Karl Rove -- the George W. Bush confidante who needs no introduction -- has written a memoir of his life in politics, Courage and Consequence: My Life as a Conservative in the Fight, which is released today. It includes an intimate look at Rove, his family -- which has come under attacks from his political opponents -- and his formation as a conservative. Rove took questions from National Review Online’s Kathryn Jean Lopez about the book -- including on the roots of Rove’s William F. Buckley- and Barry Goldwater-influenced conservatism, and Rove’s regrets on weapons of mass destruction and Trent Lott. And read on to learn the topic on which Rove feels the need to expose the “sorry excuse[s]” of Pres. George W. Bush.


KATHRYN JEAN LOPEZ: Early copies of your book got out, and the media, understandably, is mostly interested in what you have to say about Iraq. Well, that and Colin Powell getting push-ups out of you. From your vantage point, what’s the most important news in this book?

KARL ROVE: What I tried to do in the book is to step back, pull back the curtain, give people a clear look about what I've learned about politics, and share what I was privileged to see, especially during my White House years. I write about the myths that have grown up around me and those years and set the record straight in a way I hope the reader sees as well-researched, durable, and interesting.

Writing a book was an arduous, challenging process that I enjoyed more than I expected, and it left me with even more respect for people who do this for a living.


LOPEZ: You have some regrets. One of them I was surprised by: You wish you had helped Trent Lott keep his spot as Senate Republican leader. Why? Would that have been the better outcome for the Republican party? For the country?

ROVE: My point was somewhat different: Lott blames me for forcing him out as Senate majority leader following his comments suggesting America would have been better off if a segregationist had been elected president in 1948. But there was a moment when I could have offered advice that might have kept him from losing public support and forfeiting the trust of his GOP senatorial colleagues. I didn’t take the moment to disagree with his rosy (and incorrect) assessment that the issue was going away. Pressing him to do an immediate and full apology that showed he understood how badly he had offended many Americans might have kept him in the majority-leader post.


LOPEZ: You have a chapter titled, “Bush Was Right on Iraq.” Did Newsweek vindicate you last week?

ROVE: What Newsweek did was report on the almost miraculous progress that’s been made in Iraq since the surge went into effect in 2007. I certainly think that the emergence in the heart of the Middle East of an Iraqi democracy -- and it needs to be said that we’re still not home free yet -- strengthens the case that Bush was right on Iraq. It opens important possibilities.

The world is a better place now that Saddam is gone: He was a brutal dictator who started wars and destabilized the Middle East. He led a rogue regime that constantly thumbed its nose at the demands of the world. And Iraq was a home to terrorists.




LOPEZ: In the book you ask: “So why did President Bush choose to go after Saddam Hussein in the first place? Wasn’t it a diversion from what should have been the real goal, which was to defeat al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan?” Is that your greatest regret, that the Bush administration didn’t answer that question compellingly long ago?

ROVE: No, it is that we didn’t tackle a more damaging narrative, namely that Bush lied about the presence of WMD. This was a cynically political attack unleashed by unprincipled leaders of the Democratic party, who knew better but were willing to unleash it because it would corrode President Bush’s credibility if it was not refuted.


LOPEZ: There is a newspaper clipping about Scooter Libby on your desk “because it reminds [you] of how brutal politics can be, and because it captures a moment that is well known but widely misunderstood.” What would be an accurate understanding of the Libby incident, for the sake of history?

ROVE: There was no underlying offense in the Plame affair. Undersecretary of State Richard Armitage leaked Plame’s name to Robert Novak and was not charged. The criminal-justice system is a poor way to resolve what are, essentially, political disputes; our constant resort to it demeans the criminal-justice system and undermines the legitimacy of the political process.

If no crime was committed in Armitage’s leak to Novak, then why years of investigation and an indictment over a disagreement between a journalist and a government official over an issue of what was said to whom? The process was a meat grinder and went on far too long when no law was broken.


LOPEZ: You write very intimately about your parents, clearly more than you’re fully comfortable doing. But, you write, “There is something to be said about setting the record straight, especially when it involves your kin.” Is this, too, what you mean about the “brutality” of politics? Have there been moments when you saw a cure in sight for the “raging, incurable case of Potomac fever” you describe catching during a trip to D.C. early on?

ROVE: While I abhor the efforts of some journalists to distort my parents’ lives to launch political attacks on me, I don’t feel victimized. The writers in question were dead wrong, and the book gave me a chance to defend my parents, especially my father. It was but a small repayment of the many debts I owe to two people who loved me and whom I loved.

I was long ago cured of Potomac fever. While I continue to enjoy Washington and politics, I enjoy being able to spend most of my time outside the Beltway.




LOPEZ: You describe President Bush as “a conservative president.” And you go on to wage a defense of him as such. One of your explanations for the “myth” that he “was a moderate Republican who went wobbly on conservative ideas” is that he “lacks the harsh and judgmental edge of some other conservative leaders.” I can remember a time or two when he was viewed as being harsh and judgmental toward conservatives. I know he was on the receiving end there, too, but was there some sort of fundamental miscommunication on issues including immigration and the Supreme Court nomination of Harriet Miers? (I was never convinced elitism or racism or sexism, for instance, was at the heart of most conservative criticisms.) Could the White House have approached its conservative critics differently? If you had to give advice to the conservative movement for more effective dealings with the next Republican White House, what might you offer?

ROVE: There’s a lot in there. Did the White House -- especially me -- underestimate the conservative animosity toward Harriet Miers, for example? Yes, but then some conservative opinionmakers underestimated or misrepresented Harriet Miers, too. Burned by the experience of Justice David Souter, when conservatives trusted the reassurances of the chief of staff to President Bush 41, these conservatives were in no mood to accept someone whose personal views were not intimately known to them. I understand that, and if I didn’t know Harriet, I may have reacted as they did. But I did know Harriet, and so I wish I had come up with appropriate ways they could have been reassured and become supportive.

But it is what it is. The nation got two strong and able young conservative justices, and people saw the character of a bright, principled, and decent human being in how Harriet selflessly withdrew rather than force a fight that would have cost President Bush enormous capital.

In terms of how the conservative movement should deal with the next Republican in the White House: It needs to balance principled critiques with an appreciation for political realities. No president, not even Ronald Reagan, will get a perfect score on a purity test once in office. Reagan, after all, raised taxes by what at the time was a record amount and signed an immigration-amnesty bill. A couple of his Supreme Court picks turned out to be less than satisfactory. And President Reagan still belongs on Mount Rushmore. You take a statesman in the totality of his actions.


LOPEZ: Was it odd for you, someone who self-identifies as a “conservative,” to find yourself at odds with conservatives throughout the eight years of the administration?

ROVE: Conservatives are a frothy mix, so no. I often found conservatives on different sides of the same issue, whether one of substance or tactics. This diversity is healthy, though it does lead in some quarters of our movement to an unfortunate tendency to view a narrow slice of the conservative alliance as possessing the only true beliefs of the entire movement.

For the most part, conservatives were quite supportive of Bush’s agenda -- from tax cuts to his war against militant Islam to Social Security reform to health savings accounts to traditional marriage to support of Israel to free trade and much more. The differences between most conservatives and their conservative president were fairly few and far between.




LOPEZ: In your experience, in Republican circles -- say, in a governor’s mansion or a White House -- does it make a difference whether you have self-identified conservatives in the room? Can you think of a time or two when conservative principles you brought to the table made a difference?

ROVE: Yes it does matter whether conservatives are in the room, especially whether a self-identified conservative is the decision-maker. And I will duck the second part of your question out of modesty.


LOPEZ: On gay marriage, you write of the president: “I am certain that members of his family, some friends, and his vice president didn’t share Bush’s strong support for traditional marriage.” If he was surrounded by so much opposition, what motivated him -- and you?

ROVE: This was an issue that was thrust into the spotlight not by us but by the judicial overreach of the Massachusetts Superior Judicial Court. Bush is a conviction politician; he believes certain things are matters of principle, worth defending and advocating even in the face of such pressures.


LOPEZ: Is preserving traditional marriage a winning issue (I ask as gay marriage now exists in the District of Columbia)?

ROVE: Well, the majority of Americans support a traditional definition of marriage, though sentiment is shifting. Opponents of same-sex marriage should be inclusive and thoughtful, not judgmental and angry. Increasingly, the defense of traditional marriage also requires some measure of political courage, since its opponents (and their allies in the mainstream press) are all too willing to paint advocates of traditional marriage as bigots.


LOPEZ: How did Bill Buckley influence your formation as a conservative?

ROVE: As a pre-teen, I eagerly read National Review at my hometown library and then devoured every one of his books I could lay my hands on. I even badgered the librarian to find some for me. He spoke at the University of Utah, and I was enthralled. After the speech, I had a chance to shake the great man’s hand. He was a huge influence on me, and his writings still are.


LOPEZ: You describe some important political lessons you learned early on. One of them was “not everybody votes.” In fact, many don’t. How do you see the tea parties affecting this reality?

ROVE: While some tea-party members are political junkies, most that I have meet were previously uninvolved or largely disengaged from politics. The bank bailout lit the fuse, but the explosion of spending, the flood of deficits, the dramatic attempts to expand government all caused ordinary Americans to become deeply concerned about the kind of country their children and grandchildren would inherit.

If the tea-party movement becomes a semi-formal auxiliary of the GOP, its influence will decline. If it becomes a third party, it will bring about the victory of its greatest adversaries. If it continues to style itself as a movement that holds the feet of all elected officials in both parties to the fire, then it will become -- like the pro-life, Second Amendment, and civil-rights movements before it -- a durable and influential part of the political landscape that has a particular force in drawing new people into political action and voting.




LOPEZ: Another lesson you describe is learning that “brand” matters. What is the Republican brand right now, and what is the Democratic brand? Can/should/will they change before November? By 2012?

ROVE: The GOP’s brand is strengthening, primarily due to the actions of President Obama and the congressional leadership of Pelosi and Reid. But it will not be enough to simply surf on the wave of discontent with the Democrats’ actions of the last year. Republicans -- driven by conservative lawmakers such as congressman Paul Ryan -- need to offer a positive and optimistic agenda on the issues that families talk about around the kitchen table, starting with growing the economy and jobs and restraining spending and debt.


LOPEZ: You write that you “often reminded people to put political considerations out of their mind and instead focus on making good policy. I agree with the saying that ‘good policy makes good politics.’ I let people know that I would take care of the politics down the road, or let the politics take care of itself.” Could one argue that the current White House is effectively operating that way, as they ignore the negative polls surrounding their health-care plan?

ROVE: Except that it’s very bad policy. Sometimes the right thing is unpopular: Witness the initial reaction to the surge in Iraq. Then again, other times, the unpopular thing is unpopular because it is bad policy. That’s the case with Obamacare. The president and his Democratic allies have dominated the public stage and the ad wars, yet their proposal has become progressively less popular as people have made their own judgments.


LOPEZ: You write a bit about Max Cleland. For history’s sake: Was he at all wronged by the GOP?

ROVE: I honor Senator Cleland for his service to our country and his state, but he has used his defeat in 2002 to defame his political opponents and create myths about his actions in order to portray himself as a victim. He has repeatedly said things about me, the man who defeated him, and that man’s campaign that are simply not true. I cite chapter and verse in my book.


LOPEZ: You used to do politics. Now you write about it. How do you like this new chapter in life? Do you prefer one to the other?

ROVE: I like doing both, and while I can’t and won’t go back to being a consultant, there are plenty of ways to stay involved in politics, and I’ll avail myself of some of them as appropriate.


LOPEZ: You love reading. How was it being on the other side of the book?

ROVE: Writing (and researching and interviewing) was lot tougher than I thought. And thank God for brilliant editors.




LOPEZ: What are you reading now? And are you and the former president still into reading contests?

ROVE: The president and I suspended our contest as we both tackled writing our own books. I suspect he will be reluctant to restart the annual competitions because he has been robbed of the sorry excuse he’d offer after losing each year: He was busy with his day job of being “the leader of the free world.”

I juggle several books at once and am now reading Gordon Wood’s Empire of Liberty and Xenophon’s The Persian Expedition, and finishing Joan Waugh’s U. S. Grant. I am reluctantly reporting weekly on this year’s reading at Rove.com, listing what I’m reading and recommending some of the volumes.

-- Kathryn Jean Lopez is editor-at-large of National Review Online.

In his State of the Union address, President Obama mentioned the protections enshrined in the Constitution and said, “No matter who you are or what you look like, if you abide by the law, you should be protected by it.” Obama followed this lofty rhetoric with a claim that his Justice Department “has a Civil Rights Division that is once again prosecuting civil-rights violations and employment discrimination.”

As anyone familiar with the Division’s workings can tell you, this assertion is patently false. Obama’s Civil Rights Division will prosecute cases only depending on “what you look like.” If you are white and you are discriminated against in your job, at the polls, or in seeking equal access to federally funded institutions, the Division won’t lift a finger to make sure you’re “protected.”

Over the last year, I have written many articles about the politicization and outright misconduct of the Civil Rights Division under the Obama administration. I have pointed out the Division’s politically motivated dismissal of a voter-intimidation case against the New Black Panther Party, its highly dubious objection to the state of Georgia’s verifying the citizenship of newly registered voters, and its almost comedic effort to prevent the small town of Kinston, N.C., from changing its partisan town-council elections to nonpartisan because it might hurt Democratic candidates.

If you want to understand how the Civil Rights Division is being run in the Obama administration, imagine for just a moment what would happen if the most radical, ideologically left-wing advocacy organizations in Washington took control of it. Because that’s exactly what happened.

So who are the players who are responsible for all of this?

Assistant Attorney General Thomas Perez. Perez is a longtime Democratic activist and a former staffer to the late senator Ted Kennedy. When Perez was running for a seat on the Montgomery County Council in Maryland, he was asked what was the most important thing voters should know about him. His response: “I am a progressive Democrat and always was and always will be.” Once elected, the hyper-partisan Perez made no effort to hide his contempt for Republicans. He once gave a speech claiming that conservative Republicans do not care about the poor. An article in the Washington Post (April 3, 2005) characterized Perez as “about as liberal as Democrats get.”



Perez also served as president of Casa de Maryland, an extreme advocacy organization that opposes the enforcement of our immigration laws. This group has encouraged illegal aliens not to speak with police officers or immigration agents; it has fought restrictions on illegal aliens’ receiving driver’s licenses; it has urged the Montgomery County Police Department not to enforce federal fugitive warrants; it has advocated giving illegal aliens in-state tuition; and it has actively promulgated “day labor” sites, where illegal aliens and disreputable employers openly skirt federal prohibitions on hiring undocumented individuals.

It is stunning that someone affiliated with an outfit that displays such contempt for federal law would even be nominated, let alone confirmed, as the nation’s top civil-rights law-enforcement officer. But Perez has gone farther.

As a councilman in Maryland in 2003, Perez sought to force local governments to accept matricula consular ID cards, which are issued by the Mexican and Guatemalan governments, as a valid form of identification. He insisted that individuals with such cards not have to show any U.S.-issued documents to prove their identities. This proposal was ludicrous. The matricala consular IDs are rife with fraud, a fact well known to Perez. No major bank in Mexico even accepts the cards to open an account and, by last count, 22 of Mexico’s 32 states and districts reject the cards as IDs. But Perez was happy to have an excuse to thumb his nose at federal immigration laws.

