South Dakota Politics

The Affordable Care Act can’t get its act together

Intrepid reader Donald Pays has this comment on my last post:

What I was struck by in the oral arguments was the seeming ignorance of Scalia. At least I got the feeling the "liberal" justices and Kennedy were taking their jobs seriously. Even Alito and Roberts seemed to know a little bit about what was going on.

It would have been helpful if Donald had provided at least a bit of evidence for his complaint. Scott Johnson at Powerline has an actual example of a Justice who didn't seem to know what he was talking about.

Referring to the key New Deal Commerce Clause case of Wickard v. Filburn, Breyer asked, for example: "Didn't they make that man growing his own wheat go into the market and buy other wheat for his — for his cows?"

As Johnson points out, this is an absurd reading of Wickard. The government did not in any sense force Filburn to enter a market. Rather, Congress used the commerce power to prohibit Filburn from growing wheat for his own use, in excess of quotas that Congress had imposed. Perhaps Breyer's comment is, as Johnson says, evidence of "sheer intellectual laziness." I would not be so harsh. It is evidence of a justice trying to find a precedent for his preferred outcome where no such precedent exists.

I would also point out that Wickard is not a very helpful source, either judicially or politically. Would most Americans accept the idea that Congress could prohibit every single one of us from growing roses in our back yards in order to benefit florists? If this is indeed constitutional, do we want to say that Congress could further and compel farmers to buy wheat or sweethearts to buy roses?

Reader Bill Fleming has this:

The point is, we already have a default form of Universal Health Care in the US. Problem is, it is the most expensive, least intentional, purely reactionary form of it imaginable…

Reader A.I. makes a similar point:

Our current laws (perfectly constitutional or at least facing no court challenge) force hospitals to treat those who can't pay for their care. The hospitals pass those costs along to those who can pay because they have insurance. And those with insurance ended up paying more because of this cost shifting…

Thus if the court decides against the individual mandate, they will have reinforced an individual "right" for those who don't buy insurance to mooch off the rest of us…

I think that there is merit to both points. Notice, however, what Bill concedes: we already have universal health care! That is quite correct. Americans are not denied medical care because of any inability to pay. So whatever the expense and expanded government powers in PPACA get us, it isn't more health care for more people. That is contrary to most of the rhetoric in favor of the bill. Is the system going to become more efficient and less expensive under the act? It was evident from the beginning that no real cost reductions were built into it.

Likewise, A.I.'s point is contrary to the usual rhetoric, according to which the uninsured are victims. A.I. thinks they are moochers. So we are going to compel those free riders to pay their fair share. Okay. Does that mean that health insurance costs will go down from those of us who do pay for health insurance? In fact, the opposite is almost certainly going to be true. Whatever money is shaken out of the pockets of the moochers, it will be spent by the Feds on other things.

The proponents of the PPACA are constantly at odds with themselves about the effects and rational basis of the legislation. Eugene Kontorovich has this, at the Volokh Conspiracy:

There is a serious inconsistency between the government's arguments for the mandate and for the Medicaid expansion. In a nutshell, these arguments make opposite assumptions about the effect of financial duress on states' ability to execute their policy preferences. Defending the mandate, the government says states are individually incompetent to regulate insurance, because the first state to adopt generous rules would be inundated with the sick, and forced to abandon its policy. This is a basic race to the bottom story and has been around in Commerce Clause cases since the New Deal.

Crucially, the argument takes financial realities as dispositive: states cannot realistically choose to experiment with medical insurance individually because it would be ruinous. The economic effects mean that states do not really have the power to choose individual regulatory regimes.

Yet turning to the Spending power, the government asks us to believe that states can realistically turn down federal Medicaid funds, though it would be at least as ruinous if not more. Either the prospect of massive losses makes a state's ability to pursue a certain course illusory or it does not.

ObamaCare's defenders are not going goofy on Supreme Court precedents and constantly contradicting themselves because they are incompetent or intellectually lazy. The problem is that they can't openly acknowledge their real motivation. What they really want is not to save the pitiful uninsured or to make the healthcare system more efficient or, as the President initially argued, to reduce the burden of healthcare on the federal budget. What they want is a triumph of federal power over markets. If it survives, that is the one thing that the PPACA will surely achieve.

Will The King of Swing Dance the Mandate

It is generally agreed that Tuesday's hearing before the Supreme Court was a disaster for ObamaCare. Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli Jr. turned in a dreadful performance by nearly everyone's standard, including Mother Jones. He was stumbling, repetitive, talked in jargon most of the time, and had to be handed nearly every argument he could use by the four liberal justices.

It is appropriate to wonder why such a distinguished lawyer seemed to be so inept. Rand Simberg at PJ Media has suggestion: cocooning. Verrilli, like most people in the Administration and most Democrats in Congress, never talks to anyone who doesn't take it for granted that ObamaCare is constitutional and that any constitutional objection are just silly. For that reason, he was not prepared to offer the one single thing that a defense of the insurance mandate seems to desperately need: a limiting principle.

If you are going to say that Congress has the power to compel citizens to purchase health insurance then you have to go on to say one of two things. You might say that Congress has the power to do pretty much anything it wants so long as it's not explicitly prohibited in the Constitution. I suspect that that is what the Administration believes and what the four liberal Justices believe. Justice Breyer said the following, helping out General Verrilli:

I would have thought that your answer [to the question] can the government, in fact, require you to buy cell phones or buy burials that, if we propose comparable situations, if we have, for example, a uniform United States system of paying for every burial such as Medicare Burial, Medicaid Burial, Ship Burial, ERISA Burial and Emergency Burial beside the side of the road, and Congress wanted to rationalize that system, wouldn't the answer be: Yes, of course, they could.

And the same with the computers, or the same with the cell phones, if you're driving by the side of the highway and there is a federal emergency service, just as you say you have to buy certain mufflers for your car that don't hurt the environment, you could. I mean, see, doesn't it depend on the situation?

So Congress could require me to purchase burial insurance and a cell phone and cell phone plan designed by the Homeland Security Administration. I suppose they could legally require me to carry the cell phone when I go to take a whiz in case I fall and can't get up.

Is there any limit to the share of my paycheck or the hours in my day that Congress can confiscate? I don't think that Breyer thinks there is. That is certainly not how the founders viewed the Constitution. If it becomes the explicit pro-ObamaCare position, it is almost sure to lose on the Court and in the court of public opinion.

The other thing you could say is that there is a limiting principle, but that the mandate is on the safe side of that limit. It is not enough to say that health care is unique. That's like saying you only get married for the first time once. Health care will be unique until the next thing that Congress wants to require us to do. You need to show why health care is unique in a way that is consistent with the principle of limited government.

There is some chance that Chief Justice Roberts will vote with the liberal justices on the grounds of legislative deference. I have no good idea how to game that possibility. Barring that, the case will turn on whether Justice Kennedy decides to try to save the mandate. It is pretty clear that, if he does that, he will have to find some limiting principle that was not offered to him by General Verrilli or the liberal justices.

I don't know what Kennedy will do, but Avik Roy at Forbes makes a very plausible argument that the King of Swing will vote to strike down the mandate. Here is the oft quoted gem from Kennedy early in the day.

The reason this is concerning, is because it requires the individual to do an affirmative act. In the law of torts our tradition, our law, has been that you don't have the duty to rescue someone if that person is in danger. The blind man is walking in front of a car and you do not have a duty to stop him absent some relation between you. And there is some severe moral criticisms of that rule, but that's generally the rule. And here the government is saying that the Federal Government has a duty to tell the individual citizen that it must act, and that is different from what we have in previous cases and that changes the relationship of the Federal Government to the individual in the very fundamental way.

That looks like a pretty solid argument against the mandate. On the other hand, Kennedy later said this:

I think it's true that if most questions in life are matters of degree, in the insurance and health care world…the young person who is uninsured is uniquely, proximately, very close to affecting the rates of insurance and the costs of providing medical care in a way that is not true in other industries. That's my concern in this case.

That looks like he is open to some kind of limiting principle that will save the mandate. Here is what Roy says:

Does Kennedy actually buy the argument that health care is constitutionally unique? The likely answer is no. If Kennedy was really concerned about this problem, it's much more likely that he would have brought it up early on, and raised it both with the Obama Administration's lawyer, Verrilli, and the mandate's opponents, represented by Paul Clement and Michael Carvin. He did not. But when it comes to the Supreme Court's swing vote, we can never be sure.

We're all reading judicial tea leaves here. This seer sees a five to four vote against the mandate. The stakes are rather high. Are the powers of Congress limited by a general sphere of individual liberty apart from the explicit prohibitions in the Constitution? Is there, in the words of the Court, some general right, however limited, to be left alone? No more fundamental question has faced the Court in my lifetime.

The Ambiguities & Abominations of ObamaCare

Whether or in what form the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act survives, it is pretty clear that it is a very unusual piece of legislation. Two years into it, it remains about as popular as Newt Gingrich. From a New York Times/CBS poll:

The new poll, conducted last Wednesday through Sunday, finds that 36 percent of Americans approve of the health care law, while 47 percent are opposed. By nearly 2 to 1, those who say they strongly disapprove of the law outnumber those who strongly approve of the legislation. Sixteen percent have no opinion.

I admit that Obama does about 3 points better against Newt, though that 2 to 1 strongly disapprove to strongly approve number does look like Rasmussen's polling on Obama.

