Recalls & Scandals in Wisconsin

Everyone seems to expect Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker to survive his recall election. The only thing to do then is what football fans do: look to the point spread. That's what John Ellis does at Buzzfeed:

The key to this election, however, is not really whether Governor Walker wins. More or less everyone expects him to do that. The key is how much he wins by. The crude calculation is this: Walker defeat equals certain Obama win in November. Walker win by 1-5 percentage points equals very close presidential general election (nationally). A Walker win by 6 points or more equals Mitt Romney is the favorite to win in November.

That's unpersuasive, of course. A Walker defeat would not guarantee a Romney defeat, nor would a big margin for Walker guarantee a Romney victory. It's not nonsense. The one or the other might well indicate where Wisconsin's ten electoral votes will go this December. The factions in Wisconsin seem to have solidified in favor of the Republicans. They won the judicial recall by a hair. If Walker wins this one by five points or more, that would suggest the GOP holds the balance of power in statewide elections, something that might well mean that Romney has a good shot at the state.

A victory for Walker would mean two other things that are important. One is that a Republican governor can stare in the face of the Public Employee Unions and live. The other is that Scott Walker has been elevated to national stature. I don't know if he has ambitions beyond his state, but a victory will certainly earn him a place in the blessed circle of the frequently talked about.

It is possible that recall election will have resulted in some serious damage to Wisconsin Democrats. Over the weekend an outfit calling itself The Wisconsin Citizen's Media Co-op published a story online indicating that Scott Walker had fathered a child out of wedlock in 1988. The story, explicitly intended to discredit Walker's integrity, appears to be a transparent eleventh hour smear.

It is based solely on the testimony of one Bernadette Gillick, who claims to be the roommate of "Ruth," the women who bore the child. The WCMC acknowledges that it could not reach the alleged mother. As far as I can tell, no Wisconsin newspaper has published on the matter, probably on the responsible grounds that it is only a rumor. Daniel Bice, the "Watchdog Columnist" for the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, has this:

I am getting a lot of emails because of this post. Two things: (1) I tracked down and talked to Dr. Gillick's freshman-year roommate at MU yesterday, and she adamantly denies that Walker is the father of her child. Yes, she got pregnant as a first-year student, but she believes Dr. Gillick is mixing up stories.

This is dirty politics on the bottom shelf. That didn't stop KOS from running with it. I don't know who the folks at WCMC are, but they have played the dumbest sort of trick: the one that discredits their side and makes the other look better. I have no reason to believe that WCMC is connected to any reputable Democratic Party officials or other anti-Walker group, but I admit that I am now curious.

There seem to be worse things than that afoot in Wisconsin. Ann Althouse received a mailing from The Greater Wisconsin Political Fund that was positively creepy, as she puts it. Here is some of the text:

Why do so many people fail to vote? We've been talking about this problem for years, but it only seems to get worse. We're sending this mailing to you and your neighbors to publicize who does and does not vote.

We all need to pull together. The chart shows the names of some of your neighbors, showing which have voted in the past.

After the June 5^th election, public records will tell everyone who voted and who didn't.

We know who you are and we know where you live. Public records indeed show who votes, but using such information in an explicit attempt to intimidate private persons is scurrilous and authoritarian. People have a right to vote for whomever they choose and they have a right not to vote, if they choose. It's bad enough to fabricate a scandal against an elected official, but Walker is a big boy and can take it. Threatening to expose people to their neighbors is bad on a whole 'nuther level.

Apparently this is not an isolated incident. One of Althouse's readers received a letter from "researchers" at Harvard. It provided a list of political contributions by the reader, along with a list of contributions by her neighbors, with names listed and the receiving political party identified in each case. Althouse's reader was the only Republican on a list including nine contributors to Democrats.

Ve know who you are and ve haf you surrounded. The letter is apparently part of an approved graduate student "study", though it requests no information. Tom Barlett at the Chronicle of Higher Education, speculates:

According to the Web site for the project, the purpose of sending out the letters is to understand how "the open nature of information can affect contributions." I'm going to guess that researchers plan to check whether the people who received letters contributed more or less money the following year. But I could be wrong.

Okay. So the experiment will show a positive result if the letters pressure some voters to contribute more or less than they would otherwise have chosen to contribute. Under what conceivable standard is that ethical?

Again, it's one thing to know that a candidate or an interest group is funded by the Koch brothers or the National Rifle Association. It is another thing to send letters to private individuals warning them that their neighbors will know to whom they gave money. Some recipients of the letter were understandably disturbed by it. The letter from Harvard was apparently sent to persons in other states, so it may have no direct intention regarding the Wisconsin race. If so, all it discredits is the idea of the disclosure of political contributions.

The fraudulent sex scandal that the WCMC attempted to sell is old school dirty politics. The letter that Althouse received is something new and much more vicious. There are at least two real scandals here. I expect that they will remain tightly confined. I have trouble imagining that any reputable Democrat would have had anything to do with either of them. Even so they are deeply embarrassing to the anti-Walker cause. The recall election looks to be a much bigger disaster for the Democrats than anyone could have imagined when it began.

The Man Who Wasn’t There 4

Maureen Dowd is a pretty good meter when it comes to testing what intelligent and genuinely independent minded liberals have in mind. In her recent column she joins the circular firing squad of Democrats that has gathered around the President's reelection campaign. The piece offers a good catalog of how many folks on the left are disappointed with Mr. Obama and how much. The whole thing is worth reading, but I would point out two paragraphs. The first seems to me to be right on target. The second is a howler. She is here referring to what Democrat Ed Rendell says in his new book: A Nation of Wusses.

The legendary speaker who drew campaign crowds in the tens of thousands and inspired a dispirited nation ended up nonchalantly delegating to a pork-happy Congress, disdaining the bully pulpit, neglecting to do any L.B.J.-style grunt work with Congress and the American public, and ceding control of his narrative.

As president, Obama has never felt the need to explain or sell his signature pieces of legislation — the stimulus and health care bills — or stanch the flow of false information from the other side.

I assume that this is Rendell's view and not necessarily Dowd's. The first paragraph nails what has been Obama's biggest failing as President: not doing the grunt work. As many Democrats in Congress have complained, Obama doesn't stick around after the photo shoot and did very little to cultivate personal relationships even with members of his own party. He delegated way too much of the work of shaping the health care bill to Congress.

Consider the second paragraph. Surely no President ever gave more speeches on behalf of a piece of legislation than Obama gave on behalf of ObamaCare. Somehow it didn't seem to help. The legislation sank in public opinion like a bag full of treasury notes. It hasn't resurfaced.

Therein is the problem. Obama is great with a microphone in his hand, but there is only so much that can be accomplished by speaking to crowds. Legislation, by contrast, is grueling, personal work. You have to get together with small groups of people and talk it out. That's why Congress divides itself into committees.

The President's job ordinarily starts around a table with his own staff. At some point it involves talking it out with the Congressional leaders of your own party and then, yes, with the opposition leaders. It is a big help at that point if they know you and have learned to trust you. To say that the President isn't good at that would be misleading. He is positively allergic to it.

I have posted about this here, here, and here. That I was right is indicated by this paragraph from Dowd's piece:

In his new biography, "Barack Obama: The Story," David Maraniss writes that a roommate of the young Obama compared him to Walker Percy's protagonist in "The Moviegoer": an observer of his life, one step removed.

Apparently, the President isn't even intimate with himself, let alone his own administration or the leaders of Congress. Here is how Dowd closes her piece:

Superheroes and mythic figures must boldly lead. Obama's caution — ingrained from a life of being deserted by his father and sometimes his mother, and of being, as he wrote to another girlfriend, "caught without a class, a structure, or tradition to support me" — has restrained him at times.

In some ways, he's still finding himself, too absorbed to see what's not working. But the White House is a very hard place to go on a vision quest, especially with a storm brewing.

That would be my view.

Obama’s Economic Albatross

Given the economic albatross that is flopping limply on Barack Obama's chest, I honestly do not know what a smart and effect reelection campaign would look like. I don't have to wonder what a lousy one looks like. The Administration has been trying out one theme after another. Each one seems to whimper out with Jay Carney trying to find the right words to defend it.

The latest weapon to be deployed by the campaign is the "during Romney's tenure, Massachusetts ranked 47th out of all states in job creation," as Media Matters puts it. That's fair enough. One has to wonder, however, whether it occurred to someone in the campaign that this would invite the Romney campaign to compare the unemployment rate in Massachusetts during his tenure (4.7% was his best number) with the national unemployment rate now (8.2%). From U.S. News:

"Only President Obama, who has failed to meet his own goal of 6 percent unemployment, would have the audacity to attack Mitt Romney's record of creating jobs," Romney spokeswoman Andrea Saul said Thursday morning. "We're happy to compare the 4.7 percent unemployment rate Mitt Romney achieved in Massachusetts to President Obama's weak record any day." The Romney campaign says his state's jobless rate fell from 5.6 percent to 4.7 percent during his governorship. The national unemployment is about 8 percent, according to the government.

Who wins that one?

Presidents are always hostage to events and forces beyond their control. President Reagan might deserve some credit for the booming economy in 1984, but he was lucky regarding the timing. President Bush (41) might have sailed to reelection, sparing all of us the ordeal of a stained dress, had the early nineties economic recovery come a few months earlier.

It's not easy to say whether the U.S. economy would have done better if President Obama had managed to spend trillions more or (as Paul Krugman has suggested) if the Martians had invaded. If the business cycle were cycling, he ought to be in pretty good shape. A deep recession ought to be followed by a robust recovery. This one wasn't.

This last week's economic reports were nothing short of dreadful. GDP growth has all but stalled.

The gross domestic product for the first quarter of 2012 was revised down to 1.9 percent from the original 2.2 percent. The previous quarter saw a respectable growth rate of 3 percent; the revision means an already worrisome slowdown just worsened by about 14 percent.

The anemic nature of the economic recovery, as the American Enterprise Institute's James Pethokoukis notes, can be measured by the fact that GDP growth in the past five quarters has been 0.4 percent, 1.3 percent, 1.8 percent, 3 percent and now 1.9 percent.

What everyone has been focusing on is the employment picture. It isn't improving.

The United States gained a net 69,000 jobs in May, for an average of 96,000 over each of the last three months. That is down from a 245,000 gain on average from December through February. The unemployment rate rose to 8.2 percent in May from 8.1 in April, though largely because more people began looking for work. And there was more bad news: job gains that had been reported in March and April were revised downward.

