How the HAMP program is using taxpayer money to subsidize irresponsible behavior.

President Obama has a weakness for thinking in categories. For someone who provokes swoons among liberals for his great intellect, he has repeatedly evidenced an unsophisticated, one might even say simple-minded, view of the world: Workers good; bosses exploitative. Borrowers good; lenders bad. Patients good; insurance companies bad. Again and again, the president and his spokesmen have justified their expansions of government power as efforts to help those who “through no fault of their own” find themselves in difficulties.

Many politicians traffic in this kind rhetoric during campaigns, but President Obama has institutionalized it in policy.

#ad#One of those reifications -- the Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP) -- now stands revealed as a failure.

Recall that in February of 2009, President Obama proposed to solve a “crisis unlike we’ve ever known.” It wasn’t, the president insisted, that anyone had made poor decisions. “It begins with a young family.#...#They save up.#...#They choose a home that feels like the perfect place to start a life. They secure a fixed-rate mortgage at a reasonable rate, and they make a down payment, and they make their mortgage payments each month. They are as responsible as anyone could ask them to be.” But then someone loses a job, or a spouse has his or her hours cut, or a child becomes sick.

The president’s $75 billion program guaranteed that homeowners with Fannie or Freddie mortgages would be eligible for refinancing to lower rates if their mortgages were between 80 and 105 percent of the home’s worth. Other borrowers facing foreclosure would be able to refinance their mortgages down to 31 percent of their monthly income. Didn’t this mean that taxpayers who didn’t buy too much house or who paid their mortgage bills on time would be subsidizing those who did not? No, the president insisted. “I want to be very clear about what this plan will not do: It will not rescue the unscrupulous or irresponsible by throwing good taxpayer money after bad loans. It will not help speculators.#...#It will not help dishonest lenders who acted irresponsibly, distorting the facts and dismissing the fine print at the expense of buyers who didn’t know better. And it will not reward folks who bought homes they knew from the beginning they would never be able to afford.”

The president never explained how the Treasury Department would differentiate “responsible” borrowers from “speculators,” because in fact it could not. Tea-party protesters were not fooled. They carried placards saying “Honk if I’m paying your mortgage.”

In March of this year, the Obama administration, tacitly acknowledging HAMP’s failure, proposed new rules that would give jobless homeowners a three-month break on mortgage payments and offer more incentives to lenders to modify mortgages. While the administration had boldly predicted in 2009 that HAMP would save 3 to 4 million homeowners, only 434,716 had seen their monthly payments permanently lowered as of July. A much larger number, 616,839 were booted from the program during the same period, usually for failing to make payments on time. As the Los Angeles Times noted in March, “The modifications, while delaying the foreclosure process, did not appear to be a long-term solution. About 52 percent of those with modified loans defaulted again after nine months.”

Neil Barofsky, the special inspector general for the Troubled Assets Relief Program (SIGTARP, for those who speak Washingtonese) blasted the program in a July report:

Treasury’s refusal to provide meaningful goals for this important program is a fundamental failure of transparency and accountability that makes it far more difficult for the American people and their representatives in Congress to assess whether the program’s benefits are worth its very substantial cost.

The American people are essentially being asked to shoulder an additional $50 billion of national debt without being told, more than 16 months after the program’s announcement, how many people Treasury hopes to actually help stay in their homes as a result of these expenditures, how many people are intended to be helped through other subprograms, and how the program is performing against those expectations and goals. Without such clearly defined standards, positive comments regarding the progress or success of HAMP are simply not credible, and the growing public suspicion that the program is an outright failure will continue to spread.

In contrast to the Obama morality play, the foreclosure crisis was not a conspiracy of the rich and powerful against dutiful homeowners reliably making their monthly payments. It was the result of multiple follies by government, bankers, and individuals. President Obama’s instinct to insulate people from the consequences of their bad decisions (and yes, sometimes bad luck) amounts to subsidizing failure. The results are coming in daily -- persistent high unemployment, an anemic recovery, and billions upon billions of wasted taxpayer money.

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

Mona Charen

Labeling all opponents “bigots” allows the Left to forgo real debates.

Liberalism under siege is an ugly sight indeed. Just yesterday it was all hope and change and returning power to the people. But the people have proved so disappointing. Their recalcitrance has, in only 19 months, turned the predicted 40-year liberal ascendancy (James Carville) into a full retreat. Ah, the people, the little people, the small-town people, the “bitter” people, as Barack Obama in an unguarded moment once memorably called them, clinging “to guns or religion or” -- this part is less remembered -- “antipathy toward people who aren’t like them.”

#ad#That’s a polite way of saying: clinging to bigotry. And promiscuous charges of bigotry are precisely how our current rulers and their vast media auxiliary react to an obstreperous citizenry that insists on incorrect thinking.

● Resistance to the vast expansion of government power, intrusiveness, and debt, as represented by the tea-party movement? Why, racist resentment toward a black president.

● Disgust and alarm with the federal government’s unwillingness to curb illegal immigration, as crystallized in the Arizona law? Nativism.

● Opposition to the most radical redefinition of marriage in human history, as expressed in Proposition 8 in California? Homophobia.

● Opposition to a 15-story Islamic center and mosque near Ground Zero? Islamophobia.

Now we know why the country has become “ungovernable,” last year’s excuse for the Democrats’ failure of governance: Who can possibly govern a nation of racist, nativist, homophobic Islamophobes?

Note what connects these issues. In every one, liberals have lost the argument in the court of public opinion. Majorities -- often lopsided majorities -- oppose President Obama’s social-democratic agenda (e.g., the stimulus, Obamacare), support the Arizona law, oppose gay marriage, and reject a Ground Zero mosque.

What’s a liberal to do? Pull out the bigotry charge, the trump that preempts debate and gives no credit to the seriousness and substance of the contrary argument. The most venerable of these trumps is, of course, the race card. When the tea party arose, a spontaneous, leaderless, and perfectly natural (and traditionally American) reaction to the vast expansion of government intrinsic to the president’s proudly proclaimed transformational agenda, the liberal commentariat cast it as a mob of angry white yahoos disguising their antipathy to a black president by cleverly speaking in economic terms.

Then came Arizona and SB 1070. It seems impossible for the Left to believe that people of good will could hold that: (a) Illegal immigration should be illegal; (b) the federal government should not hold border enforcement hostage to comprehensive reform, i.e., amnesty; and (c) every country has the right to determine the composition of its immigrant population.

As for Proposition 8, is it so hard to see why people might believe that a single judge overturning the will of 7 million voters is an affront to democracy? And that seeing merit in retaining the structure of the most ancient and fundamental of all social institutions is something other than an alleged hatred of gays -- particularly since the opposite-gender requirement has characterized virtually every society in all the millennia until just a few years ago?

And now the Ground Zero mosque. The intelligentsia is near unanimous that the only possible ground for opposition is bigotry toward Muslims. This smug attribution of bigotry to two-thirds of the population hinges on the insistence of a complete lack of connection between Islam and radical Islam, a proposition that dovetails perfectly with the Obama administration’s pretense that we are at war with nothing more than “violent extremists” of inscrutable motive and indiscernible belief. Those who reject this as both ridiculous and politically correct (an admitted redundancy) are declared Islamophobes, the ad hominem du jour.

It is a measure of the corruption of liberal thought and the collapse of its self-confidence that, finding itself so widely repudiated, it resorts reflexively to the cheapest race-baiting (in a colorful variety of forms). Indeed, how can one reason with a nation of pitchfork-wielding mobs brimming with “antipathy toward people who aren’t like them” -- blacks, Hispanics, gays, and Muslims -- a nation that is, as Michelle Obama once put it succinctly, “just downright mean”?

The Democrats are going to get beaten badly in November. Not just because the economy is ailing. And not just because Obama overread his mandate in governing too far left. But because a comeuppance is due the arrogant elites whose undisguised contempt for the great unwashed prevents them from conceding a modicum of serious thought to those who dare oppose them.

 — Charles Krauthammer is a nationally syndicated columnist. © 2010 the Washington Post Writers Group

Charles Krauthammer

Barack Obama, the great healer, is proving to be the most divisive president since Richard Nixon.

Behind the anger over the Arizona immigration mess, the Ground Zero mosque, the economy, and the new directions in foreign policy are some recurring general themes that reverberate in each particular new controversy. In sum, they explain everything from the tea parties to the wholly negative perception of Congress to the slide in presidential popularity.

#ad#1. Two sets of rules. The public senses there are two standards in America -- one for elite overseers, quite another for the supposedly not-to-be-trusted public. The anger over this hypocrisy surfaces over matters from the trivial to the profound. Sometimes the pique arises because the spread-the-wealth, we-all-have-skin-in-shared-sacrifice presidential sermons don’t apply to those who do the preaching, as in the president’s serial polo-shirted golf excursions or Michelle’s movable feast from Marbella to Martha’s Vineyard.

More profoundly, an Al Gore, a Timothy Geithner, a John Kerry, a John Edwards, a Charles Rangel -- the luminaries who call for bigger government, higher taxes, and more green coercion -- now appear to the public as disingenuous, living lives in abject contradiction to the utopian bromides they would apply to others. So too with the media. The opinion makers at a failing New York Times, Newsweek, or CBS lost readers and viewers not just because of changing technologies, but because of incessant editorializing in which the educated and affluent, the winners in our system, berated the less educated and less well off, the strugglers in our system, as bigoted or selfish or both.

How, for example, can Americans be asked to pay higher power bills in a recession to subsidize wind power, when the green Kennedy clan worries about windmills marring its vacation-spot view?

2. The bigot card. In reductionist terms, the public now accepts that when particular groups fail to win a 51 percent majority on a particular issue, they resort to invoking racism and prejudice -- odd, when candidate Obama promised a new climate of unity and tolerance. Moreover, that disturbing trend has something to do with the president himself, who has injected racial grievance into everything from the Skip Gates controversy to the debate over the Arizona immigration law.

When the open-borders interests, or the gay-marriage advocates, or the adherents of the Ground Zero mosque cannot convince a majority of Americans that their agenda bodes well for the country, they almost instinctively fall back on the charge that America is xenophobic, homophobic, or Islamophobic. Yet the public infers that these charges reflect sour grapes rather than honest analysis: Had Arizona legislators or California voters supported the progressive agenda, then, as with the 2008 Obama victory, they would have been praised in Newsweek and on NPR for their moral sense and compassion. In short, the bigot card has played itself out and is now not much more than a political ploy to win an argument through calumny when logic and persuasion have failed.

#page#3. The law? What law? Americans accept that they cannot pass legislation in violation of the Constitution. But they do not believe that a single judge can nullify the electoral will of millions without good cause. Thus in Arizona and California, there is a sense that judges who favor open borders or gay marriage are willing to use the pretense of constitutional issues to enact such agendas despite their current unpopularity. In a general landscape in which contractual obligations are nullified, as in the Chrysler bailout, and punitive fines are imposed quite arbitrarily, as in the BP cleanup, many believe the Obama administration applies the law in terms of perceived social utility. What is deemed best for the country by an elite few is what the law must be molded and changed to advance.

#ad#If there are, for example, not sufficient votes in the Congress to pass amnesty through legislative means, why not bypass federal law through a cabinet officer’s executive fiat?

4. The futility of taxes. We talk of returning to the Clinton income-tax schedules. Yet in the late 1990s, those hikes ended up, along with the Republican cuts in mandates, balancing the budget -- without new health-care surcharges, or talk of a VAT, or caps lifted off income subject to Social Security taxes. Not now. The public recognizes that the advocates of higher taxes are not willing to make the sort of across-the-board spending cuts that once succeeded in balancing the budget. In other words, those who will start paying much more of their income to the government in the form of taxes fret that, unlike the 1990s, this time the additional federal revenue won’t balance the budget, and will be all for naught.

Worse still are two corollaries. First, we are in a ceaseless spiral in which each new tax increase will lead to justifications for more spending and thus to still higher taxes. Public employees, fairly or not, have morphed in the public mind from civil servants to pigs at the salary and pension trough, and from disinterested government workers to members of a liberal social movement that will perpetuate a federal agenda of race, class, and gender politics and higher taxes through payback bloc voting at the polls.

Second, there is a growing suspicion that this administration believes in a “gorge the beast” philosophy, the antithesis of Reagan’s “starve the beast.” In other words, redistribution may be a desired end in and of itself. If greater spending demands higher taxes, perhaps that is socially preferable, since income is an arbitrary construct predicated on some sort of social injustice. In turn, the remedy demands that the federal government impose an equality of result to correct the inequities of the cavalier free market that so unfairly pays some too much and others too little. 

In short, are our taxes not merely paying for federal expenditures, but also quite justifiably serving to confiscate income that we did not rightfully earn?

5. Disingenuousness. There is also a growing belief that the Obama administration is advancing an agenda that it cannot be fully candid about, because that agenda does not command broad support. As a result, we are habitually asked to believe that what administration appointees or supporters say is not what they really mean, or at least was taken out of context.

Justice Sotomayor did not really mean that wise Latinas make better judges than white males. Van Jones did not really mean that George W. Bush was in on 9/11, or that white youths are more likely to be mass murderers, or that whites are chronic polluters of the ghetto. Eric Holder no more meant that Americans are cowards than one of Anita Dunn’s heroes really is the mass-murdering Mao. We should not believe that the top priority of the head of NASA is to advance Islamic outreach, or that the president himself thinks that police routinely act stupidly, stereotype, or arrest innocent people on their way to get their kids some ice cream. Imam Rauf did not really say that we created bin Laden, or that we kill more innocent Muslims than al-Qaeda kills innocent non-Muslims.

All this dissimulation started with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, whose mistake was not saying the outrageous things he said -- Mr. Obama and the compliant media had contextualized his corpus of hate well enough -- but finally insulting the media at the National Press Club. The former was seen as a misdemeanor; the latter proved a felony.

Do Obama supporters, then, reveal their true beliefs only in gaffes and unguarded moments, while filling their official statements and communiqués with pretense?

#page#6. A culpable America? Finally, the public has added up the apology tours, the bowing, and the constant emphasis on race, class, and gender crimes, and concluded that this administration sees America, past and present, as the story of a culpable majority denying noble minorities their rights -- period.

In addition, Obama and his crew see America in isolation, without comparison to the wretchedness that exists in so much of the world outside our borders. So a logical disconnect is never quite explained. If America is so xenophobic and culpable, why would millions of Mexicans or Middle Eastern Muslims wish to immigrate here -- and what exactly is America doing to attract them that their own countries are not? If Michelle Obama felt that she could not be proud of America before Barack Obama’s accession, was it the free-market system that both provoked her ire and created the capital for her to jet to Marbella?

#ad#In other words, with the race/class/gender critique of the Obamians comes very little appreciation of the bounty, freedom, and affluence that they so eagerly embrace. Surely someone in the past -- perhaps even white males -- must have been doing something right for America to evolve into a place that our present-day critics apparently enjoy.

