newt Gingrich is, of course, sinking to despicable levels by using lefty arguments to attack Romney. And, as usual with Gingrich, there is an added fillip of blatant hypocrisy given that Gingrich himself served on an advisory board for a leveraged buyout company, Forstmann Little, that bought out companies and shut down some of those purchases. Gingrich seems to think it was fine for him to receive a salary and fly in a couple of times a year to give them the value of his advice, but that is distinct from anything that he criticizes Romney for, of course.

Romney needs to address these criticisms and he should do it soon. I'd recommend his holding a press briefing or speech in the week following the New Hampshire primary. He should give out his own data about the company under his leadership and he better be sure that all the figures are correct. He should answer questions from reporters about the specific allegations in the Gingrich super-PAC ad and the stories that have come out in several media outlets. It's not enough to just pooh-pooh such stories becomes they come from the MSM.

Romney must show that he has an answer for these attacks since we know that the Democrats will launch a barrage of these missiles if Romney is the nominee. They probably already have the ads storyboarded out and ready to film. Having two CEOs who worked with him at Sports Authority and Staples come out and defend him is a start, but it isn't enough.

Romney could do worse than using the defense of leverage buyouts that Avik Roy published in the National Review. He worked for Bain in the period after Romney left. That might make him biased, but it also means that he understands the business. And he outlines the sorts of defenses that Romney should be able to use.

The LBO firm must execute on its turnaround plan, either by working with the company’s existing management or by installing new managers. Managers are often tasked with the difficult work of enacting layoffs, or renegotiating contracts, that the previous regime could or would not. Sometimes the company sells off a non-core asset or product line in order to focus on what it does best. Sometimes, as with Bain’s buyout of New York pharmacy chain Duane Reade, the turnaround involves getting deep into the guts of a business and reorganizing how it does everything from locating its storefronts to buying its toothpaste.

Frequently, these turnarounds initially involve layoffs — when they work, the layoffs act as a kind of pruning that allows a tree to grow again. When the turnarounds fail, however, the layoffs don’t work, and the company goes bankrupt. More often than not, these bankruptcies would have happened anyway: In the case of Bain’s investments in the steel industry, for example, cheap steel imports from abroad made it difficult for most American firms to survive.

Bain Capital succeeded far more often than it failed in these endeavors, averaging somewhere between 50 and 80 percent annual returns from 1984 to 1999. These returns not only made Mitt Romney and his colleagues wealthy, but also rewarded Bain Capital’s investors, which included the endowments of prominent universities and foundations, such as Yale and Stanford, and also well-known entrepreneurs such as Scott McNealy of Sun Microsystems and Michael Dell of Dell Computers.

In some cases Bain may have made mistakes in its turnaround efforts, or misjudged an original business opportunity. That’s, again, what happens in the private sector. Success is not guaranteed. On the other hand, it’s fair to say that private-equity firms such as Bain Capital were responsible for many of the productivity gains, and the retreat of sclerotic labor unions, that the American economy generated in the 1990s. Rest assured that Bain would have not generated those spectacular returns for its investors, nor attracted those investors in the first place, if the majority of its investments failed.

It is true that the money that LBO firms draw out of an acquired company — in the form of dividends and management fees — will always look bad in a situation where the turnaround fails. It will be up to Romney to defend this practice. But it’s important to remember that LBO firms have every incentive to avoid letting their investments fail: After all, they stand to make far more money if their turnarounds succeed.

It’s been discouraging to read that many conservatives see Romney’s record at Bain Capital as a liability. For the truth is the opposite: Romney is a candidate uniquely suited to defending the role of free enterprise in the American economy. When liberal politicians and journalists argue that layoffs are cruel, and that capitalism is unfair, Mitt Romney can speak to how dealing frontally with a business’s problems can lead to better and more numerous jobs over the long term. He can speak not merely in abstract philosophical terms, but using the real-world examples from his successes and his failures.

These are the sorts of arguments that it is hard to make in the course of a debate where he has maybe 60 seconds to frame his answer. That is why I think he needs to do this in a big way with all the time he can use to address questions and explain his actions. If he's going to sell himself as the guy who learned in the private sector how to turn around companies, he should be able to answer these questions. And if one comes up that he doesn't know, he can simply say that he doesn't remember the details and will get back to the reporter on that. And then he should follow through. Basically, I think he needs to pull a Geraldine Ferraro and give the media time to ask their questions, get it all out there, and then go on. If he does it early enough after New Hampshire, there will be time for the media to chew over this and then for it to be old news.

If he gets attacked in the debates later on or in ads, he can honestly say that he's answered the questions and let's move on. If he wins the nomination and the Democrats attack him, this will be old news. Sure the media will enjoy talking about him as the evil, predatory capitalist, but if he can capably defend himself, he'll neutralize a lot of those attacks.

If he doesn't address these stories and criticisms, the story will linger and grow. It will be a cancer that would endanger any chance he has against Obama. One of the more appealing aspects of Romney's candidacy, in my view, is that he defends capitalism. He says things like "corporations are people" and "I like to fire people." Sure, those statements sound awful in isolation. But his points are valid. Corporations are made up of individuals; if the corporation does poorly, the people who suffer are their employees and customers. If you raise taxes on corporations, the ones who will pay are the consumers. And we should like the idea of firing people who don't do their job well rather than government bureaucrats who have lifetime tenure. That is one of the arguments for getting rid of the tenure system in public schools. Republicans should be supporting these sorts of statements instead of jumping on them as some sort of sinful gaffe. I'm with Jay Nordlinger on this.

I was watching a clip of Romney tangling with an “Occupy” protester last week. Romney was defending corporate profits. I was astounded. I don’t think I had ever seen a candidate do this. When the subject comes up, you’re supposed to denounce corporate profits or say, “Hey, nice weather we’re having, huh?”

Phil Gramm once explained to Bill Buckley why he never talked about free trade on the stump — he, a professor of economics and a free-marketeer: “Free trade benefits almost everybody. But they don’t know who they are. Free trade hurts a few, and they all know who they are.”

Over and over, Romney defends and explains capitalism. And he’s supposed to be the RINO and squish in the race? That’s what I read in the conservative blogosphere, every day. What do you have to do to be a “real conservative”? Speak bad English and belch?....

I could go on: the $10 million bet, the pink slips, conservatives wetting their pants, over and over. They have no appetite to defend capitalism, to persuade people, to encourage them not to fall for the old socialist and populist crap. I fled the Democratic party many years ago. And one of the reasons was, I couldn’t stand the class resentment, the envy, the hostility to wealth, the cries of “Richie Rich!” And I hear them from conservatives, at least when Romney is running.

Go ahead, have your “bloodbath” in South Carolina. Make Romney the little guy in the top hat, from the Monopoly game. Have your Santorum, your Perry, your Newt. They may carry something like four states in the fall, but at least they’ve never sullied their hands with — eek! — business.

Instead of giving a few one-liners on the campaign trail or in a debate, let's hear his extended answer to these attacks. He's making a big mistake if he doesn't get his version out there. Otherwise, he'll be killed by the caricature of his career. Romney should be able to defend his record. It's his career, dang it! And if the campaign is Romney versus Obama, the whole concept of democratic capitalism will be on trial. And Romney would do his own campaign as well as free markets a big favor by launching a spirited defense.

Cruising the Web

2012-01-09T06:19:00.005-05:00

So this is President Obama's selling point for reelection: elect him because he won't get along with Congress?

If you're looking for why Gingrich's support collapsed - look at his personality. People just don't like him very much when they saw Newt be Newt.

It isn't a sudden decision for Obama to abandon focusing his appeal to the white working class. They were the ones who abandoned him or never supported him in the first place.

One thing just about everyone can agree on from Saturday's debate was that they couldn't stand Diane Sawyer. It's a mystery to me that she has lasted so long with her irritating, phony shtick and mannerisms.

When I tuned in to the debate on Saturday, I caught the last few minutes of a show on ABC, "Wipeout" which seems to be a version of those old Nickelodeon shows where kids would attempt some task, fail, and then green slime would fall on them. While men tried to go through an impossible obstacle course, two guys offered a very irritating color analysis. Then the debates started and it seemed to be an oratorical continuation of the same concept with Obnoxious George and Irritating Diane.

For your next debate previewing, here is a profoundly, fundamentally transformational Bingo card of Newt Gingrich's favorite verbal tics.

Rob Walker gives a defense of our long electoral process.

George Will explains to liberals what the end result is of their redistributionist policies is a bigger government and more money for the biggest corporations.

Jay Cost explains how the nomination rules of our electoral system in the Republican party are rigged against grassroots conservatives.

Santorum and Gingrich launched their most effective attack on Romney in Sunday morning's debate by pointing out that he didn't run for reelection as governor in 2006, not for some noble desire to return to being a citizen, but because he knew he couldn't win and didn't want a major loss on his record when he ran for president. Trying to pretend that he'd accomplished all he set out to do and wanted to go into the world of business was, just as Newt said, "pious baloney."

Here is a succinct explanation of an amicus brief submitted by Mario Loyola, Richard Epstein, and Ilya Shapiro that explains why the entire bill cannot exist without the individual mandate based on what happened in states that did try to enact laws such as in Obamacare forcing companies to insure people no matter their prior conditions. without a mandate. Without the mandate, we have adverse-selection with people logically deciding not to buy insurance because they knew that the law would force insurance companies to provide them coverage once they got sick. This bankrupts the insurance companies. If the Court strikes down the individual mandate, the rest of the bill must also go or it will be a disaster.

Applying the theory behind the tragedy of the commons to the GOP debates.

Chris Christie demonstrates how to deal with Occupy Wall Street protesters.

If we evaluate Obama's foreign policy initiatives, we find that they have been failures.

A new study by economists at Harvard and Columbia followed an amazing two-and-a-half million students for over 20 years and concluded that having a good teacher in fourth grade could make an amazing difference in that student's lifetime success. They defined a good teacher as a high-value-added teacher who raised student performance on standardized tests.

I think teachers who are high-value-added and are raising test scores are having tremendous benefits for their students.

So, for example, a teacher who is in the top 5 percent, an excellent teacher, we calculate generates about $250,000 or more of additional earnings for their students over their lives in a single classroom of about 28 students.

Cruising the Web

2012-01-06T07:05:00.006-05:00

Kimberley Strassel notes that both Romney and Santorum are targeting specific appeals to the working class, but that this is part for the same sorts of class-warfare arguments that the Democrats make. They should have a message for all people, not just the working class. When it comes to class warfare, the Democrats will always be better at using the government to reward one set of people over another.

James Pethokoukis has been channeling Charles Murray to make the argument that we are making a mistake if we tell students that they all should be going to a four-year college. There are plenty of good-paying jobs that should not necessitate a four-year degree.

Conservatives want to band together behind one candidate in South Carolina, but they still can't decide who is their guy. And that's been the problem all along.

Newt is still a cry baby.

John Podhoretz marvels at how Obama seems to think that voters who are angry that he has exercised too much power in his policies will find it appealing that he is now doing things without congressional approval. His recess appointments are a sign of his weakness in getting his agenda adopted by Congress. Is he going to have any more luck if he wins reelection and still faces GOP leadership in the House and perhaps the Senate and is himself immediately dubbed a lame duck as he goes into a second term? Do people want to vote for four more years of an imperial executive who just asserts right without any constitutional precedent?

Sweden now recognizes the Church of Kopimism when thinks copying and pasting are sacraments. When anything can be a religion, there is no meaning in the word.

David Brooks admits that Obama was more liberal than he originally thought. Glad he finally bought a clue.

Even hard-scrabble Rick Santorum was able to become a millionaire upon leaving Congress. Nothing wrong with that, but it is an indication of the cozy world within which politicians operate. Just think of how much money Obama will be able to make once he leaves office.

Come on, admit it - you just gotta click on over to see the painting that is the subject of this headline: Woman Scratches, Rubs Butt over $30M Painting. I'm not sure if they could tell if she'd made a difference in the painting.

Jim Geraghty links to this fun Twitter feed of "Newt Gingrich's Ideas." One idea: "Put lead paint chips in bananas to prevent Planet of the Apes scenario."

Cruising the Web

2012-01-05T07:42:00.001-05:00

Here is some interesting data on how many voters each candidate got in Iowa per money spent.

Votes received per $1,000 spent:

1. Rick Santorum, 49
2. Newt Gingrich, 11
3. Ron Paul, 10
4. Mitt Romney, 6
5. Rick Perry, 2

You can also check out the money spent on advertising for and against candidates. You can see why Gingrich is so ticked off. However, as Major Garrett at the National Journal argues, it's his own dang fault and he lost due to his own political malpractice.

Noemie Emery is also fed up with the idea that there is some Republican establishment that was out there to prop up Mitt Romney. As she points out, it wasn't the fault of this mythical establishment that its preferred candidates chose not to run or that so many less-than-optimal candidates did choose to run. And this really only became a line of argument when people started speaking out against Newt Gingrich. This is the sort of vetting that party leaders would have done before the reforms of the McGovern Commission changed how party nominees were chosen. We should be glad to have them speak up about what they knew about Newt Gingrich before voters, through their ignorance, went further in choosing him as the nominee.

For one thing, this Establishment includes Rich Lowry, Ann Coulter, Tom Coburn and others, a collection of squishes if ever there was one, along with useful idiots such as George Will.

For another, it was a welcome attempt to revive the tradition of peer review in selection of nominees to be president, which has been in eclipse since the "reforms" of the McGovern Commission. Those were the reforms that eliminated the process of candidate-vetting by the professionals, and let the candidates in effect vet themselves.

As Robert Merry explains, the system in which pros asked themselves if nominees had scandals, were honest in dealing with others, or had weaknesses that would reveal themselves under the pressure, gave way to one in which "candidates emerge based on their own judgment of their overwhelming talents and virtues, rather than those of their political peers."

When this system, which nearly gave us Presidents Gary Hart and John Edwards, seemed in danger of producing a nominee, Gingrich, his peers and his cohorts jumped into action, and committed out loud and in public the dimension of vetting once done in private, and behind closed doors.

Ilya Somin gives a well-argued defense of negative campaigning, especially in nomination battles. And he has a good response to those who complain that such campaigning turns voters off from politics and inculcates cynicism in government. Perhaps a bit of cynicism about our government is a good thing.

If voters have a more negative view of politicians and government, it might lead them to be more hesitant about entrusting those same politicians with ever-greater power. The dubious nature of most politicians is one of the reasons why it is important to restrict the size and scope of government.

Exactly.

Leon Wolf at Red State chides his fellow conservatives for their over-the-top enmity to Mitt Romney by pointing out that he is more conservative than any other GOP nominee since Reagan and that all his flip-flops have been to the right, something conservatives should celebrate.

Obama wins two "awards" for the worst product failures of 2011. Way to go. And the high-speed train for California will join that list if the California decides to allocate the money to build this billion-dollar boondoggle.

If you want to know what liberals will be saying about Rick Santorum if he stays at the top, here is a dump of accusations against Santorum. And here are some more ethical complaints against Santorum. These are the attacks that Santorum avoided by being below the radar until this week.

Meanwhile, Daniel Henninger posits that the votes for Santorum and Paul in Iowa indicate that voters rewarded consistency in those candidates. Not Romney's forte.

John Steele Gordon takes us on a walk through the history of negative campaigning in America.

Obama's contempt for the Constitution

2012-01-05T06:37:00.002-05:00

How ironic that our president who once was a professor of the Constitution should have such a cavalier approach to that document as he is placing his nominee, Richard Cordray as director of the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau as well as three people to the NLRB, through a supposed recess appointment. Previously, when Bush did this with John Bolton to the United Nations, Senator Obama was appalled, calling Bolton "damaged goods." Harry Reid was similarly angry,

‘An end run around the Senate and the Constitution.’ “I will keep the Senate in pro forma session to block the president from doing an end run around the Senate and the Constitution with his controversial nominations.”

However, the Congress was in recess at that time so, even as Obama recognized at the time, this was within the President's constitutional powers. That is why Reid then adopted the tactic of not going out of session in order to block Bush from any more recess appointments.

Now Obama has done an even bigger end-run around the Constitution since the Congress is not in recess. John Steele Gordon explains how the House blocked this from happening.

The Constitution requires that neither house of Congress can recess for more than three days without the consent of the other house. The House of Representatives has not given that consent and has been holding pro forma sessions every three days, forcing the Senate to do likewise. When Democrats controlled the Senate in the last two years of the Bush administration, they held these pro forma sessions during recesses precisely to prevent President Bush from using the recess appointment power, which he didn’t.

And according to Clinton's Justice Department, these three days are enough to determine that the Congress is indeed in session.

In 1993, however, a Department of Justice brief implied that the President may make a recess appointment during a recess of more than three days. In doing so, the brief linked the minimum recess length with Article I, Section 5, clause 4 of the U.S. Constitution. This “Adjournments Clause” provides that “Neither House, during the Session of Congress, shall, without the Consent of the other, adjourn for more than three days ….”Arguing that the recess during which the appointment at issue in the case was made was of sufficient length, the brief stated: “If the recess here at issue were of three days or less, a closer question would be presented. The Constitution restricts the Senate’’s ability to adjourn its session for more than three days without obtaining the consent of the House of Representatives. … It might be argued that this means that the Framers did not consider one, two and three day recesses to be constitutionally significant. …Apart from the three-day requirement noted above, the Constitution provides no basis for limiting the recess to a specific number of days. Whatever number of days is deemed required, that number would of necessity be completely arbitrary.”

Remember that this recess appointment provision was put in the Constitution in the 18th century when it was envisioned that Congress would be part-time and out of session much of the year. In those days before mass communication and quick transportation, the Founders thought that we needed a way for the President to put people into place when Congress was back home and couldn't be expected back for a long time. It was certainly never envisioned that three days would be a long enough break to assert that Congress, without having formally going into recess, could be asserted to be in recess unilaterally by the President. That would be a total violation of the separation of powers, the sort of thing that Democrats were always warning about George W. Bush, but now seem not to worry about Obama doing.

Oh, and by the way, Obama's own Solicitor General, Neal Katyal, has argued the opposite view before the Supreme Court of whether a president can make recess appointments when the Congress is out for three or fewer days.

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: And the recess appointment power doesn't work why?

MR. KATYAL: The -- the recess appointment power can work in -- in a recess. I think our office has opined the recess has to be longer than 3 days. And -- and so, it is potentially available to avert the future crisis that -- that could -- that could take place with respect to the board. If there are no other questions –

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Thank you, counsel.

But what's a little consistency and respect for the Constitution when you're trying to win political support from your base?

