A 2010 summa cum laude heads to a convent.

Don’t tell Mary Anne Marks the Catholic Church is an oppressive, misogynistic disaster. She knows better. And she’s got a Harvard degree, too.

Miss Marks, a native of Queens, N.Y., graduated from Harvard University this past semester with an undergraduate degree in classics and English, delivering her commencement address in Latin. This fall, she begins a new life, discerning her future consecrated to Christ as a Catholic religious sister with the Dominican Sisters of Mary, Mother of the Eucharist, in Ann Arbor, Mich. She and I are alumnae of the same high school, Dominican Academy, in Manhattan. Before heading to Ann Arbor, she talked with me a bit about how she got to this point.


KATHRYN JEAN LOPEZ: You are a Harvard graduate. Aren’t you surrendering all the possibilities that entails by entering a convent?

MARY ANNE MARKS: Yes, if one doesn’t see becoming a well-educated, intellectually alive nun as one of the possibilities.


#ad#LOPEZ: I don’t know about you, but I read the New York Times. A number of the op-ed columnists there, and a number of the news stories, tell me that the Catholic Church is anti-woman. And from other stories, about the various scandals, the Catholic Church also sounds like a dying, loser organization of sinners. Why would you choose to represent it in such a public, hard-to-miss way -- in a religious habit?

MARKS: I feel privileged to represent the Catholic Church in a visible way, because it is an organization of sinners and sinners-turned-saints, emphatically alive, expanding, and responsive to the needs of the time, an organization that has been enormously effective in promoting the spiritual and material well-being of women and men throughout the 2,000 years of its existence.

From its earliest years, the Church’s doctrine of the equality of all humans as beloved children of God and its reverence for Mary as the spouse and mother of God elevated women to a status previously unheard of. In our own times, the Church’s unequivocal opposition to practices such as abortion and contraception, which harm women physically and psychologically, and threaten to render them victims of their own and others’ unchecked desires, makes the Church a lone voice above the chaos, promoting women’s dignity and happiness.

The cry that the Church is a “dying, loser organization of sinners” echoes down the centuries; it rang out in Christ’s day, it rang out in Luther’s day, and it rings out in ours. The second part always has and always will be too true. Kyrie eleison. The erroneousness of first part is suggested by the Church’s record of accomplishments and its longevity to this point, and by the new growth that people of my generation rejoice to see.


LOPEZ: Your call was not a sudden one. You explained to a Harvard publication that you’ve “always thought about being a nun.” You grew up in Queens at the turn of the 21st century. How would you ever think of such a thing?

MARKS: Religious life is an institution thriving in our time and in our nation; go figure.


LOPEZ: Did you ever worry that it was a weird impulse?

MARKS: No.

#page#LOPEZ: Is the countercultural nature of your call important? Especially now, in this culture, in your generation?

MARKS: Absolutely. Religious are called to witness by their life and garb to supernatural realities: God’s existence, His immeasurable love for each person, and the fact that our duty and happiness lie in returning His love. This witness becomes increasingly important as a culture’s materialism and corresponding distaste for the supernatural increase.


#ad#LOPEZ: Have you known religious sisters in your life?

MARKS: Yes. When I was young, my family often visited the Daughters of St. Paul bookstore in Manhattan, and I attended a retreat at their convent in Boston after freshman year of high school. Around 2000, I encountered my own, then very young, Dominican community and got to know the vocations director. In eighth grade, I switched from a private to a parochial school and met some of the Sisters of Charity, who had formerly run and were still somewhat involved with it. One of the sisters and I continue to keep up a strong friendship formed that year. Through her, I met several members of the relatively new order Familia Spiritualis Opus. The Dominicans of St. Mary of the Springs ran my high school, and the Sisters of Mercy administer a nursing home where I volunteered during the summers. In high school, I also visited the Sisters Servants of Mary Immaculate, whom I had heard about at my parish. During college, I met the Slaves of the Immaculate Heart of Mary at a pro-life event and visited their convent, and one of my close friends joined the Religious Sisters of Mercy of Alma, Mich.


LOPEZ: Was there anything at Dominican Academy that especially helped your spiritual growth and discernment?

MARKS: My English teacher, Mrs. Gunset, and her daily example of faith, joy, and charity inspired and encouraged me. The presence of Christ in the tabernacle under the same roof was also a tremendous privilege and source of strength; I think it was in high school that I became attuned to the desire, in moments of joy and grief, to run to our Eucharistic Lord. In college, I missed having Him there all the time and, like other students, would be frustrated to find the local church often closed. One of the beauties of convent life is Christ’s constant physical presence.

It is a tragic irony that Dominican Academy also helped my spiritual growth by laying before me in religion classes from the lips of my own teachers many classic arguments for relativism and Biblical fallibility. When I encountered these same ideas in college, I was prepared, because I had worked through counterarguments with my parents at home in high school.


LOPEZ: Is there something important to young women about all-girls schools? Did you ever think you were missing out on something?

MARKS: It has been documented that graduates of all-girls schools display greater self-confidence, engagement with current events, and academic commitment. I was always grateful for the unique camaraderie and businesslike attention to learning that characterized my experiences in all-girls schools.

#page#LOPEZ: Did you always know you were headed to Harvard?

MARKS: Not at all. I only had the faintest hope of getting in and still can’t believe it happened.


LOPEZ: I don’t know Harvard to be a great incubator or beacon of religious vocations. Am I wrong?

#ad#MARKS: Yes, Deo gratias! A couple of years ago, a young man who finished Harvard in three years entered the seminary in St. Louis. A little further back, a young woman who attended Harvard and lived in the same women’s residence that I did joined the Franciscan Sisters of the Renewal. One of my friends, whom I met while she was pursuing a degree at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, joined the Religious Sisters of Mercy two years ago. This July 25, two young men from Harvard joined the Eastern Province of the Dominicans.


LOPEZ: Were you able -- even encouraged, by elements on campus -- to pursue a spiritual life as much as an intellectual one?

MARKS: The pace of life at Harvard is fast. Tackling challenging course work and myriad extracurricular activities, and surrounded by others doing the same, even those students who desire a spiritual life are often impeded from developing one. Only the grace of a religious vocation gave me the insight and willpower to carve out a part of each day for prayer. That said, those seeking spiritual resources at Harvard will not find them lacking. A strong Knights of Columbus group complements the very active Catholic Student Association, two parish churches are within walking distance of campus, and the men’s and women’s Opus Dei houses nearby are sources of superb spiritual direction and enriching weekly and monthly events.


LOPEZ: You’re from New York. Why are you going to Ann Arbor?

MARKS: The Ann Arbor Dominicans are on fire to spread the witness of faithful religious life throughout the country and to revitalize the Church in America from the ground up, through classroom teaching, retreats, catechesis on EWTN, and whatever other means of preaching the Lord provides. They combine love for the monastic traditions of the Dominican order passed down since the thirteenth century with a zeal for Pope John Paul II’s new evangelization and for the challenges of today. Their particular devotion to Mary and to Christ’s Eucharistic presence is evident in the community’s name -- Sisters of Mary, Mother of the Eucharist -- and finds concrete expression in each sister’s consecration to Mary according to the formula of St. Louis de Montfort and in the daily period of communal Eucharistic adoration written into the constitutions. The community also emphasizes support of priests through prayer, word, and action.


LOPEZ: The Dominicans’ love of learning and teaching attracted you. Where and when did you come to love these things?

MARKS: Before the age of three. I used to observe the yellow buses lined up next to the local public school and ask my father wistfully, “Daddy, when can I go to school?” The moment I set foot in preschool was the beginning of an ongoing love affair. The first and last school day I missed was in fourth grade, when a doctor forbade me to infect my classmates with strep throat. They thought I had died when I didn’t show up that morning. My relish of learning only grew stronger in college, in those thrilling moments as a professor unfolded a new way of looking at the world, in those wrenching moments as I sat in the library walled in by piles of books hammering out an argument. The love of teaching grew up simultaneously as I encountered brilliant, enthusiastic, and imaginative teachers from my earliest years and enjoyed volunteering as a tutor.

#page#LOPEZ: Why do you want to teach? Is that more a desire or a call?

MARKS: For me, the attraction to teaching is both a desire and a call. Some sisters in my community never wanted to teach but still knew that God was calling them to the Sisters of Mary, Mother of the Eucharist; for them, the community’s educational apostolate is an element of their vocation that requires trust and surrender. In my case, I have always been exhilarated by the idea of being able to give children the solid grounding in their faith that I never received in school. Truth has always been extremely important to me, and I am thrilled that God can use me to transmit it -- Him!


#ad#LOPEZ: My Latin isn’t what it was in high school, so I read your commencement address in English. What did I miss? What is it that’s so special about Latin?

MARKS: As in any language, there are untranslatable elements: nuances of meaning; an extremely satisfying economy of expression; phrases that, through their vocabulary and word order, allude to other works of literature. There is also the mischievous thrill of expressing modern concepts in an ancient language rarely spoken today -- “e-mail” as litteris electronicis, for example.


LOPEZ: You told a Harvard publication that “One of the exciting things about being a nun is that one never knows what the future holds!” Did Harvard people think you were nuts when you started saying such things?

MARKS: Not really; it’s a little like saying, “One of the exciting things about joining the Peace Corps is that one doesn’t know where one will be assigned or what life-changing experiences lie in store.”


LOPEZ: When did you start talking to people casually, publicly, about your vocational call?

MARKS: In eighth grade, after I had committed myself entirely to God during a trip to Lourdes the previous summer. Until then, I had lived a double life, drawn on the one hand to immerse myself in the beauty of my faith, on the other to imitate the less than edifying dress, speech, and behavior of my classmates. Kneeling before the tabernacle in the lower church at Lourdes, I was filled with an understanding of God as Love and a yearning to love Him at all times in everything I did, no matter what anyone else thought. Freed from the need to conform to others’ standards and willing to make Love the ruling principle of my life, I could speak unashamedly and sincerely of my desire to become a sister.


LOPEZ: What are some of the most notable or revealing things that adults -- maybe especially faculty -- have said to you once they became aware of your vocational plans?

MARKS: Two of my professors told me they had siblings who had entered religious life. Another, a kind but thoroughly unsentimental professor who had been very encouraging of my intention to apply to graduate school, ended our discussion of my change of plans by opening her arms and declaring quietly, “I am going to give you a hug, because this is a big decision, and I admire you for it.” When I remarked to yet another professor on the many positive responses from faculty, he replied that he wasn’t surprised that academics could appreciate the appeal of a life of contemplation and of single-minded pursuit of a spiritual goal.


LOPEZ: What did your classmates say? And did their reactions, in one way or another, explain anything to you?

MARKS: Most were happy that I had found a path to which I could unreservedly commit both mind and heart, and they respected my willingness to do so. One classmate, after hearing my vocation story, felt emboldened to tell me about her upcoming marriage, and I had the chance to explain the Church’s teachings on human sexuality. Another conversation turned toward my friend’s a-religious upbringing and her current unbelief. That my plans could open up discussion on such a personal level was beautiful but also startling and slightly disconcerting, and I realized that I was already experiencing one of the great graces and great challenges of the religious life and priesthood: the legitimate expectation of others that those in a habit or collar are equipped and willing to discuss profound or painful subjects#...#anywhere: in the airport as much as in the classroom or the rectory.

#page#LOPEZ: What’s your advice to high-school and college girls who have considered a road similar to yours, but who maybe don’t know where to look or how even to talk about it?

MARKS: Spend a bit of time each day talking to Jesus, before the Blessed Sacrament if you can, or in a quiet place free of distractions. Start with 15 minutes and work up to half an hour. You can’t know what He desires for you if the two of you aren’t good friends. Ask Him and His mother for guidance. And check out some community websites, maybe starting with those listed on the website of the Council of Major Superiors of Women Religious. If a group piques your interest, send the vocations director an e-mail and see what happens! Vocations directors are not recruiters; they are seasoned religious with long experience helping young women to discern God’s will for their lives.


#ad#LOPEZ: You wanted to go to graduate school but discerned that God wanted something else. Why would you give up your free will like that?

MARKS: Part of the answer is that when Love asks you to be His spouse, you don’t quibble about the when and where. The other part is that anything worthwhile in life requires an ongoing, freely willed surrender of one’s freedom.


LOPEZ: It’s August. What does your life look like in the coming days, weeks, months, years?

MARKS: Right now, I am savoring my last few weeks with my parents. When not helping them around the house, I’m sewing my postulant outfits for the convent and preparing the rest of the items we are asked to bring with us. I am also working to publish my senior thesis as an article, finishing another article I’m co-authoring with the other two Harvard commencement orators on the oration experience, and planning a trip that the vocations director of my community and I will be making to Boston in October. Yesterday, I visited the Sirius radio studio in Manhattan to be interviewed on Lino Rulli’s The Catholic Guy about my vocation.

On August 27, my parents and I will be starting the drive to Ann Arbor to arrive the following afternoon. In a short and simple ceremony, 21 other young women and I will be accepted into the community as aspirants. During our first year, our daily schedule will include prayer, recreation, classes, study, and free time, and duties around the convent like cleaning, preparing meals, and gardening. We will also go on the occasional field trip and help the sisters with apostolic work like retreats and summer missions. After the first year, we will receive the habit and our religious names, becoming novices for two years until first profession of vows, which we will live for five years until making the lifelong commitment to religious life at final vows. Alongside this eight-year timeline for spiritual formation, there is also professional preparation: After four years of classes in the convent, we will attend a local university to obtain the degrees necessary to teach, and will student-teach in the Detroit public schools. We will then be sent to one of the growing number of schools around the country to which the sisters have been invited.


LOPEZ: Are you happy?

MARKS: Yes.


LOPEZ: For all those, younger and older than you, who are in pursuit of happiness or have given up on it: What is it and how do you hold onto it?

MARKS: Happiness is the sense of peace and joy that stems from knowledge of and union with the One Who created us and Who loves us infinitely. We will attain it fully in heaven, but we can achieve it to a significant extent beforehand by battling our desire to remain independent of God, ignoring the voices that label religion boring and unnecessary, and better acquainting ourselves with Truth through study and prayer.

— Kathryn Jean Lopez is editor-at-large of National Review Online. This piece has been amended since posting.

Interview

We cannot tax or grow our way out of this hole.

Sometime in the next week or so, the U.S. national debt will exceed $13.4 trillion.

To put that in perspective: If you earned $1 every second, it would take you 425,000 years to earn enough money to pay off that debt. And it’s not likely to get much better any time soon. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the United States will run up more than $1 trillion in debt next year as well, and for years to come. And with entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare facing more than $100 trillion in future unfunded liabilities, we may look back on this level of debt as representing the “good old days.”

Yet, as frightening as those numbers are, focusing on the deficit and debt is to confuse the symptom with the disease. As Milton Friedman often explained, the real issue is not how you pay for government spending -- debt or taxes -- but the spending itself. In other words: Don’t just look at the deficit, look at why we have a deficit. And the reason we have a deficit is pretty simple: Government spends too much.

#ad#Traditionally, federal spending has run around 21 percent of GDP. But George W. Bush and (even more dramatically) Barack Obama have now driven federal spending to more than 25 percent of GDP. And as the old joke goes, that’s the good news. As the full force of entitlement programs kicks in, the federal government will consume more than 40 percent of GDP by the middle of the century. That doesn’t even begin to count state and local-government spending.

As any doctor knows, getting the diagnosis wrong leads to the wrong treatment. Thus Democrats pose as deficit hawks by calling for more taxes. But think about how high taxes would have to be raised to pay for all the government spending to come. Federal taxes have traditionally run at around 18 percent of GDP. Currently, they are down somewhat, around 15 percent of GDP, mostly as a result of the recession. Would we really be better off if, in 2050, federal spending reached 40 percent of GDP but we doubled taxes to pay for it? There would at least theoretically be no deficit, but we would be both poorer and less free.

Of course it is almost as silly for Republicans to argue that the answer is simply to cut taxes in order to grow our way out of the problem. There are many good reasons to cut taxes -- not the least of which is that the money really is ours -- but too many Republicans argue that tax cuts would generate so much additional revenue that spending cuts aren’t necessary. They harken back to Jude Wanniski’s “Two Santa Claus Theory,” which holds that “if the Democrats are going to play Santa Claus by promoting more spending, the Republicans can never beat them by promoting less spending. They have to promise tax cuts in order to grow the economy -- not to ‘starve the government of revenue.’”

Yes, tax cuts -- at least some types of tax cuts -- will stimulate economic growth. But no amount of economic growth is going to enable us to afford the levels of spending to come. And even if it did, would that be a good thing? Do we want that big a government, even if we could pay for it?

The fact is, there is no Santa Claus -- not a Democratic spending one, and not a Republican tax-cutting one. Spending is going to have to be cut -- really cut: The old “fraud, waste, and abuse” line is not going to do it.   

Cutting spending is never easy politically. In an election season like this one, being honest about spending is liable to get you labeled as an “extremist.” But it is time for someone to step up and show the courage to tell the American people that Santa Claus isn’t coming to town.   

— Michael Tanner is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and author of Leviathan on the Right: How Big-Government Conservatism Brought Down the Republican Revolution.

Michael Tanner

And when will the media cover the Left’s Conservative-ophobia?

Here’s a thought: The 70 percent of Americans who oppose what amounts to an Islamic Niketown two blocks from Ground Zero are the real victims of a climate of hate, and the much-ballyhooed anti-Muslim backlash is mostly a myth.

Let’s start with some data.

According to the FBI, hate crimes against Muslims increased by a staggering 1,600 percent in 2001. That sounds serious! But wait, the increase is a math mirage. There were 28 anti-Islamic incidents in 2000. That number climbed to 481 the year a bunch of Muslim terrorists murdered 3,000 Americans in the name of Islam on Sept. 11.

#ad#Now, that was a hate crime.

Regardless, 2001 was the zenith or, looked at through the prism of our national shame, the nadir of the much-discussed anti-Muslim backlash in the United States -- and civil libertarians and Muslim activists insisted it was 1930s Germany all over again. The following year, the number of anti-Islamic hate-crime incidents (overwhelmingly, nonviolent vandalism and nasty words) dropped to 155. In 2003, there were 149 such incidents. And the number has hovered around the mid-100s or lower ever since.

Sure, even one hate crime is too many. But does that sound like an anti-Muslim backlash to you?