How will all this play out? 

There are many millions of Americans who have a rising stake either in receiving reallocated federal money or in administering its distribution. For nearly half a century, the public schools have been telling millions of children that America’s preeminence is ill-gotten, based largely on exploitation of less fortunate others, here and abroad. So the country is divided, and a president claiming to be the great healer of our age is proving to be the most divisive chief executive since Richard Nixon -- and, in the view of an increasing majority of Americans, by his own intent.

-- NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, the editor of Makers of Ancient Strategy: From the Persian Wars to the Fall of Rome, and the author of The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern.

Victor Davis Hanson

Tear the schools down.

In the way these things happen, we had a sudden deluge of education stories these past few days. For this Long Islander, the news was local, state, and national.

Our local news concerned a school-district referendum on spending $2 million to add buildings to our intermediate school (grades 4-6). The backstory here is that there used to be two intermediate schools in the district, this one and another. The other was a good school, much liked by parents. Unfortunately it was located in the middle of a nasty slum with a full complement of gangs, drugs, crime, and “low-income housing.” (That last phrase is Newspeak for “custom-built slums.” What, you city types thought such things didn’t exist out here in the bosky suburbs? Let me tell you.)

#ad#There was a fatal shooting near that other school after a July Fourth party. Then in August there was a double shooting, nonfatal but dramatic enough to make the regional TV news. The school board decided the neighborhood was too dangerous for kids, and closed the school. That means more students for the first school. It was scheduled to be expanded anyway via modular classrooms (= trailers), but with this new burden, the district thought a building would be necessary, and put the matter to a referendum.

We voted it down, 863 to 624. There were a number of factors in play, but large among them, to judge from conversations with neighbors, was fed-up-ness with the education rackets and their endless and endlessly increasing demands on our wallets. This is a mainly lower-middle-class town, and a lot of people -- people, I mean, who didn’t have the foresight to Get a Government Job -- are hard up. Two million dollars sounds like a lot of money when you’re hard up.

Up to the state level. New York has been declared one of the winners in Obama’s “Race to the Top” initiative. This is a scheme in which states can accumulate points for various kinds of federally approved educational initiatives, and win federal cash grants according to the number of points they get. The initiatives are defined as fuzzily as possible to allow for maximum politicization: “Providing high-quality pathways for aspiring teachers and principals” will get your state 21 points, for example. Fuzzy as the initiatives are, though, there’s enough matter in them to generate resistance from the ed-biz unions, and there have been some ugly battles in the state legislature.

To call us a “winner” is really making too much of New York’s achievement. Race to the Top is a caucus race in which well-nigh everybody gets prizes -- 10 of the 18 competitors in this latest round. Furthermore, independent education watchers seem unable to find much difference between winner states and loser states. The news has nonetheless been greeted with wild rejoicing in the local media. Even the normally sensible New York Post, America’s Newspaper of Record, ran a triumphal editorial declaring that “the money is great for New York.”

No it isn’t. Not only is it not great, it’s also not money. The federal government hasn’t got any money, and its creditors are shutting off the credit spigot. The $700 million “won” by New York is pretend money, faery gold that will melt away to nothing when the trumpets sound to herald the great inflation that is coming upon us.

#page#
Which is actually the good news. If that $700 million were real money, it would be a tad more painful to watch it disappearing into the great drooling maw of the ed-biz leviathan. Here’s the proposed allocation:

$219.7 million: New standards and assessments, revised curriculum. $177 million: Programs still to be determined that comply with federal education reform priorities. $113.6 million: Improvements at failing schools. $110.3 million: Training of teachers and school principals. $64.2 million: New data systems to track student performance.

Talk about fuzzy! You could drive a coach and four through any one of those item descriptions, and the ed-biz leeches surely will. “Training of teachers and school principals,” for example. How much more training do they need, for crying out loud? You already have to have a master’s degree before they’ll let you do any serious teaching in this state. I suppose the Devil’s Dictionary translation here is: “More sabbaticals and ‘professional development’ time away from the job.” You can bet, at a very minimum, that every one of those spending points will involve the hiring of more people -- more public-sector tax-eaters, while the private sector gasps and chokes for air.

Does not everyone by now understand that public money beyond the meager necessities is pure poison to our educational system, a domestic-policy equivalent to the resource curse? Didn’t anybody learn anything from the Kansas City fiasco? (How are they doing over there in Kansas City nowadays, by the way? Let’s take a look . . . Oh.)

Another big item recently has been the preparations for next month’s opening of the Robert F. Kennedy Schools complex in Los Angeles. The complex cost $578 million. Oh, and:

The RFK complex follows on the heels of two other LA schools among the nation’s costliest -- the $377 million Edward R. Roybal Learning Center, which opened in 2008, and the $232 million Visual and Performing Arts High School, which opened in 2009.

But isn’t California looking at a colossal budget deficit? Yes it is. So is the federal government. Leviathan must be fed, though, and there are still a few private-sector taxpayers whose veins have not yet been emptied of all their blood. And this is education we’re talking about! It’s for the kiddies! What could be more important? Why do you hate children, Mr. Derbyshire?

Here is my prescription for a reform of the nation’s education system. First, destroy all the schools. Cart away the rubble for landfill and sow the ground with salt. Abolish the federal Department of Education and all state equivalents. End all education funding from public sources.

If the inhabitants of any district then wish their kids to be educated in schools, let them raise the necessary funds themselves. Then let them build the schools themselves, like zeks. There should be just one federally approved model: an unheated wood-and-tar-paper structure with plastic sheeting for windows.

Any person above the age of twelve who wishes to attend school should have to stand outside the school gate for a month, in all weathers, pleading to be admitted. There should be a constitutional amendment banning any community from employing non-teaching staff in its schools at any ratio to teaching staff higher than one percent. And let’s have a federal penalty of 25-to-life for anyone attempting to form a teachers’ union.

Crazy, you say? No: Spending half a billion dollars you don’t have on a school to educate 4,200 students, some high proportion of whom are in the country illegally, is crazy. Shoveling seven hundred million dollars into the public sector of a state whose private sector is withering on the vine is crazy. Pretending that by spending enough money you can turn every child into a bookish child is crazy.

Though I’m certainly willing to let my proposal compete in the marketplace of ideas. How about a nationwide referendum: the Derbyshire plan, as above, vs. the Obama plan? The result might, as in our little local referendum here this week, not be the one the ed-biz panjandrums prefer.

-- John Derbyshire is an NRO columnist and author, most recently, of We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism.

John Derbyshire

Government handouts encourage citizens to act less prudently.

One of the things that make it tough to figure out how much has to be charged for insurance is that people behave differently when they are insured from the way they behave when they are not insured.

#ad#In other words, if one person out of 10,000 has his car set on fire, and it costs an average of $10,000 to restore the car to its previous condition, then it might seem as if charging one dollar to all 10,000 people would be enough to cover the cost of paying $10,000 to the one person whose car will need to be repaired. But the joker in this deal is that people whose cars are insured may not be as cautious as other people are about what kinds of neighborhoods they park their car in.

The same principle applies to government policies. When taxpayer-subsidized government insurance policies protect people against flood damage, more people are willing to live in places where there are greater dangers of flooding. Often these are luxury beachfront homes with great views of the ocean. So what if they suffer flood damage once every decade or so, if Uncle Sam is picking up the tab for restoring everything?

Television reporter John Stossel has told how he got government insurance “dirt cheap” to insure a home only a hundred feet from the ocean. Eventually, the ocean moved in and did a lot of damage, but the taxpayer-subsidized insurance covered the costs of fixing it. Four years later, the ocean came in again, and this time it took out the whole house. But the taxpayer-subsidized government insurance paid to replace the whole house.

This was not a unique experience. More than 25,000 properties have received government flood-insurance payments more than four times. Over a period of 28 years, more than 4,000 properties received government insurance payments exceeding the total value of the property. If you are located in a dangerous place, repeated damage can easily add up to more than the property is worth, especially if the property is damaged and then later wiped out completely, as John Stossel’s oceanfront home was.

Although “moral hazard” is an insurance term, it applies to other government policies besides insurance. International studies show that people in countries with more generous and long-lasting unemployment compensation spend less time looking for jobs. In the United States, where unemployment compensation is less generous than in Western Europe, unemployed Americans spend more hours looking for work than do unemployed Europeans in countries with more generous unemployment compensation.

People change their behavior in other ways when the government pays with the taxpayer money. After welfare became more readily available in the 1960s, unwed motherhood skyrocketed. The country is still paying the price for that -- and the money is the least of it. Children raised by single mothers on welfare have far higher rates of crime, welfare, and other social pathology.

San Francisco has been one of the most generous cities in the country when it comes to subsidizing the homeless. Should we be surprised that homelessness is a big problem in San Francisco?

Most people are not born homeless. They usually become homeless because of their own behavior, and the friends and family they alienate to the point that those who know them will not help them. People with mental problems may not be able to help their behavior, but the rest of them can.

We hear a lot of talk about “safety nets” from big-government liberals, who act as if there is a certain predestined amount of harm that people will suffer, so that it is just a question of the government helping those who are harmed. But we hear very little about “moral hazard” from big-government liberals. We all need safety nets. That is why we “save for a rainy day,” instead of living it up to the limit of our income and beyond.

We also hear a lot of talk about “the uninsured,” for whose benefit we are to drastically change the whole medical-care system. But income data show that many of those uninsured people have incomes from which they could easily afford insurance. But they can live it up instead, because the government has mandated that hospital emergency rooms treat everyone.

All of this is a large hazard to taxpayers. And it is not very moral.

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

Thomas Sowell

Liberals are frantically trying to explain away Obama’s problems.

You’ve got to wonder when White House political guru David Axelrod will look at the churning pools of poll data and, like Chief Brody in Jaws, say: “We’re gonna need a bigger boat.”

The analogy isn’t quite right, because in the movie, the shark ultimately loses. It’s hard to imagine a scenario where Barack Obama and Axelrod victoriously paddle away on the flotsam of their own political wreckage. But in one sense, the analogy works just fine: This White House is rudderlessly lost at sea and inadequate to the challenges it faces.

#ad#At the beginning of the year, retiring seven-term representative Marion Berry (D., Ark.) recounted a conversation he had with the president. Obama’s unrelenting push for health-care reform in the face of public opposition reminded Berry of the Clinton-era missteps that led to the Republican rout of the Democrats in 1994. “I began to preach last January that we had already seen this movie and we didn’t want to see it again because we know how it comes out,” Berry told a newspaper.

Or, to quote Brody in Jaws 2: “But I’m telling you, and I’m telling everybody at this table, that that’s a shark! And I know what a shark looks like, because I’ve seen one up close. And you’d better do something about this one, because I don’t intend to go through that hell again!”

Convinced that his popularity was eternal, Obama responded by saying, yes, but there’s a “big difference” between 1994 and 2010, and that big difference is, “you’ve got me.”

The funny thing is, Obama might have been right. Because things might be much worse for Democrats in 2010 than they were in 1994 -- and the big difference might well be Barack Obama.

In fairness, the biggest difference is probably the economy, which in political terms should be fitted for a pine box. Of course, Mr. Credibility, Joe Biden, says it’s doing great, sounding a bit like the shopkeeper in the Monty Python “dead-parrot sketch” who insists the bird’s “just resting.”

In 1994, when the Contract with America Congress was elected, the jobless rate was 5.6 percent. Today it’s 9.5 percent and may well climb higher. More than 18 percent of people who want full-time work can find only part-time jobs. Consumer confidence is falling again, housing sales recently hit a 15-year low, and the stock market is off 11 percent since its April highs for the year.

While some people -- such as yours truly -- think Obama and the Democrats deserve much of the blame for the worsening economy, one can be agnostic on all that and recognize that voters have lost faith in the Democratic party (which is not quite the same thing as saying they have bottomless respect for the GOP). The congressional generic ballot -- asking which party voters prefer -- is as bad for Democrats today as it was in 1994. Stu Rothenberg, editor of the Rothenberg Report -- not exactly an RNC direct-mail operation -- says Obama’s approval rating (already below 50 percent) will likely rival Clinton’s in November of 1994. Already, Democrats in tight races, including the Senate majority leader, are distancing themselves from the White House, and pretty much everyone has stopped trying to make lemonade out of the Obamacare lemon.

Moreover, Obama has lost his connection with the American people. He’s aloof without inspiring confidence. On issue after issue -- terrorism, immigration, the oil spill, the environment, and the Ground Zero mosque -- he seems determined to craft his responses in a way that will annoy the most people possible.

#page#Liberals are frantically trying to explain away Obama’s problems. Some want to protect their investment in Obama, and some want to protect their investment in liberalism. So some claim that his mistakes stem from not being progressive enough, while others insist that he’s played his cards right, but we need to wait a bit longer for the payoff.

#ad#I’m dubious on both counts. Obama has delivered massively for progressives, and it strikes me as idiotic to say that if he had only squeezed a bit more liberalism into his first two years, everything would be better. Moreover, I don’t think the payoff is coming, because I think the policies are wrong.

But, again, that’s an argument for a different day. What’s clear right now is that the president who claimed to be the personification of a world-historical moment has clearly misread his mandate, the mood, and the moment. He’s lost at sea, and not even a bigger boat will save him.

— Jonah Goldberg is an editor-at-large of National Review Online and a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. © 2010 Tribune Media Services, Inc.

Jonah Goldberg

Losing independents has made Democrats desperate.

The frustrations of minority status can drive a political party batty.

The temptation is to substitute belligerence for thought, insist on a self-destructive purity, lash out at the American public, and question the wisdom and viability of the country’s institutions. Indulging in these tendencies almost always makes a party’s position worse rather than better.

#ad#The Obama Democrats may be the first party to engage in this self-defeating behavior -- borne of a frustrated desperation -- while holding the presidency and both houses of Congress by substantial margins. Through an accident of timing (a national election coinciding with a financial crisis) and the exhaustion of the Bush-DeLay Republicans (who lost power almost by default), liberals took the commanding heights of the federal government while remaining a minority disposition in our national life. In short, they became a rump majority.

Through Pres. Barack Obama’s alchemy, these temporarily enlarged congressional numbers were supposed to be transformed into a permanent realignment. It hasn’t worked out, obviously. In the past 20 months, Democrats have had the power to do almost everything they want, except command the allegiance of the public. That has made them and their allies feel embattled, isolated, and perpetually aggrieved. They act like a forlorn minority at the same time they control every lever of elective power in Washington.

The ultimate source of the Democrats’ discontent is quite simple: They’ve lost independents. In 1994, in taking Congress, Republicans won independents by 14 percentage points. In 2006, in taking it back, Democrats won independents by 18 points. In the latest Gallup survey, Republicans lead among independents by 11 points, a trend that puts at risk Nancy Pelosi’s misbegotten speakership.

