South Dakota Politics

Democrat Woes And One Party Government

My latest in the Pierre Capital Journal.  A snippet:

In the 1970s, the Democratic Party in South Dakota was on the verge of being the majority party. Richard Kniep and Harvey Wollman were elected governor as Democrats in the 1970s. Democrats like George McGovern, Frank Denholm, and James Abourezk could get elected to national office. In 1972 Democrats won half of the state House seats and had majorities in the state Senate after the 1972 and 1974 elections.

Today, of the 105 seats in the South Dakota Legislature, Democrats hold only twenty-four. No Democrat holds a state constitutional office. Republicans continue to dominate voter registration rolls. Democratic candidates for governor routinely get trounced. In the last decade, two Democrat incumbents to national office, Tom Daschle and Stephanie Herseth Sandlin, have been defeated for re-election.

Read the whole thing.

Stephanie Herseth-Sandlin will not challenge Rounds

Stephanie Herseth-Sandlin has announced that she will not seek the Senate seat being vacated by Tim Johnson. I think that this is unfortunate. The people of South Dakota deserve a serious campaign from both sides. Herseth-Sandlin is the only Democrat who is currently in a position to offer such a campaign. She could have made it a competitive race.

She would also likely have lost. Mike Rounds is a popular government who has twice won an at large election in South Dakota. Herseth-Sandlin was defeated by a relative new comer in 2010. I imagine that these facts were part of her calculation. Rick Weiland's entry was taken by the Washington Post as evidence that Brendan Johnson will not run. That seems right to me and it probably indicates that the national Democratic Party has little hope for holding onto this seat.

Educate Ourselves About Islam

My latest in the Pierre Capital Journal.  Here is a taste:

After declining in attention over the years, the Arab Spring of 2011 and now the Boston bombings have once again raised interest in and anxiety over radical Islam.

Americans should increase their knowledge of Islam. It is easy to fear what one does not know, and for understandable reasons most Americans have a tenuous grasp at best on the teachings of Islam. So the first thing we might do is to pick up a copy of the Koran and read it.

Read the whole thing.

On a completely different subject, as I write this it is 92 degrees in Aberdeen.  According to The Weather Channel, the high temperature exactly one month ago was 35 degrees.  Two days ago the high was 56.  This is a great state.

Nixonian

If you are going to send someone to let a very nasty cat out of the bag, perhaps it should be someone who knows something about cats and bags. Lois G. Lerner, "the IRS official who oversees tax-exempt groups," was not such a person. She had enough of a tin ear to actually use the Nixonian expression "mistakes were made." She said that she was not good at math, which is not really helpful when you are speaking for the IRS.

Conservative activists have been complaining for years that the IRS was harassing them. I have been, up until now, a bit skeptical. It just seemed like the risk of such shenanigans would far outweigh the likely benefits. Well, those conservatives were right. From the WaPo:

The Internal Revenue Service on Friday apologized for targeting groups with "tea party" or "patriot" in their names, confirming long-standing accusations by some conservatives that their applications for tax-exempt status were being improperly delayed and scrutinized…

About 75 groups were selected for extra inquiry — including burdensome questionnaires and, in some cases, improper requests for the names of their donors — simply because of the words in their names, she said in a conference call with reporters.

All on its own this is a major scandal. It is a blatantly partisan misuse of the tax power. As the WaPo puts it in a subsequent editorial:

A BEDROCK principle of U.S. democracy is that the coercive powers of government are never used for partisan purpose. The law is blind to political viewpoint, and so are its enforcers, most especially the FBI and the Internal Revenue Service. Any violation of this principle threatens the trust and the voluntary cooperation of citizens upon which this democracy depends.

At the very least, this was an attempt by someone in the IRS to intimidate critics of the Obama Administration. Using the words "tea party" and "patriot" makes it clear who the targets were. The left has been on a full court press to discredit tea party activists since they first emerged. The request for donor lists makes it clear that the purpose was intimidation. Give to the tea party and win yourself an audit! The IRS inquistors also demanded detailed lists of the organizations members.  Vee know who you are.  As the WaPo puts it, this is inimical to the basic principles of a constitutional democracy.

In less than a day, the scandal ratcheted up a notch. From the Politico:

Senior Internal Revenue Service officials knew employees were singling out conservative groups for extra scrutiny as early as 2011, according to a watchdog agency's report set to be released next week, POLITICO has confirmed from a congressional source.

The disclosure that senior officials knew agents were flagging applications containing the words "patriot" or "tea party" contradicts public statements by former IRS Commissioner Doug Shulman…

"There's absolutely no targeting. This is the kind of back and forth that happens to people" who apply for tax-exempt status, Shulman told a House Ways and Means subcommittee in March 2012.