It is also clear that not only does no one know yet what is in it, but no one knows yet what it is. Are the penalties attached to the mandate (and upon which the finances depend) a tax or not? The answer is yes, according to the Administration. Again from the Times:

In defending the law, the Justice Department has taken a legal position — that the health care act constitutes a tax — that contradicts the political stance taken by President Obama. To do that, it has relied on legal semantics to argue that the insurance mandate will be enforced through the tax code even though Congress took pains to label it a penalty and not a tax.

After losing that argument in a lower court, the government's lawyers switched positions to agree with the plaintiffs that the litigation was not blocked by the Anti-Injunction Act. But in its brief to the Supreme Court, the administration argued that while the penalty was not a tax that would fall under the Anti-Injunction Act, it should be viewed as a tax when the court considers on Tuesday whether the mandate is permitted under Congress's broad authority to levy taxes.

So…it's not a tax when legally convenient and it should be viewed as a tax when legally convenient. Glad we cleared that up.

This confusion about the legal nature of the PPACA's penalties reinforces the claim that this thing is an altogether new animal in our political zoology. The question the Court hears tomorrow may turn on turn questions. First, can the act's proponents show that allowing the mandate would not transform the commerce clause into an unlimited grant of power? So far I have heard no good arguments that it does not. Second, can the Court strike down the mandate without making any kind of dent in Congress's existing commerce power. I have heard a lot of good arguments to that effect.

George Will draws our attention to one very interesting amicus brief written by Elizabeth Price Foley and Steve Simpson of the Institute for Justice. Here is the punch line.

The individual mandate requires individuals to enter into contracts of insurance that would never be enforceable at common law because they would violate an essential element of all enforceable contracts – mutuality of assent. This principle is now and has always been a basic presupposition of all legally binding contracts. The Founding generation recognized this principle, and so has this Court."

Mutuality of assent is a basic principle of law because it is a basic principle of natural moral reason. Suppose I enter into a contract with Professor Schaff. He agrees to mow my lawn while I am on vacation. I agree to mow his lawn later, while he is on vacation. While he is packing for a grand trip to Sturgis, why am I obligated to fulfill my end of the bargain? Because he fulfilled his? Not exactly. I am obligated to keep my end of the deal because I freely agreed to do so. By contrast, if someone puts a gun to my head and a pen in my hand, nothing I sign creates any moral obligation on my part.

Genuine consent is a fundamental feature of contracts.

The centrality of mutual assent is reinforced by various ancient doctrines that vitiate a contract's enforceability. For example, contracts can be avoided due to fraud, mistake, duress, and incapacity – all of which are grounded in a lack of meaningful consent by one of the parties. In the instance of incapacity – such as mental disability or minority – the individual's inherent inability to give meaningful consent renders his contracts invalid.

We rely on many such doctrines as mutual assent for our basic liberties while frequently forgetting altogether what they are and how they work. President Obama and his party in Congress may have done us all a big favor by reminding us so something we dearly treasure but haven't had to fight for for a long time. The PPACA is an offense against liberty. We live in interesting times.

Peddling Ignorance on Energy

It would appear that the President of the United States is appallingly ignorant about America's energy supply and really, really bad at math. Ed Morrisey directs our attention to this juicy quote from Mr. Obama's recent campaign speech at the Copper Mountain Solar Project in Boulder City, Nevada. This is from the official White House transcript:

We have subsidized oil companies for a century. We want to encourage production of oil and gas, and make sure that wherever we've got American resources, we are tapping into them. But they don't need an additional incentive when gas is $3.75 a gallon, when oil is $1.20 a barrel, $1.25 a barrel. They don't need additional incentives. They are doing fine.

Did you get that? The President of the United States thinks that a barrel of oil costs a dollar and twenty five cents. He is only off by about $105.

Morrisey thinks that the President is implying some kind of relationship between the two sets of figures, as if one could calculate oil company profits by subtracting his stated oil price from his stated gas price. That would be stupid on a grand scale and it would mean that the $1.20 figures could not be a typo or mistranscription. The President didn't say "one twenty," really meaning a hundred and twenty. He said a "buck twenty."

I don't think you can tell that from the President's words. What is more likely is that the President is speaking with a careless disregard for what he is talking about. If the transcript is a mistake, no one at the White House has bothered to correct it. Nothing useful can be inferred from the figures he is using even if they were stated accurately.

For a better case in point, see this passage in the President's speech:

An energy strategy that focuses only on drilling and not on an energy strategy that will free ourselves from our dependence on foreign oil, that's a losing strategy. That's not a strategy I'm going to pursue. America uses 20 percent of the world's oil, and we've got 2 percent of the world's oil reserves. Think about -- I wasn't a math major, but I just want -- (laughter) -- if you're using 20, you've only got 2, that means you got to bring in the rest from someplace else. Why wouldn't we want to start finding alternatives that make us less reliant, less dependent on what's going on in the Middle East? (Applause.)

Here the logic is unmistakable. The President is arguing that we must be importing 90% of our oil from other nations. Leave alone for a moment the fact that the argument is utterly stupid. Does he really not know what the genuine figure is? Either he is ignorant about a matter of national importance, or he is lying. Here is the real figure from a recent blockbuster piece by Clifford Kraus and Eric Lipton in the New York Times:

In 2011, the country imported just 45 percent of the liquid fuels it used, down from a record high of 60 percent in 2005.

No, the President is no math major. But consider Mr. Obama's substantive argument: that we need to invest in alternative energy in order to free ourselves from reliance on foreign oil. In fact, we seem to be well on our way to energy independence. Contrary to the President's argument, the supply is coming from, well, wells.

Not only has the United States reduced oil imports from members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries by more than 20 percent in the last three years, it has become a net exporter of refined petroleum products like gasoline for the first time since the Truman presidency. The natural gas industry, which less than a decade ago feared running out of domestic gas, is suddenly dealing with a glut so vast that import facilities are applying for licenses to export gas to Europe and Asia.

National oil production, which declined steadily to 4.95 million barrels a day in 2008 from 9.6 million in 1970, has risen over the last four years to nearly 5.7 million barrels a day. The Energy Department projects that daily output could reach nearly seven million barrels by 2020. Some experts think it could eventually hit 10 million barrels — which would put the United States in the same league as Saudi Arabia.

In fact, a policy that focuses solely on drilling (if you mean by that, as the President seems to mean, fossil fuel extraction) is in fact "an energy strategy that will free ourselves [is freeing us] from our dependence on foreign oil." By contrast, the President's alternative energy strategy is contributing nothing toward that end. It is unlikely to do so in the foreseeable future and cannot possibly do so in the near term.

President Obama suddenly wants to take credit for a boom in oil production. As the NYTs piece makes clear, "this turnabout is a story of industry-friendly policies started by President Bush and largely continued by President Obama," policies that Obama opposed as a candidate and that are contrary to the policies he favored when first elected. That's the buried lede in the NYT piece: Dumb Cowboy from Texas Secures U.S. Energy Independence.

You can decide for yourself which set of policies he should have pursued. What is certain is that he is feeding adoring audiences with a diet of falsehoods leavened with stupid arguments. It is scarcely impossible that the President is as ignorant about energy policy as he seems above. I will be more charitable. He just doesn't give a rat's ass about the truth of anything that he is saying.

Zimmerman & Ravi & Responsibility

I don't know what happened when George Zimmerman shot and killed Trayvon Martin. It seems very likely that Zimmerman followed Martin because Martin was Black. It also seems very likely the police should have arrested Zimmerman. I don't know the Florida law that the police now appeal to in order to excuse their hesitation. The fact that Martin was African American and Zimmerman was not may very well be the only reason that Zimmerman did not easily escape responsibility for an unjustifiable homicide.

From what has been reported about the case, it seems to me that the essential fact has nothing to do with the racial identity of Martin, or Zimmerman who is apparently Hispanic on his mother's side. The essential fact is that Zimmerman was in contact with the police when he left his vehicle to follow Martin, and they told him not to do so.

It is reasonable and justified in an emergency to draw a weapon to defend yourself or to protect the lives of other innocent persons. It is only reasonable and justified when there is an emergency, which means that you have to act right now and cannot wait for the police to arrive. We deplore it when people stand by and let an atrocity happen.

However, when a private citizen takes action in such a case, he or she had better be very certain that it was absolutely necessary. In Mr. Zimmerman's case, apparently, the police told him to back off and the slain seventeen year old turned out to be armed with nothing more than a package of Skittles. To put it mildly, the burden of proof now falls on Mr. Zimmerman to show that he is not guilty of murder.

As this case hit the press, Dharun Ravi was convicted of a hate crime. From the New York Times:

A former Rutgers University student was convicted on Friday on all 15 charges he had faced for using a webcam to spy on his roommate having sex with another man, a verdict poised to broaden the definition of hate crimes in an era when laws have not kept up with evolving technology.

Mr. Ravi's roommate committed suicide after Ravi posted the footage on the net. Reason Magazine, a Libertarian journal, is worried about this verdict.

The jury acquitted Ravi of trying to intimidate his roommate at Rutgers University, Tyler Clementi, on September 19, 2010, when Ravi briefly used a webcam in his dorm room to watch Clementi kiss another man. But the jury nevertheless concluded that Clementi, who killed himself three days later for reasons that remain unclear, felt intimidated and "reasonably believed" he was targeted because he was gay. Under New Jersey law, that was enough.

To convict Ravi of this unintentional, hateless hate crime, the jury had to infer Clementi's state of mind and conclude that the circumstances justified it.