Both Republicans and Democrats have bounced around in the mid-30s to 40s in terms of their proportion of the public since 1984, while independents have hovered in the mid-20s. During its recent tailspin, the GOP’s share declined from 40 percent in 2002 to 33 in 2008, with independents picking up from 22 to 28. Whoever gets those independents wins. And as Republican pollster David Winston points out, they reflect the basic center-right contour of American opinion.

Since 1992, according to Gallup, ideological opinion has been roughly constant: Self-described moderates have been 40 percent or a little lower; conservatives in the high 30s (although they’ve spiked to 42 lately); liberals in the high teens to low 20s. Both sides need the center, but especially liberals. It’d be rank foolishness to try to govern on the strength of only one in five people. But such has been the Obama-Pelosi project -- with unsurprising results.

The Pollster.com average of Obama’s approval rating among independents is a dismal 37.9 percent. This meltdown should have launched a thousand agonized liberal op-eds, conferences, and strategy papers on how to win back the center. If, that is, liberalism had any realistic sense of its limits. In the midst of a catastrophic loss of the middle, Obama’s supporters exhort him to get more angry, insistent, and ambitiously liberal. Having already pushed for a bridge too far, they want to go farther still. When they can’t, they conclude that it’s a damning indictment of Obama’s failure of nerve and the nation’s ungovernability.

There’s little acknowledgment that the country is in a different place than they are. To the extent there is, so much the worse for the country, which is condemned for its backwardness and intolerance. The majority is not just wrong on immigration enforcement and the Ground Zero mosque, it’s contemptible. Who knew that the American public would get accused of bigotry more often after electing an African-American president than before?

As former Bush speechwriter Peter Wehner writes, liberals “are expressing deepening alienation from our nation and turning on the American people with a vengeance.” They thought they had a mandate from heaven in 2008, and can’t bear the thought that they deluded themselves. They’ve gone from triumphalism to a petulant and uncomprehending tantrum in less than two years. The rump majority looks more exhausted by the day.

— Rich Lowry is editor of National Review. He can be reached via e-mail, comments.lowry@nationalreview.com. © 2010 by King Features Syndicate.

Rich Lowry

Okay, Salzburgers, welcome to the third installment: this third installment of these scribbles about Mozart’s hometown, and its assorted doings. For Parts I and II, go here and here. Where were we? Doesn’t matter -- I’ll just type.

One of the guests in our interview series is Christiane Karg, a young soprano -- German. Specifically, she is from Bavaria, and I say, “Oh, you’re from ‘Grüss Gott’ country.” In southern Germany and Austria -- in South Austro-Germany (though some will kill you if you say that) -- they say “Grüss Gott.” In greeting, I mean. Elsewhere, they say “Guten Tag,” etc.

#ad#Anyway, Karg is a light, high lyric soprano -- Amore (the character) in this year’s Orfeo ed Euridice (the opera by Gluck). And she makes a fascinating comment -- fascinating to me, at least: Her favorite voice of all time is Pavarotti. Not a lyric soprano or other soprano, but Pavarotti. A lot of singers feel that way: I have ascertained that from many of them.

And Karg gives me an occasion to tell one of my favorite stories: Matthew Polenzani, the American tenor, was in our interview series. (Swell guy, very good golfer.) We were saying how the Pav Man was 1) lyrical and 2) loud -- really, really loud. Huge sound. He focused it so it drilled right through your forehead: yet his voice always retained its lyricism and freshness. “How did he do that?” I asked. Polenzani said, “I have no idea -- otherwise, I’d do it myself.”

I’ve always loved that answer.

Another singer, Stephen Costello, is with Karg and me in this same session. Like Polenzani, he is an American tenor. And he makes a point about the Pav Man: His voice never failed; it held true (or true enough) till the end. It’s the rest of his body that went to pot.

#*#Sometimes, when I tell my Polenzani-Pavarotti story, I tell this story, too -- which I adore. These stories go together like peaches and cream. (Although, come to think of it, I’ve never had cream with peaches -- or peaches with cream.) Tom Weiskopf had finished his round at the Masters, and was in the television booth, providing color commentary. Nicklaus was on the 16th tee, I believe. And the announcer said to Weiskopf, “Tom, what’s going through Jack’s mind right now?” Weiskopf answered, “I have no idea. If I did, I might have won this tournament a time or two.”

#*#Feel like a quick picture? According to my e-mail, readers are kind of digging them. Although one said, “What’s with the cellphone jobs? How about investing in a digital camera?” Well, gotta crawl before you can walk. Or something. Anyway, here is just a country snap -- a snap from a walk out in the country. I consider this a friendly view, a friendly scene -- very Salzburg. Very Salzburg environs. See what you think.

#*#On the Mönchsberg, overlooking Salzburg, there is a very glamorous party -- a 60th-birthday party for Stephan Braunfels. He is the famous German architect, the maker of the Modern Museum in Munich, plus a slew of other buildings. I remember going to the Modern with the Pryce-Joneses, very shortly after it opened. Braunfels is a highly, highly cultivated man: a pianist, a music-lover, other things. He has a pedigree too.

One grandfather was Walter Braunfels, the composer. Another grandfather, I believe -- or was it great-grandfather? -- was Adolf von Hildebrand, the sculptor. His father was Wolfgang Braunfels, the art historian, and urban-design authority. A highly, highly cultivated family.

Braunfels tells a story about his grandfather, the composer -- who was half Jewish, and whose music would be in disfavor, come the Nazis. In 1923, Hitler came to him and asked whether he would compose a party hymn: a hymn for the Nazis. He must not have had the goods on Braunfels. The composer said, “Um, no thanks.”

Stephan Braunfels’s birthday party is a marathon affair, beginning at 6 in the evening, I believe, and going till about 3 in the morning. I attend from about 10 to 1. I know the party started with a performance of The Eight Seasons -- which combines Vivaldi’s Four Seasons and Piazzolla’s Four Seasons of Buenos Aires. After midnight, a jazz ensemble comes on, complete with singer: for songs by Gershwin and Porter. And the food, let me tell you -- a seated, late meal for a well-attired multitude -- is unbelievable.

Braunfels presents a slide show -- kind of a “This Is Your Life.” He talks about milestones for him, important figures and events. He went to Florence, and fell in love with everything Florentine: especially the buildings. It decided him on being an architect, I believe. At seven, he discovered Elvis -- loved him. He loved Callas too. And Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7, conducted by Furtwängler. He was thirteen when Kennedy was assassinated -- affected him greatly.

At 14, he discovered the Beatles -- loved them. He grew his hair to be like theirs. His teachers in Germany, not very understanding, said, “Are you a girl?” He went to Greece, saw the Parthenon -- was held in its spell. Wanted more than ever to be an architect (as I remember).

#page#Speed ahead a few decades: Braunfels is touching when he says that 9/11 had a big impact on him. I haven’t heard that in a while, from anybody. One of his dreams is to build a skyscraper in New York. I hope he gets to do so. Like many foreigners, he has a greater appreciation of America than most of us -- most of us natives.

As I mentioned, this is a very, very glamorous party, in a dreamy, swank setting, with swells and stars all about. The glamour is enhanced by a touch of scandal: the presence of Marc Rich, Clinton’s most notorious pardonee. Very pleasant fellow to meet.

#ad##*#So, I’m walking through the Mirabell Gardens, and there’s a little choir -- not a professional choir, but a group of tourists, of travelers: probably American. They’re sort of ramshackle, and they appear to be pilgrims of a sort. They are singing “Amazing Grace” -- and I find this wonderful, even moving. But then I see a hat out in front of them -- which bothers me. Not exactly sure why. Maybe I’m wrong, to be bothered . . .

#*#Want to see a snap of the Mirabell Gardens -- just a portion? (Of the gardens, I mean, not the snap.) I took this early on a bright Sunday morning -- here.

#*#I don’t think I’ve ever been in a city where I didn’t see Che Guevara’s face, a lot. I imagine if I were in the Kalahari Desert I’d see it -- he is like a stain throughout the earth. Worse, his ideology is, too. I see Guevara’s face just down the hall from me, in the establishment in which I am staying. He is on the wall. And I see him on the T-shirt of a little kid in the Linzergasse. He is with his parents, this boy. And his Che shirt says, “Hasta la victoria siempre.” Yeah, yeah -- “victory” will come when apparel lauding this totalitarian killer disappears, or is at least less popular.

I can’t blame the boy, of course. Blame the parents? And what about their parents? Blame the media, the schools -- the “culture”? I have written pretty steadily about Guevara for about ten years. I think I deserve a break. I won’t write about him until, say, Tuesday . . .

#*#I’ve mentioned Stephen Costello, just in passing, twice now -- he is a tenor from Philadelphia. Played the trumpet for many years. But, with a voice like his, you can’t help singing. He is married to a singer, Ailyn Perez, a soprano. They have done Romeo and Juliet together, and La bohème -- perhaps other operas, too, not sure. “What’s it like working with your wife?” I ask. Well, for one thing, you can do love scenes with ease. “You don’t have to worry about where you can touch, about what you can do, about crossing a line.” You live across the line.

Great stuff.

#*#I meet an Italian couple who live in Bologna. One of them gives me her card, which indicates that they live on, or that she works on -- I can’t remember -- Via Ragazzi del ’99. In other words, Boys of ’99 Street. What does that mean? Those were the last conscripts of World War I -- 18-year-olds, born in 1899. A great many of them were slaughtered on the battlefield, in the last year or so. The very name sort of makes me shudder.

#*#I’m not going to put this in my music criticism, so I thought I’d tell you here, in this journal -- or whatever these scribbles are. In the program for Romeo and Juliet is a nudie: a nude photo of a young girl, seemingly about Juliet’s age -- 15? Just in case you were worried that the Salzburg Festival had gone square or something. For a while, the opera productions were going through a kiddie-porn phase. A famous singer teased me about a certain production -- not of this type -- assuming I didn’t like it because it was “progressive” and “imaginative.” I said, wearily, “Look, I’m grateful for any production where the kids get to keep their clothes on.” That shut him up.

Hard to shut me up though, right? I could go on, but I’m going to save the remaining items for a final installment, on Monday (I think) (hairy weekend ahead). See you then? Thanks for Salzburg-ing with me.


#JAYBOOK#

Jay Nordlinger

West and other race-baiters have not been held accountable for their lies and distortions.

This weekend, on the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, civil-rights activists and hip-hop stars will hold what they call a “healing ceremony” to commemorate the disaster. President Obama will speak at a separate event in New Orleans on Sunday. But don’t expect any of these reconciliation-seeking leaders to confront the indelible stain of racial demagoguery left by the Left in Katrina’s aftermath. Hating George W. Bush means never having to say you’re sorry.

The Olympic gold medal for racial grievance-mongering went to rapper Kanye West, who railed during a supposedly nonpolitical nationwide telethon that the government was shooting “us,” that “those are my people down there,” and that “George Bush doesn’t care about black people!” West’s vulgar exploitation of a charity drive -- which was meant to unite America -- left most viewers with the same aghast, frozen expression as the one on comedian Mike Myers’s face as he tried to rescue their fundraising segment from the sewage.

Not to be outdone, the Congressional Black Caucus convened a press conference to blast news reporters for describing Katrina victims as “refugees.” Yes, really. The Rev. Jesse Jackson echoed their complaint: “It is racist to call American citizens refugees.” Refugees are, by dictionary definition, “exiles who flee for safety.” How this could be construed as bigoted remains as much a mystery as the source of unhinged Huffington Post blogger and self-proclaimed “social-justice advocate” Randall Robinson’s bogus claim “that black hurricane victims in New Orleans have begun eating corpses to survive.”

#ad#Robinson retracted the report, but did not apologize for spreading the black-cannibalism tale around the world and using Katrina to vent his anti-American venom about his country being a “monstrous fraud.” Nation of Islam race-hustler-in-chief Louis Farrakhan trafficked in his own baseless conspiracy-mongering about “a 25-foot-deep crater under the levee breach” indicating that the levee “may have been blown up to destroy the black part of town and keep the white part dry.” Director Spike Lee stoked the levee truthers further, declaring, “If they can rig an election, they can do anything!”

New Black Panther party head Malik Zulu Shabazz chimed in, calling the Katrina rescue and recovery operation a “racist occupation of subjugation rather than a relief effort,” and saying it was designed “to keep non-white people in a state of subjugation on all levels, and they are viewed as expendable in order to protect the interest of the system.” Donning her own tinfoil hat, Democratic Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee suggested that Republican suppression of the black vote in 2000 and 2004 was to blame for the government’s botched Katrina response.

Democratic Rep. Charles Rangel drove the racial wedge in deeper by comparing President Bush to brutal Alabama segregationist Bull Connor. “If there’s one thing that George Bush has done that we should never forget,” Rangel spewed, “it’s that for us and for our children, he has shattered the myth of white supremacy once and for all.” At a House hearing, a Katrina witness testified unchallenged that black New Orleans residents were victims of “genocide and ethnic cleansing.”

The execrable Jimmy Carter waited a few months to unleash his own Bush-bashing bile -- at the funeral of Coretta Scott King, no less -- in February 2006. “We only have to recall the color of the faces of those in Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi, those who were most devastated by Katrina, to know that there are not yet equal opportunities for all Americans.”

Carter’s speech not only lacked basic decency. It lacked any grounding in reality. According to statistics released just months after the storm by the primary morgue that processed the bodies of the deceased, 48 percent of those who died in the natural disaster were black, 41 percent were white, with another 8 percent unknown and 2 percent Hispanic. Little-noted follow-up analysis confirmed those preliminary results and also debunked the myth that the poor were disproportionately affected by the storm.

Five years later, the same color-coded paranoia and political opportunism that poisoned the Hurricane Katrina recovery permeates every current conflict in the public square: Ground Zero mosque opponents are all suspiciously funded bigots, according to Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. The tea-party movement is the new Bull Connor, according to every liberal New York Times columnist. President Obama’s critics hate black people, according to every major black Hollywood director and hip-hop mogul. As for the soul-fixing, Nobel Peace Prize–winning commander-in-chief whose election was supposed to heal the divide, I will guarantee you he won’t ever lift a finger to repudiate the cynical smear tactics against his unjustly accused predecessor.

Post-racial America, we never knew you.

— Michelle Malkin is the author of Culture of Corruption: Obama and His Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks & Cronies (Regnery, 2010). © 2010 Creators Syndicate, Inc.

Michelle Malkin

Australia’s Liberal party might win an unwinnable election.

I have been slightly surprised by the lack of interest in the Australian federal election -- and not just because Australia is arguably America’s closest ally, having fought alongside the U.S. in every war of the 20th century. No, my surprise rests on the fact that the election has been utterly gripping from before the start to after the finish.