Let’s put this in even sharper focus. America is, outside of Israel, probably the most receptive and tolerant country in the world to Jews. And yet, in every year since 9/11, more Jews have been hate-crime victims than Muslims. A lot more.

In 2001, there were twice as many anti-Jewish incidents as there were anti-Muslim, according to the FBI. In 2002 and pretty much every year since, anti-Jewish incidents have outstripped anti-Muslim incidents by at least 6 to 1. Why aren’t we talking about the anti-Jewish climate in America?

Because there isn’t one. And there isn’t an anti-Muslim climate either. Yes, there’s a lot of heated rhetoric on the Internet. Absolutely, some Americans don’t like Muslims. But if you watch TV or movies, or read, say, the op-ed page of the New York Times -- never mind left-wing blogs -- you’ll hear much more open bigotry toward evangelical Christians (in blogspeak, the “Taliban wing of the Republican party”) than you will toward Muslims.

No doubt some American Muslims -- particularly young Muslim men with ties to the Middle East and South Asia -- have been scrutinized at airports more than elderly women of Norwegian extraction, but does that really amount to Islamophobia, given the dangers and complexities of the war on terror?

For ten years we’ve been subjected to news stories about the Muslim backlash that’s always around the corner. It didn’t start with President Obama or with the “Ground Zero mosque.” President George W. Bush was at his most condescending when he explained, in the cadences of a guest reader at kindergarten story time, that “Islam is peace.”

But he was right to emphasize America’s tolerance and to draw a sharp line between Muslim terrorists and their law-abiding co-religionists.

Meanwhile, to listen to Obama -- say, in his famous Cairo address -- you’d think America has been at war with Islam for 30 years and only now, thanks to him, can we heal the rift. It’s an odd argument given that Americans have shed a lot of blood for Muslims over the last three decades: to end the slaughter of Muslims in the Balkans, to feed Somalis and to liberate Kuwaitis, Iraqis, and Afghanis. Millions of Muslims around the world would desperately like to move to the U.S., this supposed land of intolerance.

#page#Conversely, nowhere is there more open, honest, and intentional intolerance -- in words and deeds -- than from certain prominent Muslim leaders around the world. And yet, Americans are the bigots?

And when Muslim fanatics kill Americans -- after, say, the Fort Hood slaughter -- a reflexive response from the Obama administration is to fret over an anti-Islamic backlash.

#ad#Obama and Co. automatically proclaim that such orchestrated terrorist attacks are “isolated” events. But when it comes to mainstream Americans, veterans, Obamacare opponents or (shudder) tea partiers, there’s no generalization too broad or too insulting for the Left. 

It’s fine to avoid negative stereotypes of Muslims, but why the rush to embrace them when it comes to Americans?

And now, thanks to the entirely avoidable “Ground Zero mosque” controversy, we are again discussing America’s Islamophobia, which, according to Time magazine, is just another chapter in America’s history of intolerance.

When, pray tell, will Time magazine devote an issue to its, and this administration’s, intolerance of the American people?

— 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

The administration is tracking the number of jobs “created or saved,” but what about jobs destroyed?

The “Summer of Recovery” is looking more and more like the Beltway Chainsaw Massacre for America’s workers. As President Obama lolls on Martha’s Vineyard with his well-heeled Chicago pals, a new Reuters/Ipsos poll shows that 72 percent of people are very worried about joblessness and 67 percent are very concerned about massive government spending.

After a nearly $1 trillion in fiscal stimulus and several multi-billion-dollar corporate and union bailouts, unemployment remains stuck near 10 percent nationwide; jobless claims rose again last week. One shudders to think how many more jobs will be on the chopping block after the vacationing president finishes “recharging his batteries.”

#ad#The blame-avoidance industry, of course, never takes a break. Capitol Hill Democrats blame George W. Bush. President Obama blames inaction by the, er, Democrat-controlled Congress. On Tuesday, Vice President Joe Biden derided House Minority Leader John Boehner’s speech on the Obama job-killing machine as a return to the past. Biden sneered about the “good old days” when Republicans held the majority in Washington. But laid-off, unemployed, and endangered Americans in the health-care sector, the auto industry, and the oil, mining, gas, and fishing industries are no doubt wondering: What’s wrong with returning to the days when we had jobs and steady paychecks?

These are not the wealthy fat cats and Big Business titans Democrats love to demonize.

They’re employees of companies like Assurant Health, which announced last week that it would slash 130 jobs at its offices in Milwaukee and Plymouth, Minn., to prepare for costly Obamacare mandates.

They’re employees of medical-device firms in Massachusetts, where officials say they’ll be forced to cut back on operational costs and jobs thanks to a little-noticed Obamacare tax on their products that goes into effect in 2013.

They’re employees of such restaurants as White Castle and International House of Pancakes, whose executives say they will be forced into layoffs and premium hikes to cope with the federal law’s $3,000-per-employee penalty on companies whose workers pay more than 9.5 percent of household income in premiums for company-provided insurance.

They’re mom-and-pop enterprises across the country that must now deal with Obamacare’s onerous Section 9006 tax-filing mandate. It requires them to file 1099 forms with the IRS for every vendor from whom they purchase $600 or more in goods. Sen. Mike Johanns (R., Neb.) calls it one of many “job-crushing provisions” that will bury small business in paperwork and legal costs.

They’re the estimated 23,000 workers in the deepwater-drilling industry whom the White House deliberately wrote off in pursuit of its junk-science-based drilling moratorium.

They’re the estimated tens of thousands of workers employed by car dealers shut down by Obama’s auto czars at a time, as the TARP inspector general pointed out last month, “when the country was experiencing the worst economic downturn in generations and the government was asking its taxpayers to support a $787 billion stimulus package designed primarily to preserve jobs#...#all based on a theory and without sufficient consideration of the decisions’ broader economic impact.”

They’re employees of Utah oil and gas companies whose leases have been pulled without cause by Interior Secretary Ken Salazar. The Interior Department’s own inspector general rejected Salazar’s explanation that the Bush administration had rushed the leases through. The Deseret News reports that “rescinding these leases has likely cost the state millions already. Officials in Uintah county estimate the county lost 3,000 jobs in 2009, and Duchesne lost 1,000 jobs.”

They’re employees of commercial and recreational fishing businesses in New England, who have organized a flotilla on Martha’s Vineyard on Thursday to protest the Obama administration’s restrictive environmental policies and stealth regulatory ocean grab.

The White House has invested mightily in creating a propaganda infrastructure to tout its “jobs saved or created.” Taxpayers need a full, transparent accounting of how many jobs Team Obama has destroyed. Call it Wreckovery.gov.

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

Michelle Malkin

A federal court steps into the debate.

Monday’s decision from the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia halting all federal funding of embryonic stem-cell research is a surprising milestone in the decade-long debate over this morally fraught field -- and another opportunity to make the case that medical research must proceed hand-in-hand with respect for life and human dignity.

First, a little background. Human embryonic stem cells, which many scientists hope will someday lead to new therapies for a range of diseases, can be obtained only through the destruction of human embryos. But the Dickey-Wicker Amendment, which has been passed into law consistently since 1996 as part of the annual budget legislation, forbids federal funding for

(1) the creation of a human embryo or embryos for research purposes; or (2) research in which a human embryo or embryos are destroyed, discarded, or knowingly subjected to risk of injury or death.

#ad#In 1999, the general counsel of the Clinton administration’s Department of Health and Human Services argued that, consistent with the amendment, the government can fund research that uses stem cells derived from human embryos, so long as it does not fund the actual act of destroying those embryos. This way, the government technically does not fund research “in which” embryos are destroyed. President Clinton proposed to fund work that used lines of cells derived from the ongoing destruction of embryos, but to keep federal funds out of the specific process of destroying those embryos.

Whether or not it was a valid interpretation of the letter of the law, this proposal was certainly in violation of the spirit of the law. By essentially telling researchers, “if you destroy an embryo with your own money, then you will become eligible for federal funds,” Clinton’s proposed policy would have incentivized the destruction of human embryos.

That policy never actually took effect -- his administration ended before any funds flowed. When President Bush came to office, he decided that while it might be worthwhile to use some public funds to see where research on embryonic stem cells might go (and particularly to develop cells with the abilities of embryonic stem cells without destroying embryos), it was important not to use taxpayer dollars to encourage the destruction of developing human beings. Presuming the legal validity of the Clinton administration’s interpretation of the Dickey-Wicker Amendment, the Bush administration looked for a way to help scientists see where the research might go while not creating incentives for further embryo destruction.

In August 2001, Bush announced a compromise policy: He would use federal dollars to fund research on lines of cells derived from embryos that had been destroyed before his announcement, but not on any lines created after the announcement. That way, the availability of federal dollars would not act as an encouragement to destroy embryos in the future. This, Bush believed, was in line with both the letter and the spirit of the Dickey-Wicker Amendment.

Almost immediately, the Left attacked that policy, claiming that it was deceitful (not so), that it caused American researchers to fall behind the rest of the world (demonstrably false), and that it was part of a larger Republican “war on science” (ludicrous). To be sure, pro-life critics could truthfully criticize the Bush administration for not going far enough to protect human embryos. And scientists could correctly criticize the Bush policy for slowing somewhat the pace of their research -- moral restraints will have that effect. But imperfect though it was, the Bush policy was a reasonable compromise that promoted research without turning the destruction of human embryos into a national project.

#page#Believing that stem-cell research would be a wedge issue in their favor, Democrats overhyped it in the 2004 campaign. Four years later, candidate Barack Obama cast himself as a guardian of science -- and once inaugurated, he overturned the Bush policy on embryonic-stem-cell research. President Obama ordered the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to develop guidelines that would allow federal funding to flow to researchers working on stem-cell lines derived from the ongoing destruction (with the parents’ permission) of “spare” embryos frozen in IVF clinics -- essentially implementing the 1999 Clinton policy.

Monday’s court decision involved the legality of the Obama policy and the NIH guidelines. Two scientists whose work involves non-embryonic stem cells asked the court to enjoin the use of federal funds for embryonic-stem-cell research on the grounds that it violates the Dickey-Wicker Amendment. Mirroring Clinton’s argument, the Department of Health and Human Services responded that while the amendment prohibits “research in which a human embryo or embryos are destroyed,” the Obama plan funds only the research that occurs after the point of destruction.

#ad#In his ruling Monday, Judge Royce Lamberth of the U.S. District Court rejected the government’s reasoning. Embryonic-stem-cell research “is clearly research in which an embryo is destroyed,” since by definition it requires the destruction of human embryos. It makes no sense, the judge wrote, to claim that the destructive act and the experimentation on the resulting stem-cell lines are “separate and distinct ‘pieces of research.’” The fact that embryonic-stem-cell research “involves multiple steps does not mean that each step is a separate ‘piece of research’ that may be federally funded, provided the step does not result in the destruction of an embryo.” The judge issued a preliminary injunction halting all federal funding of embryonic-stem-cell research.

Judge Lamberth’s interpretation of the Dickey-Wicker Amendment is certainly in line with the original intent of the authors of that amendment, and with the understanding of the members of Congress who originally voted for it in 1996, even if the Clinton administration’s interpretation (which was then adopted by both the Bush and Obama administrations) is arguably reasonable in light of the meaning of the term “in which.” When the decision is appealed, the Obama administration will no doubt challenge the judge’s assertion of the unity of all stages of embryonic-stem-cell research. Is the judge right to conclude that any experimentation on embryonic stem cells is, in the eyes of the law, inseparable from a broader research project that implicates the destruction of an embryo? On the one hand, it is true that all research on embryonic stem cells was preceded by and is made possible by the destruction of an embryo; the two acts are morally entangled. It is certainly clear, moreover, that by offering taxpayer dollars for the research regardless of when the embryo was destroyed, the Obama policy (unlike the Bush policy) incentivizes new acts of embryo destruction.

But on the other hand, imagine a young scientist just beginning his career, experimenting on stem cells derived from embryos destroyed years earlier, on the other side of the country, when he was still in junior high. Is he morally culpable for the act of embryo destruction? Is he engaging in what the law would consider “research in which a human embryo or embryos are destroyed”? If so, then the last nine years of federal stem-cell-research funding policy -- under Bush as well as Obama -- has indeed been in violation of a law passed by Congress in each of those years.

Whichever way the matter is finally resolved in the courts, it is certainly a great improvement to be asking this question -- does the research being funded involve the destruction of human embryos? -- and presuming that if the answer is yes, then the research should not be funded, rather than debating whether the destruction of developing human lives is of any consequence, and whether it should be supported by taxpayer funds. Putting the question this way, and presuming the incalculable moral significance of human life, was certainly the intent of the Dickey-Wicker Amendment, and should be the aim of any decent society.

#page#But of course, the Obama administration and other champions of embryo-destructive research do not actually share this aim, and have always used the Clinton administration’s clever loophole as mere cover. They do in fact want to encourage the destruction of human embryos for research, and they know that the Obama policy (unlike the Bush policy) would do just that. Judge Lamberth has called their bluff.

#ad#If the political climate and schedule were different, we might expect Congress to step in -- perhaps with Democrats trying, as they have many times before, to knock the Dickey-Wicker Amendment out of the budget, or with both chambers moving on proposed legislation to fund embryonic-stem-cell research. But given the congressional calendar and the looming election, it is hard to imagine that Congress is going to do either -- or much of anything else -- during the remainder of the year. For the time being, this issue is one for the courts to decide and so, thanks to the Dickey-Wicker Amendment, the question is not whether human life is worth protecting but whether the government is going to sufficient lengths to protect it. It is a very good question.

-- Adam Keiper and Yuval Levin are fellows at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Keiper is the editor of The New Atlantis. Levin is the editor of National Affairs.

Adam Keiper Yuval Levin

Friends, I’ve just had a longish stretch in Salzburg, doing some work at the festival, and I thought I’d jot you some notes. I’m not going to throw any music criticism at you -- I’ll do some of that in the next National Review, and even more in the next New Criterion -- or rather, the October New Criterion. (In the September issue, I have a chronicle on the Mostly Mozart Festival, held here in New York.) But Salzburg is so rich and interesting, music aside, I thought I’d dilate a bit (“dilate” being one of the many words I associate with Bill Buckley).

(By the way, once I was heading off to Salzburg, and he said, “Say hello to music for me!” Quite possibly, he loved music more than words. Which reminds me: Vikram Seth, a walking literary genius among us, once wrote, “Music to me is dearer even than speech.”)

I should probably be mouthing off about war and peace, prosperity and poverty, Republicans and Democrats . . . But I’ve spent a career mouthing off about those. I think I’ll do Salzburg for a few days, and soon enough be back atop my soapbox.

#ad##*#What’s to like about Salzburg? Nothing. Unless you like glorious views, beautiful buildings, delicious food, pretty girls, high culture, first-class hiking . . . I could go on (and will). When I first went to Salzburg, I had a heretical thought -- heretical, because I was a student once in Florence, and was devoted to the place and its myth. (I do not mean “myth” in a bad sense.) My heretical thought was, “It’s as good as Florence.” I was later tempted to revise that to “better.”

#*#Have a picture -- just a little cellphone job: Salzburg near twilight, here.

#*#For several years, I stayed in a hotel just around the corner from the house in which Mozart was born. Now I stay just around the corner from the house where he grew up (on the other side of the river). I have never set foot in either place. Mozart resides in his music, really, not in those houses. You would think that historical curiosity would impel me -- but no. Don’t know why. Just down from the house in which Mozart grew up is the house in which Christian Doppler was born. Has no effect on me. (Buh-dum.)

#*#Walking on the Mönchsberg one morning, I see a couple of American girls, pedaling bikes. One, giddily, is singing, “Doe, a deer . . .” I wonder how many Americans have done that since The Sound of Music came out. Hundreds? Thousands?

#*#Stephen Costello, an American tenor, tells me he has taken the Sound of Music tour. “Not worth it,” is his verdict.

#*#Many Austrians -- many Salzburgers -- I have met over the years pride themselves on their indifference to, and ignorance of, The Sound of Music. They even profess not to know the song “Edelweiss.” Maybe they’re telling the truth.

#*#As the festival unfolds, I meet quite a few readers of National Review, and of The New Criterion. I meet them as I’m conducting public interviews, attending dinners -- just making the rounds. Some people are closeted: are closet conservatives. Their eyes dart around as they whisper, “Actually, I read you on politics, not just on music.” But others are out and proud. One couple comes to one of the interviews. The husband says, “I just wanted to see what you looked like!” I say, “I could have sent you a picture -- you didn’t have to come all the way to Salzburg.” (Again, buh-dum.)

#*#Daniel Barenboim is ever political -- and, naturally, Salzburg has invited him to give a speech: not just to conduct an orchestra or play the piano, but give a speech. Barenboim is the type to give a speech anyway. He says in Salzburg, “Music is anything but an ivory tower.” What he means is, “I’m going to mouth off, and you’re going to listen -- just because I was born with musical talent, though I may not have a political brain in my head.” According to a paper, Barenboim tells the crowd, “If Israel honestly wants peace -- a real, lasting peace and not just a superficial one which creates a platform for vague negotiations -- then, in order to move towards Palestine, it will have to acknowledge all the factions that exist there.” I guess he means Hamas.

Oh, Israel acknowledges Hamas, all right: acknowledges that Hamas is dedicated to killing as many Israelis as it can, before it destroys the entire state. Sometimes clarity of thought means that you recognize when a person or group is unappeasable.

#*#Would you like a definition of “safe”? I offer one: “Knocking Israel to an audience in Austria.”

#*#I’m glad to see Angela Merkel attending a concert. She’s just there, another face in the crowd. No fuss, no muss. Later, a festival official tells me that the chancellor had only two bodyguards with her: two. Contrariwise, Hillary Clinton, when she was First Lady, practically shut the place down, with her security.

Well, maybe we overdo it. But when there’s a problem: It appears we underdo it. These are tricky questions.

#page##*#I’m glad to see Alfred Brendel attending an opera -- a new opera by Wolfgang Rihm. Brendel, a legendary pianist, is retired now (pretty much). He is not performing in Salzburg this year, as far as I know. He’s just in attendance -- which is kind of neat, for reasons I need not lay out. (Brendel does not need to be in the spotlight to attend the Salzburg Festival. He is apparently a musically curious person, and a music-loving one.) (“But aren’t they all?” you say. No.)