I have written in support of hate crimes legislation. I think that there are cases where it is in order. But for heaven's sake, if someone secretly films someone else having sex and then posts it on the internet, isn't that enough? If you do such a thing, aren't you responsible for the consequences, regardless of the sexual, racial, or ethnic identity of your victim? If you follow someone who seems to be suspicious and then shoot him, and he turns out to be unarmed an innocent, isn't that enough for a homicide conviction?

People should be held responsible for their actions. We seem to be confused about that right now.

What Is To Be Done About The Budget

Keith Hennessey's blog is by far the best thing I have found when it comes to analyzing and charting the various budget proposals floating around. This is his chart of the President's recent budget.

The lowest, black line represents a balanced budget. The yellow line represents the historical average of deficits that are about 2% of the GDP. The green line represents a deficit level that would keep deficits stable as a percentage of the GDP.

Key #1 to understanding the President's budget is that he would bring the deficit down below the green line and then make sure he doesn't break above it again…

Key #2 is that at no point in the next ten years would his deficits be at or below their historic average. The proposed blue line is at all times above the orange line.

Okay, so that's not exactly terrible. The President is content to live with deficits that are higher than the historical average into the near future; however, they will remain at a level that will not grow faster than the GDP. The worst thing you can say about that is that the new normal is worse than the old normal.

Now we have a budget proposal from Paul Ryan in the House. Here is how it compares to the President's plan.

Ryan's plan doesn't balance the budget over this ten year period, but it results in lower deficits every year than the President's proposal and brings it well below the historical norm. Whatever complaints you have about the Ryan plan, this is what a budget would look like if it actually begins to get us out of the soup instead of simply treading water for another decade.

If you are planning to die by 2022, you might consider this a wash. The President's plan concedes that government will swallow a larger chunk of the productive economy than it did in the past, but without short term runaway growth. The Ryan would mean a smaller bite into the economy and that deficits and debt would grow less than the overall economy.

If you are planning to live past 2022 or care at all about people who will, you might want to know something about longer term trends. While we cannot predict the future, we can project the budget into the future based on proposed budgets, current law, and current demographic trends. Here is Hennessey's longer term projection.

The upward trajectory of the blue line reflects the fact that the Administration has made no attempt whatsoever to address the genuine fiscal problems in our major entitlement programs. The downward trajectory of the red line means that Paul Ryan has made such an attempt. The short terms budget proposals charted above represent a short grace period, before entitlements bring irresistible pressures to bear on the budget.

Of course, projections are only projections. It is reasonable to ask what would have to change to make the projections wrong. Here is a short list of things that I can think of.

1. Everyone suddenly starts dying at age 65.
2. The average birthrate per woman suddenly jumps up to 5.
3. The economy begins to grow at double or triple the historical rate.
4. Someone invents a pill that costs a nickel a pop and cures all diseases.
5. The Vulcans land and share their technology with us (see #3).

Perhaps you could suggest other possibilities, but it would probably take more than one of the above to throw the above projections off much. The question is not which items on my list are more likely than not, but which we can count on.

If you don't like the Ryan plan, you might want to come up with an alternative that addresses the red line above. The President isn't interested in that. The Democratic Senate has been constipated for three years and cannot pass any budget at all. That is where we are.

A Failure of Leadership

Last summer, the President and Congress faced a crisis. The Federal debt was nearing the ceiling previously established by Congress. The President and Congress were unable to come to any agreement on how to deal with the problem. The crisis was temporarily averted by creating the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction or the "Supercommittee" as it was called in the Press. The Supercommittee also failed to reach an agreement. This leaves us facing a formulaic cut of $1.2 trillion in federal spending, half of it coming from Defense. Nobody believes that these cuts will really happen and nobody knows how we will get a deal to avoid them.

In fact, the President had a deal with Speaker of the House John Boehner, negotiated after Obama returned from Church on July 17^th. The President said he wanted a deal. The outlines included $1.2 trillion in spending cuts, reducing cost of living increases for Social Security and an increase in the eligibility age for Medicare. It also included $800 billion in tax increases. He asked "How soon can we get this drafted?" If Obama could have brought the Democratic Senate to agree, a grand bargain might have been reached. That is how grand bargains get made. Three days later it was dead.

Peter Wallsten, Lori Montgomery and Scott Wilson tell the story in the Washington Post.

What happened? Obama and his advisers have cast the collapse of the talks as a Republican failure. Boehner, unable to deliver, stepped away from the deal, simple as that.

But interviews with most of the central players in those talks — some of whom were granted anonymity to speak about the secret negotiations — as well as a review of meeting notes, e-mails and the negotiating proposals that changed hands, offer a more complicated picture of the collapse. Obama, nervous about how to defend the emerging agreement to his own Democratic base, upped the ante in a way that made it more difficult for Boehner — already facing long odds — to sell it to his party. Eventually, the president tried to put the original framework back in play, but by then it was too late. The moment of making history had passed.

The actions of Obama and his staff during that period in the summer reflect the grand ambitions and the shortcomings of the president's first term.

A president who promised to bring the country together, who confidently presented himself as the transformational figure able to make that happen, now had his chance. But, like earlier policy battles, the debt ceiling negotiations revealed a divided figure, a man who remained aloof from a Congress where he once served and that he now needed. He was caught between his own aspirations for historical significance and his inherent political caution. And he was unable to bridge a political divide that had only grown wider since he took office with a promise to change the ways of Washington, underscoring the gulf between the way he campaigned and the way he had governed.

In a nutshell, here is what happened. On Sunday, the President made a genuine attempt to negotiate a deal with Boehner and both he and the Speaker thought they had a deal. While aides on both sides were working out the details, the "Gang of Six" in the Senate announced that they were working on deal involving much larger tax increases. This was something that Boehner could not possibly get through the House.

On Tuesday, the President made a rare and apparently unscheduled appearance in the White House Briefing Room. Pushing Press Secretary Jay Carney to the side, he all but endorsed the Gang of Six plan. The House Republicans thought they had been betrayed.

By Wednesday morning, as the Obama and Boehner sides gathered again in the Oval Office, the optimism of Sunday had disintegrated. Vice President Biden, a skeptic of restarting talks with Boehner after the first round collapsed, was there. There appeared to be a very different president in attendance, as well.

Excited and upbeat three days earlier, Obama now was stern and lecturing. According to notes taken by GOP aides, he opened by complaining about Boehner's demand for $200 billion in Medicaid cuts, a persistent point of contention. Then he began to talk about taxes, saying the Gang of Six "makes things more complicated." The White House would need more tax revenue or smaller health-care cuts.

That was more than Boehner could accept and negotiations stalled again. Then Obama's personality shifted once more and he went into action. On Thursday he called Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi and informed them of the original terms of his agreement with Boehner. They reluctantly agreed to support it. Two days earlier, that would have secured a deal.

But by then it was too late. For Boehner to sell the deal to his caucus, he had to trust the President to own the deal as well. He had to be confident that the President would not turn around and, say, accuse the Republicans of trying to destroy Social Security and Medicare as soon as the deal was introduced into the House. Over two days Obama had destroyed that trust.

This is a story of a chief negotiator who couldn't keep his eye on the ball. Or, as the Post has it, the story of a President who was always divided against himself when he tried to make policy. It is a story of a man in well over his head, at least where public policy is concerned.

Although Obama had denounced "kick the can down the road" deals as a candidate in 2008, he was now adjusting to the realities of his office. The agreement was at least a tactical victory. He used it to wash his hands of Washington's dysfunction, presenting himself as a well-intentioned man unable to secure a fair deal, because of the capital's enduring partisanship.

But White House advisers conceded that the collapse of the debt talks was a disaster from a policy perspective and, at least in the short term, from a political one. For the first time, Standard & Poor's, the credit rating agency, downgraded U.S. debt. Polls showed that the public blamed Obama as well as congressional Republicans, with approval ratings for both reaching new lows.

But it is not as if the man is no good at anything.

"You say you're the party of tax cuts? Well then, prove you'll fight just as hard for tax cuts for middle-class families as you do for oil companies and the most affluent Americans," Obama said to thunderous applause at a Labor Day speech in Detroit. "We're going to see if congressional Republicans will put country before party."

Suddenly, the same Democrats who had accused Obama of meekness in negotiating with the GOP were praising his aggressive new tone. What happened during those days in July when the grand bargain was almost reached, but not quite, had changed him. He no longer seemed divided.

His goal now was unequivocal: to win a second term.

Liberals & Conservatives

I have had a chance now to digest Jonathan Haidt's article in Reason, "Born This Way," that I referenced in my last post. Haidt is a psychologist doing research on the foundations of political and moral opinions. You can sample his scholarship at his home page. You can also participate in his research at this site. I have now looked at some of his more scholarly publications.

Haidt is one of the developers of Moral Foundations Theory, which outlines six "clusters" of moral concerns:

1. Care/harm
2. Fairness/cheating
3. Liberty/oppression
4. Loyalty/betrayal
5. Authority/subversion
6. Sanctity/degradation.

Haidt claims that "all political cultures and movements" base their moral appeals on these clusters. I haven't given this enough scrutiny yet, but it seems plausible.

His research establishes the following:

Political liberals [in the U.S.] tend to rely primarily on the moral foundation of care/harm, followed by fairness/cheating and liberty/oppression. Social conservatives, in contrast, use all six foundations. They are less concerned than liberals about harm to innocent victims, but they are much more concerned about the moral foundations that bind groups and nations together, i.e., loyalty (patriotism), authority (law and order, traditional families), and sanctity (the Bible, God, the flag as a sacred object). Libertarians, true to their name, value liberty more than anyone else, and they value it far more than any other foundation.

