South Dakota Politics

Election 2012 Wishful Thinking Edition

President Obama is leading Mitt Romney in every poll listed at Real Clear Politics. Even Rasmussen puts Obama two points ahead. If those polls are accurate, there won't be much point in coloring in an Electoral College map. An Obama win by four or five points nationally (his current RCP average) means that he is going to sweep most of the battleground states.

The only bad news for Obama in those polls is that his numbers remain stubbornly at or below 50% in all of them. Republicans can take a quantum of solace in that, but to think that this looks like anything but losing is wishful thinking.

I don't mind thinking wishfully, as long as I know that that is what I am doing. In that spirit, I will point out something that a lot of Republicans are pinning their hopes for change on right now. Poll after poll (including the Fox News polls) is showing samples of Democrats that match or exceed that party's turnout advantage in 2008. That was an unusually large advantage, historically. It seems unrealistic to assume that it will be repeated this year and nutty to think that it will be exceeded.

Consider the polls in battlegroundzero Ohio. An Ohio Newspaper poll gave Obama a five point lead over Romney. That was based on a sampling that was 48% Democrat, 42% Republican, and 10% Independent. Those are whacky numbers. Independents will make up a much larger share of the vote. What is the significance of that? As the Columbus dispatch puts it:

The poll indicates that Democrats are slightly more likely to vote than Republicans are this year, and Obama supporters are more enthusiastic about the election than Romney backers are. However, Romney is winning independents by a large margin.

If Ohio Democrats really are only "slightly more likely to vote than Republicans" and independents really are breaking for Romney two to one (which is apparently what the poll showed), then Romney is going to win Ohio.

Nothing in any poll is as solid as actual votes cast. We can't count the votes yet, but early voting in Ohio and elsewhere does provide some information. In Ohio we can count absentee ballots cast in 2008 with ballot requests in 2012. Here is Third Base Politics, an Ohio blog:

In 2008, total early votes cast in Ohio totaled 1,023,330. 34% of those were Democrats, 20% were Republicans, and the rest were independents or other parties. Democrats had a 14-point advantage.

So far this year, there have been 528,197 applications sent in for absentee ballots. The party breakdown at this point is 29% Democrats and 23% Repulicans. The difference is down to 6 points. For the Ohio Democratic Party who was counting on matching their early voting performance from 4 years ago, that's very bad news.

Let's look at the three largest counties.

In Cuyahoga, the dropoff isn't so bad for them. Their 2008 advantage of 37 points is down to 30. But the news is really bad in Franklin County. Their 5-point advantage from 2008 has actually reversed. So far, Republicans ballot apps outnumber Dems by 5. And in Hamilton County, the Republican advantage of 7 points from 2008 has increased to 14 points.

If those numbers are an accurate indication of how Ohio is going, the state looks to be a much bigger challenge for Obama than the polls indicate.

Another indicator that is more solid than opinion polls is voter registration. Here again the evidence seems at odds with the assumptions of pollsters. From Fox News:

Voter registration in the Buckeye State is down by 490,000 people from four years ago. Of that reduction, 44 percent is in Cleveland and surrounding Cuyahoga County, where Democrats outnumber Republicans more than two to one.

This just doesn't look like the surging Democratic electorate that the national polls are counting on. Is Ohio unique? Not so much.

Ohio is not alone. An August study by the left-leaning think tank Third Way showed that the Democratic voter registration decline in eight key swing states outnumbered the Republican decline by a 10-to-one ratio. In Florida, Democratic registration is down 4.9 percent, in Iowa down 9.5 percent. And in New Hampshire, it's down 19.7 percent…

The Third Way study, which was conducted in August, indicates the Democrats' drop in registered voters coincides with a gain in independent voters.

Both parties have seen a decline in voter registration in favor of independents. We have seen it in South Dakota, where the decline in Democratic registration has been much worse than that of Republicans. Apparently this is a trend. And if independents are really breaking Republican…

The candidate who is ahead in the polls usually wins. It is wishful thinking for a Republican to assume that the opposite will happen. It is responsible for a political scientist to point out that previously reliable indicators are pointing in opposite directions. At this point I am sure of only one thing. If Romney wins, Democrats will say that he stole the election.

Rationalism

I am by inclination a rationalist. That is to say that I tend to side with rationalists in their recent (last 500 years) argument with empiricists. Empiricists suppose that all significant knowledge comes from observation. Everything we know we learn from experience. Rationalists acknowledge that reason without observation is largely useless; however, we think that we know a lot of important things, and maybe all the most important things, by reason alone.

For a simple example, get a piece of paper and draw a simple right angle: two rays extending from a common end-point. Draw an arc near the end-point, centered on the end point. Now draw a second arc, also centered on the end-point but further out from the end point. Guess what? The second arc is longer than the first. You might suspect that you have learned this by observation, but that is clearly wrong. What you have drawn on paper are mere symbols of ideas. You probably haven't drawn it at all but merely thought it. You don't have to go out and test what you have learned; you know it a priori.  Always and everywhere, anything you physically construct will obey these rules. 

