Mitt Romney, the non-political

I know many are talking about Clint Eastwood's "speech" (which, apart from some of the awkward delivery, had some great, great lines) but I want to focus on what Mitt Romney said (or didn't say).  I thought it was a fine speech, considering the person giving it.  For what it's worth, Romney "humanized" himself and let Americans see some sides of him that they never saw before.  His charity work and generous gifts to those who never even asked for help are great examples of the high character that he obviously has.  This was good because most of the public who don't closely follow politics probably thinks Romney has barriers made up of poor people surrounding his home in Massachusetts or that his Medicare plan consists of running over old people with his giant gas guzzling SUV.

Romney also said a lot about what he has done to include women in his cabinet while he was governor and what he thinks of women generally -- obviously to counter the Obama campaign's War on Women argument.  I thought this was very close to pandering, and overall, it's not a great strategy (I know this speech was geared toward the independents who voted for Obama in 2008 but still).  I just think it teaches the wrong thing -- that Obama implicitly had a point when he accused Romney and Republicans in general of having a problem with women.  And ultimately this leads one to the idea that maybe Republicans have a fundamental problem -- not simply a problem of getting votes -- with those people who either are different from them in color, gender, or religion (I mean, look at the overly white crowd!!! says the generic MSNBC commentator).  But it can't be said enough that the Republican Party platform of 1856 stated it's outright rejection to the "twin relics of barbarism -- Polygamy, and Slavery."  That rejection of course was based on principles of right and wrong, good bad -- principles that are derived from both reason and revelation and have nothing to do with color, gender, or religion.

But overall, I felt somewhere along the lines that Charles Kesler described in his critique of the speech:

Nonetheless, the contrasts between Romney tonight and Ryan last night were manifest. Ryan spoke from strength, Romney from weakness, in several senses. Romney’s speech seemed to have been written by consultants who regarded two goals as uppermost: Mollify women voters, and justify why a businessman should be president. In pursuit of the former he “humanized” himself by invoking his parents, his undeniable love for his wife and kids and grandkids, and his appointment of women to high positions at Bain Capital and in the Massachusetts governor’s office. His advisers must be very worried about the female vote. He didn’t exclaim “I love you women!” but he did everything short of that to poach votes from Obama among that demographic. This pandering may have been necessary, but it did not make him look more presidential. On the second point, he went as far as he could to conflate the presidency with a kind of super-corporate CEO, who would provide “jobs,” “lots of jobs” for the American people. Our circumstances demand a strong appeal for jobs, but he seemed to be saying that Obama’s problem is not so much that he’s a liberal statist as that he has never had to meet a payroll in the private sector. What about Warren Buffett then? Or George Soros? Plenty of billionaires, worth much more than Mr. Romney, find Obama’s programs eminently practical and reasonable. The problem is with their liberalism, not their business acumen.

Romney shunned that sort of direct political confrontation, probably because he’s not naturally very political and because his advisers aren’t either, understanding politics only as small ball. He assured us that it was all right to be disappointed in Obama’s performance. Why shouldn’t we be indignant about it? Perhaps he left that line of appeal to Ryan, who gave plenty of reasons why Obama’s administration was dangerous to liberty and self-government, as well as prosperity. In fairness, Romney pointed out that Americans deserved better policies, which would have provided the basis for indignation had he pursued the argument. But he didn’t, at least not with gusto. Politics means, in the elementary sense, friends and enemies, but Romney is not comfortable with the enemies part. As a result, he came across tonight too often like a motivational speaker at a business seminar who is working a difficult and rather distracted audience. (The “Believe!” signs in the audience were depressing reminders of lack of belief.) He left too much not only of the political heavy-lifting (a traditional VP role) to Ryan, but also too much of the statesmanlike role of educating the voters. The presidential nominee said nothing about the Supreme Court (one of the biggest prizes at stake in 2012), nothing about Obama’s crony capitalism and corruption, and very little about Medicare and (or should I say versus) Obamacare, a big theme of Ryan’s remarks. Then there was the five-step plan to “create 12 million new jobs.” Here Romney pledged to “cut the deficit” but said almost nothing about cutting government. And he promised to repeal and replace Obamacare in order to “rein in the skyrocketing cost of health care.” That’s good, but what about the program’s threat to liberty, equality, democracy, and quality health care? He didn’t say much about Romneycare and his governorship of Massachusetts, either. A political realignment that would move the country rightward for a generation or two seemed, to say the least, to be the last thing on his mind. He foresees, and may guarantee, a squeaker.

To his credit, Ryan was not bashful about pressing any of the sharp political arguments. Whereas Romney’s speech seemed born of the fear of losing the election, Ryan’s seemed inspired by confidence in the conservative case and its noble future, or rather its possible noble future. He sees himself, of course, as a key to that future. But in 2012, or in 2016 or 2020? That remains to be seen.

Dr. Kesler really gets at something here:  is the president simply the CEO of America or is he something more?  Is Obamacare bad because it takes away money from Medicare or is it bad because it infringes upon the natural liberty that we all inherently have because of our standing as human beings?  Romney doesn't like to venture into the Land of Principle, which is politics at its highest level, but he can't just leave that to Paul Ryan.  He must internalize what Lincoln said in a speech in 1856:

Our government rest in public opinion. Whoever can charge public opinion, can change the government, practically just so much. Public opinion, or [on?] any subject, always has a "central idea," from which all its minor thoughts radiate. That "Central idea" in our political public opinion at the beginning was, and until recently has continued to be, "the equality of men." And although it was always submitted patiently to whatever of inequality there seemed to be as matter of actual necessity, its constant working has been a steady progress towards the practical equality of all men. 

Puppy Love (and Attack Dogs)

Michael Ramirez on the relationship between the MSM and Barack Obama:

In a related note, David Chalian, the now former Washington Bureau Chief for Yahoo! News, was fired yesterday for making the following comment that was picked up by a nearby microphone:

“[Republicans are] not concerned at all [about Hurricane Issac]; they’re happy to have a party with black people drowning.”

The scary part is that this guy used to work as a political director for ABC News until 2010.  Opinions like that don't get formed overnight...

PolitiFail

PolitiFact is always one of my favorite targets, and I am glad to see the Editors of National Review go after it in their latest editorial:

Its recent rulings on Medicare have demonstrated the point thrice over. PolitiFactsaid that Romney’s comment that Obama had “robbed” Medicare of $716 billion to pay for Obamacare was “mostly false.” Among its reasons: “The money was not robbed in any literal sense of the word.” So if Romney led anyone to believe that Obama had held Medicare at gunpoint and ordered it to hand over its wallet, they can now rest easy, because PolitiFact is on the case.

On the Obama campaign's claim that the Romney-Ryan Medicare plan will cost senior citizens up to $6,400 a year:

Confronted with a real falsehood, however, PolitiFact gets soft. An Obama ad had claimed that Paul Ryan’s Medicare plan could raise costs for senior citizens by $6,400 — and PolitiFact rated it “mostly true,” and then backed down to “half true.” It is wholly false. Ryan’s most recent plan was designed so that seniors will never have to pay more for Medicare than they would under Obama’s budgets. PolitiFact claims that Obama is giving an accurate characterization of an older version of Ryan’s plan. It justifies Obama’s attack on this outdated plan because the Congressional Budget Office has not evaluated the new one. Yet no evaluation by the CBO is needed to reject Obama’s attack. Ryan’s plan guarantees that seniors would always have at least one insurance option that will cost them no more than Medicare does, and at least one option that will leave them ahead.