Any hope that economic recovery would life Obama's sails is pretty much gone. It's hardly all the President's fault. He cannot fix what is wrong with Europe nor remedy the depressing news from China. He might bring the leaders of Congress together and try to hammer out some package of emergency measures. It would help if he had established strong relationships with a number of major committee chairs, but that just isn't our man. Even if he did this, it would be unlikely to help much. But at least it would look like he was attending to the public business.

Instead, as the depressing jobs report hit the presses, Obama was off for six major fundraising events. Therein lies the problem. Barack Obama is superb when it comes to selling himself. It is not easy to see that he has ever been good at anything else. If he has any proposals for solving our economic and fiscal problems, he is keeping them in reserve.

So here's a good joke that I saw on some web site and lost track of:

What is a recession? When your neighbor loses his job.

What is a depression? When you lose your job.

What is a recovery? When Obama loses his job.

Interesting Times

We have been cursed by the famous Chinese curse: "may you live in interesting times." I will travel this summer to Spain to deliver a paper at the International Political Science Association's annual conference. After arranging for flights and hotels, I just have to worry about one thing: will Spain still be in business when I get there?

Fears about Spain's debt problems roiled world markets Wednesday. Stocks fell in Europe and Asia, the euro slipped to a fresh two-year low against the dollar and Spain's borrowing costs surged. Two weak debt auctions in Italy also pushed that country's borrowing costs higher, with the 10-year yield touching 6% for the first time since Jan. 30.

Spain is at the point of collapse, due chiefly to a real estate bubble that looks rather familiar. I want to see a bull fight. Are the bulls going to be butchered for meat before I get there?

I also have to wonder whether the United States will be here when I get back.

The benchmark U.S. Treasury yield fell to its lowest level in at least 60 years on Wednesday as worries of contagion from Spain's ailing banks raised bids for low-risk investments.

Apparently a two bedroom house in the Catalonian village of Rasquera is going to take down the American treasury because the residents couldn't come up with the 75% of the vote necessary to legalize growing marijuana.

What about growing marijuana to pay off crushing municipal debt? One Spanish village put the idea to the vote Tuesday, and a majority of its citizens approved — but not the 75 percent needed.

So the U.S. Treasury goes up in smoke. How do the Matadors feel about growing marijuana?

Meanwhile the jobs picture in these United States looks rather gruesome.

The proportion of Americans in their prime working years who have jobs is smaller than it has been at any time in the 23 years before the recession, according to federal statistics, reflecting the profound and lasting effects that the downturn has had on the nation's economic prospects.

By this measure, the jobs situation has improved little in recent years. The percentage of workers between the ages of 25 and 54 who have jobs now stands at 75.7 percent, just a percentage point over what it was at the downturn's worst, according to federal statistics. Before the recession the proportion hovered at 80 percent.

We are in the midst of a global depression. It doesn't feel as bad as the last one, because the world is a lot wealthier than it was last time. The stakes are the same. The regimes will either correct the problem or they will be replaced. Cue ominous music.

A reasonable person can argue that this is not the time to cut spending as that will immediately depress economic growth. Such a person would have to explain how current spending levels can be sustained, even in the short run. If you are going to borrow to cover spending, you have to borrow from someone. Who is left to lend, if there is no confidence in the US Treasury? China?

I am simple minded. I think that the proper response to a problem is to figure out what caused it and correct the cause. Governments across the globe have over promised and over-spent. That is the cause. The solution is to bring our many international houses in order. You could argue that imposing sensible discipline on government budgets all at once would be incredibly painful. It might be possible to pay the pain out gradually. The pain is unavoidable. The main thing is to make policy that will move toward solvency.

We can be sure that the Obama Administration is not in that business.

President Barack Obama said Tuesday that only Congress can take the "bold action'' needed to spur job creation, as he unfurled an election year "to do'' list for lawmakers.

Obama's action plan for Congress centers on a series of economic initiatives he has already been pushing for months, including eliminating tax incentives for companies that ship jobs overseas and promoting new tax credits for small businesses and for companies to develop clean energy.

None of the items on the president's wish list has previously gained any traction in Congress, and there was little indication that they would in the six months between now and Election Day.

Our President is not even pretending to address the country's economic and fiscal problems. He is solely concentrated on winning reelection. If he does win that, what will he do over the next four years? All we can go on is the past. He will ignore the future.

I will try to blog from Europe. I will let you know if I make it to Rasquera and if, like, they changed their minds, and man… What was the question? Maybe I'll just join the Choom gang.

The Church v ObamaCare & the New York Times

As expected, more lawsuits have been filed against the HHS rule that would require Catholic hospitals to cover, directly or indirectly, birth control services for their employees. From the Washington Post:

Forty-three Catholic institutions, including the University of Notre Dame and the Archdiocese of Washington, filed 12 separate lawsuits against the Department of Health and Human Services Monday over new regulations requiring them to cover "drugs and procedures in direct conflict with their religious beliefs."

Here is the basic point of the complaint in Notre Dame v. Sebelius:

This lawsuit is about one of America's most cherished freedoms: the freedom to practice one's religion without government interference. It is not about whether people have a right to abortion-inducing drugs, sterilization, and contraception. Those services are, and will continue to be, freely available in the United States, and nothing prevents the Government itself from making them more widely available. But the right to such services does not authorize the Government to force the University of Notre Dame ("Notre Dame") to violate its own conscience by making it provide, pay for, and/or facilitate those services to others, contrary to its sincerely held religious beliefs.

The issue here concerns a gray area between two positions. The Department of Health and Human Services stipulates in its rule that religious institutions (as it defines them) are not subject to the requirement to provide birth control services for their employees in violation of religious scruples. The plaintiffs in Notre Dame v. Sebelius do not argue that the government can't make such a requirement of non-religious institutions. The question, then, is whether a Catholic hospital (or other religious hospitals) should be properly defined as religious institutions with regard to the rule.

I argued in a previous post that the Church's case is weak in light of the Court's Free Exercise jurisprudence. A religiously founded hospital is not a church and so does not enjoy the protections in the recent Hosanna-Tabor case. If governments can regulate Catholic hospitals (that does not seem to be in dispute) and if the HHS rule is otherwise constitutional (watch this space) and if the rule is neutral and equitably applied, then the rule can survive a Free Exercise challenge.

However, forty-three Catholic institutions are entitled to disagree with me on this point. If they choose to exercise their constitutional right to challenge the rule in Court, that challenge deserves respect. The New York Times does not agree.

Thirteen Roman Catholic dioceses and some Catholic-related groups scattered lawsuits across a dozen federal courts last week claiming that President Obama was violating their religious freedom by including contraceptives in basic health care coverage for female employees. It was a dramatic stunt, full of indignation but built on air.

It is one thing for the Times to object to the Church's argument and quite another for the Times to object, indignantly, to the Church's decision to bring its argument before the courts. Here is some of what the Times argues:

In 1993, Congress required government actions that "substantially burden a person's exercise of religion" to advance a compelling interest by the least restrictive means. The new contraceptive policy does that by promoting women's health and autonomy.

And there was no violation of religious exercise to begin with. After religious groups protested, the administration put the burden on insurance companies to provide free contraceptive coverage to women who work for religiously affiliated employers like hospitals or universities — with no employer involvement.

It is perfectly reasonable for the Times to argue that the HHS rule serves a compelling government interest and so the government can impose a substantial burden on "a person's exercise of religion". It is also reasonable to argue that the compromise offered by the White House means that no substantial burden is involved. It is just as reasonable for the Church to disagree on both points. The Church is entitled to think that forcing religious institutions to pay for contraception is not the least restrictive means of serving any compelling interest and that the President's compromise is a distinction without a difference. Resolving such disputes is precisely what Courts are for.

The Times central argument is clearly bogus.

Under the Constitution, churches and other religious organizations have total freedom to preach that contraception is sinful and rail against Mr. Obama for making it more readily available. But the First Amendment is not a license for religious entities to impose their dogma on society through the law. The vast majority of Americans do not agree with the Roman Catholic Church's anti-contraception stance, including most American Catholic women…

This is a clear partisan play. The real threat to religious liberty comes from the effort to impose one church's doctrine on everyone.

The Plaintiffs are not attempting to impose its doctrine on anyone. They are not challenging the legality of contraception or the government's power to impose the rule on secular institutions. They are resisting the imposition of government doctrine on hospitals run and supported by the Church. If they are right that their rights have been violated, then it doesn't matter a bit what the majority of Americans think about contraception. First Amendment rights do not depend on majority opinions.

The editors of the New York Times think that everyone is entitled to the opinions of the editors of the New York Times. They are all for court challenges to the constitutionality of government acts, so long as they agree with the challengers and do not favor the acts. When the Times sides with the government against the challenger, then the challenge is a "dramatic stunt" and a "partisan act".

This is both authoritarian and stupid. It's authoritarian because it regards any challenge to its own authority as illegitimate. It is stupid because all court cases are partisan by definition. Cases and controversies, this party against that one, is the only thing that the courts are authorized to hear.

I happen to agree with the Time's analysis of the Smith rule in this matter. Unlike the New York Times, I can respect people who disagree with me on such matters.

Captain America

I finally got around to Captain America: The First Avenger. It is altogether appropriate to review it for Memorial Day. The title indicates something impressive: the film was part of what we might call the Avengers Initiative. It was made with an eye to the recent Avengers film. That kind of grand strategy in film making seems to me to be very promising. Movies have a way of resisting the kind of coherent storytelling that is possible in a good TV series. Movies tend to isolate themselves from one another, even when there is a general story. For case in point, see the reboot of the Spiderman series.

By contrast, the Iron Man and Hulk films, and Thor and Captain America, were all successfully woven into one story. Let's see if they can keep that up.

Captain America is a very American movie. Steve Rogers, a ninety pound weakling with the heart of a hero, desperately desires to serve in WWII. Both his physical weakness and his impeccable character make him the ideal subject for a secret technology that aims to produce super soldiers. It works. On him. Naturally, the experiment turns out to be a one time only success.

That is a comic book version of the American promise. No matter how small you are, America is a place where you can make it big. Of course, you have to have something big inside you. Another part of the American story is expressed when Captain America assembles his team. Guess what? There's an Irishman complete with a bowler hat, a Black guy, an Asian "from Fresno", and a couple of guys who don't speak English. That looks like America to me!

