South Dakota Politics

In Praise of Markets

Markets are by far the most powerful, rational, and generous mechanisms for solving economic problems and indeed most other politically relevant problems. If "generous" seems surprising, I will add this. If you believe that markets have to be regulated because they are often cruel, you might also notice that it is a lot less painful for everyone when you get to regulate a surplus rather than a deficit.

For one case in point, see immigration. Few issues have been as stubbornly resistant to political reform as this one. A large wave of immigrants from Mexico created a great deal of anxiety in the U.S., but it also split the parties against themselves. Many Democrats saw Mexican immigrants as a plus, since they tend to vote Democratic when they get to vote. Unions did not see a continuous supply of cheap labor as so wonderful a thing. Many Republicans saw that wave of immigration as a threat to national unity and a sign that the laws were being ignored. Business interests did see a continuous supply of cheap labor as a wonderful thing.

The market was too powerful to resist. In Mexico there was a large supply of labor chasing jobs and in the US there was a large demand for labor. The spice must flow. It did.

Now, however, the currents seem to have shifted, as Via Meadia points out.

There's a WRM piece in the Wall Street Journal out today about the likely impact of the latest big wave of immigrants to reach the United States. The main takeaway: immigration in this country is not what you think. Immigrants from Asia have now replaced immigrants from the Spanish speaking world as the largest source of new immigrants, and the Asians tend to be well educated, well skilled, and when they get here they do very well.

That is a case of population flow that reminds us of how uncertain projections and trends can be. A large wave of legal, English-speaking, skilled and educated immigrants may have a down side. They are going to be competing with someone. It is hard to argue that it is bad for the United States. At any rate, a relatively relaxed immigration policy, whether de jure or de facto, is more generous and humane than the alternative.

For another case in point from Via Meadia, consider the carbon emissions projections for the United States.

Much to the surprise (and, one suspects, the chagrin) of the deranged doomsaying wing of the environmental movement, new forecasts of US CO2 emission are out and they point to an even steeper drop than the last set of predictions.

No cap and trade, no huge new taxes on oil, no draconian driver restrictions, no air conditioning bans, no rationing — and the US is on track to cut its CO2 emissions 17 percent below the 2005 levels by 2020 — and to keep cutting our emissions levels beyond that…

So, to summarize, the United States of America basically blew the global greens off completely, trampling all over their carbon tax and cap and trade agendas, and earning wails and shrieks of hatred at the Rio+20 Summit — while making huge strides toward reducing CO2 emission levels.

It's almost as if there is no connection between the green policy agenda and environmental progress.

Mead points out that this owes a lot to environmental regulations. Fuel efficiency standards are a big part of the equation. All of the real work, however, has been done by private enterprises doing what they do best.

The lesson here is regulation is most effective when it cooperates with market forces as much as possible and least so when it attempts to massively redirect or resist those forces. The global green agenda was at least in part motivated by the dream of replacing market forces with something more humane. This just doesn't work.

And if the United States can achieve this while blowing off the panicky greens and their tiresome Malthusian agendas, so can China and India. That is a very good thing, because those countries have zero repeat zero interest in adopting any green measures that slow their growth.

The truth is that if CO2 emissions are going to come down, it's going to happen the American way rather than the Greenpeace way. Instead of flinging muck and howling curses at the most successful carbon cutting large economy in the world, maybe a few more greens here and there will start thinking about how to spread the magic around.

The only way out of our environmental challenges is through. Wealthy countries can afford to care about the environment. Poor countries and developing countries will not care, whether we want them to or not.

Of Commerce & Consent

I haven't the time yet to read Natl. Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius, and I won't for some time. For that reason I am not yet prepared to endorse Chief Justice Robert's opinion that the PPACA is permissible under Congress's tax power.

Relying on the many reports about the opinion, I am willing to say this much: if the PPACA mandate is constitutional, it has to be so under the tax power and cannot be so under the commerce power.

This is clear from a comment posted by one of my cherished interlocutors, A.I.

You bring up one the worst arguments against the law in saying [that] government is forcing us to use and pay for health care. It's our own accident-prone and disease-susceptible bodies that force us to use health care. Should we then not pay for it...at least to the extent we can? Sure, we could choose to leave particular malady untreated. We could also choose to put our tongue in a light socket.

I reply: no. A.I. is rather promiscuous in his use of "we" and "us". Let me sort it out. Our "accident-prone and disease-susceptible bodies" do not "force us to use health care." People have a right to refuse treatment.

The argument A.I. is drawing on goes as follows. Everyone is part of the health care market because no one will in fact be denied treatment. Since everyone thus benefits from the system, forcing everyone to shoulder his or her fair share of the costs is merely a matter of regulating the market. That is why the mandate was thought to come under the commerce clause.

I reply that people become part of the market for health services in two ways. One is to purchase health insurance or pay directly for medical care. Another way is to decline to purchase health insurance or pay for services and instead show up at hospital emergency room when the need arises. People who chose to do the latter are indeed putting a burden on the rest of us.

However, that is because we choose to pay for their treatment. That is our decision, not theirs. We could, logically, decline to open our medical facilities to people who have been irresponsible. I am glad that we do not do so, but our decision to cover them is our choice and so imposes no moral obligations on them. To put the point more clearly, extending a benefit to someone free of charge means you can't turn around and shake them down for the bill. Otherwise, you could compel anyone to enter any market you choose and then claim a chunk of their paycheck, whether they like it or not, merely by offering them some relevant benefit.

The source of legal and political obligations is consent. Since we the people have decided to take care of the twenty something, who thinks he is going to be young and healthy forever and so doesn't have to bother with health insurance, we the people have to pay for it. That is why the mandate looks permissible as an exercise of the tax power but not of the commerce power. Citizens of this Republic tacitly agree to pay such taxes as their Congress authorizes. Persons who accept free medical care have not agreed, tacitly or otherwise, to be part of the health care market.

A Pyrrhic Defeat @ the Supreme Court

I find myself in a very odd position as I consider the Court's ruling on ObamaCare. When the first constitutional challenges were filed, I was not inclined to support them. That is because I am a judicial minimalist. I don't like it when big policy questions are decided by the courts rather than by the political branches.

On the other hand, the Court must uphold basic constitutional principles even when doing so effectively decides big political questions. I was persuaded that the expansion of the Commerce power that was the stated basis of the mandate was inconsistent with the principle of limited government. I thought that the Court should strike down the mandate on those grounds.

It seems I was right both times. I am pretty sure that what led Chief Justice Roberts to side with the court's left wing was his preference for judicial minimalism. He just didn't want to the Court to decide this issue by judicial fiat. I could be wrong about that, but I would rather not believe that he succumbed to the threats made against the Court.

There was, apparently, a five vote majority against the mandate on Commerce Clause grounds. The argument made in favor of the mandate was that everyone is part of the market for medical services and so requiring everyone to purchase health insurance (who is not provided it by the government) is merely a regulation of that market. However, the reason that everyone is part of that market, whether they like it not, is because we in fact offer health care to everyone whether they ask for it or not. Can government regulate any aspect of private behavior merely by extending a benefit relevant to that behavior and thus roping someone into a market? If so, then government's power over private conduct is indeed without limits.

Roberts and the right wing of the Court seem to agree. To uphold the mandate, Roberts introduced a new argument: that the mandate was a simple exercise of the tax powers. I won't consider that argument now.

There is no doubt that this was a very big win for the Obama Administration, if only because a loss would have been a disaster. If the Court had struck down the whole act, it would mean that most of Obama's first term in office was wasted. It also gives Obama something he dearly lacked up until now: a rational for reelection. I will nominate judges who vote to uphold liberal legislation. See how important that is!

On the other hand, this outcome exposes the Administration and Democrats generally on a number of fronts. Proponents of ObamaCare have vociferous denied that the mandate is a tax. That question has been settled. It's a tax or otherwise it is unconstitutional. It is not a small tax, either; it will count as one of the largest tax increases on record. Republicans will probably point that out. It is, moreover, a gargantuan tax increase on behalf of a piece of legislation that remains very unpopular. In his speeches so far, the President has tried to direct attention away from the core of the act and toward its more palatable aspects. That may be harder now.

Conservatives are in fact rather divided on the outcome of this case. Some view is as a calamity, and it may well be that for conservative causes. See Powerline. A very large expansion of governments regulatory and tax powers has survived a Court challenge. It won't be easy to undue that, even if Republicans win big in November.

Some conservatives think that Chief Justice Roberts, like Chief Justice Marshal in Marbury v. Madison, won the war by conceding the battle. See George Will and Jay Cost. He upheld the mandate, but forced everyone to recognize it as a massive tax increase. He put together a majority that limited Congress's power under the Commerce Clause. No, Congress can't compel you to buy something you don't want just because it thinks it's something you should have.

Roberts also struck a blow against Congress's power to compel the states to behave the way Congress wants them to. Here is a comment from John Steele Gordon at Commentary:

Roberts ruled that while the federal government can tie strings to federal money given to the states—in this case additional Medicaid funds—it cannot coerce the states by threatening to take away other funds unless its will is complied with. This is a tactic the federal government has been using for years to, in effect, make states mere administrative districts of the federal government. For instance, it forced the states to adopt 21-to-drink laws or face the loss of federal highway funds. Roberts is arguing that the states are, indeed, sovereign within their own sphere. That is also a big deal.

Yes, that is a big deal, if the Court maintains it.

I was hoping that the Court would strike down ObamaCare. I view it as a monstrosity. Part of it already collapsed under its own weight before it was ever implemented. Some of the consequences have been delayed by hundreds of wavers, issued by an Administration that wanted to delay the inevitable until after the election. The President solemnly promised us that if we like our healthcare we can keep it. Either he was ignorant about his own bill or he was lying. He sold the bill as a means of reducing health care costs and thus restore fiscal balance, but he didn't insist on any measures that would really reduce health care costs. No one thinks that this bill will lower the federal deficits. No one can yet know how it will work.