The story starts nine months ago, when Tony Abbott became leader of the conservative Liberal party to a chorus of derision from Labour opponents and mainstream-media pundits. Type “Tony Abbot” and “unelectable” into Google, and you will get 19,800 assents from the computer. Abbott was seen as too conservative, too dogmatic, and too hot-headed for the modern liberal Australia allegedly being shaped by Labour prime minister Kevin Rudd. This judgment proved to be a serious mistake.

#ad#Two months ago, Rudd was dispatched from office by an internal Labour coup because party bosses were convinced that Abbott would beat him in an election. (One was due in October.) Rudd was replaced by his deputy, the popular Julia Gillard, who became the first woman prime minister of Oz and at once surged ahead in the opinion polls. When that early lead began to wobble after policy mistakes, Gillard declared an immediate election to maximize her “honeymoon” prospect of gliding to victory.

Fat chance. The formal election campaign was even more of a roller coaster than the previous seven months had been. Leaks began to emerge from -- well, everyone believes it was from the camp of Kevin Rudd -- revealing how Gillard had voted against various popular measures in the cabinet (whose discussions and votes are private). For a week, Labour was convulsed by internal squabbles that failed to end even when Gillard and Rudd forged a cold and suspicious peace.

Abbott, meanwhile, ran a disciplined campaign focusing on the government’s faults but avoiding direct attacks on Gillard. He took the lead in opinion polls. But Gillard fought back well in mid-campaign and forced a reluctant Abbott (who himself was now playing it too safe) to hold a second debate (just as she had been forced into a first one). Debating honors were roughly even, but overall, the debates helped Abbott to look prime ministerial. When he overtook Gillard again in the final days of the campaign, Labour and its media supporters launched a desperate attack on him as a male chauvinist unacceptable to female voters. (Abbott is pro-life.) Its impact was dented, however, by the fact that Abbott was usually accompanied by his wife and three dazzling daughters who, as one commentator said, radiated love and respect for their father.

Polls on the eve of the election predicted a dead heat.

That’s almost what the voters delivered through the complicated mechanism of Australia’s Alternative Vote system. Abbott’s conservative coalition easily won the primary-vote total with 44 percent to Labour’s 38 percent. When the second-preference votes of those who had voted for smaller parties were distributed, however, Labour caught up for a photo finish. Though final figures will not be available for another week, Labour leads the Coalition by 50.50 to 49.50 percent in the “two-party-preferred” national vote, while the Coalition leads Labour by 73 to 72 in parliamentary seats -- with 76 being the number needed for a majority. Most political observers don’t expect the seats total to change by more than one seat either way. (The national vote may vary slightly more, since 2 million votes remain to be counted.) So the net effect is that the next government will be determined by a handful of independents and Greens. They are demanding fairly major changes in how Australia is governed in return for their support. So whether Gillard or Abbott heads the next government may not be known for another ten days. The roller coaster continues on its clattering way.

#page#Even so, some provisional conclusions can be drawn:

First, amid all the uncertainties, one thing is clear and undeniable: Labour lost an election it should have won easily. The last time that a first-term Australian government lost an election was 80 years ago -- and that was in the middle of the Great Depression. In the last two years, by contrast, Australia is one of two countries that have gone through the international economic crisis without having a domestic recession. Both Rudd and his conservative predecessor, John Howard, share the credit for this achievement. It helps explain why Rudd was one of Australia’s most popular prime ministers a year ago; and Gillard was at least as popular as he was. Sitting governments usually (and reasonably) get the electoral credit for prosperity if only because they have not prevented it. So Labour’s failure to benefit from these economic advantages and electoral precedents is, well, historic.

#ad#Second, Julia Gillard is a wounded leader, but not yet a dead one. As deputy prime minister she was almost as responsible as Rudd for the failings of his government. By conspiring to oust him, she helped to divide her party and to give it an image of covert and unfraternal viciousness. Several of her own policies -- for instance, creating a citizens’ council to advise on climate change -- looked shifty and proved unpopular. And though she fought bravely and effectively to the end, she lost what many thought was an unlosable election. Her party, as she well knows, is a harsh and unforgiving one. If she fails to persuade the independents to keep Labour in power, she will lose the Labour leadership too. She must either remain prime minister or face the end of her political career. That gives her wooing of the independents a slightly embarrassing edge of desperation. Several commentators have noted that on election night she praised each of them by name. She has rushed to accept their conditions unreservedly (whereas Abbott has refused some of them and defended the “Westminster constitution”). Still, she might yet cobble together a temporary gimcrack coalition of Labour, Greens, and, er, cranks -- and as the French say, nothing lasts like the provisional.

Third, Tony Abbott is the moral victor. He came closest of any leader to winning the election -- and it was an election that by all the axioms of conventional wisdom he should have lost. This was a political struggle between parties of the Left and Right, of course; but it was also a cultural struggle of liberal metropolitan elites versus the socially conservative classes of suburban and rural Australia. To the elites, Abbott was unpopular because he represented resistance to their cultural dominance of both political parties and thus of Australian life as a whole. His skepticism about climate change (he believes that its extent, and thus the policies needed to deal with it, are as yet unclear), his pro-life convictions, his firm opposition to illegal immigration, even his colloquial outspokenness -- these all marked him out as culturally unacceptable in the leafier parts of Sydney and Melbourne. You catch the tone of this in Germaine Greer’s post-election lament: “In any grown-up country . . . Tony Abbott would have been unelectable. He looks and sounds like a clown.”

But the volunteer fireman and lifeguard looked like a good bloke to most Australian voters, even some who voted against him.

Abbott is a blend of three things: an authentic, honest, and unapologetic conservative; a tough, self-disciplined, pragmatic politician who worked out a clear message and put it across vigorously; and a pleasant, affable, good-natured man. Think of him as a blend of John Howard and Ronald Reagan. Indeed, one columnist described him in a sentence that could have been (and probably was) written about Reagan: “Even people who hate Tony Abbott like him.” All three parts of his personality helped him to victory. His firmness of personal (especially religious) conviction made him appealing to those who disliked the “spin-doctor” poll-tested insincerities of recent Australian (and American . . . and British . . .) politics. His self-discipline meant that he concentrated not on winning every argument across the board but on honing a clear message on the issues of greatest importance to the voters. And his affability meant that the voters listened, liked him, and saw him as someone like themselves. In the debates he was often addressed by the voters as “Tony.”

Whoever emerges from the present confusion as prime minister, Abbott is in the stronger position. If he gets power, he will benefit from its famous “Royal Jelly” effect: Because he is prime minister, he will look like a prime minister and shed what remains of his “larrikin” image. If he remains out of power, he will look like the strong leader of a united opposition facing a defeated and illegitimate government resting on the shakiest of majorities. In either event he will join Stephen Harper of Canada and David Cameron of Britain as a major figure on the international center-right.

Indeed, he will be a persuasive alternative to the latter. Cameron lost an election he should have won; Abbott looks like winning an election he should have lost in a landslide. And he did it without apologizing for being a conservative.

— John O’Sullivan is an editor-at-large of National Review.

John O'Sullivan

The experts consider a novel proposal.

Last week on National Review Online, Newt Gingrich and Ken Hagerty proposed a free-market strategy to “subvert global terror by providing hope and opportunity in the Third World.” Could “Free Cities,” which take their inspiration from Hong Kong’s success, provide a market-friendly alternative to foreign aid as it is presently handled? And could they make a difference in the war on terror?


J. D. FOSTER
Freedom works: There’s probably no more powerful sentence in all of public policy. Freedom works to expand the scope of human activity, to allow people to explore their own talents, strengths, interests, and humanity. Not incidentally, freedom also works to build economic prosperity. Former House majority leader Dick Armey was certainly on to something when he named his new organization “FreedomWorks.”

#ad#So it should surprise no one that Armey’s revolutionary brother-in-arms, former House speaker Newt Gingrich, has come up witha new way to make freedom work around the world. He observes that freedom works very well for Hong Kong, which, despite its proximity to the Communist Chinese colossus, has used its treaty-ensured freedoms to become a remarkable economic and political success story. Gingrich’s notion is a simple one: If it worked for Hong Kong, it can work elsewhere.

Government-to-government aid cannot defeat the terrorists or even materially improve the quality of life of those trapped in poverty abroad; but what Gingrich calls “Free Cities” could do both. Updating Jack Kemp’s venerable idea of enterprise zones, he proposes that the U.S. negotiate bilateral treaties with receptive foreign governments to create designated pockets of political and economic freedom. Within these pockets, U.S.-style laws establishing economic and political freedom would be guaranteed for 50 years. The U.S. would teach and advise on how these systems work, and direct foreign aid toward these Free Cities. In turn, these cities’ more fertile environments and comparative advantages would lure foreign capital. The net result: pockets of prosperity based on economic freedom.

Free Cities would provide examples across the globe of the power of free peoples to prosper themselves and their communities. There is no better way, perhaps no other way at all, to defeat terrorism and government repression than with a plethora of examples of hope and freedom. Freedom works abroad, too.

-- J. D. Foster is Norman B. Ture Senior Fellow in the economics of fiscal policy at the Heritage Foundation.


VICTOR DAVIS HANSON
The Free Cities idea is intriguing, as long as we recognize that today’s “free cities” are free-market, capitalist places such as Singapore, Hong Kong, or even some of the Gulf-sheikhdom urban centers, which are run largely on authoritarian principles, albeit not murderous ones of the sort we see in Africa and parts of South America and Asia.

But creating enclaves of free-market economics and constitutionally protected freedoms as atolls in surrounding seas of statism and autocracy, it seems to me, would entail some sort of transnational IRS/Amnesty International in order to ensure the compliance of what I’m assuming are not otherwise liberal societies.

And given that the U.S. is awash in debt, seemingly tired after two wars, and now more protectionist than free-trade in spirit, I wonder how willing U.S. private and public interests will be to invest time, capital, and labor in creating mirror images of America in places that otherwise have had very different cultural paradigms (e.g., a free Benghazi or Tirana).

I understand the ink-blot theory -- that once these entrepreneurial zones get going, they will swell and others will emulate them -- but in all candor I am not sure the U.S. has the will, resources, or skill, whether privately or publicly, to take something like this on.

If large swaths of Detroit are turning into urban prairieland as Stockton becomes a sea of foreclosures and New York capitalists face the prospect of 65 percent aggregate income, FICA, state, local, and capital-gains taxes (in addition to rising sales, property, and inheritance taxes), we might first try the idea here at home. How about a free New York, or a free Oakland?

-- Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, the editor of Makers of Ancient Strategy: From the Persian Wars to the Fall of Rome, and the author of The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern.

#page#
YEUNG WAI HONG
It is a noble idea to plant the seed of freedom around the world, and I support it wholeheartedly. There is just one problem: Which country would willingly give 400 square miles of its land (about the geographical area of Hong Kong) to the U.S. to carry out this great experiment? Hong Kong came into existence as a result of two wars and three treaties. In 1984, Communist China acceded to the “one country, two systems” proposal of allowing Hong Kong to carry on with its colonial ways for 50 years (to the year 2047), as its own economy was in shambles. Had China been the economic powerhouse then that it is today, it is rather doubtful that it would have so readily acknowledged the inferiority of its socialist system.

#ad#Intriguingly, around the time when Hong Kong’s “one country, two systems” model was being formulated, Communist China invited the government of Singapore to carry out an experiment in Suzhou, a city near Shanghai. They were asked to develop the Suzhou Industrial Park in Singapore’s own image. This experiment failed, and the industrial park was unceremoniously given back to the Chinese, who then turned it around and developed it into one great success story.

A stone’s throw from Hong Kong is the place that comes closest to Gingrich’s idea of a free enclave -- Macau. The Chinese ceded it to Portugal some 400 years ago, not as a commercial entrepôtlike Hong Kong but as an enclave for Catholic missionaries. This was not a viable economic option, and in time, Macau got into the casino business. It has overtaken Las Vegas as the largest casino hub in the world, as it is the only place on Chinese soil where gambling is legal. As a booming economic behemoth with a legal framework that is still in a very early stage of development, Macau clearly serves a useful function for those officials who have to find a way to account for their unaccountable wealth. So, yes, we have a real-world case. But is Macau really an example of what we should aspire to?

In short, I am all for the idea of free enclaves if we can get over two little hurdles: overcoming the nationalistic pride of the host country, and making the enclave useful to the host country and to the world at large.

-- Yeung Wai Hong is publisher of the Chinese-language Next Magazine in Hong Kong.


ARNOLD KLING
This seems to be the “Charter Cities”concept advocated by economist and entrepreneur Paul Romer, the big challenge of which is negotiating with the foreign government and convincing it effectively to give up sovereignty over part of its territory. Trying to persuade foreign leaders of the benefits of having a city under American-style law might be like trying to persuade Americans of the benefits of having a city under sharia law.

The economic thinking behind this idea is sound. The big need in underdeveloped countries is not material assistance so much as better social rules and less predatory government. The difficulty will be to get the political leadership of a country to see this as an opportunity rather than a threat.

-- Arnold Kling is an adjunct scholar with the Cato Institute and a member of the Financial Markets Working Group of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. He is the author of Unchecked and Unbalanced: How the Discrepancy Between Knowledge and Power Caused the Financial Crisis and Threatens Democracy.

#page#
CHRISTOPHER PREBLE
Newt Gingrich and Ken Hagerty’s proposal to use private enterprise to elevate the less fortunate is neither novel nor objectionable. I question the wisdom of relying on a series of bilateral treaties to implement it, but their idea is otherwise consistent with the core conservative principles of individual responsibility and free markets. It should be commended on those grounds.

Where they err is in repeating the preposterous claim that terrorism flows from poverty, corruption, and despair. Free Cities would have little impact on whether future acts of terrorism are directed against Americans.

#ad#Of course, Gingrich and Hagerty are not alone in perpetuating this fallacy. President Obama argues that “extremely poor societies and weak states provide optimal breeding grounds for disease, terrorism and conflict,” and he proposes nation building as the cure. Though they favor a more market-based approach, the Gingrich-Hagerty proposal espouses the same flawed theories about what causes terrorism.

It is unfortunate that they feel the need to play this card. Academic research has disproved the poverty-terror link; so can simple observation. Some of the most notorious terrorists have been relatively well-to-do and better educated than their peers. Others have come from poor places (or were born to parents who did) but became radicalized in healthy and wealthy states, including Germany, the U.K., and the United States. In short, the poverty/poor-governance explanation for terrorism is bunk.

Gingrich and Hagerty play into this misconception by promoting their proposal as a weapon in the fight against al-Qaeda. They needn’t. Make the case for private-property rights and entrepreneurship. Continue to push foreign governments to relax restrictions on business. Shine a light on corruption. Persuade the public and policymakers that confiscatory taxation and burdensome regulations discourage private investment. Just don’t confuse these efforts with counterterrorism policy.