It should come as no surprise that Perez was once a career lawyer in the Division, which is known for attracting the most hyper-partisan career staffers in the entire Justice Department. Now he has announced that he will ramp up enforcement of “disparate impact” lawsuits -- playing the race card in employment cases and launching an effort to block banks from foreclosing on individuals who took out loans they knew they couldn’t afford. This is fitting: Perez was a political appointee in the Division during the Clinton administration, when it was hit with over $4.1 million in sanctions for filing frivolous and unwarranted discrimination claims -- including “disparate impact” lawsuits.

By the way, on the “nonpoliticized hiring” issue -- Perez issued a memorandum on Dec. 3, 2009, making it clear that he would make the final decision on all proposed career hires. And he has surrounded himself with equally radical subordinates to run the ever-growing Division.



Mark Kappelhoff. Kappelhoff was Perez’s principal deputy for most of the past year. Although the Department’s press flacks loved to describe Kappelhoff as a longtime apolitical career attorney, the reality is that he is extremely liberal and intensely political. Before coming to the Department of Justice in 1997, Kappelhoff worked for two years as legislative counsel for the ACLU. Prior to that, he served as a public defender in Montgomery County, Md., and spent several years as a legislative assistant to a Democratic congressman from Minnesota. Is it any wonder that this career attorney was initially tapped to take the No. 2 position in the Division -- a job designed as a political position and always filled by a political appointee?

Of course, the line between career attorney and political appointee in the Holder Civil Rights Division is virtually nonexistent. It is no coincidence that Kappelhoff gave almost $3,000 to Obama in the 2008 election cycle and has made nearly $5,000 in contributions to Democratic politicians over the last six years. In fact, it is rather stunning to review the Federal Election Commission website and note the tens of thousands of dollars contributed to Democratic candidates and the DNC by the supposedly apolitical career lawyers in the Civil Rights Division.

Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Samuel Bagenstos. Replacing Kappelhoff is Samuel Bagenstos, a typical out-of-touch liberal from the academy, specifically Washington University in St. Louis. He clerked for Ninth Circuit judge Stephen Reinhardt after law school, and then did a one-year clerkship with Justice Ginsburg on the Supreme Court.

Bagenstos has spent most of his career advocating far-left-wing causes from his comfortable ivory-tower perch. And he is not above making reckless attacks in pursuit of his political agenda. In 2004, representing the Democratic party in a lawsuit in Ohio filed under the relatively new Help America Vote Act, he savagely attacked the Bush Civil Rights Division (in which I worked) for arguing that there was no private right of action under that federal statute, calling it “shameful” and even deriding part of the Division’s brief as an “Alice in Wonderland” argument. When the Supreme Court agreed with the Division in 2008, he was strangely silent.

Bagenstos recently appeared in federal court in New York, arguing against a motion to dismiss one of the Division’s lawsuits. The Division’s complaint was so badly written under Bagenstos’s supervision that the judge at one point compared the government’s pleading to that of a pro se litigant, which is as close as a federal judge can come to calling you incompetent.



Deputy Assistant Attorney General Loretta King. King is, as I have stated before, one of the biggest political hacks in the Division (and that’s saying something). Anyone with even a fleeting familiarity with the New Black Panther Party fiasco from earlier this year knows that King was in the middle of one of the most egregious acts of crass partisanship and racial politics in the Division’s history. There is little doubt that King is guided almost exclusively by partisan politics. During my time working alongside her, she talked openly about resigning to run as a Democratic candidate in Maryland.

I also have previously written about how a King-led team of attorneys was slapped with $587,000 in attorney-fee sanctions in Johnson v. Miller, a Clinton-era redistricting case in which the Division commanded the State of Georgia -- in the words of the U.S. Supreme Court -- to engage in “presumptively unconstitutional race-based districting.” Not only did King lose that case, but both the federal district court and the Supreme Court excoriated the Division’s handling of it. The federal district court characterized the Division’s conduct as “disturbing” and “an embarrassment,” and pointed out that the Department’s attorneys seemed to be taking their orders directly from the ACLU. The court expressed its surprise and profound disappointment “that the Department of Justice was so blind to this impropriety, especially in a role as sensitive as that of preserving the fundamental right to vote.”

Deputy Assistant Attorney General Julie Fernandes. When it comes to sheer single-minded partisanship, however, no one is even in the same league as Julie Fernandes. Straight out of law school, Julie worked for the ACLU on race and poverty issues, and her liberal activism has grown stronger ever since. In the Clinton administration, she served as a political appointee in the Civil Rights Division, where she focused on legal and policy issues relating to voting rights, police misconduct, and racial profiling (and engaged in outrageous harassment of police officers and legally baseless attacks on law enforcement in general). After leaving the Civil Rights Division, she went to work for Clinton at the White House Domestic Policy Council, where she wreaked havoc on our nation’s immigration, race-relations, and civil-rights policies. When the Clinton administration mercifully came to an end, Fernandez joined the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights as a senior policy analyst and special counsel.



Now she has returned to the Justice Department. She sees her mission as protecting Democrats and their constituents. Just days after she gave a speech at the American Constitution Society stressing the importance of not treating the Civil Rights Division “like a buffet line at the cafeteria, cherry-picking which laws to enforce,” Fernandes convened the entire Voting Section career staff and explicitly told them that this administration would not be enforcing Section 8 of the National Voter Registration Act under her watch. (This is the provision that directs states and municipalities to regularly purge their voting rolls of individuals who are deceased or no longer living in a jurisdiction, a policy the Left has always despised.) The hypocrisy is palpable, but it’s hardly surprising coming from a demagogue such as Fernandes, who has spent so much time seeking to undermine anti-fraud measures in state and federal elections.

It’s supremely ironic that Fernandes testified to the House Judiciary Committee several years ago about the alleged politicization of the Bush Civil Rights Division. She has brazenly politicized the Division to a far greater degree, in just the first year of the Obama administration, than the Bush administration was even accused of doing. It was Fernandes who stripped the former chief of the Voting Section, Christopher Coates, the career lawyer who recommended the lawsuit against the New Black Panther Party, of all almost all of his managerial responsibilities. From the moment she arrived, she zealously micromanaged every detail of the Voting Section and sought to undermine Coates at every turn. Her agenda was to push Coates out and replace him with an ideologically reliable apparatchik, and she finally succeeded when Coates was reassigned 450 miles away, to South Carolina.

You can also be sure that Fernandes will be working closely with her friends at militant civil-rights organizations to pack the Division more than ever with liberal ideologues in the career ranks. Sources say that during the Bush administration, Fernandes’s husband, Avner Shapiro, who was a line attorney in the Voting Section, kept her well informed on who was being hired and on the status of open investigations -- despite the confidential and privileged nature of such information, particularly case files. Sources say that during the Bush administration they saw her walking out of Shapiro’s office with Division files.

Senior Counsel Les Jin. Jin’s primary claim to shame is his four-year tenure as staff director of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights (USCCR), where he helped the lawless chairwoman, Mary Frances Berry, carry out her radical, racially militant agenda. (He also was the executive director of the National Asian Pacific American Bar Association, which opposed Justice Alito’s confirmation because NAPABA supports race-based affirmative action.) Jin’s service was marked not only by constant political shenanigans, but also by financial irregularities. John J. Miller and Ramesh Ponnuru wrote an NRO column back in 2001, urging President Bush to fire Jin. They noted:

The case for replacing Jin goes beyond his being a holdover. He’s a shameless hack for Berry. He is afraid to challenge her, even when she behaves lawlessly, as in the current dispute over the commission’s makeup. He also refuses to work with the commission’s GOP-appointed members. He doesn’t let them participate in selecting witnesses to appear at commission hearings, he won’t take their names off press releases when they disagree with their content, and he was instrumental in the suppression of the dissent written by commissioners Abigail Thernstrom and Russell Redenbaugh in response to the commission’s scandalously bad report on the presidential election in Florida. There are also questions about his handling of the commission’s budget.

In fact, during Jin’s reign of terror at the USCCR, the Commission neglected to pay its $75,000 rent, refused to provide several employees a substantial part of the judgment ($188,000) that they had won against the agency in a federal discrimination claim, underfunded its employee benefit packages, and caused the agency’s financial ledger to disappear. As Gerald Reynolds, the subsequent chairman of the USCCR, later explained to a congressional subcommittee, “if a private company didn’t have a ledger, then somebody goes to jail.” Jin has already developed a special “outreach” list of civil-rights organizations that he is sending career job openings to -- no doubt to ensure that only those with the “proper” civil-rights views apply for work. Jin’s very presence in the Civil Rights Division front office emphatically demonstrates that this administration has politicized civil rights to an unprecedented degree and is committed to a reckless path of law enforcement.

Matt Nosanchuck. Another counsel serving Perez is Matt Nosanchuck, a gay activist who helped spearhead President Obama’s outreach to the homosexual and transgender community and a veteran of an organization called the “Third Way,” which advocates support for various gay and lesbian causes. He was co-counsel in the NAACP’s lawsuit against gun manufacturers and has said that there is no constitutional right to own a gun. He is joined by Jocelyn Samuels, a former Ted Kennedy staffer who came to the Division after serving as a vice president at the National Women’s Law Center, a “progressive” advocacy group that espouses one of the most radical feminist agendas and seems to be at the forefront of every liberal cause.

Karen Stevens. A fourth counsel, Karen Stevens, is technically a “career” lawyer on detail to the front office. She was cited in the inspector general’s report complaining about supposedly improper “politicization” during the Bush administration. Of course, the IG report not only failed to identify her by name, it also neglected to mention that she had been a political appointee in the Civil Rights Division during the Clinton administration; she burrowed into the career ranks just before the Clintonistas left office. She is, as you can imagine, one of the most partisan “career” lawyers in the Division.

I literally laughed out loud when it was announced internally at the Division in September that Stevens would be one of two lawyers co-chairing a new hiring committee to ensure that only “merit” was considered in the career hiring process. She is so trusted by the Democratic leadership in this administration that she was moved to the front office of the Division on the first day Obama came into office -- to occupy what is normally a political slot. The Democratic National Committee must be almost giddy when it looks over the Civil Rights Division masthead.



Chief of Staff Leon Rodriguez. Rodriguez is a former county attorney for Montgomery County, Md., and a crony of Perez from the latter’s stint on the county council. Rodriguez has been a significant contributor to both Barack Obama and John Kerry in their respective presidential runs, and has been described as solidly and reliably liberal. Rodriguez recently found himself in a big spat with a councilwoman in Montgomery County after he undertook a purportedly illegal search of the computer of one of the councilwoman’s staff members.

Associate Attorney General Thomas Perrelli. Normally, one would expect the leadership higher up in Justice Department to act as a check on any shortcomings in the leadership of the Civil Rights Division. But Perrelli, to whom Perez reports, was deeply involved in the dismissal of the New Black Panther Party voter-intimidation case and may have been taking his orders from the White House. One of his deputies is Sam Hirsch, one of the Democratic party’s main redistricting lawyers and litigators. From this perch, Hirsch can make sure that all political redistricting after the 2010 Census goes the way the party wants it to go.

Another deputy in the associate attorney general’s office shows just how far the Democratic party will go to reward ideologically correct (but legally incorrect) lawyering. Marisa Chun is a political appointee who started off as a career lawyer in the Civil Rights Division before leaving for private law practice in San Francisco. She was the lead career lawyer during the Clinton administration who filed a lawsuit against the City of Torrance, Calif., claiming that the police-officer and firefighter examinations were discriminatory because they had a “disparate impact” (sound familiar?). The case was thrown out after a federal court determined that the Division “had an insufficient factual basis” for the lawsuit and “continued to pursue the claim#...#long after it became apparent that the case lacked merit.” American taxpayers had to pay the city $1.7 million. Now Ms. Chun finds herself in an office that supervises her former colleagues and the disparate-impact crusade that Perez is launching. It is almost surreal.

Don’t get me wrong: The new administration is free to select whomever it wants for political posts at the Justice Department -- even lawyers who were involved in lawsuits that resulted in sanctions against the Department. But we all remember the Left’s relentless attacks upon the Bush Civil Rights Division for installing conservatives in leadership positions. We were subjected to endless blather about the Bush team’s arrogance for refusing to approve a handful of cases recommended by career staff, its chutzpah in allowing political appointees to manage certain litigation, and its sheer temerity for stripping some career section chiefs of their authority to exercise unfettered discretion in establishing the enforcement and policy agendas of the Division. The soaring rhetoric turned out to be just that, rhetoric.

The overwhelming majority of the individuals who populate the Civil Rights Division have always felt that because they are pursuing a virtuous mission, they are infallible and somehow have license to contravene the law, skirt ethical lines, and participate in acts of deception. Until recently, these leftists were able to act with impunity, and even today, the mainstream media continues to turn a blind eye until the Division’s misconduct becomes so glaring (think New Black Panther Party) that it simply can no longer be realistically ignored. Hopefully, however, those days are beginning to end. Abuses need to be exposed and individuals need to be called to account. And we will all be the better for it.

-- Hans A. von Spakovsky is a former commissioner on the Federal Election Commission and a former counsel to the assistant attorney general for civil rights at the Justice Department.

My flight had been delayed, so I arrived late to a 2004 academic conference, a law school gab-fest exploring legal issues in the War on Terror. The professor giving the keynote address was well into his remarks when I sheepishly entered the rear of the hall, trying to muffle the creaky door. I wasn’t paying Professor Keynote much mind until I heard him begin to inveigh against the “American Taliban.”

That was an attention grabber. Righteous rage was not the usual tone of discussions about John Walker Lindh on college campuses. That was usually reserved for George W. Bush. But fear not: Lindh was not the target of the good professor’s wrath. No, the “American Taliban” the professor decried was#...#me.

Not me specifically, at least on this occasion -- though this insult and others in the same vein were ones I’d hear any number of times at law schools and legal conferences throughout the Bush years. The professor was talking more generally: The “American Taliban” were all the lawyers who worked for the Justice Department under John Ashcroft. He meant the prosecutors who exploited the Patriot Act, detained suspects on material-witness warrants, used the immigration laws to deport illegal aliens who popped up in terrorism investigations, put Islamic “charities” out of business for funding terrorist organizations, etc. The prof’s wrath was directed at people like me (it was known that I’d be a panelist at the conference) who’d supported such counterterrorism policies as indefinite detention for enemy combatants, military-commission trials, aggressive interrogation of top jihadists, warrantless surveillance of enemy communications, and who hold the general view that jihadist terror is driven by Islamist ideology, not by American policies abhorred by the Left.

I couldn’t help remembering that 2004 incident over the past several days as we’ve endured a new round of precious pining from the American legal profession’s emirs. Their suddenly tender sensibilities are offended because seven Justice Department lawyers who volunteered their services to al-Qaeda detainees were called “the al-Qaeda Seven” in a television ad. The spot called for the Justice Department to identify those lawyers, because, as is its wont, the “most transparent administration in history” was stonewalling on the issue.

The ad was sponsored by Keep America Safe, an organization that advocates stronger U.S. national security, under the direction of Liz Cheney, Bill Kristol, and Debra Burlingame. That list of names tells you everything you need to know about the indignant tone of the criticism.