All that said, Republicans may well benefit from the fact that we will learn more about ObamaCare and how it really will work. I was well prepared for seeing ObamaCare upheld. I was very surprised by how gratifying the loss was.

ps. The most flattering view of Robert's action comes from Sean Trende.  Trende elaborates on my comparison with Marbury. 

Hatch Work

Orrin Hatch won the Utah Republican primary, fending off a challenge by Tea Party favorite and former state Sen. Dan Liljenquist. See NPR.

I had the pleasure of meeting Senator Hatch about twenty years ago. I liked him well enough, but I wasn't particularly impressed. I rode an elevator with him and took the chance to ask some questions. Some politicians will answer questions very candidly when there isn't a microphone around. Tom Daschle comes to mind. Hatch wasn't one of them. He talked in the same sound bites privately as he did when he stood up before a small group or large crowd.

So I wouldn't have been too disappointed if Hatch had lost. I wasn't hoping for that. Hatch will surely hold the seat for the Republicans. Still, it was a good thing for Hatch to be challenged. He hasn't been, since 1976. That isn't good for the party. Hatch had to pull out all the stops.

Liljenquist faced an overwhelming financial and organizational disadvantage. Hatch, learning from the defeat two years ago of his Senate colleague Robert Bennett, spent about $10 million blanketing the airwaves and building a campaign operation unlike anything Utah had seen before.

It's good to have to build those kind of resources. They will be available for others, when the time comes. It might come for Mr. Liljenquist one day.

Former state Sen. Dan Liljenquist, who survived a 2008 plane crash in Guatemala that killed 11 of 14 on board, won just enough support at the state GOP's nominating convention to advance to the primary…

Liljenquist, 37, a relative newcomer to the Utah political scene, seized on voters' concerns about the growing national debt and tried to make the case that Hatch had been a major contributor to that debt.

That is the real issue. Liljenquist was right to hold the Republican establishment's feet to the fire over it. I am guessing that the issue won't go away. Liljenquist may well have a future in the Utah political scene.

Of Work & Wet Diapers

Anne-Marie Slaughter had an important position at the State Department, working under Secretary Clinton. She has now achieved national fame, not by anything that she did on the job, but by explaining in an article in The Atlantic why she quit and what it says about contemporary American society.

Eighteen months into my job as the first woman director of policy planning at the State Department, a foreign-policy dream job that traces its origins back to George Kennan, I found myself in New York, at the United Nations' annual assemblage of every foreign minister and head of state in the world. On a Wednesday evening, President and Mrs. Obama hosted a glamorous reception at the American Museum of Natural History. I sipped champagne, greeted foreign dignitaries, and mingled.

But I could not stop thinking about my 14-year-old son, who had started eighth grade three weeks earlier and was already resuming what had become his pattern of skipping homework, disrupting classes, failing math, and tuning out any adult who tried to reach him. Over the summer, we had barely spoken to each other—or, more accurately, he had barely spoken to me. And the previous spring I had received several urgent phone calls—invariably on the day of an important meeting—that required me to take the first train from Washington, D.C., where I worked, back to Princeton, New Jersey, where he lived. My husband, who has always done everything possible to support my career, took care of him and his 12-year-old brother during the week; outside of those midweek emergencies, I came home only on weekends.

I have considerable sympathy for Ms. Slaughter. My first child was born when I was working on my dissertation back at Claremont Graduate School. My wife largely supported us with a full time factory job and a commute of more than an hour a day. For the first four years of my daughter's life, I was her primary care giver. The problem was how to do that job and keep writing about Machiavelli.

Here's how we solved it. My daughter and I went to bed every evening at 7pm. I would rise at 3am and go to the library to do my part time job (backing up the enormous computer hard drives). There I did my writing. Around 8am, I would drive to San Bernardino to teach American Government. I would get home shortly before my wife had to leave for work. It was a crazy schedule, but it worked well enough to get us by until I accepted the appointment at Northern. During the first few years at NSU, my wife stayed at home with my daughter and her baby brother.

I think it's true that I and my significant other pretty much split the child-rearing duties. I am sure that I have changed more diapers than my entire male line going back to the great ancestor of all the Blanchards and the chimpanzees.

Slaughter observes that despite the improvement in opportunities for women in the workforce, women still have a much harder time pursuing full careers than men do. There are a lot of reasons why this is the case, but this is surely the most important one:

The proposition that women can have high-powered careers as long as their husbands or partners are willing to share the parenting load equally (or disproportionately) assumes that most women will feel as comfortable as men do about being away from their children, as long as their partner is home with them. In my experience, that is simply not the case.

Here I step onto treacherous ground, mined with stereotypes. From years of conversations and observations, however, I've come to believe that men and women respond quite differently when problems at home force them to recognize that their absence is hurting a child, or at least that their presence would likely help. I do not believe fathers love their children any less than mothers do, but men do seem more likely to choose their job at a cost to their family, while women seem more likely to choose their family at a cost to their job.

The obvious question is why this dimorphism exists and how to change it if we want to level the professional playing field. Ms. Slaughter clearly things that change is order.

The best hope for improving the lot of all women, and for closing what Wolfers and Stevenson call a "new gender gap"—measured by well-being rather than wages—is to close the leadership gap: to elect a woman president and 50 women senators; to ensure that women are equally represented in the ranks of corporate executives and judicial leaders. Only when women wield power in sufficient numbers will we create a society that genuinely works for all women. That will be a society that works for everyone.

Slaughter suggests a number of social changes that might produce "a society that works for everyone."

The most provocative is that women who want careers and children might want to have the children earlier rather than, as usually happens, later.

A child born when his mother is 25 will finish high school when his mother is 43, an age at which, with full-time immersion in a career, she still has plenty of time and energy for advancement.

Another is that we should stop rewarding people who devote all their time to their jobs at the expense of those who make time for their families. She tells the story of an Orthodox Jew, whose time taken out for religious observations was respected by his colleagues. We should offer the same respect to mothers and fathers who show a similar concern for time with their children. She proposes that we stop thinking of a professional career as a single arc and start thinking of it as something that can be broken down into steps. Her proposals are thoughtful and serious and deserve reading. I can't really disagree with any of them.

I am doubtful on a couple of points. Slaughter seems to assume that the full time devotion to a career that is common at the highest levels of business and government is a result of culture and that we can cultivate different values and behaviors. This may be so, but I think it more likely that it is a result of the mechanics of competition. Yes, it might sometimes be true that people are more efficient at their work if they take more time out for other things. Still, where competition is severe, I suspect the prize will always soak up most of the competitor's time and attention.

I am also doubtful that the dimorphism that Slaughter talks about will be easy to change, even with a woman in the White House. Some social facts are largely the result of other social facts and for that reason are susceptible to rapid change. Consider birth outside of wedlock. This varies dramatically between different nations and between different populations within a nation. It varies dramatically in the same populations over time. That is because marriage is an artificial institution maintained by social pressure. When the later changes (and it can change rapidly) so does the former.

Other social facts are heavily influenced by biology and biology changes much more slowly than culture. Human males invest a lot more in their offspring than do most animals. How much they invest varies with cultures. However, there is no known human culture in which men routinely take as much let alone more responsibility for child care than women. This is a very robust social fact and it is buttressed by robust evolutionary theory. As Aristotle observed, women always know who their children are. Men have to guess. That is the kind of thing that has evolutionary consequences.

The sexual dimorphism in parental attachment and investment is marginal. Men can certainly love their children and society can certainly expect them to be responsible for them. Women can certainly compete and win across a wide range of fields and we should want them to have the opportunity to do so. That dimorphism is nonetheless real and it will be robust in samples as large as American society. It will also show up in the lives of such persons as Ms. Slaughter.

None of this means that we shouldn't try to make it easier for women to pursue careers. Her recommendations are worth considering. We might have to face the fact, however, that the foundations of this problem are very deep and that they may be stubbornly resistant to change.

As Stockton Goes, So Goes…

Maybe we are going broke because we just haven't spent enough. Maybe we are going broke because we spent too damn much and saved too damn little and promised more to more people than we could ever hope to pay.

For a survey of promises with no future, consider this from the Wall Street Journal:

By most accounts, [public] pension plans are in trouble. How many plans and how much trouble depends, at least in part, on the accounting. And now that the Governmental Accounting Standards Board has adopted new rules for calculating pension liabilities today, the hole faced by many pension plans could look a lot deeper.

The WSJ article includes a chart that will be encouraging or very depressing, depending on where you live and work. Bear in mind that the new rules are still much weaker than those governing private accounting, and that pension funds are considered adequately funded if they cover 80% of their obligations.

I was very relieved to see what I already had some idea about. South Dakota's pension fund was 96% funded under the old rules and 88% under the new rules. Now that my butt has relaxed, I can start thinking again. I note that Wisconsin is also in very good shape, at 94% under the new rules.

California PERF is at 65%. The California Teachers pension fund is at 41%. West Virginia and Vermont are also in the mid-forties. Pennsylvania School Employees is at 34% under the new rule. Illinois Teachers is at 18%. These figures are the result of unrealistic promises reinforced by ridiculously optimistic assumptions.

No one can see the future, but simple rules can tell you how to plan if you plan responsibly. I continue to believe that the world economic crisis is a result of decades of fiscal irresponsibility.

For another case in point, consider this fact: Stockton California is about to go belly-up. From the San Francisco Gate:

Faced with a crippling $26 million deficit, the City Council is expected to vote Tuesday to become the largest U.S. municipality ever to file for Chapter 9 bankruptcy protection - further stigmatizing a city already reeling from years from skyrocketing unemployment, foreclosures and rising murder rates.

How did Stockton get into this fix?

Real estate values nearly quadrupled from 2000 to 2006, pushing property taxes higher and pouring money into city coffers. Leaders of the 292,000-strong community spread out along the San Joaquin River channel pulled out $300 million in bonds for civic projects that included gussying up its waterfront and building a hockey arena and minor-league baseball stadium.