Can you say code red? Whether Commissioner Shulman deliberately lied to a House subcommittee will likely become a matter for judicial inquiry. If he did, that is probably contempt of Congress. If the Politico report is correct, then "Senior" IRS officials knew that he was providing false information to that committee. They managed to keep quiet about it until well after the election.

Critics of the Obama Administration have often accused it of being authoritarian or worse. I think that the proper term, about which there is no longer any doubt, is Nixonian.

We are unlikely to find out that President Obama knew anything about what the IRS apparatchiks were doing. We know more than enough about the culture that took root in the executive branch under his tenure. His petulant campaign against Fox News set the template. Any institution that does not adore him is suspect. Deceiving the press and the public are instinctive reactions on the part of his subordinates whenever his political interests are threatened. That is Nixonian enough for government work.

Benghazi Lies Over the White House

It was an interesting moment on The News Hour when Michael Gerson assured Mark Shields and Jim Lehrer that the Benghazi cover up is not Watergate. I am rather certain that that is true, but the fact that Gerson had to say is an indication of the seriousness of the scandal.

The way that the scandal came back to the front pages is also interesting. In what is becoming rather a pattern these days, the conservative press follows a story that isn't getting the coverage it deserves. It was Stephen Hayes at the Weekly Standard who had the scoop. That made it impossible for the rest of the press to ignore. Today Jonathan Karl at ABC broke the same story and with it the damn broke.  Now nearly everyone acknowledges the scandal. 

In the days after the Benghazi attack, Administration officials (most infamously, U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice) told us that it was the result of one the spontaneous protests that erupted in the Middle East over the infamous film about the Prophet. When it became clear that this was false, that the consulate was subject to a coordinated terrorist attack, the Administration claimed that it had only been relying on talking points supplied by the CIA.

What Hayes and Karl demonstrate is that the talking points supplied by the intelligence service were carefully scrubbed of certain bits of information. From Jonathan Karl:

ABC News has obtained 12 different versions of the talking points that show they were extensively edited as they evolved from the drafts first written entirely by the CIA to the final version distributed to Congress and to U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice before she appeared on five talk shows the Sunday after that attack.

White House emails reviewed by ABC News suggest the edits were made with extensive input from the State Department. The edits included requests from the State Department that references to the Al Qaeda-affiliated group Ansar al-Sharia be deleted as well references to CIA warnings about terrorist threats in Benghazi in the months preceding the attack.

That would appear to directly contradict what White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said about the talking points in November.

Let's recap. An American consulate was attacked and four Americans, including the US Ambassador to Libya, were murdered. On the eve of a presidential election, the Administration presented a deliberately falsified account of what happened to the press and the public. Then it lied about the fact that it had lied about the facts.

Is this Watergate? Of course not. This is not going to bring down the Obama Presidency nor should it. We don't impeach presidents for such things as lying and manifest incompetence and, even if we did, the press won't tell the story that way and the Democrats will circle will circle the wagons.

It matters a lot nonetheless. We need to know when something like this has taken place. It has done a great deal of damage to the President's credibility. His Press Secretary, Jay Carney, found out today that the White House Press Corp is hopping mad. They think that they were deliberately misled by Carney because, in fact, they were. It is unlikely that he will regain their trust. Of course the President's role in all this is unclear but that doesn't matter. Either he knew what was going on or he wasn't paying attention. Either way, he is responsible.

This is a pattern that seems to be locked in. An embarrassment results in a cover up, virtually assuring that the one will erupt at a later point, compounded by the latter. The Administration's friends were doing the President no favors by pulling out all the stops in his defense. They just can't help themselves. It has been said that virtue is its own reward. The same is true of vice.

The Biggest Benghazi Scandal

All the focus on the Obama Administration's subterfuge in the days following Ambassador Steven's murder in Benghazi is surely warranted; however, it has tended to overshadow the more important scandal. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton sent the Ambassador to an increasingly dangerous location without providing adequate security. Her State Department refused his repeated requests for more security. If she didn't know about this, then she wasn't doing her job. Whether she knew or not, as Secretary, she is responsible.

What is really damning was the decision not to send available forces to Benghazi once the consulate came under attack. This was not mere neglect. Special operations forces were ordered to stand down.

The Administration has repeatedly insisted that this was because no forces could have reached the consulate in time. This may be true in retrospect but there is no possible way that they could have known it at the time. Even if you believe that they didn't know that it was a terrorist attack, which is unbelievable, that would mean admitting that they didn't know what was going. The first wave of the attack was followed by a second. They couldn't have known that there would not be a third and a fourth or that many more persons would be in danger. Without knowing the extent of the threat, it would have been risky to send military forces to Benghazi, as the Administration has pleaded. But that is like saying that we shouldn't send in the fire department until the extent of the fire is determined.