Like most of the films in this series, this one goes to a lot of trouble to satisfy comic book nerds like me. In the comic books, Captain America had a teenage sidekick named Bucky, a sort of Robin to CA's Batman. Bucky is written into the film.

The villain in the film is Captain America's most important nemesis, The Red Skull. I still remember reading the story of his elevation to major evil. I quote here from Wikipedia:

According to the official version of the story told by the Red Skull and the Nazis, Schmidt met Hitler while working as a bellhop in a major hotel. This occurred during his late teens, around the same time that the Nazi Party gained power in Germany. Schmidt wound up serving the rooms of Adolf Hitler himself. By chance, Schmidt was present by bringing refreshments when the Führer was furiously scolding an officer for letting a prisoner escape, during which Hitler pledged that he could create a better National Socialist out of the bellhop. Looking closely at the youth and sensing his dark inner nature, Hitler decided to take up the challenge and recruited Schmidt.

That's pretty good story telling. Unfortunately, the movie doesn't include it. The Red Skull (Hugo Weaving) is the head of Hydra, the Nazi's "deep science" agency. He is no Nazi but something at least as bad. While Hitler searches for "trinkets in the desert", an obvious nod to the Indian Jones films, the Red Skull finds a true source of occult power.

Captain America, like Nick Fury, was a character born in WWII storytelling and later revived and readapted to post war culture. The film covers the entire transition. We meet Howard Stark, Ironman's dad, and he gives CA his famous shield. That piece of metal almost steals the show. It is made of some mysterious metal (that's all of it we have) and is impervious not only to bullets but to Hydra ray guns. It is a shield and an offensive weapon, but seems to come back to CA as reliably as Thor's hammer. This comic book nerd is in love.

One interesting difference in this film and all the other in the series is that Captain America actually kills people. Not just aliens and robots but real, live human beings. You could do that back when the bad guys were Nazis. There is a lot to chew on there.

Captain America is a very solid piece of superhero cinema. It doesn't quite make it up to Ironman standards, but there is very little wrong with it. This is the comic book version of American virtue. It's camp and fantastic, but it draws its power from reality. We did stand up to magnificent villains in the 1940's. Lots of small guys from Brooklyn and other parts got a lot bigger as they closed in on Hitler. Captain America is sure enough who we are. All those would be Red Skulls out there had better see the film. It's good Memorial Day material.

Obama Evades Responsibility for Spending

The trick in campaigning is to get voters to look suspiciously at your opponent. When you make a campaign statement and all the subsequent talk is about you, it almost always means you failed. I've covered the Bain game. Second case in point: on the official White House web page, under the title "Press Gaggle by Press Secretary Jay Carney" we find the following.

I just wanted to read something that I read this morning that caught my attention. This is from Market Watch's Rex Nutting. He says, "Of all the falsehoods told about President Obama, the biggest whopper is the one about his reckless spending spree. Almost everyone believes that Obama has presided over a massive increase in federal spending, but it didn't happen. Although there was a big stimulus bill under President Obama, federal spending is rising at its slowest pace since Dwight Eisenhower brought the Korean War to an end in the 1950s. Even hapless Herbert Hoover managed to increase spending more than Obama has."

That means that the rate of spending -- federal spending increase is lower under President Obama than all of his predecessors since Dwight Eisenhower, including all of his Republican predecessors. That is a fact not often noted in the press and certainly never mentioned by the Republicans.

"Press Gaggle"? Leaving that aside, Carney was actually claiming that Obama has not "presided over a massive increase in federal spending." Fact checker Glenn Kessler at the Washington Post awards Carney three Pinocchios.

In the post-war era, federal spending as a percentage of the U.S. economy has hovered around 20 percent, give or take a couple of percentage points. Under Obama, it has hit highs not seen since the end of World War II — completely the opposite of the point asserted by Carney. Part of this, of course, is a consequence of the recession, but it is also the result of a sustained higher level of spending.

What is striking about Carney's statement is not that it is a bald face lie, which surely it was. What is striking is that it is the kind of lie that a Welsh Pembroke Corgi could see through. It is like a guy in a fur coat with snow piling up on his shoulders claiming that it is unusually warm for July in Dallas. If there is one thing that is perfectly obvious to anyone who is paying the slightest bit of attention, it is that federal spending has increased dramatically under this administration.

Carney's whopper is not just transparent; it is the worst sort of thing that the Obama campaign needs right now. It focuses attention on the President's greatest weakness. It isn't really the increase in federal spending that is the problem, but the increase in federal deficits. The one necessarily involves the other. Is this really what the Administration wants to be talking about?

Somebody in the Obama operation gave Jay Carney Rex Nutting's absurd column and told him to run with it. What were they thinking? I suspect that the answer is in this passage from Kessler's column.

Nutting basically takes much of 2009 out of Obama's column, saying it was the "the last [year] of George W. Bush's presidency." Of course, with the recession crashing down, that's when federal spending ramped up. The federal fiscal year starts on Oct. 1, so the 2009 fiscal year accounts for about four months of Bush's presidency and eight of Obama's.

In theory, one could claim that the budget was already locked in when Obama took office, but that's not really the case. Most of the appropriations bills had not been passed, and certainly the stimulus bill was only signed into law after Obama took office.

After four years in office, the Administration still wants to evade responsibility for the nation's business and put it all on his predecessor. That in itself is a grave moral and political weakness. The whole point of the presidency is to put one person in a position of responsibility. Barack Obama has never been able to accept that responsibility. This is not what one looks for in a Chief Executive.

The Early Years of Obama Revealed

Four years after his election as President, a lot of information is suddenly trickling out about what Barack Obama was like as a young man. He was a wild and crazy guy. From ABC:

Now a soon-to-be published biography by David Maraniss entitled "Barack Obama: The Story" gives more detail on Obama's pot-smoking days, complete with testimonials from young Barry Obama's high school buddies, a group that went by the name "the Choom Gang." Choom was slang for smoking marijuana.

Maraniss portrays the teenage Obama as not just a pot smoker, but a pot-smoking innovator. "As a member of the Choom Gang," Maraniss writes, "Barry Obama was known for starting a few pot-smoking trends."

The first Obama-inspired trend: "Total Absorption" or "TA". "TA was the opposite of Bill Clinton's claim that as a Rhodes scholar at Oxford he smoked dope but never inhaled," explains Maraniss. Here's how it worked: If you exhaled prematurely when you were with the Choom Gang, "you were assessed a penalty and your turn was skipped the next time the joint came around."

I am a little curious as to why we haven't heard from the Choom gang until now. I am also curious as to why "Choom" doesn't bother my spell checker. I don't think that this is much more than a puff of smoke. At least it shows that Obama had leadership qualities in his teens. Without going into details, I am in no position to cast stones against Obama for his wayward ways as a youth. There is, and should be, a customary statute of limitations on such things.

More interesting, for interesting reasons, are the letters quoted in Vanity Fair. ABC reproduces a quote from a letter that Obama wrote to a girlfriend, Alex McNear, when he was attending Columbia University.

I haven't read "The Waste Land" for a year, and I never did bother to check all the footnotes. But I will hazard these statements — Eliot contains the same ecstatic vision which runs from Münzer to Yeats. However, he retains a grounding in the social reality/order of his time. Facing what he perceives as a choice between ecstatic chaos and lifeless mechanistic order, he accedes to maintaining a separation of asexual purity and brutal sexual reality. And he wears a stoical face before this. Read his essay on Tradition and the Individual Talent, as well as Four Quartets, when he's less concerned with depicting moribund Europe, to catch a sense of what I speak. Remember how I said there's a certain kind of conservatism which I respect more than bourgeois liberalism — Eliot is of this type. Of course, the dichotomy he maintains is reactionary, but it's due to a deep fatalism, not ignorance. (Counter him with Yeats or Pound, who, arising from the same milieu, opted to support Hitler and Mussolini.) And this fatalism is born out of the relation between fertility and death, which I touched on in my last letter — life feeds on itself. A fatalism I share with the western tradition at times. You seem surprised at Eliot's irreconcilable ambivalence; don't you share this ambivalence yourself, Alex?

It's easy to say that this is pretentious, but for heaven's sake it was written by a young man at college who had reasons to want to impress a girl. ABC's Chris Good goes on to quote several genuine TS Elliot scholars on the merits of analysis, which seems to me to be silly. This is no serious piece of scholarship. It's a letter.

It is, however, evidence that the young Obama was both learned and thoughtful. He was listening in class and reading outside of class and thinking about what he had heard and read. This is the kind of fellow who might go on to teach constitutional law at the University of Chicago.

It is remarkable, then, that this is virtually the first piece of evidence that we have seen of Obama's intellect. We have been told over and over again how intelligent he is, but this seems to rely altogether on people who knew him. Why did he never publish anything scholarly, before or after he became a law professor?

The answer is that he didn't have to. From the moment he arrived at Harvard Law School, he was treated as something special. He didn't have to do the work that other graduate students were required to do. He was encouraged to think that being Barack was enough. I have posted about this before.

Being Barack got him all the way from the Illinois state legislature to the White House. Why should he not think it would serve just as well once he got there? "You've got me" he told fearful Democrats as they approached the 2010 elections. Then they took a bath.

Barack Obama has been very ill served by his friends and admirers. Instead of cultivating his talents they cultivate his ego. Instead of presenting him with challenges, they put him on a pedestal. He may yet win reelection, but he will find that the challenges he then faces are just as little impressed with him as they were in his first four years in office.

Arkansas & Kentucky follow West Virginia

With 73% of the precincts reporting, President Obama has won the Arkansas Democratic Primary.

Obama        59%

Wolfe            41%

The story was similar in Kentucky.

Obama        58%

Uncommitted    42%

That makes three states in which the President failed to get more than 60% in the Democratic primary, running against a prison inmate (in West Virginia), an unknown, and "none of the above". It's hard to read much into this, but it means something. The WaPo has this:

One easy explanation — and the one regularly espoused by some Democrats — for Obama's struggles in Appalachia and portions of the South is simply that some white voters will not vote for an African American for president.

But although no one doubts that race may be a factor, exit polling suggests that the opposition to Obama goes beyond it.

And seasoned political observers who have studied the politics of these areas say race may be less of a problem for Obama than the broader cultural disconnect that many of these voters feel with the Democratic Party.

Broad patterns in elections reflect slower but equally broad shifts in the electorate. There is a lot here for Republicans to worry about, but it can't be good news for Democrats when an incumbent president of their party is running below sixty percent in state primaries.