-- Christopher Preble is the director of foreign-policy studies at the Cato Institute and the co-editor, with Jim Harper and Benjamin Friedman, of Terrorizing Ourselves: Why Counterterrorism Policy Is Failing and How to Fix It.


MARK SIMON
When the Brits left Hong Kong, they left a low-tax, free-market, and modern port city with a just legal system that protected individual rights. They also left a few hundred million bucks in the bank. Not a bad legacy for colonial masters.

But these colonial masters also assembled one of the largest police forces relative to civilian population in the 20th century -- a force aimed squarely inward to control the various uprisings that could have torn Hong Kong apart.

Assembling like-minded people in a single geographic area under a benevolent master may sound good. In 2003, the Marines’ cutting off the southern tip of Iraq and creating a new Hong Kong might have worked.But it would have been Marines, not a common set of ideas (which may or may not exist in a city populated by refugees), holding such a “free city” together and keeping it protected.

Also, the intentions and abilities of the people controlling those Marines would certainly be open to question. America is a just and kind nation, but let’s not fool ourselves about what it would take to rule, protect, and not exploit a foreign city under our hand. “Free” may not be the operative word in this plan.

-- Mark Simon is commercial director of Next Media in Hong Kong.


SAMUEL R. STALEY
The Free Cities concept is a bold, outside-the-box idea that should not be dismissed. The world economy is quickly moving from one where economic power was organized around national economies to one where economic power is created and organized around large, productive, wealth-producing cities. So, in terms of putting a finger on the source of growth and development, the Free Cities idea is spot on.

Second, Hong Kong and China’s “one country, two systems” concept is the right model. Hong Kong has many lessons to teach the West about wealth creation, and Gingrich’s concept of Free Cities updates the conceptual framework in which to think about how free economies can work in less-free political systems.

Third, while the concept seems like a stretch, there are historical precedents. The economic city-states of northern Europe that established the Hanseatic League (13th–17th centuries) created a fundamental foundation for the Industrial Revolution by promoting free trade and stable legal systems through inter-city alliances, agreements, and treaties. Similarly, the Italian city-states of the Renaissance (Florence, Milan, Venice, etc.) pulled southern Europe out of its economic malaise by nurturing their urban economies and bringing the rest of the nation with them.

In short, this is a bold idea worth taking to another level.

-- Samuel R. Staley is Robert W. Galvin Fellow and director of urban and land-use policy at the Reason Foundation.

NRO Symposium

The U.S. is in deep but not irreversible trouble.

For decades, I have been a militant anti-declinist in terms of America’s place in the world. The United States is a proud, determined, hard-working, talented, patriotic nation and people, and it is not over-extended in the manner of empires of the past that took over the lands of others and eventually collapsed under the weight of the over-ambitious hegemon. Thus came the twilight of all previous empires, from the Persian to the Russian, including several versions of the Chinese, and even the astounding nautical and commercial empire of Holland, built on the acumen and enterprise in the 17th century of scarcely a million avaricious and seafaring Dutch.

But the United States merely uprooted the native Americans (to make way for imported slaves, initially) and then swamped, thinned, or drove them into Canada before the riptide of settlers moving west. It had no interest in hanging on to Cuba, unfortunately for the Cubans, or the Philippines; President Cleveland was opposed even to accepting Hawaii as a territory; and the acquisition of Alaska by Pres. Andrew Johnson was seen as a “folly” for decades. There is no immutable or irresistible force of history ringing down the curtain on America. Yet the country is in decline. It is not logical and is certainly not irreversible, but that is not entirely relevant, because it is happening anyway.

#ad#The half-century from 1939 to 1989 was a golden American strategic age, though the execution deteriorated after the early Sixties. The defeat of the Nazis and Japanese imperialists -- with the Russians taking most of the casualties; Germany, France, Italy, and Japan joining the West as flourishing democratic allies; and the Soviets being compensated with rather second-rate and restive strategic acquests -- was followed by the containment of Communism, which caused the Soviet Union to implode and encouraged China to become a teeming hive of state capitalism, with no fire exchanged between the major protagonists.

As this was happening, the seeds of future problems were being scattered. The U.S. — dragging, by its magnetic influence, the whole Western world behind it -- became a service economy, where comparatively little that was useful was actually produced or done, and a trillion dollars was spent annually in legal fees. Millions of unskilled laborers were allowed to enter the country illegally as millions of low-skilled jobs were outsourced. Trillions were borrowed from China and Japan to buy cheap manufactures from China, luxury goods from Japan and Western Europe, and oil at ever-rising prices and in steadily larger quantities, much of it from the chief sponsors of terrorism. Respected Federal Reserve chairmen and Treasury secretaries put the U.S economy into a power dive, as the annual current-account deficit topped $800 billion, the oil price bracketed $100, gold (the canary in the mineshaft) shot over $1,000, and, in pursuit of increased family homeownership, interest rates were brought and held down, saving eliminated, and trillions of dollars of worthless mortgage-related debt were issued, rated as investment grade, and peddled all over the world in an orgiastic St. Vitus’s Dance.

The great U.S. economy, a stupefying engine of productivity and applied talent, became a mighty Ponzi scheme, as the whole nation, addicted to debt-paid instant gratification, spent the future on consumption and non-durable assets. Except for a few academic flakes, no one -- business, government, academia, the financial press -- saw what was coming. And so there is no obvious body of vindicated opinion to take over now; it is a terrible and vacuous crisis of leadership. And courage fled, arm-in-arm, with official judgment. The Congress and successive administrations ignored illegal immigration until border-state frictions made it an explosive issue, and have failed to address it seriously since. They ignored abortion, leaving it to the ill-qualified bench to determine when the unborn attain the rights of a person. They ignored income disparity, until the recession stared to shrink the disparity by reducing everyone’s net worth, and they ignore the debt bomb. Annual increases of $750 billion to $1.4 trillion in the money supply stretching forward a decade will destroy the currency and Weimarize America, and there is not a hint of an official preventive response. The Keynesian injection of spending has been shot, in a hare-brained stimulus package designed by cynical Democratic congressional-committee chairmen. The recession is still here, and most tax increases and spending reductions are hazardous to economic growth. No one leads and no one knows.

#page#

The bizarreries of modern American foreign policy began when the Kennedy-Johnson Democrats plunged into Vietnam, mismanaged the war, and insisted on inflicting a crushing defeat on America after Richard Nixon had brought a durable non-Communist South Vietnam within reach; and then, for good measure, they crucified Richard Nixon, the most successful president between Roosevelt and Reagan. Johnson allowed the USSR to pull even with the U.S. in nuclear arsenals, on the theory that this would facilitate serious arms-control discussions. It didn’t. Nixon revived American superiority through technological advances, called “nuclear sufficiency,” and arms control did make unprecedented progress at SALT 1. President Carter generously threw out America’s greatest ally in the Middle East, the Shah of Iran, “like a dead mouse,” in the words of his national-security adviser, and acknowledged that he had “learned a lot about” the Kremlin from Russia’s invasion of Afghanistan. Having secured the grudging agreement of the Western Europeans to deployment of the neutron warhead, he then unilaterally declined to deploy it, which doubtless told the Kremlin (and our NATO allies) a lot about Jimmy Carter too.

#ad#Ronald Reagan produced the golden Indian summer of American grand strategy. His brilliant poker playing bankrupted the USSR with the non-nuclear SDI missile-defense concept, which was ridiculed on the U.S. center-left as an unworkable boondoggle (which was irrelevant since he didn’t actually try to build it) and abhorrent to most of America’s so-called allies, who wished the tightest possible strategic balance between the U.S. and the USSR to confer on themselves the maximum influence for the least effort. President Bush Sr. rightly and very effectively ejected Saddam Hussein from Kuwait, but left him in place in Baghdad. And President Clinton imposed irritating but ineffectual embargoes on India and Pakistan because they had the temerity to develop nuclear weapons. George W. Bush had perfectly adequate international-law arguments to dispose of Saddam Hussein and did the world a favor by doing so, but his attempt at nation-building mired almost all of America’s ground-forces military capability in Iraq for most of his term and hundreds of billions of dollars were wasted by the blundering of the Pentagon and the tinkerers sent to remake an ancient land.

President Obama has completely fumbled the discouragement of Iran’s nuclear program, while the U.S. beseeches the assistance of the Russians and Chinese in the imposition of porous sanctions on Iran. China operates North Korea like a mischievous robot bedeviling the world (to the assumed amusement of the ghost of Douglas MacArthur), and the U.S is on both sides of the War on Terror, assisting the Saudis (who finance jihadism) and the Pakistanis (who maintain terrorist factions in Afghanistan). Iraq, the war Obama opposed and Senate majority leader Harry Reid declared to be lost three years ago, is now pronounced a success by Vice President Biden, whose endorsement is the most worrisome danger signal around, as he is always mistaken. (Remember, he plagiarized from one of the most unsuccessful political leaders in modern British history, Neil Kinnock, the blood-curdling plaint that he was “the first Biden in a thousand generations to go to a university.”) George W.’s war is more or less working now, after lasting longer than America’s participation in the two World Wars combined, and Obama’s (Afghanistan) isn’t. The factions and allies are running for cover because the president said we would be out next year. It is now a mess of eels associated with more or less amenable members of the Taliban, not a united anti-Taliban front. The president said, “Words must mean something,” in Prague, on the subject of arms control, but his never do. (And arms control is about to degenerate into universal nuclear military capacity if Iran can deliver a nuclear warhead.)

What is needed is a colossal reorientation of the country away from consumption and toward investment, the cleaning out of the morass of the plea-bargain justice system and attendant vacuum cleaners of the legal and prison industries (and the gigantic fraud of the War on Drugs), drastic education reform, genuine health-care reform, a redefinition of U.S. national interests in the world to what is essential and defensible, and then restructured alliances to reflect shared interests. Until those issues are addressed, all talk of the American superpower is rubbish. Obama’s is the fourth consecutive failed administration, and each succeeding one will make the festering problems more dangerous and difficult. As the problem is misdirection, not internal degeneracy or imperial overreach, it is a decline that will end in recovery, not a fall. It is like a non-terminal illness: America awaits a correct diagnosis, a curative plan, and a competent professional to supervise the recovery. The patient knows there is a problem and wants the cure. To paraphrase FDR, all that is missing is Dr. Comeback.

— Conrad Black is the author of Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom and Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full. He can be reached at cbletters@gmail.com.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This article has been amended since its initial posting.

Conrad Black

Our monetary PhDs need to get on the same page about policy.

The Federal Reserve is increasingly becoming a costly source of uncertainty for an economy that already has more than enough to worry about. Things get worse every time the Fed opens its collective mouth. That might be why there’s a new seasonal influence in stock prices: Now when the FOMC meets, stocks go into a big correction. (See chart.)

Chairman Ben Bernanke correctly admits that economic prospects are “unusually uncertain.” It has been a year since the U.S. economy bottomed. By this point in every other post-war recovery, real GDP has rebounded to a new all-time high, with the strongest rebounds following the deepest recessions. But not this time: We’ve now experienced both the deepest recession and the weakest recovery in the post-war period.

#ad#Meanwhile, the Fed has ventured into terra incognita. The Fed now operates a near $2.4 trillion balance sheet, holding the toxic assets of AIG and Bear Stearns and about 20 percent of the agency mortgage pass-through market -- essentially all of this funded with borrowed money. It’s the biggest leveraged hedge fund in history, and it’s being run by a committee of economics professors.

Of the five Fed governors and twelve regional Fed presidents, eleven have PhDs in economics, and nine have taught economics at the college level. If economics is a science, you’d hope all these scientists could agree on the facts, agree on how to proceed, and explain their conclusions clearly to the rest of us. But this is hardly the case. Instead, their bickering and inability to speak with shared conviction is eroding confidence.

Consider the Fed’s core strategy since it lowered the fed funds rate to near-zero in December 2008. Back then, the FOMC announced that the rock-bottom rate would be maintained “for some time,” and it repeated this promise at its next meeting. After that, the language was adjusted to “for an extended period,” where it has held through this month’s meeting.

And why was this language employed? To reduce uncertainty. Bernanke, who got his doctorate at MIT and once chaired the economics department at Princeton, explained it in a November 2002 speech: By assuring the bond market that the funds rate will not unexpectedly be hiked, yields farther out on the Treasury yield curve will come down since long-term yields are, in large part, the sum of expected short-term yields. So certainty and predictability are at the core of this scheme, enabling the Fed to fight deflation by lowering long-term rates even when the short-term rate is stuck at zero.

So now, with the economy weakening, Bernanke wants to strengthen the “extended period” language -- and up the ante in the battle against uncertainty -- by guaranteeing the “extended period” will last for, say, one year at least. In Senate testimony several weeks ago, this was first among equals on Bernanke’s list of remedies for a faltering economy.

But here’s the problem: Bernanke’s strategy for creating certainty is itself being subjected to uncertainty.

Enter St. Louis Fed president James Bullard, who received a doctorate from Indiana University and taught at Washington University. In a paper released days before the August FOMC meeting, Bullard called the ongoing zero-interest-rate policy a “peril.” In doing so, he argued that a similar Bank of Japan policy was responsible for that country’s lost decade of deflation.

#page#So now we have one economics professor saying an “extended period” of low interest rates is the cure for deflation, while another says the same policy causes deflation.

Who’s right? Well, Bullard’s case is intriguing as an abstraction, but in the real world where the Fed must operate it’s a distraction. When the funds rate was first lowered to zero in December 2008, annual CPI inflation had fallen to exactly zero. It would then go negative -- that is, into deflation -- for several months. Yet now, after 18 months of a zero funds rate, inflation has risen to 1.3 percent. So if a zero funds rate causes deflation, it’s not in the data.

#ad#Nevertheless, Bullard’s theorizing adds critical mass to the views of Thomas Hoenig, president of the Kansas City Fed. Hoenig, who got his PhD at Iowa State and taught at the University of Missouri, has dissented at every FOMC meeting this year, objecting to the “extended period” language. He argues that the promise of a near-zero funds rate will lead to credit distortions such as those that caused the housing bubble.

So here we go again: One PhD claims that assuring the markets of a continued low funds rate will reduce uncertainty and lower long-term rates; another says this policy will cause a credit bubble.

And who’s right? Between 2002 and 2005, the funds rate was demonstrably too low versus the simple “Taylor Rules” that benchmark the funds rate to inflation and growth. So serious market distortions followed, a connection that Hoenig gets right. But today, such rules unambiguously say interest rates should be below zero. So while Hoenig is brave to question the Fed’s past errors and warn against excessive intervention, it is higher rates, not low ones, that would presumably cause the distortions he fears.