Some $48 million went toward an eight-story building to replace the worn-out City Hall, where the cement work shows huge cracks and cat-size rats chew the carpets. The city had already agreed to a generous deal with its workers - everyone who worked for Stockton for at least a month became entitled to health benefits for life. Then, in 2008, the recession hit like a jackhammer.

Do I detect a pattern here? In Europe you get to take a second vacation if you don't feel up to snuff during your first one. In Stockton, you get got health care for life if you worked for the city for a month. I don't know what will happen in Europe, but in Stockton we can see what happens. The police force is cut as the murder rate doubles. The city council builds a new palace for its comfort and can't afford to move into it. People who retired expecting a couple of grand a month in health care benefits will get a couple of hundred a month, if that.

It is tempting to ignore this if you are living in South Dakota or Wisconsin, and not working in the public sector in Illinois or Stockton. Unfortunately, the budgetary future of these United States looks to be on the same trajectory as the latter. Maybe we should address that problem now rather than later. I don't know if Mitt Romney is up to that. I know for certain that the current occupant of the White House is not.

Whatever Is Wrong With The Supreme Court Can’t Be Fixed

As we wait, more or less impatiently, for the Supreme Court to announce its decision on ObamaCare, imaginations are running wild. James Fallows posted a blog with the title "5 Signs the United States is Undergoing a Coup." He came to his senses, after a fashion, and changed the title. He didn't do anything to make the post less stupid. I will bother only with his close:

Underscoring the point, a Bloomberg poll of 21 constitutional scholars found that 19 of them believe the individual mandate is constitutional, but only eight said they expected the Supreme Court to rule that way. The headline nicely conveys the reality of the current Court: "Obama Health Law Seen Valid, Scholars Expect Rejection."

How would you characterize a legal system that knowledgeable observers assume will not follow the law and instead will advance a particular party-faction agenda? That's how we used to talk about the Chinese courts when I was living there.

Well, you characterize it as a legal system in which 19 scholars out of a collection of 21 think that they disagree with the Court on an important issue. Constitutional scholars have every right to their opinions. The Supreme Court has the power to issue authoritative judicial opinions. That, Mr. Fallows, is the law. It may seem to you like a coup when the Court doesn't go your way, but it seemed much the same way to a town that was told by the High Court that it couldn't sponsor a non-sectarian prayer at its high school graduation. Comparing this to the Chinese system is five kinds of crackers.

Unlike Fallows, Jonathan Turley doesn't write stupid things. Turley argues at the WaPo for enlarging the number of justices on the High Court from 9 to 19. Ann Althouse accuses Turley of proposing a court-packing scheme. This is uncharacteristically unfair of Althouse.

Turley is not arguing for packing the Court with pro-progressive judges. He is making the familiar complaint that national political controversies are being decided by a lot of five to four decisions, meaning that one person (usually, Anthony Kennedy) is effectively making the decision for all the rest of us.

Turley correctly points out that the number of seats on the Supreme Court is not fixed in the Constitution and that many other nations have larger high courts. He makes the facially plausible assumption that a 19 member court would be less likely to divide 10 to 9 than a 9 member court 5 to 4.

On appellate courts it is rare that one or two judges consistently provide the swing votes on all issues when they sit "en banc," or as a whole. Appellate courts have also proved to be manageable while allowing for more diversity in their members. More important, the power of individual judges is diluted.

That Turley is not proposing a court-packing scheme is evident from this paragraph:

How would we get to a court of 19? Gradually. If Congress ordered such an expansion, no president would be allowed to appoint more than two additional justices in a term. Once fully staffed, the court would have a more regular natural turnover. This would allow greater variety and a more consistent opportunity for each president to name members to the bench. It would also decrease the importance of individual justices hewing so closely to party lines — potentially allowing nominees with broader experience and ideas.

It is hard to guess whether or how a larger court would work better than a smaller one. It seems clear to me that Turley gets cause and effect backwards here. We don't have large national questions resting on the shoulders of one judicial personality because the Court is evenly divided; rather, the Court is evenly divided because large national questions can rest on the shoulders of one judge.

Courts below the level of the Supremes rarely attract severe political scrutiny. However, since the nomination of Robert Bork, the balance on the Supreme Court has been the focus of as much passion as any national election. There is no good reason to think that this would change if the balance was ten to nine. One party or the other would still be tempted to pull out all the stops to prevent a President from changing the balance. Given that constant pressure, the Court would still tend over time towards a more or less even balance and swing votes would be just as potent.

There are two reasons why the Court has tended toward narrow majorities of late and they are the result of trends over the last half century. One is that the Court began to take it upon itself to intervene in major national controversies and to insert its own political judgments by its decisions. On issues like civil rights, religious liberty, and abortion, the Court decided to decide the issues. It is not that this never happened before (see McCulloch v. Maryland and Dred Scott) but it was relatively rare prior to the Second World War. Maybe it's a very good thing that the Court did this, but there is no escaping the consequential politicization of the Court.

The second reason, closely related and perhaps a result of the first, is that there are big differences among scholars, judges, and politicians about the meaning of the Constitutional provisions. Political positions are heavily implicated in the constitutional positions. Consider, for a case in point, the Supreme Court's recent decisions on the Second Amendment right to bear arms.

Conservatives like to think that there is a remedy for this. They offer such doctrines as original intent and strict construction as ways to distinguish the Constitution as the rules of the game from the actual play on the field. That the Left views conservative judicial decisions as not only wrong but illegitimate tells us that the conservatives have a point. I confess myself to be tempted by this approach. I am a judicial minimalist. I think that the Court should decide as little as possible and should view itself as a team of umpires whose job is to ensure fair play, not to help the Cubs finally win.

Perhaps, someday, our political culture will allow that. I am not holding my breath. It doesn't do so now and will not for a long time. No numerical manipulations of the court will change the basic dynamics.

What Can’t Go On Forever Can’t Go On Any Longer

Herbert Stein famously said that "if something can't go on forever, it will stop." Stein's law is frequently quoted. It is also, unfortunately, inescapable. I will add to it Blanchard's corollary #1: that when something that can't go on forever, there will come a time when it begins to stop; and #2: that people who wanted it to go on forever will vehemently refuse to recognize that it is stopping.

I think that corollary #1 is pretty obvious, but needs stating. Things that can't go on forever don't always stop at once. There often comes a moment when all the signs are there that the game is over, but that happens well before the fat lady sings. Corollary #2 relies less on logic and more on experience.

As evidence, consider France. Steven Hayward at Powerline directs our attention to a piece in The Economist.

THE French president has more power than any other European leader. And, after the second round of the parliamentary elections on June 17th, François Hollande has, on paper, more power than any other president in the Fifth Republic's history. His Socialist Party now controls both houses of the legislature, all but one French region and most of the country's departments, big towns and communes. The question is: what will this studiously modest man do with such dominance?

…Mr. Hollande will start by cutting the retirement age for some workers to 60, putting the top marginal income-tax rate up to 75%, raising taxes on wealth, inheritance and dividends, increasing the minimum wage and making it much harder for employers to fire workers. Far from curbing the size of the public sector, at 56% of GDP the biggest in the euro zone, he seems likely to expand it. With these policies he is acting against the grain of change in the rest of the EU. This will do nothing to improve France's competitiveness which, as its gaping trade deficit shows, has declined fast. Nor will it make the business climate any friendlier.

Mr. Hollande is responding to the moment by denying it. He is doubling down on the policies that brought France and the rest of the developed and a lot of the developing world to the moment of crisis. The Economist expects that Mr. Hollande will be compelled by reality to reverse course, just as Francois Mitterrand was when he tried to institute socialism in France in 1981. The Economist also notes that France is now in a much weaker fiscal position than it was in 1981.

For a second case in point, consider California. Governor Jerry Brown had proposed closing seventy of that state's almost three hundred state parks. That's the kind of thing you have to do if you want to build a bullet train from nowhere to nowhere when your state is going belly up financially. It is a bit of a shock. From the Mercury News:

Brown, a Democrat, and his predecessor, Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger, drew significant criticism for their attempts to close state parks to save money. In the 110-year history of California's state parks system, no governor has ever closed state parks, even during the Depression, to balance the budget, largely because they represent less than half of 1 percent of state spending, and also because they remain politically popular with both parties and drive tourism

Okay, state parks are wonderful. I have spent a lot of time in them. If you want to save them, you have to be able to afford them. Sacramento is between a rock and hard place. It can't sustain its present budget but it can't cut anything and can't raise more revenue without further depressing economic growth.

What couldn't go on forever is the blue state model: always increasing spending, always taking an increasing bite out of the productive economy. That went on for a long time, so long as the general economy was growing robustly. Sooner or later it had to cut into economic growth. What couldn't go on forever can't go on any longer.

We’ve Been Eating Our Seed Corn

I have frequently admitted to being simple minded. While the world's economic and financial systems are enormously complicated, it seems to me that the bottom line is not complicated at all. Governments, like private corporations and individuals, have assets and liabilities. When the first is larger than the second, the question is what to do with the surplus. When the second is larger than the first, one must do one or more than one of three things: somehow increase assets and/or diminish liabilities, or default (or declare bankruptcy), or borrow the difference.

The last is the least painful in the short run, though it means increasing liabilities over the long run. That requires that there is someone you can borrow from right now. That in turn means that someone has to be running a big enough surplus to cover your shortfall. The current world crisis seems to be the result of a simple mathematical fact: there is simply not enough surplus in the world economy to cover all of the world's debts.

The only argument on the table right now is the austerity v. stimulus argument. Those favoring the former argue that the world's debtor governments (which is pretty much all of the world's governments) must reduce their liabilities by reducing spending and, in most cases, increase their assets by increasing taxes. The partisans of stimulus argue that this is self-defeating. Reducing spending retards economic growth, which further reduces revenues. Instead, governments should borrow even more and spend even more in order to generate economic growth. Growth will result in assets that can be used to pay down the debt. The obvious question then is whom to borrow from? Germany can't bail out the world.