As Gordon writes,

It will be interesting to see if a court challenge develops. Courts hate getting in the middle of a dispute between the other two branches. But is the president not arrogating to himself the power to decide when Congress is in recess? If he has that power, what else can he dictate to Congress?

Do the Democrats really want this to stick as a precedent the next time there is a Republican president, perhaps even a little over a year from now?

And the whole question about whether or not the Congress is truly in session isn't Obama's only problem with this appointment. Mark A. Calabria at CATO looks at the actual wording of the law establishing this position.

More importantly the “recess” appointment of Cordray doesn’t solve the President’s problem. The Dodd-Frank Act is very clear, even a law professor can probably under[stand] this section, that authorities under the Act remain with the Treasury Secretary until the Director is “confirmed by the Senate”. A recess appointment is not a Senate confirmation. Now don’t ask me why Dodd and Frank included such unusual language, they could have just given the Bureau the new authorities, but they didn’t.

But hey, what does Obama care about the actual wording of a law? He certainly doesn't care about the wording of the Constitution.

UPDATE: Over at Volokh, John Elwood argues in favor of the president to be able to make appointments despite these pro forma sessions since, otherwise, the Senate would be able to block the president's nomination powers. I wonder if that is enough of an objection. If Elwood is correct, than the use of the filibuster of a nomination would also be interfering with the power of appointment.

What Romney was spending his money on

2012-01-05T06:17:00.002-05:00

This is a fascinating look at the techniques that the Romney campaign was using to identify potential voters and then target them with specific messages tailored to their concerns. I hadn't realized that it was Romney who pioneered the micro-targeting techniques that Bush used so successfully in 2004, but it fits that someone with his background in executive management would have bought into what was a new idea at the time.

Meyers and Gage first worked with Romney on his 2002 campaign for governor of Massachusetts. The two Michigan Republican operatives had grown frustrated with campaign targeting that was restricted by the limited individual information available on the electoral rolls (party registration and vote history) and historical tallies at the precinct level, where actual results are available. Gage noticed that commercial marketers and credit-scorers had begun to organize reams of demographic and consumer data—from information on education levels to who had a hunting license—that made it possible to profile an individual across hundreds of variables at once. A former pollster, he designed large-scale surveys that would allow him to tether those individual profiles to topical political attitudes to reveal patterns in electoral behavior. Advances in computing power had made it possible to manipulate tens of millions of those records at once, and Meyers and Gage let algorithms find relationships between them. Their approach allowed them to analyze voters with far more nuance than had previously been possible. When Gage visited Romney’s Cambridge campaign headquarters with a PowerPoint presentation describing his untested method, a former venture capitalist serving as Romney’s deputy campaign manager spoke up. “You mean you don’t do this in politics?”

Romney won that campaign, aided by Gage’s ability to pick out Massachusetts independents and Democrats who would be receptive to the candidate’s positions on specific issues like taxes and education. That success, along with similar projects for Republican tickets in two other states, helped Meyers and Gage win a lucrative contract to perform such “microtargeting”—as Gage successfully branded the technique—for George W. Bush’s re-election campaign. Bush’s advisers wanted to identify segments of nontraditional Republican voters, like Latino women or church-going African-Americans, who could be pulled over to Bush with targeted appeals. In 2007, Gage’s firm, TargetPoint Consulting, signed on with Romney’s first presidential campaign, and set to work finding friendly caucus-goers in Iowa.

By now this is standard procedure and I'm sure that the Democrats are doing something very similar.

What helped Romney was that he had run before and so had all the data from 2008 that his team could feed into the computer and then use to target those same voters again this time around. They didn't need the big staff that they had used before in Iowa. They could plug in their information and have volunteers work from home and then set up telephone town hall discussions targeted to a particular voter's interests and candidate preferences.

Instead of trying to win over potential Romney voters with broadcast or online ads, conspicuous direct mail, or cultivating media coverage, the campaign used a new tool to narrowly target potential 2012 voters. So-called tele-town halls would ring an individual voter’s phone with a recorded message inviting him or her to participate in a conference call with the candidate. When a voter chose to participate, an automated prompt would ask for the same information that would be solicited by volunteer ID calls: who a voter supported, how likely they were to caucus. Romney’s team was able to put together different universes for each. Supporters would be invited to “friends and allies” calls (in one, Romney assuaged those made uneasy about attacks on his health care record). Persuasion targets who were modeled to care about the economy were invited to hear Romney introduce his jobs plan; those concerned about immigration were alerted to a call with Arizona sheriff Paul Babeu, a Romney surrogate.

The tele-town halls proved popular—often tens of thousands of voters would listen in—and, at only pennies each, fused a persuasive medium like a radio ad or a candidate visit with the ability of automated survey calls to measure response. Most of the Republican caucus campaigns used these tele-town halls to inexpensively reach voters spread out geographically, but they had a particular value to Romney as he tried to add voters who hadn’t been with him in 2008. The tele-town halls allowed him to make his case to targeted groups of Iowans on specific issues without raising media alerts that he was aggressively contesting the state.

It was the information garnered from their specific targeting and tele-townhalls that gave them the confidence to go all out the last week of the race in Iowa. They might not have predicted that Santorum would be the one to rise and how many votes that he would get, but they had a lot of information on who would turn out for Romney.

That fits with Jay Cost's analysis that Romney got just about the exact same votes that he'd gotten in 2008. That was the strategy all along.

And this is the kind of operation that will be hard for someone like Santorum who is basically starting up from scratch in states like New Hampshire, South Carolina, or Florida to compete with. President Obama is probably already doing much the same thing with all the data that I'm sure they have from 2008. If Romney were to be the GOP nominee, it would be a real battle of techno-campaigns. However, if someone else beats Romney out for the nomination, it will be an indication that it takes a lot more than a snazzy approach to gathering information about voters and delivering them targeted messages to win a campaign.

I love process stories like this to find out how campaigns operated. Not only is it interesting, but it helps me in teaching politics to my AP Government and politics class. However, I'm always flummoxed about why campaigns brag like this to the media. Why pull back the curtain to let opponents know what they're doing. I understand that this sort of campaigning is a business and operatives are always looking for their next job. But can't they wait until their guy has either lost or won before they tell everyone how it's done.

Cruising the Web

2012-01-04T07:03:00.002-05:00

Mona Charen refutes the storyline that there is some sort of Republican establishment that is forcing the GOP electorate to select Romney. Just who is in that establishment? It never made sense.

The Republican Establishment, like the “international community,” is more of a figment than a reality. Whom did the so-called establishment support in 2008? Do conservative voters believe that Republican elites somehow engineered the selection of the least loyal and reliable Republican in the U.S. Senate? And how did that work exactly? John McCain was considered the frontrunner in early 2007. Yet by the summer he was languishing in the polls and so broke that he was forced to take out loans. Was it the establishment that earned McCain the nomination or was it the fact that Rudolph Giuliani ran a terrible campaign, Fred Thompson never got airborne, and Mike Huckabee undermined Mitt Romney’s Iowa sling-shot strategy?

Jay Cost looks at the data and demonstrates that those who voted for Romney yesterday fit the same demographic framework as those who voted for him last time.

Thus, Iowa is a metaphor for the whole 2012 Republican nomination campaign. It is not as though Mitt Romney has increased the breadth or depth of his support relative to 2012. At least not yet. Instead, his advantage is due primarily to the weakness of his opposition.

Richard Epstein highlights an interesting attempt to challenge rent control laws before the Supreme Court.

Peter Robinson, a former Reagan speechwriter, grades the GOP candidates on their speaking ability.

Why didn't Santorum do better earlier?

2012-01-04T06:08:00.008-05:00

Congratulations to Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum for their performances in Iowa. And especially to Rick Santorum who no one, including myself, ever gave much of a chance. Santorum did the old-fashioned thing by spending his time and doing the retail campaigning to come from back of the pack to rocket to the top of the heap. He peaked at just the right time. And winning by just eight votes isn't much of a victory for Romney, but it sure does a lot for the future of Iowa caucuses to convince people that their individual votes count.

And who would have thought that the evangelicals of Iowa would pick a Catholic and a Mormon as their two top candidates. It rather explodes that myth that evangelicals vote only for another evangelical rather than on the issues and other qualities. Otherwise, Rick Perry would have done a lot better than he did. In fact, they split their vote just like other demographic groups split up their vote.

Santorum captured the most of them, according to this round of exit polls, but only reached 32 percent. After that, Iowa evangelicals split between Paul (19 percent), Gingrich and Romney at (14 percent) and Perry at 13 percent. (Michele Bachmann, who ran a campaign aimed heavily at those voters, won just 6 percent of them.)

That precedent suggests Santorum may leave Iowa as a powerful competitor for evangelical votes, but as a Northern Catholic is unlikely to win as preponderant a share of them as did Huckabee, a Southern Baptist.

We'll see. I might be totally off base, but I sense that the candidate's religion matters a whole lot less than voters sensing that he has a sincere belief in some religion.

And, at least, Ron Paul didn't come in first. I can't see him repeating his strength among a larger GOP electorate. Rick Perry was humiliated since he'd spent time and money there. He and Michele Bachmann need to reassess the logic of their candidacies. They each had their moments in the spotlight and didn't appeal. Iowa seems to have fulfilled its traditional role of winnowing the list down for the rest of the country. I still wonder what would have happened if Pawlenty had persevered. I know he's regretting his decision to drop out early. I suspect that he would have done much better if he'd stayed in and would have been a reasonable candidate to be the anti-Mitt for voters who aren't thrilled with Romney but still wanted someone who had executive experience and strong conservative credentials. No one else in the race fits that profile. Oh, well. Just another disappointment for us.

And Newt Gingrich demonstrated that his lead was ephemeral and couldn't stand the exposure of his personality and record. He can whine and complain, but complaints never do much to help candidates. He should be talking about his message and toning down the less-appealing parts of his personality that have been on display the past few weeks. But I suspect that it is already too late for Newt and I am not disappointed with that.

I couldn't help thinking about why Santorum took so long to emerge as the lead anti-Mitt candidate. Surely he is a more feasible conservative candidate than Bachmann and Cain. He is a better debater by far than many of the other candidates. He can express his conservative beliefs with a credibility that Romney lacks. In fact I thought he did as well when he got a chance in the debates as Gingrich although he came out as whiny about not getting attention, but that won't be a problem in future debates. Santorum seemed to stick out mostly as a social conservative and hawk on foreign policy.

I've listened to Santorum for a few years since he was a substitute host on Bill Bennett's morning radio show which I often listen to. I found him very conservative and able to use his congressional experience to clarify what was going on in fights in Congress. But he also struck me as more focused on those social issues that don't move me.

He's a lot more socially conservative than I am and how previous GOP candidates going back for several decades have been. It's not that his positions are that different from other Republican candidates; it's the emphasis that Santorum puts on those issues. They are primary with him while they were secondary or even tertiary for Romney, McCain, probably both Bushes, Dole, or Reagan. Those are positions that help in GOP primaries, but probably won't help him in the general election. However, Santorum does do a great job of linking the social issues to the economic issues by pointing out that strong families do more for a good education and a strong economy than any government program. He argues that three things will do more to help young people succeed than government policies: graduate high school, get a job, and wait until you get married before having children. It would be worthwhile to have that message reach more people.

So why did the GOP electorate toy with all these other problematic candidates instead of Santorum?

It could be that he lacks the pizazz that some of the other candidates who rose up to the top had. He doesn't have the gregarious, good humor that Cain has. He doesn't have the job-creating record that made Perry initially so appealing. He doesn't have the ability to shine in debates with that patina of professorial confidence and humor that Gingrich does. Santorum comes across as earnest and somewhat plodding. But sometimes plodding wins the race - ask the tortoise.

My only guess is that he just doesn't seem electable against Obama. He suffered a deep defeat in 2006 in Pennsylvania. It was a Democratic year and Santorum was very vocal in his support for the war in Iraq at a time when it was going particularly badly. And if Romney had run for reelection in that year, he would also have suffered a big loss. One could argue, and I believe Santorum does, that it took guts for him to run his uphill campaign without sacrificing his principles. That's a contrast to Romney.

And their backgrounds are a deep contrast between the wealthy scion of a successful man and the son of the laboring class who can relate to working people and their concerns.

We'll see how Santorum does now under the klieg lights. If other candidates start dropping out and the money really pours in to the Santorum campaign, he has the chance to make it a two-man race against Romney. Then look for some of those imaginary polls putting Obama up against both Romney and Santorum. If Santorum is way behind in those polls and Romney is competitive, that could be enough to convince those Republican voters whose main concern is defeating Obama. It would be interesting to see polls contrasting how both do against Obama in Sanotrum's home state of Pennsylvania. I think those polls are quite problematic for their predicative power. The atmosphere will be very different when it is one man against another and they're both aiming their best shots against each other. However, problematic as those polls are, I do believe that they influence voters' perceptions of how electable a candidate is. So it will be interesting to see how Santorum does after he's been pounded by the media and other candidates for a while.

I would recommend to Romney not to start attacking Santorum and for his super PAC to hold back also. Santorum isn't as rich a target as Gingrich was and Romney needs to stay focused on his tactic of concentrating on Obama since that is what most GOP voters are most interested in.

I don't think that Santorum is all that vulnerable on the pork-barrel complaint that Perry was aiming at him. People expect those in Congress to get what they can for their own states so it's not much of a surprise that Santorum did that for Pennsylvania. And he voted as a loyal Republican for big votes that came up during his term in the Senate. Are Republican voters going to penalize him for supporting President Bush? I don't think so. And then there are the people who are still angry at him for supporting his fellow Pennsylvania senator, Arlen Specter. Is that really a reason to oppose him now given the competition? I don't think so, but I know there are some diehard conservatives who won't forgive him. But if it is a two-man battle between Romney and Santorum, are they really going to base their vote on something that happened six years ago?

So congratulations to Rick Santorum and welcome to the spotlight. He now has to demonstrate his staying power is longer than all those candidates who climbed to the top of the greasy pole only to slide back down.

Cruising the Web

2012-01-03T06:57:00.001-05:00

Ah, the answer to a question many people had: why does Rick Santorum keep wearing a sweater vest?

The GOP strategy against Obama is to use his own words against him contrasting his promises and the results. This will be very effective and is the problem that any incumbent would face. Obama, however, has been so grandiose and so much of his appeal was simply his own rhetoric that he is especially vulnerable to this strategy. Of course, the Democrats will try to do the same to Romney, if he's their opponent. I suspect that the charge of someone changing their position to whatever is more popular will be less deadly than the charge of falling so far short of the promises that Obama made. Without out that rhetoric what else did Obama have?

Charles Lane goes through the the numbers and finds lots of bad news for Obama.

Will Obama single-handedly rewrite the definition of "recess" in order to make recess appointments of nominees that have been blocked in the Senate? Somehow I don't think that the provision in the Constitution written in 1787 allowing the president to make recess appointments due to the difficulties in travel back in the 18th century and the expectation that Congress would be in session only part of the year would extend to the two or three-day breaks between sessions when the minority is explicitly trying to block the possibility of recess appointments.

Explaining why Best Buy is slowly going out of business and why you repeatedly get irritated when you shop there.

Here is the perfect example of over-regulation by unelected bureaucrats. The EEOC is warning employers that they may be in violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act if they require a high school diploma for employment. Amazing.

The Washington Post celebrates the end of the tax credit for corn-based ethanol and the tariff on imported ethanol as well as the tax credit for purchasing electric cars. It's a good start.

Who would think that it was a good idea to send a police officer to tell a five-year old that she had overdue books at the library? Great job in turning a child off from libraries as well as wasting the time of a policeman.

Philip Klein explains why we should be skeptical of reports of "packed rooms" in Iowa (or New Hampshire) campaign events.

Michael Barone explains the real reasons why Rick Santorum endorsed Arlen Specter over Pat Toomey in 2004. Then Barone has an interesting post looking back in history for an example of a major party having a weaker field for the presidency in a year when that party also had a great chance of taking the White House. His choice? The Democrats in 1932.

Kimberley Strassel argues that Romney seems headed for a victory as a result of his careful strategy this year as well as by seeming "good enough" for voters. And most of all, by his great luck that more popular possible candidates did not choose to run.

If you're such a political junkie that you can't wait for the final vote tonight to come in, here are 10 Iowa counties that might indicate how the vote will end up.

When you hear people lamenting the advent of super PACs this year and those nasty negative ads, just remember that this is the result of all those attempts at campaign finance reform by limiting the money that a candidate can raise for his or her own campaign.

Keep an eye on the efforts to transform Indiana into a right-to-work state.

What makes a map the best map of the United States?

Did Alan Colmes just help out Santorum?

2012-01-03T06:19:00.001-05:00

So will Iowans give Rick Santorum a sympathy vote in response to Alan Colmes' heartless comments about the way that the Santorums chose to deal with the death of their infant son? Colmes has since apologized to the Santorums, but it still boggles the mind that any media figure would think that it was appropriate to bring up such a private moment to discuss in a political context. Is that what they were talking about on the lefty blogs or was this just something that Colmes came up with on his own? It's reminiscent of the way in which leftist bloggers happily jumped into a debate of whether Sarah Palin's baby, Trig, was actually hers or not. Average people would instantly recognize that such comments are totally off-base,but that was the main point that Colmes had when he tried to argue that voters would find Santorum weird.

Colmes would have been better off making the sort of argument that Dana Milbank makes about problematic statements that Santorum has made in the past to explain why the Santorum surge won't last any longer than all the other non-Mitts have lasted.

The irony is that the attention paid to this non-issue in the last moments of the campaign in Iowa could benefit Santorum. There is nothing that charges up Republicans like some good, healthy media bashing.

Cruising the Web

2012-01-02T08:25:00.000-05:00

Happy New Year to all my readers. My best wishes for everyone to have a happy, healthy 2012. And don't fret the Mayans.

George Will thinks that 2012 could be a good year if the GOP takes the Senate. Plus he's encouraged by the signs of common sense among the electorate on energy issues.

Ron Paul, for all his rhetoric about shrinking the government, doesn't have a plan for how to deal with entitlements. He has no proposal to deal with the rising spending on entitlements that will soon eat up the entire federal budget. His only stab at a plan is to cut spending on defense. That won't do it. And oh yes, he wants to have an "adult conversation" on the topic. Big whoopty-doo.

Gretchen Morgenson observes that Wall Street and Washington teamed up to make some of the same sorts of mistakes that we were supposed to have learned from after the Great Recession.

Kyle Smith wonders why feminists hated Margaret Thatcher so much. It turns out that they didn't care about any of the stylistic complaints about women making it on their own. What they really care about is left-wing politics. And Rich Lowry feels that we could use a Margaret Thatcher today.