That this knowledge about angles and arcs is not merely abstract, but governs facts in the empirical world is evident from something we have just explained: how a flyswatter works. Why, you might wonder, is it easier to kill a fly with flyswatter than with your hand? After all, the head of the flyswatter is extended out from your arm, at a greater distance from the object of your affection. Since your hand is closer to the fly, why isn't it easier just to palm the darn thing?

The geometry above provides the answer. When you deploy a flyswatter, your wrist moves over a small arc and the killing surface of the flyswatter head moves through a much larger arc. Since both movements take the same amount of time, the flyswatter head has to be moving much faster than your wrist. That is what rationalists call a necessary truth. Reason now trumps biology. I have no idea how a fly brain works, but I can conclude, with the help of experience, that the "fly!" schema in its brain is faster than my wrist speed but slower than the swatter head speed. The real, observable world is governed by a lot of rationally knowable, a priori truths.

Rationally knowable truths are not limited to geometry; they also are available in economics. If you borrow, say, more than a trillion dollars a year to cover your consumption of wealth, then either you have lenders somewhere able and willing to lend you enormous sums indefinitely, or you are going to have to someday pay that money back, or you will have to default on your loans. Empirical knowledge suggests that the first is unlikely.

If you are going to have to pay back the loans, then either your resources will have to grow sufficiently to cover both the payments and future consumption levels to which you have become accustomed, or you will be poorer in the future because of the borrowing you are doing now. This looks rationally knowable to me. Reason alone can't tell me whether the US economy might grow in the near future at a rate sufficiently robust to cover present borrowing, but you might think that the folks signing off on the borrowing would want to present evidence to that effect. Have they? No. They aren't even thinking about it. That is sheer irresponsibility.

A lot of the left (and a recent commenter on this blog) have argued that austerity is bad during an economic recession. "Austerity" here means trying to bring spending and revenues into balance. They have a case. Austerity surely depresses economic growth and that means less revenue coming in and that makes balancing the books all the more difficult. Perhaps austerity is a self-defeating policy. Yet, if that is true, then what is the alternative? The alternative is to keep borrowing to prop up consumption. That means that there has to be someone to borrow the wealth from, no? Is there sufficient wealth somewhere in the international system, some nation or group of nations that are running a surplus sufficient to cover their own consumption and pay for all the nations that are running deficits?

If something can't go on forever, then it won't. If something can't go on much longer, then it will end before much longer. Those strike me as necessary truths. To ignore them would be irrational.

The Strain in Spain

Having visited Spain this last summer, I have very fond feelings for the place and its people. That makes for an emotional investment in the following story. From Via Meadia:

The euro mess is getting worse again. With Greece seething over the strict austerity measures required as terms of its bail-out, Spain's Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy is hoping that biting the bullet now can keep his government and even his country together. With Spain's interest rates now retesting the six percent level, the alternative to a dramatic and convincing austerity budget in Spain is a new ECB bailout. That would mean a humiliating, Greek-style loss of sovereignty, and cripple Prime Minister Rajoy and his center-right government.

As Walter Russell Mead notes, it isn't merely Rajoy's government that is at stake; it is Spain. Consider this image:

Catalonia is Spain's most productive region and also its most indebted. The Catalonians have had a very long history of nationalist sentiment and it may seem to them now that they are contributing more to Spain than Spain is contributing to them. Unfortunately for Catalonia, they are deep in the red. Getting out of Spain, if that were possible, would solve neither their problems nor Spain's problem.

The problem is simple. Like most of Europe, Spain and its provinces have been running up debt faster than their economies have grown. There is no easy way out of that. The dream of Catalonian independence like the dream of stimulus spending is only a way of avoiding reality. You can borrow against the future only if the future has something to lend.

The United States is on the same road. While some of our states are fiscally sound (South Dakota) many are not. California and Illinois, to mention two, are fiscal basket cases. The same is true of many of our major cities. The federal government is running deficits of more than a trillion a year. This might be what we should be talking about as we approach a major election. It isn't. We will be forced to face it soon enough.

Someone had to say it. I just didn’t think it would be

Howard Fineman! The editorial director for the Huffington Post has this:

Like his boxing hero Ali, Obama is floating like a butterfly -- essentially untouched -- thus far in his presidential prizefight with Mitt Romney.

And that is not good for anybody: for the country, for the voters, for the political parties or even for Obama and his administration.

What, exactly, does Fineman mean by "untouched"?

Look at the numbers. A year ago, the president's job approval rating was an abysmal 42.1 percent, his disapproval rating at 51.3. Today, his approval rating is 50 percent, his disapproval 46.3 -- an upward swing of more than 12 points…

And of course the president is well ahead on the Electoral College trends.

He has managed to do all of this without having to seriously and substantively defend his first-term failed promises or shortcomings, and without having to say much, if anything. about what, if anything, he might do substantially differently if he is fortunate enough to win again.

Unless I missed it, the president has yet to give a detailed answer to why he has failed to meet or even come close to his promises about reducing the unemployment rate. Saying that the task was harder than he initially thought isn't (or shouldn't be) a convincing explanation.

Fineman provides a long list of obvious and important questions that the President has not had to answer. Those first two are rather important. Besides blaming George W., what went wrong in your first term? Why has unemployment remained so stubbornly high? Why have incomes dropped more in the recovery than in the recession itself? Was there nothing you might have done that would have resulted in a better outcome?