It is not at all obvious, however, that borrowing heavily and spending heavily can really generate economic growth. Here is a note from Walter Russell Mead's superb blog Via Meadia:

For years, Japan has been the poster child for Keynesianism—and not in a good way. Its "lost decade" of economic stagnation is well known (at this point, it's closer to two decades than one), and this is only the beginning of its problems. Japan has been running a large budget deficit for more than twenty years now, and its debt to GDP ratio is close to 200 percent. But despite these gloriously Krugmanesque accomplishments, the economy isn't really growing, and it hasn't been for a very long time.

If heavy borrowing and spending really generates economic growth, wouldn't it be working for Japan by now?

The other question is whether the borrow now, pay later strategy has ever worked before. Here's Neil Reynolds at the Globe and Mail:

The British government has run a budget surplus in only six of the 37 years since 1975. The American government has run a budget surplus in only five of the 52 years since 1960. The Canadian government has run a budget surplus in only 10 of the 46 years since 1966. As Hudson Institute scholar Christopher DeMuth asserts in a prescient paper, Debt and Democracy, Keynesian doctrine – surpluses in the good years, deficits in the bad – has morphed in the advanced democracies into perpetual stimulus. As a result, the exponential accumulation of debt means that the next generation, people still unborn, could theoretically be required to pay all of their lifetime incomes in taxes merely to make the interest payments on an enormous debt.

I heard Paul Krugman, the high priest of the stimulus cult, saying on NPR that he'd be all for paying down debt when the economy is moving again. I would like to see an example of Krugman calling for real deficit reductions during past recoveries. I don't believe a word of this. It is obvious from the above that this is not what really happens. The governments of the UK and Canada and the US didn't borrow in bad times and pay back in the good ones. They borrowed and spent even more when times were flush.

The real problem we face is one of profligate spending. Democracy means that we the people get what we want and sooner or later that means we get what we deserve. To see how difficult the problem is, consider this story by Paul Geitner writing in the New York Times:

BRUSSELS — For most Europeans, almost nothing is more prized than their four to six weeks of guaranteed annual vacation leave. But it was not clear just how sacrosanct that time off was until Thursday, when Europe's highest court ruled that workers who happened to get sick on vacation were legally entitled to take another vacation.

Did you get that? Employers in Europe are not only legally required to pay for four to six weeks of vacation, but for another four to six weeks if you get sick while on the beach in Italy. This has consequences.

With much of Europe mired in recession, governments struggling to reduce budget deficits and officials trying to combat high unemployment, the ruling is a reminder of just how hard it is to shake up long-established and legally protected labor practices that make it hard to put more people to work and revive sinking economies.

Allow me once again to be simple minded. There are two things you can do with wealth once you generate it. One is to invest it in generating future wealth. The other is to consume it. The latter is the whole point of having an economy. The former is necessary in order to sustain an economy. When you can't put some folks to work because other folks are taking a second vacation, that means you are eating your seed corn. That is really the root of our problem.

Fast & Furious, Slow & Scurrilous

In Chapter 3 of The Prince, Machiavelli identifies one of the moral hazards of politics.

It happens in this, as the physicians say it happens in hectic fever, that in the beginning of the malady it is easy to cure but difficult to detect, but in the course of time, not having been either detected or treated in the beginning, it becomes easy to detect but difficult to cure. Thus it happens in affairs of state, for when the evils that arise have been foreseen (which it is only given to a wise man to see), they can be quickly redressed, but when, through not having been foreseen, they have been permitted to grow in a way that everyone can see them, there is no longer a remedy.

In this, as in many things (but not all things), the Florentine clerk was wise and right. For a case in point, we may look to the Fast and Furious scandal. It began as a small thing, but has now grown in a way that everyone can see it on the evening news. Whether there is any remedy remains to be seen. Here is the origin of the malady, as described by the British Telegraph:

In 2009, the US government instructed Arizona gun sellers illegally to sell arms to suspected criminals. Agents working for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) were then ordered not to stop the sales but to allow the arms to "walk" across the border into the arms of Mexican drug-traffickers. According to the Oversight Committee's report, "The purpose was to wait and watch, in hope that law enforcement could identify other members of a trafficking network and build a large, complex conspiracy case…. [The ATF] initially began using the new gun-walking tactics in one of its investigations to further the Department's strategy. The case was soon renamed 'Operation Fast and Furious."

Tracing the arms became difficult, until they starting appearing at bloody crime scenes. Many Mexicans have died from being shot by ATF sanctioned guns, but the scandal only became public after a US federal agent, Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry, was killed by one of them in a fire fight. ATF whistle blowers started to come forward and the Department of Justice was implicated. It's estimated that the US government effectively supplied 1,608 weapons to criminals, at a total value of over $1 million. Aside from putting American citizens in danger, the AFT also supplied what now amounts to a civil war within Mexico.

A boondoggle is one thing. A boondoggle with buckets of blood attached is another. It takes no Machiavelli to see why the Administration wanted to wash the blood off its hands. That, however, is how small maladies become big ones. The Justice Department at first informed Congress that no such thing had taken place. It had to walk that back. Attorney General Eric Holder denied that the Justice Department was aware of the program as it was carried out and very probably lied about when he first became aware of it.

That was the point that focus shifted upward from the crime to the cover up. If someone in the Administration had just had the courage to take responsibility, the matter would have ended there. The MSM never took much interest in the original scandal and I am guessing that most voters didn't know about it until now. By refusing to turn over thousands of documents subpoenaed by the House of Representatives, General Holder has made it much more likely that the story will be widely known.

It is the job of Congress to monitor the operations of all executive branch agencies. Because the House is under Republican control, it is doing its job. The House is preparing a contempt of Congress vote against the Att. General.

On the eve of that vote, the President of the United States asserted executive privilege. With that bold move, the scandal crossed the last remaining firewall. One of the jobs of an Attorney General is to protect the President by taking the heat for these sorts of things. Instead, the President has protected General Holder by taking ownership of the scandal.

It's not impossible that the Republicans will be hurt by this more than the Administration. They may be seen as acting out of purely political motives, which is unfair. They are acting out of mostly political motives, which is how the system is supposed to work. A backlash against the Republicans becomes more likely as the scandal becomes more severe.

If that is what the Administration is hoping for, they are gambling a lot on it. Everyone has to be wondering now what the Administration is hiding. The President is well within his rights to assert executive privilege over communications between himself and his subordinates. It doesn't protect communications between any officials below the President. The President is clearly trying to push that envelope.

Once again, the President is at odds with himself. From the WaPo:

In 2007, Obama, then a senator with higher ambitions, chided President George W. Bush for employing his executive authority to block then-senior White House adviser Karl Rove from testifying before Congress in a scandal involving the firing of nine U.S. attorneys…

Obama urged Bush to consider "coming clean," adding that "the American people deserve to know what was going on there."

It's hard not to think, if you're thinking, that the Justice Department at the highest levels knew a lot more a lot earlier than they have let on. It's hard not to suspect, if you're the least bit suspicious, that the President was informed and involved from the beginning. That is what the President's action invites us to think and suspect.

Whatever might bring down the Obama Presidency, I doubt that this will be it. It is nonetheless a big distraction as he wages his battle for reelection. Let this serve as one more annotation to a thoroughly annotated copy of Machiavelli's most famous work.

Obama v. Obama on Executive Power

Intrepid reader A.I. drew my attention to Jon Stewart at the Daily Show, who scores a big hit against Fox News and The Washington Times. Here is the quote I used in my last post, taken from the latter source:

With respect to the notion that I could suspend deportations through executive order, that's just not the case, because there are laws on the books that Congress has passed and I know that everybody here at Bell is studying hard so you know we have three branches of government. Congresses passes the law. The executive branch's job is to enforce and implement those laws and then the judiciary has to interpret the law. There are enough laws on the books by Congress that are very clear in terms of how we have to enforce our immigration system, that for me through simply an executive order ignore those mandates would not conform with my appropriate role as president.

Here is the rest of the comment that I did not include in my early post:

That does not mean, though, that we can't make decisions that emphasize enforcement on those who have engaged in criminal activity. It also doesn't mean that we can't strongly advocate or propose legislation that would change the law in order to make it more fair...more just and ultimately would help young people do the right thing and whose talents we want to embrace in order to succeed as a country.

Despite the snide remarks of my commenters about Moonies, the second part was included in the Washington Times article; so any fault is mind.

Nothing in this added passage helps the President much. Yes, he has the power to prioritize when it comes to enforcing the law and to advocate changes in the law. He does not here claim the right to use the former power to enact legal rules that were specifically rejected by Congress. In fact, he explicitly denies that he has power to do exactly what he did by his recent executive order: suspend by fiat "laws on the books by Congress that are very clear in terms of how we have to enforce our immigration system."

Sean Hannity at Fox, by contrast, did selectively edit a different set of remarks by the President. Here is the bit that was played on Hannity:

This notion that somehow I can just change the laws unilaterally is just not true [break] The fact of the matter is there are laws on the books that I have to enforce and I think that there has been a great disservice done to getting the Dream Act passed and getting comprehensive immigration reform passed by perpetrating the notion that somehow I can go and do these things. It's just not true.

Here is the rest of the remark:

What we can do is to prioritize enforcement since there are limited enforcement resources and say we're not going to go chasing after this young man or anybody else who's been acting responsibly and would otherwise qualify for legal status if the Dream Act passed.

Hannity should have included the entire passage. His edited version creates a false impression here of the contrast between the President's words and his deeds and that is journalistic malpractice.

The entire version presents a contradiction in the President's argument. No, I can't enact the Dream Act on my own, he tells us, but I can "prioritize enforcement" in order to suspend deportation of those who "would otherwise qualify for legal status if the Dream Act passed." In other words, the President was contemplating the use of that power to enact provisions from the Dream Act. The prerogative of a President to prioritize enforcement is, as Mr. Obama admits, justified in order to efficiently use limited resources. It is not for the sake of doing an end run around Congress.