This strikes me as basically correct and it has one outstanding virtue. It recognizes that the difference between left and right is not a matter of opposing values so much as a difference in preferences when choosing from the same moral pallet. Liberals aren't unpatriotic (necessarily), but they are rather suspicious of and embarrassed by appeals to patriotism. Conservatives aren't uncaring (necessarily), but that is not the spot on the pallet where they most often dip their brushes.

One difference that does emerge from his research is that conservatives understand liberals a lot better than vice versa. Haidt, Jesse Graham, and Brian Nosek tested this question with a sample of 2000. A third of the respondents were asked to fill out a survey described their own opinions. Another third was asked to fill it out "as they think a 'typical liberal' would respond", and another third was asked to fill it out as a 'typical conservative' would respond.

The results were clear and consistent. Moderates and conservatives were most accurate in their predictions, whether they were pretending to be liberals or conservatives. Liberals were the least accurate, especially those who described themselves as "very liberal." The biggest errors in the whole study came when liberals answer the care and fairness questions while pretending to be conservatives.

Again, that seems to me to be about right. Liberals see themselves as less fearful, more open to change and they see conservatives as the opposite. A lot of recent scholarship backs them up on that. Liberals also see themselves as more open minded than conservatives. That seems not to be true.

Gene Genie

Some years ago a colleague and friend of mine asked me a provocative question: what percent of our personality is due to genetic inheritance and what percent is due to the environment one is raised in. I was very hesitant to answer, for two reasons. One was that I didn't know the literature nearly as well then as I do now. The other was that I didn't know how to express my opinion in percentages. I knew exactly what it means to say that my brother and I are 50% related. We have a fifty/fifty chance of getting a given gene from the same parent or each of us from the other parent. I wasn't so clear on what it would mean to say that 30% of our personality was due to inheritance.

I know enough now to phrase the question in a better way. Consider two pairs of children. One pair consists of identical twins raised apart in very different conditions. The second pair consists of genetically unrelated children raised together in the same household. Which pair is more likely to be similar in personality, opinions, and behavior?

We know the answer to that question. The identical twins are far more likely to be similar to each other than the unrelated pair by almost any measure. Here is how psychologist Jonathan Haidt puts it in the May issue of Reason Magazine [it doesn't seem to be available yet to nonsubscribers].

We're not just talking about IQ, mental illness, and basic personality traits such as shyness. We're talking about the degree to which you like jazz, spicy foods, and abstract art; your likelihood of getting a divorce or dying in a car crash; your religiosity; and your political orientation as an adult. Whether you end up on the right or the left of the political spectrum turns out to be just as heritable as most other traits: Genetics explains between one-third and one-half of the variability among people in their political attitudes. Being raised in a liberal or conservative household accounts for much less.

Now I could answer my colleague's question with that one-third to one-half figure, but that wasn't really what he wanted to know. The real answer to his question is that nature is far more powerful than nurture in determining what kind of person each of us becomes.

He wouldn't have wanted to hear that. Both of us were schooled at the end of a long period in which the idea of social construction was dominant in the academy. However, he was a generation older and had lived with it longer. He was also a man of the left, and the left was firmly committed to the view that human beings come into this world as blank slates, to be written on (or socially constructed) by the collective action of other human beings.

The reason that the left was so fond of that view was that it seemed to allow for the radical reconstruction of human behavior. If we could just modify the environmental inputs by social reform, we could dramatically change the behavioral outputs and get better, fairer, and more sustainable societies. Conversely, if behavior has a significant genetic component, it might be difficult to alter it with current technologies. That is why the left has been deeply suspicious of biological explanations for social and political behavior.

If that view of the nature/nurture dichotomy were correct, the left would be finished. It is very probably not correct. Making better people by modifying the social environment requires an enormous degree of control over the social environment. That is in the first place tyrannical and in the second place hopeless. The greatest social experiment in human history (Marxism-Leninism) came a cropper wherever it was tried, and that is the least nasty thing one can say for it. Culture is far harder to modify than once was imagined by socialists.

By contrast, social reform based on good theories about innate human dispositions might well succeed without any recourse to tyrannical power. There may well be genes for attachment to one's kin and one's "in-group" and hostility to the non-related and the "out-group". There are no genes for racism, as the very idea of race is of very recent origin (not to mention being fallacious). Genes code for mental schema, and schema look for environmental clues. Learning how to manipulate the clues may be a far more promising strategy for progress than anything that environmental determinism ever had to offer.

For Whom The Bell Tolls

Andrew Breitbart's last gotcha was to bring to public attention a film clip of a law student speaking in support of Derrick Bell. Bell was the first African American to win tenure at Harvard Law School. The student, of course, was a young Barack Obama.

I haven't read any of Bell's writings in a long time, though I once used his book Faces At The Bottom Of A Well: The Persistence of Racism, in a course called Minority Politics. I don't have the text in front of me right now, but I recall thinking that Bell was a gifted writer and thinker and that his work was both readable and thought provoking. To put it mildly, I did not find it convincing.

The late Professor Bell was a proponent of Critical Race Theory. The word "critical" links it to an especially impressionistic version of Marxism. Here is a sample explanation from the UCLA School of Public Affairs:

CRT recognizes that racism is engrained in the fabric and system of the American society. The individual racist need not exist to note that institutional racism is pervasive in the dominant culture. This is the analytical lens that CRT uses in examining existing power structures. CRT identifies that these power structures are based on white privilege and white supremacy, which perpetuates the marginalization of people of color. CRT also rejects the traditions of liberalism and meritocracy. Legal discourse says that the law is neutral and colorblind, however, CRT challenges this legal "truth" by examining liberalism and meritocracy as a vehicle for self-interest, power, and privilege. CRT also recognizes that liberalism and meritocracy are often stories heard from those with wealth, power, and privilege. These stories paint a false picture of meritocracy; everyone who works hard can attain wealth, power, and privilege while ignoring the systemic inequalities that institutional racism provides.

Those first two sentences reveal the heart of the idea. It wouldn't matter if there were not a single genuine racist left in America (as of course, there are). Racism could still be "engrained in the fabric and system of American society," and "pervasive in the dominant culture." This relieves the CRT scholar from any need to actually demonstrate racism on the part of anyone he or she chooses to criticize.

Critical Race Theory is not a theory at all, except in the sense that conspiracy theories are theories. The point is not to build a set of hypotheses organized around a general idea in order to tell you what evidence to look for, as genuine theories do. The point of CRT is to build a narrative that is both politically powerful and immune to evidence. Critical theorists are contemptuous of the very idea of science. All theories are merely "narratives" that serve the will to power of one group against others.

For a brief but devastating judgment on this, I offer Peter Wood from The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Critical race theory has next to nothing going for it as a descriptive analytic of how American jurisprudence works. It doesn't fit the facts of American life from Brown v. the Board of Education, to court enforcement of the Voting Rights Acts, the Civil Rights Act, or hundreds of other pieces of legislation. Critical race theory is weirdly and wildly wide of the mark in either explaining how Americans have made and interpreted their laws for at least the last fifty years, and arguably long before that. CRT might have been useful as a historical frame for interpreting the Jim Crow era, but even then it fails to provide any sort of reasonable account of the 14th Amendment and Reconstruction.

That would be the problem. Of course CRT cannot tell us anything useful about the actual history and nature of the law, for its entire modus operando is to bend whatever it sees until it fits its "analytical lens." I would go further than Wood to point out that it is insulting to all those magnificent people, both Black and White, who struggled fearlessly to push the Civil Rights agenda and who sometimes gave their lives for it. CRT is both intellectually and morally pernicious.

All that said, does it matter that Barack Obama once stood up and spoke on behalf of Professor Bell? No. You can't tell anything about Obama from his brief remarks other than the fact that he was already a very good public speaker and that he admired Professor Bell. What he thought about Bell or Critical Race Theory isn't evident from his remarks.

Even if he was a CRT believer at that point, he was still a law student for Heaven's sake! Students in graduate institutions are typically young. They are immersed in an intense, frequently concentrated intellectual culture. They spend most of their time talking to their professors and other students. What happens after they leave that rarified atmosphere is what matters.

To be sure, if someone unearthed a tape of young Mitt Romney or Rick Santorum endorsing some whacky right wing theorist, you can bet that would be front page news at the New York Times. It is nonetheless stupid for conservatives to try to use Obama's association with Bell against him. No one is likely to care much, nor should they. It is only a distraction from the real issues that might matter in the present campaign.

Obama’s Leadership Troubles the WaPo

The Washington Post just published a devastating editorial on the President's leadership, or lack thereof, on Afghanistan.

There are many reasons why both Afghans and Americans are souring on their alliance, including a few over which this White House has no control. But Mr. Obama and his aides have done much to damage the relationship between the two countries and public morale on both sides. Tuesday's comments were but one more example.

The president came to office pledging a revitalized campaign in Afghanistan. But he began by terminating President Bush's practice of regular personal communications with President Hamid Karzai. Several of his envoys treated Mr. Karzai roughly and disparaged him in public. The U.S. official most able to work with the Afghan leadership, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, was abruptly pushed out of his post because of a hyped magazine article. Mr. Karzai is an erratic personality — but is it any wonder that he has grown increasingly resistant to the Obama administration?