The Left is embarrassed. It senses that the public is no longer buying its bogus narrative about the Gitmo Bar: that they are noble attorneys answering the Constitution’s call in order to protect “our values.” Many of the detainees represented by these volunteers have returned to the jihad against America. Some of them have already committed more mass murders. Others are now in top positions, planning operations against our troops and our homeland. With that in mind, preaching about “the rule of law” -- by which they mean “the rule of lawyers” -- doesn’t seem like the best strategy for progressives at the moment. So they’ve switched to the tactic that works best with their media sympathizers: just keep saying “Cheney.”

But that isn’t going to work, either. Since Jan. 20, 2009, Vice President Cheney’s warnings about national security have been vindicated. Cheney argued that American counterterrorism policies had to change after 9/11 and that regarding jihadist terror as a mere law-enforcement issue irresponsibly endangered the nation. But Barack Obama campaigned on going back to the September 10 mindset. So where are we now? Gitmo is still open, we still have military commissions, aggressive surveillance has been inscribed in our law, and military operations have escalated. The warrantless, targeted killing of al-Qaeda operatives has not been curtailed -- if anything, it has been stepped up: Evidently, that’s enough due process for Pakistan.

Obama hasn’t adopted these policies because he wants to. He has been dragged into doing so by political reality: The American people would tolerate nothing less. Given a choice, it turns out Americans vastly prefer Cheney’s counterterrorism program to the Left’s blame-America prescriptions. “Just keep saying ‘Cheney’” is not an effective argument when the public is more comfortable hearing “Cheney” than, say, “Holder.”

Here’s the Left’s other problem: For all the Obama campaign’s talk about how attorneys who voluntarily rushed to al-Qaeda’s aid were defending our “values,” the Obama administration now senses the need to hide those lawyers. It doesn’t want to name all of them, it won’t discuss their role in counterterrorism policy, and it certainly doesn’t want to talk about which terrorists they were helping. By contrast, “the American Taliban” aren’t hiding. We wear the Left’s insult as a badge of honor, as much for who our critics are as for the policy direction their insult implies.

Attorney General Holder, for example, dismissed me as a “polemicist” in Senate testimony. Imagine being called a polemicist by this guy. Here’s what he had to say in the course of slandering the Bush Justice Department for approving “needlessly abusive and unlawful practices”:

Our government authorized the use of torture, approved of secret electronic surveillance against American citizens, secretly detained American citizens without due process of law, denied the writ of habeas corpus to hundreds of accused enemy combatants, and authorized the use of procedures that violate both international law and the United States Constitution.

While Holder is gunning for indictments and retribution, those denounced as the “American Taliban” are seeking only openness in government. The designation “al-Qaeda Seven” for those lawyers who volunteered their services to al-Qaeda is not a call for anyone to be fired, nor an argument that lawyers who represented the enemy are not qualified to work in the Justice Department or elsewhere in government. It was a call for political accountability, a contention that these lawyers, and the positions they took during the Bush years, instantiate the kind of counterterrorism policies President Obama favors -- policies that endanger our national security.

No one has been a more vigorous critic of Eric Holder’s stewardship of the Justice Department than I have. I remain scornful, though, of suggestions that he be fired. Mr. Holder, like the DOJ’s Gitmo lawyers, the administration’s sundry czars, cabinet secretaries such as Janet “The System Worked” Napolitano, and advisers like John “20 Percent Recidivism for Released Terrorists Is Not Bad” Brennan, is not an independent actor. President Obama’s appointees are simply implementing President Obama’s policies. We are in a policy debate about the current direction of national security and over whether, come 2012, President Obama is the person Americans should want at the helm. By forcing that debate, we’ve pushed Obama, against his own inclinations, to be less reckless than he would otherwise have been. That’s not gotcha politics; it’s good policy.

But Holder is not content with his libelous indictment of Bush-administration lawyers and policymakers. He promised a “reckoning” against them. And, sure enough, his department has tried to ruin them. Those lawyers weren’t treated as thoughtful professionals who were simply serving the administration of justice by representing their client -- the story we’ve supposed to accept as gospel when it comes to the Gitmo Bar. When it came to the Bush lawyers, the profession’s big guns did not write op-eds about how we must separate honorable lawyers from their unpopular clients. There were, instead, demands for indictment and professional discipline. They tried to destroy John Yoo, they denied Jim Haynes a seat on the federal bench, and some of them are still trying to impeach Jay Bybee.

For the Left, it wasn’t enough to call Bush lawyers “the American Taliban.” They weren’t just trying to crystallize a political debate about the proper balance between liberty and security. They were scorching the earth. They took good men and tried to destroy them over a policy dispute. And now they’re upset about the use of a label that accurately fits what they did.



“Al-Qaeda Seven” reminds me of another legal shorthand expression: “mob lawyer.” It’s a common expression -- everyone uses it. I’d wager that a number of the DOJ’s Gitmo lawyers have either used it or been in conversations where it rolled effortlessly, and without objection, off the tongues of other prosecutors. “Mob lawyers” are lawyers who regularly represent members and associates of the mafia. It’s such a commonplace that even the mob lawyers call themselves “mob lawyers.” It’s a handle; it doesn’t mean the people who use the term don’t see the moral difference between mobsters who commit heinous crimes and the lawyers who defend them. Same with the “al-Qaeda Seven.”

Much of the commentary on this point, including from some people who usually know better, has been specious. The normally sensible Paul Mirengoff, for example, huffs, “It is entirely inappropriate to suggest that these lawyers share the values of terrorists or to dub the seven DOJ lawyers ‘The al-Qaeda Seven.’” The values of the terrorists? Which values?

Jihadists believe it is proper to massacre innocent people in order to compel the installation of sharia as a pathway to Islamicizing society. No one for a moment believes, or has suggested, that al-Qaeda’s American lawyers share that view. But jihadist terrorists, and Islamist ideology in general, also hold that the United States is the root of all evil in the world, that it is the beating heart of capitalist exploitation of society’s have-nots, and that it needs fundamental, transformative change.

This, as I argue in a book to be published this spring, is why Islam and the Left collaborate so seamlessly. They don’t agree on all the ends and means. In fact, Islamists don’t agree among themselves about means. But before they can impose their utopias, Islamists and the Left have a common enemy they need to take down: the American constitutional tradition of a society based on individual liberty, in which government is our servant, not our master. It is perfectly obvious that many progressive lawyers are drawn to the jihadist cause because of common views about the need to condemn American policies and radically alter the United States.

That doesn’t make any lawyer unfit to serve. It does, however, show us the fault line in the defining debate of our lifetime, the debate about what type of society we shall have. And that political context makes everyone’s record fair game. If lawyers choose to volunteer their services to the enemy in wartime, they are on the wrong side of that fault line, and no one should feel reluctant to say so.

— National Review’s Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute and the author of Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad (Encounter Books, 2008).

Abraham Lincoln once asked an audience how many legs a dog has, if you called the tail a leg? When the audience said “five,” Lincoln corrected them, saying that the answer was four. “The fact that you call a tail a leg does not make it a leg.”

That same principle applies today. The fact that politicians call something a “stimulus” does not make it a stimulus. The fact that they call something a “jobs bill” does not mean there will be more jobs.

What have been the actual consequences of all the hundreds of billions of dollars that the government has spent? The idea behind the spending is that it will cause investors to invest, lenders to lend, and employers to employ.

That was called “pump priming.” To get a pump going, people put a little water into it, so that the pump will start pumping out a lot of water. In other words, government money alone was never supposed to restore the economy by itself. It was supposed to get the private sector spending, lending, investing, and employing.

The question is: Is that what has actually happened?

The stimulus spending started back in 2008, during the Bush administration, and has continued under the Obama administration, so it has had plenty of time to show what it can do.

After the Bush administration’s stimulus spending in 2008, business spending on equipment and software fell -- not rose-- by 28 percent. Spending on durable goods fell 22 percent.

What about the banks? Four months after the Trouble Asset Relief Program (TARP) poured billions of dollars into the banks, the biggest recipients of that money made 23 percent fewer loans than before. A year later, the credit extended by American banks as a whole was down -- not up -- by more than $20 billion.

Spending in general was down. The velocity of circulation of money fell faster than it had in half a century.

Just two weeks ago, the Wall Street Journal reported, “U.S. banks posted last year their sharpest decline in lending since 1942.” You can call it a stimulus, if you want to, just as you can call a tail a leg. But the actual effect of what is called a “stimulus” has been more like that of a sedative.

Why aren’t the banks lending, with all that money sitting there gathering dust?

You don’t lend when politicians are making it more doubtful whether you are going to get your money back -- either on time or at all. From the White House to Capitol Hill, politicians are coming up with all sorts of bright ideas for borrowers not to have to pay back what they borrowed and for lenders not to be able to foreclose on people who are months behind on their mortgage payments.

President Obama keeps telling us that he is “creating jobs.” But more and more Americans have no jobs. The unemployment rate has declined slightly, but only because many people have stopped looking for jobs. You are only counted as unemployed if you are still looking for a job.

If all the unemployed people were to decide that it is hopeless and stop looking for work, the unemployment statistics would drop like a rock. But that would hardly be a solution.



What is going on, that nothing seems to work?

None of this is new. What is going on is what went on during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Money circulated more slowly during the 1930s than during the 1920s. Banks lent out a smaller proportion of the money they had on hand during the 1930s than they did in the 1920s. Anti-business rhetoric and anti-business policies did not create business confidence then, any more than they do now. Economists have estimated that the New Deal prolonged the depression by several years.

This is not another Great Depression, at least not yet, and the economy may recover on its own, if the government will let it. But Obama today, like FDR in the 1930s, cannot leave the economy alone. Both felt a need to come up with one bright idea after another, to “do something.”

The theory is that, if one thing doesn’t work, it is just a matter of trying another. But, in an atmosphere where nobody knows what the federal government is going to come up with next, people tend to hang on to their money until they have some idea of what the rules of the game are going to be.

— Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. © 2010 Creators Syndicate, Inc.

The signs are all around us. Even as Barack Obama and the Democrats lower their heads and prepare to bulldoze a huge new entitlement through Congress, the results of profligate government spending are everywhere apparent. It requires a prodigious degree of ideological blindness to miss this.

In Greece, decades of lavish spending on public employees and social programs have led to national bankruptcy. Greece’s budget deficit last year was 12.7 percent of GDP. Want to know what an economic dead end looks like? It looks like this: A socialist government is forced to try to adopt austerity measures on an infantilized citizenry gone soft and dependent. Public employees respond with strikes and violence. “Tax collectors began a two-day walkout,” reports the Sydney Morning Herald, “court employees launched a week-long series of work stoppages and garbage collectors also mobilized against state spending cuts that are meant to save 4.8 billion euros (6.5 billion U.S. dollars).” These smaller walkouts fall between last week’s general strike and the general strike called for Thursday.

In related news, thousands of students and faculty took to the streets to protest cutbacks and tuition increases at the lavishly funded University of California at Berkeley. Arrests were made after about 200 students rioted, vandalizing a university building and lighting trash cans on fire. An ethnic-studies professor at San Francisco State lamented the violence, explaining that it “casts a shadow on the majority of our students who are working constructively toward budget justice.”

No doubt many New Jerseyans also think of themselves as crusaders for justice. But last month, newly-elected governor Chris Christie delivered a frank assessment of the need for budget continence: “There’s no time left. We have no room left to borrow. We have no room left to tax.” New Jersey, he warned, is “on the verge of bankruptcy.” New Jersey faces a $68.9 billion long-term liability for retiree health care and other benefits, one of the steepest obligations of any state, but has not set aside the funds to cover it. The recession played a role in bringing New Jersey’s woes to a head. But part of competent government is planning for contingencies. Consider what even the liberal Newark Star-Ledger acknowledged:

We have the highest-paid police officers in the country, and they can retire after 25 years at 65 percent of their highest salary. We have the nation’s highest-paid firefighters, too. Salaries for our teachers are always at the top of the nation, or close to it. And most pay nothing for red-carpet health benefits for life.

This year, in the middle of a punishing recession -- when more than 10 percent of New Jerseyans are out of work, when others are having their pay and hours cut, when many are losing homes to foreclosure -- teachers’ average base salaries rose by nearly 5 percent, double the rate of inflation.

Unlike most private-sector employees, New Jersey police officers can cash in on unused sick days. A retiring New Brunswick officer received $376,234 for unused sick days, on top of his annual $115,000 pension. It’s a common pattern. New Jersey has run itself into a ditch, led by liberal Democratic officeholders and their public-union backers and beneficiaries.




New Jersey is one of the worst offenders (along with California, Florida, Michigan, and a few more), but nearly all states are facing a shortfall. The Pew Center on the States found a $1 trillion gap at the end of fiscal year 2008 between the $2.35 trillion states had set aside to pay for employees’ retirement benefits and the $3.35 trillion price tag of those promises. “While the economic crisis and drop in investments helped create it,” explained Susan Urahn, the study’s director, “the trillion-dollar gap is primarily the result of states’ inability to save for the future and manage the costs of their public-sector retirement benefits.”

At the federal level, the government has undertaken promises in the form of Social Security and Medicare that amount to $107 trillion in 2009 dollars. And while the future obligations under Medicare get plenty of ink, the costs of the Medicaid program (which, due to elastic eligibility standards, winds up providing nursing-home care for many middle-class elderly people in addition to the poor) may eventually dwarf the cost of its sister programs.

Last week, the Congressional Budget Office projected that if President Obama’s budget is adopted (without the health-care bill), the national debt will grow by $9.7 trillion over the next decade. And what we need, at this critical juncture, the Obama administration insists, is a huge new entitlement.

Beware of Democrats bearing Greek-like gifts.

— Mona Charen is a nationally syndicated columnist. © 2010 Creators Syndicate, Inc.

Even Nancy Pelosi’s harshest Republican critics don’t doubt her ability to wrangle votes. She again has a chance to pass Obamacare through the House in a bout of arm-twisting so intense it might violate the Geneva Conventions.

If Pelosi somehow succeeds, Democrats will tell themselves they’ve finally attained a goal that has eluded them since Truman. But it won’t be over.

In terms of the Iraq War, it will be the toppling-the-Saddam Hussein-statue phase of the operation, with more combat still in the offing. If the bill becomes law, it will suffer a legitimacy gap that will make it vulnerable to repeal.

One, it will have passed on strictly partisan votes. This wouldn’t matter if the bill were a routine matter, say the annual appropriations bill for Health and Human Services, instead of a reordering of one-sixth of the economy. Support from the minority party would show that it has the kind of broad, sustainable base of support it now lacks as the spawn of a heedless ideological bender.

Two, its skids were greased with rotten deals. Democrats hope to eliminate the special provisions that have tarred the bill in a separate package of “fixes.” Regardless, the bill wouldn’t exist in its current form if key senators hadn’t been bought off with hundreds of billions of dollars in legislative bribes. That taint can’t be undone.

Three, a parliamentary trick is necessary to its final passage. Because Democrats no longer have 60 votes for the bill in the Senate, they have to pass their fixes under “reconciliation,” short-circuiting the normal amendment process. Republicans have resorted to reconciliation many times before, although typically on the fiscal measures for which the maneuver was originally intended, or on legislation enjoying bipartisan support.

Four, the bill has been sold under deliberately false pretenses. Pres. Barack Obama can’t admit the bill’s real purpose is to cover the uninsured no matter what the fiscal consequences. So he sounds like GOP budget hawk Paul Ryan when he talks about it. Obama insists that it will cut the deficit, bend the cost curve down, and reduce premiums, when it’s likely to do the opposite on all three counts.