Obama's plan for reelection: celebrate his inability to get along with Congress and then try to go around them as much as possible. He will embody the imperial presidency.

Newt's Super PAC is attacking Charles Krauthammer for his criticisms of Newt. I don't think they'll get very far with the idea that Krauthammer is "a bit jealous of Newt's intellect." Please.

The RNC has some New Years' resolutions for Obama and other Democrats.

Ugly dog breeds are surging in popularity. Now, if only that would happen for ugly people.

Mark Steyn contemplates Seasonal Stockholm Syndrome felt by those who suffer by having to go back to work on January 2.

Cruising the Web

2011-12-30T00:29:00.000-05:00

So Michele Bachmann reportedly refrained from attacking Mitt Romney because she and her husband thought that she might have a chance to end up as a vice-presidential candidate on a Romney ticket. What kind of dream world was she inhabiting? I guess it's the same one that thought she might have a chance in a run for the presidency.

Jonah Goldberg explains why Charlie Sheen was the Man of the Year. It seems that 2011 was the year in which those who are losers pretended to be winners.

Speaking of protest, consider the Occupy Wall Street movement. Not since the Hebrews killed themselves at Masada has there been a group that more obviously won by losing. Of course, the Jews at Masada were freedom fighters battling Roman imperialism. The Occupy Wall Streeters think they’re fighting imperialism when they throw a tantrum about having to pay their debts.

The Occupy movement’s meager tangible accomplishments (We recycled our own urine!) are inversely correlated with their lavish press coverage. The protesters were named Time magazine’s person of the year. Though in fairness, Time diluted its sycophancy by including the Arab Spring protesters who’ve (so far) ushered in a glorious new era of Islamism in places such as Egypt. Winning!

(Though perhaps not as clear cut a “win” as President Obama’s decision to declare political victory and pull our troops out of Iraq prematurely, so we can lose a war we sacrificed so much to win.)

Peggy Noonan makes several good points today such as that the rise of Newt Gingrich worked out to make Romney a better candidate. And she deplores the trend of people, like Herman Cain or maybe Michele Bachmann and others, who run for the presidency not because they think they have a serious shot at it but who are seeking an increase in their name recognition or getting a cable TV contract or sell a book. Now with the debates and TV appearances becoming the primary tool in running for office, it takes a lot less money to get your name out there. Expect to see more of this.

The Hill reports that, despite GOP efforts to block funding for the enforcement of the ban on regular incandescent light bulbs, experts think that the companies will still obey the law.

Barney Frank is still lying about his role in blocking regulation of Fannie and Freddie.

Here is Politico's top ten list of pundit mistakes this past year.

Cruising the Web

2011-12-29T10:34:00.002-05:00

Hans von Spakovsky rips Eric Holder's politically-motivated actions on blocking South Carolina's new voter ID law. When the facts and data are not in Holder's way, he just resorts to racial demagoguery.

Here's a moment that I wish I hadn't learned about: Arlen Specter doing a stand-up comedy routine where some of the jokes were not printable in a family newspaper. Ugh. The ones that were printable were not that funny. I'd say he should stick to his day job, but he doesn't have that one any more. Oh, and here is the video of his routine.

Jeff Jacoby speaks up for the crass commercialism of the season.

This tells you all that you need to know about the Arab League's condemnation of government violence in Syria: the man they chose to monitor the situation was the Sudanese general who led the janjaweed groups that were behind the genocide in Darfur.

The irony of sending a war criminal to try and stop the commission of war crimes is lost on the Arab League. It is also lost on Syria’s dissidents who continue to be killed and harassed by the government with the so-called monitors doing nothing.

It says it all right there. The Arab League doesn't give a flip about massacring civilians and they don't care who knows it.

What a surprise: Economists don't give Obama and his administration very high marks.

Several bloggers are coming out with their endorsements for the GOP primaries, or at least their positions on Romney. John Hinderaker of Powerline endorses Mitt Romney. His co-blogger, Scott Johnson, resists the bandwagon for Romney. John Hawkins explains his seven reasons to oppose Romney. Face it, we're left with choosing the least bad candidate. They all have problems. Hawkins makes a good argument about why Romney won't be as electable as people think; he's going to get hammered by his experience at Bain Capital. That's all very true, but this may be the one election when Romney wouldn't be as damaged by that as he would be in other years.

How lame is this: Newt Gingrich is now explaining away his vacation in Greece at the start of his campaign as his need to investigate the Greek fiscal crisis up close. Sure. It's taken him six months to come up with that excuse. Please. Pull another one, Newt.

Karl Rove is out with his political predictions for next year. He doesn't predict who the GOP nominee will be, though he predicts that Obama will lose. Also intriguingly, he predicts that Pelosi or Reid, or both, will leave their leadership positions.

Ron Paul volunteers are told to behave according to the standard, WWRPD. In other words, no tatoos, drinking, drugs, or tweeting.

Timothy Carney exposes the lies behind Obama's claim not to take money from lobbyists.

In the District of Columbia, the police union is claiming that policemen have been shifted from their normal neighborhood beats in order to patrol Occupy DC protesters. And they also claim that violent crime has increased in the past month.

Why have caucuses in the first place?

2011-12-28T11:42:00.003-05:00

Here's a primer on how the Iowa GOP caucuses work. One difference from the way the Democratic caucuses operate is that everyone can cast a ballot for whomever they want by writing the name down and putting it in the ballot box. For Democrats, they have the two...-step process wherein you form groups for each candidate and only those groups that have above the minimum get voted on. So if your preferred candidate doesn't get enough minimum support, you have to go join another preference group. They're allowed to entice you with hot chocolate and cookies to join their group. It's a strange system. If a state has to have a caucus, I prefer the GOP system where you have a secret ballot and can vote for your choice without having to worry if there are a minimum number of other voters for that choice at your particular precinct. But overall, I find the caucus system very unappealing. It discriminates against those who don't have the time to spend a couple of hours showing up to vote at a specific vote and time. What about people who work the night shift or have small children and no sitter.

We're usually told that the benefit to Iowa going first is that these voters will spend the time meeting the candidates and judging them. But this year, it is the televised debates that seem to have been the main factor in determining who is up or down in the Iowa polls. The candidates who have spent the most time and effort in Iowa, Michele Bachmann and Rick Santorum, are having a hard time cracking into the top tier so personal encounters don't seem to be playing the role that they usually do. Last time, John McCain won the caucuses without spending any effort to win in Iowa. As Michael Barone pointed out, the Iowa caucuses aren't predicative of much at all, at least not for the GOP. And if Ron Paul wins here next week, it will be one more bit of evidence of how unreasonable it is to attach any sort of electoral importance to the whole Iowa caucus system.

The funny thing is that it is the media who have created this monster. If they paid little attention to the results, we would all be better off. And their reporters wouldn't have to be spending their holiday season in Iowa. It would be a win-win, but the media just can't help themselves and so we'll probably be pooh-poohing Iowa caucuses for decades to come. It's a glum prospect.

Cruising the Web

2011-12-28T10:13:00.001-05:00

Gosh, those GOP delegate allocation rules are so complicated. Even though supposedly only state contests after March are supposed to have winner-take-all awarding of delegates, some states have enacted rules whereby a candidate who wins over 50% of the vote would get all or almost all the delegates. As more candidates will drop out after losses in the early states, it will be easier for a candidate to score over 50%.

The Obama administration has been ignoring due diligence in how it has enacted new regulations. Despite Obama's pretense, they're not studying the costs and benefits of new regulations.

David Brooks outlines the reasons why the progressive era is not the model for today's economy. A lot as changed in the past century.

Jeff Jacoby reminds us of a theme I've long advocated - our Founding Fathers intended us to have gridlock in the federal government.

The Framers of the Constitution never expected Congress to clear the decks for sweeping presidential action. They weren’t troubled by fears that America would be rendered “ungovernable’’ by the ease with which new laws or major policy changes could be delayed or derailed. What the smart set bewails today as “gridlock’’ or “brinksmanship’’ or an “agenda of pure nihilism,’’ the architects of the American system regarded as indispensable checks and balances. They knew how flawed human beings can be, and how ardently propelled by their passions and ideals.

Justice Scalia was singing this tune earlier this year when he told the Senate Judiciary Committee that we should learn to love the gridlock.

Mark Titus inaugurates a great sportswriting gimmick: give three possible scenarios and have people guess which one was the actual Dick Vitale digression to jump from an Indiana Hoosiers game to talking about Andrew Luck. He calls it "Dick's Degrees of Separation" as he challenges readers to distinguish fake Dickie V tangential digressions from the real one. I can't do it.

Another strike against Ron Paul: a commenter led me to this post at Red State reminding us that, after losing the nomination fight in 2008, Ron Paul endorsed the eternally noxious Cynthia McKinney. And he also endorsed Ralph Nader. Yeah, as if they're such big libertarians. How does that fit in with his claim to be so consistent?

David Allott finds eerie similarities between Newt Gingrich and Alan Keyes.

What a shame: New York Times employees are angry at management. One complaint is that outgoing executives are getting extremely generous severance packages while other employees have experienced pay cuts and layoffs. Oh, the irony.

Cruising the Web

2011-12-27T12:21:00.001-05:00

Here's an interesting defense of Ebeneezer Scrooge as part of the original 1%.

Newt Gingrich has his own newsletter problem. The WSJ has uncovered an endorsement by Newt of Romney's health care plan in Massachusetts, a plan that Gingrich is excoriating today. And, as Ed Morrissey points out, Gingrich's defense that he wasn't the one who wrote his newsletter's praise of Romneycare is quite lame, especially given that Gingrich has been criticizing Ron Paul for making the same defense of his own newsletter scandal.

Michael Barone reflects that Iowa has a rather sorry history of picking the eventual Republican nominee. The GOP caucuses have low turnout with a disproportionately high percent of those caucus-goers being evangelical Christians. That is not what we're going to see in other states. Barone points out that New Hampshire and South Carolina have done a much better job at picking the eventual nominee.

Take a look at what famous people were born in years ending in 11. Who knows what future luminaries were born in this past year.

Mark Steyn can always find gloom in our demographic future. But he does it in such an entertaining way that I always enjoy reading his predictions of demographic and financial doom. Here he finds a segue from the birth of John the Baptist to the problems facing countries that have constructed a welfare state but are not having the babies necessary to grow up and pay for those promises.

The NYT looks at Mitt Romney's career at the Harvard Business School. It's pretty impressive that he could simultaneously get a law degree at Harvard Law as well as being one of the top students at Harvard Business School while being married and the father of two children. Since the Democrats like to characterize Republican politicians as either stupid or evil, I guess that Mitt will have to be evil. Or will they trot out a new category as just being weird?

Dan Amira at the New York Magazine blog has some fun mulling over which other historic events could serve as metaphors for Newt Gingrich now that we know that not qualifying for the Virginia ballot is somehow like Pearl Harbor, a severe setback on the way to an ultimate victory or something.

* Gingrich's birth = the Big Bang
* The time Newt Gingrich was pushed out of office by his own party = Cain killing Abel
* The time Newt Gingrich shut down the government after being forced to sit in the back of Air Force One = Rosa Parks
* Newt Gingrich's idea to replace school janitors with children = Einstein's theory of relativity
* The time Newt Gingrich's car got stuck in some mud = Vietnam
* The time Callista made Gingrich do the dishes = slavery

Check out and see how you'd do in answering these Google interview questions.

It took Ron Paul 482 tries before a bill he authored was made into law. FYI: the bill facilitated the sale of a customs house in Galveston.

Thomas Sowell has one of his always-enjoyable Random Thoughts columns today. I like this one:

What do you call it when someone steals someone else's money secretly? Theft. What do you call it when someone takes someone else's money openly by force? Robbery. What do you call it when a politician takes someone else's money in taxes and gives it to someone who is more likely to vote for him? Social Justice.

Cruising the Web

2011-12-26T10:58:00.001-05:00

A belated Merry Christmas to all my readers! I hope you're having a lovely time with your friends and family. I am.

Here's a nice story following Stephen Curry as he went back to school at Davidson during the lockout. He's planning on writing his senior thesis on NBA players and tattoos.

See the winner of the worst Christmas sweater contest. It's a good choice.

How convenient: the Romney charity foundation he set up started donating to conservative groups just as he started exploring a run for the presidency.

Of all the things to criticize Mitt Romney for, his laughing at the Chevy Volt is not one of them. The only way that people can be encouraged to buy the car is with massive government subsidies. And the average income of a Volt purchaser is $170,000. So why are taxpayers subsidizing their car purchases? Mitt's right: it is an idea whose time has not come.

In suggestions for naming the Romney campaign bus, I vote for the RomBus. I like math jokes.

The Washington Post analyzes Newt's conversion to Catholicism thus following in a distasteful trend of examining Republican candidates' religion; a subject that the media was much less interested in exploring for Barack Obama at a similar point in the race in 2007. But there is one tidbit I hadn't known: he asked his second wife, Marianne, for a divorce just eight months after she had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. The contrast with Mitt Romney is telling.

Libertarians and Republicans would have benefited from giving Ron Paul the attention he deserves

2011-12-26T06:56:00.003-05:00

The New Republic has a catalog from some of the most incendiary quotes from Ron Paul's newsletters. It's a chilling list complete with snapshots of the offensive pages. It's a subject that would have received more national attention if Paul hadn't been regarded as a non-contender. Certainly, in all of those candidate debates there could have been one journalist to call him on the insults against Martin Luther King, the praise of David Duke, and this quote after the 1992 race riots in Los Angeles.

“Order was only restored in L.A. when it came time for the blacks to pick up their welfare checks three days after rioting began. ... What if the checks had never arrived? No doubt the blacks would have fully privatized the welfare state through continued looting. But they were paid off and the violence subsided.”

I wonder if all those young people who are attracted to Paul's anti-government and isolationist positions would still be flocking to his campaign and helping him to win various straw polls if they had heard the full litany of these quotes. And Paul's defense that he didn't write what was in the newsletter that went out over his name with him listed as editor and publisher is quite lame. In 1995 he was promoting them in a C-Span interview. Are these the management skills for someone running to head the executive branch? As Ed Morrissey wrote,

Um, yeah. A politician sends out a newsletter filled with these kinds of paranoid rants, and then claims it would be “too confusing” to fire the people who supposedly wrote it in his name and explain that he didn’t really believe in any of it. There’s some real truth-telling for you!

Morrissey then links to this post by Ace that should give Republicans pause.

There are a lot of people who find it implausible that Barack Hussein Obama didn't know the basic tenor of the Reverent Wright's sermons of hatred. It is unlikely in the extreme, they reason, that Obama could have missed each one of Wright's hateful, anti-semitic seethings -- these statements were too pervasive to believe he just happened to miss every single one of them.

Well, the old-line racist/neoconfederate ravings in Paul's newsletters (for which he was paid; people paid for this, and he profited) were more pervasive.

Furthermore, these missives were written with a specific goal in mind: creating a "paleoconservative alliance" between libertarians and old-time neoconfederates and former Klanners.

Does Doctor Paul seriously expect us to believe he wasn't even aware of the basic ideological line his newsletters were peddling? He claims he didn't even have that minimum level of editorial knowledge?

A line here or a line there, I could understand. But we are talking here about the basic thrust of his newsletters, which were paranoid, survivalist, racist, anti-semitic, and homophobic. All that's missing is some anti-Catholic agitation and he's got the full Klanner set covered.

Read the rest of Ace's post. It's a winner.

Nick Gillespie of Reason Magazine tried to deal with the entire issue but ended up basically saying it didn't matter because Paul is saying what they want to hear about the policies he would adopt as president and besides, the newsletters just don't sound like the Ron Paul they're familiar with.

Doherty is right that the appeal of Paul in the here and now has absolutely nothing to do with the newsletters and everything to do with the fact that he alone among Republicans (and Democrats) is providing an actual alternative to the status quo. As Doherty [a Reason writer who is publishing a biography of Ron Paul next year] says, in an age of historic and chronic budget deficits, Paul is the only candidate talking about actually cutting spending; in a country tired of war and unabated increases in military spending, only Paul is talking about reducing the size and scope of armed forces and redirecting foreign policy; and in a country that never embraced bank bailouts and monetary policy that abetted the asset bubble that fueled the financial crisis, Paul was the first person to talk about auditing the Federal Reserve.

While Gillespie wants Paul to deal "more directly than he has so far" with the newsletters, he also believes that Paul's positions are better for minorities in the long run so the newsletters should not be a disqualifying issue.

I'm always wary of political supporters who say that their candidate should "deal" with some controversial question that has cropped up as if answering some questions should put the whole thing to rest. Herman Cain supporters wanted him to "deal" with the adultery allegations as if all it needed was his denial for the whole question to disappear.

Jonathan S. Tobin is right. Libertarians need to deal with the issues arising from this pulling back the veil on Ron Paul. The conservative movement was stronger when William Buckley read the John Birchers out of it. The libertarian movement should clean its own laundry. As Tobin writes, the views expressed in those newsletters as well as his flirtation with 9/11 Trutherism and opposition to any tough stance against Iran or help for Israel are a feature, not a bug of Paul's ideology.

Gillespie is right that many libertarians and even Republicans will vote for Paul in spite of his troubling connections and not because of them. Many conservatives share with libertarians their disgust for big government and the compromises some Republicans have made in order to buy popularity. But Paul’s isolationism on foreign policy speaks to the conspiracy crowd precisely because his view of the world conforms to their vision of an evil America rampaging across the globe. Given his own extremism — which extends to his rationalizations of the Taliban and the Iranian regime — it’s little surprise that wingnuts of the extreme right and left flock to his cause (and deluge the websites of journalists who point out their candidate’s shortcomings with hate mail). Try as they might, respectable writers like Gillespie can’t explain away the fact that there is a straight line between the newsletters and many of his other views.

I understand that libertarians want to overturn the system, not just to reform it. There’s a facile logic to Paul’s approach, but that is exactly why the haters love him. As much as libertarians and anti-establishment Republicans want to believe in him, he is a product of the John Birch milieu of the far right, and that leaves them twisting themselves into pretzels trying to justify supporting a candidate for president who is irredeemably damaged by the lunatic fringe with which he has long associated himself.