Debate about monetary policy is healthy, but this is no time for the Fed to act like a coffee klatch in the faculty lounge. The arguments need to be resolved -- correctly, one hopes -- since resolution would be an end in itself. It’s the lack of resolution -- indeed, the apparent impossibility of reconciling the opposing absolutes offered by seeming experts -- that explains why the stock market swoons after every FOMC meeting.

All this suggests a radically simple solution: a policy time-out for one year. In other words, the Fed should commit to leaving the near-zero funds rate and its large balance sheet just as they are. If there’s some kind of dire economic emergency, the Fed can respond. And if the PhDs want to debate, they can hold “office hours,” just like in college.

Businesses, investors, and households already face crippling uncertainty about future tax rates and regulations. Wouldn’t it help if, for just one blessed year, they could at least be certain about the Fed?

-- Donald Luskin is chief investment officer of Trend Macrolytics LLC, an independent economics and investment-research firm. He invites you to visit his blog and welcomes your comments at don@trendmacro.com.

Donald Luskin

The media’s biased coverage of the Ground Zero mosque leaders.

Wow! The Washington Post has identified “rabble-rousing outsiders!” I don’t think I’ve heard language like that since Southern segregationists complained about young civil-rights activists descending on Mississippi. So who are these interlopers stirring up the unwashed masses? No need to guess: It’s anyone who dares criticize plans for an Islamic center near Ground Zero in Manhattan. According to Jason Horowitz, the author of a story on the front page of the Post’s Style section, New Yorkers take a “dim view” of them.

Mr. Horowitz informs us that the planned Islamic center has become “the prime target of national conservatives who, after years of disparaging New York as a hotbed of liberal activity, are defending New York against a mosque that will rise two city blocks from Ground Zero.”

The hypocrisy! Have they no shame?

Mr. Horowitz was no doubt so busy reporting this big story that he missed the bulletins about Senate majority leader Harry Reid and former Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean -- no nasty national conservatives, they -- also opposing the Ground Zero Islamic project.

However, Mr. Horowitz did score an interview with Ali Mohammed, who sells “falafel over rice” in the besieged neighborhood and who has “reached his saturation point.” Opponents of the project, he says, “got nothing to do with New York and they don’t care about New York. They are trying to create propaganda.”

Yes, of course, this is a New York thing. Foreigners wouldn’t understand. The terrorists who brought down the Twin Towers had a bone to pick with the Big Apple. That explains why Mr. Horowitz doesn’t ask Mr. Mohammed who he thinks attacked us on 9/11, or what their ideology and goals were. Indeed, there is not a single sentence in his article relating to such matters.

Besides, New York City’s “entire political establishment” thinks the Islamic center is a dandy idea. And when a political establishment speaks, who has the right to question them? Certainly not politicians and reporters and bloggers from outside the five boroughs! The nerve of some people!

Mr. Horowitz also interviews Oz Sultan, a spokesman for the project, who sings from the same hymnal: “The people behind this [Islamic center] are New Yorkers. These are local yokels.”

How does that square with Mr. Sultan’s refusal to rule out the possibility that funds for this $100 million project may be raised in Saudi Arabia and Iran? Inquiring minds may want to know; Mr. Horowitz does not even ask.

Instead, he makes clear whom he does not view as local yokels or even real New Yorkers: “the city’s tabloids,” whose reporters and editors “know they have a good thing going” -- in stark contrast to Mr. Horowitz and the prestige media, which cover stories like this strictly from a sense of civic obligation.

#page#
If this piece were exceptional, it would be unfair of me to give it such a tongue-lashing. But, as I’ve argued before, it’s part of a pattern, a trend -- one that, despite criticism, continues to strengthen. A companion piece in the Post exclaims that the Islamic center will contain “a Sept. 11 memorial [!],” but never bothers to question what that memorial might say about the 9/11 attacks. Will they be described as an atrocity or merely a tragedy? Who will the memorial say was responsible, and on behalf of what belief system were they acting?

Similarly, a Washington Post interview with Daisy Khan, the wife of Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, the key organizer of the project, is headlined: “When Will Muslims Be Accepted?” Ms. Khan tells the veteran journalist Sally Quinn: “The Republicans are really going after us.”

Quinn responds by asking Daisy Khan#...#nothing. Nothing about the project’s funding; nothing about the imam’s past statements regarding 9/11 (American policies were an “accessory”), Osama bin Laden (“made in America”), Hamas (the imam would prefer not to characterize the group), or terrorism (“complex”) -- nothing. It’s as though Daisy Khan has purchased an advertisement.

Another interview with Ms. Khan, this one by Tamer El-Ghobashy in the Wall Street Journal, also consisted of one softball question after another. For example:

How did you react to the Anti-Defamation League registering their opposition to the location of the center?

What are the features of the planned center that people may not have heard about?

What element of the fallout from this proposed center concerns you most?

A New York Times piece on the controversy similarly avoids any uncomfortable questions. Its reading of recent history: “On top of the fear and confusion in New York about Islam after 9/11, a movement had begun to spring up against Muslims seeking a larger role in American public life.” What movement would that be? Who leads it? Where do they meet? Shouldn’t the Times -- the Times! -- include some attempt to substantiate the announcement of the birth of such a terrible “movement”?

Last week, I was a guest on To the Point, a radio show broadcast on public stations around the country and moderated by Warren Olney, whom I consider both professional and fair. But, to my chagrin, he asked not a single question about Imam Rauf’s beliefs, and when I tried to quote the cleric he cut me off, saying that was a distraction from the real issue. Which is what? Warren later told me he thinks it’s “America’s tradition of religious freedom.” But I -- and most critics of this project -- have never argued that Imam Rauf doesn’t have a First Amendment right to build a mosque anywhere he owns property. I’ve argued that he should not be above scrutiny.

To some, that makes me an Islamophobe; and according to Time magazine, I have plenty of company. A cover story titled “Is America Islamophobic?” asserts that “many opponents” of the Islamic center “are motivated by deep-seated Islamophobia.” Not a shred of evidence is offered, though Time does cite a poll that finds 46 percent of Americans believe Islam is more likely than other faiths to encourage violence against nonbelievers.

Goodness, why would anyone think that? Could it have something to do with the fact that there have been close to 16,000 terrorist attacks carried out in the name of Islam since 9/11? Just last month, Time had on its cover the photograph of an 18-year-old Afghan girl whose nose and ears were sliced off by members of the Taliban because she had violated Islamic religious law as they interpret it by “running away from her husband’s house.” The word “Taliban” means “the students.” Students of what? Engineering? Dentistry? No. Of Islam.

#page#
Let’s say it one more time loudly for the media moguls in the cheap seats: Most Muslims are not terrorists. But in the 21st century, most of those slaughtering women and children in the name of religion are Muslims. This is a movement. This is a reality. And it is a problem. It ought to be seen by Muslims as very much their problem -- a pathology within their community, within the “Muslim world,” within the ummah.

Instead, the richest and most powerful Islamic organizations -- often financed by oil money from the Middle East -- incessantly play the victim card. Daisy Khan tells ABC’s Christiane Amanpour that in America, it’s “beyond Islamophobia. It’s hate of Muslims.”

Time encourages this grievance mentality (or tactic) by asserting that “to be a Muslim in America now is to endure slings and arrows against your faith -- not just in the schoolyard and the office but also outside your place of worship and in the public square, where some of the country’s most powerful mainstream religious and political leaders unthinkingly (or worse, deliberately) conflate Islam with terrorism and savagery.”

No, they don’t. What they conflate with terrorism and savagery are al-Qaeda, the Taliban, Hezbollah, Hamas, Lashkar-e-Taiba, al-Shabaab, Abu Sayyef, Fatah Al-Islam, the Muslim Brotherhood, and dozens of other groups that justify their terrorism and savagery based on their interpretation of Islamic doctrine.

Many of the country’s religious and political leaders would like to hear more of their Muslim neighbors say plainly: “Not in my name! Not in the name of my religion!” They are distressed when they learn -- not through the mainstream media -- that Imam Rauf has said instead: “The United States has more Muslim blood on its hands than al-Qaeda.”

He said that some time ago, when he was still answering questions from the media. In recent weeks, as a national controversy has swirled around the biggest project in which he has ever been involved, he has been ”unavailable.” Time does not criticize him for stonewalling as they would criticize any non-Muslim who declined comment for a cover story. Instead, Time excuses him, saying he seems to have been “stunned into paralysis” by the unfairness of it all.

Is this moral posturing or cowardice or self-delusion or the byproduct of the multicultural ideological mush that so much of the media has been both eating and dishing out? Whatever the cause, they really have gone mad. Small wonder that the rabble is becoming roused -- with or without the help of those pesky outsiders.

-- Clifford D. May is president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a policy institute focusing on terrorism and Islamism.

 

 

Clifford D. May

Look at the books.

The economy has not been cooperating with the Democrats’ “recovery summer”: Unemployment remains stubbornly high; new and existing home sales indicate that housing prices have still farther to fall from their pre-bubble highs; the Dow is struggling to stay above 10,000; and a host of other economic indicators point toward continued weak growth, if not an outright double-dip. Searching for bright spots, the Obama administration has seized upon the resurgent U.S. auto industry, and specifically on the bailed-out GM -- which has posted its first profitable quarters since 2004 and looks set to relaunch itself as a public company this fall, just in time for the elections.

But if we have learned anything from the stimulus, it is that a few quarters of success attributable to government policy do not mean that the policy was successful. Home sales took off last April as the expiration of the New Homebuyers Tax Credit neared, only to plummet this summer when it became clear that the policy had merely pulled demand forward instead of stimulating new demand. The same thing happened with Cash for Clunkers, to a lesser extent: A brief bump in sales of cars and light trucks was followed by a steep drop. Sales have since gone up slightly, but the latest forecasts predict weaker demand for autos to go with weaker demand for housing and continuing high unemployment.

#ad#That’s a problem for GM: As part of its government-financed bankruptcy, it has indeed done an admirable job of cutting costs, and this is the primary reason the company is back in the black. Can it stay that way in an environment of falling sales and declining market share? Then there are GM’s pension obligations. In the Financial Times, Tony Jackson recently pointed out that the company is forecasting returns on its pension investments of around 8.5 percent a year. That’s pretty optimistic in the current environment of wildly fluctuating stocks and low interest rates on fixed-income securities. Jackson thinks a more realistic calculation would leave GM’s pension with an annual shortfall of around $7 billion, which might dampen investors’ appetite when the company’s IPO rolls around.

The success of that IPO is crucial to determining whether the bailout of GM can be said to have succeeded (which is a separate question from whether the government was right to bail out the company at all). Much of the taxpayers’ “investment” in GM is held in the form of preferred stock. According to the government’s own estimates, GM’s market capitalization would have to reach $67 billion for taxpayers to break even. At its peak, in 2000, GM’s market cap was $57 billion. One GAO report concluded that “Treasury’s own analysis suggests that the circumstances necessary for the companies to reach market capitalizations high enough for Treasury to fully recover its equity investments are unlikely.”

Amid misleading claims that GM has paid back all of its bailout money, it is important to keep in mind just how much government support the automakers received: Out of $50.7 billion in loans to GM, only $7 billion, or 13.8 percent, has been repaid. (If you believed GM’s claim that it paid back its loans to the government in full, with interest and ahead of schedule, can you loan me some money?) Chrysler got $10.7 billion, of which it has repaid $2 billion. And let’s not forget about GMAC (now Ally Bank), GM’s financing arm, which received $16.2 billion and has yet to repay any of it. GM rid itself of GMAC’s problems by spinning it off shortly before declaring bankruptcy, but the money loaned to GMAC should count toward GM’s bailout: If it hadn’t been necessary to keep financing available to GM customers, GMAC probably would have been allowed to fail.

The bottom line is that GM and Chrysler still owe the government a great deal of money, and it is far from clear that they will be able to repay it all. As long as the prospect of large losses for taxpayers loom in the distance, it is impossible to say that the jobs saved didn’t come at the expense of other jobs. Even if all the money is paid back, it is hard to predict what consequences will follow from such an unprecedented bailout. The automakers have had a good couple of quarters; if the Democrats are lucky, they’ll have a couple more. But we are a long way from being able to say that the bailout “worked,” much less that we wouldn’t have been better off letting GM and Chrysler reorganize in bankruptcy without our help.

-- Stephen Spruiell is an NRO staff reporter.

editor’s note: This article has been amended since its original posting.

Stephen Spruiell

Wars launched in past Augusts show the importance of military readiness.

Historian Barbara Tuchman characterized the events leading up to World War I as The Guns of August.

While there is no statistical evidence that wars break out any more often in late summer than in other seasons, the world was torn apart at that time of year twice during the 20th century: in early August 1914, and then again on Sept. 1, 1939, when Nazi Germany invaded Poland. Maybe it is the effects of the heat, or the sense of urgency to do something before the cold of winter; but nonetheless, we’ve also seen a lot of late-summer violence the last few decades.

#ad#Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait on Aug. 2, 1990, leading to an American-led air campaign and ground war in early 1991 that demolished the Iraqi army. On Sept. 11, 2001, 19 radical Islamic terrorists took down the World Trade Center complex and hit the Pentagon -- the worst foreign attacks on the continental United States since the British burned much of Washington, D.C., in 1814.

What can we learn from these dog-day cataclysms?

First, for all the rising prewar tensions, the general slaughter to follow was mostly unforeseen. Experts thought August 1914 would lead only to a war “over by Christmas” -- not 500 miles of trenches from the North Sea to Switzerland, and 8 million combat dead by 1918. Even after Hitler invaded Poland in a lightning strike, no one dreamed that more than 50 million deaths would follow.

Second, these late-summer bloodbaths usually followed from the initial impression of aggressors that they would face few consequences. After the Munich Agreement, Hitler had no reason to believe that gobbling up Poland would lead to a world war rather than more of the same appeasement. Saddam Hussein had no idea that the United States would react to a far-away border dispute by mobilizing a global coalition against him, and by bombing large swaths of Baghdad. Likewise, few imagined that nine years after 9/11, American troops would still be fighting in Afghanistan to keep the Taliban -- the former hosts of Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda -- from returning to power.

In short, grand professions of peaceful intent in the face of global tensions, or even noble indifference to dictatorial aggression, ensure that war follows.

Finally, in the ensuing wars the United States lost thousands of soldiers when it was not well prepared -- and far fewer when it was. There was almost no American military in 1914 and little more when we declared war on Germany and Austria-Hungary in 1917.

America was once again woefully unarmed in 1939, when Germany started the European war, and not in much better shape when attacked by the Japanese in December 1941. As a result, in both of its victorious world wars the United States lost tens of thousands of troops.

A fully armed and mobilized volunteer American military forced Iraqi forces out of Kuwait with relatively few losses. And even in the long current slogs in Iraq and Afghanistan, for all the heartbreak of their terrible human costs, fewer American soldiers have died than in single past battles like the Meuse-Argonne or Iwo Jima. In short, America never went to war regretting that it was overarmed and overprepared.