Five, the bill is abidingly unpopular. It has been under water, sometimes deeply so, in almost every poll. The public has sent a consistent message that it opposes the bill, with the Senate election in Massachusetts providing the exclamation point.

Obama’s original choice for health-care czar, Tom Daschle, warned Democrats long ago that bulldozing reform through on a narrow basis would make it liable to repeal. He cited the example of Australia, where reforms were passed, repealed, and passed again throughout the 1970s and 1980s. In the U.S., Obamacare-style insurance reforms were passed, then fully or partially overturned in Kentucky, New Hampshire, and Washington after those states suffered spiraling premiums and insurance-market meltdowns. 

So Obamacare needn’t stand forever. Aspects of the bill that take hold immediately (ending lifetime limits on care, etc.) won’t have a broad-based effect. The large-scale subsidies for insurance don’t kick in until 2014, after myriad tax increases and cuts to the popular Medicare Advantage program. Nothing in the bill will seriously limit the premium increases against which Obama now inveighs. They may even worsen as young, healthy people leave the insurance market, knowing they soon will be able to wait to get insurance until after they are sick.

Reversing any of this won’t be easy. Republicans will need 60 votes in the Senate, and Obama will wield his veto in defense. The law’s delayed onset will give Republicans breathing room, though. Surely, it won’t look any more affordable as the entitlement crunch approaches and the Washington agenda turns to deficit reduction. And Republicans may well have elected a president before it fully takes effect.

T. S. Eliot said “there is no such thing as a Lost Cause, because there is no such thing as a Gained Cause.” Even if it passes, Obamacare won’t be a “gained cause,” but a source of unremitting, high-stakes contention.

-- Rich Lowry is editor of National Review.

As reported by the Washington Post: “President Obama’s proposed budget would add more than $9.7 trillion to the national debt over the next decade.”

CNN adds, “Of that amount, an estimated $5.6 trillion will be in interest alone.”

The Post continues: “The CBO [Congressional Budget Office] and the White House [are]#...#both predicting a deficit of about $1.5 trillion this year -- a post-World War II record at 10.3 percent of the overall economy. But the CBO is considerably less optimistic about future years, predicting that deficits would never fall below 4 percent of the economy under Obama's policies and would begin to grow rapidly after 2015.

“Deficits of that magnitude would force the Treasury to continue borrowing at prodigious rates, sending the national debt soaring to 90 percent of the economy by 2020, the CBO said.”

CNN notes this particularly chilling prediction from the CBO: “By 2020#...#debt held by the public would reach $20.3 trillion, or 90% of GDP. That’s up from 53% of GDP in 2009.”

I suspect that most Americans, if asked whether these numbers trouble the Democratic leadership and President Obama, would answer in the affirmative.

They would be wrong.

They would be wrong not because the Democratic party and the president are economic illiterates or bad individuals, but because the Democratic party and the president are leftists, and most Americans, including most Democrats, do not understand the Left. They may understand liberalism, but President Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and most Democratic representatives and senators are not liberals; they are leftists. Few Americans understand the difference.

They do not realize, for example, that there is no major difference between the American Democratic party and the leftist social democratic parties of Western Europe. They do not know that, from Karl Marx to Barack Obama, the Left (as opposed to liberals) has never created wealth because it has never been interested in creating wealth; it is interested in redistributing wealth.



Therefore, unprecedented and unsustainable debt that will negatively affect most Americans’ quality of life, render the dollar increasingly undesirable, and undermine America’s prestige and power in the world -- these developments do not particularly disturb the Left. They may trouble the president, the Democratic party, and their allies on some political level, but that pales in comparison to the Left’s zeal for what it really wants: a huge government overseeing a giant welfare state and a country with far fewer rich Americans.

Achieving those goals is far more important than preventing a decline in the American quality of life. The farther left one goes on the spectrum, the more contempt one sees for the present quality of American life; the Left regularly mocks many of the symbols of that life, from the three-bedroom suburban house surrounded by a white picket fence to the SUV, or almost any car, in the driveway (Americans should be traveling on public buses and trains and by riding bicycles, they believe).

As for the dollar, I can bear personal testimony to the decline of its prestige. I am writing this column in Morocco. In Casablanca, my wife and I and another couple hired a Moroccan driver for the day. When it came time to pay, the man refused to accept dollars; he wanted to be paid in either euros or Moroccan dirhams. Yes, dirhams rather than dollars. But the demise of the dollar as the world’s currency disturbs the Left as much as does America’s not getting a gold medal in curling at the Winter Olympics.

And as for America wielding less power in the world, the American Left considers that to be a positive development. They think it is the world community as embodied in the United Nations that should wield power throughout the world, not an “overstretched,” “imperialist,” and “militarist” United States.

I used to believe that the Left and the Right had similar goals for America, that they just differed in the means they wanted to use to get there. I was mistaken. The Left has a very different vision of America than those who hold to America’s founding values, most especially individualism and small government. Their vision is one in which a once-in-a-lifetime chance to establish a giant welfare state dominated by the Left is worth any price -- even America’s steep financial decline.

-- Dennis Prager is a nationally syndicated radio talk-show host and columnist. He may be contacted through his website, dennisprager.com.

Amid much fanfare, the president last year launched the Department of Education’s “Race to the Top” (RTT). Funded with $4.35 billion in stimulus dollars, the competitive grant program urged states to comply with 19 federal priorities and dramatically expanded Uncle Sam’s role in school reform. And, as opposed to the first $100 billion in education stimulus spending, the president promised in the State of the Union that RTT would reflect a new sensibility: “Instead of rewarding failure, we only reward success. Instead of funding the status quo, we only invest in reform.”

Our earnest secretary of education, former Chicago school superintendent Arne Duncan, repeatedly bragged last year how tough he would be. He promised, “It’s going to be a very, very high bar. People won’t believe it until we do it. Obviously, hold us accountable for sticking to that.” The rhetoric played well, with RTT garnering raves from David Brooks and the Wall Street Journal.

Well, Duncan had his first test last Thursday, when the first round of RTT finalists were announced. And Duncan failed in grand fashion. The contest was about as tough as winning a trophy in peewee soccer. Fifteen states and the District of Columbia were named finalists, out of 41 applicants.

In giving a finalist billet to more than a third of the applicants, Duncan disappointed even Democratic reformers. Old Clinton hand Andy Rotherham, a prominent education reformer who frequently rises to the administration’s defense, deemed it “sort of an ‘uh oh’” moment. He thought the inclusion of Ohio and New York was “not a great sign” and judged that the administration had honored other applicants, like Illinois and Colorado, that “were arguably bubble states at best.” Joe Williams, the New York-based executive director of Democrats for School Reform, described himself “baffled” by the Empire State’s inclusion.

The New York and Ohio cases pose particular problems in that neither is regarded as especially reform-minded but both have reportedly brought political muscle to bear on RTT. It was reported last fall that New York Sen. Chuck Schumer told constituents that they could relax, because he’d been assured that New York would be a finalist. And recently it was reported that Gov. Ted Strickland of Ohio, facing a fierce reelection contest in a key electoral state, was leaning on Rahm Emanuel to make sure Ohio scored some RTT swag.



When one actually takes a look at the applications, the situation gets even uglier. The Department of Education asked states to document everything in their proposals and issued guidelines that applications should  total no more than 350 pages. The result? Every state exceeded the guidelines, with no consequences. States padded their applications with hundreds of pages of letters of support, research papers, jargon-laden memos, and curricula. New York, for instance, included 156 pages of letters of support. It’s not clear whether states whose consultants produced less voluminous applications were penalized for their failure.

And those oversized applications were stuffed full of trendy educational buzzwords and catchphrases. New York’s 908-page application, for instance, guarantees, “an intense focus on curriculum and meaningful professional development based on student performance; data-driven instruction where teams develop individual student action plans based on data from formative and interim assessments; differentiated professional development and coaching based on data.” It pledges “clear, content-rich, sequenced, spiraled, detailed curricular frameworks” for new assessments. And it promises “to support differentiated professional development closely linked to student growth data, identify coaches and mentors using effectiveness ratings closely tied to student growth data, and build data-driven feedback loops between professional development, coaching/mentoring activities, and teacher effectiveness.” All that “professional development” talk portends sops to the teachers’ unions, of course.

A huge part of the problem here, which has been mostly overlooked, is that RTT embodies two visions of reform. The first cracks open systems hampered by anachronistic bureaucracies and policies; thus the enthusiasm for encouraging states to knock down data firewalls or to lift charter-school caps. These measures don’t tell states or local officials what to do with their newfound freedom; they merely create the space in which to act.

The second vision is a reiteration of the familiar progressive predilection for prescriptive reform. For example, RTT requirements demand that states explain how they will use data to improve instruction, intervene in low-performing schools, provide effective support to teachers and leaders, and so on. This vague list of demands for compliance with what the federal government deems the best practices of the moment accounts for 85 percent or more of RTT scoring.

Whereas bureaucracy-busting measures tend to be cut-and-dry -- states either did or did not enact certain reform legislation -- the bulk of RTT is about promising to do things. Since this kind of compliance is about plans and intentions rather than actions, it’s a call to stack up catch phrases and jargon in lieu of action.

Talking a good game raises expectations. Duncan talked a lot of trash, but pulled up lame in the first leg of his big race. We’ll see if he can do better on the next lap.

-- Frederick M. Hess is director of education-policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute and author of the just-published Education Unbound.

This week, the Obama administration announced it will create a new poverty-measurement system that will eventually displace the current poverty measure. This new measure, which has little or nothing to do with actual poverty, will serve as the propaganda tool in Obama’s endless quest to “spread the wealth.”

Under the new measure, a family will be judged “poor” if its income falls below a certain specified income threshold. Nothing new there, but, unlike the current poverty standards, the new income thresholds will have a built-in escalator clause: They will rise automatically in direct proportion to any rise in the living standards of the average American.

The current poverty measure counts absolute purchasing power -- how much steak and potatoes you can buy. The new measure will count comparative purchasing power -- how much steak and potatoes you can buy relative to other people. As the nation becomes wealthier, the poverty standards will increase in proportion. In other words, Obama will employ a statistical trick to ensure that “the poor will always be with you,” no matter how much better off they get in absolute terms.

The Left has promoted this idea of an ever-rising poverty measure for a long time. It was floated at the beginning of the War on Poverty and flatly rejected by Pres. Lyndon Johnson. Not so President Obama, who consistently seeks to expand the far-left horizons of U.S. politics.

The weird new poverty measure will produce very odd results. For example, if the real income of every single American were to magically triple over night, the new poverty measure would show there had been no drop in “poverty,” because the poverty income threshold would also triple. Under the Obama system, poverty can be reduced only if the incomes of the “poor” are rising faster than the incomes of everyone else.

Another paradox of the new poverty measure is that countries such as Bangladesh and Albania will have lower poverty rates than the United States, even though the actual living conditions in those countries are extremely bad. Haiti would probably have a very low poverty rate when measured by the Obama system because the earthquake reduced much of the population to a uniform penniless squalor.

According to Obama’s measure, economic growth per se has no impact on poverty. Since the beginning of the 20th century, the incomes of nearly all Americans have increased sevenfold, after adjusting for inflation. However, from Obama’s perspective, this increase in real incomes had no impact on poverty, because the wages of those at the bottom of the income distribution did not rise faster than the incomes of those in the middle.

What has the Obama measure to do with actual poverty? Not much. For most Americans, the word “poverty” suggests destitution: an inability to provide a family with nutritious food, clothing, and reasonable shelter. But only a small number of the 40 million per­sons classified as poor under the government’s current poverty definition fit that description. Most of America’s poor live in material conditions that would have been judged comfortable, or even well-off, two generations ago.



The government’s own data show that the typical American defined as poor (according to the traditional, pre-Obama poverty measure) has two color televisions, cable or satellite service, a VCR or DVD player, and a stereo. He also has a car, air conditioning, a refrig­erator, a stove, a clothes washer and dryer, and a microwave. He is able to obtain medical care. His home is in good repair and is not overcrowded. By his own report, his family is not hungry, and he had suf­ficient funds in the past year to meet his family’s essential needs. While this individual’s life is not opulent, it is far from the stark images conveyed by the mainstream media and liberal politicians.

Clearly, “poverty” as currently defined by the government has little connection with “poverty” as the average American understands it. The new Obama poverty measure will stretch this semantic gap, artificially swelling the number of “poor” Americans, and severing any link between the government’s concept of poverty and even modest deprivation.

In honest English, the new system will measure income inequality, not poverty. Why not just call it an “inequality” index? Answer: because the American voter is unwilling to support massive welfare increases, soaring deficits, and tax increases to equalize incomes. However, if the goal of income leveling is camouflaged as a desperate struggle against poverty, hunger, and dire deprivation, then the political prospects improve. The new measure is a public-relations Trojan horse, smuggling in a “spread the wealth” agenda under the ruse of fighting real material privation -- a condition that is rare in our society.

True, the new Obama measure will not, at present, alter benefits or expand eligibility for welfare programs. But the new measure does establish a new philosophy of poverty. For the first time, the government is planning to define poverty as a problem that can never be solved by the American dream: a general rise of incomes of all Americans across society over time. By definition, poverty can now be solved only by the dream of the Left: massive taxes on the upper and middle classes and redistribution to the less affluent. In effect, the Obama poverty measure sets a new national goal of class warfare and income redistribution.

Of course, massive “wealth spreading” is already under way. This year, government will spend some $900 billion on means-tested aid for the poor and low-income persons, around $9,000 for each American in the low-income third of the population. According to the Left, that’s not nearly enough. The new poverty measure will use deception to promote a much larger welfare state. Taxpayers, beware.

-- Robert Rector is a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation.

The quick read on Arkansas lieutenant governor Bill Halter’s bid for the U.S. Senate has been that Blanche Lincoln, one of the most endangered Democrats in the Senate, being caught as she is between the agenda of a liberal administration and the conservative electorate of her home state, will be forced to shift to the left in a bid to avoid a primary defeat.

But there are two hitches in that interpretation. First of all, Lincoln is reacting to the challenge by explicitly separating herself from the Democratic-party label -- which has seen better days in Arkansas. Second, for a progressive alternative, Halter doesn’t seem that eager to paint himself as more liberal than Lincoln on very many big issues.

Lincoln’s first ad would probably get applauded at any tea party. She mocks Congress as a bunch of children fighting and throwing money around, declaring, “This is why I voted against giving more money to Wall Street, against the auto-company bailout, against the public-option health-care plan, and against the cap-and-trade bill that would have increased energy costs for Arkansans. None of those were right for Arkansas. Some in my party didn’t like it very much. But I approve this message because I don’t answer to my party. I answer to Arkansas.”

 

Halter has been endorsed by Daily Kos and MoveOn.org, and he’s supposed to be the answer to the prayers of grassroots liberals frustrated with Lincoln. But he doesn’t seem up to the role. For starters, here’s how he handled a question on the Holy Grail of the progressive grassroots, the public option: “If you ask 100 Arkansans what the ‘public option’ means, they are going to give you 100 different answers. People don’t understand what that truly means.” He continued, “I would be supportive of giving the public the option to voluntarily buy into a medical program like Medicare.#...#People are going to understand what that means more than just the two word phrase ‘public option.’”

Not exactly the full-throated rallying cry one might have expected. Then there’s card check, another key liberal priority where Lincoln has been shaky.