It is difficult to understand why the Administration refused to send help to the Americans in Benghazi. It is impossible to excuse it.

Colbert Retort

Mark Sanford decisively defeated Democrat Elizabeth Colbert Busch in the South Carolina Congressional District 1 election: 54/45%. He won a majority in each of the five counties. Sanford won by largely by nationalizing the election. At one point he staged a mock debate with a cardboard cutout of Nancy Pelosi. That worked pretty well in a district that Mitt Romney carried by 20 points.

As I would like the Republicans to retain the House of Representatives, I can't be too disappointed with this turn of events. I can be a little disappointed. Sanford achieved national fame by disappearing for six days while he was governor. It turned out he had jetted on public money to join an Argentine woman who was not the wife he had.

It does seem to me that there is something wrong when a public figure can win office after that kind of disgrace. I am guessing that a lot of Democrats would agree, but only because Sanford was guilty of SWR, which is to say, Sinning While Republican. They seem to think that Sanford was somehow worse that Bill Clinton because the former charged the public for his plane fare. How soon we forget that Bill used the Arkansas State Police to solicit babes for him. They weren't exactly acting pro bono.

The left undermined a lot when it circled the wagons around Bill Clinton, not the least of which was Bill Clinton. If Daschle had managed to lay down the law when the first bimbo eruption occurred during the campaign, Clinton might not have wasted so much of his presidency trying to weasel out of his many indiscretions. I am sorry to see Republicans doing the same thing in SC 1. Of course, they netted that seat. Maybe that's the only thing we care about anymore.

The President Who Wasn’t There

Now that Obama is safely back in office for four more dismal years, some of his fervent well-wishers are coming around to something that I have been pointing out for years: he doesn't know what is job is, or has little interest in doing it, or both. The President's recent press conference can only have left everyone scratching their heads. What exactly was the point of coming out to answer questions to which he obviously had no good answers?

Maureen Dowd has what may be the best comment on the day:

ABC News' Jonathan Karl asked Obama if he was already out of "juice" to pass his agenda, citing the president's inability to get a watered-down gun bill passed in the Senate, Congress swatting away Obama on the sequester cuts, and the recent passage of a cybersecurity bill in the House with 92 Democrats on board, despite a veto threat from the White House…

"But, Jonathan," he lectured Karl, "you seem to suggest that somehow, these folks over there have no responsibilities and that my job is to somehow get them to behave. That's their job. They are elected, members of Congress are elected in order to do what's right for their constituencies and for the American people."

Actually, it is his job to get them to behave. The job of the former community organizer and self-styled uniter is to somehow get this dunderheaded Congress, which is mind-bendingly awful, to do the stuff he wants them to do. It's called leadership.

Here is no admirer of the Congress nor someone inclined to want Obama to fail. Dowd is disgusted because she wants the President to enact a liberal agenda and because she does know what his job is. It is leadership. One of his key roles is legislative leader, which is to say to stand over both houses and try to marshal them toward a coherent public agenda.

Dana Milbank notes something else that Obama said to Jonathan Karl:

"You know, rumors of my demise may be a little exaggerated," Obama said. Back in 1995, Bill Clinton assured Americans that he was still relevant; this may be the first time a president asserted that he was still alive.

The question is not, however, whether the President is still alive. It is whether he has ever been alive or at least present and, if he is both, what the Hell he has been doing. The key problem is illustrated by the President's insipid comments on his Syria policy. From the editors of the Washington Post:

THE MUDDLE that is President Obama's policy on Syria has grown still muddier. On Tuesday the president backed away from a "red line" he had drawn on the use of chemical weapons by the regime of Bashar al-Assad, setting the threshold for proof of a violation in such a way as to virtually exclude the possibility that one could ever be confirmed. Yet that same day his aides leaked to The Post and other news organizations the news that the president might soon reverse his long-standing opposition to providing Syrian rebels with arms. And the administration readied yet another effort to persuade Russia to abandon its support of the Assad regime in favor of a negotiated political transition. Can any coherence be found in this?

Well, that would be no. As the WaPo points out, the President had earlier drawn a "red line" that the Syrian government would cross if it used chemical weapons. Now that the line has been crossed, we discover that it is not red so much as pink or maybe beige. Here are the President's actual words:

We don't know how they were used and when they were used and who used them. We don't have a chain of custody.