Bain Drain

It's a pretty gruesome tale, that Bain Capital ad that the Obama campaign produced. It begins with a good company making quality steel products and a band of brothers proud of their work and putting their sons and daughters through college. Then Bain Capital sunk its fangs into the factory and bled it dry. Folks should have been suspicious when that truck pulled up just after dusk and the Karl Rove clones carried a coffin shaped box into the management suite. Count Romney had arrived.

The only problem with the ad is that it is a bald faced lie. Here is David Brooks at the New York Times.

The Obama attack ad accused Bain Capital of looting a steel company called GST in the 1990s and then throwing its workers out on the street. The ad itself barely survived a minute of scrutiny. As Kimberly Strassel noted in The Wall Street Journal, the depiction is wildly misleading.

The company was in terminal decline before Bain entered the picture, seeing its work force fall from 4,500 to less than 1,000. It faced closure when Romney and Bain, for some reason, saw hope for it in 1993. Bain acquired it, induced banks to loan it money and poured $100 million into modernization, according to Strassel. Bain held onto the company for eight years, hardly the pattern of a looter. Finally, after all the effort, the company, like many other old-line steel companies, filed for bankruptcy protection in 2001, two years after Romney had left Bain.

This is the story of a failed rescue, not vampire capitalism.

Let's count the ways that the ad is wildly misleading. First, the steel plant in the ad wasn't doing well before Bain arrived. It had already lost more than three quarters of its workforce and would have closed in 1993 if Bane hadn't stepped in. The steel industry was in terrible shape in the 80's and 90's.

Second, far from looting the factory, Bain Capital spent $100 million modernizing the plant. It turned out to be a bad gamble. Kimberly Strassel's article at the WSJ explains what happened.

The strategy worked for a time. The market firmed up and GSI became a U.S. leader in steel rods. In 1994 it felt confident enough to distribute a dividend to investors. In both 1996 and 1997, GSI would realize $1 billion in revenue.

And then came the tsunami. The late 1990s saw a new outpouring of cheap steel from elsewhere around the globe. The Asian financial crisis walloped the mining industry, cutting demand for GST products. The price of GST's electricity and natural gas skyrocketed. The union dug in, refusing to make concessions. By April 1997, it was on strike, shooting bottle rockets at guards. Labor costs spiked, and by 1999 GSI was reporting $53 million in net losses.

In 2001 GSI failed, along with 30 other steel companies. That was well after Romney left Bain Capital.

Third, Bain didn't kill the Kansas City plant. It kept it in business and its workers employed for eight more years. The Kansas City plant had a sad end, but that's only a small part of the picture.

The Obama ad doesn't note that the broader company, GS Industries, employed 3,500 and that the Kansas City plant (with 750 workers) was the only one shuttered. Other plants were bought and operate today. Nor does it mention Bain's other steel investment in the early 1990s, in an Indiana start-up called Steel Dynamics. The firm touts innovative technology and a nonunion workforce. It today reports $6.3 billion in revenue—25 times what it claimed in its 1996 IPO—and employs 6,000.

I don't much blame the Obama campaign for producing a fraudulent ad. They desperately need to direct attention away from Obama's record and they need to damage Romney.

But if I were working on the Obama campaign I would be very worried. This has so far been a boondoggle. Instead of Romney, it is the Obama campaign that has spent the last few days on defensive. Mayor of Newark, Cory Booker, a genuine hero, was reduced to eating his words about the ad. The President, when he should be looking presidential at a meeting of NATO, had to take time out to answer a question about the Bain ad with a short, prepared speech defending it.

The Bain ad also exposed a genuine contradiction in the campaign's strategy. One voice in the ad reassures us that there is nothing wrong with equity capital as such. It was a discordant note in an otherwise disciplined presentation. Who thought it was necessary and why? Well, there is this, from The Hill:

President Obama raised far more cash from hedge fund and private equity donors than any other candidate in the 2008 election cycle.

According to an analysis by the nonprofit group Open Secrets, Obama took in nearly $3.5 million from large private-equity donors that year — nearly twice what his general-election rival, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), pocketed.

This year Romney is giving Obama a run for that same money.

Romney is doing well in fundraising from the financial sector. According to Open Secrets, Romney has already outraised Obama in this cycle $2.5 million to $650,000 from hedge funds and private equity firms.

Still, it's hard to bite a hand that feeds you more than a half a million dollars and hard to cross an industry upon which a lot of prominent Democrats depend. So attacking Romney as a vampire capitalist always has to have a "not that there's anything wrong with that" clause inserted.

Conservatives often imagine that Obama is a closet socialist. If so, it would be socialism of the French kind: the same set of companies and no new ones decade after decade, in a cozy relationship with government. Obama's Bain ad exposed more weaknesses of his than of his opponent. That should worry people who were expecting a ruthlessly efficient campaign.

Why Rich Nations Are Rich & Poor Nations Are Poor

Some nations are very rich and some are very poor. Anyone who thinks that the fate of millions of human beings is worth caring about should wonder why the one and why the other. A standard answer in social science is exploitation. Rich nations become rich and stay that way by exploiting the poorer ones and keeping them poor. That argument has been very powerful as a political program. It underwrote national liberation movements all over the world. Unfortunately, the general success of those movements have done very little to remedy the problem. That is in part because the exploitation thesis is almost, but not entirely, wrong.

Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel, which won a Pulitzer Prize, is the best book I have read on the subject. I will summarize one of Diamond's key arguments. The Americas and Africa are each arranged along a north/south axis. Eurasia, by contrast, has a very long east/west axis. Flora and fauna are adapted to local climates, which makes it fairly easy to move them east and west but rather challenging to move them very far north and south. This made it possible for a lot of productive crops and herds to end up in one place in Eurasia: the Fertile Crescent. A lot of food in one place means a lot of people and a lot of people encouraged the development of sophisticated social and political arrangements. That is why civilization arises where first it did and that is why it arose much later elsewhere.

I admit to being simple minded. I like such explanations because I can understand them and test them. This one seems pretty good. Some conservatives have criticized Diamond because they think he slights the value of good institutions. That this is not what he is up to is evident in a current piece he has in the New York Review of Books. The piece is a review of Why Nations Fail by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson.

The fence that divides the city of Nogales is part of a natural experiment in organizing human societies. North of the fence lies the American city of Nogales, Arizona; south of it lies the Mexican city of Nogales, Sonora. On the American side, average income and life expectancy are higher, crime and corruption are lower, health and roads are better, and elections are more democratic. Yet the geographic environment is identical on both sides of the fence, and the ethnic makeup of the human population is similar. The reasons for those differences between the two Nogaleses are the differences between the current political and economic institutions of the US and Mexico.

Diamond points out that some national borders are a very robust test of the effect of institutions.

Besides Nogales, examples include the contrasts between North and South Korea and between the former East and West Germany. Many or most economists, including Acemoglu and Robinson, generalize from these examples of bordering countries and deduce that good institutions also explain the differences in wealth between nations that aren't neighbors and that differ greatly in their geographic environments and human populations.

What are good institutions?

Among the good economic institutions that motivate people to become productive are the protection of their private property rights, predictable enforcement of their contracts, opportunities to invest and retain control of their money, control of inflation, and open exchange of currency. For instance, people are motivated to work hard if they have opportunities to invest their earnings profitably, but not if they have few such opportunities or if their earnings or profits are likely to be confiscated.

Diamond shows that the exploitation thesis is not entirely wrong.

Among non-European countries colonized by Europeans during the last five hundred years, those that were initially richer and more advanced tend paradoxically to be poorer today. That's because, in formerly rich countries with dense native populations, such as Peru, Indonesia, and India, Europeans introduced corrupt "extractive" economic institutions, such as forced labor and confiscation of produce, to drain wealth and labor from the natives. (By extractive economic institutions, Acemoglu and Robinson mean practices and policies "designed to extract incomes and wealth from one subset of society [the masses] to benefit a different subset [the governing elite].")

But in formerly poor countries with sparse native populations, such as Costa Rica and Australia, European settlers had to work themselves and developed institutional incentives rewarding work. When the former colonies achieved independence, they variously inherited either the extractive institutions that coerced the masses to produce wealth for dictators and the elite, or else institutions by which the government shared power and gave people incentives to pursue. The extractive institutions retarded economic development, but incentivizing institutions promoted it.

If you are looking to pin a crime on Europe, here is a crime to pin. I would add to this crime the introduction of socialism, which is inherently extractive. When wealth is viewed as a fixed thing, rather than something to be constantly generated, the powerful in a society will always managed to extract most of that fixed thing.

Good institutions are not the whole story. There is a reason why good institutions developed where they did and why it is very difficult to introduce them elsewhere. Geography is a very powerful factor in the history and distribution of economic development.

One of those geographic factors leaps out of a map of the world in Why Nations Fail that depicts national incomes. On that map, both Africa and the Americas resemble peanut butter sandwiches, with thick cores of poor tropical countries squeezed between two thin slices of richer countries in the north and south temperate zones.

In the New World the two north temperate countries (the US and Canada, average incomes respectively $47,390 and $43,270) and the three south temperate countries (Uruguay, Chile, and Argentina, respectively $10,590, $10,120, and $8,620) are all richer—on the average five times richer—than almost all of the intervening seventeen tropical countries of mainland Central and South America (incomes mostly between $1,110 and $6,970). Similarly, mainland Africa is a sandwich of thirty-seven mostly desperately poor tropical countries, flanked by two thin slices each consisting of five modestly affluent or less desperately poor countries in Africa's north and south temperate zones.

Almost all of the world's wealthy nations are found either above or below the tropics. Since there isn't a lot below, that explains the dominion of the "north". What is wrong with the tropics?

Two major factors contribute to the poverty of tropical countries compared to temperate countries: diseases and agricultural productivity. The tropics are notoriously unhealthy. Tropical diseases differ on average from temperate diseases, in several respects. First, there are far more parasitic diseases (such as elephantiasis and schistosomiasis) in tropical areas, because cold temperate winters kill parasite stages outside our bodies, but tropical parasites can thrive outside our bodies all year long. Second, disease vectors, such as mosquitoes and ticks, are far more diverse in tropical than in temperate areas.

Finally, biological characteristics of the responsible microbes have made it easier to develop vaccines against major infectious diseases of temperate areas than against tropical diseases; we still aren't close to a vaccine against malaria, despite billions of dollars invested. Hence tropical diseases impose a huge burden on economies of tropical countries. At any given moment, much of the population is sick and unable to work efficiently.