In defense of Paul’s candidacy, Gillespie seems to be arguing that libertarians need to rally around him despite his imperfections because he is the most viable spokesman for their ideas:
Paul is not the perfect vessel for a libertarian message, but waiting for perfection is something ideologues insist on. Most of us are far more interested in someone who at least has shown he understands the most pressing issues of the moment — and the future.
With all due respect to Gillespie, you have to be taking some of the drugs that Paul wants to legalize in order to believe he has even a remote chance of being the Republican nominee, let alone elected president. Far from a pragmatic attempt to get him into the White House, his campaign is still very much the stuff of ideologues. Moreover, libertarians also need to face up to the fact that their little coalition of fellow travelers is populated by those to whom Paul’s disturbing record is an attraction rather than a drawback.

Principled libertarians need to rethink a decision to tie their ideas to such a flawed vessel. It’s more than obvious to all but his zealots that the vast majority of Americans want nothing to do with a candidate like Paul even if some aspects of his libertarian beliefs are attractive. Those intellectuals who try to justify supporting such a person’s futile run despite his long involvement with a hateful lunatic fringe are trashing their movement’s integrity for very little in return.

There are principled libertarians out there. There are libertarians who have an appealing message about shrinking the size of government and getting government out of our lives. They also can advocate for the U.S. pulling back from its role in the world without indicating that they think U.S. actions prompted the attack on 9/11 or that Israel is to blame for discontent in the Middle East. They might not have come out with positive comments on Bradley Manning as a patriotic heroand the Wikileaks publication of classified documents.

Instead of defending Ron Paul, why don't libertarians get behind those candidates? Why didn't they support Gary Johnson rather than Ron Paul? He had a similar message, more leadership experience without the kook baggage.

Even beyond the newsletters, Politico came up with six statements that Ron Paul needs to explain. While libertarians might agree with all those statements, other GOP voters might not be so fond of his disdain for Ronald Reagan or his support for drug legalization. Even his son backed away from Paul's position opposing the 1964 Civil Rights Act. As Alana Goodman reminds us, even if you ignore his newsletter and the statements Politico highlights, there are enough of his other statements to put Paul on the fringiest of the fringe.

This list doesn’t even include his vehemently anti-Israel comments, his opposition to the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, his close relationship with unhinged conspiracy-monger Alex Jones, and his wild claims that there’s a conspiracy to overthrow the U.S. government and institute a “New World Order.”

So Paul’s supporters are right, to an extent – other than the newsletters, there is no evidence that he’s ever praised David Duke or decried the “evil of forced integration.” But there is plenty of evidence that for years Paul has aligned himself with – and benefited greatly from – the same movement that has spawned much of the racism and anti-Semitism on the right. Looking at his record and hearing his recent controversial comments, the content in the newsletters isn’t as “out of character” as some have tried to argue. [Links in original]

As Paul does better in the polls, those newsletters and some of his past statements on foreign affairs particularly will come up more and more in the press coverage. And he will come to be the face,warts and all, of the libertarian message. If true libertarians don't want to be tainted by his racist statements, they should do more to denounce those statements now and to turn away from him. If not, their entire ideology will be irredeemably connected to such positions.

And on a purely political basis, this couldn't be working out any better for Mitt Romney, certainly one of the candidates true libertarians would most disdain. If Paul comes in first or second in Iowa, it will only hurt the other candidates' appeal as the non-Mitt candidate. The vote in Iowa is just 10 days away and there probably isn't time for the newsletter issue to emerge as a big time problem for him ahead of the caucus vote on January 3. However, as the race goes on, if Paul does well in Iowa, the newsletter quotes will appear more and more in the news. I would expect it to come up in the January 7 and 8 debates right before New Hampshire's primary. Paul's appeal will dissipate to just the fervent few who will support him no matter what. There is a quiet period in February in the nomination contest; that would be the time for a non-Paul, non-Romney candidate might hope to take hold.

But will there be another candidate with the money, organization, and appeal to take Paul's place in the non-Mitt sweepstakes? We've already seen that Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry didn't have the organizational chops to get on the ballot in Virginia. How many other states will their organizations fail to compete with a Romney juggernaut?

Nate Silver explained how Ron Paul's success is helping Mitt Romney. As Silver notes, Ron Paul has a ceiling in how many GOP voters would consider supporting him. And those numbers are before the gimlet eye of the media is cast over his record.

The irony is that Mr. Paul’s campaign may so far have made Mr. Romney’s path easier. It has released exceptionally effective commercials against Mr. Gingrich, while also feuding with Mrs. Bachmann. If Mr. Paul was a more traditional candidate, this strategy might make sense, since Mrs. Bachmann and especially Mr. Gingrich are threats to win Iowa. Weakening these candidates might also tend to help Mr. Romney, but that would not be Mr. Paul’s major concern.

But Mr. Paul is an unusual candidate; his ability to influence the Republican race depends as much upon the order of finish among the rest of the candidates as how well he does for himself. If Mr. Romney finishes a strong second in Iowa behind Mr. Paul, for instance, that showing will be in line with expectations — enough so that Mr. Romney will probably not relinquish his 17-point lead in New Hampshire and should book a solid win there. That would put Mr. Romney on the inside track for the nomination, with Mr. Paul proving to be little more than a footnote.

Just think if Paul had been exposed more fully earlier in the campaign. He still might have done well in Iowa, but he wouldn't have been in the top tier. Those Republican voters with libertarian leanings would have had to look elsewhere. Rick Perry might be the logical choice with all his talk of the 10th Amendment and getting the federal government out of people's lives. Or, once Perry and Cain fell behind, could there have been a strange sort of evangelical-libertarian alliance to get behind Rick Santorum? That seems iffy, but it would have been better than tying the small-L libertarian banner to a fringe candidate who, as Tobin wrote, came out of the John Birch milieu and felt quite comfortable with racial statements going out under his name in the past. It is a stink that will take some time to get out of the libertarian closet and that is a true shame.

UPDATE: John Hawkins has published a lengthy and revealing statement from Eric Dondero, a man who worked for Ron Paul as an aide from 1987 to 2003. If you want to have more of an idea of why Ron Paul should not be considered seriously for the presidency or even for Congress, you need to read this statement. Dondero denies that Paul is a racist, anti-Semite, or even anti-gay, though he cites a couple of incidents to show Paul's discomfort with gays such as refusing to shake the hand or use the bathroom of openly gay men. He says that Paul does not hate American Jews, but absolutely opposes Israel.

He is however, most certainly Anti-Israel, and Anti-Israeli in general. He wishes the Israeli state did not exist at all. He expressed this to me numerous times in our private conversations. His view is that Israel is more trouble than it is worth, specifically to the America taxpayer. He sides with the Palestinians, and supports their calls for the abolishment of the Jewish state, and the return of Israel, all of it, to the Arabs.

Paul's isolationism is quite severe, even to the point of thinking that we should not have been involved fighting Hitler in World War II.

Ron Paul is most assuredly an isolationist. He denies this charge vociferously. But I can tell you straight out, I had countless arguments/discussions with him over his personal views. For example, he strenuously does not believe the United States had any business getting involved in fighting Hitler in WWII. He expressed to me countless times, that “saving the Jews,” was absolutely none of our business. When pressed, he often times brings up conspiracy theories like FDR knew about the attacks of Pearl Harbor weeks before hand, or that WWII was just “blowback,” for Woodrow Wilson’s foreign policy errors, and such.

I would challenge him, like for example, what about the instances of German U-boats attacking U.S. ships, or even landing on the coast of North Carolina or Long Island, NY. He’d finally concede that that and only that was reason enough to counter-attack against the Nazis, not any humanitarian causes like preventing the Holocaust.

Paul was deeply opposed to the war in Afghanistan or any military response to the attacks of 9/11. Dondero, who was a senior aide to Paul at the time recounts that Paul was adamantly determined to vote against the war resolution against Afghanistan but only switched his vote at the ladt minute. Dondero believes that Paul realized that he would have lost reelection in 2002 if he'd voted the way he wanted. Dondero concludes,

If Ron Paul should be slammed for anything, it’s not some silly remarks he’s made in the past in his Newsletters. It’s over his simply outrageously horrendous views on foreign policy, Israel, and national security for the United States. His near No vote on Afghanistan. That is the big scandal. And that is what should be given 100 times more attention from the liberal media, than this Newsletter deal.

I'm not sure that I agree that the newsletters are no big deal. They are part of the entire picture. Paul's crazy views on foreign policy have been pretty clear from the debates. Other candidates, particularly Rick Santorum, have challenged him strongly on those positions. Paul's core group of supporters don't seem to care. However, highlighting those views along with the noxious statements from his newsletters may well serve to contain any growth of the Paul vote beyond those core Paul supporters. And that would be a very good thing for everyone else involved.

Legislation to seem rather than to be

2011-12-23T11:06:00.004-05:00

The agreement on extending the payroll tax holiday is the perfect example of how our nation's solons would prefer to pass something that they can pretend helps the economy and the blessed middle class than the tough legislating that would actually do something of real benefit.

There is no one who seriously believes that a two-month extension, or even a 12-month extension would affect economic growth. Honest economists realize that people don't make decisions based on temporary tax cuts. We need some assurance that those tax cuts will remain in place for the long term before we change our economic behavior.

Charles Krauthammer summarizes how silly this legislation is.

To begin with, what even minimally rational government enacts payroll tax relief for just two months? As a matter of practicality alone, it makes no sense. The National Payroll Reporting Consortium, representing those who process paychecks, said of the two-month extension passed by the Senate just days before the new year: “There is insufficient lead time to accommodate the proposal,” because “many payroll systems are not likely to be able to make such a substantial programming change before January or even February,” thereby creating “substantial problems, confusion and costs.”

The final compromise appears to tweak this a bit to make it less onerous for small business. But what were they thinking in the first place? What business operates two months at a time? The minimal time horizon for business is the quarter — three months. What genius came up with two? U.S. businesses would have to budget for two-thirds of a one-quarter tax-holiday extension. As if this government has not already heaped enough regulatory impediments and mindless uncertainties upon business.

But making economic sense is not the point. The tax-holiday extension — presumably to be negotiated next year into a 12-month extension — is the perfect campaign ploy: an election-year bribe that has the additional virtue of seizing the tax issue for the Democrats.

When George McGovern campaigned on giving every household $1,000, he was laughed out of town as a shameless panderer. President Obama is doing exactly the same — a one-year tax holiday that hands back about $1,000 per middle-class family — but with a little more subtlety.

Obama is also selling it as a job creator. This takes audacity. Even a one-year extension isn’t a tax cut; it’s a tax holiday. A two-month extension is nothing more than a long tax weekend. What employer is going to alter his hiring decisions — whose effects last years — in anticipation of a one-year tax holiday, let alone two months?

Remember that we just had one year of the payroll tax holiday. Have you noticed any big difference in employment or consumer behavior? And then there is the dishonesty that attends suspending payment to the supposed Social Security trust fund. For years, in fact since its inception, Social security has not been portrayed as a tax, but as insurance to which we all contribute and from which we all will benefit. But now suddenly, it's a tax, just like any other tax.

This is a $121 billion annual drain on the Treasury that makes a mockery of the Democrats’ reverence for the Social Security trust fund and its inviolability. Obama’s OMB director took Social Security completely off the table in debt-reduction talks under the pretense that Social Security is self-financing. This is pure fiction, because the Treasury supplies whatever shortfalls Social Security faces. But now, with the payroll tax holiday, the administration openly demonstrates bad faith — conceding with its actions that the payroll tax is, after all, interchangeable with other revenue and never actually sequestered to ensure future payments to retirees.

This money will have to be found somewhere. And remember, Social Security was going broke faster than anticipated before we even started with last year's tax holiday.

For years we have borrowed from Social Security surpluses to fund general spending. In turn the fund received government IOU's. Well, now there are no surpluses to help out the general budget. Instead, the already broke budget will now have to make up the shortfall in Social Security collection as well as paying back those IOUs. And this is all after the miserable attempt by the Super Committee to find some cuts in the federal budget over the next ten years totally fell flat.

Sure the Republicans were inept in how they fought this battle over extending the tax holiday. But this whole issue would embarrass Kabuki theater. The extension is just a political sop so Obama can pose as a tax cutter. It does nothing for the true problems with our economy and just deepens our deficit without accomplishing anything worthwhile.

North Carolina's state motto is "To be rather to seem." Observing our politicians has long convinced me that the reverse is true for our entire political system.

Cruising the Web

2011-12-23T08:49:00.001-05:00

Los Angeles is having to trim its budget in order to pay for the millions that they had to pay due to the Occupy LA movement.

Something else to blame bush for - the weak Republican field. Though the argument is rather a stretch.

Ron Paul can't make up his mind on the source of the racist comments in his newsletters from the 1990s. It's such a bad story for Paul that he walked out of a CNN interview when pressed on the story of those newsletters.

John Taylor makes a lot of sense - a major problem holding back economic growth is the instability in our tax policy. What economists understand, but not politicians is that temporary tax cuts don't lead to sustainable economic growth. Businessmen make decisions based on the longterm and not a few months' reduction in taxes.

This won't be good for Mitt Romney: he's refusing to release his tax returns. That's never good for a presidential candidate.

Ed Morrissey reminds us of when Ron Paul was praising Bradley Manning. And there are people who actually believe that this guy should be commander-in-chief?

George Will is where I am on Newt Gingrich's proposals to force the judiciary to yield to elected officials when he doesn't like their decisions.

Judicial deference to majorities can, however, be a dereliction of the judicial duty to oppose actions irreconcilable with constitutional limits on what majorities may do. Gingrich’s campaign against courts repudiates contemporary conservatism’s core commitment to limited government....Gingrich’s unsurprising descent into sinister radicalism — intimidation of courts — is redundant evidence that he is not merely the least conservative candidate, he is thoroughly anti-conservative. He disdains the central conservative virtue, prudence, and exemplifies progressivism’s defining attribute — impatience with impediments to the political branches’ wielding of untrammeled power. He exalts the will of the majority of the moment, at least as he, tribune of the vox populi, interprets it.

Here's the story of how California Democrats got around the voters who had chosen to put redistricting in the hands of a citizens' commission.

Jim Geraghty wishes for an "all-surrogate debate" with Bobby Jindal for Perry, Chris Christie for Romney, and J.C. Watts for Gingrich. Heck, forget the debate; how about an all-surrogate election instead of the one we have?

Typical liberal demagoguery to try to equate voter ID laws with Jim Crow and other forms of racial discrimination. It's all one more example of how Eric Holder is politicizing the Justice Department.

President Obama: Our Fourth Best President:

Cruising the Web

2011-12-21T11:21:00.003-05:00

James Pethokoukis discusses the five worst economic ideas of 2011. And then for good measure, he adds in 12 good ideas for launching economic growth in 2012.

The best thing about a Ron Paul win in the Iowa caucuses is that it could kill off the caucuses as an important political moment in the presidential campaign. Of course, its history of not picking the winners might have done that years earlier. And the Iowa Straw Poll has certainly meant little, but that doesn't stop the media from saturation coverage of a meaningless vote bought by the candidate who wants to spend the money and energy to bring in supporters.

If you haven't read Mark Steyn's article, The Gingrich Gestalt, do yourself a favor and head on over to read it.

More bad news for Governor Bev Perdue of North Carolina. The Carolina Journal reports that someone in the US Bureau of Labor Statistics has been leaking news of the unemployment numbers to her office and Mike Easley's office ahead of time. This is a violation of federal law. You can imagine the financial gain someone could make while having that information ahead of the rest of the world. It's not clear that they were doing anything with the advance information except crafting PR statements, but they should have been aware that they were receiving illegal information and reported it.

With Rick Santorum getting an endorsement from a leader of evangelical Christians in Iowa, he seems set for becoming the next not-Mitt candidate. He makes a lot more sense than Newt Gingrich did for those opposing Mitt to coalesce around. Their problem is that they waited so late in the game to do it. He doesn't have the money to make a big push and the holidays are going to interfere with the bounce he might get from this endorsement. Perhaps if they had done it earlier, he might have had more of a chance. The big knock on Santorum was that he seemed hopeless to win. Well, most candidates who have zoomed up to the non-Mitt lead seemed hopeless when they started. It's about time that Santorum got a chance.

With all the focus on the extension of the payroll tax holiday, people have lost sight of the fact that the patch on the Alternative Minimum Tax is set to expire. And then there's the Doc Fix some other tax loopholes that are also going to expire. But the Congress and President want their vacation. Lovely. Meanwhile, businessmen have to make decisions on their own policies without the certainty of knowing what their taxes are going to be over the next few years. No wonder they sit on their money and don't expand.

Fred Barnes argues that Barack Obama is so transparent that we can all see through him.

Whining about political ads is not a good strategy. What does Newt think will happen if he gets the nomination and goes up against the Obama juggernaut? And, as Jennifer Rubin points out, most of the negative ads are simply quotes of things that Gingrich himself has said or references to what he has done.

Eliot Abrams rightly calls out Thomas Friedman and Joe Klein for their anti-Semitic complaints about the pro-Israel lobby. What is the difference between what they have written and what Pat Buchanan said in 1990? We recoiled from Buchanan's words back then, but Friedman and Klein write from honored positions at major publications. Shame.

John Hawkins at Right Wing News publishes his list of the 50 Best Political Quotes of 2011. It's a good list. Find out which quote from Barack Obama makes the list and then marvel that he not only said it, but then did nothing about it.

We're not going back to the smoke-filled rooms

2011-12-21T10:42:00.003-05:00

Jay Cost makes the argument for going back to the convention picking the candidate instead of the present system with primaries and caucuses.

But the more I studied it, the more I learned that the old method was a very efficient and fair way of choosing presidential nominees.

I learned that it was not elitist; average people came from all over the country to Chicago or St. Louis or some central city to hammer out an agreement on who would lead the party.

I learned that it was open, in most respects: roll call votes were public, the speeches were public, and so on. You can go online and find all of the formal acceptance addresses and a lot of the nominating addresses without much effort. Very little of it was hammered out in secret; correspondence from generations long gone suggest that there was much less wheeling and dealing than we might otherwise expect, at least by the nominees themselves, who usually stayed away from the convention for fear of giving the impression that they were actively in pursuit of the prize.

I learned that the nominees tended to be fair reflections of the sentiment of the party during the period. There were some exceptions – like for instance in 1912 when Teddy Roosevelt was probably the choice of the grassroots of the Republican party but William Howard Taft won the nomination anyway – but by and large you had men on both sides who represented the majority sentiment of their own faction. A great example of this was the victory of William Jennings Bryan in the Democratic nomination in 1896. He was young and inexperienced, certainly not what you’d call an insider, but he tapped into the mood in his own party, and it gave him the nomination.