President Obama has made a Buddhist parable of himself. The Buddha spoke of a man who was shot by a poisoned arrow and would not allow it to be removed until he knew who shot it, what the man's cast was and how tall he was, how the bow was made and of what it was made, etc. To put it prosaically, that is not an effective policy on poison.

What is striking about these words is not how awful they are but what they demonstrate. He dared the Assad to cross a line and then had no idea what to say or do when the latter crossed it. The only viable conclusion is that no one in the Administration, least of all its head, has been thinking about this in advance. This was the best they could come up with on the fly.

I am not one of those calling for American intervention in Syria. I am not sure that we have any idea of what to do, short of invasion. Here is what I am sure of. You should probably think about what you will do if the other side crosses the line before you publically draw the line. You'd damn well better think about it afterward, while waiting to see if the line holds. Obama seems to have waited until just before he walked out to meet the press, if then.

No one in my lifetime has come to the office of the Presidency so innocent of any experience in leadership. He is likely to leave office with that innocence intact.

Bad News About Health Care from Oregon

There are basically three basic goals toward which recent efforts at health care reform were aimed. Two of them are economic: the American health care system costs too much and people need to be protected against the financial burden of health care. The last is about medicine: people will be healthier if they have better access to health care.

It is doubtful that ObamaCare can deliver substantial progress toward the first two goals. It does almost nothing to reduce overall health care spending and it while it will mean that some patients will be relieved of some of the costs of treatment, it is also clear that most of us will pay a lot more.

What about the last goal? Does expanding health insurance and in effect cheap or free care improve the health of the recipients? The state of Oregon recently ran what was, unintentionally, as good a test as one could devise. They provided funds to add 10,000 new people to Medicaid. A lottery determined who would get the slots. Health care experts signed up 6,400 of those who won the lottery and 5,800 of those who entered but didn't win.

This provided a large sample. It met the criteria of a random, controlled test, since the two groups were selected by lot the one provided a control group to compare outcomes with the other. If access to medical care without financial burden improves health outcomes, this is where you would be able to see it in glowing color.

Meagan McArdle reports the sad news. Here is a passage she quotes from the study.

We found no significant effect of Medicaid coverage on the prevalence or diagnosis of hypertension or high cholesterol levels or on the use of medication for these conditions. Medicaid coverage significantly increased the probability of a diagnosis of diabetes and the use of diabetes medication, but we observed no significant effect on average glycated hemoglobin levels or on the percentage of participants with levels of 6.5% or higher. Medicaid coverage decreased the probability of a positive screening for depression (−9.15 percentage points; 95% confidence interval, −16.70 to −1.60; P=0.02), increased the use of many preventive services, and nearly eliminated catastrophic out-of-pocket medical expenditures.

McArdle explains:

No statistically significant treatment effect on any objective measure: not blood pressure. Not glycated hemoglobin. Not cholesterol. There was, on the other hand, a substantial decrease in reported depression. But this result is kind of weird, because it's not coupled with a statistically significant increase in the use of anti-depressants. So it's not clear exactly what effect Medicaid is having. I'm not throwing this out: depression's a big problem, and this seems to be a big effect. I'm just not sure what to make of it. Does the mere fact of knowing you have Medicaid make you less depressed? For that matter, I'm not sure what the policy implication is. If you wanted a program to cure depression, Medicaid is probably not what you'd design.

The data is in. Expanding medical insurance did not make an appreciable difference on any objective measure. The three conditions mentioned above are precisely the ones that we are very good at treating. One reason for this is that people in the control group usually obtained access to treatment when they sought it.

I thought from the very beginning of the ObamaCare drama that the real problem was not that Obama was a closet socialist but that neither he nor the Democrats in Congress were bothering to ask any of the most important questions. They knew what was wrong with the health care system: not enough government control. They knew exactly what to do about it. They had known all these things and so didn't bother to think about them. They have known them for so long that they cannot remember not knowing them. It's not what people think that gets us in trouble. It's what they know that just ain't true.

The Little Way Of Ruthie Leming

My review of Rod Dreher's new book, in in the Pierre Capital Journal.  A snippet.

Dreher’s book is a tribute to his sister and also to a place. Many successful people tell him of the meaninglessness of their pursuit of wealth and accomplishment. Our rootlessness and individualism often leave our lives without purpose or meaning. A strong connection to a place can give us just that.

Dreher is not naïve about the shortcomings of small towns. They are often small-minded and provincial. Still, the book’s dedication says it all. He dedicates the book to his sister’s children, writing “This is your mother; these are your people.”

We in South Dakota have many of the same virtues as small-town Louisiana. The pastoral simplicity of our state is not for everybody, but we should recognize its value and the hazards of rootless cosmopolitanism. This is our land. These are our people. Nothing to be ashamed of there.