I have always wondered how PolitiFact could pull the rug out from under the public so easily.  Poll after poll shows the disdain and distrust the public has towards the media -- especially against network news broadcasts -- but why is it that when a story is published with the word PolitiFact in the title does that story and all of the "facts" contained therein become a legitimate source of news?  

Republican Speeches and Political Rhetoric

I was able to see both Ann Romney's and Chris Christie's speeches live last night.  Ann Romney, who is not used to giving speeches in public (especially before an audience of that size) did very well.  A couple lines, though, rang false.  The line about how Mitt Romney will work harder so that we can work a little less struck an off note (is that what Americans should aspire to?), and I would have appreciated some more concrete examples of Romney's love for his fellow man but overall, I thought it was good.

Christie was good too, and the implicit points he was making were well taken (the argument that conservative governors have turned their states around as opposed to what is happening nationally).  I thought it was interesting that immediately after the speech (I was watching Fox News coverage), Chris Wallace panned it and, to an extant, so did Charles Krauthammer.  It seemed as though there were not many people in the middle:  either you love or you hated it.  I also appreciated Christie making the point that in order to be a self-governing people, the political class has to treat the people like adults and not shield them from the hard truths.  I also agree with some of the conservative commentators I have read that not enough time was devoted to expounding on Obama's failures while in office, but I hold out hope that that may be coming in the next couple of days.

I later watched Gov. John Kasich's speech and thought it was good too (I have heard most of it before in one form or another).  His media savviness really shined when his teleprompter went down almost immediately and he had to go off of his paper copy he had with him at the podium.  One wonders if the US would go to Defcon 5 if the same thing was to happen to Obama.  But I digress.  

Overall though, the speeches also show the oftentimes problematic political rhetoric that is used by both sides today.  Steve Hayward has some great examples of this:

I have two grumps of my own about two specific tropes of current political rhetoric that show up in the speeches both political parties. The first is “we created jobs.” Most of the Republican governors who spoke yesterday—McDonnell, Kasich, and Haley—used this formula. The problem with “we created jobs” is that jobs are not “created” ex nihilo like God in Genesis, nor are they created by government. More precisely, we should say that jobs are generated—but they are generated overwhelmingly by private sector investment. To be sure, government policy helps create (a proper use of the term) a favorably investment climate for investment that produces new jobs, and that includes infrastructure rightly understood. 

In other words, the “created” language subtly abets Obama’s “you didn’t build that” argument. Better to convey the idea that government improves the conditions of freedom (that term again) that enables Americans to generate growth and employment, rather than making it seem like government is the entity “creating” the jobs. 

The second fingernails-on-blackboard trope is “grow the economy.” Never mind the dubious grammar of using “grow” as a transitive verb. This sounds like the economy is a plant, and if we just pour on some government water it will grow. Let us not forget that Bill Clinton was the originator of this phrase, and like “create jobs,” it abets the view that government is the prime mover of the economy. 

I say let us retire these two clichés of political rhetoric, and come up with more precise formulas that better convey a substantive conservative understanding of the primacy of the private sector over the public sector.

I would add one:  All the talk of needing "leaders" and looking for "leadership" falls flat and ultimately, does not fully describe the political virtues we are really looking for.  After all, you could plausibly claim that even Hitler was a great "leader."  The words the speechwriters are looking for is statesman and statesmanship.

It's always tough to win an argument when you are essentially using language that originated from the political thought of your opponent.  Republicans and conservatives need to do a much better job of this.

2016: A Review

Yesterday, I saw the documentary 2016, which was written and directed by Dinesh D'Souza and John Sullivan.  The movie is basically an adaptation of D'Souza's 2010 book The Roots of Obama's Rage.  It runs just over an hour and half (which is just about the right time for a movie of this kind), and it overall has the feel of a well done, serious documentary (Gerald R. Molen, the producer, has done Schindler's List among other top movies).  The theater was much less than half full, but I am sure that was due to the fact that I went to the 11:30 showing.

D'Souza, the President of King's College in New York, first introduces us to his grand theory by explaining that in order to understand Barack Obama's political philosophy, we need to have actually read his first book, Dreams From My Father.  Unlike most, if not all, of the press since Obama has come on to the national stage, D'Souza actually thinks it important to find out the background of the man who is now our president.

D'Souza's main claim is that Obama has inherited his politics from his father, whom he met only once in 1971.  They did, however, correspond over a number of years so this does seem plausible.  Obama's politics are driven by his father's anti-colonialism which, for D'Souza, explains everything from why Obama sides with the Falkland Islands in their disputes with the British to why he wants to redistribute wealth and have the rich pay a higher share of taxes.  In the midst of this D'Souza does us a great service by explaining the radical people who had great influence over Obama during his formative years.  John Hinderaker at Power Line has more:

Obama came of age, over a period of decades, in an environment that can charitably be described as hard-left. His father and mother were both socialists or worse. His maternal grandfather selected a mentor for young Barry who was a long-time member of the Communist Party USA. The socialist New Party listed him as a member. His friend, colleague and fundraiser Bill Ayers is a terrorist who says he wishes he had set off more bombs. His college professor Edward Said was the leading intellectual voice of those who want Israel destroyed. His law school mentor Roberto Unger was too far left for Brazil’s socialist party, and was sent back to Harvard, where he declined all interviews lest he endanger Obama’s electoral prospects. The minister who converted him to Christianity was Jeremiah “Gad damn America” Wright. You can go on and on.

This is very important and highlights something that D'Souza too easily overlooks.  Why does Bill Ayers or Edward Said believe in many of the same things Obama believes in?  They're certainly not anti-colonialists.  Why does virtually every major Democrat in Washington believe that the cure-all to the nation's economy is to raise taxes on the rich?  Last time I checked, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi weren't from a third-world country.  While D'Souza mines some very good details and information that the public ought to have known before they picked Obama in 2008, this theory certainly does not explain the whole, and it has the great potential to actually undercut the conservative argument.  

Ramesh Ponnuru reviewed The Roots of Obama's Rage in the Claremont Review last year and found that the anti-colonialist theory left much to be desired:

By the time he explains that sending more troops to Afghanistan is another clever anti-colonialist gambit, one begins to wonder whether anything could falsify the theory. He sees the auto bailout as evidence that Obama views the autoworkers' unions as victims of oppression by neo-colonialist CEOs. If Obama had let the companies sink, though, couldn't the anti-colonialist theory have explained it away as his indifference to a symbol of American might?

And:

Perhaps the real solution to the mystery of Obama is that there is no mystery at all. Obama's political views are consequential because he is the president, but they show little sign of being especially interesting aside from that. Genus liberal, species academic, character type pragmatic: That classification seems adequate. His heart belongs to the Left, and his heart of hearts to Barack Obama.