I would note that Jon Stewart engages in his own act of egregious falsification and it is unintentionally instructive. He scoffs at the notion that there is something unprecedented in the President's action.

Apparently what Obama has done is completely without precedent in our Democracy. To find examples of a President acting unilaterally on deportation policy would, I mean to find examples of that you'd have to go back as far as, ahhhhh, George W. Bush.

Stewart plays a clip, apparently from a foreign news agency, praising President Bush 43 for a reprieve of Liberians during that country's civil war. Stewart goes on to point out that Clinton, Bush 41, and Ronald Reagan did much the same.

What Stewart neglects to tell his audience is that all these actions were done within the confines of existing immigration law. US immigration law allows persons who do not otherwise qualify as refugees to receive Temporary Protected Status or Deferred Enforced Departure status. These apply to specific groups of people who would face persecution or extreme hardship if they were repatriated. The exceptions have been used for persons from war-torn countries in Africa and Central America. The Obama Administration issued a TPS for persons from Haiti after the earthquake. Those are examples of executive authority exercise within the law as opposed to executive fiat modifying the law.

What the President did in his recent action on immigration has nothing to do with prosecutorial discretion, as his surrogates kept insisting on Sunday talk shows, or with prioritizing enforcement. He was not acting in order to save resources, but to "do the right thing." He suspended deportations otherwise demanded by law, a group defined by standards from a bill that Congress failed to pass. I have taken no position on whether this is constitutional or not. I only point out that the President has clearly said that it is unconstitutional and that it is within his powers. Anyway, he did it.

One Day Late

 

Obama’s Immigration Rule is Unconstitutional according to Obama

The President announced this week that he has decided to stop enforcing certain parts of American immigration law.

President Obama announced a new policy Friday that eases deportation rules for as many as 800,000 undocumented immigrants in the United States, allowing immigrants who were brought to the U.S. before they turned 16 but are younger than 30 and have been in the country for at least five consecutive years to not face deportation, and apply for temporary work authorizations.

This might be the right policy. It raises, however a very important question: does the President have the prerogative to simply stop faithfully executing duly enacted federal law because he has decided it's bad policy and not in his political interests at the moment? The White House thinks so. From George Stephanopoulos:

Obama senior adviser David Plouffe said the White House is "absolutely confident this is within our authority" on President Obama's immigration policy change announced Friday, but emphasized it "is not a permanent solution." "Our attorneys — the homeland security attorneys — are absolutely confident this is within our authority, to use some discretion," Plouffe told me this morning on "This Week."

On the other hand one constitutional law scholar, who taught briefly at the University of Chicago Law School, disagrees. The Washington Times has this quote from March, 2011:

With respect to the notion that I could suspend deportations through executive order, that's just not the case, because there are laws on the books that Congress has passed and I know that everybody here at Bell is studying hard so you know we have three branches of government. Congresses passes the law. The executive branch's job is to enforce and implement those laws and then the judiciary has to interpret the law. There are enough laws on the books by Congress that are very clear in terms of how we have to enforce our immigration system, that for me through simply an executive order ignore those mandates would not conform with my appropriate role as president.

So President Obama has issued an executive order that he himself considers blatantly unconstitutional. He thinks it is his job to enforce and implement laws passed by Congress, and that to ignore the "very clear" mandates in our immigration laws would not "conform with [his] appropriate role as president." That is what he said unambiguously fifteen months ago.

There are two reasonable possibilities here. One is that the President didn't really believe what he said in 2011. He just said whatever he needed to say to justify his inaction at that time. The other is that he did believe it but it doesn't matter to him. He is not one to let his constitutional scruples stand in the way of his reelection. Take your pick. Either way it means that one can put no trust in what the President says, no matter how solemnly he says it.

Offhand I can think of five reasons that a President might offer for selectively enforcing federal immigration laws. The first is that the President considers the law to be unconstitutional. In that case, he is duty-bound to refuse to enforce it. So far as I can tell, the Administration is not arguing that the immigration laws are unconstitutional.

A second reason would be that the law in question is in conflict with another, equally binding federal law. That doesn't seem to be the case here.

Third, the President could that this is an exercise in prosecutorial discretion. The Administration does seem to be employing this language, but it doesn't work here because such discretion is exercised in individual cases, not in an across the board rule.

Fourth, the President could argue that he is merely "prioritizing". When crimes are many and police resources are limited, one can adopt a policy of focusing first on the worst crimes. Again, that doesn't help much here. The President is not putting deportation of a certain category of offenders lower on a list. He is taking that category off the list for deportation.

Fifth, the President can argue or act as if he believed that he has the prerogative to nullify portions of federal laws by refusing to enforce them. That is clearly what the President is doing here. He is all but enacting the Dream Act without Congressional action, which is to say he is making new law through executive order.

Politically, this looks to be a daring move. On the one hand, it has clearly flummoxed the Romney campaign at a time when the Obama campaign desperately needed to do some flummoxing. Obama's folks were very worried about the possibility that Marco Rubio would move his own version of the Dream Act through and then end up as Mitt's running mate.

On the other hand, this is not the sort of move that is going to be popular with independents or with union Democrats. It also raises some problems on the jobs front. When job creation is so slow, adding 800,000 new, legal job seekers to the roles might not improve the situation.

The question we might want to ask now is whether we agree with President Obama (March 2011) that President Obama's executive order on immigration (June 2012) is unconstitutional or not? A lot of conservatives are inclined to cheer Obama's action. They hope that a soon to be Republican President can bring the fiscal house of these United States under control simply by refusing to spend money as required by law. Maybe they are right. If you want the next Republican president to have the power to nullify federal law by executive fiat, you will have the one Obama but not the other to testify on your behalf.

Daniel Lieberman’s Final Solution to Obesity

Evolutionary biology can tell me a lot about why I experience ecstasy when I pop a strip of golden-roasted chicken skin into my mouth. It can tell me a lot about why doing this too often isn't good for me. It can't tell me what to cook or when to go on a diet. When I make out a menu with my significant other, as I do once a week, I am not the least bit interested in the long term interests of my genes. I am interested in staying healthy as long as I can and in enjoying every bite. What I want is not mere life, to use Aristotle's distinction, but the good life.

Confusing evolutionary explanations of our evolved dispositions with moral imperatives concerning our behaviors is constant in discussions of human evolution. It is one of the chief obstacles to reading evolutionary biology clearly. It is especially bad when it comes out of the mouth of an evolutionary biologist.

Daniel Lieberman, professor of human evolutionary biology at Harvard, has written a dumb and pernicious essay for the New York Times. He prostitutes and confuses his calling for the sake of defending New York Mayor Bloomberg's crusade against big gulp soft drinks.

Much of Lieberman's essay is devoted to an uncontroversial explanation for why modern humans have trouble keeping the weight off. For almost all of our history on this earth, human beings lived like other animals: close to the margin. Our ancestors survived long enough to become ancestors because they craved foods that promoted their survival. The most valuable of those foods were rare enough in what we call the environment of evolutionary adaptation. Now, due to technology and human appetites, they are abundant. This is very sudden in evolutionary terms and that presents us with some problems.

Obesity's fundamental cause is long-term energy imbalance — ingesting more calories than you spend over weeks, months and years. Of the many contributors to energy imbalance today, plentiful sugar may be the worst.

Since sugar is a basic form of energy in food, a sweet tooth was adaptive in ancient times, when food was limited. However, excessive sugar in the bloodstream is toxic, so our bodies also evolved to rapidly convert digested sugar in the bloodstream into fat. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors needed plenty of fat — more than other primates — to be active during periods of food scarcity and still pay for large, expensive brains and costly reproductive strategies (hunter-gatherer mothers could pump out babies twice as fast as their chimpanzee cousins).

Simply put, humans evolved to crave sugar, store it and then use it. For millions of years, our cravings and digestive systems were exquisitely balanced because sugar was rare. Apart from honey, most of the foods our hunter-gatherer ancestors ate were no sweeter than a carrot. The invention of farming made starchy foods more abundant, but it wasn't until very recently that technology made pure sugar bountiful.

That is a good explanation for why a lot of us have weight problems. So what should "we" do about it? Lieberman considers three options. One is to do nothing and hope that science can cure us. Another is to trust to public education, which Lieberman tells us isn't very effective. Apparently people don't behave the way he wants them to behave after he has finished admonishing them. Here's the third:

The final option is to collectively restore our diets to a more natural state through regulations. Until recently, all humans had no choice but to eat a healthy diet with modest portions of food that were low in sugar, saturated fat and salt, but high in fiber. They also had no choice but to walk and sometimes run an average of 5 to 10 miles a day. Mr. Bloomberg's paternalistic plan is not an aberrant form of coercion but a very small step toward restoring a natural part of our environment.

You have to love that term "final option." Lieberman wants government to "restore our diets to a more natural state through regulations." There are so many things wrong with this that I hardly know where to begin. The state of nature may have been blessedly free of obesity, but it is hardly something that any rational person would wish to restore. We live in the first period in human history where more people suffer from obesity than from malnutrition. These are the kinds of problems one should have.

Lieberman apparently thinks that "Mr. Bloomberg's paternalistic plan is a non-aberrant form of coercion," which means that he is not the least bit opposed to coercion. He also lets a rather larger cat out of his bag. If Bloomberg can forbid individuals from purchasing soft drinks, on the basis of this argument, he can also require them to "walk and sometimes run an average of 5 to 10 miles a day." Perhaps New York's finest on horseback with pellet guns would do the trick. This is totalitarian thinking.

Our love for sugar and fat are evolved dispositions. So are our frequent desires to tell other people what to do and our bristling when someone tells us what to do. No history of sugar consumption can tell us that the governor of New York should decide what a guy in line at a taco stand should order. The balance between liberty and public order is far more important than the average weight of New Yorkers and it turns on rather different considerations.

I find Lieberman's essay offensive for two reasons. One is that how much Dr. Pepper I drink is none of his damn business. He is an enemy of liberty. The other is that he prostitutes good science in order make my diet and everyone else's his business. He is one in a long line of rascals who have exploited good science to justify appalling political agendas.