#*#At a social function, I meet a young Turkish musician -- someone new to me. There have not been many Turks in the realm of classical music. I can think of two off the top of my head: Leyla Gencer, the fabled soprano. (They called her the “Queen of the Pirates,” because she did not make many commercial recordings, but was heard on plenty of illicit, or “pirate,” recordings.) And Fazil Say, a pianist of today.

Anyway, I mention to this fellow that I have interviewed Erdogan. He makes a face. I see it’s okay to enter political waters. We are on the same beam. He says he is appalled by what Erdogan and his gang are doing to Turkey. “They are destroying the country that Ataturk built. They are forcing us into reverse.” I don’t mean to be too cutesy with language, but a veil is being drawn over Turkey -- and this has serious consequences for the region, for the United States, and, most of all, for Turks (and for Turkish women in particular).

I could go on about Turkey, and about this conversation, but . . .

#*#May I say something about the attractiveness of the Salzburgers -- of the Austrians in general? I noticed something, when I first visited -- this was some years ago. Even the policewomen were beautiful. Or at least the type to hold your gaze. And policewomen are supposed to be . . . otherwise. (Except for Angie Dickinson.)

You would not use the term “meter hag” in Salzburg. (You should not use it anywhere, of course.) For one thing, there are no meters (that I’ve noticed). For another, there are no hags -- or darn few.

I once made a terrible remark -- but its terribleness will not stop me from repeating it: “You can almost forgive them for considering themselves a master race.” I said almost.

I have never seen so many beautiful older women as in Salzburg and environs -- and by “older,” I don’t mean “cougars.” I mean grandmothers, great-grandmothers -- women in their 70s, 80s, and 90s. Such striking-looking women. I have seen too many of them for this to be a matter of a few, anomalous individuals. Pattern City, as the first Bush might say.

#*#I mentioned the police, above -- the fuzz. And I know I have said, in previous columns, that certain German words are stigmatized for me: Achtung, for example. I must say that the word Polizei still creeps me out a little, when I see it on the sides of cars. I mentally put a Volks in front of it . . .

#*#One morning, I interview Emily Righter, a young American singer -- at the beginning of her career. She is the daughter of a basketball coach -- and was a basketball player herself. She is 5’11”, and simply looks athletic, if you can look it (and, of course, you can). I ask her, “Are you a good athlete? Don’t be modest, now -- just tell us.” She says, “Yeah.” I’m grateful for her candor. She’s also a completely winning personality.

She has told us that, when she was ten, she auditioned for -- and got -- Annie (the part, I mean, in the musical). At the end of our interview, knowing that she’s game for most anything, I ask if she will sing for our audience “Tomorrow.” And she does, beautifully. What a sport, what a winner.

#*#Two days later, she participates in a master class with Christa Ludwig, one of the great singers . . . ever. Ludwig is in her 80s now. She has a lot to impart. I miss the master class, having another engagement. But if you ever have a chance to see/hear/experience Ludwig -- count yourself blessed.

#*#Talking about singing “Tomorrow” reminds me of an old joke: A father is tired of hearing his daughter sing, ineptly, around the house. He says, “Can you sing long ago and far away?” (There was a song called “Long Ago (and Far Away).”)

#*#Years ago, I had a golf partner who said, “I’ll meet you at 8 bells,” or, “We’re teeing it up at 8 bells -- be there.” “Bells” was his expression, for time. In Salzburg, I think of this: because church bells, outside my window, chime the hour -- I mean peal the hour, practically assail the hour -- all day long: from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. And, for sheer punctiliousness, they ring the quarter hours: one ring for :15, two for :30, and three for :45.

It’s nice and all, but I think of a line from a hymn: “O, the clanging bells of time, / Soon their notes will all be dumb.”

Amen.

#*#I’ve got loads more to tell you, but I think that’s enough for today -- for one installment. How many will there be? At least two more -- maybe three. Let me leave you with a little snap of the Festung -- the Festung as seen from elsewhere on the Mönchsberg. Isn’t a writer supposed to write, rather than show pictures? Yes, but I wanted to save you a thousand words. Anyway -- here you go.


#JAYBOOK#

Jay Nordlinger

From the Aug. 30, 2010, issue of NR.

In July, the Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 103 in Bay City, Mich., used funds from its dues-paying members to erect a pair of billboards -- one on Saginaw and Columbus, another on Euclid near Fisher -- designed to instill fear in the 35,000 Michiganders the union’s officers were sworn to protect.

The billboards warned that unlike Bay City’s finest, city hall couldn’t prevent residents from being “Beaten,” “Shot,” “Stabbed,” or “Robbed,” and confronted passers-by with an image of a masked man pointing an automatic pistol at them.

#ad#City commissioners, facing a $1.66 million budget deficit, had asked the city’s eight public-sector unions -- which include two separate Teamsters locals -- to shed 10.8 percent in labor costs to avoid job losses. Only the firemen met the July 1 deadline for the cuts, having struck a tentative deal at the eleventh hour. The other seven were hit with layoffs -- including the police, who saw five officers pulled from their force of 57, and who were given until the end of August to ratify new contracts if they didn’t want the reduction in force to become permanent.

It’s a story that is playing itself out in cities, counties, and states across the country. Hoboken, N.J., is planning to lay off 18 cops, eliminate top-brass positions, and civilianize a number of non-patrol police functions. Akron, Ohio, is eliminating holiday overtime pay for emergency-service workers and reassigning a number of police to school districts, where costs can be “shared.” East St. Louis, Ill., one of America’s most dangerous cities, is trying to stave off police and fire reductions in force with accounting tricks such as salary deferrals. In perhaps the most dramatic example, the gang-ridden city of Oakland, Calif., laid off 80 police officers -- a full 10 percent of its force -- in an effort to balance the city budget.

Everywhere, cash-strapped councils and legislatures in the second year of post-crisis America are struggling to bring outlays in line with a shrunken and stagnant revenue base after decades of metastasizing growth in public-sector labor costs. And they are being forced to take a hard look at their salary and pension obligations to police and firefighters -- obligations that are both prime drivers of structural deficits and as close a thing as there is in local governance to a sacred cow.

And the fuzz aren’t taking it lying down. In Akron, Fraternal Order of Police local president Paul Hlynsky has engaged in a public war of words with mayor Don Plusquellic, accusing him of lying and negotiating in bad faith. In a move to rival that of the Bay City police union, Oakland police chief Anthony Batts responded to the layoffs by ticking off a list of 44 situations to which his reduced force would no longer be able to respond -- and it wasn’t just cats up trees and noise-ordinance violations. The list included felonies like burglary and grand theft, extortion and fraud.

#page#Throughout these crises, the unions have succeeded in casting the choice as one between public safety and layoffs, avoiding reductions in, or even talk of, their extravagant compensation packages.

According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, in 2008, state and local governments spent $1.1 trillion on public-employee compensation, a number that accounts for fully one-half of their total spending. State and local employees earn, hour for hour, 34 percent more in wages than do workers in the private sector, and enjoy far more generous health-insurance, sick-leave, and pension benefits.

#ad#The public/private disparity is especially stark when one focuses on public-safety compensation in places such as Oakland; police and firemen have accounted for about 75 percent of expenditures from the city’s general fund over the last five years. Average total compensation for an officer in Oakland -- a city in which the median family earns $47,000 -- is $162,000 per year.

As with most public-sector workers, a major -- and opaque -- piece of emergency-services compensation comes in the form of lifelong pensions.

“Public-safety workers tend to receive the most generous public-employee pensions,” says Josh Barro, a Manhattan Institute fellow and expert on state and local finance. “They are based on a significantly shorter career -- it is not atypical to see police and fire pensions based on 20 years of service -- and they also tend to be more generous as a percentage of salary.”

Other laws make the payouts even more generous. In New York, for instance, a “presumptive disability” law makes it easy for firemen to secure lifetime, tax-free pensions at three-quarters pay; when examining a fireman for the purpose of determining whether he has a work-related disability, a doctor is required to start with the assumption that certain illnesses are job-related even if there is no evidence that they are. A fireman from a Bronx ladder company who develops a lung disorder will qualify for disability retirement even if it’s unclear whether he developed his impairment from smoke inhalation on the job, or from his two-pack-a-day cigarette habit.

The “presumptive disability” bonanza is sometimes exacerbated by abuse. In July, the New York Post told the story of John C. McLaughlin, a 55-year-old former FDNY lieutenant who retired in 2001 with an $86,000-a-year disability pension, after it was determined that he was an asthmatic with diminished lung capacity. This despite the fact that McLaughlin is an accomplished triathlete who regularly competes in long-distance races.

McLaughlin is hardly alone. An astonishing 80 percent of 2010 FDNY retirees have qualified for disability benefits.

#page#How did police and fire unions score such a sweet deal? Part of it is institutional. Since public-safety unions can, by law, virtually never strike, nearly all of them take advantage of their right to force “interest arbitration,” wherein an ostensibly neutral third party settles contract disputes between labor and government. As such arrangements became commonplace through the 20th century, police and fire unions began to see their compensation rise faster than that of non-uniformed public employees. The availability of legally binding arbitration meant that unions had less incentive to deal directly with their government employers, while elected officials facing angry voters could blame expensive settlements on the imposition of the arbitrators.

#ad#The effect of forced arbitration on the fiscal health of local government is starkly illustrated in a recent comparative study of Fairfax County, Va., and Montgomery County, Md., undertaken in a refreshing Washington Post staff editorial from May:

Virginia law denies public employees collective bargaining rights; that’s helped Fairfax resist budget-busting wage and benefit demands. As revenue dipped two years ago, Fairfax officials froze all salaries for county government and school employees with little ado. By contrast, Montgomery leaders were badly equipped to cope with recession. County Executive Isiah Leggett took office proposing fat budgets and negotiating openhanded union deals.#...#Then, as economic storm clouds gathered, he shifted gears and cut spending -- while still trying to appease the unions.

Notoriously, one such deal guaranteed almost $300 million in pension benefits over 40 years to thousands of employees based on salary increases they never received. The giveaway became known as “Phantom COLAs,” for the cost-of-living raises that were never paid. And even when Montgomery’s teachers agreed to give up cost-of-living raises last year, about two-thirds of them continued to receive step increases of up to 4 percent.

As a result of their different collective-bargaining policies, the two demographically similar jurisdictions have “parted ways.” Montgomery County is “lurching under the weight of irresponsible governance, unsustainable commitments and political spinelessness,” while Fairfax, “though facing tough choices[,]#...#has a brighter future.”

But beyond institutions, political -- and even cultural -- norms play a role in the special status of police and fire compensation. For one thing, cops and firemen are swing voters.

“Their unions are more powerful in the sense that they are more politically heterodox,” says Barro. “Teachers’ unions are nearly unanimous in their political support for Democratic officeholders. Fire and police unions split their loyalties more, and are therefore in a better position to extract support from politicians.”

“Republicans don’t view it as a waste of time to try to make police unions happy,” he adds.

#page#And if public-safety workers are split in their political allegiances, the elected class is unified in its deference to men and women in uniform, especially after a decade whose defining acts of heroism were performed by cops and firemen from New York and New Jersey. Politicians are loath to be seen as trying to nickel-and-dime our heroes.

Legislators have been able to see the sense through the sentimentality before, most notably in the case of education policy, where the elite consensus -- from editorial boards to the Obama administration -- is moving away from teacher hero-worship and the fetishization of things like class size (a preoccupation that happened to pad the coffers of the unions) and toward teacher accountability. But fiscal crisis notwithstanding, this has yet to happen in public safety.

#ad#Instead, public-safety unions have been able to buffalo the public into thinking that keeping the peace requires breaking the bank. What the public sees is scary billboards and lists of unenforceable statutes, and not, for instance, the fact that the Oakland Police Department backed out of a job-saving deal that would have required officers to make a mere 9 percent pension contribution, because the city could guarantee only one year, and not three, without further layoffs.

That police unions say they want to avoid layoffs yet act so as to make them necessary should leave little doubt that their priority is to preserve the privileges of their vested senior members at the expense of both the rookies who are usually first out the door and the communities they serve.

In solving the immediate crisis posed by the unions’ intransigence, state and local governments facing structural deficits must be allowed to lower labor costs without endangering public safety -- by reducing compensation across the board instead of laying off staff. In most jurisdictions, governments can’t renegotiate the terms of existing union contracts, even in fiscal emergencies. This must change. Better yet, states should follow the lead of Virginia and ban collective bargaining by public employees.

We must take care that public-safety workers are not allowed to hide behind the badge. That they are our heroes does not excuse them from taking part in the difficult choices that must be made to restore solvency to state and local governments. If the unions won’t let them, and the elected class won’t make them, then the citizenry must shame them. Somebody must watch the watchmen.

— Daniel Foster is news editor of NRO. This article first appeared in the Aug. 30, 2010, issue of National Review.

Daniel Foster

With a word on <i>Atlas Shrugged</i> in the contemporary scene.

In writing “The Greatly Ghastly Rand” for NR’s current print issue, I wanted to evaluate Ayn Rand foremost as an artist, applying the simple standard, “Does this inspire me? Do I like what this woman is showing me of her soul?” This is more or less the standard Rand would have applied to herself. As I noted, she asserts in her Fountainhead introduction that her purpose as a writer is “the projection of an ideal man.” She goes on to explain that “any didactic, intellectual or philosophical values” in her novels are only a means to that end, and that her goal “is not the philosophical enlightenment of my readers” but “the portrayal of Howard Roark [or the heroes of Atlas Shrugged]” -- Rand’s brackets; she is quoting herself -- “as an end in himself.”

#ad#Whittaker Chambers, in reviewing Atlas Shrugged, was instead concerned with Rand as a political thinker. He is fairly explicit about this: “Atlas Shrugged can be called a novel only by devaluing the term. It is a massive tract for the times. Its story merely serves Miss Rand to get the customers inside the tent, and as a soapbox for delivering her Message.” He then details his objections to the Message -- and here I think he does her an injustice.

The crucial passage:

It is when a system of materialist ideas [Chambers has just claimed that Rand presents “a forthright philosophic materialism”] presumes to give positive answers to real problems of our real life that mischief starts. In an age like ours, in which a highly complex technological society is everywhere in a high state of instability, such answers, however philosophic, translate quickly into political realities. And in the degree to which problems of complexity and instability are most bewildering to masses of men, a temptation sets in to let some species of Big Brother solve and supervise them.

One Big Brother is, of course, a socializing elite (as we know, several cut-rate brands are on the shelves). Miss Rand, as the enemy of any socializing force, calls in a Big Brother of her own contriving to do battle with the other. In the name of free enterprise, therefore, she plumps for a technocratic elite (I find no more inclusive word than technocratic to bracket the industrial-financial-engineering caste she seems to have in mind). When she calls “productive achievement” “man’s noblest activity,” she means, almost exclusively, technological achievement, supervised by such a managerial political bureau. She might object that she means much, much more; and we can freely entertain her objections. But, in sum, that is just what she means. For that is what, in reality, it works out to. And in reality, too, by contrast with fiction, this can only head into a dictatorship, however benign, living and acting beyond good and evil, a law unto itself.

The basic error is to say that Rand wants her own species of Big Brother to “solve and supervise” the problems of complexity and instability. This simply is not so. It is true that her “prime movers” withdraw from society in order to effectuate the collapse of the “looters”; in this sense they “do battle” with the “socializing elite.” But they fight precisely against the idea that any person or persons should be granted Big Brotherly responsibilities. They oppose, precisely, the “suprevis[ion]” of a “managerial political bureau.” Their message throughout, to borrow Rand’s formulation, is: “Hands off!”

#page#
Chambers is fair enough to continue: “Of course, Miss Rand nowhere calls for a dictatorship. I take her to be calling for an aristocracy of talents. We cannot labor here why, in the modern world, the pre-conditions for aristocracy, an organic growth, no longer exist, so that the impulse toward aristocracy always emerges now in the form of dictatorship.” But I think he is still mistaken, and his diction misleading. Aristocracy is an arrangement in which certain persons have a political right to rule other persons exploitatively. Any such arrangement would be abhorrent to Rand’s heroes. It will admittedly be the case, in a free society of freely transacting individuals, that those of superior talent enjoy a greater share of material abundance and influence. This outcome will be, in fact, an organic growth. But it is far from aristocracy, and to wield influence is not to rule. Chambers’s elision of these ideas is a surprising piece of sloppiness from so intelligent a writer.

#ad#There is an argument to be made that the line between the informal influence of a Google Inc. and the formal power of a “managerial political bureau” is becoming ever blurrier, but Chambers does not make it or anticipate it. Instead he holds that capitalism is necessarily materialist and that a “materialism of the Right” must culminate in something like Hitler’s National Socialism. I believe those claims to be false, and Chambers’s whole way of thinking about these issues strikes me as quaintly Marxian -- in both its conception of capitalism and its invocation of historical inevitability. The latter pops up again and again throughout the review, every time Chambers says, effectively, “I don’t care what she claims to advocate -- this is what it must come to in practice (but you’ll have to take my word for it).”

While I find Rand’s evangelistic atheism off-putting in the extreme, I believe Chambers is also wrong to claim that her system is “a forthright philosophic materialism.” Insofar as I am familiar with her writings and public statements, she had nothing kind to say about materialists. Certainly she rejected much that conventionally accompanies materialism; for example, she believed in the freedom of the will in contradistinction to causal determinism. And a minor theme of Atlas Shrugged is that its heroes, though denounced as materialists, are more capable of enjoying spiritual pleasures (“spiritual” here understood in a non-religious sense -- she has in mind the capacity e.g. to love, or to feel profound aesthetic appreciation) than are their denouncers. I think the correct assessment is that Rand rejected any division at all between body and mind, material and spiritual (another instance of her indebtedness to Nietzsche, which Chambers perceptively noted). Here is one of Atlas Shrugged’s heroes, Henry Rearden, making the point, as he realizes that he was wrong to accept the label “materialist” and feel guilty for being one:

I damned the fact that my mind and body were a unit, and that my body responded to the values of my mind. I damned the fact that joy is the core of existence, the motive power of every living being, that it is the need of one’s body as it is the goal of one’s spirit, that my body was not a weight of inanimate muscles, but an instrument able to give me an experience of superlative joy to unite my flesh and my spirit.