And I learned that, by and large, the nominees tended to be decent men. For instance, when you look at the Gilded Age – which spans from about the end of the Civil War to the Panic of 1893 – it was a very corrupt time in politics; but when you look at the nominees on both sides, you generally see honorable human beings. Sure, Ulysses S. Grant allowed corruption to fester in his administration and James G. Blaine – the GOP nominee in 1884 – was kind of smarmy, but they were the exceptions.

I tend to agree with him about the deficiencies of the current system. And at least, with the convention system, there had to be some sort of consensus among the party leaders to pick the nominee rather than going with whomever won momentum coming out of states like Iowa and New Hampshire. It's hard to see that there was much consensus in picking people like Walter Mondale or Michael Dukakis as the Democratic nominee or picking Bob Dole or John McCain for the GOP. And if Romney wins, it will be despite the lack of enthusiasm among the the Republican electorate for him, not because of it.

He may be right, but it's not going to happen. I can't think of any example in our nation's history when we've adopted a more democratic approach to government and then curtailed that reform once we saw its results. We've vastly expanded the franchise since the founding; we've added in the popular election of senators; we've gone from party caucuses choosing the nominee to conventions to using primaries and caucuses as we do now. We've opened up the selection of delegates to the convention. In fact, we're just now fighting an under-the-radar battle to keep the National Popular Vote proposal to doing away with the Electoral College.

The parties don't have the kind of power to walk back the primary system of choosing delegates to the conventions. Heck, they don't have enough control to determine the schedule of the primary votes or to back away from the present schedule and go to a more rational regional primary sort of system. No way they would have the control to drop the entire primary system and return to what were called the smoke-filled rooms to pick their candidate.

Certainly, in recent times we could see that a convention would do a better job. A Democratic convention in 2008 would probably have picked Hillary Clinton over Barack Obama. It's hard to believe that she would have been a worse choice than Obama. And imagine who might have gotten picked if the GOP were meeting in a convention this year to pick their nominee. Those leaders who took themselves out of the fight like Chris Christie, Bobby Jindal, Jeb Bush, Mitch Daniels, or Paul Ryan might have emerged as a consensus nominee. And they would have been men that the party could have rallied around instead of someone like we're set to nominate this time around with most of the party heaving a sigh of discontentment while they hold their nose and think of how much they despise Obama as the go to the polls.

It's a nice dream, but that is all it is.

Obama's self-love

2011-12-21T09:41:00.004-05:00

If we did have a race between Barack Obama and Newt Gingrich, it would be a battle between the two to see who has more self-love and a more grandiose vision of himself. "60 Minutes" left it out of their show, but it is now up on their unedited interview that Obama said this about himself.

“The issue here is not going be a list of accomplishments. As you said yourself, Steve, you know, I would put our legislative and foreign policy accomplishments in our first two years against any president — with the possible exceptions of Johnson, F.D.R., and Lincoln — just in terms of what we’ve gotten done in modern history. But, you know, but when it comes to the economy, we’ve got a lot more work to do.”

Oh, please. His biggest legislative accomplishments were the stimulus and health care. The stimulus so clearly failed of its objectives that Obama has had to make up a phony statistic of "jobs created or saved" to find something positive to say about its results. Practically every day we learn of some story indicating how that money was wasted. A majority of the American people would like to see the health care bill repealed. Republicans were able to ride disgust with Obama's so-called legislative achievements to historic victories in 2010.

John Hinderaker compares the numbers on unemployment, economic growth, inflation, and gas prices in the first three years of Obama's presidency with those of Reagan's presidency. The comparison is not favorable to Obama. In fact, it would make a great ad for some PAC to run all next year.

And those foreign policy achievements? What are those? I guess he's counting how he arbitrarily ignored the advice of the generals on the ground to pull out of Iraq and Afghanistan. Perhaps those were great moves, but we'll have to wait to find out how those turn out. Likewise in Libya. We're still waiting to see what happens with the so-called Arab Spring, but it looks rather ominous at the moment for US interests. And he can't count anything he has done with Iran to be a success. The only move that we can judge now is killing Osama bin Laden. And I doubt if there is any president who wouldn't have given that order.

Hinderaker challenged other bloggers and writers to contrast those three years of Obama's presidency with that of other presidents. Since Obama defined the modern presidency to include Lincoln, why not go back a bit further and include Washington? Or if that seems too much of a stretch, I'd put in the first three years of Truman's presidency. He ended the war in Europe and the Pacific, worked to stabilize the economy in the post-war period while setting us on the way to oppose the Soviet Union in the Cold War without going to actual war with the Marshall Plan and the Berlin airlift as well as establishing the containment policy that would last for decades. Legislatively, Teddy Roosevelt's first three years might stack up there. If we're going to look at the economic record, Coolidge deserves a mention. And Eisenhower is certainly in the mix. Heck, I'm sure that Bill Clinton would love to match his first term against Obama's.

But even if everything was great both domestically and in foreign policy in Obama's America, only the most arrogant of men would start praising himself in front of the cameras in this manner. He is so used to hearing over-the-top praise from the media and winning a Peace Prize before he'd actually done anything that he has totally bought all the hype. Can't he stick up for his actions without having to place himself in the pantheon of American presidents? His self-love is so great that he seems to actually believe this nonsense and see nothing wrong with advertising his own view of himself. And note that, in comparing his achievements to those of Lincoln, FDR, and Johnson, he inserts that telling adverb "possibly." So in his own eyes, he may possibly surpass those former presidents. I guess he did really believe his own nonsense about his nomination being the moment when the rise of the oceans started to recede and the planet start to heal.

His megalomania knows no bounds. Just imagine how great he'd consider himself if he got reelected.

Cruising the Web

2011-12-20T11:11:00.003-05:00

ABC Fact-checkers call the administration "misleading" in how they're characterizing the GOP plan to pay for the payroll tax cut.

Speaking of fact-checking, here's a welcome choice for "Lie of the Year." PolitiFact.com, not a right-wing organization, chose the Democratic smear that "Republicans voted to end Medicare" as their choice for Lie of the Year.

The WSJ has this great quote from economist Lawrence Lindsey:

Politicians who assert their role in directing funds to the "industries of the future" want to play entrepreneur with someone else's money. They are ill suited to the role. The politician who takes over the direction of capital is quickly revealed as this year's amateur following last year's experts.

Ah, what a lesson for President Obama and the Democrats to master. Alas, they still think they have the golden, enlightened touch when it comes to picking the winners of the future.

Perhaps that is why Ed Morrissey refers to Obama having the "Minus Touch."

Perhaps someone might want to check if Barack Obama has the Minus touch lately, because companies that come into contact with his Porkulus package keep heading towards insolvency. First we had Solyndra, followed by Beacon Power and Open Range, EnerDel, with a campaign-financing detour to MF Global. Next up — LightSquared?

Newt Gingrich might claim that he was just a consultant, never a lobbyist, but it is a distinction without a difference. Salon has the audio of phone calls that Gingrich made on behalf of his Center for Health Transformation to advise clients on how to take advantage of the good parts of Obamacare and how to use Gingrich to influence Republicans on which parts of the Affordable Care Act to repeal and which to keep. When asked about how his efforts don't constitute lobbying, he has this totally disingenuous answer.

In 2010, I asked the former speaker about his refusal to register as a lobbyist. Although he met with lawmakers and helped craft industry-friendly legislation with Capitol Hill staff, he told me that his influence peddling did not technically constitute lobbying because it “benefit[ed] the country at large.”

Yeah, and what lobbyist would admit that anything he or she pushed for didn't "benefit the country at large?"

John Hawkins excavates 12 Ron Paul quotes to explain why Ron Paul can never be president. Perhaps now with his position in the polls climbing, people can examine the racist and wacky Truther statements he's made in his history. Ramesh Ponnuru has more on why conservatives should not be voting for Ron Paul. James Kirchuk at The Weekly Standard has been doing yeoman's work at examining Ron Paul's newsletters and associates. The New York Times reprises those accusations today. Ed Morrissey explodes the ludicrous defense that Paul has made of those newsletters.

How likely would it be that a publisher made a million dollars in revenues from his enterprise, managed to employ his family at the business, and yet never bothered to look at its product? Zero, even if one buys the argument that Paul allowed other people to ghost-write the newsletter under his own name and in the first person without ever reviewing their output to make sure that it didn’t contradict his own political stands. And even if people are prepared to swallow all of that, the fact remains that Paul made millions as a publisher peddling vile, racist tracts and insane conspiracy theories, which any Democratic opponent would produce in toto during a general election, even disregarding Team Obama’s predilection for oppo research.

Here is what Romney should be saying when the Democrats come after him about his history at Bain Capital.

The 2012 election will come down to a choice between two visions of how the federal government should manage the economy: Obama and the Democrats believe the federal government should be an active market participant, investing in new companies like Solyndra and bailing out old companies like Chrysler. Romney and the Republicans believe the federal government should set broad rules that make America a relatively competitive place to invest, but should avoid directly picking winners and losers in the marketplace.

Jay Cost examines the general election and explains why Obama is a very beatable incumbent... if the Republicans don't blow it.

Thomas Sowell presents his argument for Newt Gingrich over Mitt Romney.

Conn Carroll researches the woman who served as the model for the artwork on Time Magazines cover for its stupid choice of The Protester. And she is the perfect symbol of the fatuity of the selection.

"I still have debt and I'm not paying it back because I feel like at this point, I have an obligation to try and disrupt and upset the financial industry," Mason told 360.

And how did Mason rack up all this debt she now feels she has a moral obligation not to pay?

"I got a credit card because I had no money and I needed a credit card to buy things that were essential to my life during this time. I had already spent all this money on clothes, make-up, accessories, and I got the credit card because I needed to pay my electric bill," she said.

And why did Mason buy all those clothes, make-up, accessories?

"Most of it was feeling inadequate and insecure and feeling pressure to look a certain way. What I also think is it was that you're just surrounded by these messages telling you to buy, buy, buy, consume, consume, consume," she said.

So Mason admits she got into debt spending money she didn't have on items she didn't need. She believes she has not only the right, but the obligation, not to repay her creditors because society forced her to "consume, consume, consume."

Mason is the perfect poster child for the Occupy movement.

What are the most annoying Facebook updates?

Robert Samuelson heralds the eclipse of Keynesian economics. As Keynes himself would have said, "When the facts change, I change my mind." Meanwhile, Steven Hayward finds that Hayek is vindicated once again.

What a funny way to run a country

2011-12-20T11:06:00.002-05:00

J.T. Young has a great post about the absurd budgeting process that is what we have today in Washington. He refers to the "Budget Onion," meaning that there is so much beneath the surface compared to what we're seeing go forth in the capital. We have the basic appropriations process which is supposed to be finished by October 1. There are supposed to be 12 separate appropriations bills to fund the government or else it shuts down. So far they've passed only three and so we are being funded on continuing resolutions. They keep reenacting these and each time it comes down to some do-or-die moment giving politicians many opportunities to bloviate and demagogue. It goes on and on until we are ready to start positioning for the following year's budget.

Then there was the big supposed crisis over raising the debt ceiling. We resolved that with the Super Committee which was supposed to find cuts in the deficit over the next decade by November 23. They failed so there are now automatic cuts that will purportedly go into effect. Yeah, sure.

With the Super Committee having been unable to achieve any savings, we get the budget onion's third layer: mitigating the automatic cuts. Expect both parties to seek to undo those cuts threatening their policy priorities -- for Democrats, social spending, and for Republicans, defense spending.

Because those automatic cuts won't happen until 2013, that gives the parties roughly a year to fight over undoing specific ones. If it took Washington all summer to reach agreement to cut spending by $917 billion in general, imagine how bitter the battle will be over avoiding particular cuts?

Then next we'll be playing out fights over the budget during the presidential election. It will be time for everyone to be posturing and holding the budget hostage while they play for the cameras.

The budget -- and more precisely, the deficit -- is one of the race's most prominent issues.

No wonder. At its most basic, the budget is simply the government's priorities measured in money. Additionally, its deficit is historically high. The result is that the budget has become a political battlefield expressed in dollars. It is impossible to campaign without taking stances on it. Those positions limit what budget negotiators can pursue, if they want Congress to pass it and Obama to sign it. And they are likely to dictate at least the opening positions in subsequent negotiations even after the next election.

I'd add in this week's fight over extending the payroll tax holiday. Each side has their favored way of funding the tax holiday. The Republicans are looking for budget cuts while the Obama administration and Democrats want to raise taxes on the wealthy. Whichever proposals win out, those solutions will be off the table for other money savings that we want to pay for the increase in the debt ceiling or other spending proposals. And that isn't even touching our biggest fiscal hole - entitlement spending.

It's a mess and so much of what you hear them fighting about in today's crises don't even touch on the much scarier fiscal problems looming over our future.

Democrats favoring big businesses

2011-12-20T10:32:00.002-05:00

This is how corporate welfare and higher taxes work. Illinois had such huge deficits that they've raised taxes on businesses to one of the highest taxes on business in the country. But then certain big businesses like the Chicago Board of Trade and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange plus Sears threatened to leave Illinois due to the higher tax rates.

Democratic Governor Pat Quinn and the Democrats panicked because they feared facing a steady stream of companies leaving the state. So they started handing out tax breaks to the bigger companies.

That law fired up a motorcade of lobbyists from major Illinois companies like Motorola, Caterpillar, Sears and others to descend on Springfield and seek tax breaks lest they leave for states where business taxes are much lower. More than a dozen companies have already left for Indiana and Wisconsin.

So Mr. Quinn started giving special tax passes to the biggest and most influential 1%. The Chicago Tribune reported in May that Mr. Quinn had already doled out corporate welfare to at least 80 firms, costing the state nearly $500 million since 2009. The Chicago Merc and the Board of Trade complained that the Quinn tax grab would cost them $50 million a year.

That refutes the idea that liberals pretend to believe that higher tax rates on businesses won't affect their behavior.

And who is stuck holding the bag: those smaller businesses that didn't have the leverage to squeeze tax breaks out of Springfield.

Naturally, Mr. Quinn justifies the carve-outs as essential to job creation. But in January Democrats claimed that tax increases would have no economic impact. Now small and medium-sized businesses that don't have lobbyists are stuck paying the higher tax rates. Mr. Quinn's policies benefit the 1% of politically connected businesses at the expense of the other 99%, often small shops with 10, 20 or 50 employees.

Mr. Quinn's other claim in January was that the tax hike was essential to balance the budget. Yet the Illinois Policy Institute recently calculated that over 15 years the revenue loss from all the corporate tax giveaways will exceed the revenues raised from the corporate tax increase. Oh, and there's still a budget deficit.

Once again the lesson is that high tax rates fail to raise the revenue that liberals claim, not least because liberal politicians follow their tax increases by passing out favors to the rich and powerful. The same will happen in Washington if President Obama gets his way to allegedly soak the rich. Too bad the liberal media won't admit it.

And while they're admitting things, they could also acknowledge that higher and lower tax rates do influence behavior, not only of individuals, but of businesses too.

Cruising the Web

2011-12-19T09:55:00.001-05:00

If you were celebrating the preservation of freedom of choice in your light bulb purchases, don't get too excited. It is only for a year and all it does to deny the Department of Energy the money to enforce the ban for a year. Who knows what will happen next year? And whether any stores that you frequent will actually break the law even though they know that the DOE won't be enforcing it?

If you're having trouble picking a 2012 candidate, try this match game to see which candidate is closest to you in policy proposals. Here's another one.

Newt goes for the standard excuse that politicians usually use when they're accused of something that they can't answer. He says he should have explained himself better about his work for Freddie Mac. And then he gives the silliest defense by saying that most of the money that he earned from Freddie Mac went to overhead. Well, money is fungible and whether the funds from Freddie Mac went to overhead or into his pocket, it's all the same thing when he's running a consulting firm. however, as the WSJ has reported, he was speaking up for both Fannie and Freddie and the whole idea of government-sponsored enterprises in 2007. He was defending the idea of such government agencies help people buy houses. Well, that is what led us into this whole mess in the first place.

The real history lesson here may be what the Freddie episode reveals about Mr. Gingrich's political philosophy. To wit, he has a soft spot for big government when he can use it for his own political ends. He also supported the individual mandate in health care in the 1990s, and we recall when he lobbied us to endorse the prescription drug benefit with only token Medicare reform in 2003.

As late as Thursday night's debate, Mr. Gingrich was still defending his Freddie ties as a way of "helping people buy houses." But that is the same excuse Barney Frank used to block reform, and the political pursuit of making housing affordable is what led Freddie to guarantee loans to so many borrowers who couldn't repay them. Yesterday's SEC lawsuit against former Fannie and Freddie executives for misleading investors about subprime-mortgage risks only reinforces the point.

Romneycare isn't any better as an example of Romney relying on government to fix a problem. So no one should deceive themselves that somehow Gingrich is all that different. And he's still misleading us about his work for Freddie Mac.

Now that Ron Paul is doing better in the polls and may even be set to win Iowa, it's time to revisit the Ron Paul Newsletters that he sent out in the 1990s. These newsletters contained racist statements. We heard all about a rock with a racist name on Rick Perry's family's hunting grounds that may or may not have been painted over when the Perrys purchased the land. How about hearing about statements that were sent out with Ron Paul's name over them? Read this piece from Reason magazine in 2008 to find out more about them.

The WSJ gives credit to Gingrich for raising the danger of an EMP attack.

Did you know this about Romney's time at Bain Capital?

Romney bought and sold or invested in Experian credit reporting agency, Domino’s Pizza, Staples Superstore, AMC Entertainment, Brookstone, Burger King, Burlington Coat Factory, DoubleClick, Guitar Center, Hospital Corporation of America (HCA), Sealy, The Sports Authority, Toys R Us, Unisource, Warner Music Group, The Weather Channel and more than more than a hundred others.

He started with $37 million. Romney left Bain in 1998. Today Bain Capital controls $65 billion in assets.

If you had invested $1000 in Bain Capital at the beginning of Romney’s fourteen-year run, that would have been worth more than $39 million by the time he was through.

These are the sorts of details Romney shouldn't be ashamed about plugging when he gets attacked for his work as some sort of Gordon Gekko.

Jeb Bush has an eloquent and well-reasoned plea for getting government out of the way for economic progress.

Have we lost faith in the free-market system of entrepreneurial capitalism? Are we no longer willing to place our trust in the creative chaos unleashed by millions of people pursuing their own best economic interests?

The right to rise does not require a libertarian utopia to exist. Rather, it requires fewer, simpler and more outcome-oriented rules. Rules for which an honest cost-benefit analysis is done before their imposition. Rules that sunset so they can be eliminated or adjusted as conditions change. Rules that have disputes resolved faster and less expensively through arbitration than litigation.