The climate in the tropics makes you sick. It also makes it harder to grow food.

s for agricultural productivity, it averages lower in tropical than in temperate areas, again for several reasons. First, temperate plants store more energy in parts edible to us humans (such as seeds and tubers) than do tropical plants. Second, diseases borne by insects and other pests reduce crop yields more in the tropics than in the temperate zones, because the pests are more diverse and survive better year-round in tropical than in temperate areas. Third, glaciers repeatedly advanced and retreated over temperate areas, creating young nutrient-rich soils. Tropical lowland areas haven't been glaciated and hence tend to have older soils, leached of their nutrients by rain for thousands of years. (Young fertile volcanic and alluvial soils are exceptions.) Fourth, the higher average rainfall of tropical than of temperate areas results in more nutrients being leached out of the soil by rain.

Finally, higher tropical temperatures cause dead leaves and other organic matter falling to the ground to be broken down quickly by microbes and other organisms, releasing their nutrients to be leached away. Hence in temperate areas soil fertility is on average higher, crop losses to pests is lower, and agricultural productivity higher than in tropical areas. That's why Argentina in South America's south temperate zone, despite its conspicuous lack (for most of its history) of the good institutions praised by economists, is the leading food exporter in Latin America, and one of the leading ones in the world.

There is another factor that makes a great deal of difference. Can you get stuff into and out of the place?

The other important geographic factor is whether an area is accessible to ocean-going ships because it lies either on the sea coast or on a navigable river. It costs roughly seven times more to ship a ton of cargo by land than by sea. That puts landlocked countries at an economic disadvantage, and helps explain why landlocked Bolivia and semi-landlocked Paraguay are the poorest countries of South America. It also helps explain why Africa, with no river navigable to the sea for hundreds of miles except the Nile, and with fifteen landlocked nations, is the poorest continent. Eleven of those fifteen landlocked African nations have average incomes of $600 or less; only two countries outside Africa (Afghanistan and Nepal, both also landlocked) are as poor.

I recall here the real estate agent's three criteria for a valuable house: location, location, and location. It is going to be very difficult to raise the standard of living in central Africa or most of South America to the levels of, say, Sweden. This is not to say that it's impossible. If we want to make progress, we have to acknowledge reality. Diamond's review in the NYRB is pregnant with reality.

Walker Running

It is looking very good for Scott Walker in Wisconsin. From the WaPo:

All three polls out this week show Walker leading Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett (D) by between 5 percent and 9 percent. Perhaps more illustrative, though, are the candidate's personal favorability and approval numbers.

Despite all the attempts by Democrats and organized labor to turn him into the bogeyman, Walker's job approval and favorable rating both remain in positive territory, at right around 50 percent.

Barrett, meanwhile, has no such luxury. The latest Marquette University Law School poll of this race showed his favorable rating at just 37 percent, compared to 45 percent who view him unfavorably.

As of late March, the same pollster showed Barrett, the 2010 Democratic nominee against Walker, was viewed favorably by 34 percent and unfavorably by just 27 percent.

That's a massive shift, with his unfavorable rating jumping 18 points in just seven weeks. It reflects both the difficult primary that he just emerged from (in which labor backed his opponent) and Republicans' sustained early effort to define him.

Stephen Hayes at The Weekly Standard thinks that Walker is riding high because he has been doing a good job.

By virtually every objective measure, Walker has been an extraordinarily successful governor. In just 16 months, the state has erased a $3.6 billion budget deficit, and according to figures released this month by the Wisconsin Department of Revenue, it will have a $154.5 million surplus on June 30, 2013. Property taxes, which had risen by more than 40 percent since 1998, are down for the first time in years.

While that may be an essential ingredient in his survival, it is probably not the primary cause. If Walker wins, it will be for two reasons. One is that his coalition turned out to be stronger and larger than the coalition assembled against him. Passions are fierce on both sides. Hayes describes how an argument that began over the recall ended with a woman (anti-Walker) running over her husband (pro-Walker). Unfortunately for Tom Barrett, the driver seems to be in the minority.

The other reason Walker is likely to survive is that there is no convincing reason for the recall election in the first place. The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel has weighed in.

We see no reason to remove Walker from office. We recommend him in the June 5 recall election.

Walker's rematch with Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett was prompted by one issue: Walker's tough stance with the state's public-employee unions. It's inconceivable that the recall election would be occurring absent that. And a disagreement over a single policy is simply not enough to justify a vote against the governor.

Well, yes. Eighteen million dollars is a lot to spend on an election that turned out to be a repeat of one held two years ago.

The recall election was a bad mistake. Instead of punishing Walker for his anti-union policies and striking fear into the hearts of Republican governors across the land, as intended, it seems like to stand as endorsement of those policies and proof that a governor can stand up to public unions and live to tell the tale.

It may be a bit worse than that for Democrats. When the DNC decided not to invest heavily in the recall, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee decided to step in. That, however, means less money available for Democratic candidates this November.

Just right now, Scott Walker's courage seems to be paying off.

Chen Comes to America

The great escape that began when Chen Guangcheng climbed barefoot over a garden wall has now ended in success. Chen arrived in the U.S. with his children Saturday night. While I stand by my criticisms of how our diplomats handled this affair at its beginning, in the end we did right by Chen. The Administration deserves full credit for that.

I would also direct your attention to Walter Russell Mead's piece on the President's Asian policy. I think that Mead is quite correct to praise it, especially in the case of Burma.

It was scarcely six months ago when the Administration, in a rare display of display of diplomatic finesse, announced a movement of troops and deepening of military ties with a group of nations from Australia to Vietnam to the Phillipines in the span of less than a week. This set the tone for American presence in the region from that point on, and although nothing as dramatic as that first week has occurred since, the tides have continued to run America's way. In the past year, we've seen the emergence of something less formal and less directed than an alliance but more organized and more focused than a supper club springing up around the Chinese perimeter. At Via Meadia we think of it as the entente, and it stretches from Korea to India around the Asian rim.

Less important globally but very important morally is the astonishing liberalization going on in Burma. Aung San Suu Kyi (pause for gassho) was not only freed from house arrest, but is free to go abroad. This is one of those small things that are really as big as anything else. The US State Department had a big hand in this. How all this will turn out is, of course, uncertain; however, right now it looks like very well played policy.

Cherokees, Kenyans, & The Declaration of Independence

We live in interesting times. Here is the latest blockbuster from the WaPo:

Minority babies outnumbered white newborns in 2011 for the first time in U.S. history, the latest milestone in a demographic shift that's transforming the nation.

It is difficult to know what that might mean in a nation where Harvard Professor and Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren is a minority faculty member because she is (but really isn't) 1/32^nd Native American, but Robert Zimmerman, whose mother is Latina, is a White Hispanic because he shot an African American teen. If Warren and Zimmerman somehow had kids, would they be part of the thrust or the drag in the WaPo's "demographic shift"?

If you think that racial and ethnic identity is clear and meaningful, consider the "birther" theory. I have always been and I remain contemptuous of the charge that Barack Obama is not, as the Constitution requires, a "natural born citizen." It comes as some surprise to learn that, among prominent birthers, one finds Barack Obama. Or at least his literary agent. From the Telegraph:

Breitbart.com has discovered that in 1991 Barack Obama's literary agent (who also represented New Kids on the Block) published a booklet that included a biography of the future President. The audience was "business colleagues" in the publishing industry and it was designed to promote Obama's anticipated first book (later abandoned) called Journeys in Black and White. Here's how it describes the author's origins.

Barack Obama, the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review, was born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia and Hawaii. The son of an American anthropologist and a Kenyan finance minister, he attended Columbia University and worked as a financial journalist and editor for Business International Corporation.

The key phrase here is "was born in Kenya" – and this bio line was apparently being used as late as 2007.

I suppose that if you can believe that Elizabeth Warren is, in some meaningful sense, Cherokee, it shouldn't be too hard to believe that Barack Obama was born in Hawaii and Kenya. The Telegraph's point is not that this discredit's Obama's claim to birth on American soil, but that it shows that the mainstream press did a lousy job of vetting Obama in 2008.

Maybe, but that's a small point here. What it shows is that race, ethnic identity, and national origin are invested with emotional power and that ambitious persons frequently exploit the ambiguity of these categories in order to take advantage of that power. Sometimes such persons are tempted to fib a bit. There is less reason to believe that Elizabeth Warren is a Native American than to believe that Barack Obama is really a Kenyan. One document less, to be precise.

Racial categories can be very useful for purposes of demographic analysis; however, they are more frequently abused as weapons or sources of anxiety. In the cases described above, these categories are no more real or more useful than astrological signs. Americans have worried that immigration would dilute the body politic. Once we worried about Irish and Polish immigrants. Now we worry about Hispanics and Muslims. These worries are always vane.

What it means to be an American has nothing to do with the color of your skin or what language your grandfather spoke or what gods he worshiped. The American homeland is not blood or soil but parchment. To be an American means that, more or less consciously, you sign your name to the Declaration of Independence and recognize yourself as one of "We the People" in the preamble to the Constitution.

Enormous waves of immigrants have come here and signed on and they have been enrolled. If the strength of those institutions continues, it won't matter what percentage of babies are White or Black or chartreuse. If the institutions fade, no amount of Whiteness, whatever that is, will save us.

Romney the Wobbly

Mitt Romney got some good news from Gallup this week. While he remains tied with Obama on a head to head matchup and Obama remains tied with himself on approval/disapproval (47%), have of Americans have suddenly decided that they like the Mitt. His personal approval rating reached 50% for the first time. His 50% favorable/41% unfavorable rating is in sharp contrast to the 39% favorable/47% unfavorable score he received back in February.

Some observers have suggested Obama's recent declaration in favor of gay marriage has a lot to do with this. That may be true, but if so I suspect that it all because Obama's evolution hurt him more than it helped him and not at all because Romney took the opposite position. While Romney's opposition to gay marriage is more in sync with how Americans actually vote than how they answered surveys, personal approval is not about that. Obama's battlefield conversion may have firmed up his support with fund raisers and activists, but it looked an awful lot like a purely calculated move. Being wishy-washy on such issues eats away at one's personal image about as fast as anything.

Meanwhile Romney has been dealing rather badly with the issue of homosexuality on a number of fronts. This is likely to catch up with him fast if he doesn't firm up. Perhaps the worst case is this one, reported by the LA Times:

In mid-April Romney hired Grenell, a former spokesman for former United Nations Ambassador John Bolton, to become the foreign-policy spokesman for his campaign, starting this month. Grenell happens to be openly gay, and a vocal advocate of gay marriage -- not that those aspects have anything to do with the war in Afghanistan or Iran's nuclear program.