Despite his errors, Chambers succeeded brilliantly in diagnosing Rand’s attitude. He is absolutely right that the book’s “dictatorial tone” is “much its most striking feature.” He is right about its “overriding arrogance,” its “shrillness,” its “dogmatism.” He is right that Rand tends to think “little about people as people,” but “a great deal in labels and effigies.” And I would go so far as to say that Rand, given the chance, might well have been a totalitarian. More: She might have felt -- as Chambers puts it -- that “right reason itself” enjoined her tyranny. The crudity of her reasoning, and her use of it to justify her hatreds, is on prominent display in the gas-chamber scene I discuss in my essay. All of the train’s passengers are deemed “responsible” and even “guilty” for the regnant political order, and therefore deserving of their deaths, even though the degree to which they could in fact have been responsible or guilty is highly variable: A playwright and a mother married to a low- or mid-level bureaucrat (as well as her children!) are lumped together with a high government official. Rand enjoys killing them all.

#page#
Yes, Ayn Rand had the temperament of a totalitarian. But to make this criticism fairly, one must concede that insofar as that temperament became dominant -- as it did in her private conduct befitting a cult leader -- it would not have been in harmony with her philosophy.

***

A final, brief word about Atlas Shrugged in the contemporary political scene. There are indeed parallels. For example, Henry Rearden, who owns steel mills and has invented a new alloy, is required by the government to sell his eponymous metal to all comers. This is not exactly the same as, but not altogether different from, our government’s command that health insurers provide coverage to all. Or consider this bit of dialogue:

“They’re not laws, they’re directives.”

“Then it’s illegal.”

“It’s not illegal, because the Legislature passed a law last month giving him the power to issue directives.”

#ad#The characters could easily be talking about our treasury secretary’s vast to-be-specified powers under the new financial-regulation bill -- or any other “progressive” law empowering a regulatory class to legislate.

In some of its satire as well -- and Rand can be quite funny as a satirist -- Atlas Shrugged seems timely. “An atmosphere suggesting the kind of meeting where a presiding body puts something over on a mentally retarded membership” could serve as a characterization of Nancy Pelosi’s procedural gymnastics; its hyperbole would emphasize an important truth.

But the parallels should not be overstated. There are two huge differences between our world and the world of Atlas Shrugged. The first is one of degree: Rand’s looters are trying to Sovietize the United States, whereas Obama & Co. would be content to remake us as a European-style social democracy. There are good reasons to object to both, but it would be a tremendous mistake to ignore the differences between them, and promoters of Atlas Shrugged should be consciously on guard against implying that Obama favors the former.

The second difference is one of motive. There is no room at all in Atlas Shrugged for the idea that its policymakers are acting on good-hearted but misguided principles. They are parasites, plain and simple, aware of their evil even if they take pains to hide it from themselves (this in fact confirms their awareness), which is why Rand is happy to hurl them all -- if I may quote Chambers a final time -- into “one undifferentiated damnation.”

Quite apart from its colossal artistic defects, then, Atlas Shrugged’s power as an anthem against President Obama’s agenda seems to me to be highly limited, and I think those of us who oppose that agenda would be unwise to push it as our manifesto.

— Jason Lee Steorts is managing editor of National Review.

Jason Lee Steorts

It can’t be done without confronting mainstream Islam and its sharia agenda.

‘Secularism can never enjoy a general acceptance in an Islamic society.” The writer was not one of those sulfurous Islamophobes decried by CAIR and the professional Left. Quite the opposite: It was Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the Muslim Brotherhood’s spiritual guide and a favorite of the Saudi royal family. He made this assertion in his book, How the Imported Solutions Disastrously Affected Our Ummah, an excerpt of which was published by the Saudi Gazette just a couple of months ago.

This was Qaradawi the “progressive” Muslim intellectual, much loved by Georgetown University’s burgeoning Islamic-studies programs. Like Harvard, Georgetown has been purchased into submission by tens of millions of Saudi petrodollars. In its resulting ardor to put Americans at ease about Islam, the university somehow manages to look beyond Qaradawi’s fatwas calling for the killing of American troops in Iraq and for suicide bombings in Israel. Qaradawi, they tell us, is a “moderate.” In fact, as Robert Spencer quips, if you were to say Islam and secularism cannot co-exist, John Esposito, Georgetown’s apologist-in-chief, would call you an Islamophobe; but when Qaradawi says it, no problem -- according to Esposito, he’s a “reformist.”

And he’s not just any reformist. Another Qaradawi fan, Feisal Rauf, the similarly “moderate” imam behind the Ground Zero mosque project, tells us Qaradawi is also “the most well-known legal authority in the whole Muslim world today.”

#ad#Rauf is undoubtedly right about that. So it is worth letting it sink in that this most influential of Islam’s voices, this promoter of the Islamic enclaves the Brotherhood is forging throughout the West, is convinced that Islamic societies can never accept secularism. After all, secularism is nothing less than the framework by which the West defends religious freedom but denies legal and political authority to religious creeds.

It is also worth understanding why Qaradawi says Islam and secularism cannot co-exist. The excerpt from his book continues:

As Islam is a comprehensive system of worship (Ibadah) and legislation (Shari’ah), the acceptance of secularism means abandonment of Shari’ah, a denial of the divine guidance and a rejection of Allah’s injunctions. It is indeed a false claim that Shari’ah is not proper to the requirements of the present age. The acceptance of a legislation formulated by humans means a preference of the humans’ limited knowledge and experiences to the divine guidance: “Say! Do you know better than Allah?” (Qur’an, 2:140) For this reason, the call for secularism among Muslims is atheism and a rejection of Islam. Its acceptance as a basis for rule in place of Shari’ah is downright apostasy.

Apostasy is an explosive accusation. On another occasion, Sheikh Qaradawi explained that “Muslim jurists are unanimous that apostates must be punished.” He further acknowledged that the consensus view of these jurists, including the principal schools of both Sunni and Shiite jurisprudence, is “that apostates must be executed.”

Qaradawi’s own view is more nuanced, as he explained to the Egyptian press in 2005. This, I suppose, is where his vaunted reformist streak comes in. For private apostasy, in which a Muslim makes a secret, personal decision to renounce tenets of Islam and quietly goes his separate way without causing a stir, the sheikh believes ostracism by the Islamic community is a sufficient penalty, with the understanding that Allah will condemn the apostate to eternal damnation at the time of his choosing. For public apostasy, however, Qaradawi stands with the overwhelming weight of Islamic authority: “The punishment . . .  is execution.”

The sad fact, the fact no one wants to deal with but which the Ground Zero mosque debate has forced to the fore, is that Qaradawi is a moderate. So is Feisal Rauf, who endorses the Qaradawi position -- the mainstream Islamic position -- that sharia is a nonnegotiable requirement. Rauf wins the coveted “moderate” designation because he strains, at least when speaking for Western consumption, to paper over the incompatibility between sharia societies and Western societies.

#page#Qaradawi and Rauf are “moderates” because we’ve abandoned reason. Our opinion elites are happy to paper over the gulf between “reformist” Islam and the “reformist” approval of mass-murder attacks. That’s why it matters not a whit to them that Imam Rauf refuses to renounce Hamas: If you’re going to give a pass to Qaradawi, the guy who actively promotes Hamas terrorists, how can you complain about a guy who merely refuses to condemn the terrorists?

When we are rational, we have confidence in our own frame of reference. We judge what is moderate based on a detached, commonsense understanding of what “moderate” means. We’re not rigging the outcome; we just want to know where we stand.

If we were in that objective frame of mind, we would easily see that a freedom culture requires separation of the spiritual from the secular. We would also see that sharia -- with dictates that contradict liberty and equality while sanctioning cruel punishments and holy war -- is not moderate. Consequently, no one who advocates sharia can be a moderate, no matter how well-meaning he may be, no matter how heartfelt may be his conviction that this is God’s will, and no matter how much higher on the food chain he may be than Osama bin Laden.

Instead, abandoning reason, we have deep-sixed our own frame of reference and substituted mainstream Islam’s. If that backward compass is to be our guide, then sure, Qaradawi and Rauf are moderates. But know this: When you capitulate to the authority and influence of Qaradawi and Rauf, you kill meaningful Islamic reform.

There is no moderate Islam in the mainstream of Muslim life, not in the doctrinal sense. There are millions of moderate Muslims who crave reform. Yet the fact that they seek real reform, rather than what Georgetown is content to call reform, means they are trying to invent something that does not currently exist.

#ad#Real reform can also be found in some Muslim sects. The Ahmadi, for example, hold some unorthodox views and reject violent jihad. Witness what happens: They are brutally persecuted by Muslims in Pakistan, as well as in Indonesia and other purported hubs of moderation.

Meanwhile, individual Muslim reformers are branded apostates, meaning not only that they are discredited, but that their lives are threatened as well. The signal to other Muslims is clear: Follow the reformers and experience the same fury. As Qaradawi put it in the 2005 interview, public apostates are “the gravest danger” to Islamic society; therefore, Muslims must snuff them out, lest their reforms “spread like wildfire in a field of thorns.”

Today, “moderate Islam” is an illusion. There is hardly a spark, much less a wildfire. Making moderation real will take more than wishing upon a star. It calls for a gut check, a willingness to face down not just al-Qaeda but the Qaradawis and their sharia campaign. It means saying: Not here.

— Andrew C. McCarthy, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, is the author, most recently, of The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America.

Andrew C. McCarthy

The Obama administration fesses up to another bank bailout under HAMP.

Can I let you in on something hilarious going around the Internet these days? No, I’m not talking about the Double Rainbow video. I’m talking about the reaction -- just as amusing, though not nearly as joyful -- of a number of left-wing political bloggers and commentators to the discovery that the administration’s foreclosure-mitigation program was actually a slow-motion bailout for Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and the banks, and not really designed to help underwater borrowers at all. Imagine Neo’s reaction when he’s told what the Matrix is, only pretend that the Matrix was something that was obvious all along, and you’ll get why I’m laughing.

The program’s intention was clear from the outset, as the editors of National Review Online noted when it was announced 18 months ago:

So, cui bono? Put simply, this program is designed to benefit Fannie and Freddie shareholders, not the great majority of Americans struggling with their mortgages. The only loans that can be restructured are those held in Fannie/Freddie portfolios or securitized by the twins. Just in time to benefit from a refinancing boom, Fannie and Freddie plan to raise their fees to as high as 3.5 percent on April 1. (Note that date, taxpayers, and ask yourselves who is being played for the fool.) And only a tiny slice of homeowners will be eligible — those who are in relatively weak positions (house payments exceed 31 percent of gross income) but not too weak (house payments do not exceed 38 percent of gross income) and who are, despite their mortgage difficulties, still creditworthy enough to pass bank underwriting standards. Fannie and Freddie get new capital, new income, and better loans in their portfolios. Most homeowners get nothing, and taxpayers get the bill.

At the time, a lot of supporters of the administration argued that only heartless Republicans and conservatives would oppose such a well-intentioned and generous program to keep struggling borrowers in their homes. The plan was the subject of CNBC commentator Rick Santelli’s famous rant, which drew angry condemnation from liberals and kicked off the tea-party movement that continues to drive them insane.

It turns out that conservatives were right: The program was full of bad incentives for borrowers and backdoor bailouts for banks. Neil Barofsky, the special investigator in charge of overseeing TARP spending, recently blasted the Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP): “The American people are essentially being asked to shoulder an additional $50 billion of national debt without being told . . . how many people Treasury hopes to actually help stay in their homes as a result of these expenditures,” Barofsky’s report stated. The report also noted that HAMP “has not put an appreciable dent in foreclosure filings,” because, among other reasons, “the number of trial and permanent modifications that have been cancelled substantially exceeds the number of homeowners helped through permanent modifications.”

But the real eye-opener for left-wing supporters of the program came when a handful of financial bloggers posted write-ups of their visit to the Treasury Department last week. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and Co. had invited these bloggers to a private briefing as part of the department’s outreach efforts leading up to its big seminar on the future of housing finance. One of the subjects the bloggers and the Treasury officials discussed was HAMP. According to blogger Steve Waldman’s write-up, Treasury officials were “surprisingly candid” about the program’s failures:

The program has gotten a lot of bad press in terms of its Kafka-esque qualification process and its limited success in generating mortgage modifications under which families become able and willing to pay their debt. Officials pointed out that what may have been an agonizing process for individuals was a useful palliative for the system as a whole. Even if most HAMP applicants ultimately default, the program prevented an outbreak of foreclosures exactly when the system could have handled it least. There were murmurs among the bloggers of “extend and pretend”, but I don’t think that’s quite right. This was extend-and-don’t-even-bother-to-pretend. The program was successful in the sense that it kept the patient alive until it had begun to heal. And the patient of this metaphor was not a struggling homeowner, but the financial system, a.k.a. the banks.

In a word, duh. It’s not like no one saw this coming. We did (see above). But here’s the funny part: Many left-wing commentators apparently trusted the administration’s good intentions to the point of being “shocked” by these revelations.

#page#Duncan Black, who blogs as Atrios, wrote, “Conning homeowners by announcing a government program designed to help them when in fact it was designed to help the banksters is, in my world, ‘cruel.’”

Mike Konczal at Rortybomb, who attended the briefing, wrote, “The narrative seemed to change from helping homeowners to spacing out the foreclosures. I asked them to repeat it, because the idea that billions of taxpayer dollars are being spent to smooth out foreclosures for banks struck me as new narrative -- it’s explicitly extend-and-pretend, and also fairly cynical.”

But my favorite was economist/blogger Brad DeLong, who summed up his blindsided take with the headline: “Department of ‘Huh?!’: HAMP Edition.”

Huh? What? Obama effectuated a “cynical” and “cruel” bailout of Fannie and Freddie under the guise of a compassionate mortgage-modification program? The mind reels! The heart aches! What else has he lied to us about?

It’s actually worse than all that. The administration’s program created an incentive for underwater borrowers who weren’t yet behind on their mortgage payments to fall behind on purpose in order to qualify for a modification under HAMP. An aide to a Republican congressman tells NRO, “People who could have made their mortgage payments end up three months behind, and they can never recover from the penalties and late fees, so they end up in worse shape than if the program had never existed from the outset.”

The aide, who works on constituent issues, says, “I’ve had at least one case where the person gets a letter saying that they qualify for HAMP, and from their point of view, it would really help them out if they were able to qualify for a lower payment, but if they had to make the payment they were making, they could have done it by cutting back on other parts of their life.

“Then at the end of the process, they’re denied the modification, and they’re three months behind on their mortgage,” he says.

Why have so many been denied modifications? According to ProPublica’s Ryan Knutson, it’s because “the Treasury Department . . . encouraged banks to start trials quickly, causing banks to make trial offers to people without fully vetting their eligibility, and ultimately letting in many homeowners who were destined to fail.”

But from the banks’ point of view, even if many of these borrowers end up in foreclosure, at least the program juiced a few trial payments out of those who had stopped making payments altogether. And it eased the crush of foreclosures for awhile, giving Fannie, Freddie, and other financial institutions room to breathe. It was designed, as Treasury officials are now candidly admitting, to help banks, not homeowners. Supporters of the program are shocked by this turn of events. They wouldn’t be, if they had listened to us.

-- Stephen Spruiell is a National Review Online staff reporter.

Stephen Spruiell

Unlike prior presidents, Obama remains an enigma to the public.

There was a time when Barack Obama disavowed his middle name, Hussein. During the 2008 campaign, Obama’s aides bristled even at references to him by his initials BHO, so sensitive were they to the offending “H.”

Then, after he won the election, he proudly brandished his middle name as evidence of his connection to the Muslim world and of America’s tolerant embrace of people with even the most exotic backgrounds. With new polls showing 18 percent (in a Pew Research poll) or 24 percent (in a Time magazine survey) believing Obama is a Muslim, the name Hussein is surely headed back to a secure, undisclosed location.

#ad#That a sliver of Americans believe Obama is a Muslim is not shocking in the context of other bizarre and stupid things they tell pollsters. In a rebuke to geography teachers everywhere, 10 percent of people either don’t think Hawaii is part of the United States or aren’t sure. Twenty percent believe aliens have contacted us here on Earth. And 11 percent have confidence in the United States Congress.

But the numbers tell us something important about President Obama: We don’t know him. The most powerful and famous man in the country is still the mysterious stranger. He rose from nowhere, winning an election based partly on being an unknown quantity, and an unknown quantity he remains.

Obama has proven adept at crafting and then casting off synthetic identities. He was the good-government, process-obsessed reformer -- until he wanted to raise countless millions of dollars outside the campaign-finance system. He was the post-partisan scourge of politics as usual -- until his hyper-partisan first 18 months in office. He was the moderate -- until he pushed his vast left-wing spending agenda.

Obama’s candidacy always had the sense about it of a supremely artful marketing campaign. His bio video during the Denver convention made him sound like a corn-fed product of the American heartland. There was barely a hint of the father from Kenya and the boyhood in Indonesia and Hawaii -- in short, what made him so biographically alluring to worshipful journalists.

He was the blank canvas upon which people could paint their visions of grandeur. One moment Obama was the loyal parishioner of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who converted him to Christianity and was the fount of preacherly wisdom from whom Obama ripped off his most famous rhetorical riff, “the audacity of hope.” The next, he’d hardly heard of the good reverend.

An element of the Obama-is-a-Muslim opinion is perfervid critics wanting to believe the worst of him, but not all. According to Pew, the number of Americans who identify him as Christian has declined from 51 percent in October 2008 to just 34 percent. The more we see of him, the less we know of him. Only 46 percent of Democrats and 43 percent of blacks think Obama is a Christian. His faith simply hasn’t made an impression on the public.

Compared with his predecessors, Obama is as transparent as a billiard ball. You knew George W. Bush was an unapologetically pro-business, freedom-spreadin’ Texas evangelical. You knew Bill Clinton was a flawed but brilliant Southern operator, part of whose charm was the ability to lie with impressive fluidity. Who is Obama?

He’s a man constantly traveling under a cloak of ideological falsity, since he can’t speak frankly of his big-government ambitions. He’s emotionally remote. And he’s the product of life experiences alien even to his most natural supporters. In the heat of the controversy over her firing from the Agriculture Department, civil-rights activist Shirley Sherrod pointedly noted that Obama “is not someone who has experienced what I have experienced through life.”

None of this would matter particularly if Obama’s program were working -- he could identify himself with its successes. As it is, he’s the cipher in chief, overexposed but underperforming, as detached as a law-school lecturer. President Obama is assuredly not a Muslim. For many of his countrymen, though, he remains a question mark.

— 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

Obamacare threatens the unparalleled success of US medicine.