Well, that's our man isn't it? The President was committed to our campaign in Afghanistan. Indeed, back when he was criticizing Bush 43 for the Iraq invasion, one of his points was that Bush neglected Afghanistan. As NPR puts it, during the 2008 presidential campaign

Obama would mention the war in Afghanistan as "the good war," with a direct link to the Sept. 11 attacks. In contrast, the Iraq war was "a war that has not made us more safe, but has distracted us from the task at hand in Afghanistan" — as Obama told a rally in Pennsylvania in April 2008.

It is hardly surprising that President Obama discontinued personal communications with President Karzai. Obama didn't get involved in critical negotiations over the debt ceiling. He has almost no personal relationships with members of Congress in either party. He seems to communicate with his own Administration by means of checking boxes when he is alone, late at night. It is a small wonder, then, that he didn't bother to personally communicate with the leader of a country with whom we are allied in a war.

Okay, so the President isn't a people person. That doesn't excuse his Administration's utter neglect of the Afghan government, let alone his incoherent strategy. Again from the WaPo:

The president reluctantly accepted the advice of his generals that he adopt a strategy of counterinsurgency against the Taliban and send additional troops to carry it out. But he arbitrarily cut the number of troops sought by commanders; set an equally arbitrary deadline for beginning their withdrawal; and rejected the military's advice that the pullout be staged after this year's summer fighting season. Now his aides are reportedly pushing for further troop withdrawals next year, once again against the Pentagon's recommendation. Meanwhile, negotiations with the Taliban are being pursued over Mr. Karzai's head, and sometimes in spite of his objections.

As they watch these moves, Afghans, the Taliban and neighbors such as Pakistan can reasonably conclude that the United States, rather than trying to win the war, is racing to implement an exit strategy in which the interests of Afghans and their government are slighted. Americans, meanwhile, rarely hear Mr. Obama explain the mission or the stakes.

The President imposed arbitrary cuts and arbitrary deadlines. He decided to invest blood and treasure in a counterinsurgency strategy while simultaneously making it clear to everyone including our mortal enemies that we were pulling out no matter what the outcome. Again, that's our man.

Let us remember that Afghanistan was the platform from which Osama bin Laden planned and launched the September 11^th attack on the United States. To be fair, it isn't clear what kind of policy could have succeeded there. That didn't stop the President from making an utter mess of it. The WaPo calls his words "troubling". That is gentle enough, but when a Democratic President loses the WaPo he has lost a lot.

The President’s $900 Billion Bill Will Cost How Much?

Two years ago I posted on the fiscal sleight-of-hand that was involved in passing the Patient Protection and Affordable health Care Act. I wrote this:

Whatever its merits as a reform of the healthcare system, in financial terms ObamaCare is an act of shameless fraud. The act is said to be $940 bill (meaning over ten years) and to lower deficits by $138 billion. Douglas Holtz-Eakin, former director of the Congressional Budget Office, lays out the largest and most obvious bits of deceit in those numbers in the New York Times.

The Democrats went to extraordinary lengths to produce a bill that would be scored by the CBO at under a trillion smackers over ten years. Here is what the President promised Congress and the American People in 2009:

Now, add it all up, and the plan I'm proposing will cost around $900 billion over 10 years -- less than we have spent on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and less than the tax cuts for the wealthiest few Americans that Congress passed at the beginning of the previous administration. (Applause.) Now, most of these costs will be paid for with money already being spent -- but spent badly -- in the existing health care system. The plan will not add to our deficit. The middle class will realize greater security, not higher taxes. And if we are able to slow the growth of health care costs by just one-tenth of 1 percent each year -- one-tenth of 1 percent -- it will actually reduce the deficit by $4 trillion over the long term.

I pointed out the magic involved in the President's math. I thought it obvious that the bill would cost much more than that.

Astoundingly enough, I was right. Philip Klein, at the Washington Examiner, reports on this year's CBO scoring.

President Obama's national health care law will cost $1.76 trillion over a decade, according to a new projection released today by the Congressional Budget Office, rather than the $940 billion forecast when it was signed into law.

If the CBO is right, the ten year cost of the PPACA will be almost twice the advertised price. Next year's estimate will very likely put the cost closer to two and a half trillion. The fiscal projections made at the time of its passage were, as I noted, acts of shameless fraud.

On the other hand, how much does this matter? The CBO just upped the deficit estimate for last fiscal year from $1.079 trillion to $1.171 trillion. How much the PPACA adds to the deficit remains to be determined. Let me suggest that it will exceed estimates. Meanwhile, it will be absorbing two trillion over ten years, wealth that cannot be used to fund anything else or reduce deficit spending. This is the fiscal record of our President.

Obama’s Bad New York Times Poll

The latest New York Times/CBS poll is getting a lot of attention. Here is the money quote from the accompanying article:

Despite improving job growth and an extended Republican primary fight dividing his would-be opponents, President Obama is heading into the general election season on treacherous political ground, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll.

At a time of rising gas prices, heightened talk of war with Iran and setbacks in Afghanistan, Mr. Obama's approval rating dropped substantially in recent weeks, the poll found, with 41 percent of respondents expressing approval of the job he is doing and 47 percent saying they disapprove — a dangerous position for any incumbent seeking re-election.

That is bad news with some excusive padding stuffed into the middle. The Times might have also pointed out the conventional wisdom that the debate over contraception insurance was supposed to boost the President in the polls. Well, the news isn't all bad on that front.

Mr. Obama appears to be retaining much of his gains among important demographic groups, erasing inroads that Republicans made in 2010, especially among women. But his falling approval rating in the last month extended to his handling of both the economy and foreign policy, the poll found. And his weakening position cut across all major demographic groups, even among those with which he has kept an edge over his Republican challengers: independents, moderates, college graduates and younger voters.

It is difficult to see how Mr. Obama could really be "retaining much of his gains among important demographic groups," if "his weakening position cut across all major demographic groups." But if, as the Times says, he is retaining gains among women it might be that the contraception controversy did him some good. That, however, is not what their own poll shows.

In February, the President's approval rating among men was 45% and among women 53%. In the March poll, the numbers are 41% each. That's a loss of four points among men and 12 points among women! How, exactly, is that "retaining his gains"?

The President's approval rating declined 8 points among Independents, down to 39%. He lost 9 points among moderates (56-47%); a devastating 18 points among 30 to 44 year olds (52-34%); 16 points among households with yearly incomes between $30 and $50,000 (50-34%). What Demographic group is he retaining? I could only see a gain among voters making more than $75,000 a year. That'll do the trick!

The paragraph above is a textbook case of what Mickey Kaus calls "cocooning". That means spinning lies to protect oneself from reality. Of course, it's only one poll, and some others.

Sharp as the drop in Mr. Obama's approval rating was in the Times/CBS News poll, it was not in isolation. The latest ABC News/Washington Post poll, released on Monday, also reported a drop in Mr. Obama's overall approval rating, to 46 percent from 50 percent last month. The latest tracking poll from Gallup, also released Monday, showed Mr. Obama with an approval rating of 49 percent.

The Times poll is devastating. To be sure, "polls capture only a particular moment in time, and can be influenced by the way questions are asked or the mix of people who are surveyed," as the Times says, in a desperate attempt to discredit its own findings. Did the Times suddenly change its polling language to the disadvantage of the President?

I am not counting on anything right now. Maybe the economy is about to zoom upward. Maybe Obama will send Seal Team 6 to kill the Joker. Maybe Mitt Romney will turn out to be as bad as Santorum and Gingrich say he is. But if these polls are right, this looks like the beginning of an incumbent collapse of Jimmy Carter proportions. It's no wonder that the Times is telling lies about what its own poll shows.

I don't know what drove the President's numbers down so dramatically over the last month. Gas prices are indeed a factor that every voter with a car can understand. However, no single factor is likely to deeply wound a candidate unless the voters are already disposed to dump him. If they are so disposed, so much as a wet rabbit may be enough to start the muddy surface sliding downhill.

One thing is for certain. The conventional wisdom that the contraception debate would doom Republicans is not yet confirmed.

The Biology of Beauty

Yours truly has accepted an invitation to present a paper at the World Congress of the International Political Science Association. It meets this summer in Madrid. For that reason, you can expect more posts on Biopolitics.

I have been thinking about the biological foundations of virtue. Virtue is a concept that was essential to classical moral and political philosophy. It was neglected for centuries in modern philosophy, but has recently made something of a comeback in ethics. Virtue is any capacity of soul that enables and makes likely some beautiful action. Thus, someone who possesses the virtue of courage is more likely to take a personal risk on behalf of his fellow citizens, or even on behalf of innocent strangers. There is a lot of analysis such actions in sociobiology. Human partnerships have been very powerful over the history of our species. Virtues conspicuously displayed advertise one's value as a partner in a cooperative relationship.

But right now I want to dig a little deeper. What is a beautiful action? There is little doubt that our appreciation for beauty has its roots in biology. The very fact that we can see colors, let alone take pleasure in a colorful scene is connected to the fact that we can digest fruit. The obvious worry that such an insight is that it is reductionist: it reduces our appreciation of a great painting, for example, to digestion.

I knew that understanding beauty in these terms is not in fact reductionist long before I became interest in Darwinian explanations. I knew it because I know Socrates. In Xenophon's Memorabilia, Socrates argues that the beautiful is dependent on the useful and good. Socrates admires a set of armor for how well it fit the body of its intended owner. He inferred this not from the owner, whom he didn't know, but from the design of the armor itself. In this way, Socrates recognizes beauty as emerging from usefulness and at the same time understands that the beautiful cannot be reduced to mere usefulness. The armor was the least bit useful to Socrates but that does not stop him from appreciating it.