More importantly, is there nothing you might do in the next four years that will work better? While we are on the subject, what exactly do you intend to do with four more years? Does anyone have a clue as to what the President's agenda will be if he does win?

Fineman fixes blame on a number of culprits, three of them being Mitt Romney. Fair enough. He also recognizes that the press shares a lot of the blame.

Obama was such a cool and uplifting story to so many in the media in 2008 that they essentially ceded ground to him that they have yet to reclaim. He ran a tightly controlled message campaign then, and has run an even more tightly controlled White House, with few press conferences and deep access only to those most likely to write positive stories.

Of course, it wasn't just the President's cool or his inspiring story that corrupts the press. It is the fact that they want him to win a lot more than they want answers to any of the questions that Fineman asks.

Fineman's original point is important. It's bad for everyone, including both parties, the next President, and the American people, that so many questions are swept under the rug now. Of course, Fineman himself seems to be in the perfect position to remedy the problem he alerts us to. Surely an editorial director could direct his writers to start doing their jobs. Could he not, starting now, arrange for a series of hard hitting pieces raising just these questions? If the Obama campaign fails to answer, then the HuffPo could bring attention again and again to that silence. Of course he can't do that. If he did, he wouldn't be editorial director for another day. The election still might be close. Obama might not win.

The Myth of Mitt Romney

There are two myths about Mitt Romney that are curious. One is that he is a "really extreme extremist." But in reality, if you look at the entirety of his career, Romney may be the most moderate Republican nominee since Jerry Ford. While Romney has moved to the right over time, Romney, to steal from Jonah Goldberg, speaks conservative as a second language. There is no doubt that he is not a movement conservative. Of course, we hear over and over how the Republicans have been captured by the radicals. There is no doubt the party has moved right over the last three decades. But let's look at all Republican presidential nominees since Reagan. George H.W. Bush was no movement conservative nor was Bob Dole. Let's not forget that Bush I called supply-side economics "voodoo economics" and Dole once joked that a bus full of supply-side economists fell off a cliff, and it was a tragedy because one lived. John McCain, "the maverick," has made a career out of driving conservatives nuts. Only George W. Bush can plausibly be seen as a real movement conservative. But even Bush II signed into law No Child Left Behind, hugely expanding the federal commitment to education, and the Medicare prescription drug benefit, a large new entitlement. This is why conservatives, outside of Bush's tax cuts, were largely tepid towards his domestic policy (and some, like George Will, William Buckley and the entirety of the American Conservative, disliked his foreign policy as well). Romney is well within the tradition of Bush I, Dole and McCain. He is a pragmatic (even squishy) conservative, certainly no ideologue.

Then there is Romney the plutocrat. This is, oddly, the stranger accusation. If elected, Romney would not be the richest president ever. According to Forbes, Romney would be behind (in order, and controlling for inflation) Washington, Jefferson, and Hoover. As Meatloaf said, two out of three ain't bad. So why the envy towards Romney, whose fortune is well short of Washington's? According to Forbes, if John Kennedy would have lived to inherit his father's wealth, it is likely his wealth would have exceeded that of Romney. And of course John Kerry, who just narrowly missed becoming president, is worth about two and a half times what Romney is worth. There is one difference, though. Romney earned nearly every penny he has (you might recall that he gave the entirety of his inheritence from his father to Brigham  Young University). John Kerry inherited or married into almost all of his wealth. Obviously Romney is very wealthy, but the focus on his wealth seems oddly out of proportion. His crime appears to be that he is a Republican who made his money, not a Democrat who inherited it, as did Kerry and the Kennedys.

Also, by almost all accounts, Mitt Romney is an uncommonly decent man. I am not just talking about that fact that he gave about 4x as a high a percentage of his income to charity last year as did Barack Obama. Let's be honest, even though he is going way beyond tithing, he can afford it. But look at all the accounts of his life. He did take the time to go on Mormon mission. The reviews of his time as a Mormon bishop are largely (but not universally) positive. Just look here and here. These news stories depict various examples of a decency and warmness to his fellow man that are striking. How about two examples:

Ted Oparowski, a retired firefighter, and his wife, Pat, a secretary, still praise Mr. Romney for ministering to their 14-year-old son, David, who was dying of cancer three decades ago.       

The boy, upon hearing that Mr. Romney was a lawyer, asked him to help draft a will, so that he might leave something to each of his friends. Mr. Romney pulled out a legal pad, and together they wrote one up. Later, he gave the eulogy at the boy’s funeral....

When Clayton Christensen, a Harvard business professor, and his wife, Christine, felt overwhelmed by church obligations, Mr. Romney showed up unexpectedly at the door. With three young children, Mr. Christensen was in charge of missionary work; his wife ran the relief society, ministering to Boston’s poor.       

“He said, ‘I was just driving home from work, and I had a feeling that I needed to stop by and tell you that God loves you.’ ” Mr. Christensen was so moved, he recalled, that he wept.