A Falsehood Wrapped in a Fallacy

Any doubts about the President's campaign were resolved today by his speech in Cleveland. It was advertised as a major address on the economy and, less explicitly, as a reboot for the campaign after a really bad no good stretch. Anyone who has been paying attention over the last three years had good reason to be skeptical. The skepticism was warranted.

You would expect conservatives to be unreceptive and you would not have been disappointed. Charles Krauthammer called it a rehash on Fox. John Hinderaker at Powerline offers a devastating analysis of the speech.

If the speech was to do any good at all, campaign wise, it should surely have impressed sympathetic figures in the press. It doesn't look like it did. Hunter Walker, who blogs for the New York Observer at Politicker, scoops up some Tweets from MSNBC and ABC. Here is one from Devin Dwyer at ABC:

Obama speech in Ohio felt more lecture or courtroom arg than rally. He streamlined pitch, imbued urgency, said voters will break stalemate.

Across the board, commenters complained about the length of the speech. Jonathan Alter said on air that it was one of the worst speeches he had heard Obama make. Here's his Tweet:

Just cheerleading BO doesn't help him. He needs a sharper, more cogent message with some memorable lines. I ain't walking my criticism back.

For a more analytical approach from someone who had high hopes for President Obama's speech on the economy, here is Dana Milbank at the WaPo.

I had high hopes for President Obama's speech on the economy. But instead of going to Ohio on Thursday with a compelling plan for the future, the president gave Americans a falsehood wrapped in a fallacy.

The falsehood is that he has been serious about cutting government spending. The fallacy is that this election will be some sort of referendum that will break the logjam in Washington.

A "falsehood wrapped in a fallacy" is not the sort of thing that a sympathizer hopes for in a President's speech. As for the fallacy, here is the sweet spot in Milbank's report:

No scenario shows either party with a chance of amassing a solid governing majority of the sort Obama had when he took office. The way to break the stalemate is through compromise, not conquest.

What Milbank doesn't elaborate on, but I will, is the fact that the President had a very unusual opportunity to fix the nation's fiscal problems in this first two years in office. He was in the White House and his party controlled both houses of Congress with a filibuster proof majority in the Senate. Mr. Obama and his supporters like to blame the Republican opposition for his many failures, but how much did he accomplish when the Republicans were powerless? They spent all their time and advantages on a healthcare plan that a vast majority of the public now despises. What they didn't do was to address the more serious fiscal and economic problems.

I haven't checked to see if it's even mathematically possible for the Republicans to win a filibuster proof majority in the Senate. If such a thing could happen, would the Republicans do better than the Democrats did? I have my doubts. What we do know for certainty is that Democratic control of the Federal Government is not the solution to our problems.

As for the falsehood:

Despite his claim that "both parties have laid out their policies on the table," Obama has made no serious proposal to fix the runaway entitlement programs that threaten to swamp the government's finances…

Nothing in Obama's speech came close to a proposal to fix the debt problem; he dealt with that only at the end of the speech — largely by complaining about Republicans' refusal to consider higher taxes on the wealthy.

Obama alleged, correctly, that Republicans' refusal to countenance tax increases scuttled the Bowles-Simpson plan and the Senate's Gang of Six plan. He argued, also correctly, that Republicans' refusal to budge on taxes is "the biggest source of gridlock in Washington today." He's on solid ground, too, in saying Republicans would end Medicare as we know it.

But none of that is going to help Obama, because he hasn't come up with a viable alternative.

I think it is false to blame Republicans for the failure of Bowles-Simpson. Obama let the plan die without ever seriously defending it or trying to build a consensus for it in Congress. I think it is true that the Republican opposition to tax increases will sooner or later have to relax if the problem is going to be solved. If it is true that the Republicans would end Medicare as we know it, it is equally true that the Democrats have no plan to save it. Milbank agrees with Krauthammer that the speech was a "rehash".

The President's speech looks to be another failure at a moment when a success was desperately needed. Its length alone was an unforced error. As for substance, what could he have done differently? His record is dreadful and he has no plans for the future. What orator could have risen to that challenge?

Obama is Losing

My election Shaman paid me a surprise visit today. He was standing just outside my front door as I retrieved the mail. He rattled his beaded stick a couple of times and then said: "Focus on the cost!" He then vanished in a puff of blue smoke, leaving behind only a damp bar napkin with some smudged charts scribbled on it and a few peanut shells clinging to its corners.

I thought at first that he might have been talking about campaign finance or the pension plans in San Jose. After reflection, I am pretty sure he was talking about Jay Cost.

At this point in the election cycle, we have two kinds of information. One is indirect: how the economy is doing, how the campaign organizations are performing, etc. Those sorts of indicators are obviously grim for the Obama campaign. Obama is running against the worst economy any incumbent has suffered in a very long time. His campaign got off to as bad a start as ever I have seen.

The other is direct and includes information about how the voters are actually lining up. Here the news is not so bad on the surface. Obama is running about even with Romney and has leads in some key states like Pennsylvania. There are, however, a lot of cracks appearing in the ice. Gallup notes this:

Gallup Daily tracking indicates Barack Obama is receiving less support in the 2012 presidential election from some of the white subgroups that gave him the strongest support in 2008. These include non-Hispanic white registered voters who are 18 to 29 years old, female postgrads, and the nonreligious, among others.

Support among non-Hispanic whites has declined up and down and across the board, with the largest fall registered among younger voters.

And then there is some ominous news from North Carolina. A PPP poll finds that Obama continues to lose support among African Americans in the Tarheel state. From Business Insider:

The poll finds that Mitt Romney would get 20 percent of the African-American vote if the election were held today, compared with 76 percent for Obama. Overall, Romney has a 48 percent to 46 percent lead on Obama in the crucial swing state.

Obama received 95 percent of the support from African-Americans in North Carolina in the 2008 election, compared with just 5 percent for Republican nominee John McCain.

Not good. Now for my Election Shaman's advice, I look to the Cost. Jay Cost is the best election analyst currently writing. His only competition is Nate Silver. I would like to consult Silver more often, but the New York Times won't let me. Cost considers the polls that the MSM reads as an electoral advantage for Obama. Here is the money quote:

The president is under 50 percent in most swing state polling averages. It's not an ironclad rule that Obama cannot rise in the polls, but common sense suggests that it will be tough. He's been the president for three years – if you're not inclined to vote for him now, what will five months of a campaign do?

It's worth noting as well that most of these polls show the president getting roughly his job approval, which is all we should expect him to receive in the general election (maybe a little less). And his job approval rating has consistently been under 50 percent for two-and-a-half years.

Again, not good. It's hard for an incumbent to rise much above his polling numbers, for reasons that Cost mentions. Short of a surge for Obama due to some unforeseen event (war with Russia or Mars) or some calamitous collapse of the Romney campaign, what would one look for?

In a more recent post, Cost considers the larger dynamics. Presidential elections are determined by three things: Democratic turnout, Republican turnout, and which way the swing voters swing. In the four elections between 1996 and 2008, Democrats comprised a larger percentage of the turnout than Republicans. In 2000, the advantage was 39/45%. Bush 43 lost the popular vote but won in the Electoral College. In 2004, the turnout tied at 37% each, and Bush won both the popular and electoral vote. In 2008, the Democratic advantage was 39/32%, and Obama won both easily.

What about independents?

Independents do not approve of President Obama. According to the Gallup poll, the president has pulled in just 43 percent support from independents over the last month, and just 36 percent of "pure independents," i.e., those with no ties at all to either party. Worse, as this analysis from Alan Abramowitz suggests, the swing vote shows no signs of warming up to the president any time soon. Indeed, according to the Gallup poll, the president has not been above 50 percent with independents since November 2009.

Cost estimates that if Barack Obama had won only 43% of independents in 2008, his popular vote margin would have been a mere four tenths of one percent instead of a healthy four percent. So if:

1. Obama really does lose almost 60% of the independent voters in November and
2. Democrats turn out in numbers similar to 2008 and
3. Republican turnout remains at 2008 levels,

then the most Obama can hope for is to win by a squeaker. Another way to put that is that the election would be a tossup and I will be waiting for returns at four in the morning.

The trouble for the Obama campaign is that only the first of those possibilities is likely. Does anyone think that Democrats will be as enthusiastic about Obama this time around as they were last time? All the evidence suggests that Republicans are more energized than ever. Rasmussen, as Cost notes, has a sterling record when it comes to predicting the partisan turnout in Presidential elections. Rasmussen has the Republicans enjoying a consistent advantage in party identification.

I don't make predictions very often. My Election Shaman does, but he isn't ready yet. He does direct us toward Cost, who concludes this way:

All of this suggests that it is the Republican base vote that is more energized than its Democratic counterpart, at least at the moment. Hence Team Obama's continued efforts to curry favor with the vast array of interests that comprise the core Democratic vote.

If that holds up over the next five months, and independents do not warm up to the president, Obama is going to lose. It won't be a 1980- or 1984-style blowout, but it will look similar to what we saw in 1988 and 2008. That's what happens with a lukewarm party base and broad opposition from independent voters.

If all this is correct, the election is Romney's to lose.

The Children of Men & of Women

Do children raised by a same sex couple turn out better or worse as adults compared to children raised by both their biological parents? That's obviously a question with important implications for gay adoption and for gay marriage. It is just as obviously a question with heavy political freight.

Sociologist Mark Regnerus published a study in Social Science Research that attempted to improve upon previous answers to the question by expanding sample size and refining methodology. Here is Charles C. W. Cooke's summary of the result from the National Review.

Ultimately, Mark Regnerus set out to answer the question of whether children who have parents in a same-sex relationship experience disadvantages when compared with children raised by their biological, married parents. The answer, contra the zeitgeist, appears to be a resounding yes. Children with a parent in a same-sex relationship "underperform" in almost every category. Some of these differences may be relatively benign — whether one voted in the last presidential election, for example — but most are decidedly not.