His conventionality is a good thing for conservatism. One reason conservatism's political fortunes rebounded so quickly after the 2008 election is that liberalism made its critique of President Bush too personal—a matter of his own alleged stupidity and closed-mindedness rather than of the conservative creed. If Americans reach the verdict that President Obama is a failure, it would be better for conservatism if they attributed that failure to the liberalism he shares with most of his party rather than to his personal quirks. The evidence suggests, too, that this attribution would be just.

While ani-colonialism may have something to do with it, surely the bigger target for conservatives should be modern liberalism itself -- the same modern liberalism that began with the Progressive movement in the early twentieth century.  Arguing instead that far from being an outlier, that Obama represents  the logical extension and evolution of many the policies and ideas behind modern liberalism would certainly be a more controversial but overall a much more effective argument (it would also be the identical argument that Tea Partiers among others were making in 2010, and look how that election turned out).  Let's just hope that the president does not have another four years to further the project.

Akin's Folly

By now, you have probably heard more than enough about Missouri Rep. Todd Akin, who is running against the vulnerable incumbent Senator, Claire McCaskill.  Akin, a 6-term congressman, did not drop out of the race before the 5pm deadline yesterday, which means that if he drops out now, it will have to be accompanied by a court order.

In instances like these, I am always inclined to support the Republican nominee (e.g., the inconsistent treatment of Republicans and Democrats by the media for one), but upon learning that Democrats in Missouri directed over a million dollars against Akin's Republican primary opponents and knowing the strong possibility that Republicans could take over the Senate, I am with the strong majority who would like to see Akin step aside.  Not only does his comment do damage to the Pro-Life movement, but on top of that, Democrats can now demagogue on the issue and act as though all Republicans and conservatives believe Akin's statements until they prove otherwise (which also shifts the focus off the Obama record and the economy).

Here is Paul Mirengoff taking apart Akin's statements and trying to make sense out of them:

Here is Akin’s statement: 

It seems to me, from what I understand from doctors, that [a pregnancy resulting from rape] is really rare. If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down. But let’s assume that maybe that didn’t work or something: I think there should be some punishment, but the punishment ought to be of the rapist, and not attacking the child.

First, contrary to the outrageous claims of feminists/Democratic partisans like Kirsten Powers, Akin never claimed that there is such a thing as a legitimate rape (in the sense of an acceptable or ok rape). Clearly, when he said “legitimate rape” he meant actual rape, as opposed to consensual sex that later is alleged to be rape. 

We know this from the context, including the fact that he calls for punishment of the rapist. If Akin thought that actual rape can be “legitimate,” he would not have advocated punishing the rapist. Akin plainly was saying that in cases of real rape the female body shuts down the reproductive process, whereas in cases of falsely alleged rape, it does not.
Some feminists would take issue with Akin’s implicit claim that not all reported rapes are actual rapes. But that view represents the triumph of ideology over facts. In reality, not all claims of rape are legitimate claims 

The most damning interpretation of Akin’s remarks would be that if a pregnancy results, the claim of rape could not have been legitimate. But Akin stopped short of making that claim. Indeed, he assumes that this is not the case. And he talks of the body “trying” to shut the process down, not invariably being able to do so. 

The problem with Akin’s statement – and it is a very big problem – lies in his view that the female body has ways to shut down its reproductive process in response to rape, such that pregnancies resulting from rape are “really rare.” The evidence strongly contradicts this assertion. Akin’s embrace of junk science not supported by data represents the same kind of triumph of ideology over facts that, as noted above, some feminists are guilty of.

I can tell what Akin was attempting to say, and it doesn't even make any sense.  Plus, resorting to language like that really makes it difficult to mount any kind of defense even if what he said was close to some level of rationality.  Akin needs to step down and let someone else (Jim Talent) take on a very beatable opponent.

O-I-H-O

Whoops:

Another picture was taken with the correct spelling but nevertheless, the damage was already done to Buckeye Nation.

Drifting Away

Michael Tanner reviews Rachel Maddow's Drift in the newest issue of Counterpoint and finds much to be desired:

Drift is an awful book. It is poorly researched, poorly written, and poorly argued. That, however, is not the problem. The problem is that it is treated as a serious work by people who should know better, thereby legitimizing it and its brand of “thought” in the minds of unsuspecting readers. The net result is a degradation of the level of political discourse in the nation. Instead of the intellectual arguments of a Hamilton and Jefferson, or, more recently, that of a Buckley and Galbraith, the nation’s discourse is being brought down to the level of playground insults. It is up to thoughtful people on both the right and left to halt this downward slide and bring serious conversation back to the table.

Ouch.

An example of the unserious nature of the book:

The best example of Maddow’s lack of discretion in her use of sources comes when she addresses the Reagan rearmament. Taking the position that the military buildup was unnecessary, she quotes Leonid Brezhnev, Konstantin Chernenko, and Yuri Adropov as definitive proof that the Soviet Union had no hostile ambitions towards the US and wished for a peaceful solution not involving an arms race.

When intellectual laziness that should get an F from any decent college professor is exalted, this is what ends up happening (but thankfully, not at places like this).

Even Meathead Knows the Truth

In an answer to media questions on the smallness of the crowds President Obama is attracting as opposed to those of 2008, a campaign spokeswoman said that the campaign is intentionally drawing smaller crowds so that the president can more "closely engage with the crowd."  Mark Steyn feels like he has heard something like this before:

ROB REINER: The last time Spinal Tap toured America, they were, uh, booked into 10,000 seat arenas, and 15,000 seat venues, and it seems that now, on their current tour they’re being booked into 1,200 seat arenas, 1,500 seat arenas, and uh I was just wondering, does this mean uh…the popularity of the group is waning?

BAND MANAGER DAVID AXELROD: Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no…no, no, not at all. We have plenty of time for big stadium gigs. But our focus right now is on intentionally limiting crowds by restricting tickets – to allow the band to better connect with fans.

ROB REINER [NODDING]: Yeah.

I think Spinal Tap's first single (they were then known as the Thamesmen) would work very well as Obama's campaign theme song:

Miseducating the Public: Hollywood and Citizens United

Yesterday, I saw The Candidate, the new Will Ferrell movie that pits Ferrell, the incumbent Democrat, against Zach Galifianakis, an incompetent loser, in a race for the 14th House District in North Carolina.  The movie is typical of the over-the-top kinds of comedies that Hollywood has been churning out since the mid-90's.  Even though both Ferrell and Galifianakis are identified by party, the role of the actual positions that are typically espoused by either party are cast aside in favor of showing that politics today is driven by money and only money.  The main reason this is so, the film both implies and outright states, is the dastardly evil and corrupt Citizens United decision, which supposedly opened up the door for corporations both in the United States and overseas to buy and sell presidents, representatives, and senators as if they were buying and trading stocks.  (The antagonists of the film, the evil Moch brothers, are very similar to another set of brothers in the earlier, and much better, Trading Places, are of course stand ins for the much derided and maligned Koch brothers -- though no liberal can ever seem to even give a coherent account of just what Koch Industries actually does.)  Even as I got up and was leaving the theater, I heard a couple a few rows in front of me discussing the evils of the Citizens United ruling and how it debased our politics even further than it already was.