“As you know, the previous legislation that was labeled as ‘card check,’ it’s no longer on the table,” Halter said. “The negotiations now have moved beyond that and have moved into a discussion of can we make elections occur more rapidly and how can we ensure that workers have a process where they have the ability to decide collectively for themselves how they want to be represented in negotiations.”

Then there’s Halter’s first ad. There’s something strange about it. No mention of the public option, no mention of the health-care bill, and it drips such anti-establishment folksiness that Sarah Palin would probably find little in it to quibble with.

 

 

(The ad is almost a carbon copy of one he ran in his bid for lieutenant governor in 2006.)



David Kinkade, a Little Rock-based political consultant who contributes to the blog The Arkansas Project initially thought that Lincoln had the skill, money, and infrastructure to withstand the Halter challenge. Now he’s beginning to wonder: “The Lincoln camp’s initial response was less than inspiring. By Tuesday, Halter was up on the air with his first ad -- Lincoln didn’t follow until Thursday, allowing him two full days of advertising. This doesn’t sound like a big deal, I know, but there’s only about 60 days in the primary period, so it does matter. The Lincoln campaign looked like they were completely caught with their pants down, even though the Halter challenge has been lingering out there for months. So his first week has been fairly crisp and in control, while Lincoln just looks like she’s been flailing and reacting.”

Kinkade’s description of the Lincoln camp’s circumstances brings back echoes of other recent races where we’ve seen snake-bitten campaigns that just couldn’t seem to get out of their own way -- the campaigns of Martha Coakley, Creigh Deeds, Elizabeth Dole, and, arguably, John McCain.

“Lincoln’s campaign is already perilously close that line at which, whatever they do, it just ends up looking like they don’t know what they’re doing,” Kinkade said. “The closest analogy I can think of is the 2008 Democratic presidential primary -- remember how Hillary Clinton hit that point where everything she did was just mocked, and they couldn’t do anything right? Lincoln’s kind of getting that feel to her.#...# I worked on Asa Hutchinson’s campaign for governor here in Arkansas in 2006, and it happened to us, too, though quite a bit later. It’s like being in a hole you can’t climb out of.#...#I’m still not at the point where I’d bet on Lincoln losing the primary. But, boy, they sure are acting like they want to.”

Perhaps Lincoln will prove too slow-footed to emerge from the primary. But if she falters, it will be tough to argue that it was an insufficiently liberal voting record that spelled her doom. The fact that Halter isn’t explicitly running to the left reflects that, although Arkansas has plenty of Democrats, it doesn’t have that many liberals. (In 2008, only 36 percent of Democratic primary voters identified themselves as “liberal.”) It certainly doesn’t have that many voters who are enamored with President Obama and his agenda; he lost the primary 70 percent to 26 percent, the general 59 percent to 39 percent. These days, Obama’s approval rating there is in the neighborhood of 38 percent -- which may be why the president’s “you’ve got me” declaration failed to reassure Rep. Marion Berry, a seven-term House member from northeastern Arkansas. Shortly after Obama declared that his campaign-trail prowess would ensure that 2010 didn’t turn into another 1994 GOP tsunami, Berry announced his retirement.

Former president Bill Clinton is backing Lincoln; Emily’s List is backing Halter; even in a year with a political mood friendlier to liberals, it wouldn’t be hard to determine which of those two has more sway among Arkansas Democrats.

Despite liberal enthusiasm for the recent primary challenger, it appears to be the wrong state, the wrong issue environment, and the wrong year for a challenge from the left. If Lincoln emerges from the primary, she will still face a tough reelection fight against the Republican, most likely either U.S. Rep. John Boozman or state Senator Gilbert Baker. But the day after the primary, the newspaper headlines in Arkansas will probably declare: “Halter Topped.”

-- Jim Geraghty writes the Campaign Spot on NRO. 

 

New York -- Mitt Romney, sitting ramrod straight, is gazing up at the gleaming glass boxes on Park Avenue as we zoom through midtown Manhattan. It is lunchtime, and the streets are swarming with business folk -- attorneys with lattes, analysts with take-out sushi. For Romney, this is a glimpse of his old world, a world of mergers, acquisitions, and Harvard Business School lingo. His new world, one of big ideas and presidential aspirations, sits on his lap, in the form of his latest book, No Apology: The Case for American Greatness.

Romney knows how to use his time in the wilderness. Unlike many of his potential Republican foes for the 2012 presidential nomination, Romney has kept a relatively low profile since ending his 2008 primary campaign. No television show, no drama for the former Massachusetts governor. Instead, Romney is laser-focused on electing state and federal Republican candidates in the midterm elections.

That strategy is paying off. In January, Scott Brown, the Bay State’s new GOP senator, credited Romney as being instrumental to his come-from-behind win. Elsewhere, Romney’s political-action committee, Free and Strong America, has donated over $120,000 to Republican candidates over the past year. Last month, he went so far as to defend former president George W. Bush, his party’s battered hero, in a speech at a conservative conference. All of these efforts, and his book, are signals to the GOP faithful that a certain former governor is tanned, rested, and ready.

GETTING TO THE POINT
The release of No Apology has garnered Romney numerous lighthearted television appearances, from The View to The Late Show with David Letterman. The buzz is nice, he says, “and a lot of fun,” but not his purpose. The will-he, won’t-he presidential chatter misses the point as well.

Americans, he explains, do not want to hear horse-race chatter, but desire, strongly, a real and substantive policy debate, be it about geopolitics or domestic policy. No Apology -- a 324-page Romney vade mecum chock-full of policy talk, data, charts, anecdotes, quotes, and arguments -- is, in his eyes, a step in that direction. It covers a few key policy areas: 100 pages on America’s role in the world, plus chapters on health care, fiscal policy, education, and “the culture of citizenship.”

“I have wanted to write something like this for about 20 years,” Romney says.” He jokes that he “became unemployed unexpectedly” and, “with a little time on my hands,” told himself that “this is the time to do it.”

Developing his book’s theme was easy. “When I was in the private sector, doing business around the world, I became concerned that Americans were not seeing what was happening around the world,” Romney says. “We think of ourselves as being light years ahead of other nations, and that was the case when I was going around the world in the 1960s. But today that is no longer the case. There are other parts of the world that are eclipsing us in terms of productivity, infrastructure, investment in higher education, and technology. Unless we change course, I’m very concerned that America is going to be eclipsed by some of those other nations. So I wanted to tell this story.”




That often meant taking himself off the page. “You know, I think it is great to write a book about one’s personal life experiences and relationships with others -- I love reading books like that -- but I wanted to write a book about the real concerns I have about the country’s future,” he says.

Romney does not mean to scare his readers with No Apology, and the book’s tone is far from polemical. But he does intend to be frank: “As long as there are people out there, politicians in particular, that say ‘no worries, no problems, all we have to do is adjust the taxes a little bit and things will get better,’ then I think people are not getting the straight story.”

ROMNEY ON ENTITLEMENTS
Romney dedicates a long chapter to America’s fiscal future, detailing his thoughts on the “entitlement nightmare,” the political “shell game” of hiding long-term liabilities, the “mountains of debt,” and the need for a balance sheet for the federal government:

Never before has there been a generation of Americans that has imperiled the following generations’ opportunity for achievement and advance as we have done. And America’s ability to preserve individual freedom and the nation’s security is also in jeopardy, because unless things dramatically change, our debts and obligations will imperil our economy and our military -- not because of fierce foreign competitors or the need to engage enemies militarily, but simply because of our own woeful negligence.

He also spends ample time in No Apology explaining the controversial universal-health-care program he helped engineer in Massachusetts. The book’s title works most appropriately here, since Romney doesn’t flinch in defending the “Massachusetts model,” which includes a mandate that residents buy insurance. Romney says it “succeeded in getting our citizens insured without breaking the bank.” He also takes care to explain the difference between a state-by-state approach and Obama’s national approach:

My own preference would be to let each state fashion its own program to meet the distinct needs of its citizens. States could follow the Massachusetts model if they chose, or they could develop plans of their own. These plans, tested in the state “laboratories of democracy,” could be evaluated, compared, improved upon, and adopted by others. But the creation of a national plan is the direction in which Washington is currently moving. If a national approach is ultimately adopted, we should permit individuals to purchase insurance from companies in other states in order to expand choice and competition.

Romney suffered from “schizophrenia” over how to handle his health-care plan during his 2008 run, says political analyst Charlie Cook, but now is realizing that talking about it, as but one example of his “competent” governing, makes sense.




The “competence” tack could work, but to pull it off, Romney might have to shift gears away from the social-conservative issues he relied on in his last presidential campaign. In No Apology, Romney does not distance himself from those values, but attempts to frame them in a way that’s less politically hot by connecting them to broader values of “citizenship.”

“The American culture -- hard work, sacrifice, love of opportunity, the pioneering spirit we have, the significance of family, patriotism, the respect for life -- all these things feed into it,” Romney says. “These are not just social issues. But we should not minimize what social issues are. They’re really critical, as are the other elements.”

THE AMERICAN FUTURE
The most notable aspect of No Apology is how, for its first third, the book functions as a rumination on the nature of American power. Romney does not see international relations as a web of competing nation-states seeking a balance, but as a competition between four models of geopolitical order -- the American model of freedom and democracy, the authoritarian and commerce-heavy Chinese model, the Russian authoritarian energy-based model, and the violent-jihadist model. To win, he writes, America must “be wary and vigilant,” because “by mid-century, out grandchildren may well view Russia with the same concern which we and our parents once did.”

America risks becoming like failed great powers of the past, from the Ottoman Empire to the ancient Chinese and the British Empire, Romney argues. He offers a solution:

The only successful way to overcome foreign advantage#...# is to create an advantage of one’s own -- to innovate. And if you conclude that your competitor’s advantage is permanent and insurmountable, the best course is to choose new paths and new products. Over the centuries, the siren songs of protectionism and isolationism have taken down some very impressive empires.#...#I’m reminded of the words from Proverbs, “Where there is no vision, the people perish.”

Since Obama was elected, “I see other nations having a new glint in their eye,” Romney says. “I see China with an ambition to lead the world. Same with Russia aspiring to be a superpower, and the jihadists have always had their own maniacal ambition.”




“China can be a partner for stability, but I’m not sure they know exactly where they are heading,” he adds. “They have adopted free enterprise, in some respects, and yet they also want to become a very powerful player on the world stage and ultimately want to eclipse us. I don’t think they like the idea that we are as strong as we are in the Pacific and that we have such sway in their region of the world. I think they’d like to readjust that balance. I don’t look at them as an enemy, but as a competitor. Their model, authoritarianism with the absence of freedom, is not a model I want to see become the model for the 21st century for my grandkids.”

While Romney is an avowed supporter of military power, he also spends time in No Apology advocating “soft power.” President Obama, he says, has misunderstood that term’s meaning.

“The greatest shortcoming between our ability and our performance in foreign policy comes in our exercise of soft power,” Romney says. “Our inability to sway and influence affairs in the world without military might has been disappointing over the past year. It is extraordinary to me that we have not been able to dissuade Iran, for instance, from its foolish course. Or North Korea, a nation that is puny in its capabilities, from their course. It just underscores our inability to effectively use diplomacy, the sway of our economic vitality, our cultural advantages -- we’re just underperforming in those areas. If we were to organize our effort as effectively in the diplomatic sphere as we do in the private sector, we’d have a lot bigger impact.”

While working on his chapters about foreign policy, Romney found that objective measures of power were hard to come by. So, he developed his own, calling it the “Index of Leading Indicators.” He is the first to say that his model is “easy to criticize,” but hopes that his 14-point outline on everything from GDP levels and tax levels to health-care costs and national-security preparedness is a move toward providing some sort of “corrective” for future leaders trying to make sense of America’s place in the world.

“I really wanted to be able to go back 25 years and calculate for each one of the indices, to see what they said then and see what they said today,” Romney says. “To be honest, I found it beyond my capacity as a writer to get all that data. It was really hard to try and go back 25, 50 years and pull out that data. But we can certainly collect it now. If others have other points they’d like to add to the data index, great, but I think it’s a worthwhile exercise to try and actually track the progress that we’re making in preserving our values and shoring up the foundation of our national strength.”




Do we need a more data-driven political discourse in America? “You can correctly assume that from my book,” Romney laughs. “In the private sector, you must have data. People getting up and pontificating are going to be dismissed at meetings, and probably from their jobs. You have to provide data to demonstrate why your posture is correct. In the public sector, you watch these politicians discussing major issues absent any particular data. I find that astonishing. Now, you want to see both sides of the data -- it can be manipulated to prove any point. Yet if you have neutral observers gather the data, or partisans on both sides to present, you can learn from that experience. Otherwise, if you don’t look at data, you’re bound to miss the lessons from the past.”

THE PERSONAL TOUCH
Despite all of the policy stuffed into No Apology, the book also gives us a peek into Romney’s mind, particularly regarding the inspiration of his father, George Romney, a former three-term governor of Michigan and famous automobile executive who served in Nixon’s cabinet after losing the GOP nomination for president in 1968.

“The greatest gift that my father gave me was, frankly, his personal example,” Romney says. “We all love our dads, but as time went on, I recognized just how unique and special he was. When I was a younger boy, I didn’t realize that, but as time went on, I saw that this guy really is a very unusual person, and what he did became more and more meaningful to me, and I began to study it. When I was at business school, the case discussed on the first day of my business-policy class was the American Motors Corporation and the turnaround led by George Romney. You can’t help but think if they’re teaching that at Harvard Business School, then he really is quite a guy. I saw the things he experienced more personally, at a closer inspection point than other people enjoyed, and I wanted to share those perspectives more broadly.”

Those lessons from his father, couched in MBA-speak, are sprinkled throughout the book. Romney sees the United States, much as his father saw General Motors, as a powerful, though hardly infallible, force. “There is nothing as vulnerable as entrenched success,” he says, quoting Romney Sr.

While No Apology works on many levels -- as the opening salvo of a potential 2012 campaign, as a critique of Obama, as a fresh application of strategic-consulting metrics to American power -- it is most notable for showcasing Romney’s restlessness, and his eagerness to participate in major policy debates.

As Park Avenue streams by his window, Romney continues to speak that world’s language, with talk of models, efficiency, and strategy. Yet it is big ideas about American power, foreign affairs, and fiscal policy that animate him these days, not the bottom line. Far from his political winter, Romney is a man in the political wilderness, waiting, apologia in hand.

-- Robert Costa is the William F. Buckley Jr. Fellow at the National Review Institute.

Imagine that New Mexico governor Bill Richardson, citing his state’s “unique linguistic and cultural heritage,” signed into law a bill with the following provisions:

 

1)    English and Spanish are the co-official languages of New Mexico, but government agencies, courts, and the legislature will operate in Spanish, with English translations available only upon request.

2)    English will be taught in New Mexico’s schools as a foreign language, with students receiving a mandatory 50 minutes of instruction per day in English.

3)    New Mexico will seek an exemption from the provisions of federal law that require students with limited English proficiency to be given standardized tests in English within three years.

Governor Richardson is a colorful character, but not that colorful. As a presidential candidate in 2004, he passionately argued that Spanish should not be a co-official language with English, let alone be given “first language” status.

Remarkably, Nancy Pelosi will soon bring to the floor a bill that would allow Puerto Rico to become the 51st U.S. state without changing policies that are identical to those in our hypothetical New Mexico. It is rumored that the Puerto Rico Democracy Act (H.R. 2499) will be placed on the rarely used “suspension calendar,” barring any floor amendments and suggesting that the measure is less about democracy than about Democratic electoral power.