On Tuesday the Washington Post reported that Grenell quit his new job because of pressure from "anti-gay conservatives."…

Romney's team says it tried to persuade Grenell not to leave. And in a statement Grenell gave to the Post's Jennifer Rubin, he thanks Romney for the "clear message" that "being openly gay was a non-issue for him and his team." But the statement also suggests he didn't think he could be himself in Romney's service.

There are all kinds of theories about why Grenell left, but it is difficult to believe that Romney couldn't have persuaded Grenell to stay. If he had kept Grenell on, it would have shown that Romney can stand up to pressure from his own coalition. If Grenell was doing a good job (good enough for John Bolton), then Romney should have pulled out all the stops to keep him. Failing to do the right thing, and that is surely what it looks like, makes Romney look weak and weak isn't likeable.

The second case is Romney's waffling on gay adoption. From CBS:

[Romney] said on Thursday: "And if two people of the same gender want to live together, want to have a loving relationship, or even to adopt a child -- in my state individuals of the same sex were able to adopt children. In my view, that's something that people have a right to do. But to call that marriage is something that in my view is a departure from the real meaning of that word."

But then on Friday, he was asked, in an interview with CBS' WBTV in Charlotte, N.C., how his opposition to same-sex marriage "squared" with his support for gay adoptions. Romney told anchor Paul Cameron, "Well actually I think all states but one allow gay adoption, so that's a position which has been decided by most of the state legislators, including the one in my state some time ago. So I simply acknowledge the fact that gay adoption is legal in all states but one."

It's a bad idea to talk of adoption as a right belonging to the adopter. When child custody is contested in court, the judge ought to hold the interests of the child above the claims of the parents. Sometimes that comes down to a judgment call and in such cases "rights" language does not help much.

A reasonable person can believe that being raised in a household with a mother and father is preferable to being raised in one with two parents of the same sex. That would matter, if it should matter, only in case where things were otherwise equal. Where an adoption is uncontested, a same sex couple should be judged the same way any couple would: solely by their fitness to be parents.

Romney could have said that. If he had done so firmly, he would have looked like a man who knew his own mind. The same would be true if he had come out against gay adoption, though that would be more problematic and would have been wrong, in my view. At least it would have been decisive. Instead, he used the reasonable position in favor of state prerogatives as a dodge. That makes him look indecisive, and indecisive isn't likeable.

Romney needs to firm up. He isn't seeking the Republican nomination anymore, he is running for President. He can't afford to ignore political realities and those include making sure his coalition continues to coalesce. Another political reality is that voters on the right and in the middle have to trust him. Sometimes the best way to secure that trust is to figure out what is the right thing to do and then do it.

Of Ballots & Budgets

If the budget process were like one of those card games where you can win by losing every single hand, the President would be in good shape right now. The budget he submitted to Congress failed to win a single vote in either house. It was voted down today in the Senate, 99-0.

It is not hard to say what this means. The President has calculated that he can produce a budget that shows skyrocketing deficits as far as the eye can see without suffering much damage. His campaign probably supposes, and probably correctly, that Romney won't be able to exploit the issue without offering his own alternatives and that any possible alternative will produce juicy targets in the campaign.

Individual Democrats cannot rely on that same calculation. They cannot afford to put their names on a document that is so manifestly irresponsible. Their strategy is to offer nothing and attack everything that the other side offers. That is fine so long as you think that political calculations are all that's important. If, however, you think that addressing the fiscal solvency of the nation might be at least a little bit important, you would have to note that the Democrats in Congress and the White House are altogether incapable of it.

Fiscal responsibility is a hard issue to win an election on. While I doubt that the issue is hurting Obama now more than it already has, it is possible that it is helping Republicans in Congressional races. The most recent generic polls show a GOP lead of almost 2% in the RCP average. Republicans almost always do better than the generic polling question predicts. Rasmussen has the GOP up by 7% with a sample of 3500 likely voters. Gallup/USA Today confirm that with a 6% lead for Republicans. If those numbers hold, the next Congress will be firmly in Republican hands.

The recall election in Wisconsin suggests that a Governor willing to be bold on fiscal matters can survive the predictable challenges. Rasmussen shows Walker leading in his rematch with Tom Barrett by five points. That is confirmed by a Marquette Law School poll that gives Walker a six point lead. Perhaps a better indicator is the fact that the DNC seems to have decided not to invest in the recall fight. Rachel Maddow has called this the second most important election this year. I suspect she will not repeat that on her MSNBC show if, as seems likely, Walker wins. Walker is showing what the virtue of courage can achieve.

My friend and esteemed blogosphere colleague, Cory Heidelberger, reveals, inadvertently, the problem that the Democrats are resolutely ignoring. He complains about Republicans starving kids to feed the armed forces and comes up with an impressive list of spending cuts that may or may not happen in the near future. That suggests a horizon in which it's only a matter of will to do the right thing, or a matter of guns vs. butter.

What's just over that firmly limited horizon is a fiscal situation in which there will be no money for guns or butter. Borrowing astronomical amounts of money to finance spending now means that interest payments will start to squeeze out all other spending in the future. We are not talking about fifty years from now, but twenty if we are lucky. It isn't going to help to plead "think about the children" if we have nothing left to spend on the children, or on highways, or on defense, or on anything else.

That is the reason that the Democrats in Congress are fiscally constipated. They can't afford to pass anything because it would require them to lift their horizon past this year's election. The rise of the Tea Party movement is evidence that this is present in the consciousness of a large class of voters. How it will affect this election is not something I claim to know. I do know that you cannot make the world go away by refusing to lift your eyes to eye level.

The People Are Revolting

Most folks, most of the time, are content to allow elites to manage their governments. They reserve only the power to decided, from time to time, which group of suits gets to put their hands on the levers. When the voters begin to express an anti-establishment sentiment, it is a sure sign that the managers are failing at their tasks.

This is what has happened in Europe. The election of Francois Hollande in France and the failure of Greek parties to form a government are cases in point. The project of European Union was executed with consistent contempt for the voters. That didn't kill it as long as the scheme held together. Now that it is falling apart, Europe's elites have lost control of their peoples.

The United States has always been more democratic, which is to say more responsive to the electorate, than its European counterparts. The same trend, however, is evident here.

In West Virginia, Keith Judd, an inmate serving 210 months for extortion in Texas, won 40% of the vote in the state's Democratic Presidential Primary. Barack Obama won the remaining 60%. It is easy to say that this doesn't matter and that it is a protest vote that reflects local conditions. President Obama doesn't like coal, and a lot of West Virginians don't like that.

Now, however, the same thing seems likely to play out in Arkansas. From the Weekly Standard:

A new poll of Arkansas Democrats shows Barack Obama receiving support from only 45 percent of Democratic primary voters in Arkansas's Fourth Congressional District, while 38 percent support his underfunded and relatively unknown primary challenger, Tennessee lawyer John Wolfe, Jr. Seventeen percent are undecided in the district poll.

Much the same thing is playing out in Republican primaries. The defeat of long time incumbent Dick Lugar in Indiana is one example. Now we have Nebraska. From the Politico:

Nebraska state Sen. Deb Fischer wrested the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate from Attorney General Jon Bruning Tuesday night, riding a burst of late momentum to pull off an unexpected victory.

Her stunning come-from-behind performance amounts to a warning flare about the volatility of the primary season and the unintended impact of outside groups.

Fischer, a rancher and little-known state lawmaker, maintained a positive, above-the-fray tone while Bruning and state Treasurer Don Stenberg consistently traded blistering barbs. But she also benefited from a flurry of outside spending against Bruning, the front-running establishment favorite for more than a year who watched his polling lead evaporate during the final week of the campaign.

The Politico tries to blunt the impact of its own story by using the word "volatility", as if this were about something like the weather, and by bringing in the issue of outside money. Horse feathers. If the money made a difference, it was only because there was a difference to make. What stands out in this story is not volatility but a steady headwind. The people are mad as Hell and they aren't going to take it anymore.

Republicans may or may not benefit from these populist currents. If they do, they will have to figure out in short order how to address the public angst. There is a widespread loss of confidence in our fundamental institutions. If that is not corrected, soon, the next crisis will be a lot more interesting. Trust this political scientist on one thing: in politics, interesting is usually directly proportional to terrifying.

Fauxcahontas

When I was a kid we still played cowboys and Indians and let me tell it straight: nobody wanted to be the cowboy. Indians were way cooler. A friend of mine had a picture of a Cherokee ancestor with long white hair in a three piece suit.  He sold posters reproduced from the picture with the title "Puck's Uncle". 

So I have some sympathy for Elizabeth Warren, who is trying to take back the Senate seat that Repubican Scott Brown lassoed after Ted Kennedy died. Warren decided early in her law professor career that she'd rather be an Indian than a cowgirl. From Legal Insurrection:

When Elizabeth Warren first acknowledged that she had represented herself to be Native American when filling out forms for the Association of American Law Schools directories in the mid-80s through mid-90s, Warren based her claim entirely on family "lore."

Warren's claim was accepted at face value by at least two institutions of higher learning. From the Boston Herald:

The University of Pennsylvania, where Warren worked from 1987 to 1994, listed her as a minority in a "Minority Equity Report." The report comes after Harvard Law School claimed Warren as a diversity hire in 1996.

This quickly turned into a crisis for the Warren Campaign. She claimed that she had listed herself as Native American "because I thought I might be invited to meetings where I might meet more people who had grown up like I had grown up." She vigorously denied she had taken advantage of the identification in her career and a lot of folks from Harvard and Penn came forward to back her up on that. Well, was she in fact part Native American?

Warren's campaign forgot the First Rule of Holes and kept digging. They rounded up a genealogist who conjured up evidence supposedly identifying a Cherokee ancestor of Ms. Warren. The Boston Herald:

"She would be 1⁄32nd of Elizabeth Warren's total ancestry," noted genealogist Christopher Child said, referring to the candidate's great-great-great-grandmother, O.C. Sarah Smith, who is listed on an Oklahoma marriage certificate as Cherokee. Smith is an ancestor on Warren's mother's side, Child said.