But even a source like The New York Times Magazine has pointed out that almost everything we think we know about the consequences of Citizens United is just flat wrong.  Here is Matt Bai, the chief political correspondent, on this topic back in mid-July:

The reason for this exponential leap in political spending, if you talk to most Democrats or read most news reports, comes down to two words: Citizens United. The term is shorthand for a Supreme Court decision that gave corporations much of the same right to political speech as individuals have, thus removing virtually any restriction on corporate money in politics. The oft-repeated narrative of 2012 goes like this: Citizens United unleashed a torrent of money from businesses and the multimillionaires who run them, and as a result we are now seeing the corporate takeover of American politics.

As a matter of political strategy, this is a useful story to tell, appealing to liberals and independent voters who aren’t necessarily enthusiastic about the administration but who are concerned about societal inequality, which is why President Obama has made it a rallying cry almost from the moment the Citizens United ruling was made. But if you’re trying to understand what’s really going on with politics and money, the accepted narrative around Citizens United is, at best, overly simplistic. And in some respects, it’s just plain wrong.

Some actual facts on the subject:

Those who criticize the effect of Citizens United look at these very technical changes [mostly linguistic in nature] and see an obvious causal relationship. The high court says outside groups are allowed to use corporate dollars to expressly support candidates, and suddenly we have this tidal wave of money threatening to overwhelm the airways. One must have led to the other, right?

Well, not necessarily. Legally speaking, zillionaires were no less able to write fat checks four years ago than they are today. And while it is true that corporations can now give money for specific purposes that were prohibited before, it seems they aren’t, or at least not at a level that accounts for anything like the sudden influx of money into the system. According to a brief filed by Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, and Floyd Abrams, the First Amendment lawyer, in a Montana case on which the Supreme Court ruled last month, not a single Fortune 100 company contributed to a candidate’s super PAC during this year’s Republican primaries. Of the $96 million or more raised by these super PACs, only about 13 percent came from privately held corporations, and less than 1 percent came from publicly traded corporations.

Even smart liberals realize how Democrats have overplayed their hand:

Even so, the Supreme Court’s ruling really wasn’t the sort of tectonic event that Obama and his allies would have you believe it was. “I’d go so far as to call it a liberal delusion,” Ira Glasser, the former executive director of the A.C.L.U. and a liberal dissenter on Citizens United, told me. Which leads to an obvious question: If Citizens United doesn’t explain this billion-dollar blast of outside money, then what does? 

But what about the massive influx of money since the descision:

The level of outside money increased 164 percent from 2004 to 2008. Then it rose 135 percent from 2008 to 2012. In other words, while the sheer amount of dollars seems considerably more ominous after Citizens United, the percentage of change from one presidential election to the next has remained pretty consistent since the passage of McCain-Feingold. And this suggests that the rising amount of outside money was probably bound to reach ever more staggering levels with or without Citizens United. The unintended consequence of McCain-Feingold was to begin a gradual migration of political might from inside the party structure to outside it. 

And in his examination of raw numbers, [campaign finance "expert" Richard] Hasen managed to ignore what is probably the most relevant bit of data during this period: 2010 and 2012 were the first election cycles since the enactment of McCain-Feingold in which a Democrat occupied the White House. Rich conservatives weren’t inspired to invest their fortunes in 2004, when Bush ran for the second time while waging an unpopular war, or in 2008, when they were forced to endure the nomination of McCain. But now there’s a president and a legislative agenda they bitterly despise (much as Soros and his friends saw the Bush presidency as an existential threat to the country), so it’s not surprising that outside spending by Republicans in 2010 and 2012 would dwarf everything that came before. What we are seeing — what we almost certainly would have seen even without the court’s ruling in Citizens United — is the full force of conservative wealth in America, mobilized by a common enemy for the first time since the fall of party monopolies. 

Doesn't more money equal a political advantage:

I recently called Carter Eskew, a longtime Democratic adman and strategist whose clients included Al Gore in 2000, and asked him a simple question: How much did he think he would really need for a candidate today, if he could have an unlimited budget to run a national ad campaign, including all the outside money? Eskew paused before giving a declarative answer: $500 million. Anything beyond that, he said, was probably overkill.

In other words, there’s a threshold below which a presidential candidate can’t really compete effectively, and that number — whether it’s $500 million or something less — is outlandish enough that it should give us pause. But beyond that number, it’s not clear that spending an extra $200 million or $500 million will really make all that much of a difference on Election Day. More likely, the two ideological factions are now like rivals of the nuclear age, stockpiling enough bombs to destroy the same cities over and over again, when one would do the job.

Well, it looks as though the "narrative" on Citizens United is absolutely false.  But, when a certain party (with the help of Hollywood and the MSM) is running a campaign in which the goal is to obfuscate rather than educate, this all makes sense.

All You Need to Know

This single graph sums up the last four years of the Obama Administration:

The bottom two lines make up the main thrust of the argument the Obama Administration made to the American people in selling the stimulus package.  The top line tracks the actual unemployment numbers (it's even worse than that when you consider how many people have all together stopped looking for work).

Rush to Judgement

In his review of Stephen Knott's Rush to Judgment: George W. Bush, the War on Terror, and His Critics, John Yoo, of course himself being the center of much of the controversy during the Bush Administration's War of Terror, agrees with Knott on the inconsistency of those who savaged Bush and said he was mangling the Constitution and are now silent during the Obama Administration's continuance or extension of many of the same policies.  Yoo argues that in order to get past the partisan fights of today, we must recognize the inherent power of the executive and role of the prerogative:

But strip away the partisanship and exaggerated rhetoric, and their mistake is their willing blindness to the deep well of executive authority that underlay the extraordinary measures taken in response to the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. The author of earlier works on Hamilton and on covert action, Knott makes plain what CRB readers know all too well: presidential power, in an emergency, engages the long debate over the place of the prerogative in the American Constitution. Presidents have exercised something like the prerogative—the ability to act in the silence of, or even contrary to, written law—throughout American history. Thomas Jefferson purchased Louisiana from Napoleon even while believing the Constitution required an amendment to legalize the acquisition of territory with the potential to become new states. After the firing on Fort Sumter, Lincoln raised an army and navy, withdrew money from the Treasury, and suspended habeas corpus without Congress's authorization. FDR extended aid to Great Britain in the face of the Neutrality Acts before U.S. entry into World War II.

This nicely sums up the problem with the critics:

Knott finds frustrating not only that academics give Bush little credit for protecting the homeland, but also that they remain openly and notoriously inconsistent in their criticism. Bush may have ordered the waterboarding of three al-Qaeda leaders, for which some presidential scholars believed the heavens would fall. Obama, by contrast, has used drones to kill hundreds of al-Qaeda leaders and sometimes innocent family members and bystanders—a greater deprivation of the human rights of many more people. Bush's academic critics raised nary a peep in protest. Scholars claimed that Guantanamo Bay amounted to some kind of legal black hole, rather than a prisoner-of-war camp over which military, not civilian, rules normally apply. Several of these critics have served in an administration that has kept Guantanamo open and continued a policy of detention without trial for enemy combatants. Even the dreaded signing statements, by which Bush allegedly circumvented the Constitution, have been resurrected by his successor. The faculty lounges, somehow, are not abuzz this time.