There is so much political spin, and so many numbers games being played, when it comes to medical care that we have to go back to square one and the simplest common sense in order to get some rational idea of what government-run medical care means. In particular, we need to examine the claim that the government can “bring down the cost of medical care.”

The most basic fact is that it is cheaper to remain sick than to get medical treatment. What is cheapest of all is to die instead of getting life-saving medications and treatment, which can be very expensive.

#ad#Despite these facts, most of us tend to take a somewhat more parochial view of the situation when it is we ourselves who are sick or who face a potentially fatal illness. But what if that decision is taken out of your hands under Obamacare and is made for you by a bureaucrat in Washington?

We won’t know what that leads to until the time comes. As Nancy Pelosi said, we will find out what is in the bill after it has passed. But even now, after Obamacare has been passed, not many people want to read its 2,400 pages. Even if you did, you would still not know what it would be like in practice, after more than 150 boards and commissions issue their specific regulations.

Fortunately -- in fact, very fortunately -- you don’t have to slog through 2,400 pages of legalistic jargon or turn to a fortune teller to divine the future. A new book, The Truth About Obamacare, by Sally Pipes of the Pacific Research Institute, lays out the facts in the plainest English.

While she can’t tell you the future, she can tell you enough about government-run medical systems in other countries that it will not take a rocket scientist to figure out what is in store for us if Obamacare doesn’t get repealed before it takes full effect in 2014. It is not a pretty picture.

We hear a lot about how wonderful it is that the Canadians or the British or the Swedes get free medical treatment because the government runs the system. But we don’t hear much about the quality of that medical care.

We don’t hear about more than 4,000 expectant mothers who gave birth inside a hospital, but not in the maternity ward, in Britain in just one year. They had their babies in hallways, bathrooms, and even elevators.

British newspapers have for years carried stories about the neglect of patients under the National Health Service. When nurses don’t get around to taking a pregnant woman to the maternity ward in time, the baby doesn’t wait.

But the American media don’t tell you about such things when they are gushing over the wonders of “universal health care” that will “bring down the cost of medical care.”

Instead, the media spin is that various countries with government-run medical systems have life expectancies that are as long as ours, or longer. That is very clever as media spin, if you don’t bother to stop and think about it.

Sally Pipes did bother to stop and think about it in The Truth About Obamacare. She points out that medical care is just one of the factors in life expectancy.

She cites a study by Profs. Robert Ohsfeldt and John Schneider at the University of Iowa, which shows that, if you leave out people who are victims of homicide or who die in automobile accidents, Americans live longer than people in any other Western country.

Doctors do not prevent homicides or car crashes. In the things that doctors can affect, such as the survival rates of cancer patients, the United States leads the world.

Americans get the latest pharmaceutical drugs, sometimes years before those drugs are available to people in Britain or in other countries where the government runs the medical system. Why? Because the latest drugs cost more and it is cheaper to let people die.

The media have often said that we have higher infant mortality rates than other countries with government medical-care systems. But we count every baby that dies and other countries do not. If the media don’t tell you that, so much the better for Obamacare.

But is life and death something to play spin games about?

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

Thomas Sowell

For the Left, their opponents can never have decent motives.

I recently wrote about leftists’ hatred for conservatives as people, not merely for the conservative ideas they hold. Demonization of opponents is a fundamental characteristic of the Left. It is not merely tactical; they believe people on the right are bad. (Here’s a test: Ask someone on the left if active support of California’s Proposition 8 -- retaining the man-woman definition of marriage -- was an act of hate.)

A related defining characteristic of the Left is the ascribing of nefarious motives to conservatives. For the Left, a dismissal of conservatives’ motives is as important as a dismissal of the conservatives as people. It is close to impossible for almost anyone on the left -- and I mean the elite Left, not merely left-wing blogs -- to say, “There are good people on both sides of this issue.” From Karl Marx to Frank Rich of the New York Times, this has always been the case.

#ad#In the Left’s worldview, conservative opponents of affirmative action cannot be driven by concern for blacks -- opposition is animated by racists; conservative opponents of illegal immigration are animated by racism and xenophobia; opposition to abortion is a function of sexism; President Bush went to war for oil and American imperialism; and conservative supporters of retaining man-woman marriage hate gays.

This is not true of elite conservatives. Leading conservative columnists, leading Republicans, etc. rarely depict liberals as motivated by evil. Conservatives can say, “There are good people on both sides of the issue,” because we actually believe it.

Almost any contentious issue would provide proof of the Left’s need to attack motives, but the proposed Islamic center and mosque near Ground Zero is a particularly excellent example.

I have not come across a mainstream-leftist description of opponents of the mosque/Islamic center being built near Ground Zero that has not ascribed hate-filled, intolerant, bigoted, “Islamophobic,” or xenophobic motives to those who oppose it. Contrast this with how mainstream opponents of the mosque describe the proponents of the mosque and you will see an immense divide between Right and Left in the way they talk about each other.

Here are but a few examples of how mainstream proponents of the mosque describe opponents and their motives:

• Michael Kinsley, editor at large, The Atlantic:

“Is there any reason to oppose the mosque that isn’t bigoted, or demagogic, or unconstitutional? None that I’ve heard or read.”

• Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times blog, August 19, 2010:

“The far right wing has seized on the issue as an occasion for fanning hatred against Muslims.”

• Tony Norman, columnist, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:

“#...#a handful of politicians who cynically conflate the religion of American Muslims with the nihilism of the 9/11 terrorists.”

• Andrew Sullivan, The Atlantic blog:

“The pursuit of power through demagoguery.”

#page#• Peter Beinart, senior political writer for The Daily Beast, associate professor of journalism and political science at City University of New York (in a column titled “America Has Disgraced Itself”):

“In today’s GOP, even bigotry doesn’t spare you from bigotry.”

“GOP leaders call them [those building the mosque] terrorists because they don’t share Benjamin Netanyahu’s view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”

“And oh yes, my fellow Jews, who are so thrilled to be locked arm in arm with the heirs of Pat Robertson and Father Coughlin against the Islamic threat.”

#ad#And in a Politico column titled “Decency Lost”:

“Republicans are clawing over each other to demonize Muslims.”

• Allison Kilkenny, Huffington Post:

“This mock piety is really a cover for Islamophobia.”

“Indeed, America is extremely hostile -- not only to Islam -- but to anyone who gives off the air of being exotic, or different.”

“Xenophobia is really a convenient cover for a deeper bigotry.”

• James Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute, Huffington Post:

“Shame. Your bigoted appeals to fear and intolerance disgrace us all and put our country at risk in the world.”

• Michael Hughes, Huffington Post:

“Even more hideous is the way in which these bigots try to hide their overt prejudice in the emotional guise of love and caring, purportedly because they believe we must be ‘sensitive’ to the families of the victims of 9/11.”

• New York Times editorial:

“Republican ideologues, predictably#...#spew more of their intolerant rhetoric.”

“The country ignores such cynicism and ugliness at its own peril.”

“Too many Republican leaders are determined to whip up as much false controversy and anguish as they can.”

#page#• New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof:

“Why do so many Republicans find strip clubs appropriate for the ground zero neighborhood but object to a house of worship?”

“[They] are cynically turning the Islamic center into a nationwide issue in hopes of votes.#...#They’re just like the Saudi officials who ban churches, and even confiscate Bibles, out of sensitivity to local feelings.”

“Today’s crusaders against the Islamic community center are promoting a similar paranoid intolerance.”

• Keith Olbermann, MSNBC:

“[The] country has begun to run on a horrible fuel of hatred -- magnified, amplified, multiplied, by politicians and zealots, within government and without.”

#ad#• New York Times columnist Frank Rich:

“This month’s incessant and indiscriminate orgy of Muslim-bashing.”

“So virulent is the Islamophobic hysteria of the neocon and Fox News right -- abetted by the useful idiocy of the Anti-Defamation League#...#”

“The ginned-up rage over the ‘ground zero mosque’ [was motivated] by the potential short-term rewards of winning votes by pandering to fear during an election season.”

“[It started with] a New York Post jihad.”

“The Islamophobia command center, Murdoch’s News Corporation.”

Why does the Left attribute only nefarious motives to those who believe that the Islamic center does not belong near Ground Zero?

Because leftism holds these beliefs:

1. Those who hold leftist positions are, by definition, better people than their opponents.

2. Those who hold leftist positions have, by definition, pure motives; therefore, the motives of their opponents must be impure.

I conclude with this: I believe that a wiser man than the present imam would have decided to avoid precisely what he has inspired -- intense division in America -- and would have immediately retracted his decision to erect an Islamic center and mosque right by the slaughterhouse of 9/11, which happened to have been caused by his co-religionists.

But I also believe that there are good arguments and good people on both sides of this issue.

I can say that, however, for one reason.

I am not on the left.

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

Dennis Prager

Republican primary candidate Rick Scott seeks to rejuvenate the American Dream.

Florida gubernatorial candidate Rick Scott doesn’t need to hang James Carville’s famous sign (“the economy, stupid”) to know what’s on people’s minds this election season. Voters’ questions on the campaign trail are telling enough.

“If there are ten questions, the first ten are, ‘How are you going to help me make sure I get a job?’” Scott says.

With the most recent figures showing an uptick in state unemployment to 11.5 percent -- the fifth-highest figure in the nation -- Floridians are looking for a way out. Scott tells NRO he can provide just the right kind of leadership.

#ad#“What people want is somebody that they can believe in, that has done it before, that knows what it’s like,” Scott says. “You know, you look at my background, I know what it’s like to live in public housing. I know what it’s like when your family has no money to buy anything. I know what it’s like to get Christmas from the firemen.”

A businessman, entrepreneur, and health-care executive, Scott says he never considered entering politics until the threat of Obamacare arose. “Every government-run health-care system overpromises, runs out of money, and rations care. I didn’t want that to happen to Americans, so I organized a group -- the website is cprights.org,” Scott says. “We did a documentary on the U.K. system, the Canadian system. Then we did ads all across the country saying, ‘This is what ought to happen.’”

The activism piqued his interest in politics. “We killed the public option, and we almost won the whole bill, but we didn’t have principled-enough politicians,” Scott says. “So at the end of that debate in March, I decided I was going to run for office.” He jumped into the gubernatorial race in April and rocketed into the lead based on a flurry of self-funded ads and solid conservative rhetoric.

Scott holds his private-sector career and rags-to-riches story up as proof of his willingness and ability to fix the economy. “I lived the American Dream,” Scott says. “The dream -- what I grew up believing -- is that in this country, you can do anything. You don’t have to have money, you don’t have to have connections, and you can build any business you want, take any career you want. And I’m scared to death that that dream’s not there anymore.”

The answer, Scott says, is his “7–7–7” plan to create 700,000 jobs over the next seven years through seven steps, most of which call for reducing the size and scope of the state.

“What’s ruining that dream,” Scott says, “is government regulation, government taxes, government uncertainty, government deficits, and politicians who are owned by special interests.”

That final jab -- and others like it -- is directed at Scott’s opponent, Florida attorney general Bill McCollum, whose campaign and associated 527 organization have received donations from groups such as U.S. Sugar and the Florida Chamber of Commerce.

For his part, McCollum has hammered Scott about the $1.7 billion fine for Medicare fraud that was levied against Columbia/HCA, the health-care company Scott led. The McCollum camp has also pushed Scott to release information from a civil deposition he took part in six days before the announcement of his candidacy.

Should a sitting politician release information when he’s deposed? “I think it all depends on what the issue is. I think if it’s something that’s relevant to their decisionmaking process, sure,” Scott says. “But if it’s something that has nothing to do with decisionmaking, and it’s really just brought up by somebody in a campaign, that’s totally different.”

#page#Dealing with a tight race and fickle polls, both sides have escalated their charges. But Scott says he doesn’t foresee a problem burying the hatchet after the primary and rebuilding the GOP base to oppose Democrat Alex Sink. “My opponent this fall believes in bigger government, is supporting Obamacare, is supporting President Obama and all of his initiatives to move the country in the wrong direction,” Scott says. “The Republican party will rally around my principles of limited government, business background, fiscal responsibility -- all these things.”

Scott has poured more than $25 million of his own money into his campaign and, if it’s necessary in the general election, is willing to contribute more. “I will make sure, through my own investment and through raising funds from others, that we’ll have all the necessary funds to run a very successful campaign against the Democratic nominee,” Scott says.

#ad#Until then, Scott continues to barnstorm the state in advance of Tuesday’s primary, spreading his message and drawing energy from the voters he meets along the way. “This campaign, for me, is the most inspiring time,” Scott says, “because you can see the needs out here, and you can see the desire and the hunger for somebody who will come along and change the direction of this state.”

— Kyle O. Peterson is Florida election reporter for NRO’s Battle ’10 blog.

Kyle O. Peterson

Her distance from American concerns disables her from being a fair moderator of American debates.

On May 26, Christiane Amanpour addressed Harvard’s 2010 graduates. She had the difficult task of capturing the significance of their educations and at the same time inspiring them. Her ringing words? “Renew your passports.”

As one graduate explained to me afterward, “I guess internationalism is just her thing.” No kidding. With a British accent, an Iranian father, a former assistant secretary of state for a husband, and almost three decades as CNN’s chief international correspondent, Amanpour is a citizen of the world. She’s also the new hostess of This Week, a show previously known for interviews of Washington insiders and sharp debates over American politics, policy, and culture.

#ad#Amanpour’s agenda was visible in the most recent episode, which had a decidedly international focus and perspective. She interviewed Afghan president Hamid Karzai, discussed the effects of the Ground Zero mosque controversy on the Muslim world, and then moved on to corruption in Afghanistan. It wasn’t clear why she bothered to broadcast from Washington.

We shouldn’t be surprised. Her intentions were clear from the outset.

In ABC’s promotional advertisement, a montage of scenes from foreign conflicts set the background as Amanpour intoned, “Sunday morning, see your world: This Week on ABC,” and then, “This week, the world’s newsmakers answer to you.” No picture from Washington made the montage. No mention of politics, just “the world” and “our world.”

On the eve of her debut, she reminded TopLine -- before the show’s hosts could sneak in a question -- “You know, I’ve spent my whole career traveling the world in a quest for understanding and explaining the world.” So what was she doing taking on an American political show, just before huge midterm elections? “I’m fascinated also in exploring the nexus between domestic American policy and foreign policy,” she explained. “Because the truth of the matter is, this is the most powerful country in the world, but it’s no longer an island.”

Fair enough. But, as Tom Shales put it, the show was “hardly a haven for isolationists” before her debut. When TopLine asked her whether the show would acquire an international focus, she dodged. “What I’m looking to do is bring in different perspectives.#...#We’re going to discuss the substantive matters that matter to the world.” She promised repeatedly to “open a window to the world.” America had so far, evidently, been shut in.

Her August 1 debut episode opened with Amanpour dramatically striding before a spinning globe as she explained, “After 20 years covering the world, the story in this country is turning into one of the most fascinating [sic].” The script revealed Amanpour’s view of America: The country is a nexus, a microcosm, and a center of power for the world over, a good vantage point from which to see everything else. That is what makes American politics relevant to Amanpour.

Amanpour is, no doubt, accomplished, sharp, and tough. Her first episode included an interview of Nancy Pelosi. She confronted the speaker with the famous Time magazine cover photo of a woman disfigured by the Taliban, and asked about the Democrats’ exit plan for Afghanistan. Pelosi hedged. Then, Amanpour said that Democrats might “lose their majority in the House” and asked how that happened. Pelosi tried to slip away. “Well, that’s one version of the story and --” but Amanpour gripped her. “I know you’re putting on a great face because you have to#...#[but] your own president’s spokesman said that you might [lose the majority].” The speaker of the House quivered. Her lips curled to a smile, but her eyes did not.

Amanpour is nothing to scoff at. But American politics are not her forte. Plus, she commands a salary of $2 million even as ABC is cutting back on other expenses. So why didn’t they select Jake Tapper, who served as a White House correspondent and host pro tem of This Week from March through July? For some reason, ABC was willing to dish out a lot of cash for a new, international take on politics.

Jake Tapper’s final episodes focused on the hot spots of American cultural politics: Shirley Sherrod, the NAACP, and the tea party. America’s brightest talked through America’s tensest conflicts. The guests, particularly George Will, exchanged sharp words and withering snark. They were exciting, visceral, engaging, and fun.

#page#But Amanpour’s four episodes have been focused overseas: the effects of WikiLeaks on Afghanistan, the floods in Pakistan, withdrawing from Iraq, the psychiatric problems of deployed soldiers, the effect of the mosque controversy on American-Islamic relations. One discussion actually took place abroad, with a missing spot at the roundtable filled by a video of a foreign journalist. She also did something totally new, honoring “all those who died in war this week,” instead of limiting herself, per tradition, to slain Americans.

Amanpour hasn’t come off as aggressively opinionated or anti-American. But her internationalist perspective shapes the conversation. For example, during the August 8 roundtable on “Amending the 14th Amendment,” Gillian Tett of the Financial Times explained American concerns about immigration with a British accent: “You only have to go back to the era of the great crash, the Great Depression, to see what happens when you have a period of profound#...#economic dislocation and pain, and people start putting up barriers and pointing the fingers.” She worried about our “culture of hate, and this, you know, scapegoating that’s going on right now.” Tett’s explanation and characterization of American opposition to illegal immigration -- one concordant with the international interpretation of American politics and with faddish pop political psychology -- went unchallenged. Perhaps there is something other than a “culture of hate” at work, but no competing explanation was heard around Amanpour’s table, nor was one asked for.

#ad#The August 15 episode featured a roundtable on “Mosque Madness.” Amanpour opened the discussion with a leading question: “[The president] said the United States could not afford to have yet another generation of Muslims viewing it as the enemy. So do you think it’s wise to have this huge hubbub over it, or it should just go forward, this mosque?”

Note the implicit assumptions: (1) The concern is the mosque’s effect on international relations -- not on 9/11 victims. (2) The blame for “this huge hubbub” lies with the critics of the mosque -- not with Imam Rauf. (3) Just letting it go forward is the way to stop the hubbub -- changing the location will not. (4) American acts cause Muslim enmity -- Muslims are so fragile that debating a mosque’s location will destine a generation to anti-Americanism.

Despite her physical relocation to Washington, D.C., Amanpour still seems to be observing American politics from overseas. She doesn’t advance a position -- she merely asks whether Americans should continue their mean-spirited bigotry toward innocent Muslims. She reports, you decide.