This does not count the well told story of Romney personally overseeing the search for the daughter of a Bain Capital employee who had gone missing in New  York. Imagine Mitt Romney going to rave parties showing the young woman's picture. Because that's what Romney did and it worked. And by now many know that Romney and one of his sons literally saved a family from drowning.

 Compare this with Barack Obama.  According to Game Change co-author John Heilemann, "I don’t think [Obama] doesn’t like people. I know he doesn’t like people."  Or take Ryan Lizza of the New Yorker, quoting a Democrat "in the know":

The truth, he added, “is that Obama doesn’t really like very many people.” He  ticked off the names of some of Obama’s longtime friends: the Whitakers, the  Nesbitts, Valerie Jarrett. “And he likes to talk about sports. But other than  that he just doesn’t like very many people.”

I heard a podcast some time ago with the New York Times' David Brooks, an Obama supporter in 2008.  Brooks, who has met Obama many times, says that Obama is the most self-confident man he has ever met and takes it personally if anyone disagrees with him.  And of course Obama famously said:

“I think that I’m a better speechwriter than my speechwriters,” Mr. Obama told Patrick Gaspard, his political director, at the start of the 2008 campaign, according to The New Yorker. “I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I’ll tell you right now that I’m going to think I’m a better political director than my political director.”

Granted, anyone who is president is going to have an ego.  But Obama seems to have an almost pathologically inflated sense of his own awesomeness.  This is a problem because, if I may quote Dirty Harry (not an Obama supporter), "A man's got to know his limitations." As the New York Times reports, "But even those loyal to Mr. Obama say that his quest for excellence can bleed into cockiness and that he tends to overestimate his capabilities." And one can barely imagine Obama engaging in acts of personal warmness and kindness that appear to have defined Mitt Romney's life. 

Of course, if you prefer Mr. Obama's politics, none of this matters.  Likewise with Mr. Romney.  As George Will recently stated, we are chosing a president, not a buddy. But perhaps it is time to rethink our myths of Romney the Cold Fish and Obama the Healer of All Wounds.

Better Heath Care Through Consumer Choice

The left loves the idea of greater government control over health care in the United States. The right hates that idea. This ancient conflict (relatively speaking) drove the legislative process that produced ObamaCare. It effectively prevented any rational analysis of the real problems that plague health care and so made it certain that we would not spend our time and money looking for effective solutions. I thought it appalling, as this was playing out in the first two years of Obama's presidency, that neither Congress nor the press bothered to examine health care systems around the world in order to find out what worked and what does not.

One thing that the left seemed to believe beyond any possible doubt is that consumers of health care can't make rational decisions. They just don't know enough to tell the difference between good health care providers and bad ones and so consumer choice cannot be a force in encouraging better care. That would be very bad if it were true, since consumer choice is nearly always the most effective driver of improved services. But is it true?

Walter Russell Meade at Via Meadia directs our attention to this fascinating piece in the Wall Street Journal by Marty Markary.

U.S. surgeons operate on the wrong body part as often as 40 times a week. Roughly a quarter of all hospitalized patients will be harmed by a medical error of some kind. If medical errors were a disease, they would be the sixth leading cause of death in America—just behind accidents and ahead of Alzheimer's. The human toll aside, medical errors cost the U.S. health-care system tens of billions a year. Some 20% to 30% of all medications, tests and procedures are unnecessary, according to research done by medical specialists, surveying their own fields. What other industry misses the mark this often?

Trying to fix this problem from above, either by professional organizations policing themselves or government watchdogs policing the doctors, is doomed to failure. Doctors and hospitals will do what government agencies do: they will band together to protect themselves from unpleasant scrutiny.

Markary suggests an obvious solution:

Every hospital should have an online informational "dashboard" that includes its rates for infection, readmission (what we call "bounce back"), surgical complications and "never event" errors (mistakes that should never occur, like leaving a surgical sponge inside a patient). The dashboard should also list the hospital's annual volume for each type of surgery that it performs (including the percentage done in a minimally invasive way) and patient satisfaction scores.

A survey of New Yorkers found that approximately 60% look up a restaurant's "performance ratings" before going there. If you won't sit down for a meal before checking Zagat's or Yelp, why shouldn't you be able to do the same thing when your life is at stake?

Nothing makes hospitals shape up more quickly than this kind of public reporting. In 1989, the first year that New York's hospitals were required to report heart-surgery death rates, the death rate by hospital ranged from 1% to 18%—a huge gap. Consumers were finally armed with useful data. They could ask: "Why have a coronary artery bypass graft operation at a place where you have a 1-in-6 chance of dying compared with a hospital with a 1-in-100 chance of dying?"

Instantly, New York heart hospitals with high mortality rates scrambled to improve; death rates declined by 83% in six years. Management at these hospitals finally asked staff what they had to do to make care safer. At some hospitals, the surgeons said they needed anesthesiologists who specialized in heart surgery; at others, nurse practitioners were brought in. At one hospital, the staff reported that a particular surgeon simply wasn't fit to be operating. His mortality rate was so high that it was skewing the hospital's average. Administrators ordered him to stop doing heart surgery.

If consumers are provided with useful information then their choices will encourage better services. Of course, a lot of people needing care will not actively seek out such information. They will still hear people talk.  That's how lots of things work.  Some of us read the reviews before we go to a movie and some of us just ask people who have seen the darn thing. 