One deficit is particularly worrying: Less than 2 percent of children from intact, biological families reported experiencing sexual abuse of some nature, but that figure for children of same-sex couples is 23 percent. Similarly disturbing is that 14 percent of children from same-sex couples have spent some time in foster care, compared with around 2 percent of the American population at large. Arrest, drug experimentation, and unemployment rates were all higher among children from same-sex families.

Social Conservatives will surely see that answer as a vindication. It is far from clear, however, what this result means. As is the case with many important findings in social science, where the data is good it is often difficult to determine precisely what question has been answered.

William Saletan at Slate objects that the sample was skewed.

The survey went on to ask: "From when you were born until age 18 … did either of your parents ever have a romantic relationship with someone of the same sex?" If the respondent said yes, he was put in the "gay father" (GF) or "lesbian mother" (LM) category, regardless of subsequent answers. But if he said no, a later question about the relationship between "your biological parents" was used to classify him as the product of an "intact biological family" (IBF) or of an "adopted," "divorced," "stepfamily," or "single-parent" household. In other words, broken families were excluded from the IBF category but included in the GF and LM categories.

But there is an obvious reason for that parsing of the sample. Again from Cooke:

The first thing that Regnerus found is that gay households with children are located in the same geographical areas as the households of straight couples raising kids. Contrary to stereotypes, there is no real concentration of children where gays tend to live en masse. For example, as there are few children in San Francisco's households overall, there are also few children living with gays in San Francisco. In fact, Georgia is the state that has the most children living with same-sex couples. Despite being allegedly less gay-friendly, Middle America is very well represented in the gay-couple-with-child demographic. And consistent with general trends, Latino gay couples have more children than do white gay couples.

Regnerus found that children in the study rarely spent their entire childhoods in the households of their gay parent and partner. Only two of the 175 subjects who reported having a mother in a lesbian relationship spent their whole childhood with the couple, and no children studied spent their entire childhood with two gay males. The numbers drop off pretty sharply as time progressed, too: For example, 57 percent of children spent more than four months with lesbian parents, but only 23 percent spent more than three years.

There are just very few examples of children raised from infancy in stable, single parent households, far too few to generalize from. Again from Saletan:

What the study shows, then, is that kids from broken homes headed by gay people develop the same problems as kids from broken homes headed by straight people. But that finding isn't meaningless. It tells us something important: We need fewer broken homes among gays, just as we do among straights. We need to study Regnerus' sample and fix the mistakes we made 20 or 40 years ago. No more sham heterosexual marriages. No more post-parenthood self-discoveries. No more deceptions. No more affairs. And no more polarization between homosexuality and marriage. Gay parents owe their kids the same stability as straight parents. That means less talk about marriage as a right, and more about marriage as an expectation.

Here is how Cooke put it.

Regnerus's study is a success insofar as it answers the fundamental question of whether children raised by same-sex couples end up differently: Clearly they do, and it does not require a conservative viewpoint to see that "differently" very often means "worse." It is debatable, though, whether this is an indictment of same-sex households or of instability. Indeed, the major takeaway from the report is less an indictment that same-sex households are a negative thing and more an affirmation that intact, biological households are a positive thing. Put simply, if you want to give your children the best start in life, you should have children inside of wedlock and stay together for the duration. But then, we already knew that.

What the study shows is that a stable marriage is the best arrangement for raising children. Saletan thinks that this is a strong argument for legal gay marriage. This strikes me as problematic. There are some obvious reasons why so many persons surveyed come from broken homes. Biologically heterosexual couples can be biologically productive, even if one of the parents is gay; same sex couples cannot. Large gay communities are found in places like San Francisco, where nobody is having children. It is unclear how we will ever get enough same sex couples, married with children, to make a fair sample.

Saletan is dead spot on when he says "Gay parents owe their kids the same stability as straight parents. That means less talk about marriage as a right, and more about marriage as an expectation." As I have argued frequently here, that is the problem with the gay marriage debate. Marriage is not about rights, it's about obligations. So long as that is understood, I am in favor of legal same sex marriage. As far as adoption and custody are concerned, it is really all about the children.

Obama: Doctor to the World Economy

Postmortems of Obama's Friday press conference have been plentiful on the web and the previous descriptor is unusually appropriate. Aside from his disastrous gaff, the entire performance impressed no one positively. Ed Rogers at the WaPo is scathing.

If you are president of the United States and you don't have anything to say, don't have a press conference to say it. If you're the president of the United States and by Thursday it's widely believed you've had one of the worst weeks of your presidency, take Friday off, and specifically avoid having a press conference.

Anytime you are president and you're speaking in public at an ill-timed press conference after a bad week, try to have something to say, and do a good job in saying it. I watched the whole thing, but it's not easy to think of one useful thing that he had to say. And what he said, he said very poorly. Was it just me, or did the president seem a little dazed and confused? He should have had a cup of coffee before the press conference.

And one more thing that's a pet peeve. The president says "uhhh" too much

Wow. No content, poor delivery, and a bearing suggesting lack of sleep or maybe a few of Rick Perry's painkillers add up to a pretty dreadful review. Coming at a moment when the all the President's persons surely were aware of his need to firm up, this suggests a campaign in very bad shape.

It doesn't get much better when we look to a review that tries to rescue the President. William Saletan at Slate points out that Mr. Obama points out that the President didn't really focus on the US economy in his press conference on the US economy. Instead, he blamed America's problems on Europe and Asia and Congress (meaning: Republicans). So there was content in the speech. The content was that pretty much everyone on the planet except Obama is to blame. Did I mention that Saletan is defending the President?

Saletan points out that Obama presented himself as doctor to the world economy.

Obama didn't just play the victim. He played doctor. He counseled Greece, Germany, and Spain. He urged Europeans to stabilize their banks, focus on growth, and gradually balance their books. He argued that the capital requirements he imposed on U.S. banks after the 2008 economic crisis would allow our financial system to "absorb some of the shocks that might come from across the Atlantic." And he encouraged Europe to adopt similar policies. "What we've tried to do," he concluded, "is to be constructive, to not frame this as us scolding them or telling them what to do, but to give them advice in part based on our experiences here in having stabilized a financial situation effectively."

Leave aside the questions of how well the domestic patient is responding to Dr. Obama's prescriptions and whether he has any standing to lecture any foreign nation about fiscal management. The Doctor Obama meme, if it could somehow be retailed, might restore a little of that '08 magic. The best odds Saletan can come up with are 50/50.

Will it work? Maybe. I can think of two presidents who tried to answer a bad economy by running for re-election as leader of the free world. One was George W. Bush. The other was his dad.

In fact, the only problem with the Doctor Obama meme is that it is either two years too late or seven months too early. The argument that divides politicians and economists across the globe may be described simply as austerity vs. stimulus. Those favoring austerity argue that what got us into this fix was indulgent over spending and over borrowing, so the only solution is to tighten the fiscal belts. Those favoring stimulus argue that austerity is self-defeating in the short run, as it depresses economic growth and so prolongs the slump.

Put that way, stimulus looks to have the stronger case. There are, however, a couple of tragic flaws. Stimulus requires that you have resources to inject. That in turn requires either strong domestic reserves or someone else to borrow a lot of cash from. With China and India failing, the US is now benefitting from its status as the last non-German safe place to put your money.

That leads us to the second tragic flaw. The US is borrowing heavily and that means borrowing against its own future. The CBO recently warned us, once again, that the fiscal trajectory of the federal treasury is headed toward disaster. Borrowing heavily now to stimulate the economy means accelerating toward the precipice. It also increases the risk that global financial markets will lose confidence in their last, best hope. If that happens, the world financial system will collapse. What's a doctor to do?

An answer is offered by Keith Hennessey, author of the best economics blog in the business. Hennessey presents the austerity/stimulus debate in a dialogue between "Lefty" and "Righty". At the risk of a spoiler, Righty argues that the two positions are not mutually exclusive.

I want to fix our government's unsustainable borrowing path by making big changes to medium and long-term government spending, especially in the big 3 entitlements. In any conceivable reform those changes don't even begin for a few years, and once they do, the spending "cuts," as you call them, phase in gradually over time. I propose policy changes that have no effect for the next few years, then a small effect for a few years. It then grows gradually over time to have huge long-term effects.

Our long term fiscal problem is due to programs that a structured so they tend automatically toward national insolvency. A President and a Congress could restructure them. That would not require any austerity right now nor would it threaten people on the verge of retirement. Let the changes begin five years down the road, or as long as you think it will take for the economy to recover. If you wonder whether anyone will trust future promises from Congress, I reply that the only solution to structural insolvency is structural solvency.

If we did this, it would reassure world capital markets and give the President and Congress more flexibility in dealing with the current dilemma. If you really believe that fiscal responsibility is in order, just not right now, you would be proposing something like this right now. If you aren't for the latter then you are lying about the former.

Dr. Obama might have proposed something like this two years ago, or better yet four years ago. He did not. He certainly won't do so now, and that probably means that the surgical gown is destined for the duster. Mitt Romney can't propose it. The airwaves would be flush with clips of him pushing Grandma off the edge. Only the next President can hope to do so. That might be the good news and it might be the bad news.

The Leaky Cauldron Administration

It has been over two years since I first asked myself this question: how long can the bad news for Obama go on? I now think that the answer is: until November, and then maybe for four more years. It is still quite possible that Obama will win reelection, but it is becoming increasingly likely that it will be in spite of himself.

His most recent gaffthat the "private sector's doing fine,"sits quite comfortably on the shelf next to his campaign's retired memes. Once again, he spent more time explaining and walking back his comments than he did in making thema sure sign of an unforced error.

What bubbled up into the President's consciousness and then made a dash for his lips is a Krugman theme: we are in this pickle only because of a calamitous fall in public spending by the state governments. There is an argument to be made there, but not the sort that one can make in front of reporters. Does the President really want to say what Krugman apparently thinks: that what is wrong with the U.S. is that the states can't run deficits the way members of the European Community can? What he has to say is that he really didn't mean to say what he did say and believed.