Amanpour’s innuendos reached a peak in Sunday’s episode. One section was, “Debating the Ground Zero Islamic Center.” Don’t let the name fool you. There was no debate. It was an interview with Daisy Khan (the wife of Imam Rauf) and Joy Levitt (an adviser on the mosque project). Amanpour claimed that a “backlash against Islam has been seen across the country.” She didn't say how peaceful requests for a new location constitute a “backlash.”

As This Week is becoming more international, it is also becoming more parochial. Amanpour’s voice, and the voices she brings in, may have more countries of origin, but they are narrower -- all members of the same cosmopolitan clique, to whom it would not occur to doubt the assertion that opponents of illegal immigration are a “culture of hatred and#...#scapegoating.” This new international voice has never conversed with, and cannot sympathize with, the policemen, firefighters, veterans, and Teamsters who protested at Ground Zero on Sunday morning during Amanpour’s broadcast.

Amanpour may have been a fine foreign correspondent, at least when Israel was not involved. But her distance from American concerns disables her from being a fair moderator of American debates. This Week is a one-stop shop for American political debate no more.

-- Matthew Shaffer is the William F. Buckley Jr. Fellow at the National Review Institute.

Matthew Shaffer

From the Aug. 30, 2010, issue of NR.

‘From almost any page of Atlas Shrugged,” Whittaker Chambers wrote here 53 years ago, “a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding: ‘To a gas chamber -- go!’” What he did not write is that Ayn Rand throws in a gas chamber.

It’s about two-thirds through, in a chapter called “The Moratorium on Brains,” than which I reread no farther. (Our president seems to have inspired -- which is not quite the word -- half the country to read Miss Rand, and I wanted to remind myself what she was teaching them.) A train is carrying 300 passengers through the Rocky Mountains to San Francisco. America is falling altogether to pieces, its citizens starving to death, because the prime movers -- Rand’s term for the productive men and women on whom economic creation and therefore life-or-death depend -- have called a strike. They are hanging out in a mountain valley that their leader, Mr. John Galt, has cleverly hidden from the world by means of refractor-ray shield.

#ad#The world scarcely has diesel locomotives. When the one attached to that train breaks down, the only replacements are coal-burning, which is a problem, because the train is about to pass through an eight-mile tunnel that is not properly ventilated for locomotives of this type. It happens that an important looter -- Rand’s term for the half-wits running and ruining the country -- is on the train and has strong feelings about getting to San Francisco. His name is Kip Chalmers. “It’s not my problem to figure out how you get the train through the tunnel, that’s for you to figure out!” Kip Chalmers screams at a station agent. “But if you don’t get me an engine and don’t start that train, you can kiss good-bye to your jobs, your work permits and this whole goddamn railroad!”

This is persuasive. “The station agent had never heard of Kip Chalmers and did not know the nature of his position. But he knew that this was the day when unknown men in undefined positions held unlimited power -- the power of life or death.” And so the station officials, knowing that the loss of their jobs means the loss of their lives, call in a coal engine, procure a drunken engineer, and condemn every passenger on the train to death by asphyxiation.

But that isn’t why I stopped reading. I stopped because Rand thinks they deserve it.

It is said that catastrophes are a matter of pure chance, and there were those who would have said that the passengers of the Comet [that’s the train] were not guilty [note that word] or responsible for the thing that happened to them.

The man in Bedroom A, Car No. 1, was a professor of sociology who taught that individual ability is of no consequence.#...#

#...#The woman in Bedroom D, Car No. 10, was a mother who had put her two children to sleep in the berth above her, carefully tucking them in, protecting them from drafts and jolts; a mother whose husband held a government job enforcing directives, which she defended by saying, “I don’t care, it’s only the rich that they hurt. After all, I must think of my children.”#...#

#...#These passengers were awake; there was not a man aboard the train who did not share one or more of their ideas.

Now there are two important defenses of Rand. The first is that it is the looters, not the prime movers, who make the gas chamber possible and send the train into it. The second is that Rand’s philosophy is incompatible with totalitarianism, and no one who believed it would ever send anyone to a gas chamber. Both are true. Neither has anything to do with what troubles me about this gas chamber, and about Ayn Rand. And to explain that, I must say something about Rand at her best, which I believe is to be found in the second half of The Fountainhead, a book I did successfully reread.

#page#In her introduction to its 25th-anniversary printing, she says: “This is the motive and purpose of my writing: the projection of an ideal man.” Yet this man -- the architect Howard Roark -- turns out to be pretty boring. He rarely speaks. When he does, it is rarely interesting (and when it is, it is transparently didactic). He has no sense of humor. As his enemies try to destroy him, he shows so little emotion that the reader must rely upon an abstract sense of justice in order to give a damn. Howard Roark is a ghost of a protagonist.

#ad#To some degree this was inevitable, however -- Roark will conduct himself with a minimum of drama, for Roark is egoless. I realize that’s a dirty word in The Fountainhead, but I’m using it in a special sense, one I think Rand could accept. For Rand, “egoless” means self-negating, sacrificing yourself to something or someone else. What I will use it to mean is an absence of self-consciousness about your ego -- a self-esteem secure enough that you don’t compare yourself with others, a focus on your work complete enough that you don’t worry whether it will succeed, a general freedom from thinking of your identity abstractly and trying to justify or glorify it. This sense is approximately the antonym of “egotistical” -- the word, Rand explains in her introduction, that she mistakenly used for “egoistical” when writing The Fountainhead. “I don’t make comparisons,” Roark says. “I don’t want to be the symbol of anything.” He does not want to be a great architect; he wants to build his buildings. That’s egolessness.

Its antithesis is Roark’s foil, Peter Keating, also an architect, whom we meet graduating from college as valedictorian and self-consciously enjoying the fact that many people are looking at him. The crucial distinction between these types is that only a Roark can be creative. A Keating, a man who must justify himself before and in comparison with the world, is essentially derivative. He cannot create anything his own, because he has accepted a standard not his own. And this principle comes with a corollary for anyone who wishes to be a creator: He must not -- as Rand puts it in a note that her heir, Leonard Peikoff, reprints in his Atlas Shrugged introduction -- “place his wish primarily within others” or “attempt or desire anything that#...#requires primarily the exercise of the will of others.#...#If he attempts that, he is out of a creator’s province and in that of the collectivist and the second-hander.”

This corollary is not, properly speaking, a moral imperative, because no obligation has been established to try to be creative. But the Randian hero is creative, and will observe the corollary, and that is why, in addition to never sacrificing his interests for another’s, he will never ask others to sacrifice their interests for his. Much like the Nietzschean superman, the Randian hero cannot be predatory or exploitative; this would not give him what he wants, because no one outside himself has it to give. (Chambers’s statement that the Randian voice commands “from painful necessity,” his belief that Rand favors rule by a technocratic elite, and the title of his review, “Big Sister Is Watching You,” are all, therefore, in error.)

Most of The Fountainhead’s second-handers are mediocrities out to make themselves feel better by cutting down their betters. This isn’t very interesting either. Rand doesn’t care enough about many of these characters to make real people of them, and she draws their personalities in a manner both crude and incoherent. Keating, for example, is both devilishly calculating -- as when he forces out a partner at the firm, making room for himself, by accosting him with such violence as to induce a heart attack -- and stupidly inert -- as when his mother manipulates him into not marrying the woman he loves.

The book finally starts to get interesting when we meet its Devil, an architecture critic and public intellectual named Ellsworth Toohey. Toohey is a second-order second-hander: He preaches a gospel of collectivism so as to win power over the Keatings. He is out to “collect souls,” and they will consent to his rule because he will secure their egos (in my sense of the word) by destroying the egoless. His weapon is to invert values, so that the creators are despised. He is witty, urbane, eloquent, ironically colloquial, physically repulsive, smashingly dressed, surgically subtle, and purely ruthless.

#page#Two other characters will come to life. One is Gail Wynand, the aristocratic newspaper baron who publishes Toohey’s column. Wynand has made a Devil’s bargain and his papers have no soul: They print whatever the public wants, no matter how indecent, dishonest, or ugly, and it is indeed ugly. Wynand tells himself he doesn’t care, because the ugliness pays for his private gallery of the most priceless and exquisite art. But because deep down he is an incomparably noble man, his conscience is tearing him to shreds. He has long attempted to blast it away by recreationally forcing honorable men to betray their integrity. We meet him holding a gun to his temple and deciding not to pull the trigger.

#ad#The other is a beautiful young woman named Dominique Francon. Dominique seems not to love anyone or anything, but is secretly possessed by a reverence for beauty. Her hobby is to destroy priceless and exquisite art. We meet her shortly after she has thrown a sculpture down a ventilation shaft. She thinks it is too beautiful to be seen by mankind.

Neither of these two is, properly speaking, realistic, but then neither are Dostoevsky’s characters. Wynand and Dominique remind me of something Robert Nozick writes in The Examined Life: “Some literary characters are#...#‘realer than life,’ more sharply etched, with few extraneous details that do not fit. In the characteristics they exhibit they are more concentrated centers of psychological organization.#...#They are intensely concentrated portions of reality.” What is intensely concentrated in Wynand and Dominique is a passionate but thwarted idealism. Each is gripped by his conception of the beautiful and the good, but each betrays it without cease, and ironically out of loyalty to it.

Roark gives each a chance to redeem himself. For Dominique, redemption means learning not to worry about those who scorn what she finds beautiful -- only when she can overcome her ego’s vulnerability is she able to marry Roark, with whom she has long been in love. For Wynand, redemption means devoting his premier newspaper to Roark’s defense as Roark stands trial for victimlessly dynamiting a building that, in violation of a contract, was not being constructed according to his specifications.

Such is the public fury against Roark that Wynand’s editorials provoke a reader backlash and a strike of his staff. He even seems to be making Roark more hated. But Roark does not care:

“Gail, it doesn’t matter, as far as I’m concerned. I’m not counting on public opinion, one way or the other.”

“You want me to give in?”

“I want you to hold out if it takes everything you own.”

Roark wants Wynand to save his soul, you see. Wynand has sinned against the creator’s code. He has spent his life, not bringing forth the best within himself, but debasing it for the worst in his readers. Roark sees that he is “the worst second-hander of all -- the man who goes after power.” And now that he wants to yoke this supposed power to his own convictions, it vanishes: He can lay no claim to the minds of others.

I, too, want mightily for Wynand to hold out. He becomes magnificent, awe-inspiring, in the discovery of his integrity. When he does not hold out -- when he betrays Roark rather than close his paper -- I feel as I do when I dream I have done something unforgivable. When in his final conversation with Roark -- whom he feels too guilty ever to see again, even though, as atonement, he has shut down the paper anyway -- he commissions the tallest building in New York, a “monument to that spirit which is yours#...#and could have been mine,” I feel the relief of redemption. There is a passage in which Roark does not know that something he has said has given a passing character “the courage to face a lifetime.” Rand’s hymn to integrity might achieve the same effect.

Which makes it all the harder to take Atlas Shrugged.

#page#It’s not just the gas chamber. She piles offense upon offense, and they all come down to this: Instead of bringing forth the best within her, she brings forth the barely comprehensible hatred of her derangedly insecure ego.

How do we see this?

#ad#In her contempt for her creation. There is no Ellsworth Toohey, no villain we can respect and -- as readers -- enjoy. These looters possess, at best, “the cunning of the unintelligent and the frantic energy of the lazy.” Their chief speaks in a voice “high with anger and thin with fear.” You know by looking at them that they are evil, the physical signs of evil being obesity, baldness, round-facedness, and soft- or watery-eyedness. The heroes, by contrast, are flawlessly, violently beautiful. The men invariantly have sharp features; the heroine’s hair slashes across her face. This projection of virtue and vice into physiognomy and physique disfigures The Fountainhead as well, but less. In Atlas Shrugged Rand seems to grow more spiteful with every page turn, so that the looter on page 7 has “a small, petulant mouth, and thin hair clinging to a bald forehead,” while the two on page 560 have a “pendulous face#...#with the small slits of pig’s eyes” and a “doughy face#...#that scurried away from any speaker and any fact.” Even their names are belittling: Buzzy Watts, Chick Morrison, Tinky Holloway.

Then there is the fact that some of the heroes are first-class haters. Foremost here is Francisco d’Anconia, who is pretending to be a worthless playboy so that the looters won’t respect him enough to notice how he is tricking them into destroying their copper supply. He charms with such proclamations as: “The rotter who simpers that he sees no difference between the power of the dollar and the power of the whip, ought to learn the difference on his own hide -- as, I think, he will”; and, of women he has manipulated into falsely claiming affairs with him and so destroying their reputations: “I gave those b**ches what they wanted.” How I long for the boring Roark, who is almost incapable of anger. (“It’s because of that absolute health of yours,” a friend tells him. “You’re so healthy that you can’t conceive of disease.”)

And of course the damnation. Rand calls to mind Thomas Aquinas’s notion that the righteous in Heaven will be able to observe the torments of the wicked in Hell, the better to enjoy their blessedness, with the difference that Rand, as the creator of this world, is analogous not to the righteous but to God. One suspects God would feel less pleasure damning people. You don’t do this with the word “little,” for example, unless you are really having a good time: “The man in Roomette 3, Car No. 11, was a sniveling little neurotic who wrote cheap little plays into which, as a social message, he inserted cowardly little obscenities.”

#page#What, then, went wrong? How could the woman who gave me Gail Wynand give me this? Rand answers the question herself, in the notes for Atlas Shrugged (which was originally to be called “The Strike”):

The Strike is to be a much more “social” novel than The Fountainhead. The Fountainhead was about “individualism and collectivism within man’s soul”; it showed the nature and function of the creator and the second-hander.#...#Their relations to each other -- which is society, men in relation to men -- were secondary, an unavoidable, direct consequence of Roark set against Toohey. But it is not the theme.

Now, it is this relation that must be the theme.#...#

#...# I set out to show how desperately the world needs prime movers, and how viciously it treats them.

#ad#What I think is that because The Fountainhead is not primarily a social novel -- because Rand was concerned primarily with presenting the ideal man’s soul -- she looked into herself and gave expression to the finest things she found. She did this by imprinting them on her fictional landscape, which is why even the villains of The Fountainhead possess a measure of dignity and humanity. But in Atlas Shrugged Rand instead looked out and showed us the world of men as she sees them. And she sees them viciously.

There is so much to be said against Rand as an artist. There is the inept dialogue -- characters begin a great many sentences by shouting each other’s names or saying “You know”; the heroes speak, every one of them, in exactly the same voice; the averagely intelligent advance the plot by blurting out their secrets. There is the Girl Scout banality of Atlas Shrugged’s heroine, who seems to have escaped from the young-adult section. There is the preposterous omnicompetence of the heroes, equally at home on the Harvard faculty or in a Vin Diesel movie, and the endless gushing about their exalted feelings, Rand’s attempt to steal with treacle what she has not earned with character development. There is that editorial discipline which gave us John Galt’s speech.

I don’t care. I don’t require of my artists that they be perfect craftsmen; I require that they inspire me. What is sad to me about Rand is that she could, but that the creator of Gail Wynand could create only one; that she could no longer imagine him when she looked out at mankind; that what she showed us instead was her need to reassure herself, in terms frankly delusional, of her superiority to it.

There is a desperately sad moment in The Fountainhead when Keating, who originally wanted to be a painter and upon the collapse of his career has acquired an easel, offers his canvases to Roark and asks -- though he cannot say the words -- whether they’re any good.

“It’s too late, Peter,” [Roark] said gently.

Keating nodded. “Guess I#...#knew that.”

When Keating had gone, Roark leaned against the door, closing his eyes. He was sick with pity.

This is the feeling that stopped me at the gas chamber. I cannot damn Ayn Rand, and for the too few hours of deep inspiration she offered me, I give my thanks. But it got too painful to look any longer, and so, exercising the right of any self-interested reader, I simply closed the book.

— Jason Lee Steorts is managing editor of National Review.

Jason Lee Steorts

A baker’s dozen of potential upsets in this fall’s House matchups.

By some counts, the GOP has a shot at 103 currently Democratic seats in the U.S. House of Representatives this year.

You have probably marveled at Florida GOP House candidate Allen West’s speeches on YouTube. You’ve been amused to learn about the offbeat biography of Sean Duffy -- MTV reality-show star, world-champion lumberjack, and a successful district attorney. You’ve chuckled at the thought of Jon Runyan plowing through New Jersey Democrat John Adler the way he used to plow through defensive lineman. And when North Carolina’s Bob Etheridge attacked that kid who asked him whether he supports the Obama agenda, you probably noticed how Renee Ellmers answers questions in a pleasant, informative, and non-strangulating manner.

#ad#But with so many promising Republican challengers this year, a bunch of potential upsets are flying well under the radar. And with the political environment going from bad to worse for Democrats, it is increasingly likely the night of November 2 will include some winners that almost no one saw coming. If you’re searching for some of these long shots who are looking shorter these days, here is a dirty baker’s dozen of GOP challengers to keep an eye on. They’re underfunded, unrecognized, rarely mentioned, and given no chance#...#and they may just win anyway.

1. Ed Martin vs. Russ Carnahan, Missouri’s 3rd District.

Reasons the challenger should have no chance: It’s a D+7 district on the Cook Partisan Voting Index. Russ Carnahan won with 66 percent of the vote in 2004. The Carnahan name is supposed to be magic in Missouri politics, and his sister Robin is running for Senate.

Reasons the challenger has a chance: Robin Carnahan’s lousy polling indicates that the family name doesn’t carry the weight it once did. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch has already declared that Martin is “giving Carnahan the toughest general election campaign of his congressional career.” A recent poll puts Martin within striking distance, 39 percent to 48 percent.

2. Rob Cornilles vs. David Wu, Oregon’s 1st District.

Reasons the challenger should have no chance: Wu, first elected in 1998, won 71 percent of the vote in 2008; the last “serious challenge” to Wu, in 2004, held him to 58 percent. This is a D+8 district.

Reasons the challenger has a chance: The local press notes that President Obama’s approval ratings this district are not great: 50 percent approval, 46 percent disapproval. Cornilles’s campaign conducted a poll of the district and found their man trailing modestly, 40 percent to 46 percent. Like Obama, Wu has been touting the recovery; Cornilles is hitting him for claiming a recovery that the district doesn’t feel and accusing Wu of “mailing five direct-mail pieces at taxpayer expense through the congressional franking privilege.” Cornilles trails Wu in cash, but has raised more than $607,000 and has $256,000 in cash on hand.