In Washington, D.C., rules are going in the opposite direction. They are exploding in reach and complexity. They are created under a cloud of uncertainty, and years after their passage nobody really knows how they will work.

We either can go down the road we are on, a road where the individual is allowed to succeed only so much before being punished with ruinous taxation, where commerce ignores government action at its own peril, and where the state decides how a massive share of the economy's resources should be spent.

Or we can return to the road we once knew and which has served us well: a road where individuals acting freely and with little restraint are able to pursue fortune and prosperity as they see fit, a road where the government's role is not to shape the marketplace but to help prepare its citizens to prosper from it.

In short, we must choose between the straight line promised by the statists and the jagged line of economic freedom. The straight line of gradual and controlled growth is what the statists promise but can never deliver. The jagged line offers no guarantees but has a powerful record of delivering the most prosperity and the most opportunity to the most people. We cannot possibly know in advance what freedom promises for 312 million individuals. But unless we are willing to explore the jagged line of freedom, we will be stuck with the straight line. And the straight line, it turns out, is a flat line.

A truly zany idea

2011-12-19T06:23:00.003-05:00

The rap on Newt Gingrich is that he has dozens of ideas, but only a few of them are good. A truly rotten idea is his push to limit activist judges with what are, frankly (as Newt would say), extra-constitutional means. On CBS's Face the Nation, he put forth his zany idea of how to rein in activist judges.

SCHIEFFER: Let me just ask you this and we’ll talk about enforcing it, because one of the things you say is that if you don’t like what a court has done, the congress should subpoena the judge and bring him before congress and hold a congressional hearing. Some people say that’s unconstitutional. But I’ll let that go for a minute.

I just want to ask you from a practical standpoint, how would you enforce that? Would you send the capital police down to arrest him?

GINGRICH: If you had to.

SCHIEFFER: You would?

GINGRICH: Or you instruct the Justice Department to send the U.S. Marshal. Let’s take the case of Judge Biery. I think he should be asked to explain a position that radical. How could he say he’s going to jail the superintendent over the word “benediction” and “invocation”? Because before you could — because I would then encourage impeachment, but before you move to impeach him you’d like to know why he said it.

It is a very dangerous idea to say that judges whose rulings politicians don't like should be called before Congress to explain their positions. That is what the written opinions are for. Gingrich likes to cite the Federalist Papers that the Judiciary was designed to be the "weakest branch." That is true, but it was not designed to be subordinate to the legislative branch in this way. This would put the judges under the sway of whichever party controls Congress and would endanger the courts' independence. Do conservatives want to see conservative judges hauled before Congress when Democrats control one of the branches of government? Gingrich's proposal has provoked criticism on both sides of the ideological spectrum.

Michael W. McConnell, director of the Constitutional Law Center at Stanford University and a former federal appeals judge appointed by Bush, also observed that conservative audiences “should not be cheering” and “are misled” if they believe Gingrich’s proposal is in their interest at a time when Republicans are looking to the Supreme Court to declare President Obama’s health-care law unconstitutional.

“You would think that this would be a time when they would be defending the independence of the judiciary, not attacking it,” he said. “You can’t have it both ways. It can’t be that when conservative Republicans object to the courts, they have the right to replace judges, and when liberal Democrats disapprove of the courts, they don’t. And the constitution is pretty clear that neither side can eliminate judges because they disagree with their decisions.”

Gingrich has also said that he'd take on the courts just as other presidents did.

“Just like Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln and FDR, I would be prepared to take on the judiciary,” Gingrich said.

Citing Lincoln’s criticism of the Dred Scott decision, Gingrich said he had no time for legal experts – including former U.S. attorneys general – who argue his plan would undermine the separation of powers.

“I would suggest to you, actually, as a historian I may understand this better than lawyers,” Gingrich said, adding that law schools have “over-empowered lawyers to think that they can dictate to the rest of us.”

No modesty there. In fact his arrogance is reminiscent of Barack Obama.

Gingrich likes to cite Jefferson as one who opposed the power of the courts. Jefferson's views of constitutional powers are not ones that we should be emulating today. In protest of the Alien and Sedition Acts, Jefferson authored the 1799 Kentucky Resolution that asserted the power of the state governments to nullify federal laws that they thought were in violation of the constitution.

That the several states who formed that instrument, being sovereign and independent, have the unquestionable right to judge of its infraction; and that a nullification, by those sovereignties, of all unauthorized acts done under colour of that instrument, is the rightful remedy

Can you imagine the chaos that would have erupted if states had that power? This was not a man whose interpretations of the Constitution are necessarily the ones we should be citing in 2011. Gingrich likes to use Jefferson's abolishing of federal courts that had been created by the Federalists before John Adams left power as an example of what he'd do.

Kelly: These are conservative former attorneys generals who have criticized the plan, as I say, dangerous, ridiculous, outrageous, totally irresponsible.

Gingrich: Sure. I’d ask, first of all, have they studied Jefferson, who in 1802 abolished 18 out of 35 federal judges? Eighteen out of 35 were abolished.

Kelly: Something that was highly criticized.

Gingrich: Not by anybody in power in 1802.

Well, there is a reason for no one in power in 1802 criticizing Jefferson - that is because Jefferson's Republicans had won control of the presidency and both houses of Congress in 1800. Of course, they weren't criticizing his abolishing judicial positions that had been filled by Federalists. But following such a precedent would mean each party that had power abolishing the judges that the previous presidency had appointed if the new president had power in Congress to do so. Think of what Obama and the Democrats could have done when they came into power in 2009. Following Gingrich's logic, they could have done away with Alito's position on the Court or other judges that Bush had put on the courts.

Even Ron Paul knew enough to question Gingrich's position here.

Paul: Well the Congress can get rid of these courts. If — if a judge misbehaves and is unethical and gets into trouble, the proper procedure is impeachment. But to subpoena judges before the Congress, I’d really question that. And if you get too careless about abolishing courts, that could open up a can of worms. Because it — you — there — there could be retaliation. So it should be a more serious — yes we get very frustrated with this. But the whole thing is, if you just say, well we’re going to — OK there are 10 courts, lets get rid of three this year because they ruled a — a way we didn’t like.

That — that to me is, I think opening up a can of worms for us and it would lead to trouble. But I really, really question this idea that the — the Congress could subpoena judges and bring them before us. That’s a real affront to the separation of the powers.

Jefferson's actions against the courts and against Chief Justice John Marshall in particular were some of the more questionable moves he made as president and in his post-presidential career. He maneuvered behind-the-scenes to manipulate opinion and actions against Marshall. In response to the 1819 decision in McCulloch v. Maryland, Jefferson fulminated against the decision and the assertion of power by the Supreme Court and allowed to be published a letter that he'd written concerning a book that a Mr. Jarvis had written. Jefferson wanted to assert his opinion that the Supreme Court should not have the ultimate authority to make decisions on the Constitution.

You seem, in pages 84 and 148, to consider the judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions; a very dangerous doctrine indeed, and one which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy. Our judges are as honest as other men, and not more so. They have, with others, the same passions for party, for power, and the privilege of their corps. Their maxim is “boni judicis est ampliare jurisdictionem,” and their power the more dangerous as they are in office for life, and not responsible, as the other functionaries are, to the elective control. The Constitution has erected no such single tribunal, knowing that to whatever hands confided, with the corruptions of time and party, its members would become despots.

While Jefferson proposed submitting constitutional questions to a vote of the people instead of judges, James Madison, who also opposed the McCulloch decision, argued that the only solution for those who disagreed with John Marshall's opinions was to amend the Constitution.

It is a further boast that a regular mode of making proper alterations has been providently inserted in the Constitution itself. It is anxiously to be wished therefore, that no innovations may take place in other modes, one of which would be a constructive assumption of powers never meant to be granted.

And should Andrew Jackson's opposition to the Marshall court be one that a presidential candidate emulate today? Jackson's most famous dispute was with Marshall's finding in Worcester v. Georgia that a state could not supersede federal treaties made with the Cherokee guaranteeing their right to own land in Georgia. Georgia ignored the Court's decision and Jackson refused to do anything to enforce that ruling supposedly saying "John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it." While historians doubt that Jackson may have actually said that, there is no doubt that he did nothing to support the Court's ruling. Contrast his inaction with Eisenhower's enforcement of the Court's ruling on desegregating schools when he sent federal troops into Little Rock.

And Gingrich looks to FDR's battle with the Court as a model. Remember that battle when FDR tried to pack the Court by adding six more justices? Even his Democratic supporters in the Congress failed to back him on that one.

Two of Bush's attorneys general recommend throwing out the more outlandish of Gingrich's ideas, while keeping his focus on judicial appointments as an election issue.

Some of the ideas are "dangerous, ridiculous, totally irresponsible, outrageous, off-the-wall and would reduce the entire judicial system to a spectacle," said former Attorney General Michael Mukasey....Mukasey and Alberto Gonzales, in exclusive interviews with Fox News' Megyn Kelly, said they are particularly alarmed by provisions such as allowing Congress to subpoena judges after controversial rulings to "explain their constitutional reasoning" to the politicians who passed the laws.

"The only basis by which Congress can subpoena people is to consider legislation. To subpoena judges to beat them up about their decisions has only -- if they are going to say that has to do with legislation they might propose, that's completely dishonest," Mukasey said.

"I think we have a great government, a great country because it's built upon the foundation of the rule of law. And one of the things that makes it great and the rule of law is protected by having a strong independent judiciary," Gonzales said.

"And the notion of bringing judges before Congress like a schoolchild being brought before the principal to me is a little bit troubling. I believe that a strong and independent judiciary doesn't mean that the judiciary is above scrutiny, that it is above criticism for the work that it does, but I cannot support and would not support efforts that would appear to be intimidation or retaliation against judges."

Mukasey has counseled Mitt Romney, Gingrich's chief rival for the Republican presidential nomination, but said only once, and he would do the same for any GOP candidate. He and Gonzales said they were also not happy with the Gingrich call for the power to impeach judges or abolish judgeships following any ruling considered particularly outrageous.

They were additionally very skeptical of Gingrich's suggestion that we should just "do away with" the Ninth Circuit because of some of the left-leaning decisions from that group of jurists.

"The fact is the Constitution empowers the Supreme Court to establish lower federal courts. Presumably it can undo lower federal courts. But to say that you are going to undo an entire court -- simply because you don't like some of their decisions -- when there are thousands of cases before that court is totally irresponsible," Mukasey said....While technically it's possible for Congress to impeach a judge or eliminate a court, both Mukasey and Gonzales expressed serious concern about putting a judge's job on the line based on his or her decisions.

"I would tread very, very carefully down the road with this notion that 'okay, this judge has rendered a decision that we think is very unpopular and we're not happy with it so we're going to try to impeach this judge. I think that's not healthy. I think the way you deal with decisions made by judges that you are not happy with is you win presidential elections. You elect a president who is going to appoint people to the judiciary who understand the appropriate rule of judges," Gonzales said.

"That's why they have a judiciary that's supposed to be independent," Mukasey added. "That's why they have judges who serve guaranteed life terms who have salaries that can't be diminished during their lifetime so that they are independent of political pressure."

Both Mukasey and Gonzales applaud Gingrich for calling attention to problems in the judicial system. Both say they support his calls to make judicial appointments more of a focus of political campaigns, a preference for judges who follow the original intent of the Constitution and steering clear of foreign law in interpreting the founders' intent.

"There's a lot in here that's good. Take a red pen to the parts that are bad, stick with the parts that are good and run on it," Mukasey said.

Gingrich might tout his standing has a historian, but he is wading into very murky waters here with the examples that he's holding up. While the Court can be infuriating in some of its decisions that anger conservatives, remember that there are just as many decisions that have liberals fuming. But just as conservatives derided Obama for his public castigation of the Supreme Court in his State of the Union address, we should be wary of some of Newt's more outré ideas and this is certainly one of them. It might play well with conservatives angry over some liberal judicial decisions, but this is a dangerous road to travel down. I'd prefer a more judicious approach than to say we should be hauling judges whose decisions we don't like before Congress or that we should impeach them or that the President should refuse to obey such rulings.

This is a zany proposal and the fact that Gingrich believes he knows better is telling of his temperament and judgment.

Cruising the Web

2011-12-15T06:58:00.002-05:00

For those like Thomas Friedman and Barack Obama who think we should be emulating China's economic policies, should take a look at China's deserted Disneyland.

How are Democrats going to demonize Paul Ryan's Medicare plan, now that a Democratic senator is teaming up with him on a proposal?

Clearly, Obama's 2012 strategy is to try to make the election about his Republican opponent. Hmmm which Republican might make that Obama task easier?

Marc Thiessen is exactly right: it's just crazy for the Romney team to be trotting out former White House chief of staff John Sununu to attack Gingrich. Do conservatives really want to hear from the guy responsible for giving the country Justice David Souter?

Newt Gingrich might tout himself as one of the original supply-siders, but the evidence isn't that clear when we revisit the Tax Reform Act of 1986. He preferred to use tax credits to earn the votes of various groups in order to model FDR, the man he considers "the greatest figure of the 20th century" and America's best president of that century, by buying off various voting groups with tax breaks rather than simplifying the tax code.

There is something about these satires that always amuses me. This is one of the best I've seen. I love the idea that Gingrich is citing William Kristol's eternal hope that there will be some other candidate entering the race.

(H/t Allahpundit)

The two sides of Newt

2011-12-15T06:52:00.002-05:00

Blankley captured the memories that conservatives have of why we liked Gingrich back in the 1990s.

But then there's the other side of Newt that has troubled me. Rich Lowry does a good job of portraying the problems with the two sides of Newt.

The New Newt says he’s 68 years old and therefore has mellowed and matured. He was 65 years and a few months old when he opposed TARP and then supported it. He was still just 67 years old when he criticized President Obama for not instituting a no-fly zone over Libya and then criticized him for doing it. He was on the cusp of 68 when he denounced Paul Ryan’s Medicare reform as “right-wing social engineering,” before contorting himself to explain it away.

We should all envy Newt Gingrich’s vitality that he has been capable of such youthful indiscretions in his mid to late 60s. The Gingrich story is less the tale of a slow evolution toward steadiness and wisdom than the fable of the scorpion and the frog. The scorpion stung the frog as it hitched a ride across the river because it couldn’t help itself. Newt is intellectually frenetic by nature. He’ll be 105 and wildly contradicting himself from one day to the next as he indulges his latest enthusiasms.

There’s something tremendously invigorating about this. They called Lincoln “old” when he was in his 30s, a testament to his gravity. Newt feels young even though he’s about as old as Ronald Reagan when he ran in 1980. If Franklin Roosevelt was like a bottle of champagne, according to Winston Churchill, Gingrich is like a snort of helium.

His volatility makes it impossible to make any statement about him as a general-election candidate with assurance. Will he enthuse the Republican base? Yes, right up to the moment he stops enthusing it with some jarring provocation. Will he beat President Obama in the debates? Yes, right up until he makes an ill-tempered comment that washes away all his impressive knowledge and brilliant formulations. Will he be the bipartisan healer, the partisan bomb-thrower, or the post-partisan big thinker? Yes, yes, and yes.

All that is predictable about Newt is that he is unpredictable, and, irresistibly, an election that should be about President Obama and his record will become about the heat and light generated by his electric performance. That’s the way it was as speaker, too. Eventually, he wore out his welcome in epic fashion. Benjamin Franklin said any houseguest, like a fish, stinks after three days. With the public and his colleagues, Gingrich became the houseguest who would never leave.

More than a decade after he was cashiered as speaker, he’s back on the basis of his superlative handling of the debates. He is better informed and has more philosophical depth than any of his rivals. Despite all his meanderings through the years, he knows how to win over a conservative audience as well as anyone. The debates have held out the alluring promise of a New Newt. But beware: The Old Newt lurks.

One example of the "bad Newt" that bugged me was his off-the-cuff criticism of Romney's experience at Bain Capital. It wasn't that Newt criticized Romney, but that he chose to use the left's tired approach chastising Romney for having sometimes had to lay people off in order to remake companies. George Will chastises Newt for his remarks.

This departure from his pledge that his campaign “will be relentlessly positive” represents the virtue of recycling applied to politics. Gingrich is reusing the attack honed by Ted Kennedy in 1994, when Romney suffered a 17-point loss in attempting to take Kennedy’s Senate seat.

The Kennedy-Gingrich doctrine is this: What the economist Joseph Schumpeter called capitalism’s “creative destruction” is not really creative. Rather, it is lamentable and, when facilitated by capitalists, reprehensible. For Kennedy, this made sense: Reactionary liberalism holds that whatever is, from Social Security to farm subsidies to the Chrysler Corp., should forever be. But Gingrich is supposedly our infallible guide to the sunny uplands of a dynamic future.

Will then contrasts Gingrich's own rhetoric with what Romney was doing in his career.

Gingrich has three verbal tics which, taken together — and they usually come in clumps — signal his depth and seriousness. Deploying his three F words, he announces his unique candor by prefacing this or that pronouncement with the word “frankly.” What he frankly says is that “fundamental” change is necessary for America. He knows this because he sees over the horizon, into a “future” requiring “transformational” (Gingrich’s self-description) leadership.

Romney, while at Bain, performed the essential social function of connecting investment resources with opportunities. Firms such as Bain are indispensable for wealth creation, which often involves taking over badly run companies, shedding dead weight and thereby liberating remaining elements that add value. The process, like surgery, can be lifesaving. And like surgery, society would rather benefit from it than watch it.

Romney surely anticipated that such an attack would come — but from Democrats, in the general election, not from a volatile Republican. He now understands Rep. Paul Ryan’s response when Gingrich attacked his entitlement reform as “right-wing social engineering.” Said Ryan: “With allies like that, who needs the left?”

Intra-party competitions are supposed to reveal candidates’ potential susceptibilities to attacks. Two unfair attacks against Romney concern his polish and his past. Four years ago, Mike Huckabee, targeting Romney without mentioning him, slyly said, “I want to be a president who reminds you of the guy you work with, not the guy who laid you off.” And there is a photograph of Romney that will eventually be seen far and wide (and can be seen at http://wapo.st/romneybain). It shows a young Romney and six Bain colleagues feeling their oats, with paper currency protruding from their dark suits. The young men are overflowing with what John Maynard Keynes called “animal spirits.”

We should welcome such spirits and should hope for political leadership that will hasten the day when American conditions are again receptive to them. Until then, economic dynamism will not return. We should not expect Gingrich to understand this until he understands that his work for Freddie Mac was not, as he laughably insists, in “the private sector.”