Along those lines I was tipped off to a more modern version of the problem by listening to an All In The Mind podcast featuring V.S Ramachandran, a neuroscientist. Ramachandran mentioned a famous experiment by the great ethologist, Niko Tinbergen. You can read an excellent account of the experiment here.

Herring gull chicks will peck at a certain spot, colored red, on its mother's beak. This is a cue to the mother to regurgitate food. In an ingenious series of manipulations, Tinbergen isolated the features that cue the chick's behavior. The chick will peck at a detached beak or a piece of wood. It will peck at almost any color dot so long as there is a high visual contrast. But Tinbergen achieved more than that. He succeeded in something that herring gulls have never managed: herring gull abstract art.

He created several models and began experimenting through trial and error. First, he dulled the end of the beak so that it was rectangular rather than pointed at the edge. The chicks seemed indifferent to this change. Then he elongated the rectangle, and the chicks started to react more aggressively. When he made the beak thinner, so that it was just a long super-thin line, the chicks went absolutely nuts, reacting almost twice as excitedly as they would have for a normal beak.

Tinbergen had discovered the essential properties, or the recipe, for a beak that tells a chick what to peck at: high visual contrast, rectangular elongation and thinness, and the color red. So he took a long stick, painted it red, he showed it to the chicks. They excitedly pecked at it. Then he added three white lines to the bottom, to enhance the contrast, and he reduced the thickness by half. When he showed this object to the chicks, they went absolutely insane, pecking in every direction as quickly as they could.

Niko Tinbergen had reverse engineered the seagull chick to create an uberbeak. But it looked nothing like a beak at all.

Herring gull chicks turn out to be aesthetes. They prefer an abstract, exaggerated version of their mother's beak to the real thing. One way to put this is that the preference for the exaggerations is a byproduct of the inclinations that are selected for. That is indeed reductionist and there is nothing wrong with that. However, it is equally valid to say that there was a hitherto undiscovered an unexploited aesthetic dimension to the herring gull soul. The preferences that were selected for allow the chicks to be enticed in ways that are detached from any usefulness. Herring gull artists should take note.

Human souls are incredibly complex by contrast. Our ability to appreciate beauty is grounded in (or emerges from) inclinations that were selected for according to their usefulness. They also allow us to appreciate beauty apart from any reduction to usefulness. The arts explore this dimension of the human soul (and simultaneously, of nature) not only by Tinbergenian manipulations of our simple, evolved dispositions, but also by combining the aesthetic spaces opened up by any number of inclinations. The result is the vast (but not infinite) variety of the human arts. This is the opposite of a reductionist account; it is radically expansionist.

This has tipped me off to a possible explanation for a small but perhaps key difference between Plato and Aristotle. Both recognize a tripartite division among good things. There are things you do solely because they are useful (getting paid for a job you hate); those that you do both because they are useful and because they are gratifying (getting paid for a job you love to do); and those that you do only because they are gratifying (doing a job without pay for the sheer love of it). However, Plato thought that the best goods are those that are both useful and gratifying. Aristotle thought that the best or highest goods are those that are simply gratifying. Neither Plato nor Aristotle was in any sense a reductionist. Plato, however, was more worried about reductionism than Aristotle was. He was concerned to show that higher things like beauty and justice were both useful and good in themselves. Aristotle thought that reductionism was more or less vanquished. He was more concerned with the operation of the virtues.

At any rate, I think that a coherent account of the virtues must begin with the biology of beauty, though it cannot end there.

Santa Swiss Delivers Health Care

One of the most striking things about the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is that it was never clear exactly what problem it was supposed to address. The President defended the necessity of an overhaul almost solely on fiscal grounds. In order to get our budget under control, we had to reduce our health care expenditures. Yet the act as passed was almost completely innocent of any genuine mechanisms for cost control.

We were told that way too many people lack adequate health insurance. To address that problem, however, one needs to be clear about why it is a problem. Is it because many Americans are not receiving adequate health care? Or is the problem again one of economics: too many people facing ruin or hardship because of personal health care costs? There was never any attempt to determine the extent of either problem.

One of the things I complained about early on was the astonishing lack of interest in Washington and in the MSM regarding other health care systems. Which ones work best and which are worst and why? You'd think that a White Paper laying out the general details and statistics about health care systems in other nations would have been in order. If there was one, the New York Times didn't tell me about it.

Avik Roy and Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry are filling in for Meagan McArdle at her Atlantic blog. Much as I admire McArdle, Roy and Gobry have been very enlightening. Gobry argues that the French system, often said to be one of the best in the world, is amazingly similar to the U.S. model. The French system is based on a highly regulated private health care industry and employer provided insurance. At present, the French system has much lower costs but it is facing the same long term challenges that threaten our health care regime.

Roy argues that conservatives were wrong to fear socialized health care because that is what we already have. The market is dramatically restricted in the U.S. He has his own favorite health care system: Switzerland. Here is Roy writing in Forbes:

The Swiss system, called Santésuisse, is striking in its differences to ours. Government spending on health care in Switzerland is only 2.7 percent of GDP, by far the lowest in the developed world. By contrast, in 2008, U.S. government spending on health care was 7.4 percent of GDP. If the U.S. could move its state health spending to Swiss levels, it would save more than $700 billion a year.

Despite this apparent stinginess, the Swiss have achieved universal coverage for all its citizens. The Swiss have access to the latest technology, just as Americans do, and with comparably low wait times for appointments and procedures. And the Swiss are among the healthiest people on earth: while life expectancy is not the ideal proxy for overall health, nor of a health care system's performance, life expectancy for a Swiss citizen on his 65th birthday is second only to that of Japan's.

Now he has my interest. Effective and convenient healthcare at a fraction of the cost would surely solve our health care problems, whatever they may be. So how does Santa Swiss pull this off?

Swiss citizens buy insurance for themselves; there are no employer-sponsored or government-run insurance programs. Hence, insurance prices are transparent to the beneficiary. The government defines the minimum benefit package that qualifies for the mandate. Critically, all packages require beneficiaries to pick up a portion of the costs of their care (deductibles and coinsurance) in order to incentivize their frugality.

The government subsidizes health care for the poor on a graduated basis, with the goal of preventing individuals from spending more than 10 percent of their income on insurance. But because people are still on the hook for a significant component of the costs, they often opt for cheaper packages; in 2003, 42% of Swiss citizens chose high-deductible plans (i.e., plans with significant cost-sharing features). Those who wish to acquire supplemental coverage are free to do so on their own.

99.5% of Swiss citizens have health insurance. Because they can choose between plans from nearly 100 different private insurance companies, insurers must compete on price and service, helping to curb health care inflation. Most beneficiaries have complete freedom to choose their doctor, and appointment waiting times are almost as low as those in the U.S., the world leader.

Yes, Virginia, there is a market. However, Roy points out that Santa Swiss also has a mandate, a minimum benefits standard, and Medicare style cost controls. These would not be palatable to conservatives. Since I consider the mandate to be constitutionally problematic, I would have to think that part of it through.

Liberals won't like the Santa Swiss because of its heavy reliance on market mechanisms. Over and over in the debate we heard experts tell us that ordinary people aren't expert enough to make judgments about their health care. That may be true with regard to specific treatments; however, people can figure out that the Mayo Clinic is better than other hospitals. They can also weigh the costs and benefits of copays, flexible spending accounts, and deductibles.

It is possible that something like the Swiss model could have been adopted in the U.S. What we got instead the most problematic features of the Swiss model grafted onto the existing system with all of its warts. Republicans are as much to blame as Democrats. The GOP could have done the hard work that the left was uninterested in doing. They might have insisted on comparisons such as the one Roy presents, and they could have done them on their own if the Democrats resisted.

Instead, both sides spent all their time and energy fighting ancient battles. The Democrats won. They got a lot more government control over health care, which was what they really cared about. The only hope now is that the High Court will trash the whole thing. Then maybe we can go back to the drawing board and this time draw something on it.

You Should See Her Mother!

Here is a tasty story, courtesy of historian Michael Beschloss from a conversation on Presidential Courage at the JFK Presidential Library.

JFK spent a considerable amount of time complaining to [British PM] Harold MacMillan about bad press coverage. People were criticizing him. It was making him annoyed. And finally MacMillan, who was a generation older and wiser said, "Jack, what do you care? Just brush it off. It's just the press. You shouldn't get so exercised." And it made President Kennedy, I think, even more irritated to hear that. So Kennedy said, "Well Harold, how would you like it if the press wrote that your wife, Lady Dorothy, was a drunk?" Which actually she was. And MacMillan, unruffled, said, "Well, if they did that, I would just issue a statement saying, 'You should have seen her mother!'"

MacMillan was indeed wiser than Kennedy, at least on this topic, and I suspect that he was born older. He certainly had the right attitude. Politics is hardball. If you can't stand this kind of heat, get out of the kitchen and head for the bar.

When Rush Limbaugh called Sandra Fluke a slut and a prostitute for her testimony before the House Democratic Steering and Policy Committee, he proved one thing. He is an idiot. In the first place, he talked about contraception as if he doesn't have the slightest idea how it works. Maybe he doesn't. In the second place, how could he not know that he was feeding the press a great story of conservative misogyny? It is one thing to say that we shouldn't have to pay for Ms. Fluke's extracurricular activities. Passing judgment on them made sure that the point would be lost.