Dreams vs. Reality

Dana Milbank on Paul Ryan's stop at the State Fair in Iowa:

Ryan, in a trying-too-hard outfit of blue jeans, wide leather belt and red-and-white checked shirt, began with a painful effort to establish common ground with the locals.

 “What a beautiful day to be at the state fair,” he said. “We have fairs. Do you have Wristband Day here?”

 Apparently Iowans do not have Wristband Day, because the crowd was quiet.

 “That’s the favorite day for my kids, because Wristband Day, you can buy a wristband and ride all the rides with just one wristband for the whole day.”

 The Iowans stood like corn stalks on a still morning.

 “So it’s just from a Wisconsinite to a neighboring Iowan: Have Wristband Day. Your kids will love it.”

 If there were crickets at the Iowa State Fair, you would have heard them chirping.

A picture taken at Miami University, where Paul Ryan will be speaking tonight:

One question for Milbank:  If Paul Ryan is so bad at speaking in public, why does this line stretch as far as the eye can see?

When Politics Gets in the Way

You may have about the shooting that occurred today at the HQ of the Family Research Council in Washington D.C.   CBS News has more:

(AP) WASHINGTON - A man suspected of shooting and wounding a security guard in the lobby of a Christian lobbying group had been volunteering at a community center for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people.

A law enforcement official has identified the suspect arrested in Wednesday's shooting as Floyd Corkins II of Herndon, Va. Investigators were interviewing his neighbors.

Another official says the shooter made a negative reference about the work of the Family Research Council before opening fire. The officials spoke anonymously because they were not authorized to discuss the ongoing investigation.

The title of the CBS report is "Cops: LGBT volunteer shoots conservative group's guard."  

The focus of this should absolutely be on the recovery of the security guard who was shot in the arm.  But I pause for a second to think about what if a Tea Partier walked into the offices of Center for American Progress and shot a guard, what the MSM's reaction would be.  How many panels on civility would be convened on Capitol Hill?  How many specials would be aired on NBC and CNN on the similarities between conservatism and terrorism?  How many speeches on the need for civility would take place?  Maybe it's just me...

Whose Values?

Remember when Rahm Emanuel, the Mayor of Chicago, castigated Chik-fil-A for not representing "Chicago values?"  Paul Rahe heard the same thing I did when he said those words:

I associate Chicago with thuggery. It is, after all, the murder capital of the United States. It is renowned for political corruption. It is the city where the graveyards are most likely to turn out in force on election day. It is the city where, to do business, you have to donate to the machine. It is the city where sealed divorce records become public knowledge if you dare to take on the Democratic Party. It is the place where the mob has a working relationship with the mayor. It is the home of Tony Rezko, Jesse Jackson Jr., Rod Blagojevich, and Saul Alinsky -- and, like Illinois more generally, it has been so thoroughly looted by the political crooks that it teeters on the verge of bankruptcy. It is the very model for the system of crony capitalism, fixed elections, and political intimidation that Barack Obama  and the Democratic Party have been trying to introduce into the country at large.

Progress Unmasked

In a recent letter, the Ohio Farmer notes an irony that cannot be repeated enough:

There is a strange irony in the name "progressive," for the progressives' "living constitution," in replacing enumerated powers and the sovereignty of the people with the unlimited sovereignty of government, resembles the British constitution we rejected over two centuries ago. The next historic act in America’s constitutional drama is to recover the Founders' Constitution. 

The actual Progressive project realized consists in shifting the car in reverse and slamming on the gas pedal.

  

Is Liberalism Bookless?

Steve Hayward takes note of a recent Slate column that notes that modern liberalism has become bookless.  Beverly Gage's essay on Slate.com explores the reasons why this is so in light of Paul Ryan's recent public appeals to the economics of Ayn Rand and Hayek to name a few.  She notes that liberals do not have anything resembling the conservative canon.  Hayward surmises the reasons behind this trend:

A few years ago Martin Peretz wrote in The New Republic that “It is liberalism that is now bookless and dying. . .  Ask yourself: Who is a truly influential liberal mind [on par with Niebuhr] in our culture?  Whose ideas challenge and whose ideals inspire?  Whose books and articles are read and passed around?  There’s no one, really.”  Michael Tomasky echoed this point in The American Prospect: “I’ve long had the sense, and it’s only grown since I’ve moved to Washington, that conservatives talk more about philosophy, while liberals talk more about strategy; also, that liberals generally, and young liberals in particular, are somewhat less conversant in their creed’s history and urtexts than their conservative counterparts are.”

While there is something to this lament, it seems slightly overstated.  Even leaving aside the popularity of fevered figures such as Noam Chomsky, one can point to a number of serious thinkers on the Left such as Michael Walzer, or John Rawls and his acolytes, or Rawls’ thoughtful critics on the Left such as Michael Sandel.  However, the high degree of abstraction of these thinkers—their palpable distance from the real political and cultural debates of our time—is a reflection of the attenuation of contemporary liberalism.

I agree with Hayward that Gage does delve into hyperbole because there have been plenty of liberal intellectuals in the twentieth century -- Rawls, Dewey, Woodrow Wilson -- who have have had major influence and have published widely-read essays and books.  Virtually all of the historians of the early twentieth century were from the liberal persuasion and thought the New Deal the highest form of statesmanship.  I think there is definitely something to what Gage is arguing. (It has to do with the emergence of conservatism as an intellectual force against liberalism, which has basically enjoyed a dominant reign since the early twentieth century.  But -- and I think Gage had this in mind as well --, in the past ten years, what liberal intellectual giant or otherwise has written a major, influential work?)  Modern conservatism is now reaping the benefits of seeds planted long ago while modern liberalism has now been caught flat-footed.

Don't Know Much About History, Part II

Justice Ginsburg on the Constitution in the WSJ:

“The founders of our country were great men with a vision,” Justice Ginsburg said.  “They were held back from realizing their idea by the times in which they lived.

But, she added, their notion was that society would evolve and that the clauses of the Constitution would grow with society.

“The Constitution would always be in tune with society that the law is meant to serve.”

And Calvin Coolidge, striking down the notion that the Declaration of Independence (and the Constitution) evolves and should reflect the growth of society:

About the Declaration there is a finality that is exceedingly restful. It is often asserted that the world has made a great deal of progress since 1776, that we have had new thoughts and new experiences which have given us a great advance over the people of that day, and that we may therefore very well discard their conclusions for something more modern. But that reasoning can not be applied to this great charter. If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people. Those who wish to proceed in that direction can not lay claim to progress. They are reactionary. Their ideas are not more modern, but more ancient, than those of the Revolutionary fathers. 

Don't Know Much About History

Since Harry Reid's odious claim that Mitt Romney hasn't paid any taxes in the past ten years, conservatives have rightly been up in arms and have called out Reid on his falsehood.  Ann Coulter notes that in the midst of this, some conservative commentators have been likening Reid's statements to those made by Sen. Joe McCarthy during his supposed witch hunt in the late 50's concerning communist infiltration in the State Department.  But this is all wrong.  McCarthy did find communists in the State Department and was only taking Democrats to task for not following through with their own investigations:

McCarthy said he had the names of 57 communists or communist sympathizers working in the State Department who needed to be investigated. Separately, he cited a 1946 letter from former Secretary of State James Byrnes to Congress stating that there were 205 known security risks still working there.