Puerto Rico’s political status is complex, and the Act counts 58 Republicans among its 181 co-sponsors, including thoughtful conservatives like Indiana’s Mike Pence. Whatever the complexities, though, thoughtful people should agree that no state in the Union legally treats English as its “second” language, let alone as a foreign language, and a Puerto Rican state should not be an exception.

Led by Puerto Rico’s formidable pro-statehood Del. Pedro Pierluisi, the Act’s supporters make two attractive arguments that fall apart under closer inspection. First, they contend that the Act merely creates an island-wide referendum, and therefore vindicates self-determination rather than statehood per se. But since the current U.S.-Puerto Rico “commonwealth” relationship has no legal sunset date and will endure unless Congress acts to change it, passage of H.R. 2499 must at least be acknowledged as making statehood infinitely more likely. The bill divides the island along hard party lines: It is supported by Pierluisi’s New Progressive party and opposed by the pro-commonwealth Popular Democratic party.




The Act’s supporters also soothingly assert that the Act-created referendum is locally funded and legally non-binding: It is meant merely to inform Congress of Puerto Ricans’ will. If the measure really only creates a “poll by ballot box,” however, one wonders why Puerto Rico’s solidly pro-statehood legislature does not initiate an identical process rather than doing the heavy lifting of seeking the congressional seal of approval.

While the bill is technically non-binding, in the sense that no legislation binds future Congresses from changes, it is hardly morally non-binding. Puerto Ricans are born with U.S. citizenship, and Congress would scarcely react to a vote for statehood in a congressionally sanctioned election with a shrug. If Congress issues what amounts to an invitation to vote for statehood now, only to change the terms of the deal later, it would be a slap in the face of American citizens that would draw international outrage.

Congress can avoid this course by consulting history. Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote, in his book Pandaemonium: Ethnicity in International Politics: “In two centuries, the United States Congress has admitted thirty-seven new states to the original Union of thirteen. But always a stated or unstated condition was that English be the official language. Louisiana, for example, might and did retain the Code Napoleon, but trials were to be in English. . . . E pluribus unum.”

Like Puerto Rico, the territories that became Arizona, New Mexico, and Oklahoma all entered the Union with large and historically rooted non-English-speaking populations. To ensure assimilation, the congressional enabling acts in all three cases required that “schools shall always be conducted in English.” Congress should condition statehood on lifting Puerto Rico’s exemption from the federal requirements that standardized tests be given to limited-English-proficient students within three years of entering school.

The foreignness of English in Puerto Rico is greater in magnitude than it was in any state at any time in our national experience. Census data show that just 20 percent of the island’s residents speak English fluently. By comparison, California has the lowest proficiency rate among the 50 states, but its 80 percent proficiency rate dwarfs Puerto Rico’s. The deeply rooted preference for Spanish makes Puerto Rico’s 1993 elevation of English to “co-official” status practically irrelevant. Authentic “official English” policies increase English learning, but they will not work when English is merely an add-on to a pre-existing official language that is spoken in 95 percent of homes. Congress should condition statehood on making English the sole official language, which would still allow Spanish translations for a population in transition while insisting on acceptance of the lingua franca of the Union.

Both of these changes would require a sea change in Puerto Rico. But acceptance of a “Spanish first” state would be a sea change for the Union. Courtesy to our fellow citizens requires that they be honestly informed of all the costs and benefits if they are to join us in the Union.

-- Tim Schultz is director of government relations for U.S. English.

 

One feature of the American character, noted by Winston Churchill among others, is to respond with overwhelming force when seriously provoked. But while our essay on American exceptionalism has been attacked quite severely, the attacks are too weak to constitute a serious provocation, and thus no heavy artillery need be deployed.

The longest-form criticism, that of Damon Linker in The New Republic, set the tone for many others in the blogosphere; indeed, many others merely quoted Linker while adding a “Hear, hear!” of their own. Linker accuses us of caricaturing our political opponents, avoiding inconvenient facts, and indulging in ideological self-congratulation. These are, as it turns out, also the exact methods by which he advances his argument.

Linker writes, for example, that “it is most certainly not the case, as Lowry and Ponnuru piously write, that America’s creed of liberty -- including the principle of equality of opportunity and respect -- was ‘open to all’ from the beginning.” What we actually wrote is that “Americans took inherited English liberties, extended them, and made them into a creed open to all.” That “from the beginning” is Linker’s invention. As are many of the views which he attributes to us. For it is certainly not the case that our essay describes liberals as unpatriotic, or suggests that America has nothing to learn from other countries, or demands a foreign policy of swagger and self-praise, or urges anyone to take “uncomplicated delight in our nation’s past.” We recognize full well that criticism of American practices, even sharp criticism, can be warranted and just; hence our praise for the abolitionist and civil-rights movements.

Linker then notes that many Americans live among poverty and blight. Lowry and Ponnuru, he writes, “appear to be untroubled” -- note the weasel words -- by their plight. “Conservatives like Lowry and Ponnuru” supposedly uphold “the fiction that America has always been a land of equal opportunity for all. Liberals respond by crafting policies that they hope will bring the country into closer conformity to the ideal of equal opportunity for all. That’s one way to define the division of labor that separates our nation’s parties at this moment in our history.” Yes, that is one way: a childish and smug way, as well as an inaccurate one. (It’s not liberalism’s deep concern for the opportunities of poor people that motivates its opposition to school choice.)

Linker claims that our description of the American creed -- as consisting of “liberty, equality (of opportunity and respect), individualism, populism, and laissez-faire economics” -- wrongly identifies it with the ideology of contemporary conservatism. The formulation actually comes from the sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset, no movement conservative. That Linker considers these commitments unacceptably right-wing tells us more about his views than ours.

David Rieff follows the Linker line while adding a special dash of insanity all his own: “Lowry and Ponnuru would presumably indignantly deny that their accusations against President Obama and his supporters had anything of the same quality of the ad that ran in The Dallas Morning News the day President Kennedy was assassinated, accusing him of having made a secret deal with the Communists.#...#This is not the language of political argument, it is the language that was in the north Texas air the day John Kennedy flew into Dallas. And while it may not end on a grassy knoll, it is almost certainly going to end badly. Very badly.” About this extraordinary passage the only thing to say is that it is not the language of historical intelligence.

Robert Lane Greene, a blogger for The Economist, does not distort what we wrote but challenges our (admittedly somewhat hyperbolic) claim that America is the freest and most democratic nation on Earth. We are not the most democratic nation, he argues, because we let “money” influence campaigns, and we are not the freest because our labor law is supposedly hostile to unions. Those who find these arguments persuasive will perhaps also agree with Greene’s conclusion that, in not so finding them, we oppose honest criticism of the U.S. and are thus not “real patriots.”

Two other bloggers suggested that we misread President Obama. Mark Murray, writing for NBC’s First Read, argues that President Obama believes in a distinctively liberal form of American exceptionalism. “But if you read Obama’s speeches -- from the presidential campaign and now as president -- you see a president with a different idea of American exceptionalism: America’s unique ability to evolve and become a more perfect union. ‘This union may never be perfect,’ he said in his famous ’08 speech on race, ‘but generation after generation has shown that it can always be perfected.’”

This is to make our point for us. In our essay we noted that President Obama identifies with the Wilsonian project of relocating American greatness not in our fixed constitutional principles but in our supposed ability to transcend those principles. In this view, the genius of the Founders essentially consists of their enabling progressives to undo their handiwork. On this “evolutionary” reading of history, it would not be too much of a stretch to say that the American story culminates in the election of President Obama and the enactment of his agenda. Note, however, that the U.S. is not, in fact, exceptional in its ability to undergo political evolution. In that department, we must humbly concede that France has us beaten.

Conor Friedersdorf rightly points out that Obama followed his statement that he believes in American exceptionalism the same way that Greeks and Brits believe in the exceptionalism of their countries with an acknowledgment that the United States has a “core set of values#...#that are exceptional.” We should have noted those words. But the fact that Obama said them, and has on other occasions also had warm words about his country, the Constitution, and the Declaration of Independence, does not alter our judgment. It would be remarkable if any president did not say such things. What is remarkable are some of the things he has said that it is impossible to imagine any of his predecessors saying, e.g., this bit from his United Nations speech in September: “For those who question the character and cause of my nation, I ask you to look at the concrete actions we have taken in just nine months.”



Friedersdorf also questions our assessment of Obama’s agenda. He does not, for example, see how moving a hybrid public/private health-care system further toward nationalization could be a blow to America’s distinctiveness. To assume that a difference of degree cannot be important is, however, fallacious. That the health-care policies that President Obama seeks would greatly increase middle-class dependence on the federal government cannot be seriously disputed; neither can the fact that it would be a move the country in a European direction, a point none of our critics dispute.

Our essay attracted some criticism from the right as well. Matthew Lee Anderson faults us for adopting theological language by referring to an American “creed” and an “economic gospel”; it seems to us that his problem here is a literalism at odds with widespread usage. He writes further that “any claims to American exceptionalism ha[ve] to be tempered and chastened by our own social evils, chief of which is abortion.” The accusation that the two of us have underestimated the evil of abortion makes up in novelty for what it lacks in sense. The injustice of our practice and legal treatment of abortion is a stain on the national character. But in no way does it tell against our argument -- which, to restate it, is that the agenda of contemporary liberalism would seriously undermine distinctive and valuable American traits.

There are still four loose ends to tie up before leaving the critics. First: Our comment that Americans are distinctive in their willingness to respond to attack has been ridiculed as the very opposite of an exceptional trait, but we stand by the claim; a more profitable (because true) line of criticism would probably be that this willingness can often be taken too far.

Second: We wrote, “As president [Obama] has been unusually detached from American history: When a foreign critic brought up the Bay of Pigs, rather than defend the country’s honor he noted that he was a toddler at the time.” Critics have misconstrued our point. We do not think Obama was under any obligation to defend the Bay of Pigs; it would have been fine for him to say that he did not consider it worthwhile to debate any country’s decisions from the early ’60s. What we found telling was how Obama made the response about himself. Now it is surely possible that our political disagreements with Obama have led us to read too much into that remark; but it is not the only occasion on which Obama has implied that American history has begun anew with his presidency.

Third: Many, many blog posts have been written about two words in this passage: “The Left’s search for a foreign template to graft onto America grew more desperate. Why couldn’t we be more like them -- like the French, like the Swedes, like the Danes? Like any people with a larger and busier government overawing the private sector and civil society? You can see it in Sicko, wherein Michael Moore extols the British national health-care system, the French way of life, and even the munificence of Cuba; you can hear it in all the admonitions from left-wing commentators that every other advanced society has government child care, or gun control, or mass transit, or whatever socialistic program or other infringement on our liberty we have had the wisdom to reject for decades.” The two words are “mass transit.”

Contrary to our least literate critics, nothing in that passage suggests that we consider subways an infringement on our liberty. Nor does it mean that we are skeptical of mass-transit subsidies because the policy strikes us as European. It means something closer to the opposite: that we suspect that much of the enthusiasm for these subsidies among liberals is based on mass transit’s association with Europe.

Fourth: Several critics, again taking their cues from Linker, say that we are guilty of celebrating the American public’s capacity for self-delusion when we favorably cite a Gallup poll showing that 31 percent of Americans expect to be rich some day. But definitions of “rich” are subjective (the median respondent treated income of $120,000 a year and assets of $1 million as the cut-off). While 31 percent of Americans may not attain riches by their own definitions, it is not crazy for them to think they might.

Our essay has also led other people to offer friendly amendments to it. Yuval Levin notes that American exceptionalism consists of a fusion of creed and culture. Some liberals, he notes, ignore or downplay the cultural element and some conservatives the creedal one. In recent years, actually, we would say that some conservatives have been prone to the characteristic liberal error; hence the popularity in some conservative quarters of the notion that America is (simply and solely) an idea rather than a nation. Matthew Spalding makes the same point in a different way, rightly noting that the American Revolution appealed to the historic liberties of Britishers while grounding them in natural rights.

Victor Davis Hanson notes that one reason for American exceptionalism may be that we did not inherit from England “a large underclass of only quasi-free people attached to barons as serfs.” Sadly, a worse institution took root here, but never became part of the national psyche. John O’Sullivan suggests that American exceptionalism is a special case of Anglospheric exceptionalism, and is more easily defended when seen as such. The first proposition is surely right, and the second one right in many cases.

We thank these commentators for their sensible observations -- and for reading what we actually wrote.

Late last month, during testimony before Congress, Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke made the following eye-popping statement: “Commercial real-estate loans should not be marked down because the collateral value [the estimated value of the property on the market] has declined. It depends on the income from the property, not the collateral value.”

It would have been much better for the economy if Bernanke had been this clear about mark-to-market accounting back in 2008. If he had, the U.S. might have avoided the Panic of 2008.

But it’s never too late, and now that mark-to-market ideology is affecting the ability of the Fed to exit its quantitative-easing policy, Bernanke is finally onboard.

A little background is in order.

In November 2007, the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) reinstated mark-to-market accounting for the first time since 1938. This rule uses bids (exit prices) to value assets. So far, so good. However, in 2008, the market for asset-backed securities dried up. The prices of bonds that were still paying in full fell by 60 or 70 percent, and these losses often were driven through income statements. This wiped out regulatory capital, caused bankruptcies, and created a vicious downward spiral in the economy.

In retrospect, it is clear that this accounting rule was a potent pro-cyclical force behind the 2008 panic.

Finally, on April 2, 2009, the FASB allowed banks to use “cash flow” to value bonds when the markets are illiquid -- the same sentiment that Bernanke expressed before Congress. This fixed the immediate problems in the system, and the economy and financial markets have been on the mend ever since. In fact, the stock market bottom of March 9, 2009, came on the very day news broke that Reps. Barney Frank and Paul Kanjorski would hold a hearing to force the FASB to change the misguided accounting policy.

However, overzealous bank regulators are now enforcing their own version of mark-to-market accounting. Regulators are making banks write down loan values and increase loan-loss reserves based on appraiser-driven valuations. And yes, these are the very same appraisers who over-valued properties five years ago. Now, because appraisers often use foreclosures and distressed sales as comparable recent transactions, they are undervaluing properties.

To the regulators, it doesn’t matter if a loan is still being paid on time. And it doesn’t matter if a lower valuation of the collateral will force an already stressed borrower to come up with more cash. Regulators have decided that they want banks better capitalized, and one way they can do that is to reduce the value of a bank’s assets and then force these banks to raise money from shareholders.

This, in turn, is undermining bank lending, hurting small businesses, and keeping the unemployment rate high. And the worst part is that it’s just not necessary. Mark-to-market accounting does not solve problems; it creates them by acting as a pro-cyclical force. Milton Friedman understood this, and he wrote about the devastating link between mark-to-market accounting and the Great Depression bank failures. Franklin Delano Roosevelt finally figured this out in 1938 -- he suspended the rule and the Depression ended soon thereafter. Coincidence? We think not.



Similarly, in 2009, with mark-to-market rules in place, two stimulus bills totaling over $1 trillion, the $700 billion Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP), zero percent interest rates, and trillions of dollars in other Fed and Treasury actions did not turn the market around. Private money did not flow into the banking system until the FASB finally allowed cash flows to be used to value assets when markets are illiquid.