If genuine, it would make her, at most, 1/32^nd Cherokee. Was it genuine? William A. Jacobson of Cornell Law School reports the following on his Legal Insurrection blog:

I reached out to Christopher Child, the well-known genealogist who was the source of the claim, and his employer, the prestigious New England Historic Genealogical Society (NEHGS), but they have gone silent, refusing to comment on, defend or correct their claim that Warren was 1/32 Cherokee.

I will be so bold as to point out the obvious. Warren's claim in the Law School Directory was fraudulent. There is not a shred of evidence that she is part Native American. The listing of Ms. Warren by Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania as a "diversity" hire is therefore equally fraudulent. The Warren campaign compounded the original fraud with the help of a sympathetic genealogist, but did so in a way almost guaranteed to blow up in their faces.

Apart from the blatant mendacity of this affair, it exposes so much that is wrong with the Affirmative Action regime. Let us suppose for a moment that Ms. Warren's great-great-great grandmother really was Cherokee. Would that entitle her to special consideration when applying for a job? Ms. Warren and her defenders vehemently deny that she benefitted in any way from minority identification, and that claim is altogether plausible. But why do they have to make it? Isn't the whole point of Affirmative Action to make minority status count for something in hiring and admissions? By denying that she benefitted from her minority status, don't they concede the point that Affirmative Action tarnishes the reputation of those who take advantage of it?

The affair strikes deeper at the idea of Affirmative Action than that. The justification for racial and ethnic preferences, one that is woven into constitutional law, is that they serve the compelling state interest of fostering diversity in higher education. By according preference to minority applicants, public universities bring in diverse viewpoints and unique perspectives. Okay. But does anyone really believe that Elizabeth Warren brought a unique perspective to the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard just because her great-great-great grandmother was Cherokee? Isn't she in body and soul as White as a sheet of eight and half by eleven copier paper?

Elizabeth Warren is one on a very long line of White folks pretending to be Indians. I think that she had made an utter fool of herself, but it is not me that she needs to apologize to. Again from the Boston Herald:

Suzan Shown Harjo, a former executive director of the National Congress of American Indians, expressed outrage yesterday after learning that Warren had identified herself as a Native American on law school records without documentation.

"If you believe you are these things then that's fine and dandy, but that doesn't give you the right to claim yourself as Native American," said Harjo, who said Warren might have taken a job another Native American could have received.

Obama Evolves

The President has finally come out of the closet, politically speaking, on legal same sex marriage. From ABC News:

President Obama has abandoned his longstanding opposition to same-sex marriage but says the decision on whether or not to legalize the unions should be left up to individual states, which are "arriving at different conclusions at different times"…

"At a certain point, I've just concluded that, for me personally, it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same-sex couples should be able to get married," he said.

As positions go, this one is reasonable. It must be, because it is my position. I think that legal same sex marriage is pretty much inevitable and I think that it is the right thing to do. I do not, however, believe that the US Constitution requires it nor do I believe that it should be imposed on the states by Congress.

The President describes his views as "evolving". Revolving would be more like it. In 1996 he was on record as being all for same sex marriage and opposed to efforts to ban it. In 2004, running for the US Senate, he said this:

"I'm a Christian," he said. "I do believe that tradition and my religious beliefs say that marriage is something sanctified between a man and a woman."

Now he has come full circle. Much the same thing must be said about Mitt Romney, who was all for same sex marriage before he was against it. Call me a cynic, but I suspect that the evolution of both men had a lot more to do with political calculations than with genuine soul searching.

If there is a difference here, it is this. I have no idea what Mitt Romney really thinks about this issue, but I have a pretty good idea what he would do. He would do nothing. He won't try to reverse the ban on homosexuals in the military. He won't try to use federal power to coerce the states in one direction or the other.

I have a pretty good idea what Barack Obama thinks. I don't believe he has ever been really opposed to same sex marriage. What I don't know is what he will do once safely reelected. Will he respect the right of states to decide the issue, as he suggests in his ABC interview? Or will he use every power at his disposal to try to compel the states to drop their opposition? Whither will he evolve next? It would be nice to know.

What I do know is that Obama's position is logically at odds with the actions of his own Justice Department. Here is Jonathan Adler at the Volokh Conspiracy:

The problem with the President's position is that it cannot be reconciled with the Administration's stance on the constitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act. According to Attorney General Eric Holder, he and the President concluded that the constitutionality of legal distinctions based upon sexual preference cannot be defended. In their view, because DOMA precludes federal recognition of same-sex marriages, it violates the constitutional guarantee of equal protection under the Fifth Amendment. Further, according to Holder's statement, they concluded that no "reasonable" constitutional argument could be made in DOMA's defense.

Yet if DOMA is unconstitutional under equal protection, which applies to the state and federal governments equally, then how could any state law barring recognition of same-sex marriages survive constitutional scrutiny?

In other words, while the President says he believes that states should be allowed to reach "different conclusions at different times" on the question of same-sex marriage, the administration's legal position is that a state's refusal to treat opposite-sex and same-sex couples alike is unconstitutional. So while the President may say he'd like to leave this question to the states, that's an option his administration has already taken off the table.

Once again we are faced with a choice. Either this former constitutional law professor doesn't understand what his own administration is doing, constitutionally speaking, or he is not being candid about it.

Six states allow legal same sex marriage. In several cases this has been the result of court action. Thirty states have laws that confine marriage to a union between a man and a woman. All of them have been passed by popular vote. Apparently, a lot of people do not share the view that I hold and that the President professes.

To be sure, this is a Republic and not a democracy. The Constitution controls popular majorities as much as it controls the President and Congress. Is this a case where the people ought to be overruled? I think the people of North Carolina and the people of South Dakota ought to know what the President will do on this score. His personal feelings are irrelevant. What matters is what he intends and is prepared to do. All we know right now is that he says one thing and does another.

Chen4: The New Yorker Edition

I have been waging a battle on behalf of the obvious for several days on this blog. I pointed out that the initial deal brokered by US diplomats on behalf of Chen Guangcheng, on the protection of which he left the American embassy, was a deeply embarrassing bungle. I presented evidence of this from a wide range of sources. My cherished interlocutor, A.I., accused me of trying to "baffle em with bullshit".

I think I have about beat this one to death, but today I chanced to listen to the New Yorker Political Scene, a podcast I subscribe to. On May 3^rd, just in the middle of things, Evan Osnos, the China correspondent for the magazine, and pundit Ryan Lizza. Here is my transcription of their discussion.

Evan Osnos. Well, initially the deal sounded quite promising, if unusual, which was that the US side announced that they had struck an agreement with the Chinese that would allow Chen Guangcheng to relocate with his family from their home village where they had been subject to such persecution to move elsewhere in China…

But it was really only within a couple of hours that this deal began to unravel. He had gotten to the hospital and was reunited with his wife and it was at that point, it becomes clear now, that he began to learn of the immense pressure that his family and wife were under after he escaped. The guards who had been surrounding his house for years essentially moved into the house. As he put it several times, they were eating at his table; they'd installed security cameras in his house and they said, essentially, had he not agreed to this deal the Chinese guards told his wife that they would beat her to death.

So he gets out of the embassy and, you have to imagine the mindset that this guy has at this point. He's obviously exhausted. He's in the middle of an enormously complex diplomatic negotiation. And then he's told by everyone around him that there is no way that the Chinese government is actually going to honor its promises and protect him in the years ahead and I think that's the point at which this got extremely complicated because he began saying that he wants to leave China, that he made a mistake and that he had been in some sense pressured to leave the embassy early.

After the deal was announced and it was said that Chen was going to be starting a new life in China and he would be given the protection of the Chinese Government and that US officials would be able to monitor him, this was greeted right away by skepticism from the human rights community and from people who are familiar with the way things work in China because frankly that scenario always seemed farfetched. It's just difficult to imagine that this man could go from being under brutal house arrest on one day and then a week later is enrolling in a new university with this family. The fact is that was always a higher bar than they were ever going to meet. But the fact is that it came unraveled even faster than anyone could imagine.

Ryan Lizza: I mean if that's the case I mean that it seems really embarrassing for the Administration and for Kurt Campbell, the Assistant Secretary for, what is it, East Asian Affairs, Evan, and Hillary Clinton who's over there, they sort of took ownership of this deal, bragged about it to the American press, and now the story seems to be coming out that this guy Chen was offered no protection whatsoever.

Evan Osnos. The other thing that seems worth mentioning here is that this is a rare case in which both the US government and the Chinese Government end up looking terrible, frankly. This is not a deal that has produced any benefits for anybody, with the exception of the Romney Campaign.

That is the position that I have taken.

Indiana & Wisconsin

There were two interesting elections today, one in Indiana and one in Wisconsin. Republicans turned out Richard Lugar, who had represented Indiana in the U.S. Senate since 1976. Lugar's defeat is an obvious sign that the Tea Party is still a potent political force. State Treasurer Richard Mourdock won 61% of the primary vote, a landslide. Of course if Mourdock loses in November it will be another case of the Republican Party shooting itself in the butt. This certainly puts a new seat in play for the Democrats.

Lugar was eighty and it was probably time for him to retire. He also made the mistake loosening his ties with his constituency. Lugar was declared ineligible to vote in his "home district." He hasn't really lived in Indiana for a long time. He also seemed to regard his Senate seat as something he was entitled to. It's hard to blame him, but those are the things that can be the kiss of death for an incumbent Senator.

I am guessing that Mourdock holds that seat for the Republicans.

The other election was doubly interesting. It was the special primary ahead of the recall election that Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker is facing next month. Two things stand out. One is that the Union candidate, Kathleen Falk, was flattened by Tom Barrett (35 to 57%). The Unions of course were the major force behind the recall election, hoping to punish Walker for his curbs on public union collective bargaining. From the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel:

Shrugging off millions of dollars spent by labor groups to defeat him, Tom Barrett walked to victory in Tuesday's Democratic primary and set up a more taxing sprint toward June 5 - a historic recall that will be a rematch of his unsuccessful 2010 race against Gov. Scott Walker.

In the recall primary, The Associated Press called the race for the Milwaukee mayor over former Dane County Executive Kathleen Falk, showing that more than $4 million doesn't necessarily buy a close race.

It has been frequently noted that the Democrats primary campaign shifted its focus away from union issues to bread and butter economic issues. From the WaPo:

MADISON, Wis. — When Wisconsin Democrats launched their recall drive against Republican Gov. Scott Walker last year, it was all about unions. They wanted Walker to pay with his job for pushing legislation that stripped almost all public workers of nearly all their collective bargaining rights.