As the opprobrium built against Limbaugh, along with the loss of several sponsors, Conservatives responded by pointing out that Bill Maher called Sarah Palin a cunt. Does that mean that Obama's super PAC will give back Maher's $1,000,000 contribution? There are a million reasons why that isn't going to happen. But comedian Louis C.K. isn't going host the Radio and Television Correspondents' Association Dinner, apparently because of equally nasty things he said about Palin.

This is supreme silliness on both sides. We might wish for more decorum on the part of politicians and pundits. We shouldn't wish for it on the part of comedians. We aren't going to get it from either. There is almost no public standard of decorum left. That doesn't mean that no standard is possible. I like to think I maintain one here. Meanwhile I am content with a bitter and divisive public forum. Let the mud fly.

Whatever we should worry about in our public discourse, it isn't the misogyny of Rush Limbaugh or Bill Maher.

President’s & Deficits Compared

Yes, Rush Limbaugh is a big fat idiot. I humbly suggest, however, that that is not the most important issue of the day. I continue to think that what we ought to be talking about is the fiscal solvency of the United States of America.

A brief conversation with a friend of mine (who happens to be a firm Democrat) inspired me to compare the fiscal records of Presidents since Reagan was elected in 1980. I used inflation adjusted numbers from Obama's Office of Management and Budget. I calculate the total deficits/surplus for each President beginning with his second year in office and ending with first year of his predecessor, since budgets must be prepared a year in advance. Here is the result.

1982-1989    -1,412,228,000,000        Reagan

1990-1993    -1,035,646,000,000        Bush41

1994-01            62,904,000,000            Clinton

2002-09    -3,546,539,000,000            Bush43

2010-11    -2,593,084,000,000             Obama

2010-12    -3,920,032,000,000            Obama

2010-17    -7,360,158,000,000              Obama

Reagan ran up a total deficit of $1.4 trillion over eight years. Bush41 racks up an impressive $1.035 trillion over only four years. No deficit hawk, that one. By contrast, William Jefferson Clinton managed to run a modest surplus of 63 billion over his eight years, according to these numbers.

I have often written on this site that the Clinton presidency was largely a success in terms of domestic policy. This is certainly true of his fiscal policy. It's fair to note that he enjoyed some advantages. He came into office as a recovery was in progress and left before the next recession set in. After his second year in office he faced a Republican Congress and decided to triangulate. Still, his was the most fiscally sound presidency in the period we are considering.

Over eight years George W. Bush managed a total deficit larger than his three predecessors combined. Granted, he came into office as a recession was beginning and saw another well under way before he left. Almost half his deficit ($1.4 trillion) came in the single year after he left office. Still, when Obama blames Bush for all the difficulties facing the current administration, he has a point.

Now to Obama: he managed a deficit larger than twenty years of Reagan, Bush41, and Clinton in just two years. By the end of his third fiscal year, according to OMB estimates, he will have accomplished what spendthrift Dubya took eight years to do. Past this year, all estimates are ephemeral. Projections beyond this year all assume unrealistic rates of growth. In absence of a Vulcan landing or some other happy surprise, the real deficits will be higher than projected.

Still, it is significant that the OMB projects a total deficit for the years 2010-2017 of well over seven trillion dollars. That is double the damage that Dubya did in his eight years, and it isn't what happens if Obama's plan fails. That's his plan.

Perhaps a better comparison is deficits as a percentage of GDP. Here is the chart:

Reagan    -4.3%    1982-89

Bush41    -4.3%    1990-93

Clinton    -0.1%    1994-2001

Bush43    -3.4%    2002-09

Obama    -7.9%    2010-13

Houston, we have a problem. I do not know who the next President will be. I do know that if the next President wants to blame all his problems on his predecessor, as Obama is wont to do, he will have twice the case that Obama had against George W. Bush.

The Evolution of Altruism

In the "modern synthesis" of Darwinian natural selection and population genetics, evolution is driven by a dynamic involving genes and traits. A gene or array of genes codes for the production of a trait in the development of an organism. In turn, the trait contributes to the preservation of the genetic factors. This applies not only to physical traits such as mammary glands, but to behavioral traits as well. Why does this particular bitch invest time and precious resources nursing her litter? She does so because her mother did so and her grandmother and great grandmother, etc.

This theory is among the most robust in modern science. However, like all good science, it is subject to challenges. One of the theoretical problems that emerged early is the problem of altruism. Altruism is defined in biology as a behavior that involves a Darwinian sacrifice by on individual on behalf of another. A honey bee worker is capable of reproduction but sacrifices the opportunity to make use of that capacity in favor of service to the queen. The explanatory problem goes like this: if the theory of natural selection is correct, genes that code for altruistic behavior ought to put themselves out of business. An individual who is more reproductively selfish should be more reproductively successful. That should result in her genes proliferating in the population, leading to the eventual extinction of the altruistic genes.

For decades, evolutionary theorists employed the concept to inclusive fitness to solve the problem. When does an altruistic behavior promote the genes that code for it? It does so when it contributes to the replication of more copies of my own genes carried by my relatives.

This was expressed in a simple formula called Hamilton's rule: rb > c. Here r is relatedness. I am related to my brother by a factor of .5, meaning that we share about half our genes. I got the good ones. I am related to my aunt by a factor of .25, to my first cousin by a factor of .125, and to a second cousin by .312. The altruistic behavior may benefit one or more of my relatives, so b is that number. By definition, altruistic behavior involves a Darwinian cost, meaning that it reduces the probability that I myself will enjoy reproductive success. So c indicates that probability. A honey bee who gives up reproduction altogether pays a cost of 1.

So by this calculation, it makes very good Darwinian sense for me to risk or even sacrifice my life on behalf of three brothers: .5 x 3 > 1. I get more copies of my genes into the next generation if all three brothers bear children than I do if I bear children and they do not. Thus genes that code for familial sacrifice proliferate better than genes that code against it.

This has been regarded as a very robust theory. It explains why human beings are more likely to cooperate with near kin than with strangers and why a band of genuine brothers has proven to be such an effective fighting force throughout history. It also explains honey bees. These creatures are haplodiploid, meaning that females have two sets of genes (diploid) whereas males have only one set (haploid). One the queen mates with only one male, the honey bee sisters are more closely related to one another (.75) than to their own sons (.5). Since they cannot mate, they can have only sons. The result favors cooperation with their sisters for the good of the colony over trying to reproduce on their own. Many highly organized insect societies (bees, ants, and wasps) have this reproductive system; ergo: inclusive fitness explains the hymenoptera superorganisms.

Or so the theory has it. Recently this solid theory has been challenged by a scientist who was once one of its most powerful advocates. E. O. Wilson, the founder of sociobiology, has concluded that the theory is wrong. Most of the haplodiploid insects did not evolve into superorganisms. Termites did so, but they are not haplodiploid. Wilson thinks that Hamilton's rule is not very useful.

This challenge has created a lot of friction and heat. I won't go into the details here. The gist is that Wilson thinks that the close relatedness of honey bees, for example, is a result of a strong social organization rather than its cause. Altruism develops when a special set of adaptations virtually forces individual organisms to cooperate with and make sacrifices on behalf of their fellow organisms. Only once those conditions occur do a lot of brothers and sisters end up hanging around one another long enough for something like inclusive fitness to kick in.

I have been teaching inclusive fitness in my Biopolitics class for over ten years. I will continue to do so for the time being, as it is still the dominate theory. However, I not only suspect that Wilson is right, I hope he is right. The reason is that Wilson's current thinking points in the direction of group selection. This is the idea that natural selection can favor traits that benefit one group over another within a larger population, even if that trait involves a disadvantage for within group competition. This explains why ants and anthropoi have all but inherited the earth. For an excellent summary of this idea, see E.O. Wilson and D.S. Wilson (2007).

I think that this is one of the trends in modern biology that is bending the science back around toward Plato and Aristotle. So far I might be the only one who thinks that. So far.

As a postscript, let me say that I have no patience for anyone who tries to end an argument by appealing to "settled science."

Affirmative Action & the Culture of Deceit

To be fair, Regents v. Bakke (1977) does not rank among the most execrable decisions in the Court's history. It is scarcely as bad as Dred Scott (1856) or Plessy v. Ferguson (1895). One could hardly rank it lower than the second tier from the bottom of very bad cases.

The Court had to decide whether affirmative action by state universities was a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the 14^th Amendment. At question were admissions policies that unambiguously discriminated against Alan Bakke merely because of his racial identity.

The Court might have said that it is permissible to discriminate in favor of minority candidates against White candidates because the purpose of the policy was to remedy past discrimination against minorities. This would lead to the odd conclusion that equal protection protects some persons more than others, something Conservatives resolutely object to. While I am very skeptical about that proposition, there are arguments to be made in favor of it.

Current law protects persons with disabilities against discrimination and indeed requires a wide variety of practices intended to open access to public and private facilities and to create a "barrier-free world". The law does not protect short people, despite obvious difficulties that such people experience and reams of evidence that they suffer discrimination. Being an attitudinally challenged person myself, am I denied equal protection? Probably not. The purpose of the law is not to inhibit one population but to provide needed protection for groups that especially need it. This is a judgment call and it is one that legislatures are better able to make than courts.