If enough people check out the hospital dashboards before checking in, that alone will scare hospital administrators into taking action. Unfortunately, the thrust of ObamaCare is to prefer uniform benefits and care over consumer choice. That is the wrong direction.

Of Wolves and Men

Environmental policy conflicts can sometimes be easy to solve when you are looking for a tradeoff between well-defined goals and interests. They can be almost impossible to resolve when impressionism trumps analysis.

Several years ago I spent some time in Yellowstone with a group of professors and students. Our task was to study three environmental issues. One was the conflict between snowmobilers and "quiet park" advocates. The second was the conflict between ranchers and wolves. The third involved the threat of brucellosis, a disease that might possibly be communicated between Yellowstone's bison and ranch cattle. A week of watching wolves and buffalo, talking to ranchers and listening to lectures, hardly makes me an expert; however, I came away thinking that all three problems were manageable.

By restricting the snowmobiles entering the park to the quieter models, limiting the number of machines admitted and confining them to established roads, a reasonable balance had been struck between those who want to cross silent winter spaces on skis and those who want to roar through such spaces in a train of rockets.

The ranchers I talked to did not like wolves one little bit, but they were largely reconciled to the fact that wolves aren't going away again. Wolves are everywhere now as a result of an extremely successful reintroduction policy. Ranchers want a little more freedom to kill wolves that are preying on their livestock and maybe they should get it. Apart from that, there is little to fight about.

The brucellosis problem is more difficult but it may be manageable. This disease is a great threat not only to ranchers but to the entire cattle industry in states where it appears. Ranchers fear that Yellowstone's bison herds might infect their cattle and they want those herds to be better contained. In addition to buffalo, elk also carry the disease. That is a touchier issue as everyone likes elk. Some ranchers we talked to earn extra income guiding parties of hunters. There is evidence that artificial elk feeding grounds, intended to keep elk numbers up over winter, are a major cause of infection among those animals.

There is hope that Brucella abortus can eventually be eliminated from Yellowstone animals. In the meantime, slaughtering bison that leave the park and eliminating elk feed grounds may be both necessary and sufficient.

For a lesson in how not to approach such issues as these, consider the Chicago Tribune's recent editorial: 'The War on Wolves'. The Trib has its fur up over the legal hunting of wolves. The editorial begins with a misanthropic musing on the misbehavior of the human species. It then proceeds to articulate an environmental version of original sin:

How could the feds tolerate the hunting of an ecologically important creature that, by the mid-1900s, was hunted almost to oblivion? "

Apparently the Trib thinks that we should not ask whether hunting limited numbers of wolves is a threat to the recovered wolf population. The editorial never raises that question. Instead we should consider the guilt we bear for our past sins. We shouldn't hunt wolves now because we were bad to them in the past.

The Trib lumps ranchers who fear wolves preying on their herds with hunters who want a chance to put a wolf head over their dining room tables as a vast alliance bent on the extinction of all things lupine. This is noxious numbskullery. Most ranchers would indeed like to see wolves go away altogether. Hunters by contrast would like to see the population of wolves increase so that their chances of bagging one would go up. Hunters and conservationists are natural allies whenever they are willing to look each other in the eye. That, of course, is the problem.

The Tribune's editors assure us that

We aren't anti-hunting.

No. They are anti-hunter, as is clear from this gem:

The conflict pits people who would enjoy shooting wolves — think Sarah Palin, firing from an aircraft — against what a Montana wolf hunter interviewed on The Sportsman Channel called "a bunch of wingnut screwballs from wherever (telling) us how to manage wildlife."

I am not sure what the Chicago Tribune thinks about ranchers, but its editorial is dripping with loathing for hunters and trappers. It is altogether innocent of the simple question whether the hunting of wolves makes sense as ecological management. That might not be the best way to consider conservation policy.

I don't hunt but I have no objections, moral or otherwise, to hunting. I am just plain scared of guns. As for wolves, I think they are about as cool as any animal that walks the earth. I spent a marvelous day at Yellowstone watching them through scopes. I chanced to see a pair of them digging for something only a few feet away from my car. I think that the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone and elsewhere was a great achievement. I hope that their populations flourish and increase.

If hunting wolves is a threat to wolf populations, then we should not allow it. If it is not such a threat, then we certainly should allow it. Adding hunters to those who want to see more wolves strengthens that constituency. If you want to find a reasonable solution to such conflicts, perhaps reason ought to be your guide. What you think of Sarah Palin might not be so helpful.

The Man Who Is Suddenly There

The President of the United States is a busy man with a lot on his mind. Jodi Kantor fills us in at the New York Times:

For someone dealing with the world's weightiest matters, Mr. Obama spends surprising energy perfecting even less consequential pursuits. He has played golf 104 times since becoming president, according to Mark Knoller of CBS News, who monitors his outings, and he asks superior players for tips that have helped lower his scores. He decompresses with card games on Air Force One, but players who do not concentrate risk a reprimand ("You're not playing, you're just gambling," he once told Arun Chaudhary, his former videographer).