More recently, Democrats, buoyed by fresh federal statistics that show Wisconsin's economy is still sputtering badly, have tried to transform the election into a referendum on the governor's failure to put people back to work. Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett and a group supporting Kathleen Falk, the two front-runners for the Democratic nomination, launched new television ads over the last three days ripping Walker for not creating jobs.

The steam has all gone out of the union kettle.

Powerline noted the other thing that stands out. Despite facing only token opposition in the Republican Primary, almost as many Republicans turned out to vote for Walker as voted for all the Democratic candidates combined (614,000 to 651,000). That suggests that Walker has a strong base of support. Instead of a referendum on Walker's public union reforms, the election will be simply a repeat of the last one. A lot of voters will wonder why it was worth the cost.

I am guessing that Walker survives, probably comfortably.

The Avengers

I have been happily married for more than 30 years; I have had been blessed with two wonderful children and a job I enjoy; and I have seen The Avengers. The worst thing I can say about the film is that it does come last on that list of blessings.

I was an avid reader of comics in my early teens and a fierce partisan of Marvel. Spiderman was unquestionably my favorite, but The Avengers was a close second. Recently Hollywood finally figured out how to translate comics into film in an effective way. Spiderman 1 and 2, Ironman, and the two Batman features were all fine pieces of film making and, more amazingly, satisfied almost all the comic book nerds who saw them.

It is always perilous to pronounce judgment after seeing a movie for the first time, but I think that The Avengers is by far the best of the lot. The film spins around the "tesseract," a mysterious, luminously purple box-thingy that everyone wants but no one can control. Thor's brother, Loki, comes to earth with help from a shadowy alien race, bent on acquiring the box. SHIELD (kind of like the Department of Homeland Security only with ray guns, and the "homeland" is planet earth) assembles the Avengers.

We get Ironman, Thor, and the Hulk, followed by Captain America (the leader), The Black Widow, and Hawkeye. I put the heroes in two groups because one of the problems that this movie handles well, but not perfectly, is their incommensurate abilities. The first three heroes are what I call class one superheroes. Their powers are way off the human scale. They are more than a match for ordinary weapons or even giant robot slugs and gravity is no limitation. Captain America is class two: superhuman abilities, but just above human scale. The Black Widow and Hawkeye are well trained soldiers with really cool weapons. Keeping both groups in the action plausibly was quite a challenge, but the movie generally met it.

The single best thing about the movie is its dialogue. It is consistently clever, crisp, and funny. When someone insults Loki, Thor objects that Loki is his brother and a homeboy from Asgard. A SHIELD agent says dryly "he's killed forty people in two days." Thor responds: "he is adopted." When Captain America is advised that Thor and Loki are gods, he responds "there is only one God, sir, and I am pretty sure he doesn't dress like either of them."

All the characters are well crafted and the actors seemed born to play their respective roles. Tom Hiddleston's Loki supplies one of the most important elements in any superhero drama: the compelling villain. He is beautiful to look at and listen to. He is capable of arousing some sympathy, but when the evil face emerges it is plenty evil. Robert Downey Jr.'s performance would have stolen the show if the show hadn't been so bloody good.

Mark Raffalo as Bruce Banner is simply brilliant, hitting the mark in each scene by skillfully underplaying it. He is helped by the fact that the characters around him treat him the way they would a case of TNT. Everyone knows that will happen if this one explodes into the Hulk.

In spite of the large number of characters, neither the action nor the stories ever get crowded. The film consists almost entirely of set pieces of action, every single one of which is delicious. The Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) appears first tied to a chair, apparently being interrogated and slapped around by a trio of Russian thugs. One of the thugs answers his cell phone and announces "it's for her." For reasons you will learn, she gets to take the call and we find out in short order who is interrogating whom.

There isn't much about the film that is serious, though it does touch on the ambiguities of war and national security. What is SHIELD hiding from its heroes? The touch is light and will offend almost no one. The theme of freedom and submission is prominent and very healthy. The Avengers are a typically American set of heroes: diverse in origin, almost ungovernable, but able to come together for the simple reason that we need them to.

The movie does heavily employ that charm of competent authorities that is conspicuous in a lot of espionage movies. SHIELD has powerful weapons and better yet, it has its act together. One wonders how a world drowning in debt manages to produce a gigantic, flying battle platform. Happily, that is ignored. The Avengers is merely and every bit a comic nerd's dream come true.

Apparently, we comic nerds were on to something. The Avengers has already broken the Harry Potter record. The secret behind the movie's success is simple. Josh Whedon. Whedon is not incapable of producing a flop, but he is incapable of producing something that does not glow with genius. Buffy the Vampire Slayer was one of the finest TV shows ever produced. One of my happy thoughts when I left the theater was that Whedon can now do whatever he wants to do. That can ruin a genius, but at this point I have faith.

Go see The Avengers. Oh, and wait through the first listing of credits for the Easter egg. It reveals a future villain. I think I know what that thing was that revealed its face. It was a Skrull! Am I right?

Bad Jobs

We are in uncharted economic territory just now. The most recent jobs report was terrible. The unemployment number ticked down a bit, to 8.1%. President Obama is touting that as good news on the campaign trail, which is what I would advise him to do were I advising him.

Unfortunately, the economy created only 115,000 jobs in April, well below expectations and far below the level that would be needed to move back to where we were when the recent recession began. This level of job creation doesn't even keep up with population growth.

One of the reasons that unemployment went down is because more people stopped looking for work and so don't show up in the figure. Civilian work force participation is now lower than it has been since 1981. We have lost the last 30 years.

Pictures speak louder than words. Here is the chart:

What this shows us is that the current decline in jobs is unique. Most recessions since WWII are V shaped: declines in jobs that were sharp, deep, and short, followed by robust gains. It used to be assumed that this was a healthy process, which is why a recession was sometimes called a "correction".

The recessions beginning in 1990 and 2001 were different. Job losses went on longer but were much shallower than previous recessions. That is especially true for the recession beginning in 2001.

The current line of job losses combines the worst of both. It is much deeper than previous recessions, has now gone on longer than the longest of previous recessions, and it is very far from returning to the point where the recession began. This is the first recession in recent history that has failed to generate a recovery. At the current rate, there will be no recovery or, if there is one, it will take decades.

If you are expecting me to say that it's all Obama's fault, prepare to be disappointed. Obama's policies have not be different in any significant regard from George W. Bush's policies. If anything, Obama doubled down on Dubya. The only thing we can say for certain is that, so far, the Bush/Obama economic strategy has come a cropper.

Maybe Paul Krugman is right. Maybe spending during peace time at WWII levels is just not enough stimulus. Government should spend much faster and go into debt much deeper. Perhaps that will do the trick. Maybe I am right. Maybe a half century of fiscal irresponsibility is finally catching up with us. Government should take steps to put its fiscal house in order.

What is not at question is this: President Obama is running with the worst economic record in post war history. That record is not merely worse in degree, but worse in kind. Perhaps we should judge Obama and his presumptive opponent not by how they treat dogs but by what they proposed to do over the next four years to address the economic situation. It is pretty clear that Obama is going to propose nothing. It is not at all clear that Romney has any real alternatives. This is not, I suspect, the point on which the election will be decided. It is merely the point on which it should be decided.

Chen Guangcheng 3

The Washington Post continues to blame Chen Guangcheng for the failure of the initial deal supposedly brokered on his behalf by U.S. diplomats.

Chen's own changing wishes and ability to broadcast them through the media have repeatedly flipped carefully scripted plans and scrambled the negotiations.

Well, at least we know whose fault it is. Too bad Chen has all that access. The London Telegraph has a different explanation:

Attempts to broker a deal while Mr Chen was still in the embassy that would have allowed him to leave China on medical grounds are said to have broken down because senior Chinese leaders would not sanction it. Mr Chen's own fears for his future became apparent after he was moved to Chaoyang Hospital for treatment for the broken foot he suffered in his escape.

If the Telegraph is right, the initial deal never really existed. Until someone finds evidence that someone above the level of janitor in Beijing did sign off on the deal, the Telegraph's account stands.

Unfortunately, much the same seems to be true of the current deal allowing Mr. Chen to leave China. Is there in fact a deal? The Administration seems to think so, sort of. Again from the WaPo:

U.S. officials expressed hope for the new deal, but some also displayed caution.

In a closed phone briefing with human rights groups, one high-level State Department official acknowledged that Washington was relying on "good-faith assurances" from the Chinese government, according to several who were on the call.

"They were very careful not to describe it as a guarantee," said one of those briefed, who requested anonymity in order to describe the conversation. "There seems to be a lot of caution given what happened the first time around."

That supports the Telegraph's view, that when Chen returned to Chinese custody there never was in fact any deal. As for now, here is a bit from the Guardian:

"Mr Chen has been offered a fellowship from an American university, where he can be accompanied by his wife and two children," US state department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said on Friday.

"The Chinese government has indicated that it will accept Mr Chen's applications for appropriate travel documents. The United States government expects that the Chinese government will expeditiously process his applications for these documents, and make accommodations for his current medical condition," she added.

Here, from the same article, is the proper response to that.

Phelim Kine, of Human Rights Watch, said: "The lesson of the last 48 hours is that expectations really need to be backed with concrete plans for delivery.

"It's encouraging that the US government has confidence that the Chinese government will respond appropriately in this regard, but there's no guarantee. What's required now is public confirmation by the Chinese government and the issuance of a schedule for how and when this process will be completed."

Kine managed to do what no one else seems to be able to do: spell out what it means to actually have a deal. It is pretty clear that no deal yet exists. All the optimistic talk over the last two days has rested, not on any guarantees, but on "good faith assurances," indications, and expectations.

Chen may yet be released. That is what I expect to happen. The most commonly cited reason is that allowing him to leave is the quickest way to ensure that he fades from the public eye. The problem is that Chinese diplomats and the Security apparatus aren't always on the same page. China is not a formal system of the kind that liberal democracies understand. It is a constantly shifting net of personalities and alliances. It is only fair to say that our diplomats have their work cut out for them.

Chen Guangcheng looks like a genuine hero to me. He taught himself to be lawyer, stood up against petty corruption, and then stood up against a world-class brutality. For his troubles he has served seven years in captivity. Whether or how much we can help him remains to be seen, but if we can help him it won't be by wishful thinking and imagination. Constantly speaking and acting as if we have cut some kind of deal with Beijing when we obviously haven't just makes us look like a bunch of damn fools. I think Chen deserves better than that, even if we don't.