3. Scott Sipprelle vs. Rush Holt, New Jersey’s 12th District.

Reasons the challenger should have no chance: Holt, elected in 1998, won 62 percent of the vote in 2008 and usually performs around that level.

Reasons the challenger has a chance: For some reason, the DNC felt the need to run ads defending Holt’s vote for the health-care bill. Sipprelle -- a Princeton-based venture capitalist -- had $490,000 in cash on hand as of June 30 and has committed to match at least the first $1 million in donations to his campaign. New Jersey was a reliably Democratic state until Chris Christie’s win last year; now Obama’s approval rating is even with his disapproval rating -- 47–47 in Quinnipiac -- and Holt remains one of the most liberal members of Congress. Christie won four of the five counties whose parts make up Holt’s district.

#page#4. Benjamin Lange vs. Bruce Braley, Iowa’s 1st District.

Reasons the challenger should have no chance: Braley won 65 percent of the vote in 2008; in his first bid for this seat, in 2006, he won with 55 percent. Braley is the vice-chair of the DCCC, so that committee will be pretty darn committed to make sure he comes back next January. There will be a third-party candidate, a self-employed gem cutter who describes himself as ideologically close to the tea party.

#ad#Reasons the challenger has a chance: Lange actually narrowly outraised Braley in fundraising for the second quarter, raising $108,587 compared with Braley’s $106,678. Perhaps even more strikingly, “Out of approximately 400,000 registered voters in the district, only six constituents contributed to Braley’s reelection bid this past quarter, while Lange raised 85% of his funds from constituents inside the district.” The governor’s race appears likely to be a big GOP win; if it is, once and future governor Terry Branstad may have coattails. The Senate race is also likely to be a GOP rout.

There is reportedly a video tape of Braley, the former president of the Iowa chapter of the American Trial Lawyers Association, addressing the national organization in a seminar on how to sue doctors. When Democrats are abandoning their defense of a health-care bill that included no serious malpractice reform, such a video could be highly damaging.

5. Andy Vidak vs. Jim Costa, California’s 20th District.

Reasons the challenger should have no chance: Jim Costa hasn’t faced a tough opponent since his first campaign for the House in 2004. He ran unopposed in 2006; he won 74 percent in 2008.

Reasons the challenger has a chance: Jim Costa was another one of those ought-to-be safe Democrats who had the DNC running ads in their district, defending his vote for health care. This district includes parts of two cities with astonishingly high unemployment: Bakersfield (15.7 percent) and Fresno (16 percent).

By far, the biggest local issue in this district is water access; a long-simmering dispute about the fish in the Sacramento–San Joaquin Delta and water needs in the San Joaquin Valley led to Costa “declaring war” on fellow California Democrat George Miller. The local press notes he’s been “repeatedly pummeled by Republicans in the valley for not doing enough to get the federal government to ease water pumping restrictions.” Costa’s opponent, Hanford farmer Andy Vidak, is picking up support from local farmers.

With competitive Senate and gubernatorial races, the GOP should have good turnout.

6. Ryan Frazier vs. Ed Perlmutter, Colorado’s 7th District.

Reasons the challenger should have no chance: Perlmutter won 63 percent of the vote in his district in 2008, which put him 4 percentage points ahead of Obama. At one point, it looked like the GOP would win Colorado’s Senate and gubernatorial races handily; now the Senate looks like a tough fight, and the governor’s race is an uphill climb that matches the Rocky Mountains.

Reasons the challenger has a chance: The district was designed to be competitive; as recently as 2002, it was the most evenly divided district in the country. The NRCC thinks that Perlmutter’s vote for cap-and-trade will be devastating among locals employed in Colorado’s oil and gas industries. Frazier is young (32), and he is only the second black candidate to run for federal office as a Republican in Colorado. President Obama has been significantly underwater in this state since August of last year.

7. Bill Johnson vs Charlie Wilson, Ohio’s 6thDistrict.

Reasons the challenger should have no chance: Despite narrow wins by Bush in 2004 and McCain in 2008 in this district, Wilson has won by wide margins. He won 62 percent of the vote in both 2006 and 2008. Before Wilson, the district was represented by Ted Strickland, the current governor of Ohio, from 1992 to 2006. (Note: This is not the Charlie Wilson depicted by Tom Hanks in the movie Charlie Wilson’s War.)

Reasons the challenger has a chance: I’ll let CNN set the stage: “Backlash against a stagnant economy and opposition to Democratic initiatives such as health care reform have given an opening to Republican challenger Bill Johnson.” Johnson is attempting to get Wilson to weigh in on issues that are uncomfortable for Democrats -- the Ground Zero mosque, whether New York congressman Charles Rangel should resign, etc. Both top-of-the-ticket races -- for governor and senator -- are looking bad for Democrats in Ohio.

#page#8. Mike Keown vs. Sanford Bishop, Georgia’s 2nd District.

Reasons the challenger should have no chance: Bishop has represented this district since 1992, and has usually won comfortably, with a floor of 54 percent (in 1996 and 2000) and a ceiling of 69 percent (in 2008). It is 48 percent African-American. Obama carried the district, 54 percent to 46 percent. Bishop is on the House Appropriations Committee.

Reasons the challenger has a chance: Besides the usual factors of high unemployment and frustration with incumbents, as the NRCC crows, Keown has raised nearly $350,000 -- more than any of Bishop’s recent opponents and an exceedingly healthy amount in a relatively inexpensive district in which to buy ads. The incumbent’s campaign skills may be a little rusty: “Bishop’s 2010 campaign got off to a rocky start last Wednesday when Press Secretary Aston McRae fired off a three-page e-mail accusing Keown of budgeting issues while serving as mayor of Coolidge and alleged twice voting for a pay raise while a member of the state House of Representatives. Unfortunately for McRae, the e-mail was sent from Bishop’s congressional office instead of from the campaign, and that’s a no-no. McRae pulled the offending document from Bishop’s website and issued a retraction two days later.”

#ad#9. Ilario Pantano vs. Mike McIntrye, North Carolina’s 7th District.

Reasons the challenger should have no chance: McIntrye has won healthily since his first election to this seat in 1996, always netting between 70 percent and 91 percent of the vote.

Reasons the challenger has a chance: This is actually an R+5 district; Bush beat Kerry here 56 percent to 44 percent. Pantano’s first ad features Wilmington attorney and registered Republican George Roundtree declaring, as StarNews Online puts it, that “he considers McIntyre a friend and has supported him financially over the years, but that he can’t do it any longer.” “The country, my grandchildren, my children cannot afford the agenda of Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid,” Roundtree says. “Whether you like it or not, Mike, you are tied to that agenda.”

Pantano’s already attracted one surprise guest for two fundraisers: actor Kelsey Grammer.

10. Morgan Philpot vs. Jim Matheson, Utah’s 2nd District.

Reasons the challenger should have no chance: Matheson is in his fifth term, usually knows how to vote for his district, and won with 63 percent of the vote in 2008 -- while McCain was carrying his district with 58 percent of the vote. And for what it is worth, this is the least Republican district in Utah.

Reasons the challenger has a chance: In a year like this, any Democrat who represents an R+15 district will have to sweat. The unexpected dismissal of longtime senator Bob Bennett suggests Utahans may be tuning out the traditional arguments in favor of incumbents. Philpot is holding town-hall meetings to contrast with Matheson, who hasn’t held one in years; the NRCC is knocking Matheson as a “phantom Congressman.” Traditionally, a member who holds a district that leans heavily towards the other party makes up for the partisan disadvantage with great personal charisma, constituent service, or bipartisan appeal. This is harder to do when you are disinclined to meet voters in large groups.

11. Theresa Collett vs. Betty McCollum, Minnesota’s 4th District.

Reasons the challenger should have no chance: This is a D+13 district; McCollum won it in 2008 by 37 percentage points.

Reasons the challenger has a chance: Upon winning the primary, Collett, a University of St. Thomas law professor,challenged McCollum to four debates. She’s still waiting for a reply. On the stump, Collett makes her points in a crisp, clear, direct style. Outgoing governor Tim Pawlenty is giving Collett some help. Collett is severely underfunded, but McCollum has only $160,634 in cash on hand as of July 21, which is fairly low for an incumbent.

#page#12. Dr. Scott DesJarlais vs. Lincoln Davis, Tennesee’s 4th District.

Reasons the challenger should have no chance: Davis managed to win this seat in what was generally a good year for Republicans (2002), and kept it while Bush was winning Tennessee handily in 2004. Davis is sitting on $472,000 in campaign funds.

Reasons the challenger has a chance: This is one of the most Republican seats in the country to be represented by a Democrat. In 2008, Barack Obama did not win any of the 24 counties that, entirely or in part, fall inside the borders of this district. Davis admits that if he slacks off in his campaign effort, he will probably be defeated. DesJarlais raised nearly $300,000 for his primary fight. In April, a GOP poll showed Davis somewhat vulnerable, with a 45 percent favorable/30 percent unfavorable rating among voters, down from 65 percent favorable/15 percent unfavorable in 2008. In matchups with two prospective Republican nominees, Davis led 44 percent to 33 percent.

#ad#13. Dan Kapakne vs. Ron Kind, Wisconsin’s 3rd District.

Reasons the challenger should have no chance: Ron Kind has represented this district since 1996; he won 64 percent of the vote in 2008. He’s sitting on $1.3 million in cash on hand.

Reasons the challenger has a chance: Despite Kind’s wide margins of victory, the district is only scored D+4. A July poll put Kapanke at just six points behind (38 percent to 44 percent). Worse for the incumbent, “only 37 percent believe Ron Kind has performed his job as Congressman well enough to deserve re-election. Fully 49 percent believe it is time for a change and a new person should be elected.” Kind has had some rough receptions at his “listening sessions” in his district. Kapanke, a state senator, has raised $581,000 and has $342,000 on hand, fairly strong numbers.

Of course, all of the above candidates remain underdogs, and one shouldn’t be surprised if they fall short of victory on Election Day. But none can be counted out yet, and they have already made Democrats’ goal of keeping control of the House harder to achieve by expanding the number of races on which the DCCC will have to spend its limited resources. Safe Democrats aren’t extinct, but they are much rarer than they were two years ago.

-- Jim Geraghty writes the Campaign Spot for NRO.

Jim Geraghty

The feds aren’t doing school districts any favors by encouraging them to spend money they don’t have.

Earlier this month, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan heaped praise on Congress for including $10 billion for “EduJobs” in a state-aid package that it had enacted. The move to subsidize teacher salaries and avoid layoffs was so admirable, Duncan told the press, because Congress’s “historic vote means school officials won’t need to make those tough calls.” Indeed, Duncan termed mailing 10 billion borrowed bucks to the states “a real, real act of courage.”

This definition of courage has become something of a theme for Obama’s Education Department -- despite its reputation for gritty reform-mindedness. Earlier this summer, Maura Policelli, the department’s senior adviser for external affairs, told state officials to stop worrying about funding and “to see how [stimulus] funds can help alleviate layoffs.” She explained that this “require[s] some courage because it does involve the possible risk of investing in staff that you may not be able to retain in the 2011–12 school year.” When one official asked what would happen if a state had “unspent [American Recovery and Reinvestment Act] money after 2011,” Policelli said: “You will be fired.” Looks like courage is not just about spending, but about spending quickly.

#ad#All of this might be laughable if the feds weren’t making it harder for states and school districts to prepare for rough seas ahead. When asked by the Associated Press what happens if districts use this money as a short-term fix and stand to get hammered next year, Duncan replied, “Well, we’re focused right now, Donna, on this school year. . . . We’re hopeful we’ll be in a much better spot next year.”

Well, while Duncan can hope to his heart’s content, the reality is that things will get much worse for schools before they get better. Scott Pattison, the executive director of the National Association of State Budget Officers, notes, “There are so many issues that go way beyond the current downturn. . . . This is an awful time for states fiscally, but they’re even more worried about 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014.” Property taxes account for about a third of school spending, but property-tax valuations tend to lag property values by three years -- which mean school districts are on the front end of a slide that’s got several years to run. And, as the authors of a recent Rockefeller Institute report note, “Even if overall economic conditions continue to improve throughout 2010, fiscal recovery for the states historically lags behind a national economic turnaround and can be expected to do so in the aftermath of the recent recession.”

Duncan also made the fantastical claim, to USA Today’s Greg Toppo, that “the vast majority of districts around the country have literally been cutting for five, six, seven years in a row. And, many of them, you know, are through, you know, fat, through flesh, and into bone.”

First off, Duncan is just flat-out wrong. Duncan’s own National Center for Education Statistics, for instance, reports that, nationally, current K–12 per-pupil expenditures increased from 2003–04 to 2006–2007 (the most recent school year for which the NCES reports spending) by 17 percent -- from $8,310 to $9,683. Indeed NCES data make clear that the last two years have been the first time in more than a half-century that per-pupil spending has declined from the year before. And even in the past two years, job losses in K–12 education have been much more modest than in the private sector. It’s befuddling that Duncan is making excuses for officials bemoaning their twice-a-century belt tightening, rather than encouraging them to take a hard look at benefits, staffing, operations, and management.

Duncan, who singled out for praise the $1.2 billion that EduJobs is funneling to California, also might want to consider the recent Pepperdine study of 52 California school districts. This study reported that spending rose 21.9 percent from 2003–04 to 2008–09, outpacing both state income growth and inflation. On a per-pupil basis, spending actually jumped 25.8 percent over that period, while classroom spending as a share of total outlays declined from 59 percent to 57.8 percent. Where did the money go? Pay rose by 28 percent for certificated supervisors and administrators and by 44 percent  for classified supervisors and administrators.

Look, no one makes tough choices in flush times. No executive in the public or the private sector is eager to squeeze salaries, shut down inefficient programs, or trim employees when he can avoid it. This is why tough times can be so healthful for organizations. They make possible the occasional pruning. They prod managers to tackle problems that otherwise get swept under the rug. This permits organizations to regain their fighting trim, to reexamine old priorities, and to create a leaner culture focused on productivity and performance.

Even if some state or local leaders are inclined to swing the budget ax, promises of federal funds targeted for “job preservation” make them look like surly killjoys. Even if a superintendent knows that plumping the payroll is going to lock in new benefit commitments, make it harder to justify necessary efficiencies, and thus make things worse going forward, the feds have now made it tougher for her to cut the budget.

#page#Moreover, so long as the bailout drawer might be open, union leaders who might be inclined to deal know that they will look like suckers and softies if they do so. That’s doubly true when they know that standing firm is a great way to accentuate the crisis, making it easier for the administrators to plead for new dollars.

A spokesman for New Jersey governor Chris Christie recently told the New York Times that federal bailouts for schools are “a real double-edged sword. This money will not be there next year, and we’re not going to get back up to the funding that they had previously been used to.”

#ad#Earlier this summer, the National Council on Teacher Quality reported the following: “Financially under the gun, many districts have found ways to avert layoffs. New York City, for example, instituted a ‘cost-of-living’ wage freeze. Other districts are asking teachers to make salary and benefits concessions -- by contributing more to their health insurance plans, for instance.”

But Duncan is making such measures less likely to surface and less likely to succeed. I guess that’s what he means by courage.

-- Frederick M. Hess is director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute and, with Eric Osberg, coeditor of the new book Stretching the School Dollar.

Frederick M. Hess

Stewart Baker explains the difficulties facing DHS.

‘Without a shot being fired, without even a clear sense of who the attacker is, much of the United States could find itself living in post-Katrina New Orleans, but without hope of a rescue anytime soon.” Stewart Baker, the founding policy director at the Department of Homeland Security under Pres. George W. Bush, makes this and other alarming announcements in his new book, Skating on Stilts: Why We Aren’t Stopping Tomorrow’s Terrorism. He explains why he’s so worried, what he learned about the ACLU, and more in an interview with National Review Online’s Kathryn Jean Lopez:

LOPEZ: How did you come up with the title? I mean, I know you’re into hiking, but have you ever tried skating on stilts?

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BAKER: I was trying to convey two things. First, the notion that new technology can make us faster and more effective while also raising both the probability and the consequences of failure. Second, I thought it captured the flavor of working at the top of DHS -- exhilarating, exhausting, and never more than a minute’s inattention from disaster.

Have I ever skated on stilts? I go hiking every year with my son, except for last year, when I was trying to get the book done while also relaunching my law practice. I’ve done a fair amount of rollerblading, but never on stilts. I’ve left enough skin on the Washington & Old Dominion Trail as it is.

LOPEZ: You write about being at the Pentagon memorial to those who were murdered there on September 11, 2001: “I look for my birth year -- 1947. Eleven dead. More than any other year. That seems fitting. By 2001, we baby boomers had shaped the United States to reflect ourselves. We were what the attackers hated. This is our fight.” Do boomers know that? Have they forgotten?

BAKER: That’s a great question. In general, I think boomers, or at least their leaders, have been oblivious to how they’ve changed the world, or how those changes are viewed abroad. Boomers want to get credit for legitimizing sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll, or at least two out of three; at the same time, their one great claim to moral authority, the triumph over racism, is tied to an enthusiasm for embracing other cultures and an expectation that they’ll be embraced in return.

In the Islamic world, that expectation seems incoherent. There, you can stand for modernism, women’s rights, sex appeal, and rock music, but that puts you in permanent opposition to traditional Islamic values and their defenders -- at the risk of your life. If the attacks of 9/11 were a reaction to the West’s intrusion into the Islamic world, and that’s certainly how I’d view them, then the boomers did a lot to cause the reaction.

In the boomers’ generational narrative, though, the bad guys are defenders of traditional values who don’t like dark-skinned foreigners, while the good guys attack traditional values and defend dark-skinned minorities. So the boomers’ response to the attacks has been to prove that they are the good guys by showing how tolerant of Islamic culture and Middle Eastern minorities they can be.

It makes a kind of sense if your generational myth is the Freedom Riders in Mississippi, but I don’t think it communicates much more than muddle (or perhaps weakness) to al-Qaeda and its sympathizers.

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LOPEZ: Is the “Ground Zero mosque” a homeland-security issue? How does it sit with you?