Just in time comes a second disaster, which I will call the Leaky Cauldron scandal. Both the House and Senate Intelligence Committees are boiling made about leaks to the press. A treasure trove of details about American and Israeli intelligence operations have been printed in the New York Times. Republicans accuse the Administration of leaking the information for political gain. Regardless of the motive, there seems little doubt that the leaks come from the White House. The NYTs says that the White House wrote off on the final articles. Somebody is lying. 

Prominent Democrats on both committees, including Senate Committee Chair Dianne Feinstein are pushing for an investigation. Attorney General Holder has appointed to prosecutors to investigate, though they are not "special". That means he can control them.

Either the Administration leaked this information intentionally, or it leaked it carelessly, or the New York Times has moles in the White House. Whichever it is, it doesn't make the White House look like a trustworthy custodian of sensitive information. That is a scandal.

Finally, I note the recent CBS/New York Times poll on ObamaCare.

A new CBS News/New York Times poll reveals that nearly seven in ten Americans want the Supreme Court to overturn either all or President Obama's health care law or strike down just the individual mandate.

In the poll released on Thursday, 41 percent of those polled think Mr. Obama's health care law should be overturned completely by the Supreme Court, with another 27 percent of respondents saying they want the court to keep the law but overturn the mandate.

Nearly one-quarter - twenty-four percent - of respondents want the entire law upheld. The margin of error is three percentage points.

Okay. So the President's signature piece of legislation, the one that he spent the most time and political capital on, the one that was not in any sense forced by events, is supported by "nearly one-quarter" of the people polled. Nearly 70% want the Court to strike it down in whole or in part. So much for the view that the Court will act in defiance of American Democracy if it does strike ObamaCare down.

Allow me to review. The President cannot manage to speak coherently about the economy without shooting himself in the foot. His Administration can't seem to conduct covert operations without informing the whole world about what it is doing. His one big piece of legislation is firmly supported by twenty-four percent of the people. Maybe this is all just bad luck. President Obama continues to blame previous Administrations and Europe for our misfortunes. Common sense suggests that, when the team keeps blowing it at every stage of the game, the solution is to fire the coach.

New Theme

I suppose I don't have to tell any returning readers (there are such people!) that I have changed the look of the blog. It was always pretty boring and I never really liked the old banner. I am not at all certain I will stick with this one, but I invite comments.

I also cleaned up the links section and I intend to add a few more. I got rid of the old testimonials and stuff, though I may restore them in some form.

The truth of the matter is that I never took the time out to master TypePad. It was just too easy to post when I wanted to.

Anyway, this will do for a while.

Daily Show on Wisconsin

 

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

 

Public Sector Unions Curbed in California

This has been a very bad year for public employee unions. Scott Walker's victory Tuesday was the knockout, to be sure; however, it is easy to forget that the Wisconsin unions couldn't even get their candidate nominated by the Democrats.

Public sector unions suffered also suffered defeats in two cities in California Tuesday. [hat tip to David Harsanyi] On the ballot in San Diego and San Jose were propositions that limit public sector pensions, bringing them in line with private sector pensions, and allowing a freeze on benefit increases during periods of fiscal emergency. The measures passed in both places, by two-thirds and seventy percent margins respectively. It is easy to explain why San Diego and San Jose did so. From the AP:

Supporters in both cities relied on a simple pitch: Benefits beyond what most voters receive working at private companies are draining city coffers.

San Diego's independent budget analyst estimated savings of nearly $1 billion over 30 years. Reed estimates San Jose's plan will save up to $180 million a year.

San Diego's payments to the city's retirement fund soared from $43 million in 1999 to $231.2 million this year, equal to 20 percent of the city's general fund budget, which pays for day-to-day operations.

As the pension payments grew, San Diego's 1.3 million residents saw roads deteriorate and libraries cut hours. For a while, some fire stations had to share engines and trucks. The city has cut its workforce 14 percent since 2005.

San Jose's pension payments jumped from $73 million in 2001 to $245 million this year, equal to 27 percent of its general fund budget. Voters there approved construction bonds at the beginning of the last decade, but four new libraries and a police station have never opened because the city cannot afford to operate them. The city of 960,000 cut its workforce 27 percent over the last 10 years.

San Diego Councilman Carl DeMaio staked his mayoral bid on the pension measure, using fiery rhetoric to criticize public employee unions. He advanced to a November runoff in Tuesday's election.

The problem was elementary. Public sector benefits were putting the squeezing on all other municipal spending. That was resulting not only in a deterioration of physical infrastructure and services. It was also costing jobs. The public workforce was cut in San Diego. Unopened libraries and police stations in San Jose, besides being an enormous waste of money, are empty of public employees.

Any doubt that the matter might have been resolved by negotiation with responsible unions may be resolved by this quote from the Mercury News:

Yolanda Cruz, president of the city's largest union, called the measure "an unfortunate way to spend taxpayer money fighting it in court because we will definitely take it there. Taxpayer money would be better used getting services back."

I am inclined to agree with Walter Russell Mead that the blue state model (buying the support of public unions by lavishly dishing out benefits during boom times that can't be cut when the boom is over) is a model with a great future behind it. It will end either by political means, as seems to be happening in San Diego, San Jose, and Wisconsin, or it will end as a result of very painful economic events. One would be better than the other.

Hitler Finds Out That Scott Walker Won The Recall Election

Scott Walker & Barack Obama

Governor Scott Walker invested a great deal of courage in his gubernatorial campaign and in what he did after he was elected. Today he enjoyed an early payout. He became the first governor in U.S. history to survive a recall election. He improved his margin of victory over his earlier match against Tom Barrett from 5% to what looks to be 8%.

I haven't seen any good turnout numbers, but they look to be extraordinarily high. All the stops were pulled out on this one by both sides and the result was that Walker improved his numbers in most of Wisconsin's counties. It is possible that Democratic enthusiasm was depressed by the nomination of Barrett over Kathleen Falk, the Union favorite, and by Barrett's decision to downplay the union angle. But that is just another way to say that the opposition to Walker's agenda was a loser. Today's election is as vivid a mandate for Walker's policies as representative democracy ever supplies.

The decision to mount a recall challenge to Governor Walker wasn't stupid, it was just disastrous. When it was made, the radicals and public unions in Wisconsin felt the wind at their backs. If they could have brought Walker down, that would have been a major victory in Wisconsin and nationally. It was a gamble. Sometimes gambles go bad. Ask Napoleon.

It has damaged Barack Obama in two ways. One is that he declined to appear in Wisconsin on Barrett's behalf. It is not hard to reconstruct his campaign's thinking. They thought Barrett was going to lose and they didn't want to be involved in a loss. That just reinforces the view that he is all spreadsheet and no production. If he had gone to Madison he would at least have shown that he had heart, that the core of his party could count on him to fight for them to the end. They obviously cannot.

It is possible that Barrett didn't want Obama to come to Madison. His appearance might have energized the opposition as much or more than it energized the anti-Walker forces. Okay. That indicates the second problem that Walker's victory poses for Obama. The Republicans have been winning every statewide election in Wisconsin since 2010. Their coalition coalesced today stronger than ever. Will it evaporate before November? Walker raised a lot more money that Barrett. Some of that money was spent on building a get out the vote operation that will be in place come November.

The President's reelection team has been counting Wisconsin as a given. Apparently it is not. That means that the President will have to spend time and money trying to win the state back. How exactly does he do that if he was afraid to show up in the state in June? Let's put it this way: Obama has to hope that Mitt Romney is a lot less palatable to Wisconsin voters than Scott Walker was. You see the problem.

ps.  It looks as if the Republicans won all of the Wisconsin State Senate Recall elections as well.  Not a bad day, that. 

I take it back. 

Walker Wins 2 Live Blogging

9:00p At this hour MSNBC and Fox News have both called the Wisconsin recall election in favor of Governor Scott Walker and his Lt. Governor, Rebecca Kleefisch.

9:15p The Huffington Post (Pollster) site has the best monitor I have seen. In addition to coloring the counties, there is a page comparing Walker's results now with the 2010 results. Walker seems to be improving his results in most of the counties.

9:30p With 50% of the precincts reporting, Walker is leading Barrett by 17%. I assume that margin will decline as urban numbers come in, but it does seem likely that Walker will improve his results over 2010.

Blasts from the Past. Here are some comments from my cherished interlocutors, from a post of August 12^th, 2011.

Donald Pay: "Walker's recall is guaranteed."

Bill Fleming: "I think Walker is toast, KB."

Ken Blanchard: "Donald: it seems like only yesterday that you were assuring us that Feingold's reelection was guaranteed."

9:45p Once again, exit polling seems to have failed miserably. The exit polls shot a ray of hope toward the anti-Walker coalition in the first hour after the real polls closed, showing a 50/50 outcome. This is very unfortunate for both professional and amateur political nerds, for they are the only information we have on the breakdown of voters. It seems pretty clear that we can't rely on anything these polls tell us.

10:00p With 71% of the precincts reporting, Walker's lead is about 15%. About a third of the results for Milwaukee and Dane counties are in, with Barrett leading but well below his 2010 totals.

10:20 Barrett just conceded. Walker's lead is down to 10% with 80% reporting.

10:30 Ann Althouse points out an interesting comparison: this map, showing which way the counties went in the State Supreme Court and this one, showing the current county results from today. Wisconsin got a lot redder.

11:05 with over 90% of the districts reporting, Walker is holding a lead of about 9%. I am closing down the live blogging and going on to do a wrap-up post.

Walker Wins Wisconsin

At this hour MSNBC and Fox News have both called the Wisconsin recall election in favor of Governor Scott Walker and his Lt. Governor, Rebecca Kleefisch.

 

Recalls & Scandals in Wisconsin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Man Who Wasn’t There 4

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That would be my view.

Obama’s Economic Albatross

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

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

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

Who wins that one?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is a depression? When you lose your job.

What is a recovery? When Obama loses his job.