We should keep such bothersome late-summer history in mind this August. The world is once again heating up with the weather. Iran boasts of its new nuclear reactor -- with more to come. A nuclear North Korea keeps threatening South Korea. Hezbollah and Syria are arming to the teeth with new missiles. And an assurgent Turkey is seeking an updated version of its Ottoman imperial past. Meanwhile, the United States has unsuccessfully reached out to firebrand leaders such as Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez, and Syria’s Bashar Assad, while drifting away from its Indian, Israeli, and European allies.

Even more worrisome, in times of 1939-like recession and staggering deficits, the United States is understandably talking of massive cutbacks in its military. Nations never reduce defense expenditures because they want smaller militaries, but because in tough times the public shortsightedly thinks that money is better spent on social programs at home.

The combination of provocative rivals abroad, our president’s constant assurances that the United States has been at fault in the past and wants to reach out to enemies in the future, and probable defense reductions should remind us to tread carefully this late summer.

Unfortunately, the past guns of August teach us that war may be looking for those who are not looking for war.

-- Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author, most recently, of The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern. © 2010 Tribune Media Services, Inc.

Victor Davis Hanson

If Republicans do well in November, they could shift a significant number of House seats to the GOP.

Every ten years, it’s time for reapportionment and redistricting. The framers of the Constitution created the first regularly scheduled national census and required, for the first time that I am aware of, that representation in a legislature be apportioned according to population.

Reapportionment is automatic: A statutory formula takes the census figures and apportions the 435 House districts among the 50 states. Wyoming and six other states will each get one, California will probably get 53, and the rest some number in between.

#ad#Seven states, according to projections by Polidata Inc., will gain a House seat, and Texas will gain four; nine states will lose a House seat, and Ohio will lose two. Overall, states carried by John McCain in 2008 will gain a net seven seats (and electoral votes), and states carried by Barack Obama will lose seven.

But that doesn’t necessarily mean Republicans will gain House seats. That depends on redistricting -- how the lines are drawn by the politicians in each state (or, in a couple of cases, by nonpartisan commissions).

That’s particularly true in states with large numbers of districts and densely packed metropolitan areas. You can’t do much gerrymandering in a state with only a few districts. But you can in states with more than four or five.

Eighteen months ago, it looked like Democrats were going to profit from redistricting. An optimistic scenario for Democrats, extrapolating from the 2008 election results, was that if they could gain three governorships and three state senates and otherwise hold what they had, they would control redistricting in 14 states with more than five districts, including California, New York, Illinois, Michigan, North Carolina, and New Jersey.

Those states are projected to have 195 districts, and thus will have 195 House seats following the 2012 elections. Clever redistricting could move between one and two dozen into the Democratic column. That would have been the Democrats’ best redistricting cycle since the one following the 1980 census.

But that scenario now is the stuff of dreams. Democrats are threatened with losing many governorships and legislative chambers, and their chances of taking over many from the Republicans look dismal.

Instead, the optimistic scenario belongs to the Republicans. If they hold what they have and capture a few governorships (Ohio, Tennessee, Wisconsin) and a few legislative chambers (the houses in Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, and both houses in Wisconsin), they will control redistricting in eleven states with more than five House seats, including Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Texas. Those states are projected to have 178 House seats.

This would be an even better redistricting cycle for Republicans than the one following the 2000 census, which was their best in 50 years. It could move one to two dozen House seats into the Republican column.

But a few caveats are in order.

First, optimistic scenarios don’t always come true. If Republican Meg Whitman is not elected governor in California, Democrats will be able to draw the lines of its 53 districts. That could offset Republican gains elsewhere. And it’s not a sure thing that Republicans will make the gains they need to control the process in several states.

Second, redistricting doesn’t lock up seats for one party forever. A few years ago pundits were lamenting that it did -- and then Democrats won dozens of seemingly safe Republican seats in 2006 and 2008. This year, Republicans may win many seemingly safe Democratic seats.

The last redistricting cycle came during the period of stable partisan alignments that persisted from 1995 to 2005. Redistricters could pretty well count on voters to vote the same way they had last time and the time before.

Now we seem to be in a period of very unstable partisan alignments. What looks like a safe seat based on 2008 numbers may not look safe under 2010 numbers. And those numbers may not be etched in stone. No one I know of is predicting confidently how Americans will vote in 2012.

In the end, the voters get a say. But in an otherwise close election, redistricting can determine control of the House. And that can make an enormous difference in legislative outcomes, as it has during the past decade.

The unpopularity of the Obama Democrats’ policies seems sure to hurt the party this year. Redistricting seems likely to extend the pain for several more election cycles.

— Michael Barone is senior political analyst for the Washington Examiner. © 2010 the Washington Examiner.

Michael Barone

Ladies and gentlemen, yesterday I started a little Salzburg journal -- go here. Let me just wade into Part II (Part Zwei, if you’re in a Salzburg mood). And let’s move out of Salzburg -- to Kitzbühel, the famous ski village maybe an hour and a half southwest of Salzburg. Let me take you into the graveyard, in particular -- macabre, I know, but notable.

Toni Sailer is buried here. He was the “Blitz from Kitz,” a great downhill skier, a great Olympic champion. Later he did television and movies -- a huge personality in Austria. The kind with 100 percent name recognition -- as famous as the Kaiser, if there were a Kaiser. (More on that later in this journal.)

#ad#Also buried in this cemetery is Heinrich Harrer, the Seven Years in Tibet man -- a fabled mountaineer, and athlete, and author. When young, he joined the SS. He lived a much better life thereafter. He was a great supporter of the Tibetans, and the Dalai Lama honored him. Tibetans -- exiles, of course -- make pilgrimages to his grave, here in “Kitz.” They dress it up with national and Buddhist items.

Also buried -- this is sad -- is Arnold Schwarzenegger’s brother, Meinhard, who died as a young man -- 25, I think -- in 1971. Car accident.

#*#Flying around Kitzbühel -- gliding, I should say -- are paragliders. They make a pretty amazing sight, amid the mountains. And speaking of amazing sights: May I show you the view from the front yard of our lunchtime hosts? Try this.

#*#Back in Salzburg, I meet a couple who live in Silicon Valley. She’s Austrian -- Austrian-born, I should say -- he’s Dutch (Dutch-born). National Review readers, bless them. I ask where they met. “Skiing in Kitzbühel,” they say. Nice. They spend about four months of the year in St. Gilgen (Austria). Otherwise, they’re back in Silicon Valley. And, needless to say, he is an engineer, one of those men who helped make the American economy boom: and who showered the world with life-improving goods.

Will such people still immigrate to the United States? Are they able, bureaucratically? Is America still attractive enough -- still the land of the future, still the land of opportunity? These are worrisome questions.

Peter Thiel, the great American entrepreneur, told me something sobering earlier this year, during the Oslo Freedom Forum. He said, “Watch emigration” -- watch an outflow from America, rather than the usual, traditional inflow. Then we’ll know we’re in deep you-know-what.

#*#As regular readers know, I bear no ill will toward the millions of campesinos who cross our southern border. We know why they do it, and they’re right to do it. (The law-breaking is problematic, to be sure.) But it kills me a little that two young German bankers I know can’t work in America and make their lives in America, as they want to, while the millions of campesinos just waltz over the border. The two young Germans feel they were born American -- “I was born in the wrong country,” they say. “I am naturally and spiritually and temperamentally American.” All they want to do is become American citizens. They want to join our great and ongoing experiment, and have American children: native-born ones.

But no. Our government won’t let them.

If there is room for the Latin American millions -- and we are a big, bounteous country -- can’t we make a smidgeon of room for European investment bankers? Especially when their hearts beat red, white, and blue? I promise you they wouldn’t be waving German flags in America -- they don’t wave them now. They wouldn’t demand bilingual education, or ballots in German -- they already speak English like Masterpiece Theater hosts.

Don’t get me wrong (I know I sound defensive): I am for the illiterate or semi-literate southern masses -- particularly those who go through lawful channels. We can’t all be investment bankers. (I certainly can’t.) I have hailed the hard-working, manual-laboring immigrant repeatedly. I would not last a week in his shoes. But, when it comes to immigration, I’m for my European friends, too. Which I think is less than Klan-like. Isn’t it?

#*#While I’m on this bitter jag, let me add a comment: In thought, they are like John Roberts, not Sonia Sotomayor. If judges, they would never describe themselves as the equivalent of a “wise Latina.” They would say, “I’m an American, and an adherent to the Constitution -- period.” They are Miguel Estradas, not Sotomayors.

Okay, end of bitterfest. How’d I get on this soapbox anyway? Isn’t this supposed to be a Salzburg journal? Oh, yeah -- the Dutch-born American from Silicon Valley.

#*#Street names are interesting in Salzburg -- for instance, you see “Wilhelm-Backhaus-Weg,” “Wilhelm Backhaus Way,” referring to the great German pianist (1884-1969). There are many other streets named for other Austrian or German musical bigs. But there is also “Mascagnigasse,” “Mascagni Lane” -- delightfully incongruous, to me. Because, as you know, Mascagni was an Italian: composer of the little (but great) opera Cavalleria rusticana.

#page##*#Erwin Schrott comes from Uruguay -- not the home of many music stars (classical division), and he is one. He is a bass-baritone, and, this season, he is singing Leporello in Don Giovanni. (He is also a famous Don Giovanni.) (I am speaking of the role, not the singer’s personal life.) Moreover, Schrott is a guest in our interview series: the series of the Salzburg Festival Society.

I realize his name is Erwin Schrott -- but, trust me, he is South American. Lots of Germans lurking in South American backgrounds . . .

I ask him about singers he heard while growing up -- recordings he listened to. Deadpan, he says, “Tom Jones.” Then he explains, “My mother was in love with Tom Jones. It made my father a little jealous.” Schrott also listened to plenty of classical singers -- Plácido Domingo, for instance (though Domingo, at his swooniest, can sound more Vegas than Tom Jones -- or Engelbert).

I ask him about the popularity of classical music, and of opera in particular -- people in the music biz are always worried about popularity. I guess almost everyone, in almost every biz, is. Schrott says something that brings a smile to my face: “Houses [opera theaters] don’t want to hear me say this, but ticket prices are too high.” They are indeed. One of the reasons is: exorbitant union demands. But that’s a subject for another day . . .

Couple of years ago, we had Ferruccio Furlanetto, the famed Italian bass, in this series. I asked him about warming up -- he does very little of it. “Maybe ten minutes,” before a performance, he said. Well, what about Schrott? He gets a look in his eye and says, “I warm up in my first aria onstage.”

Anna Prohaska, sitting next to me, says, “Oh, you low voices! You have it so easy!” Who is Anna Prohaska? A young English-Austrian soprano, who is singing Zerlina in Salzburg’s Don Giovanni. She is also a guest -- an interviewee -- in this same hour. She is an interesting combination: an intellectual (clearly), a musical talent, and a radiant, girl-like personality. A very rare package.

Furlanetto has an extraordinary speaking voice -- extraordinarily beautiful. So does Schrott. Even before they sing, you can tell they can -- at least I think you can.

The Festival Society, kindly, has given us all boxes of chocolates -- really, really delicious chocolates from Fürst, just about the best sweet-maker in the world. Schrott points to himself and says, dramatically, “Chocoholic -- serious chocoholic.” Join the club, baby.

#*#My Don Giovanni remark, above, reminded me of something. About four years ago, René Pape was a guest in our series. (He is another bass -- a German.) He described himself as a real-life Don Giovanni -- he had few doubters. He is also one of the great smokers in the history of singing -- smokes like a chimney; so did Fischer-Dieskau. Marlboro should use these guys in ads . . .

#*#Earlier, I gave you a picture from lunch at Kitzbühel. Care for a picture from lunch atop a mountain in Puch, just outside Salzburg? Go here.

#*#In yesterday’s installment, I was praising the food in Salzburg -- and it deserves praise, lavish praise, indeed. But I notice something: Often food in this delicious town tastes too salty to me. And I think I know why: In America, some years ago, we declared a war on salt; everything was more lightly salted, if salted at all. One’s palate adjusted. I have a feeling that Europe didn’t wage this war on salt: They kept salting “normally.” And now, to my palate, the food is apt to taste over-salted.

At least that’s my theory. I could be full of it.

You will point out that Salzburg -- the very name -- means “Salt City.” And right you are . . .

#*#A friend of mine goes off into the mountains to pick Steinpilzen -- enormous mushrooms, and extremely tasty too. How big are they? I tell her, “They look like something that people, at least children, would sit on in fairy tales.” She considers this for a second, then smiles her assent.

#*#On the golf course, I’m paired with a lawyer from Vienna, a very nice guy, who speaks very good English. I ask where he picked up his English. He says, oh, here and there. I ask whether he has traveled in America. Oh, yes, quite a bit. Well, where, when? He gets a sheepish smile on his face: “I toured around America when I was young -- ages ten and eleven.” He was a member of the Vienna Choir Boys.

He seems embarrassed, almost apologetic. I say, “Oh, nothing to be embarrassed or apologetic about! What a wonderful experience.” It was, he confirms. And this is something interesting about spending summer weeks in Greater Salzburg: You might just play golf with a grownup Vienna Choir Boy.

See you tomorrow for Part Drei? I can see now that I’ll need another part -- I think we’ll end up with a fourth installment on Monday. But don’t hold me to that. Like our congressmen, I reserve the right to revise and extend, or subtract, my remarks . . .


#JAYBOOK#

Jay Nordlinger

Adapted from the Aug. 30, 2010, issue of NR.

As his fellow incumbents drown in a tea-party wave, Sen. John McCain somehow remains afloat. On Tuesday, McCain squared off against J. D. Hayworth, a former congressman, in Arizona’s GOP Senate primary; yet Hayworth, a border hawk and talk-radio star, arrived defanged. After lurching hard, and awkwardly, to the right for months, McCain won easily. McCain of course credits his survival to pluck. But luck, too, played a part, as did his boatload of cash. Unlike many of his colleagues, who have faced political neophytes this season, McCain drew a foe with twelve years of experience in the House — a short stint compared with McCain’s nonstop congressional tenure since 1983, but more than enough of a record for opposition researchers to mine. McCain, with ease, punched early: Hayworth was a well-known pork-barrel spender and an acquaintance of Jack Abramoff, the disgraced lobbyist. Initially, “Hayworth tried to portray himself as an outsider, as some sort of fiscal conservative,” McCain told me before the primary. “We knew that we had to define him — I freely admit that.”

#ad#“We did not want to make the mistakes of Charlie Crist and Bob Bennett and become another statistic,” adds Brian Rogers, McCain’s communications director, referring to a pair of establishment candidates who found themselves in trouble. “Look at what happened to Crist,” he says. In Florida’s GOP Senate primary race, Governor Crist ignored Marco Rubio, his upstart opponent, “for months, enabling him to shape the narrative.” With Hayworth, “we simply could not let that happen. Bold colors were necessary.”