His idea of birthday relaxation is competing in an Olympic-style athletic tournament with friends, keeping close score. The 2009 version ended with a bowling event. Guess who won, despite his history of embarrassingly low scores? The president, it turned out, had been practicing in the White House alley.

You have to love that "guess who won?" I am guessing that one crucial skill that all of his staff have to have is that of massaging the President's ego. Kantor backs me up.

Even those loyal to Mr. Obama say that his quest for excellence can bleed into cockiness and that he tends to overestimate his capabilities. The cloistered nature of the White House amplifies those tendencies, said Matthew Dowd, a former adviser to President George W. Bush, adding that the same thing happened to his former boss. "There's a reinforcing quality," he said, a tendency for presidents to think, I'm the best at this.

With the golf and the card games and the secret bowling practice, what doesn't the President have time for? Marc Thiessen, writing for the WaPo, found out:

The Government Accountability Institute, a new conservative investigative research organization, examined President Obama's schedule from the day he took office until mid-June 2012, to see how often he attended his Presidential Daily Brief (PDB) — the meeting at which he is briefed on the most critical intelligence threats to the country. During his first 1,225 days in office, Obama attended his PDB just 536 times — or 43.8 percent of the time. During 2011 and the first half of 2012, his attendance became even less frequent — falling to just over 38 percent. By contrast, Obama's predecessor, George W. Bush almost never missed his daily intelligence meeting.

Not to worry. Surely 38% of the Dalai Bama is worth a lot more than 100% of Dubya. In fact, the President is such an intelligent consumer of intelligence that he doesn't need to discuss it with actual human beings.

When I asked National Security Council spokesman Tommy Vietor if the president had attended any meetings to discuss the Presidential Daily Brief (PDB) since Sept. 5, he repeatedly refused to answer. He noted that Obama had attended a principals meeting of the National Security Council on Sept. 10 and reiterated that he reads the PDB…

Vietor's reply is quite revealing. It is apparently a point of pride in the White House that Obama's PDB is "not briefed to him." In the eyes of this administration, it is a virtue that the president does not meet every day with senior intelligence officials. This president, you see, does not need briefers. He can forgo his daily intelligence meeting because he is, in Vietor's words, "among the most sophisticated consumers of intelligence on the planet."

Truly sophisticated consumers of intelligence don't see it as a sign of weakness to "be briefed" by the experts. Most of us, if we subscribed to a daily report on, say, astrophysics, would probably need some help interpreting it. But when it comes to intelligence, Obama is apparently so brilliant he can absorb the most complicated topics by himself in his study.

But one does have to wonder about this, from Thiessen's Sept. 13^th piece:

According to the public schedule of the president, the last time the Obama attended his daily intelligence meeting was Sept. 5 — a week before Islamist radicals stormed our embassy in Cairo and terrorists killed our ambassador to Tripoli. The president was scheduled to hold the intelligence meeting at 10:50 a.m. Wednesday, the day after the attacks, but it was canceled so that he could comfort grieving employees at the State Department — as well he should. But instead of rescheduling the intelligence briefing for later in the day, Obama apparently chose to skip it altogether and attend a Las Vegas fundraiser for his re-election campaign. One day after a terrorist attack.

No matter how brilliant the President is, wouldn't the approach of Sept. 11^th have been a good time to actually talk to his intelligence staff? Might he not have asked a few relevant questions? Perhaps he might have asked whether sending our ambassador to Benghazi with rather little in the way of protection just before the infamous anniversary was really such a good idea.

One also has to wonder why, if the President is so self-sufficient that he doesn't need to be briefed, that it he suddenly feels the need to be briefed. Again, Thiessen fills us in:

According to official White House schedule, today the president attended his daily intelligence meeting in the Oval Office for the fifth day in a row. It appears that President Obama's attendance has improved dramatically since the story broke last week that he had skipped more than half his daily intelligence meetings during his time in office — including every day in the week leading up to the attacks on U.S. diplomatic facilities in Egypt and Libya…

I asked the Government Accountability Institute to check when was the last time Obama attended his daily intelligence meeting for five consecutive business days. They report that the last time was Feb. 6 to 10 — over seven months ago.

Thiessen is suggesting that his own story may have encouraged the President to suddenly begin attending his daily intelligence briefings. It's hard not to think that this may be right. If so, so much the better. This is one of the reasons we need adversarial voices in the press. Of course that would mean that the President is mostly concerned with how he looks rather than with doing his job.

The second possibility, not mutually exclusive of the first, is that after the Benghazi murders the President feels the need to be actually briefed by actual human beings. That, however, admits the obvious. The President should have shown up for the five meetings before September Eleventh.

The Administration's reaction to the Benghazi murders has been a boondoggle. For a week they kept feeding everyone a story that no one believed: that the attack on the consulate was a spontaneous reaction to the infamous video clip. They sent UN Ambassador Susan Rice onto last Sunday's talk shows to peddle that line, which was either evidence of the Administration's cluelessness or a bald faced lie. Take your pick. Even a very astute and engaged executive cannot anticipate every crisis. Still, I can't help wondering whether the Administration would have been caught so flat footed if someone close to the President had dared to tell him he ought to attend to his business instead of working hard to convince him that he was a master at bowling.