His point, misconstrued by Democrats at the time and since, was not to accuse specific individuals, but rather to indict the Democrats for turning a blind eye to ridiculous security risks in important government jobs, even after Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and Alger Hiss. (Sorry, Nation magazine, they’re still guilty.)

McCarthy gave his Wheeling, W.Va., speech two weeks after Secretary of State Dean Acheson had defended celebrity communist spy Hiss on Jan. 25, 1950 — the day of Hiss’ criminal conviction for denying under oath that he was a Soviet spy.

Even after Whittaker Chambers had produced documents proving that Hiss was working for the Soviet Union while advising President Roosevelt, the Democrats were still defending a traitor. Chambers said of Acheson’s disgusting defense of Hiss, “You will look in vain in history for anything comparable to it.”

It's interesting how people are remembered as opposed to what they actually did.

Just the Facts

Pete Spiliakos on the stark differences between how the Ryan budget treats Medicare and how the Obama budget treats Medicare and what should be the main arguments against Obama/Biden:

2.  The facts that every Romney-Ryan supporter needs to memorize and repeat at every opportunity:  The Ryan budget spends just as much on Medicare as the Obama budget.  The Ryan budget keeps traditional Fee For Service Medicare for those who want that option. The Ryan budget also allows future seniors to have choices of other plans that might offer the same or better service at a lower price.  The Obama budget just cuts Medicare spending centrally and leaves future working-class and middle-class seniors with no realistic options other than just taking what the centralized rationing board chooses to give them (or not give them as the case may be.)

3.  And something else that can’t be repeated enough:  It isn’t just that the Obama budget raises taxes.  The Obama budget raises taxes and cuts Medicare.  And it isn’t just that the Obama budget raises taxes and cuts Medicare.  It is that the Obama budget raises taxes, cuts Medicare and still leaves us on the path to national bankruptcy.  This isn’t a bad starting place for Romney-Ryan.

I think it may be a shock for some to learn that the Ryan budget "spends just as much on Medicare as the Obama budget."  While this is true, Ryan's overall end is completely 180 degrees opposite of that of President Obama.  Ryan's end is a return to constitutional government; Obama's end is State paternlism, where every need of the citizen and every stroke of bad luck is met with open arms from state administrators.  To get back to constitutionalism though, you cannot let the means destroy the ends.  This is always important to remember (and so is this fact, which Romney/Ryan should be shouting from the rooftops from here until November:  That Obama does change Medicare and Romney/Ryan does not).

UPDATE:

Glenn Reynolds has the best line I have seen on how Romney/Ryan should attack Obama on Medicare:

You know what will kill Medicare as we know it? Medicare as we know it.

Perfect.

It's Ryan

By now you know that Paul Ryan is Mitt Romney's pick for VP.  If you haven't read Stephen Hayes piece on Ryan, please take some time and read it.  Also, the New Yorker recently profiled Ryan as well (I haven't read it yet, but I am sure it has a lot of interesting, subtle jabs at Ryan.  Also, again without reading it, it probably provides a window to see how liberal elites view Ryan).

Be sure to read the speech Ryan gave this morning in front of the USS Wisconsin in Virginia.  This excerpt is very impressive:

But America is more than just a place...it's an idea.  It's the only country founded on an idea.  Our rights come from nature and God, not government.  We promise equal opportunity, not equal outcomes.

This idea is founded on the principles of liberty, freedom, free enterprise, self-determination and government by consent of the governed.  

This idea is under assault.  So, we have a critical decision to make as a nation.

We are on an unsustainable path that is robbing America of our freedom and security. It doesn't have to be this way.

The commitment Mitt Romney and I make to you is this:

We won't duck the tough issues...we will lead!

We won't blame others...we will take responsibility!

We won't replace our founding principles...we will reapply them!

Mitt Romney needed to do something to change the way things were going.  This pick certainly does that.

He Did It

In light of the pro-Obama super PAC Priorities USA Action commercial that shows a former steelworker, Joe Soptic, imply that Mitt Romney had a hand in wife's death, The Onion has uncovered the ultimate story that has, until this day, been covered up by those in the highest seats of power: 

CHICAGO—With campaign rhetoric becoming increasingly heated and both presidential nominees releasing more attack ads, a new 30-second spot from the Obama campaign this week accuses his opponent Mitt Romney of committing the 1996 murder of 6-year-old beauty pageant queen JonBenét Ramsey.

Titled “He Did It,” the advertisement asks if anyone can truly remember where Romney was the night of the child’s murder, and whether the U.S. populace wants a president capable of strangling a little girl and dumping her body in her parents’ basement.
President Obama appears at the end of the advertisement to approve the message.
“I think this is a fair ad, and I think Mitt Romney owes an explanation to the American people as to why he murdered JonBenét Ramsey,” said Obama campaign manager Jim Messina, who called the commercial’s black-and-white reenactment of Mitt Romney carrying a kicking and screaming child to her death “accurate.” “Ultimately, voters need to know who they’re getting with Mitt Romney: a job- and child-killing businessman who is so deceitful he won’t release his tax returns or admit to a senseless murder that shook the nation to its core.”

Scheduled to run in multiple swing states, with significant airtime in Ramsey’s home state of Colorado, the ad criticizes Romney not just for killing the prepubescent girl, but for going to extreme lengths to cover it up. It also states that Mitt Romney paid former school teacher John Mark Karr to falsely come forward as the murderer, and accuses the former Massachusetts governor of being a sex offender.

Over a silhouette of Romney walking away from the Ramsey mansion—blood dripping from his hands—the commercial’s narrator asks, “If Mitt Romney kept the murder of JonBenét a secret from the American people, what else is he hiding?”

Moreover, at the end of the spot a smiling Romney is seen at a campaign event saying, “I killed her, and I had a good time.” Sources from the Romney campaign were quick to announce that the audio and video had been cobbled together from different statements he made during that particular rally.

“Personally, if I killed JonBenét Ramsey, I would have come clean and told the American people that on day one,” Obama’s communication director David Axelrod said on Sunday’s installment of Meet The Press. “But I think that’s a key difference between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. Barack Obama never murdered a child, and Mitt Romney did.”

According to sources at Obama’s Chicago headquarters, the “He Did It” commercial is just the first in a new series of attack ads that accuses Romney of drowning actress Natalie Wood in 1981, convincing cult leader David Koresh to burn down the Branch Davidian ranch in Waco, TX, and causing the Challenger disaster.

“I think these ads will end up being very effective,” former Bill Clinton campaign strategist Dick Morris said. “If you are an undecided voter and you are constantly seeing images of Mitt Romney standing over a child’s lifeless body, or, as in the case of the ‘Zodiac’ spot, shooting two high schoolers at point blank range on their first date, that’s a pretty persuasive image right there.”

Added Morris, “This ad very effectively reminds us that no child murderer has ever been elected into the White House.”