BAKER: To tell the truth, I’m pretty ambivalent. Of course there’s a right to build the mosque there, but the First Amendment doesn’t put an end to the debate over what’s appropriate. I guess I’m like the vast majority; we honor the rights of the builders of the mosque but we profoundly wish that they’d show more sensitivity than they have so far.

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LOPEZ: Nidal Malik Hasan at Fort Hood. Umar Abdulmutallab on Christmas Day. Faisal Shahzad at Times Square. Najibullah Zazi and the New York City subways. We’ve had our share of attacks and close calls this year. Are we not doing what we need to do to protect the homeland?

BAKER: Stopping lone-wolf attacks is extraordinarily difficult. Plus, now that the meme of Islamic suicide attacks is abroad in the land, it’s going to attract some nutcases who might have killed their relatives or coworkers in a different climate. I don’t think we should expect to stop every one of those attacks. Our best hope is to keep al-Qaeda and its affiliates from organizing and training a bunch of these people for a much more dangerous effort. So far, we’ve been lucky, but some of that luck is the result of a concerted effort. We spotted some of the attackers who were foiled in part because we know a lot about who is traveling to places where they might get training, and federal and New York City authorities have been aggressive about infiltration of nascent conspiracies. On the whole, I’d say that this administration has picked up and carried forward many of the policies that worked in the last administration, especially at home. Abroad, there’s a growing risk that disengagement will allow al-Qaeda and its allies to find a place of refuge where our drones and troops will no longer go.

LOPEZ: “The American Civil Liberties Union went nuts,” you write about one policy, in your book. Could that be written frequently?

BAKER: Yes, unfortunately, the ACLU’s business model these days is to go nuts whenever the government responds to new threats by using new technology. The ACLU’s tactic is one of weakness; they know that as new technologies become more common, the government’s use of those technologies will come to seem ordinary common sense. So they have to start shouting early, before the technology is widely adopted, so it can be cast as strange, scary, and oppressive. My favorite example was when the ACLU denounced as the second coming of 1984 the police’s use of handheld computers to search publicly available databases. It seemed silly then. A couple of years later, when we all are getting iPhones and Android phones with search built in, it seems downright quaint. But in other areas, like access to travel data, the ACLU and their foreign allies in the European Union have made it very difficult to run a smart air-security program.

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LOPEZ: Were their concerns ever valid or reasonable?

BAKER: Sure, there’s a grain of truth in most such concerns. If you’ll forgive a digression, I’ve always been fascinated by the social predictions that accompany new technology, and especially the dystopian predictions. Because those founding fears are transmitted as part of the culture of the early adopters. The air industry, born in an age of war, feared the use of civilian flights for military purposes, and many early measures were designed to prevent such uses. The nuclear industry was born in original sin -- “I am become death” and all that -- so its advocates were always trying to find a way to show how splitting the atom could make mankind safer and better off; they became advocates for nuclear power and disarmament. And the same is true for computers. Born into a bitter and unresolved struggle with totalitarianism, the early industry was alive to the ways in which data processing could enable state control of citizens. That was not a foolish concern, and it’s a good idea to be wary of that possibility. And indeed, the elite of the profession, even today, is acculturated as part of their technical education and socialization to resist such uses. But I would argue that the acculturation process has produced an overreaction. It’s like an autoimmune disease in which useful responses to antibodies has been so amped up so far that they’re causing harm, not good.

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LOPEZ: You used to argue for the wall between cops and spies, as you put it. When did you see you were wrong?

BAKER: Not until after 9/11, when I saw how much harm the wall had done. In August 2001, as administered by the FISA court, the wall prevented the FBI from using a large, preexisting task force of criminal investigators to track down the al-Qaeda operatives we knew had entered the country. They could have been found and stopped if more resources had been mustered in those days, but even with the intelligence systems blinking red about an imminent attack, the FISA court and the FBI were more focused on maintaining the wall than on stopping al-Qaeda. That was far too high a price to pay for the modest and mostly theoretical civil-liberties payoff we got from the wall.

LOPEZ: So you’re not anti-privacy?

BAKER: Like everybody, I believe in privacy, and I mourn the loss of secrecy and anonymity that modern technology has brought about. But trying to roll those developments back is a fool’s errand, and rolling them back just in government is dangerous as well as foolish, since it will keep the government from protecting citizens from serious threats. I think we should protect privacy by using technology rather than fighting it. For example, the first place we should implement comprehensive computer surveillance is in government workers’ use of government databases. They should lose workplace privacy first and most thoroughly, since that will allow us to punish government employees who misuse private data. We already do that -- in the 2008 campaign, both Barack Obama and Joe the Plumber were the victims of “file browsing” by hostile or curious government workers, and practically all of the browsers were caught and fired. Some were prosecuted, thanks to our computer-audit capabilities. Adopting those capabilities in a concerted fashion is very good practical protection for privacy.

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LOPEZ: How would you rate Janet Napolitano’s job performance?

BAKER: On fighting terrorism and building DHS into an effective and unified agency, I think she’s done well. She’s had an opportunity to back away from many of the initiatives that were launched in the last administration. Instead, she’s kept most of them, and embraced a few with great enthusiasm. Perhaps her most effective achievement, for which she doesn’t get much credit, has to do with DHS’s role inside government. It would have been easy for this administration to treat DHS as the ugly stepsister -- adopted in a form that Democrats didn’t like, committed to a mission associated with the last administration, and lacking any Democratic alumni who could speak up for the department in the crucial early turf battles. Instead, from the moment she took the reins, she’s made DHS a force inside the administration, establishing that its role in fighting terrorism is a nonpartisan issue. Under a different leader, the outcome could have been very different

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LOPEZ: Isn’t it next to impossible to do that job well? Isn’t the Department of Homeland Security way too big? Not just the bureaucracy, but its mission?

BAKER: It’s an operational department, which is rare in the federal government. DOD, Veterans Affairs, and DHS are the three biggest departments precisely because they actually deliver services direct to constituents -- rather than telling states or industry how to deliver services.

That’s an immense management challenge. I’m not sure it makes DHS “way too big,” since those workers would have to be somewhere. Putting them in DHS has certainly helped focus them on terrorism prevention in a way they weren’t before. The best example is border enforcement, which used to be divided between Justice (immigration), Treasury (customs) and Transportation (Coast Guard). Those are all smaller departments where in theory the border enforcers could have gotten more attention and oversight than at DHS. But in fact, each of those departments was dominated by a culture that was focused on something else -- prosecutions, or revenue, say. Only when they came to DHS could they take full responsibility for dealing effectively with border issues, and on using border authorities to keep terrorists out of the country. I think that’s a major accomplishment that is directly attributable to the creation of DHS.

Of course, in an operational department with 50,000 employees, someone is always screwing up. Plus, as I said earlier, completely stopping every lone wolf attack is an unrealistic goal. If you hold the secretary responsible for every screw-up of that sort, the job is impossible. But I don’t think that’s been happening, at least not recently.

LOPEZ: You’ve written that “one of my cybersecurity nightmares is that foreign nations will use a network attack to bring down our power grid in a time of crisis.” Do you just have particularly Bauer-ish nightmares, or is that a real threat?

BAKER: It is. Our computer networks are remarkably insecure, and the use of those networks to support the power grid is still growing. Indeed, the “smart grid” program is spurring that growth. Plus, it’s so difficult to attribute such attacks, given the Internet’s current architecture, that the temptation to launch an attack and blame it on criminals or “volunteers” would be very strong.

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LOPEZ: You predict a “biological” “disaster” that won’t likely be prevented, because of all these business and foreign and foreign interests who would push back against necessary measures. Are you being overly dire? Do we have concrete reasons to be worried about “biological malware”?

BAKER: Here’s why I think a biologic disaster is coming if we stay on our current trajectory. Biotech’s ability to construct viruses from scratch is following something like Moore’s Law -- it’s twice as cheap and twice as easy to build a virus today than it was a year ago, and it will be four times as cheap and easy next year. Pretty soon, the ability to build smallpox from scratch will move from a few very sophisticated labs to college and even high-school labs. I have a lot of faith in the essential goodness of most people, but I don’t see how we proliferate that frightening capability that widely without it falling into the hands of someone who has a grudge against the world. And that doesn’t take into account the possibility that someone would make a different but equally dangerous virus out of sloppiness, or because they have invented a vaccine for the new bug but can’t sell it unless the disease spreads.

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LOPEZ: How does the Visa Waiver Program remain a threat?

BAKER: The Visa Waiver Program allows people from some 35 countries to come to the U.S. without prior vetting. In its original conception, the program assumed that we could trust all the citizens of particular countries not to do anything here that we couldn’t live with. Of course, we were worried more about illegal immigration than terrorism, so we ended up trusting most developed countries. The VWP was reformed substantially in the last administration, and I tell the story in the book. Now, no one comes here without going online and getting permission first, and most countries in the program share information about suspected terrorists and criminals inside their borders, so we know whom to scrutinize. All of the countries admitted after 9/11 have done this, and any other candidates will need to meet the standard.

Unfortunately, some of the countries that were admitted before 9/11, like France and some other Western European countries with large Muslim populations, don’t share such information. So there’s still a lot of risk in the program. We will need to show great resolve, and a willingness to kick a few of the least cooperative countries out of the program, if we want to close these security holes.

LOPEZ: Do we regularly surrender security to diplomacy?

BAKER: Yes.

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LOPEZ: With certain countries in particular? Europe seems to be a big problem.

BAKER: I think we tend to view the European Union as an ally, even though most European institutions are strikingly cool, if not hostile, to U.S. interests, even in areas of common concern. I talk in the book about how often European officials tried to thwart reasonable security measures, using bogus legal and privacy arguments. There were three such negotiations between 2003 and 2007. Now the Europeans have launched a fourth attack on U.S. security measures. I can’t think of another jurisdiction in the world that would feel free to force the U.S. into four negotiations in seven years over the same topic.

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LOPEZ: How can you see that changing?

BAKER: I’d say Europe needs some tough love. European institutions are used to the idea that, come what may, the U.S. will support greater European consolidation. But in fact, the U.S. has much better relations with the nations of Europe than with Brussels, which raises the question whether the U.S. should continue to support further consolidation of authority in Brussels, especially since there’s little evidence that European publics (as opposed to European elites) actually want more consolidation.

LOPEZ: How can the Transportation Security Administration be made better?

BAKER: We need to move from a weapons-focused air-security system to one that focuses on finding potential terrorists. I’ve got a chapter that lays out the way that travel data and good ID can be used to start the shift to a more efficient and more flexible screening system.

LOPEZ: Is there anything you’ve been pleasantly surprised by from the Obama administration?

BAKER: As I said earlier, DHS has seen a lot of continuity in counterterrorism policy and operations. That didn’t have to happen.

LOPEZ: Is there anything that they’ve reversed that keeps you up at night?

BAKER: This administration has said a lot about cybersecurity, but it has lost a lot of practical momentum. The determination and some of the decisions that had been mustered in 2008 to address cybersecurity risks have been rolled back, delayed, or turned over to the lawyers for more talk. Meanwhile, the risks continue to grow.

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LOPEZ: You write that “The new administration has embraced civil liberties rhetoric with enthusiasm. Some of them seem convinced that they have a mandate to roll back any security measure that reduced privacy or inconvenienced the international community. I don’t think that will happen with border security, but the new administration’s deference to privacy groups and international opinion will make it far harder to do anything about the new threats.” Why do you say that about the border? What inspires your confidence?

BAKER: 9/11 provided a riveting and formative experience of our national-security exposure. Indeed, that may have been the only such experience that President Obama lived through -- since he missed the Cuban missile crisis. I’m confident that he understands experientially why we need real security measures aimed at terrorism. And in fact the last 18 months have demonstrated that the Obama administration is largely committed to the counterterror programs of the last administration.

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LOPEZ: If whoever truly directs homeland-security policy for this administration can take one lesson from your book, what would you hope it be?

BAKER: When privacy groups attack your program, and they will, don’t surrender. The ACLU and its allies in the media always fight a great first round. If you stop the fight then, you’ll lose. But if you counterpunch with real data and self-confidence you can win every round after the first.

LOPEZ: Knowing what you know, what makes sleep possible?

BAKER: To paraphrase Churchill, in my experience our politicians, and the electorate, usually do the right thing -- after exhausting all the alternatives. And that’s how we’ll get the privacy-security balance right as well. I figure my job is to minimize our casualties in getting to that point. Plus, I’ve been surprised and pleased that a book that is so blunt about the failings of the privacy lobby has received so many favorable reviews from mainstream media such as the L.A. Times and the Wall Street Journal. Maybe that means that journalists, who have a nose for cant, are starting to get wise to the privacy lobby’s excesses. If so, the tide may have already turned.

LOPEZ: How can the average American voter make use of your book?

BAKER: I’d offer two lessons:

1. Technology will make it easier for bad people to cause us harm. And government can only do so much. You need to be prepared to help yourself, your family, and your neighbors if bad things do happen. Don’t obsess about it; just make sure you have a week’s worth of stuff to keep you going in an emergency. Food, water, fuel. And, for reasons I give in the book, a course of antibiotics stored in a cool, dry place.

#page#2. Since everyone believes in privacy and is a little uneasy about where technology and classified security programs could take us, there’s a temptation to say, as I once said, that a little more privacy and a few more protections for civil liberties can’t hurt. It’s also tempting to assume, when your party isn’t in power, that shocking government abuses of power are imminent, so any restriction on government authority is probably a good idea.

It’s not. As the book shows, over and over, that kind of thing can get people killed. It was a seemingly harmless civil-liberties measure that killed our last best chance to find the hijackers. It also prevented TSA from building a security system that looks for terrorists, not just weapons, and at the same time made privacy victims out of a bunch of kids who had the same name as a terrorist. For five years, because Congress had declared that TSA could not be trusted with airline passengers’ birthdates, those kids spent years getting hassled in airports because they couldn’t be distinguished in government records from terrorists. And the rest of us were less safe because passengers like the Christmas Day bomber escaped notice.

#ad#Both the Republican and the Democratic parties have politicians who pander to that kind of disaffected libertarian sentiment.

As always in a democracy, the best way to put a stop to that is stop voting for them.

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

Interview

Barbara takes out her boxing gloves on abortion.

‘Carly Fiorina would make abortion a crime.”

With a single word, California Democratic senator Barbara Boxer may have shattered a glass ceiling in American politics: In using the scarlet A-word, “abortion,” Boxer has done something rhetorically unusual -- at least for a politician who favors abortion on demand.

As Chuck Donovan, a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation and co-author of Blessed Are the Barren: A Social History of Planned Parenthood, puts it: “I don’t know if I can remember any ad where the A-word was used by an advocate.” The idea, usually, is to sound mainstream. Abortion may be legal, but it doesn’t make people feel comfortable to talk about it; better, therefore, to use such euphemisms as “pro-choice” and “Planned Parenthood.”

#ad#Abortion-industry groups, including NARAL Pro-Choice America and Planned Parenthood, are Boxer’s loyal army in the battle to keep her Senate seat, the latter having announced it will spend at least a million dollars in the effort. In the wake of the California primary, NARAL’s political director said: “Pro-choice Americans may have no stronger ally in the U.S. Senate than Senator Barbara Boxer. Year after year, Sen. Boxer has stood with women against the continuous assaults on our right to choose from anti-choice senators.”

Boxer is running in California, so use of the A-word makes sense to Larry J. Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia: “I think Boxer fully realizes what a close race she is in.” Abortion is one of the best defining issues that Boxer has.

But there could be a political danger in this strategy, even in California. “Since fiscal issues dominate every poll of women in California (and nationwide), spending even a nanosecond on abortion in a 15-second spot screams, ‘I am out of touch; send me packing -- please!’” warns Republican pollster Kellyanne Conway. Further, “the use of the word ‘abortion’ shows how tone-deaf she is to her own supporters. The abortion-rights crowd hates it because it reminds everyone what the product of the ‘choice’ really is.” So while Boxer calls the other gal extreme, the word fits her well.

Boxer’s ad shows prison bars, suggesting, as pro-abortion extremists have been known to do, that the fact that Fiorina is pro-life means that she wants to send women to jail for abortions. Earlier this summer, in fact, Boxer’s campaign manager said just that: “Carly Fiorina is so extreme that she would make abortion illegal and turn women and doctors into criminals.”

Liz Mair, a spokesman for the Fiorina campaign, calls the charge “a total distortion.” She explains Fiorina’s actual views, and contrasts them with Boxer’s: “Carly thinks we can and should curtail the tragic practice of abortion, not punish women -- a mainstream position -- whereas Barbara Boxer has voted five times against a ban on partial-birth abortion, supports taxpayer funding of abortion, and thinks a baby only acquires rights when it arrives home from the hospital.”

The reference to partial-birth abortion is a significant one. When former Pennsylvania Republican senator Rick Santorum asked Boxer whether she “would accept the fact that once the baby is separated from the mother, that baby cannot be killed,” she couldn’t answer the question.

When you’re an activist for abortion -- and have become necessarily immune to the horror of it -- you end up accepting ideas that are not just wrong in themselves, but also horrifying to most of your fellow citizens. So, whether Boxer wins or loses, her frank use of the A-word may have significant fallout for the “right to choose” movement.

Carly Fiorina, for her part, offers more than rhetoric. She offers a human story -- who is standing right next to her.

She tells interviewers that her husband, Frank, could very easily have fallen victim to abortion. “My mother-in-law was told to abort her child, who became my husband. She chose something different, obviously, and that made all the difference in her life and mine and certainly his,” Fiorina has said. “She spent a year in the hospital after his birth. My husband is the joy of her life, and he is the rock of my life. So those experiences have shaped my view. . . . I recognize that a lot of women disagree with me on [abortion]. But I also know that women in general are not single-issue voters.” 

That sounds like the voice of a reasonable person. Boxer appears ready and willing to challenge that. All credit to her for her honesty. In an environment where taxpayer funding of abortion has been increased by manipulative White House and Democratic rhetoric, it’s welcome. In a country that is increasingly reasonable, Barbara Boxer keeps making that scarlet A brighter. Not that she has to -- her record says it all. It’s the icing on her out-of-touch campaign cake. And it may just not be the Golden ticket this year -- even in California.

— Kathryn Jean Lopez is editor-at-large of National Review Online. She can be reached at klopez@nationalreview.com. This column is available exclusively through United Media. For permission to reprint or excerpt it, please contact Carmen Puello at cpuello@unitedmedia.com.

Kathryn Jean Lopez