Vote for the beard

Heckler's Veto

Let me build on Ken's post below.  Donald argues,

"Generally I agree, and I totally agree pre-publication or pre-showing.  But what if the movie was made with the intent and specifically funded to foment violence by getting others riled up enough to commit illegal acts, including murder, that you knew would happen as a result of distributing the film?  If prosecutors could prove a nexus of this film to a plan or plot, the First Amendment right might not be defense."

As this is a rare instance of comity among SDP commentors, I hate to bicker, but let me disagree slightly with Donald.  I am not sure intent is the right measure.  If I make a video of myself eating a pork chop and my intention is to offend Muslims and Jews, does that mean that my video can be banned?  But if I make the video just because I like pork chops it can't be banned?  This looks a lot like viewpoint discrimination.

I will readily admit that this is not my area of expertise, and I am surprised that the legal blogs, especially Volokh, have not really tackled this issue from a legal standpoint (although Eugene Volokh himself, one the the nation's leading 1st Amendment scholars, makes a prudential argument against banning offensive videos here).  But it seems to me that there has to be some real incitement in any work in order for it to be banned.  Schenk, as Ken alludes, was actively encouraging people to disobey the law.  It needs to be noted, though, that "clear and present danger" was largely replaced with "imminent lawless action" in Brandenburg v. Ohio.  Does the contents of "The Innocence of Muslims" actually encourage people to violence?  From what I have seen the answer is most definitely "No."  No reasonable person could draw that conclusion.  But, of course, the fanatics are not reasonable.

In the law there is a notion of the "heckler's veto."  Just because someone does not like a kind of speech doesn't mean they get to veto it.  Example, if I say that every time Barack Obama talks about the killing of Osama Bin Laden I myself will kill someone, does that mean that Obama is inciting violence when he talks about Bin Laden, and thus the law can shut him up?  Of course not.  The heckler does not get to shut down otherwise protected speech that he doesn't like by making threats.  Indeed, as Volokh points out, this would only encourage people to violence.  If my preferred view point is not winning, I can just start killing people and then those who disagree with me or have different views must shut up.  In American law Muhammed is not sacrosanct.  If people want to depict him in violation of Muslim sharia, they are free to do so.  If they want to make fun of Muhammad, as, say, Jesus is every day in a thousand different ways, then that is protected too.  "The Innocence of Muslims" might be stupid, but it is protected speech.  We should all be angered that one of its creators is being hauled into interrogation in the dead of night to answer for this thought crime.

Update: I edited a couple typos from the original.

 

A Clear & Present Danger to Liberty

 

MSNBC aside, we now have a serious argument that The Innocence of Muslims does not deserve protection under the First Amendment. Sarah Chayes, former special assistant to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and a resident associate at the Carnegie Endowment, presents it in the Los Angeles Times.

In one of the most famous 1st Amendment cases in U.S. history, Schenck vs. United States, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. established that the right to free speech in the United States is not unlimited. "The most stringent protection," he wrote on behalf of a unanimous court, "would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic."

Holmes' test — that words are not protected if their nature and circumstances create a "clear and present danger" of harm — has since been tightened. But even under the more restrictive current standard, "Innocence of Muslims," the film whose video trailer indirectly led to the death of U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens among others, is not, arguably, free speech protected under the U.S. Constitution and the values it enshrines.

Ms. Chayes doesn't elaborate on the issue in Schenck, but I will. He sent circulars to draftees during WWI that criticized the draft and urged them to assert their rights. The Court ruled unanimously that Schenck did not enjoy First Amendment protection.

The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent.

The clear and present danger test would be later be used to deny free speech rights to communists arguing, even abstractly, in favor of an overthrow of the American government. It is very doubtful that the contemporary Court would allow any such restrictions. Ms. Chayes is resting her case on abandoned applications of court principles that one would think are universally recognized now as serious threats to freedom of speech.

She is right, of course, that the "fire in a theater" restriction still stands. Indeed, free speech rights are not absolute. That metaphor, however, is intended to do two things: limit restrictions on speech to cases of imminent danger and to keep it local, or narrowly tailored so as to be as little burdensome on First Amendment rights as possible.

She makes a good case for the imminent danger that the film represents. While the film may have been in the can for a while before the trouble started, it started immediately once the Muslim world became aware of it. The film and acts such as pastor Terry Jones' burning of Koran can provoke violence and murder very quickly. Chayes argues that it doesn't matter whether the intent of the speech is to provoke violence.

Words don't have to urge people to commit violence in order to be subject to limits, says [Anthony] Lewis. "If the result is violence, and that violence was intended, then it meets the standard."

Of course, the standard suggested by the jurisprudence that Chayes cites is much broader than that. If it were adopted by the Court, the government could crack down on any speech it thought likely to provoke violence. In the current environment, that could include virtually any film or book or article that might offend militant Islamists. A scholarly work that undermined doctrinal histories of Islam would be subject to review. Even if the standard is limited to actual violence, the threat to freedom of speech would be pervasive.

Surely Salman Rushdie's novel The Satanic Verses would lose First Amendment protection. I don't know if anyone has actually died because of this novel, but no one can argue that the threat of violence has not been imminent for the author since the Iranian Regime put a bounty on his head.