He probably believes that. He seems to believe there is always some higher synthesis, inaccessible to lesser intellects, that makes all his contradictions disappear. One awaits the synthesizing of his multicity tour in 2009 with Barack Obama’s education secretary, Arne Duncan, and Al Sharpton promoting “a common education reform” of primary and secondary schools.

Ouch.

But if you don't like his position one day, just wait; we're sure to hear another one down the road. Look at these switcheroos that he's pulled on foreign policy.

LIBYA

"Exercise a no-fly zone this evening, communicate to the Libyan military that Qaddafi was gone and that the sooner they switch sides, the more like they were to survive, [and provide] help to the rebels to replace him.... This is a moment to get rid of him. Do it. Get it over with." - March 7, 2011

"I would not have intervened. I think there were a lot of other ways to affect Qaddafi. I think there are a lot of other allies in the region we could have worked with. I would not have used American and European forces." - March 23, 2011

Gingrich initially opposed using military force in Libya, arguing in late February that if the United States simply made it clear to the Libyan military that "they had friends" in America, "you'd be surprised how rapidly they would shift sides" and "replace Qaddafi." He called for the United States to unilaterally impose a no-fly zone over Libya days later, only to criticize President Obama's intervention weeks after that. Gingrich rejected claims that he'd flip-flopped, explaining that what he opposed was the White House scuttling non-military options by declaring that Qaddafi must "go," only to then predicate the intervention on "humanitarian" grounds rather than the removal of Qaddafi.

Go read the other examples. He's such a wide-thinking sort of guy that he encompasses multitudes within himself. Romney is also a flip-flopper. They both are. It's very discouraging.

And now Paul Ryan has come out in an interview responding to Gingrich's advice that Republicans not try to go to far out ahead of public opinion in reforming entitlements.

In an interview with Coffee & Markets, Gingrich said that Republicans should not “impose” solutions that are “very, very unpopular.” Ronald Reagan, he noted, “ran to be a popular president, not to maximize suicide.”

In order to “govern over the long run,” leaders need “the American people [to] think you’re doing a good job and think you’re doing what they want,” he continued.

Ryan, in an interview with National Review Online, says that he disagrees with Gingrich, and urges Republicans to confront fiscal problems, irrespective of political risk. Worrying about electoral “suicide,” he says, is a disservice to voters, “who don’t want to be pandered to like children.”

“This is not the 1990s,” Ryan says. “The ‘Mediscare’ is not working and we should not back down from this fight. I, for one, believe the country is ready, they’re hungry for it. They are ready to hear real solutions. We shouldn’t wait around for the status quo to become popular.”

“Leaders don’t follow the polls, leaders change the polls,” Ryan says. “We have moved so far in advancing entitlement reform, not just in Congress but in this [presidential] race, with most of the candidates embracing comprehensive entitlement reform. That has been a very good thing. At this point, we should be moving forward, not moving backwards.”

So we have the visionary Newt Gingrich who, supposedly, wants to be a transformational figure and yet he's backing away from attacking the biggest problem facing our fiscal future. Not quite the image of Gingrich that he's been trying to get out there, is it?

Oh, why did Ryan shy away from running? Every time I hear or read something he's written I'm impressed that he's the very best in explaining what our problems are and what needs to be done. I'm not like one of the Weekly Standard die-hards who are still hoping that someone like Ryan will still jump into the race or that we'll have a deadlocked convention when we can erase the memories of all these disappointing candidates by turning to Ryan. I'm just so depressed that, at this crucial moment, we have such lackluster and disappointing candidates.

Beware Ron Paul's views on Israel

2011-12-15T06:48:00.004-05:00

Ron Paul has a formidable organization of dedicated supporters in Iowa. And organization matters a lot. And there may be plenty of people who have grown disgusted with the Newt-Mitt battles and want to send a message by picking the next guy. But, as Philip Klein writes, using a vote for Paul to send a political message will end up endorsing Paul's noxious views on foreign policy, particularly on Israel.

But the reality is that on numerous occasions, Paul has crossed the line from merely saying America should stay out of all conflicts, to actively attacking Israel and taking the Palestinians' side -- even when the non-interventionists should theoretically remain silent.

Nearly three years ago, Israel launched a counterattack on Palestinian terrorists in Gaza who had been firing thousands of rockets at Israeli civilians. In early January 2009, Paul released a web video in which he charged that Israel was launching a "pre-emptive war," that Palestinians were living in a "concentration camp" and that they merely had "a few small missiles."

He then repeated this claim on Press TV -- the state-owned propaganda channel of Iran's Islamist government. "To me, I look at it like a concentration camp, and people are making homemade bombs," he said of the situation in Gaza, adding sarcastically, "like they're they aggressors?"

Not only did Paul inaccurately portray Israel as the aggressor, and ignore the Israeli victims of Palestinian terrorist attacks, but he also played into the global propaganda campaign to delegitimize Israel. Israel's enemies think that Jews have exploited global sympathy for the Holocaust, so they routinely liken Israelis to Nazis with phrases like "concentration camp."

Voters may like the purity of his desire to cut spending, but that is not all a presidential candidate should be judged upon. President Obama has been the president most hostile to Israel since 1948. That would change with the election of a Republican president. So why would good conservatives want to support a guy who regards Israel as an aggressor who has set up a concentration camp in Gaza?

While a vote for Paul in Iowa would help Romney, Republican voters should consider the bigger picture. If they want to send a message, vote for Santorum, Perry, or Bachmann. Don't vote for someone of Paul's views.

How a candidate should sell himself

2011-12-15T06:36:00.002-05:00

I've been working this week with a school committee to help several of our students who are preparing for scholarship interviews. So I have this mindset of how can a person best present his or her record to win over listeners. We keep telling these wonderful students not to be afraid to tell more anecdotes that are illustrative of the leadership they've shown at school. It continually surprises us that these wonderful students who have been doing marvelously inspirational things still have trouble telling their stories in an interview setting in a way to let the interviewer feel an emotional connection with them.

As I came out of one such practice session and then started reading some of the political news of the day, I was struck by how Gingrich and Romney could use some of the same advice that we'd just been giving 12th graders.

Tony Blankley, who served as spokesman for Gingrich during the 1990s, takes up the cudgels for his former boss to argue that Gingrich showed true leadership in getting the policies through the House.

One of his key insights was to recognize that the two-dozen Northeastern moderates and liberals in the GOP caucus held the balance of power -- we didn't have 218 safe conservative votes in the House. Gingrich needed to avoid them playing off the GOP against the Democrats, which is what such a faction in any congressional party normally tries to do. Rather, he wanted them to feel fundamental loyalty and value in sticking with the GOP working majority. To do that, they had to get some of the provisions that they wanted in bills, often enough that they would stick with the conservatives on other issues.

This required a lot of maneuvering by Gingrich. Conservative members got frustrated that he did that. They called that erratic on his part. No, it was a necessary, calculated maneuver. He was actually shrewdly managing a precarious majority. If Gingrich hadn't kept the Northeastern liberals in the fold, very little would have been accomplished in those spectacular four years of legislating and leadership.

This might not be what conservatives today want to hear, but it is what leading any group to accomplish something in politics must do.

If I were working with Newt, I'd tell him to talk about those days of leading the House Republicans to try to achieve conservative ends like balancing the budget and passing welfare reform. Don't just say that you did it, but pull back the curtain a little to talk about how he got that done. How did he bring along the disparate branches of the GOP to achieve those accomplishments? Let him expand on his background to counter reputation he's earned as someone with scattered enthusiasms and a lack of follow-through and organization.

That's the side of Newt Gingrich that had me excited back in 1994 and supporting him through the whole mess of the government shut-downs which was mostly a tactical failure than a strategic failure. Yes, we lost the spin wars and Newt didn't help things by blabbing away about Air Force One, but the policy was the right one and I supported that.

If I were conducting those same sorts of prep interviews with Mitt Romney, I would be advising him to tell us more about what went into his experiences rebuilding companies or turning around the Olympics. Don't just tell us that you did those things, but bring it alive by telling us how you did it. Give us some anecdote that illustrates your actions. This is what Reagan was so good at. When people say that Romney doesn't connect with people, perhaps it would help him to make that connection if he stopped telling us that he knows how the private sector works and started showing us. He keeps repeating that same line but I don't hear the follow up about how that experience in the private sector would help him turn around the economy. I just the hear the assertion that it is so. He needs to tell us what he learned and how he's going to apply it to the nation's economy. If he learned about the crippling effects of regulation, give us an example from a business he was connected with and then connect that to Obama's policies. Think of "My Fair Lady" and how he can "Show Me."

It's advice that works for our students vying for a scholarship and it works for politicians competing for our votes.

What a Democrat says about Obama

2011-12-14T07:09:00.003-05:00

There is an amazing essay in The Hill by Democrat Representative Dennis Cardoza of California blasting President Obama's leadership and guessing that Obama would prefer to be a professor rather than the nation's leader. He criticizes the administration in its early deays for "idea disease" for throwing out a new idea every couple of days so that there was no prioritization of what was important and no follow through.

Then there was the President's arrogant, professorial attitude towards others.

Early in his administration, President/Professor Obama repeatedly referred to “teaching moments.” He would admonish staff, members of Congress and the public, in speeches and in private, about what they could learn from him. Rather than the ideological or corrupt “I’m above the law” attitudes of some past administrations, President Obama projected an arrogant “I’m right, you’re wrong” demeanor that alienated many potential allies. Furthermore, the president concentrated power within the White House, leaving Cabinet members with no other option but to dutifully carry out policies with which they had limited input in crafting and might very well disagree.

But it seemed just fine for the White House staff to be ignoring outside advice because they were convinced that they knew everything they needed to know and didn't need to understand how their policies would appear to and affect ordinary Americans.

One former administration official told me directly that the people in the White House “NEVER TALK TO REAL PEOPLE.” Another former Obama staffer confided to me that it was clear to him that the president didn’t mind giving speeches (lectures), but really avoided personal contact with members of Congress and folks outside the Beltway. “He doesn’t seem to derive energy from spending time with regular people the way Clinton did. He rallies to give speeches for the big crowds, but avoids individual contact,” the former staffer recalled. This “arms-length” attitude extends to top decision-makers in the president’s administration. A senior housing official recently told me that, despite the fact that he was responsible for crafting policies to stem the foreclosure crisis, he had personally never met with a homeowner who had been foreclosed on.

Why meet the ordinary folks when this philosopher kings and his coterie know so much better what needs to be done. They have the wisdom to run the American banking, car, housing, and energy industries. They know the exact tinkering that must be done to figure out the economy and figure they can control everything from Washington. Why should they need to talk to anyone else whether it be "regular people" or other Democratic politicians who, like Cardoza, have not felt the love from the administration.

It's a measure of how weak Obama is as a leader that one of his own allies would publish such a column. He never would have done this when Obama was running high on his media-fueled Messiah campaign. That would have come across as suicidal blasphemy. Today it's just easily understandable criticism that a Democratic congressman feels comfortable in delivering publicly.

Don't believe Obama's protests of ignorance

2011-12-14T06:44:00.004-05:00

Obama has been defending his performance on the economy by resorting to that excuse that failed politicians always give when their policies are unpopular. They say that their real failure is not the policies but their ability to explain them to those darn people who are too dumb to understand how wonderful those actions have been. President Obama has added a new fillip to this common excuse. In Obama's eyes, the problem was that he and his crew didn't know just how bad the economy was when he took office in January 2009 so he didn't explain sufficiently to the public the dire situation we were in.

“I think we understood that it was bad but we didn’t know how bad it was.” He added: “I think I could have prepared the American people for how bad this was going to be had we had a sense of that.”

Stephen Hayes remembers that Google is our friend and so revisits the warnings that not only Obama but every media outlet were making back in the Fall of 2008.

So was Barack Obama surprised by the seriousness of the economic problems in 2008, as he now claims?

In a word: No.

On September 28, 2008, in the first head-to-head debate with John McCain, Obama said: “We are going through the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.” He called it “a defining moment in our history.”

A post on the Obama administration’s transition page said that the United States “faces its most serious economic crisis since the great depression.”

Obama had every reason to badmouth the economy before the 2008 election. The media backed him up.

If Obama was exaggerating, others believed him. The depth of the recession was widely reported when Obama was elected. On November 5, one day after the election, Agence France Presse reported that “Obama faces the biggest global crisis since the 1930s Great Depression and a host of domestic economic ills, including rising unemployment, falling home values and deeply shaken confidence when he takes office on January 20.” An analysis by the Associated Press sounded a similar note, arguing “the president-elect must immediately confront the worst economic conditions since the 1930s Great Depression.” The Boston Globe called it “the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.” A memo from the Obama-friendly Center for American Progress called the situation “perhaps the most daunting economic challenge faced by a new president since the Great Depression.”

I remember back in 1993 when Bill Clinton claimed that the reason he couldn't pass the tax cut he'd campaigned on was because he hadn't realized how bad the economic situation was in until he got into office. It wasn't believable then and it isn't believable now.

What Obama was truly ignorant was of how his stimulus policy was going to fail to stimulate and, coupled with his health care bill and his regulatory policies, would prevent the economy from rebounding. And now his only defense is that his oratorical skills and knowledge of the economy were insufficient to warn the people about how long it was going to take for the economy to recover. That is, instead of his administration's projections about how the stimulus was going to lower unemployment and jumpstart the economy. He overpromised and now he's facing the results. His only defense is to blame his ignorance and lack of persuasive powers. Sure.

The Newt-Mitt warfare

2011-12-13T07:10:00.005-05:00

Yesterday Romney and Gingrich attacked each other in their major areas of weakness. John Podhoretz characterizes as mutual destruction by rhetorical cruise missiles.

On Sunday, Mitt Romney called on Newt Gingrich to return the $1.6 million he received from the government-sponsored Freddie Mac, the housing agency whose calamitous lending policies were a core cause of the 2008 financial crisis.

Gingrich responded yesterday by bringing up Romney’s years at the head of private-equity firm Bain Capital: “If Gov. Romney would like to give back all of the money he’s earned from bankrupting companies and laying off employees over his years at Bain, then I would be glad to listen to him.”

As Podhoretz points out, these are attacks aimed at their core weaknesses. Newt Gingrich's work for Freddie Mac hurts two ways - making Gingrich seem like a typical Washington insider who made money after leaving Congress by becoming a lobbyist/spokesman/historian for hire. And for Freddie Mac of all groups? That links him up with the housing debacle. And his too-clever-by-half defense that they were just asking him for his historical wisdom doesn't pass the laugh test. This is an attack that resonates with many people and would give conservatives pause. It is a legitimate criticism.

But Gingrich's attack on Romney comes from the left and sounds just like the sort of attack the Obama campaign would make against Romney. Yes, Bain capital took over businesses and people lost their jobs as they remade those businesses to shed unprofitable practices and build on the strengths of those companies. As a result many more people gained jobs when, without that investment of money and expertise, perhaps everyone employed by those companies might have lost their jobs if the companies went down the tubes. This is business works. As Podhoretz writes, Gingrich used to understand this concept.

In doing so, though, Romney and his team made decisions that over the years put thousands out of work.

Their argument, and it is the right argument, is that those workers would have lost their jobs anyway, along with everyone else at those failing businesses. Over time, by turning those businesses productive, they created better jobs and enduring employment opportunities.

That’s one key dynamic of capitalism, what Joseph Schumpeter called “creative destruction.” Someone once described it thus: “One observer said to me recently that in America every week 300,000 people are laid off but 350,000 are hired. It is that turmoil and turbulence of the marketplace, Schumpeter’s ‘creative destruction,’ that allows us to continue to grow and evolve and that in recent years has given us one of the longest periods of prosperity in American history.”

The person who wrote that sentence was . . . Newt Gingrich, in a 1998 Inc. magazine article.

Contrast what happened when Romney's company took over and rebuilt failing businesses to how Freddie Mac contributed to the housing bubble and our Great Recession. Is that how Gingrich, the world-transformer, envisions how to approach our nation's economic problems: bad-mouthing businessmen rebuilding failing businesses and supporting public subsidies of housing for those who can't afford such houses?

As Brit Hume observed, Gingrich "starts swinging" when he "feels upstaged or threatened....Just ask Paul Ryan."

There are plenty of legitimate ways to attack Mitt Romney's record as governor; it's telling that Gingrich chose this method of attack.

Cruising the Web

2011-12-13T06:06:00.003-05:00

Ah, this explains it. Newt Gingrich's vision of his own historical, transformational role in government comes from science fiction.

Speaking of science fiction. George Takei, the actor who played Sulu on Star Trek, is taking on "Twilight."

Marijuana growers have taken to national parks to grow their crop. And they're damaging the ecosystems in the parks in the process.

Georgia Republicans are not jumping in to help their fellow Georgian, Gingrich.

The 99% can't afford the Occupy Wall Street movement.

The becoming modesty of Barack Obama: He rates his achievements over the past three years exceeding all previous presidents except Lincoln, FDR, and LBJ. yeah, sure.

Harry Reid thinks that the existence of millionaires who are job creators are about as real as unicorns.

Close to 2/3 of the American public think that big government is a bigger threat to the country than big business or big labor. That's close to an all-time high in Gallup's polls since they've been asking that question in 1965.

The eternal cluelessness of Debbie Wasserman Schultz who denies that unemployment has increased under Barack Obama. When the facts aren't in your favor - just make stuff up.
Chris Dodd wants to emulate China when it comes to regulating the internet.

How 60 Minutes wasted the hour it had to interview Barack Obama: Well, of course. You don't think they were going to ask hard-hitting, penetrating questions instead of giving him an opportunity to spout his campaign rhetoric, did you?

Richard Epstein takes down Obama's ignorance of the economy as displayed in his populist demagoguery. And as Michael Barone points out, such populist arguments haven't won elections for Democrats since Harry Truman.

Dick Cheney said that Obama had three options after our drone went down in Iran, but rejected those options and instead asked Iran to return our drone. If that is true, it counters all the positive vibes that Obama has accrued from killing Osama bin Laden. I have no idea if it would have been possible to have destroyed the drone with an airstrike or if a team could have recovered it. It's difficult to believe that the President passed up a legitimate attempt to destroy the drone once it had gone down.

Fred Barnes argues that the debates have not served the GOP well by distracting attention from Obama's weaknesses and diminishing the leading candidates. On the other hand, the debates have given people who aren't in Iowa and New Hampshire to get a feel for these candidates. But Barnes is absolutely correct that the debates have placed a disproportionate amount of attention on their skills in short answer questions instead of their policy positions and by allowing the peripheral candidates the opportunity to hang around. But shouldn't such candidates hang around at least until people cast actual ballots?