Though the Obama campaign has denied it, many Beltway observers have said the advertisements are retaliation for the Romney camp’s highly controversial ad, “Boom,” which accuses the president of being the fertilizer bomb that destroyed an Oklahoma City federal building in 1995.

The Crisis of Modern Liberalism and the Conservative Argument

In the Summer edition of the Claremont Review of Books Jonah Goldberg reviews Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness: Ten Years of the Claremont Review of Books and finds that much of modern conservative thought owes much to the influence of the Claremont Institute and its flagship publication (though it's certainly not anywhere close to as influential as it should be).  As Jonah notes, since its inception, the main project of the Claremont Institute has been to recover the natural right and natural law understandings that pervade both the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.  As Jonah explains:

At home or abroad, the fundamental question of the Constitution is how, in a free society, shall men use power over other men. The founders' answer was, in short, very carefully. That is why we have checks and balances, separation of powers, divided government, and all of the other mechanisms that make it hard for us to oppress one another. For this form of government to work, citizens must believe in self-government, an idea itself grounded in the framers' understanding of human nature as expressed in the Declaration of Independence and elsewhere. No other publication has more effectively or eloquently made that argument over a sustained period of time. This is all the more impressive given that they have done so without falling into cant or cliché. Each piece in this book—and in the magazine—reads like what it is: an honest and deep examination of the books and ideas that shape the intellectual climate. 

But even through the heydays of conservatism (or what's thought today to be its heyday) during the Reagan Revolution in the waning years of the Cold War, what made the diverging views of conservatism coalesce was a common enemy that manifested itself in the guise of the twin evils of communism and Marxism.  Now that this common enemy has been defeated for now, modern conservatism until recently had been largely more focused on what it was against rather than what it was for.  Politically, this changed in the 2010 election with the advent of the Tea Party and other organizations that began as a movement against "big government" and were for a return the Constitution and the principles of the American Founders.  The return to first principles coincides with Jonah's observation that the temporary Cold War coalition masked an ever-widening fissure in what later came to be called modern conservatism, or what began as the reaction against the Progressive Movement.

In the person of Barack Obama do we have a politician, along with the Democratic Party behind him, moving back to arguments of the earlier Progressives who openly called for an overturning of founding principles so that our country could instead be guided by the currents of History.  No longer being content with simply continuing on the rhetorical tradition that FDR had created and was sustained through Bill Clinton's presidency -- concealing radical critiques of the Constitution and its principles in speeches that seemed to suggest that they and the Democratic Party were following completely within the Founding tradition --, Obama returned to Osawatomie, Kansas and voiced arguments not heard in public since the days of long ago.

I will leave by quoting Charles Kesler, who nicely sums up what should supply the metaphysical grounding underneath the conservative counter argument:

Some conservatives start, as it were, from Edmund Burke; others from Friedrich Hayek. While we respect both thinkers and their schools of thought, we begin instead from America, the American political tradition in all its genius and profundity, and the relation of our tradition to revealed wisdom and to what the elderly Jefferson once called, rather insouciantly, "the elementary books of public right, as Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, Sidney, etc." We think conservatism should take its bearings from the founders' statesmanship, our citizens' loyalty to the Declaration and Constitution, and the scenes, both tender and proud, of our national history.

Politcs as a Hammer

When I got into work this morning, I saw the following email from the Chairman of the Ohio Democratic Party, Chris Redfern, in my inbox:

Dear Kyle,

There’s no way to sugarcoat this: If we lose this election, it means that our state can be bought by the highest bidder.

And make no mistake, if Ohio can be bought, this country can be bought.

Ohio is the tipping point, and the Chamber of Commerce, the Koch brothers, Karl Rove, and Wall Street special interests know it. Every dollar they spend to win here goes straight towards rolling back financial reforms, increasing the cost of education for our children, and increasing tax breaks for billionaires.

We’re just under 100 days away from Election Day and what we do right now will affect whether these groups continue to spend their millions here or fade away to concentrate on other targets. We must commit to defend Ohio today.

[...]

Total spending against Sherrod Brown now tops $13 million, and President Obama has been outraised by his opponents for two months straight. It’s clear that the special interests know where their bread is buttered and will use every dollar to distort facts and mislead everyday Americans.

If you’ve been sitting on the sidelines or waiting to get involved, now is the time. The only way to keep pace and fight back in this crucial election year is to raise a minimum of $25,000 for the Defend Ohio fund to help pay for literature and advertising as we move into the final stage of the campaign.

I urge you to get involved -- before it’s too late.

[...]

Without your help today, Obama and Sherrod will face an increased threat from these groups as they press their funding advantage. When grassroots supporters like you take action, it makes them reconsider the safety and size of their investment here.

[...]

It’s up to people like you and me to make the difference.

Thank you for all that you do,

Chris

Chris Redfern
Chairman
Ohio Democratic Party

The basic message:  If Democrats win, the people's voice was heard loud and clear.  If Republicans win, the people's voice was trampled upon by special interests (of course, as we all know, Democrats receive zero funding from any outside groups or special interests).

I don't know about you but that seems pretty persuasive to me...

Facts are Stubborn Things

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi has now come to the defense of Sen. Harry Reid's indefensible accusations late last week that Mitt Romney has paid no taxes for the past ten years.  Here is her persuasive and logical argument:

"Harry Reid made a statement that is true. Somebody told him. It is a fact," Pelosi told The Huffington Post in a Sunday interview. "Whether he did or not can easily be disposed of: Mitt Romney can release his tax returns and show whether he paid taxes."

[...]

"The salience of what Harry Reid is saying is related" to the contents of Romney's tax plan, Pelosi said. "Here's a guy who wants you to pay more when I think, 'I' meaning Harry Reid, somebody told me he hasn't even paid his taxes. But he wants you to pay more to underwrite tax cuts for the wealthy. ... It's like a double doozy."

Well I heard through the grapevine through several different people who I trust who in turn heard it from several other people who they trust that Nancy Pelosi runs a drug running operation out of her house.  Must be true since I heard it from people I trust.

Newspeak

Marvin Olasky on what the media failed to report after US gymnast Gabby Douglas won gold on Thursday:

It was hard to miss yesterday the Christian beliefs that gave Gabby Douglas the foundation for all the work and concentration that went into her gold medal performance. Interviewed on television directly after her triumph, the gymnast said, “I give all the glory to God. It’s kind of a win-win situation. The glory goes up to him and the blessings fall down on me.”

Later Douglas tweeted, “Let all that I am praise the LORD; may I never forget the good things He does for me.” Earlier in the Olympics she had blogged for ESPN, “Gotta give God the Glory! Thank you everyone for praying for me! It means so much to me!”

[...]

Stories in USA Today and the Los Angeles Times didn’t mention it, nor did The New York Times story, but The Times did note that Douglas’ mother and the mom of the family she lived with in Iowa “shared religious beliefs.” The Times did not specify what those beliefs are.

The Christian Science Monitor also left out what is so important to Douglas, but it did quote her saying “’hard work really does pay off’ in the astonished tones of someone who had just bought a Ginsu knife and was shocked to learn that it really can cut tomatoes wafer-thin.” Good line.