On the other hand, the Court could have struck down affirmative action. They did neither. The Court struck down the California policy as a "quota system." This means that it roped off a number of positions for special admissions and all but posted a sign: no White person need apply. Instead, the Court determined that public universities could develop a system that includes race as one of a number of factors and by that means achieve exactly the same outcome as a quota system. Justice Powell:

It has been suggested that an admissions program which considers race only as one factor is simply a subtle and more sophisticated -- but no less effective -- means of according racial preference than the Davis program. A facial intent to discriminate, however, is evident in petitioner's preference program, and not denied in this case. No such facial infirmity exists in an admissions program where race or ethnic background is simply one element -- to be weighed fairly against other elements -- in the selection process… And a court would not assume that a university, professing to employ a facially nondiscriminatory admissions policy, would operate it as a cover for the functional equivalent of a quota system. In short, good faith [p319] would be presumed in the absence of a showing to the contrary in the manner permitted by our cases.

Notice the weasel words "facial," "assume" and "professing". The Court does not deny that the system they are advocating "is simply a subtle and more sophisticated -- but no less effective -- means of according racial preference than the Davis" quota system. In theory, Bakke would be eligible for any position in the UC Davis Medical School's freshman class. In practice, he would be effectively excluded from the same number of slots. In other words, the Court decided that discriminating against White applicants in favor of minority applicants is okay so long as you lie about it.

To see how this works, consider the admission system at the University of Texas at Austin which is challenged in the upcoming case Fisher v. Texas. From the WaPo:

The Texas system guarantees admission to students who graduate in the top 10 percent of their high schools' senior classes. Some 75 percent of those admitted as freshmen to the school in Austin each year have come from this pool, which has helped UT make great strides in increasing minority enrollment, which hovers between 18 percent and 20 percent.

The school decided that students who filled the remaining slots should reflect the state's growing diversity. UT took into account several factors in addition to grade-point average and SAT scores, including whether an applicant came from a one-parent household or one where more than one language is spoken. Ms. Fisher cites these considerations as constitutionally problematic.

There is nothing wrong with these admissions criteria except that they are clearly designed to discriminate on the basis of race and ethnicity while remaining facially neutral. That's okay as long as you think that it's racial and ethnic discrimination is okay as long as you discriminate in favor of the right people and you aren't too honest about what you are doing.

The Bakke decision mandated a culture of deceit in public university admissions. This is inherently corrupting. If we are going to practice remedial discrimination, we have to admit what we are doing. If we can't bring ourselves to admit that, we need another solution.

2 Dumb 4 Democracy

Here is a bit of bad news for democracy. People are way too dumb for it to work. From RealClearScience:

The democratic process relies on the assumption that citizens (the majority of them, at least) can recognize the best political candidate, or best policy idea, when they see it. But a growing body of research has revealed an unfortunate aspect of the human psyche that would seem to disprove this notion, and imply instead that democratic elections produce mediocre leadership and policies.

The research, led by David Dunning, a psychologist at Cornell University, shows that incompetent people are inherently unable to judge the competence of other people, or the quality of those people's ideas. For example, if people lack expertise on tax reform, it is very difficult for them to identify the candidates who are actual experts. They simply lack the mental tools needed to make meaningful judgments.

Modern science tends to encourage specialization, which means that most scientists know a lot about not very much. That becomes a problem when they try to draw large conclusions from their own narrow work, which they are often tempted to do in order to draw attention to their research.

The study mentioned above seems to establish a remarkably unremarkable conclusion.

"If you have gaps in your knowledge in a given area, then you're not in a position to assess your own gaps or the gaps of others," Dunning said. Strangely though, in these experiments, people tend to readily and accurately agree on who the worst performers are, while failing to recognize the best performers.

Well, yes. If you don't know anything about X, you might not be a good judge of who does know something. There is nothing wrong with research that backs up a "duh!" Sometimes it turns out that what seems obvious is in fact false.

The trouble here is that Dunning doesn't seem to know anything about democracy. There are at least three fundamental arguments in its favor. The first turns not on competence or judgment but on consent. Whether a government is competent or not, its just powers can come only from the governed.

The second turns on the idea of effective policy. Consider an analogy: who is the best judge of a piece of software? Hint: it isn't the designers and technicians. Often their very expertise makes it difficult for them to predict how user-friendly the program will be for non-experts. The best judge is the population of users. Likewise, voters are pretty good judges of how well policies are working for them.

The third argument turns on the idea of responsive government. In the market place, producers have to meet the needs of consumers if they want their product to continue selling. Likewise, elected governments have a strong incentive to try to meet the needs of their constituents: they want to be reelected. Despite its large population, India has avoided mass famines. The same cannot be said of China and North Korea. Every voter is competent enough to tell when he or she is starving.

To those fundamental considerations, I would add one more. No alternative to democracy has shown that it is any better at producing competent leaders, if the competence you are looking for is that of the public servant and not, say, the efficient tyrant and mass murderer.

On the bright side for Mr. Dunning, he has managed to illustrate his own thesis.

Spotlight@Northern with Peter Lawler

Unforunately, our interview with Peter Lawler didn't succeed.  We couldn't get Skype to work properly.  We hope to fix this in the future.  We also have Larry Arnhart on board to discuss Darwinian Conservatism.  Keep checking!

James Q. Wilson, RIP

James Q. Wilson was the very model of a modern political scientist. He was also, I would add, a model conservative. Wilson is most famous for advancing the "broken windows" theory of crime prevention. The general idea is that signs of social disorder (leaving broken windows unrepaired) encourage further social disorder. Such signs send the signal that no one cares enough to enforce the most modest standards of social order and thus foster a culture of social disorder.

That is a profoundly conservative idea, perhaps even the conservative idea. Conservatives tend to think that social order is delicate and must be continually nurtured, enforced and, well, conserved.

Wilson was also one of the first mainstream political scientists to take Biopolitics seriously. In The Moral Sense, he argued against the one prevailing view that morality is entirely determined by culture and history. Human beings are biologically equipped for moral communities just as they are biologically equipped for membership in linguistic communities. While moral codes may differ from one culture to another in the same way that language differs, there are a number of moral concepts that are universal. Chief among these is the idea of fairness or reciprocity. There is no human culture that does not include a concept of reciprocal obligation. Recent science provides overwhelming support for this idea.

One of Wilson's books that is very underappreciated is On Character. You might suppose that, if anything were entirely a product of culture, it would be the concept of a good character. Wilson argued to the contrary. The foundation of good character lies in the development of two human capacities. One is the ability to empathize. If I am a person of good character, I recognize that others have interests of their own just as I do and that I should respect their interests if I want them to respect mine. The other is the capacity to defer short term gratification for long term benefits. Taken together, good character is the foundation of civic virtue. It makes it possible for a person to defer his own short term gratification for the sake of the common good.

Wilson was right about all of this. I didn't know him, but I have heard that he exemplified in his person the virtues that he explored in his writings. I would like to believe that the first person who greeted him in heaven was Aristotle.

Neither Obama Nor Romney

I find myself thinking, not for the first time, that none of the candidates currently running for President can possibly win election and that includes Barack Obama.

Why the GOP can't win.

It is difficult to say that the Republicans have ever looked weaker at this point in the election cycle. Mitt Romney just barely managed to win Michigan, a state in which he is a favorite son of sorts, while splitting the delegates with Rick Santorum. Mitt won big in Arizona, a state where he only needed to win as it is winner take all. There is some sense of elation in Mitt's camp today, but as A.B. Stoddard put it on Fox News, it is the elation that comes not with triumph but from a brush with death.

The outlook for the Republican process looks the same as it has for weeks. Romney is probably the only candidate who can win, but he faces a long slog before he can wrap it up. The possibility of a brokered convention is real. No one really knows what that would look like today, but most of those who yearn for a Republican victory are very afraid to find out.

What Republicans should fear, however, is not a failure to rally around Romney. It is that Romney will be the Republican John Kerry: a candidate whose only bankable asset, either among his party or among the voters at large, is that he is not the incumbent President.

Why Obama can't win.

Given the disarray in the Republican contest right now, you'd expect Obama to be well ahead in all the polls. The Battleground poll does show Obama with a ten point lead. Rasmussen gives Romney a one point lead. Both polls measure likely voters. Gallup is continuously polling and their numbers are rather astonishing.

Among registered voters, where Democrats do better than among likely voters, Romney is four points ahead of Obama. Santorum is only one point behind. That doesn't look good for an incumbent President, especially when all the focus is on the squabble between his potential opponents.

Gallup has been continuously tracking the President's approval rating. Obama has been running a negative approval rating since July of last year. While is it rather narrower than it was for several months, 50% of voters currently disapprove of his job performance versus an approval of 45%. Those are poor numbers for an incumbent seeking reelection.

That doesn't exactly spell doom. This is precisely the point in the cycle where Jimmy Carter and George Bush (41) saw their approval ratings collapse. It is, however, below George W. Bush (43), whose rating hovered around 50% all the way to reelection.

Rasmussen has been running a Presidential Approval Index since the beginning of Obama's presidency. This compares those who strongly approve of the President's performance in office against those who strongly disapprove. He is the chart, from Powerline:

That measurement, if accurate, compares the President's core support with his core opposition. It is reasonable to suppose that these are the people most likely to vote, contribute, and act on behalf of or against the President. A 16 point Obama deficit is very bad news.

My point in this post is not that Romney or Obama is likely to lose. One of them (assuming a Mitt nomination) will surely be sleeping in the White House next year. My point is that a year from now the Oval Office will almost certainly belong to a man with no large core of support among the voters. He will either be the not-Obama or the not-player to be named later.

It is possible of course that President Romney (or Santorum) will be able to build a consensus by decisive action on the nation's problems. I ain't betting on that, but it could happen. By contrast, four more years of Obama will be four more years of the same. Happy March!