Cruising the Web

2011-12-12T07:44:00.002-05:00

Perhaps the Mitt Rommey $10,000 bet will be a major turn-off for voters. Certainly the analysts on TV are all asserting it is. I watched the debate and my reaction at the time was that it was a mark of Romney's confidence in his position and I didn't take it seriously as a real-money bet since there was no way that Perry was going to take him up on it. However, if this is what people are talking about, then they're not talking about something that Romney would like them to be talking about. And since most people don't watch the debates, the spin is what matters. John Podhoretz puts his finger on why Romney might still benefit from the debate. Iowans may take a second look at Paul, Santorum, or Bachmann after the debate and such voters are more likely to come from those who have newly switched to Newt Gingrich than from those who have been supporting Romney all along. Romney is back to his original hope that the other candidates will split up the non-Mitt vote instead of coalescing around Newt.

James Joyner explains why establishment-types of Republicans are appalled at the idea of Newt Gingrich as the GOP nominee. It is very close to where I'm am on Gingrich.

I was a big Gingrich fan in 1994. While, in hindsight, I find some of the tactics used to get attention for himself and bring discredit on the Democratic House leadership of the day unsavory, he was a shrewd tactician. And he was as articulate a spokesman for core Republican principles as any national politician since Reagan.

But, like many a revolutionary, he was a lousy leader once he took power. He was constantly maneuvered into corners by Bill Clinton, who managed to use Gingrich as a foil in his triangulation policy. Gingrich alienated most of his own caucus and the country within a few months and became the bogey man of the 1996 elections, with every Republican morphing into his likeness in all the ads.

As to the issues, Gingrich makes Mitt Romney look like a pillar of consistency. At least Romney has an excuse, even if he can’t use it: he was running to govern and then governing one of the most liberal states in the union back then and is now looking to run the whole country now. It’s hardly surprising that he’d take different policy stances under those vastly different circumstances. Gingrich, on the other hand, has been a public intellectual for the past fifteen years and has been known to flip-flip on an issue in the space of a weekend.

Whiton’s specific examples illustrate the other major problem I have with Gingrich: he’s an unserious wonk who likes to throw ideas against a wall and see what sticks.

Here's a very nice take-down of Thomas Friedman. But Andrew Ferguson's is still one of the best.

Tina Korbe links to this excellent Reason TV to explain why the 2009 stimulus didn't work to bring down unemployment using the stimulus spending in Silver Spring, Maryland as a case study of why the stimulus was such a failure.

This is what the GOP candidates should be talking about instead of re-hashing the same arguments over and over. Of course, having the breathy, yet oleaginous Diane Sawyer ask questions at the debate guarantees that they won't be talking about what is wrong with Obama's policies.

Jeff Jacoby has the real reason why the US Post Office is failing.

Could this be the end of the model that presidential hopefuls had since Jimmy Carter won Iowa in 1976 of having to campaign in person throughout the state?

The pictures and stories coming out of Russia to protest Putin's cheating in the election are stunning. The government has had to resort to tricks like scheduling tests for Saturdays to keep young people in school and from attending the protests. Not a good sign.

Which candidate would be the William Jennings Bryan of 2012?

Why wasn't this what the Iowa debate was about?

2011-12-12T06:42:00.002-05:00

Kyle Smith writes in the New York Post about how Obama's obnoxious Osawatomie speech was based on the President's typical fallacies and strawmen. And above all, Obama betrays yet one more time that he has absolutely no understanding of how the economy works or how jobs are created.

In essence Obama’s speech is a bald plea to restrict freedom: to seize more in tax to take away spending decisions from more individuals. To keep job creation tied up, held hostage to notions of “greed” or “unfairness,” because “the free market has never been a free license to take whatever you can from whomever you can,” as though every great fortune hides a crime. He brags about all the regulations he is doing away with (a talking point that fools no one) even as he costs Kansas thousands of jobs by refusing to approve the Keystone XL fuel pipeline that is ready to be built in the state.

Even more alarming was Obama’s freedom-smothering suggestion that if businesses know what’s good for them, they had better start factoring in some nebulous overall consideration of the community’s needs, which look amazingly similar to the Obama campaign’s needs.

Rebuilding the economy, the president said, “will require American business leaders to understand that their obligations don’t just end with their shareholders.” They don’t? Even after you’ve paid your local, state and federal income taxes; even after you’ve gotten everything up to code with every clipboard-wielding bureaucrat who wants to shut you down — you still have to worry about whether Washington approves of your overall vibe. Obama said companies should bring back jobs from China “because it’s good for business” (how about we let business decide that?) and “because it’s good for the country.”

In other words, businesses should do things as stupidly as Washington does them, to placate special interests and buy themselves popularity. If Apple stopped manufacturing in China and did everything in California, would anyone buy a $10,000 iPad? Would Apple be doing the community, much less its shareholders, any favors by going broke trying to sell things for more than customers will pay?

Instead of asking the questions that George Stephanopoulos and Diane Sawyer to spark division among the candidates or to play into liberal beliefs that there is something morally redeeming about having been in economic difficulties at one time, why couldn't the debate have been about giving the candidates an opportunity to express how they would answer Obama's arguments?

There's a lot more to the presidency than debate performance

2011-12-12T06:26:00.001-05:00

Ross Douhat nails it when he explains why GOP voters are falling for Gingrich now. It's not that different from how 2004 Democrats thought that nominating Kerry would help them show up Bush as a chickenhawk by having an actual Vietnam Vet report for service as their nominee.

But Newt Gingrich’s recent rise in the polls is being sustained, in part, by a right-wing version of exactly the impulse that led Democrats to nominate Kerry: a desperate desire to somehow beat Barack Obama at his own game, and to explode what conservatives consider the great fantasy of the 2008 campaign — the conceit that Obama possessed an unmatched brilliance and an unprecedented eloquence.

But nominating someone just so the debates would show up Obama is not what the GOP needs to be doing.

More important for the Republican Party’s purposes, it isn’t 2008 anymore, and conservatives don’t actually need to explode the fantasy of Obama’s eloquence and omnicompetence. The harsh reality of governing has already done that for them. Nobody awaits the president’s speeches with panting anticipation these days, or expects him to slay his opponents with the power of his intellect. Obamamania peaked with the inauguration, and it’s been ebbing ever since.

Newt Gingrich might debate circles around Obama. He might implode spectacularly, making a hot mess of himself while the president keeps his famous cool. But either way, setting up a grand rhetorical showdown seems unlikely to supply a disillusioned country with what it’s looking for from Republicans in 2012.

Conservatives may want catharsis, but the rest of the public seems to mainly want reassurance. They already know Barack Obama isn’t the messiah he was once cracked up to be. What they don’t know is whether they can trust anyone else to do better.

And Gingrich is not a figure whose history as a leader inspires reassurance and trust. If you want an insight to why so few of his House colleagues are supporting him this time around, read this look at his party leadership in 1998.

A divider, not a uniter

2011-12-09T07:28:00.002-05:00

Remember when the Barack Obama persona was about how there was no red America or blue America and that we should stop demonizing those with whom we disagree? I know, I know. That seems like a different century from today's view of three years of this man as president. Now he'll tell us that he isn't engaging in class warfare and then go ahead and do what he just said he wouldn't do. Peter Kirsanow has a wonderful post up with a non-exhaustive list of the phrases that Obama used during his Osawatomie speech.

‘This Isn’t About Class Warfare’

. . . President Obama said during (and about) his speech in Osawatomie, Kansas on Tuesday. Except that a quick scan of his remarks shows that he singled out the following as having an “unfair” advantage, “tricking families,” “getting rich,” and engaging in all manner of depredation, generally at the expense of the middle class:

“those at the very top”

“the privileged few”

“insurance companies”

“typical CEO”

“the top one percent”

“mortgage lenders that tricked families into buying homes”

“somebody pulling in $50 million”

“Wall Street”

“failed CEOs”

“payday lenders”

“most Republicans in Washington”

“some billionaires”

“the financial sector”

“the wealthiest Americans in the country”

“your employer”

“Republicans in Congress”

“a certain crowd in Washington”

“Republicans in the Senate”

“banks and institutions making bets with other people’s money”

“the same folks who are running Congress now”

“Warren Buffet”

“debt collectors”

“a quarter of all millionaires”

“the top one hundredth percent”

“major banks”

“ a few who can afford high-priced lobbyists”

“the wealthiest Americans in the country”

“those who would go back to policies that stacked the deck against the middle class”

“the breathtaking greed of a few”

“big banks”

The list is not exhaustive.

He was not being divisive. Just channeling the Rough Rider, that’s all.

Cruising the Web

2011-12-09T07:03:00.003-05:00

Apparently, there is big business in those ugly Christmas sweaters.

California is a fiscal nightmare. And it is what the country's future would be if Obama got his way.

It is clear that Eric Holder learned the important lessons from his time serving in Bill Clinton's administration. Now he's trying to explain to Congress the difference between lying and misleading Congress. Just the sort of distinction that we look to in our attorney general.

Apparently, that meeting between Newt Gingrich and conservative leaders didn't go as swimmingly as first portrayed. Of course, a similar meeting with Mitt Romney wouldn't have been all that pleasant either.

Herman Cain considering doing a radio or TV show. I think that was this was all about and he was surprised to rise to the top of the polls and be discussed as the leading candidate.

Peggy Noonan proposes a bumper sticker for Newt. "Newt Gingrich: It's all true." All the good and all the bad.

Steven Malanga debunks the myth of local government layoffs that Biden has been peddling.

Take local education workers. Hiring has far outpaced the growth in student enrollment, driving down the number of students per teacher in American public schools to 15.6 in 2010 from 26.9 in 1955, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Robust hiring has continued even during periods of enrollment declines, including from 1971 through 1984, when the number of public-school students fell virtually every year, declining in total by 15%, while the ranks of teachers grew by 7%.

But we rarely hear much about enrollment levels when education staffing is debated. Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, for instance, show that local education employment is back to about where it was in 2006 after recent cutbacks. Sound terrible? Maybe not so much when you consider that public-school enrollment has been stagnant since 2006.

And so it goes with the misleading stories and rhetoric.

Just what the Red Cross needs to be concerned over - possible violations of the Hague and Geneva conventions by....video games.

A better way to save money

2011-12-09T06:48:00.004-05:00

Stephen Moore and Walter E. Williams have a proposal to counter the Obama ideas of taxing the wealthy. Instead, let's stop subsidizing the wealthy.

Raising tax rates on high incomes, as Mr. Obama proposes, would only cut the deficit by about 6%, even assuming—wrongly—that those higher taxes wouldn't slow the economy.

The much bigger fiscal drain from the wealthy is on the federal expenditure side of the budget ledger: tens of billions each year in grants, loans, subsidies, guarantees and benefits pocketed each year by wealthy Americans as individuals and firms. Any campaign to downsize big government will only succeed if the needed deep cuts in spending are deemed by voters as equitable. In an era of $1 trillion-plus deficits and a $15 trillion national debt, we would like to think that a national consensus could be reached to eliminate handouts to individuals and companies with net incomes above $1 million.

We've long argued that the GOP should lead the charge. Republicans should fight harder to eliminate taxpayer funds for the Export-Import Bank, which makes loans to major Fortune 500 companies like Boeing and General Electric, to solar- and wind-energy companies like Solyndra, and for Department of Commerce subsidy programs to manufacturers and high tech companies.

The left-leaning Environmental Working Group found that among the beneficiaries of various farm programs from 1995-2005 were David Rockefeller and Ted Turner, and companies that own farms such as John Hancock Life Insurance. Last month Sen. Tom Coburn (R., Okla.) put out a report, "Subsidies of the Rich and Famous," that identified tens of billions of dollars of handouts to the wealthy. His report included farm payments under government programs to rock stars like Bruce Springsteen and former professional athletes like Scottie Pippen.

Rather than stand up against all this, Republicans recently allowed the Federal Housing Administration to guarantee home mortgages of up to $750,000. Not many in the bottom 99% can afford such homes.

Meanwhile, President Obama (and many interest groups on the left) continue to defend the tens of billions of dollars that Energy Secretary Steven Chu has doled out to "green companies" and their millionaire investors. Mr. Obama is a big fan of the International Monetary Fund, which bails out banks and financial institutions on a global scale. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi has torpedoed all Republican budget proposals to modestly means-test Social Security and Medicare. So billionaire seniors receive full benefits.

Of course, Democrats like to believe that they can pick the winners and losers in the economy and then use taxpayer money to help their favored choices. This is bad economics and a waste of money.

We propose a new law: Let's call it The Millionaire Subsidy Elimination Act. It would prohibit anyone with an annual income over $1 million from receiving any government benefits. There's a big advantage to cutting benefits to millionaires rather than raising their tax rates to 40% or 50%. Slashing expenditures would help grow the economy, while raising tax rates would hurt U.S. competitiveness and job creation....

Washington doesn't create wealth. It reshuffles it. If our calculations—which include corporate welfare and other subsidies reported in a variety of studies including most recently Mr. Coburn's—are correct, there is now more than $200 billion in annual income transfers every year to Americans whose whose incomes exceed $1 million. Washington's myriad subsidy schemes betray the middle class and the poor in ways that sanctimonious politicians who talk incessantly about "fairness" seldom admit to.

You'd think that such a plan could gain bipartisan support though it is very tough for politicians to give up their power to dole out money to their favored causes. But they'd be put in the position of having to defend giving federal money that is such short supply to businesses and the wealthy.

Is 2012 truly going to be a different sort of nomination fight?

2011-12-08T06:57:00.003-05:00

We're going to see a test of the theory that 2012 will be a different election from previous nomination fights and that organization will matter much less than the celebrity and support earned from all the debates. Newt Gingrich has little organization on the ground in any of the early states. Mitt Romney has organization in states throughout the nation. The Romney campaign recognizes that the new proportional rules make this a different sort of election from earlier elections in that it will take longer for a winner to be declared.

Gingrich is scrambling to just get his name on the ballot in some states. He missed the deadline for Missouri and now he needs to qualify in other states. Perhaps all the enthusiasm that he's generated in the past few weeks will simplify his task, but it's not a good sign that he is failing at this simple test of executive ability in running a campaign.

It's not encouraging to learn of how Gingrich piled up big debts just this year in running his campaign. He was blowing money on expensive private jets and other expenses and still hasn't paid back those creditors. And one of his biggest creditors is Newt Gingrich himself.

One of the campaign’s biggest creditors is Gingrich himself, who billed his campaign more than $125,000 for a mailing list and travel expenses, about half of which remained unpaid at the end of last quarter.

Hammond said about $42,000 of the debt owed to Gingrich in the second quarter was for the cost of the candidate’s personal mailing list, which he sold to the campaign. Hammond said Gingrich was paid for the list in the third quarter. The payment does not appear to be disclosed as required on Federal Election Commission reports, something Hammond said might have been an oversight.

The payment suggests that Gingrich was reimbursed ahead of other creditors for a list that he could have given to the campaign as an in-kind contribution.

Ah, is that really the type of leadership and executive ability that we're looking for? Someone who still is trying to make money off of his own campaign and paying himself before he pays other businesses to whom he owes money?

Karl Rove, who, whatever you may think of him, knows about running a winning campaign in the old-style politics where organization and money are important requirements for securing the nomination, thinks that Gingrich's lack of organization in Iowa may lead him to under-perform his expectations in Iowa.

Last election Republicans ridiculed Barack Obama's claim that he had executive ability because he'd run a successful presidential campaign. We've seen how ridiculous that claim was. But that doesn't mean that the converse is true - that someone who can't lead a good campaign organization will be a good Chief Executive. And with all the stories we've heard about Newt's tantrums and lack of organization as Speaker of the House don't give us any confidence that he's truly a man suited to be leading the country.

Cruising the Web

2011-12-08T06:22:00.004-05:00

T.J. Rodgers explains the lunacy of Obama's economic policies by looking at solar policy as a microcosm of the administration's lack of logic.

Here then, is a practical guide to the Obama administration's nonsensical solar policy: Washington gives tax breaks to Wall Street to fund LLCs that buy solar panels from the Chinese to "help" the American solar industry, while the ITC threatens to levy a tariff on those solar panels, which would raise the price of solar energy to U.S. homeowners. In short, Wall Street pockets the money and consumers get higher solar-energy prices.

We should stop reflexively indicting Wall Street "greed" and focus instead on Washington as the disruptive force in one market meltdown after another. Solyndra, the poster child of the Law of Misguided Subsidies, borders on irrelevancy compared to the full impact of bad economic policy.

The Washington Post's Fact Checker rates Obama's claims in his Osawatomie speech a Three Pinocchios speech with his claims about the rich paying only 1% in taxes.

The deputy commanding general of the U.S. military in Iraq contradicts Joe Biden's claim that the Iranian interference in Iraq is "very much overstated."

Daniel Henninger sees a parallel to Godfather II in Obama's Kansas speech as he singles out the wealthy who are supposedly getting a free ride in today's economy, he's cutting a segment of the population out. And what is his great idea of how to help the rest of us once he's slammed TR's "malefactors of great wealth?"

The Kansas speech was built around one concrete policy idea: that the rich and millionaires (officially still defined as families with before-tax income above $250,000) should send him more money so he can "invest" it. This single policy, if we heard correctly, will end high unemployment, raise middle-class incomes, put children through college, make America fair and defeat countries that pollute.

Yeah, sure. We've seen what that approach has done for us since 2009 and the proof isn't there.

The left as seen through the Center for American Progress and Media Matters have been organizing a steady campaign against Israel. Is this really where the Democrats want to be?

Ann Coulter bitingly revisits Newt's long-time adoration of the Tofflers and the "Third Wave" about how we need lots of government programs to help people adjust to the technology revolution. As Mark Steyn imagines a Gingrich candidacy,

We’d wind up with a cross between Teddy Roosevelt and Alvin Tofler who canoodled on the sofa with Nancy Pelosi demanding Big Government climate-change conventional-wisdom punitive liberalism just as the rest of the planet was finally getting off the bandwagon . . . but the media would still insist on dusting off their 1994 “The Gingrich Who Stole Christmas” graphics.

And then Steyn on the radio,

“I think this is the worst of all worlds for Republicans,” he said. “He is someone whose inclination — he’s got this progressive big government streak. He’s sort of like Teddy Roosevelt mixed with some sort of novelty-crazed futurologist. He has a big government progressivism sort of inside him, yet combined with the reputation of some sort of ruthless right-wing extremist.”

Yeah, that's a winning candidate right there. No wonder the Democrats are happy to throw bombs at Romney and cheer Gingrich on from the sidelines.