Once the rule was changed, banks were able to raise $100 billion in private capital. And since the rule change, TARP money has been repaid by institutions that were forced to take it, while the Treasury and Fed’s Public-Private Investment Program never got off the ground.

But as long as bank regulators still impose mark-to-market-style rules -- indeed, as long as such rules remain even a threat to the system -- the system will not fully heal.

For example, a viable market for the securitization of asset-backed loans is highly unlikely to reappear until mark-to-market accounting is dead and buried. Why would anyone buy asset-backed securities when there is still the potential for market-driven declines in value to undermine the ability of the financial system to hold these securities even if cash flows are not impeded?

If you don’t believe this, read the exchange between Bernanke and congressman Kanjorski:

REP. PAUL KANJORSKI: I’m particularly interested in#...#the commercial real estate problem. Could you give us your assessment of [that problem]#...#and if there’s any action we in the Congress should take?

CHAIRMAN BEN BERNANKE: Congressman, it remains probably the biggest credit issue that we still have. Yesterday, Chairman Baird talked about the increase in the number of problem banks. A great number of those banks are in trouble because of their commercial-real-estate positions.#...#The Fed has done a couple of things here. We have issued#...#guidance on commercial real estate, which gives a number of ways of helping, for example instructing banks to try to restructure troubled commercial-real-estate loans, and making the point that commercial-real-estate loans should not be marked down because the collateral value has declined. It depends on the income from the property, not the collateral value. We’ve also, as you know, had this TALF program, which has been trying to restart the CMBS -- commercial mortgage-backed securities -- market with limited success in quantities. But we have brought down the spreads, and the financing situation is a bit better. So we are seeing a few rays of light in this area, but it does remain a very difficult category of credit, particularly for the small- and medium-sized banks in our country.

While Mr. Bernanke did not directly link accounting rules with his attempt to “restart” the CMBS market, it is clear that if mark-to-market accounting remains alive, this market will not be easily resurrected. No matter how much money the Federal Reserve throws at the market for securitized assets, the private sector will remain skittish if there is the potential for an accounting rule to wreck the market again.

This is very important for the Fed’s exit strategy and for the growth of the loan market in the years ahead. Without securitization, bank lending will continue to drag while the Fed worries about withdrawing support from the system. The U.S. needs a viable securitization marketplace, and mark-to-market accounting remains a big stumbling block.

Simply, mark-to-market accounting needs to die. It should be stabbed in the heart with a cedar stake, shot with a silver bullet, and then buried under six feet of garlic powder. Like the evil killer in a horror flick, we need to make sure it never gets up off the floor again.

While we do not agree with everything Ben Bernanke is doing these days, his recent comments, which finger the impact of accounting rules and conventions on the economy, are right on the money. Hopefully the SEC, Treasury, the FDIC, Congress, and the FASB were listening.

-- Brian Wesbury is chief economist and Robert Stein is senior economist at First Trust Portfolios L.P.

‘Well, that’s real courage.”

If I had a dollar for every conservative I’ve heard say that -- sarcastically -- about Republican senator Jim Bunning of Kentucky, I could easily buy lunch at the D.C. Caucus Room restaurant -- and keep the wine flowing.

Senator Bunning was making headlines for filibustering a bill to extend unemployment benefits. For days, I read and listened as he was accused of single-handedly holding the Senate -- and down-on-their-luck, out-of-work Americans -- hostage. He was doing this, if some of the media coverage was to be believed, because he didn’t care about anyone or anything except whatever point he was selfishly trying to make. The Washington Post described him as “angry and alone, a one-man blockade against unemployment benefits, Medicare payments to doctors, satellite TV to rural Americans and paychecks to highway workers.”

But Bunning’s point was worth making. These unemployment payments are extra-budgetary. The federal government doesn’t have the money for them: It has to borrow to make these payments. Media folk and others might feel quite comfortable condemning Bunning -- the lazy story is “Mean Republican seeks to hurt the unemployed” -- but how about listening instead?

His point, in his own words, was: “If we cannot pay for a bill that all 100 senators support, how can we tell the American people with a straight face that we will ever pay for anything? That is what senators say they want, and that is what the American people want.”

That’s a question that’s going to launch more than a few tea parties and get a few people like Scott Brown elected to seats no one would ever have predicted they’d win.

That magical stimulus bill Vice President Biden keeps defending is what launched this round of extended unemployment benefits, which is now turning into a seemingly endless cycle (almost a hundred weeks and counting) of added extensions. That’s what Bunning wanted Congress to be held accountable for. That’s what he wanted Congress to make actual cuts in other spending in order to fund.

Contrary to what the Democratic party wants us to believe, Republicans occasionally do utter a word other than “No.” Jim Bunning certainly did. He audaciously proposed actually paying for the endless stream of unemployment benefits. And for that he was proclaimed an enemy of the people. By the media. By the Democrats. By members of his own party.

Maine Republican Susan Collins, a frequent thorn in the side of her fellow Republicans (though this time she was part of a large crowd), declared that Bunning’s position did “not represent a majority of the Republican caucus.” She was unfortunately right. He failed. And only 19 senators ultimately objected to the continued deficit spending.

This from a Congress that has pretended -- at least, the Democrats in the majority have -- that it is all about paying as it goes. “PAYGO” is the legislation that it just put in place last month, legislation that this Congress subsequently has serially waived so that it doesn’t, in fact, need to pay as it goes.



Collins turned her back on Bunning, and so did many other Republicans -- too many. But I’ll tell you this, for what it’s worth: On Capitol Hill that week, I met many younger staffers who were cheering Bunning on. I couldn’t help thinking of my first days in Washington, when I encountered a young Hill staffer from Wisconsin named Paul Ryan. Now, of course, he’s a congressman himself, and his expertise and hard work on health-care reform and fiscal responsibility have earned him the attention of even the condescender-in-chief, Barack Obama.

So don’t get too cynical about Congress. Instead, the next time a Jim Bunning takes a stand, encourage him. The next time a senator or congressman steps out into the firing line to do something sensible and responsible, defend him from the inevitable attacks. I remember hearing a priest once remind the congregation he was preaching to, “When your pastor does something good or inspiring, thank him. People often don’t.” It’s the same for any kind of leader -- maybe even more so for members of a legislative body that has the kind of approval ratings that would get most of us fired.

Encourage a Jim Bunning, because there are Jim Bunnings taking on the PAYGO lie who aren’t retiring this year. In fact, some of them have just arrived. The new senator from Massachusetts, Scott Brown, has introduced legislation that would return upwards of $80 billion in unused stimulus funds to taxpayers over six months, in the form of a payroll-tax cut. It may not change lives or change Washington, but it’s the right thing to do, which is a good start. (Legislators don’t always need to be revolutionary, just right and responsible.) The election in November will bring more fresh faces to Congress -- and, with them, a new generation of bright young staffers who will be encouraged to discover that the public appreciates it when their representatives do the right thing.

-- Kathryn Jean Lopez is editor-at-large of National Review Online. She can be reached at klopez@nationalreview.com.

So there was President Obama giving his bazillionth speech on health care, droning yet again that “now is the hour when we must seize the moment,” the same moment he’s been seizing every day of the week for the past year, only this time his genius photo-op guys thought it would look good to have him surrounded by men in white coats.

Why is he doing this? Why let “health” “care” “reform” stagger on like the rotting husk in a low-grade creature feature who refuses to stay dead no matter how many stakes you pound through his chest?

Because it’s worth it. Big time. I’ve been saying in this space for two years that the governmentalization of health care is the fastest way to a permanent left-of-center political culture. It redefines the relationship between the citizen and the state in fundamental ways that make limited government all but impossible. In most of the rest of the Western world, there are still nominally “conservative” parties, and they even win elections occasionally, but not to any great effect (let’s not forget that Jacques Chirac was, in French terms, a “conservative”). The result is a kind of two-party one-party state: Right-of-center parties will once in a while be in office, but never in power, merely presiding over vast left-wing bureaucracies that cruise on regardless.

Republicans seem to have difficulty grasping this basic dynamic. Less than three months ago, they were stunned at the way the Democrats managed to get 60 senators to vote for the health bill. Then Scott Brown took them back down to 59, and Republicans were again stunned to find the Dems talking about ramming this thing into law through the parliamentary device of “reconciliation.” And, when polls showed an ever larger number of Americans ever more opposed to Obamacare (by margins approaching three-to-one), Republicans were further stunned to discover that, in order to advance “reconciliation,” Democratic reconsiglieres had apparently been offering (illegally) various cozy Big Government sinecures to swing-state congressmen in order to induce them to climb into the cockpit for the kamikaze raid to push the bill through. The Democrats understand that politics is not just about Tuesday evenings every other November, but about everything else, too.

A year or two back, when the Canadian Islamic Congress attempted to criminalize my writing north of the border by taking me to the Canadian “human rights” commission, a number of outraged American readers wrote to me saying, “You need to start kicking up a fuss about this, Steyn, and then maybe Canadians will get mad and elect a conservative government that will end this nonsense.”

Makes perfect sense. Except that Canada already has a Conservative government under a Conservative prime minister, and the very head of the “human rights” commission investigating me was herself the Conservative appointee of a Conservative minister of justice. Makes no difference. Once the state swells to a certain size, the people available to fill the ever expanding number of government jobs will be statists -- sometimes hard-core Marxist statists, sometimes social-engineering multiculti statists, sometimes fluffily “compassionate” statists, but always statists. The short history of the post-war welfare state is that you don’t need a president-for-life if you’ve got a bureaucracy-for-life: The people can elect “conservatives,” as the Germans have done and the British are about to do, and the Left is mostly relaxed about it because, in all but exceptional cases (Thatcher), they fulfill the same function in the system as the first-year boys at wintry English boarding schools who for tuppence-ha’penny or some such would agree to go and warm the seat in the unheated lavatories until the prefects strolled in and took their rightful place.




Republicans are good at keeping the seat warm. A bigtime GOP consultant was on TV crowing that Republicans wanted the Dems to pass Obamacare because it’s so unpopular it will guarantee a GOP sweep in November. Okay, then what? You’ll roll it back -- like you’ve rolled back all those other unsustainable entitlements premised on cobwebbed actuarial tables from 80 years ago? Like you’ve undone the federal Department of Education and of Energy and all the other nickel ’n’ dime novelties of even a universally reviled one-term loser like Jimmy Carter? Andrew McCarthy concluded a shrewd analysis of the political realities thus: “Health care is a loser for the Left only if the Right has the steel to undo it. The Left is banking on an absence of steel. Why is that a bad bet?”

Indeed. Look at it from the Dems’ point of view. You pass Obamacare. You lose the 2010 election, which gives the GOP co-ownership of an awkward couple of years. And you come back in 2012 to find your health-care apparatus is still in place, a fetid behemoth of toxic pustules oozing all over the basement, and, simply through the natural processes of government, already bigger and more expensive and more bureaucratic than it was when you passed it two years earlier. That’s a huge prize, and well worth a mid-term timeout.

I’ve been bandying comparisons with Britain and France but that hardly begins to convey the scale of it. Obamacare represents the government annexation of “one-sixth of the U.S. economy” -- i.e., the equivalent of the entire British or French economy, or the entire Indian economy twice over. Nobody has ever attempted this level of centralized planning for an advanced society of 300 million people. Even the control-freaks of the European Union have never tried to impose a unitary “comprehensive” health-care system from Galway to Greece. The Soviet Union did, of course, and we know how that worked out.

This “reform” is not about health care, and certainly not about “controlling costs.” As with Medicare, it “controls” costs by declining to acknowledge them, or pay them. Dr. William Schreiber of North Syracuse, N.Y., told CNN that he sees 120 patients per week -- about 30 percent on Medicare, 65 percent on private insurance plans whose payments take into account the Medicare reimbursement rates, and about 5 percent who do it the old-fashioned way and write a check. He calculates that, under Obamacare, for every $5 he now makes, he’ll get $2 in the future. Which suggests now would be a good time to retrain as a Realtor or accountant, or the night clerk at the convenience store. Yet Rep. Louise Slaughter (Democrat, N.Y.) justifies her support for Obamacare this way: “I even had one constituent -- you will not believe this, and I know you won’t, but it’s true -- her sister died. This poor woman had no dentures. She wore her dead sister’s teeth.”

Is the problem of second-hand teeth a particular problem in this corner of New York? I haven’t noticed an epidemic of ill-fitting dentures on recent visits to the Empire State. George Washington had wooden teeth, but presumably these days the Sierra Club would object to the clear-cutting. Yet, even granting Congresswoman Slaughter the benefit of the doubt, is annexing the equivalent of a G7 economy the solution to what would seem to be the statistically unrepresentative problem of her constituent’s ill-fitting choppers? Is it worth reducing the next generation of Americans to indentured servitude to pay for this poor New Yorker’s dentured servitude?

Yes. Because government health care is not about health care, it’s about government. Once you look at it that way, what the Dems are doing makes perfect sense. For them.

— Mark Steyn, a National Review columnist, is author of America Alone. © 2010 Mark Steyn

Some years ago, one of my favorite doctors retired. On my last visit to his office, he took some time to explain to me why he was retiring early and in good health.

Being a doctor was becoming more of a hassle as the years went by, he said, and also less fulfilling. It was becoming more of a hassle because of the increasing paperwork, and it was less fulfilling because of the way patients came to him.

He was currently being asked to Xerox lots of records from his files, in order to be reimbursed for another patient he was treating. He said it just wasn’t worth it. Whoever was paying -- it might have been an insurance company or the government -- would either pay him or not, he said, but he wasn’t going to jump through all those hoops.

My doctor said that doctor-patient relationships were not the same as they had been when he entered the profession. Back then, people came to him because someone had recommended him to them, but now increasing numbers of people were sent to him because they had some group insurance plan that included his group.

He said that the mutual confidence that was part of the doctor-patient relationship was not the same with people who came to his office only because his name was on some list of eligible physicians.

The loss of one doctor -- even a very good doctor -- may not seem very important in the grand scheme of heady medical-care “reform” and glittering phrases about “universal health care.” But making the medical profession more of a hassle for doctors risks losing more doctors, while increasing the demand for treatment.

A study published in the November 2009 issue of The Journal of Law & Economics showed that a rise in the cost of medical-liability insurance led to more reductions of hours of medical service supplied by older doctors than among younger doctors.

Younger doctors, more recently out of medical school and often with huge debts to pay off for the cost of that expensive training, may have no choice but to continue working as hard as possible to try to recoup that huge investment of money and time.

Younger doctors will probably continue working, even if bureaucrats load them down with increasing amounts of paperwork and the government continues to lower reimbursements for Medicare, Medicaid, and -- heaven help us -- the new proposed “universal health care” legislation that is supposed to “bring down the cost of medical care.”

The confusion between lowering costs and refusing to pay the costs can have a real impact on the supply of doctors. The real costs of medical care include both the financial conditions and the working conditions that will ensure a continuing supply of both the quantity and the quality of doctors required to maintain medical-care standards for a growing number of patients.



Although younger doctors may be trapped in a profession that some of them might not have entered if they had known in advance what all its pluses and minuses would turn out to be, there are two other important groups that are in a position to decide whether or not it is worth it.

Those who are old enough to have paid off their medical-school debts long ago, and successful enough that they can afford to retire early or to take jobs as medical consultants, can opt out of the whole elaborate third-party payment system and its problems. What the rising costs of medical-liability insurance have already done for some, the hassles that bureaucracies and politicians create can do for others.