Reporters are surprised and sometimes shocked to hear that faith in Christ (except among people they think are crazy) makes a difference. When I did a Nexis computerized search of “Gabby Douglas” and “Christian” in publications yesterday and today, only Agence France Presse came up: “Douglas, a devout Christian.” No major publication apparently quoted her “glory to God” remarks.

But that makes sense, within standard journalistic understandings. Newspaper space is limited: Why waste it by bringing up something irrelevant, even though the subject of the story benightedly thinks it important?

Pushing Old Ladies Around

Some words of wisdom from Jonah Goldberg in today's G-File on abortion and capital punishment:

I recently wrote about the death penalty and I've been getting annoying feedback ever since. I'm in favor of the death penalty for people who deserve to be put to death. I very much oppose the death penalty for people who do not deserve to be put to death. I phrase it this way because so many opponents of the death penalty love to point to innocent men who were sentenced to die as if proof of error in the system invalidates capital punishment in principle. I don't know if an innocent person has ever been executed, but even if one were that outrage (and it would be an outrage) no more invalidates the death penalty than an instance of friendly fire invalidates the need for a military.

Look at it this way: If in, say, Illinois they wrongly sent a man to death row does that make the Aurora killer any less deserving of the chair? Where is the transitive property here?

But that's not even why I'm talking about the death penalty. One of the more annoying rejoinders to any discussion of the death penalty is, as one e-mailer puts it: "You f***ing wingnuts are such hypocrites, you talk about being pro-life but you have no problem killing minorities when it suits you."

I find this category error mind-boggling. Now while I'm functionally pro-life for the most part, I am not conventionally so. But that's irrelevant given the charge of plenary incompatibility of the pro-life and pro-capital-punishment positions. 

First off, when a fetus shoots up a movie theater or rapes and kills a little girl or throws political dissidents into a wood chipper please be sure to shoot me an e-mail or tweet about it, because that sounds like an interesting story.

On that point, the argument against abortion hinges on the fact that it is the taking of an innocent life, often for selfish purposes. If you don't think it's a life worthy of respect that's something we can argue another day. The point here is that pro-lifers do think it is a life, an innocent life. And as I said at the outset, I'm in favor of the death penalty for people who deserve to be put to death. What has an eight-and-a-half-month-old fetus done that it deserves to be put to death? The abortion-rights position holds that the uterine-occupant's crime is that, if allowed to be born, it will potentially inconvenience or harm the mother. Obviously, the issue of harming the mother is morally significant, but the inconvenience issue is much less so.

However you want to think about all of that, what's very clear is that the moral contexts of abortion and capital punishment are very, very different.

This is a good time to invoke William F. Buckley's old line about moral equivalence. If you have one man who pushes an old lady out of the way of an oncoming bus and you have another man who pushes an old lady in front of an oncoming bus, it will simply not do to describe them both as the sorts of men who push old ladies around. Abortion renders a whole class of humans, non-human. Capital punishment says that a specific human being, one who has been proven to have taken another human life, is fit for execution. The death penalty may or may not be wrong, but to my mind it has as much in common with abortion as indexing capital gains or the infield fly rule. 

What I find fascinating is the way pro-abortion, anti-death-penalty types find this so hard to understand. Here's my theory: They think that pro-lifers suffer from magical thinking. A burning bush, or a guy in a white robe, or some mystical book told them to oppose abortion. The incantations surrounding this belief involve phrases like "sanctity of life" and "every life is sacred." And so they conclude that pro-lifers are being inconsistent by not extending the magic cloak of protection to serial killers, mass murderers, and child rapists.

Demagogue

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has been lately throwing anything at the wall to see what sticks (or what the media will run with).  Here is his latest charge against Mitt Romney:

“He didn’t pay taxes for 10 years! Now, do I know that that’s true? Well, I’m not certain,” said Reid. “But obviously he can’t release those tax returns. How would it look?

“You guys have said his wealth is $250 million,” Reid continued. “Not a chance in the world. It’s a lot more than that. I mean, you do pretty well if you don’t pay taxes for 10 years when you’re making millions and millions of dollars.”

This is all the more interesting in light of the fact that Harry Reid has refused to release his own tax returns...

Assessing Romney

When I got into work this morning, the first thing I saw was this Quinnipiac poll that was recently taken in key battleground states, including the all important state of Ohio.  The poll has Obama being up on Romney 50 - 44 in Ohio.

As soon as I saw the numbers, I was suspicious.  This post on Power Line confirmed them.  Polls in 2008 in Ohio showed Barack Obama being up at this point in the race by 15 points, with Democrats outnumbering Republicans by a 35 - 27 margin.  Obama took the state by 2.5 points. 

But with that aside, I am still not overly-optimistic about Mitt Romney's numbers, even though, as I showed above, they are not as bad as advertised.  With everything that has gone in the past three years from high unemployment to the ramming through of a still largely unpopular healthcare law, it just seems like Romney should be up in the polls.  Romney has no doubt done better lately (see this speech he gave in Israel), but he is still trying to fight the caricature Obama's team created about Romney, that he only cares about the rich, likes to fire people, and outsources jobs overseas (all charges by the way are false but they are probably still persuasive to the average voter).

This thought led to me to browse through a speech Calvin Coolidge gave in 1925 to the American Society of Newspaper Editors.  Coolidge, in his time but certainly in much more recent times, has been given the same treatment Romney has only it has been done by historians.  To be sure, Coolidge talked about business in many speeches, but he was always careful to talk about in the context of natural rights, or the principles that undergird the American Republic.  Here is the key excerpt: 

There does not seem to be cause for alarm in the dual relationship of the press to the public, whereby it is on one side a purveyor of information and opinion and on the other side a purely business enterprise. Rather, it is probably that a press which maintains an intimate touch with the business currents of the nation, is likely to be more reliable than it would be if it were a stranger to these influences. After all, the chief business of the American people is business. They are profoundly concerned with producing, buying, selling, investing and prospering in the world. I am strongly of opinion that the great majority of people will always find these are moving impulses of our life. The opposite view was oracularly and poetically set forth in those lines of Goldsmith which everybody repeats, but few really believe: "Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey, Where wealth accumulates, and men decay." Excellent poetry, but not a good working philosophy. Goldsmith would have been right, if, in fact, the accumulation of wealth meant the decay of men. It is rare indeed that the men who are accumulating wealth decay. It is only when they cease production, when accumulation stops, that an irreparable decay begins. Wealth is the product of industry, ambition, character and untiring effort. In all experience, the accumulation of wealth means the multiplication of schools, the increase of knowledge, the dissemination of intelligence, the encouragement of science, the broadening of outlook, the expansion of liberties, the widening of culture. Of course, the accumulation of wealth cannot be justified as the chief end of existence. But we are compelled to recognize it as a means to well-nigh every desirable achievement. So long as wealth is made the means and not the end, we need not greatly fear it. An there never was time when wealth was so generally regarded as a means, or so little regarded as an end, as today (emphasis added).

Romney needs to do a better job in this, making the case constantly that the money made by business is not an end to itself; that no one is arguing for the ultra-individualist position Obama is implicitly arguing against; that the Republican position doesn't entail a simple love of big coporations; that a just government does not take the bread from the mouth of one man to feed another.  I don't want to leave the impression that Romney has not done these things, but he could certainly do much better.