But the senator’s own baggage weighed heavily on him. On immigration, McCain was understandably viewed with suspicion. Along with Ted Kennedy, he had co-sponsored, in 2007, a “comprehensive reform” bill that many critics saw as a veiled move toward amnesty. Beyond that, there was a never-ending scroll of past dalliances with Democrats. So Hayworth, too, came armed. For the first few months of the campaign, he hammered McCain for his votes against the Bush tax cuts and for the bank bailout, to the delight of voters frustrated with Washington. As winter turned into spring, Hayworth’s poll numbers began to tick up, from 22 points down in Rasmussen’s January survey to just seven by mid-March. The former drive-time host on KFYI, charismatic and with a linebacker’s build, basked in the attention. He was going to be a giant-killer, the Great Right Hope.

When I found Hayworth greeting his fans at the Conservative Political Action Conference in late February, the candidate was boastful. “John McCain is vulnerable on everything,” he said, beaming. “He should rename his bus the Double-Talk Express. His campaign of conservative conversion is just sad and predictable.” Yet all was not well in Hayworth land: A clip from his talk show in which he chatted about President Obama’s birth certificate surfaced, and McCain pounced. “Consumed by conspiracies!” screamed one spot. Instead of being able to highlight McCain’s policy shifts, Hayworth was boxed into a corner, forced to deny, over and over again, that he was a “birther.” Then, while at CPAC, he caught more flak, this time for sitting down for an interview with the John Birch Society.

#page#But Hayworth doggedly fought on, and swatted away the criticisms. Even after McCain vocally led the floor fight against Obamacare, Arizona Republicans remained skeptical of the senator’s jolt to the right. A late-March stump stop for McCain by Sarah Palin, his running mate in 2008, also did little to stir the base. By mid-April, Rasmussen put Hayworth within five points of McCain — but his springtime momentum was to be short-lived. Before the month ended, reacting to numerous reports of increased violence along the border, Gov. Jan Brewer signed Arizona Senate Bill 1070, which requires immigrants to carry proof of legal status, and ignited a countrywide debate on immigration. With his key issue suddenly dominating state politics and national headlines, Hayworth looked to surge. McCain, however, elbowed Hayworth out of the spotlight by jumping into the fray as a self-proclaimed border sheriff — advocating an increased National Guard presence and billions for new security measures.

#ad#“Complete the danged fence!” the senator growled in an ad, with his Navy cap on and a border guard alongside. McCain then proposed a tough ten-point plan on border security with Sen. Jon Kyl, his fellow Arizona Republican, and touted it on the cable networks and Sunday shows. As McCain drastically recast himself, Hayworth’s climb stalled out. Unlike many senior incumbents, “who make the mistake [of thinking] that people love them,” McCain “recognized that he had real problems,” says Larry Sabato, a political scientist at the University of Virginia. “He was willing to turn 180 degrees on immigration and the maverick label.”

McCain’s friends say the brazen repositioning — or the “adjustment,” depending on whom you ask — was instinctual as much as it was political. “He sensed early that this could become serious, that this was an awful year,” says Mark Salter, his longtime speechwriter. The primary, Salter says, was viewed within McCain’s inner circle much like the senator’s 1992 reelection bid, “which came so quickly after Keating,” an influence-peddling scandal in which McCain had become entangled. “Everyone agreed that this is a year where you had to make an effort.” McCain’s border maneuvers led to gains in the polls: By late May, he was up by double digits. He was also blanketing the airwaves, outspending Hayworth ten to one.

Then, in June, as Brian Rogers puts it, political “gold” fell into the campaign’s lap — something much more damaging to Hayworth than his talk about Obama’s birth certificate: A YouTube video surfaced showing him, while out of office, hawking “free money” from the federal government. The ad was made soon after Hayworth lost his House seat in 2006, and introduces him as a former member of the Ways and Means Committee who will help viewers obtain a government grant. “It’s something you should take advantage of,” he explains. Needless to say, this was a message the tea partiers loathed. McCain began to tag Hayworth as a “huckster” whenever he could, and by early July he had a 23-point lead in one poll and a 45-point lead in another.

While Hayworth floundered, McCain demonstrated his stature on military matters. As the ranking member of the Armed Services Committee, the senator was a stalwart voice in favor of the Afghan War during the turmoil surrounding Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s radioactive comments to Rolling Stone magazine. When I met with McCain in early July, all he wanted to talk about was the war. A few days later, McCain led a group of senators on a surprise Fourth of July trip to Afghanistan and Iraq. On television, in Arizona as elsewhere, it was McCain the senior statesman. Hayworth could do little to compete with McCain’s furrowed-brow leadership on national security.

By now, McCain’s path to victory was clear. Two July debates were left — Hayworth’s best chances to change the dynamic of the race. “I knew that I had to do well in the debates,” McCain says. “I could not let him bother me with his shtick.” McCain decided to focus on policy. “We could convince people not to like Coke, sure,” he says. “But I had to give them a reason to like Pepsi.”

#page#On July 16, the gloves came off in Phoenix, where McCain met Hayworth and Jim Deakin, a little-known tea-party activist, in the first televised debate. Hayworth was never able to draw blood. Both McCain and Hayworth appeared relaxed and prepared. “I have never seen such smiley candidates in my life,” Larry Sabato says. McCain called himself a “proud Ronald Reagan conservative” and stole a line from the Gipper, too, saying often about Hayworth: “There he goes again.”

#ad#Hayworth, for his part, did his best to call out McCain’s “political shape-shifting” without getting nasty. “I’m the consistent conservative,” he said, and McCain is the “convenient” one. He took time to apologize for his grab-your-handout infomercial, in order to free himself up to go on offense. “I’m willing to admit my mistakes,” he said; “they were more personal in nature. The unfortunate thing, John, is that you’ve made mistakes that have hurt America.” He also chided McCain for running harder against him than he had against Barack Obama. “Shame on you,” Hayworth said, wagging his finger. It was not enough. Hayworth got in some entertaining one-liners and quips, but failed to deliver the knockout he needed.

McCain seemed every bit the happy warrior. “McCain is a pugilist,” says Rick Davis, McCain’s longtime senior adviser. “He does not take it personally, in the sense that he does not hate Hayworth or have some kind of personal vendetta against him. Being in the ring so long, he has become realistic about these kinds of things, and approaches them in an almost clinical fashion.” McCain adds that he was itching for a brawl, even after two bruising presidential campaigns. “I was never like, ‘Oh, God, not this again,’” he laughs. “I like this stuff.”

Thanks to his strategic opportunism and tactical aggressiveness, McCain’s victory on Tuesday can now be chalked up as another “he survived” moment for the Arizona senator. “John McCain has nine lives,” says Mark McKinnon, a former senior McCain adviser unaffiliated with the campaign. “Clearly, he’s got a few left. The primary challenge just proves that the old soldier still has a lot of fight left in him.” At least enough, apparently, to get past a flawed challenger like J. D. Hayworth.

— Robert Costa is a political reporter for National Review.

Robert Costa

The Department of Defense’s new report provides too little analysis, and arrived too late.

The Department of Defense recently released its long-overdue annual report on China’s military power. The document tells us much about how the Democratic Congress and the Obama administration would like to approach relations with China, and not nearly enough about China’s military modernization. It suggests we have a Congress that does not take the China challenge seriously and a White House that is uncertain how to tackle it.

The problems started with the 2010 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which revised the 2000 NDAA -- the law that requires an annual DOD report to Congress on China’s military power -- in a number of ways. Most noticeably, the 2010 NDAA changed the report’s title from “Military Power of the People’s Republic of China” to “Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China,” which obscures the report’s purpose by framing China as a passive actor. China’s development of an anti-satellite (ASAT) capability, for example, is not a military development involving China; it is a decision by China to enhance its military power.

#ad#Also, before the 2010 NDAA, the report’s scope included “the tenets and probable development of Chinese grand strategy”; now, Congress has stripped away every mention of “grand strategy.” DOD had in the past been instructed to provide analysis of “trends in Chinese strategy that would be designed to establish [China] as the leading political power in the Asia-Pacific region and as a political and military presence in other regions of the world.” Now, DOD must report on “trends in Chinese security and military behavior that would be designed to achieve, or that are inconsistent with,” “the goals . . . shaping Chinese security strategy and military strategy.”

Further, since its inception, the report’s purpose has been to inform the Senate and House about Chinese military power so that Congress can adequately fund U.S. defense needs; this is why the law requires that the report be submitted by March 1 of each year, long before the NDAA debates take place. But this year, not wanting to anger the Chinese -- who have complained about the report year after year -- the White House delayed its release, presumably excising declassified information that it deemed too provocative. (The Chinese complained anyway.) By the time the administration released the report to the public, Congress was in recess and the rest of Washington on vacation. Published too late to have the impact that it should on the congressional debate over the 2011 NDAA, and at a time when few members of Congress are likely to comment, the report has failed in its purpose: to inform Congress as it prepares the coming year’s defense-spending bill.

It seems that the White House wishes to avoid an open, honest, and public debate about China’s military modernization and intentions in Asia. Such a debate might make it more difficult for the administration to pursue a cooperative approach to relations with Beijing. While the recent decisions to wade into the South China Sea territorial disputes and to send the USS George Washington to exercise in the Yellow Sea -- both of which elicited strident Chinese objections -- suggest that the White House might be abandoning that approach, the report’s handling should make outside observers think twice. At best, it suggests a confused China policy; at worst, that the president prefers “business as usual” -- or rather, business as in 2009. This president seems most comfortable when he is extending an open hand; he is unlikely to quickly set aside the “strategic reassurance” policy articulated last year. If that means manipulating the public’s perceptions of a rising China, then so be it.

The irony of this state of affairs, unfortunately, seems to be lost on this administration. It is Beijing -- not any report produced by the Defense Department -- that is primarily responsible for how China is perceived. As the new report notes, “the limited transparency in China’s military and security affairs enhances uncertainty and increases the potential for misunderstanding and miscalculation.” Beijing fails to satisfactorily explain the reasoning behind its aggressive military modernization, thus generating concern and suspicion amongst its neighbors and in the United States.

Unfortunately, the DOD report also fails to adequately explain Chinese military modernization. A close reading reveals that the modernization is robust, and is occurring across all of the service branches. But the report (like its predecessors) does not explain how these developments are related to each other or to Beijing’s strategic goals. What role will they play in China’s security strategy? In China’s military strategy?

For example, this year’s report, like last year’s, notes that China is developing an aircraft carrier and that its navy has already started training pilots for carrier-borne aviation. But it does not explain that aircraft carriers are the quintessential instrument of military power projection. A nation does not build them if it does not see a need to project air power to distant shores. With Chinese carriers patrolling the seas, Guam, Australia, all of Southeast Asia, and the entirety of India will for the first time be in range of People’s Liberation Army tactical aircraft.

#page#The 2010 report similarly lacks analysis of the developments in China’s missile force. While it mentions the 2nd Artillery Corps’s development of an anti-ship ballistic missile (ASBM), few details are provided, and no attempt is made to explain the impact it will have on the U.S. Navy’s ability to operate in the Western Pacific.

The report is vague about the PLA’s overall missile buildup as well. It notes that “China is fielding an array of conventionally armed ballistic missiles [and] ground- and air-launched land-attack cruise missiles . . . to hold targets at risk throughout the region.” But again, there is no explanation of what this might mean for U.S. forces in the region. Can those missiles hit American bases and those of our allies? What kind of damage can they inflict?

#ad#Though you wouldn’t know it from reading the report, China likely envisions using ASBMs, other ballistic and cruise missiles, future carriers, and other capabilities -- including nuclear and quiet conventional attack submarines, cyber- and space-warfare assets, and an integrated air-defense system -- in pursuit of its regional goals. Those goals are, in short, to unify Taiwan with the mainland, to settle East and South China Sea disputes in China’s favor, and, more broadly, to assert its primacy in the region.

In a Taiwan Strait crisis, for example, the PLA could use its missile force to strike American aircraft carriers in the Western Pacific, and airbases in Japan and potentially on Guam. Strike-group ships that survived could be stalked by multiple, increasingly stealthy submarines. Meanwhile, the now-limited number of tactical aircraft that the U.S. could send to the fight would face a highly sophisticated air-defense system on the Chinese mainland, but only if they could bypass or punch through combat air patrols launched from Chinese carriers in the East China and Philippine Seas. Chinese cyber and space operations would further complicate American efforts to bring force to bear. This would leave China’s air force, ground forces, and smaller surface warships to focus their efforts on Taiwan.

This is a relatively straightforward story, and one that the DOD reports have failed to tell over the years. China, thankfully, has a long way to go before it will be able to successfully pull off such an operation. But American forces in Asia are vulnerable, and increasingly so as Chinese military modernization continues. The administration should provide the American people and the U.S. Congress with a full accounting of PLA modernization and Chinese strategic goals, and of how they are linked; armed with such an accounting, Congress would be in a position to fund the military America needs for the Asia-Pacific region. Congress, of course, also has a responsibility to ensure that it is getting the information it requires. Last year’s changes to the DOD China report were ill considered and should be revisited.

When it comes to China, this administration seems to be pulled in two directions. It spent much of 2009 trying to reassure China that the U.S. welcomes its rise; the White House’s handling of the report was one effort in that broader campaign. At the same time, there has been the occasional glimpse of a more confrontational approach to Beijing: Secretary Clinton’s Internet-freedom speech, arms sales to Taiwan, Secretary Gates’s remarks at the International Institute for Strategic Studies’ Asia Security Summit (also known as the Shangri-La Dialogue), and the recent diplomatic contretemps over the South China Sea.

Hopefully, the president is learning that these two approaches need not be mutually exclusive. With an honest recognition that the United States and China share some interests but not others, the president should, sooner or later, settle on the proper course: to cooperate with China on issues where goals intersect, and to vigorously defend those U.S. interests that China threatens. If the two countries can find a way to cooperate on climate change or in international economic forums, they should do so. But Washington should be less concerned with “reassuring” Beijing and more concerned with deterring it from upsetting the American-led international order.

This requires both an unwavering commitment to the security of U.S. allies and partners in Asia -- including Taiwan -- and the maintenance of an American preponderance of military power in the region. The role of U.S. forces in the Asia-Pacific region should be, first and foremost, to deter Chinese aggression. Absent a robust, resilient force in the region, Beijing will be tempted to resort to force to achieve its goals. And absent an honest public debate in this country about China’s rise -- a debate the report fails to foster -- that robust, resilient force may one day be a thing of the past.

-- Michael Mazza is a senior research associate at the American Enterprise Institute.

Michael Mazza