There is another group that doesn’t have to put up with these hassles. These are young people who have reached the stage in their lives when they are choosing which profession to enter, and weighing the pluses and minuses before making their decisions.

Some of these young people might prefer becoming a doctor, other things being equal. But the heady schemes of government-controlled medicine, and the ever more bloated bureaucracies that these heady schemes will require, can make it very unlikely that other things will be equal in the medical profession.

Paying doctors less and hassling them more may be some people’s idea of “lowering the cost of medical care,” but it is really just refusing to pay the costs -- and taking the consequences.

-- Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. © 2010 Creators Syndicate, Inc.

Rather than a post-partisan olive branch to congressional Republicans and the American public, President Obama’s latest health-care speech was a declaration of war. He’s more than willing to use a 51-vote reconciliation majority to jam through a roughly $2 trillion health-care plan that amounts to a government takeover of nearly one-fifth of the economy. He’s prepared to stick Uncle Sam right in the middle of the age-old relationship between patients and doctors, and doctors and hospitals, all while subjugating the private health-care insurance system to the status of a government-run utility -- without bending the cost curve downward.

More spending. More tax hikes on investors, businesses, and individuals. New government boards to control prices, ration care, and redistribute income. The Obama administration is basically taking a giant government leap backwards that the country doesn’t want to take.

One of the most galling features of this plan is a taxpayer-subsidized government-insurance entitlement for people earning up to 400 percent above the poverty line, or nearly $100,000 for a family of four. In other words, a middle-class health-care entitlement that will add millions of people to the federal dole. It’s all too reminiscent of the political dictum of the old New Dealer Harry Hopkins: tax and tax, spend and spend, elect and elect.

The spending has been well chronicled by congressman Paul Ryan, who baffled President Obama at the so-called health-care summit with his cogent analysis of a ten-year cost of $2.3 trillion that sets a floor, rather than ceiling, for the likely expense of this entitlement package. Obama had no rebuttal.

On taxing, let’s not forget that the current health-care payroll tax of 2.9 percent will be expanded to cover all forms of investment and capital formation, on top of the repeal of the Bush tax cuts. The anti-growth consequences are incalculable. As the late Jack Kemp used to say, you can’t have capitalism without capital.

The White House says job creation is priority number one. But you can’t have new jobs without healthy businesses. And healthy businesses require investment. However, by taxing investment more we’ll get fewer jobs, reduced real wages, and slower economic growth.

And how stupid is it for the president to support a six-month payroll-tax cut for small businesses in the name of job creation while imposing a 1 percent permanent increase in that very same tax to fund the massive new health-care entitlement. Talk about self-defeating.

Oh, by the way, a government takeover of health care will cripple one of our most productive job-creating sectors. Over the deep two-year recession, while overall corporate payrolls fell by about 7.5 million, private health-care firms created almost 700,000 new jobs.



And the health-care industry is one of our fastest-growing, most technologically advanced areas. With constant breakthroughs in biotech, pharmaceuticals, medical equipment, and diagnostics, the growing demand for more health care could elevate this prosperous job-creating sector to a third of the economy in the decades ahead. What’s wrong with that? Why crush it?

Health-care reform was supposed to be about getting 10 million low-income, chronically uninsured people some health insurance. But that can be solved by playing small ball. Health-care reform also was supposed to slow down cost increases. But that will never happen until the third-party payment system, run by Big Government and Big Business, is replaced by true consumer choice and market competition.

Just give consumers the tax break, and let them shop across state lines to find the right insurance plan. And young people who are already paying taxes into Medicare should not be mandated to pay more taxes into this entitlement plan. The young will pay for health insurance when they’re ready to pay for it.

Clearly this new New Deal, or new Great Society, or whatever it is, is the government selling a product that the rest of the country doesn’t want. Ironically, polls show that roughly 80 percent of voters believe their health insurance is satisfactory, good, or excellent. Polls even show that the public knows that a simple majority vote on reconciliation is an insufficient check on runaway government.

The Byrd rule says that reconciliation is for budget control and deficit reduction. But the Obama Democrats think they can use reconciliation to install a massive new social policy that would emulate the socialist-labor entitlement state now prevalent in Western Europe. As the Greece crisis amply shows, that entitlement state is on the verge of bankruptcy.

Perhaps Obama’s throwing down the gauntlet on nationalized health care will be the political gift that keeps on giving, in terms of political regime change come November. But if Obamacare does pass, a future rollback will be very difficult, and American health care and economic prosperity will be put in grave jeopardy.

 

-- Larry Kudlow, NRO’s Economics Editor, is host of CNBC’s The Kudlow Report and author of the daily web blog, Kudlow’s Money Politic$.

This is not that hard. The salient issue in the controversy over Justice Department attorneys who formerly represented our terrorist enemies detained at Guantanamo Bay is this: They were volunteers.

The lawyers and their lefty legions expect you to overlook that. Lawyers presume that they have an elite status in our litigious society and that their superior knowledge of the law will intimidate critics into silence. Since they are trained advocates, they figure that if they feign enough indignation over somebody’s “questioning their patriotism,” then Americans will shrink from asking, “How is it patriotic to go out of your way to help America’s enemies in wartime?”

Often, that line of defense works. In 2007, these same lawyers managed to get a Defense Department official run out of town. His hanging offense? He observed that many American corporations might prefer to find a new law firm rather than continue retaining one that used clients’ legal fees to subsidize its representation of terrorists who murder Americans. The observation, of course, was common sense. If you found out a restaurant you patronized was using the profits from serving you to provide free meals for al-Qaeda, would you keep going there, or would you find another restaurant? But when The Profession shrieked, our politically-correct-on-steroids Defense Department cried “uncle” in about a nanosecond. The al-Qaeda Bar and its cheerleaders calculate that this sorry episode will make the rest of us pipe down if we know what’s good for us.

Not all of us.

There is no legal right to counsel in a habeas corpus case. The vast majority of American citizens and aliens who are incarcerated after being found guilty of crimes do not get lawyers to help them challenge the legal proceedings against them or the conditions of their confinement. They must represent themselves. The United States has detained millions of war prisoners in our history, and those prisoners have never been entitled to counsel in order to challenge their detention -- indeed, until 2004, they didn’t have a right to challenge their detention, period. And even terrorist detainees who were charged with war crimes in military commissions had no right to representation by private counsel; instead, the rules provided for the assignment of military defense lawyers at the expense of the American taxpayer.

The legal profession’s depiction of these lawyers as heroic servants not of the enemy but of the Constitution is unmitigated nonsense: You can’t be performing a vital constitutional function when the function is not required by the Constitution. They can repeat the lie a million times, but that won’t make it a fact. These lawyers made a conscious decision to contribute their services, usually gratis, to enemy combatants with whom the American people are at war.




This is not to say they are insincere in seeing themselves as noble -- even “admirable,” as Stephen Gillers, the New York Times’s go-to expert on legal ethics, put it. He tut-tuts that criticizing these lawyers, suggesting that deep-pocketed clients should shun them, “is prejudicial to the administration of justice.” Really? Yes, he reasoned, “it’s possible that lawyers willing to undertake what has been long viewed as an admirable chore will decline to do so for fear of antagonizing important clients.”

Long been viewed as an “admirable chore” by whom? By other lawyers, that’s who. To put a finer point on it: by other left-wing lawyers. The attorneys who volunteered their services to America’s enemies do see themselves as serving a noble cause. But that is their subjective perception of the matter, and an utterly self-absorbed one. It elevates their self-congratulation for their “values” (which they monotonously insist are America’s values) over the national interest of the American people, which is to achieve victory by breaking the enemy’s will.

Down here on planet earth, there is nothing wrong with you if you don’t admire lawyers who willfully donate their skills to America-hating jihadists. There is something wrong with a legal profession that insists we not only let American lawyers take up the enemy’s cause but that we admire them for doing so.

Most Americans -- at least those who are not graduates of American law schools -- would say that, when we go to war, our compelling national interest is victory. If something is legally required of us (e.g., compliance with the Geneva Conventions when the enemy is entitled to its protections), we agree that we must comply. But our agreement is appropriately grudging. We’re at war with savages. They should not get one iota beyond what is minimally required. And if you, non-lawyer, decided to help the enemy, give advice to the enemy, contribute money to the enemy, or conduct trade with the enemy, you would find yourself indicted. You would become the object of your countrymen’s scorn.

Lawyers don’t see it that way. They are convinced that there is something so exceptional about their skill set that it is beyond such mundane considerations as national interests. Don’t you dare call them unpatriotic. They’re simply more important than you are. They serve a higher calling: the law. And in so doing, in exhorting the robed lawyers to endow the enemy with more due process (while the enemy plots to kill you and your family), they make you rubes better people. They drag our backward, benighted country kicking and screaming into the light.

That’s their delusion. You’re under no obligation to share it.

The Gitmo detainees, prisoners of war, are not like indigent defendants prosecuted in the criminal-justice system. The Constitution guarantees counsel to people accused of ordinary crimes. The lawyers who represent such defendants do fulfill a necessary constitutional function. The criminal-justice system, which undergirds the rule of law on which our society depends, could not function without them.




That’s not the case with the volunteer Gitmo Bar. If that enterprise were dissolved tomorrow, the rule of law would not be compromised in any way. Prisoners of war could still file habeas corpus petitions -- they’d just have to do it themselves, like American prisoners do. If a military judge thought a particular legal claim was potentially meritorious but complex, the judge could appoint a military lawyer to help the detainee -- just as the federal district courts, at their discretion, can appoint counsel in unusual cases to represent habeas claimants. And if detainees were charged with war crimes, they would be more than adequately represented by the military defense lawyers. The system would get along just fine -- indeed, it would get along just as it was designed to get along. Sure, we’d no longer have hundreds of volunteer litigators making the military’s job far more difficult as it tried to fight the war we rely on it to fight. That would be bad for al-Qaeda, but it would be good for us.

America’s enemies are no more entitled to counsel in pursuing legal claims than, say, a pro-life group that chooses to file a lawsuit. If I went out of my way to contribute my services for free to a pro-life group, do you suppose the New York Times would have the slightest hesitation about drawing the inference that I was sympathetic to the pro-life cause? Of course not. The Gray Lady wouldn’t pretend that I was just, in the Gillers lexicon, promoting “the administration of justice.” After all, no one would have forced me to take that case. There are countless causes that a lawyer willing to donate his services can find. When you’re a volunteer, you’re doing what you want to do, not what you have to do.

As the law is currently understood, it is legal for a lawyer to volunteer his services to America’s enemies. It is absurd, however, to suggest that we have to applaud that decision. And it is equally ludicrous to suggest that we are forbidden from drawing the obvious conclusion that a lawyer who makes such a decision is predisposed to condemn the United States and to sympathize with America’s enemies on some level.

Here’s the landscape: The Obama Justice Department is staffed with many lawyers who volunteered their services to America’s enemies. Since those lawyers have been running the department, there has been a detectable shift in favor of due-process rights for terrorists, a bias in favor of civilian trials in which terrorists are vested with all the rights of American citizens, a bias against military tribunals, the extension of Miranda protections to enemy combatants, a concerted effort to publish previously classified information detailing interrogation methods and depicting the alleged abuse of detainees, efforts to subject lawyers who authorized aggressive counterterrorism policies to professional sanction, the reopening of investigations against CIA interrogators even though those cases were previously closed by apolitical law-enforcement professionals, and the continued accusation that officials responsible for designing and carrying out the Bush administration’s counterterrorism policies committed war crimes.

You may think this is a coincidence. I don’t. And I’m not going to pretend it is because some lefty lawyer screams “McCarthyism.” This isn’t demagoguery. It is cause and effect. And if it is hurting President Obama politically, that is because he deserves to be hurt for indulging it.

-- National Review’s Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute and the author of Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad (Encounter Books, 2008).

Senate Banking Committee members Chris Dodd (D., Conn.) and Bob Corker (R., Tenn.) are reportedly on the verge of introducing a landmark financial-reform bill. Dodd, the committee chairman, began collaborating with Corker in mid-February, after the breakdown of talks with GOP ranking member Richard Shelby of Alabama. Thus far, a bipartisan agreement has been stalled by a few hot-button issues, chief among them the creation of a new Consumer Financial Protection Agency (CFPA).

Back in December, the House of Representatives approved legislation that would establish an independent CFPA with the authority to regulate all manner of financial products, including credit cards and mortgages. Not a single Republican voted for the bill. When negotiating with Corker, Dodd scrapped the independent-agency idea and suggested housing the CFPA at Treasury, which would give it regulatory sway over non-bank financial institutions. Corker rejected that proposal but supported putting the new consumer watchdog inside the Federal Reserve.

Shelby remains the key Republican player on this issue. While he is distrustful of the central bank and would prefer to place the CFPA within the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation -- headed by Sheila Bair, who is widely respected on both sides of the aisle -- he is more concerned about the new agency’s regulatory powers than its location.

Indeed, we should not overstate the differences between Corker and Shelby, says Cato Institute economist Mark Calabria, who worked for Shelby as a Banking Committee staffer from 2003 to 2009. Both oppose launching an independent agency or forming a CFPA at Treasury, and both are wary of letting consumer protection trump prudential regulation. While Corker holds a more benign view of the Fed than Shelby does, the Alabama Republican seems amenable to establishing a CFPA within the central bank, provided its regulatory clout is appropriately limited.

Yet many Democrats, in both the House and Senate, are still championing a fully independent consumer entity. So is President Obama. Earlier this week, an administration official told the Wall Street Journal that Obama “remains strongly committed to an independent agency whose singular focus is advocacy for consumers.” Republicans, meanwhile, have spurned the independent-agency plan but are also reluctant to embrace the Fed option.

“I fail to see how putting consumer protection in the Fed is the right course of action,” says a GOP senator on the banking panel. “That’s going to be a hard sell.” While Democratic and Republican committee members have found common ground on some issues -- such as resolution authority and systemic risk -- “this consumer-protection issue still has a long way to go,” because there are “two different philosophies at work.” The Republican senator, who requested anonymity, emphasizes that Shelby’s blessing will be crucial: “Unless the ranking member signs off on the bill, it’s going to have a hard time getting anywhere.”

Consumer protection is hardly the only divisive issue. Conservative activists have sent a letter to Dodd and Shelby warning that corporate “proxy access” provisions “would benefit special interests with political agendas at the expense of ordinary shareholders.” Democrats and Republicans have also been wrangling over how to regulate derivatives and whether to adopt the so-called Volcker Rule on proprietary trading.

But the CFPA debate has been the most radioactive. “It’s crazy to have it in the Fed,” House Financial Services Committee chief Barney Frank (D., Mass.) told the Boston Globe this week. According to the Globe, “Frank said that he has the support of the Democratic House leadership to stop the idea.” An article in the online version of The Nation declares, “If Dodd proceeds with a gutted version of the CFPA, every aspect of the Wall Street overhaul will have been entirely undermined.”

Dodd’s willingness to accept a watered-down bill with no independent consumer agency may reflect a desire to burnish his Senate legacy before retiring. The Connecticut Democrat is not seeking reelection, and he “wants this bill more than anyone,” says Calabria. Unfortunately for Dodd, given the enthusiasm for an independent CFPA among Democrats (including Obama) and the depth of anti-Fed sentiment among members of both parties, his legislation will face a difficult road to the president’s desk.

-- Duncan Currie is deputy managing editor of National Review Online.