The film maker Theo van Gough was murdered for producing a film Submission that criticized the treatment of women under Islam. He worked with the Somali-born writer Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who came to the U.S. when the Netherlands decided she wasn't worth protecting. Under Chayes' standard, this would be sufficient grounds for stripping First Amendment protection from U.S. film makers who intended to produce a similar movie. Of course, says Chayes:

The point here is not to excuse the terrible acts perpetrated by committed extremists and others around the world in reaction to the video, or to condone physical violence as a response to words — any kind of words. The point is to emphasize that U.S. law makes a distinction between speech that is simply offensive and speech that is deliberately tailored to put lives and property at immediate risk.

Regardless of what point she thinks she is making, the effect of her standard is to reward "the terrible acts perpetrated by committed extremists." All they would have to do to put a writer or film maker in the dock would be to burn a few flags, jump over a few walls, and murder a few innocents.

Protecting free speech has always been inconvenient. It has never before involved the kind of threat presented by militant Islam. This is a moment when we have to decide whether we are really prepared to defend our liberties or not. Sarah Chayes thinks we should back down. I dissent.

ps. I found the clip posted at the beginning after I had posted the above.  I am now rather ashamed by timidity.  Long live Christopher Hitchens. 

Low Voltage Policy

One of Barack Obama's achievements is the Chevy Volt, GM's entry into the hybrid market. The Administration pushed the development of the vehicle and why should it not? There's global warming and the fact that the US government now owns a car company.

There is a bit of a problem, however. From Reuters:

Nearly two years after the introduction of the path-breaking plug-in hybrid, GM is still losing as much as $49,000 on each Volt it builds, according to estimates provided to Reuters by industry analysts and manufacturing experts. GM on Monday issued a statement disputing the estimates.

Cheap Volt lease offers meant to drive more customers to Chevy showrooms this summer may have pushed that loss even higher. There are some Americans paying just $5,050 to drive around for two years in a vehicle that cost as much as $89,000 to produce.

Hybrid vehicles are great for car buyers who are want to publically display their environmental bone fides. They are not actually good for the environment. Heavy government subsidies are necessary to make them affordable enough for an Ivy League Dean. That means that wealth produced elsewhere, and not by wind power, has to be shifted over to the production of these eco-friendly lemons. Eighty-nine grand will buy you a really nice house in Aberdeen. Of course you still have to plug it in.

The Washington Post published a scathing editorial on the President's electric car policy.

AS A CANDIDATE for president in 2008, Barack Obama set a goal of getting 1 million all-electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles on the road by 2015. In February 2011, the Obama administration's Energy Department issued an analysis purporting to show that, with the help of subsidies and tax credits, "the goal is achievable." This was a paltry claim in the first place, since 1 million cars amount to less than 1 percent of the total U.S. fleet. Yet it is increasingly clear that, despite the commitment of many millions of taxpayer dollars, the United States will not hit Mr. Obama's target by 2015. A recent CBS News analysis suggested that we'll be lucky to get a third of the way there.

The Energy Department study assumed that General Motors would produce 120,000 plug-in hybrid Volts in 2012. GM never came close to that and recently suspended Volt production at its Hamtramck, Mich., plant, scene of a presidential photo-op. So far, GM has sold a little more than 21,000 Volts, even with the help of a $7,500 tax credit, recent dealer discounting and U.S. government purchases. When you factor in the $1.2 billion cost of developing the Volt, GM loses tens of thousands of dollars on each model.

Some such losses are normal in the early phases of a product's life cycle. Perhaps the knowledge and technological advances GM has reaped from developing the Volt will help the company over the long term. But this is cold comfort for the taxpayers who still own more than a quarter of the firm…

No matter how you slice it, the American taxpayer has gotten precious little for the administration's investment in battery-powered vehicles, in terms of permanent jobs or lower carbon dioxide emissions. There is no market, or not much of one, for vehicles that are less convenient and cost thousands of dollars more than similar-sized gas-powered alternatives — but do not save enough fuel to compensate. The basic theory of the Obama push for electric vehicles — if you build them, customers will come — was a myth. And an expensive one, at that.

Ouch. The WaPo points out that, as the plug-in car lines sputter,

they are taking the much-ballyhooed U.S. advanced-battery industry down with them. A Chinese company had to buy out distressed A123, to which the Energy Department has committed $263 million in production aid and research money. Ener1, which ran through $55 million of a $118 million federal grant before going bankrupt, sold out to a Russian tycoon.

Reality is mocking the President's promises. Ron Bailey offers us a bit from the President's State of the Union:

In three years, our partnership with the private sector has already positioned America to be the world's leading manufacturer of high-tech batteries. Because of federal investments, renewable energy use has nearly doubled....

I will not cede the wind or solar or battery industry to China or Germany because we refuse to make the same commitment here.

Well he was a quarter right about the batteries. He is ceding the industry to China and Russia. At least the Germans didn't get it. This is dreadfully bad policy. It is failing on all its aims and costs a bundle to boot. Energy and environmental policy have to be based on clear thinking, not wishful thinking. Government is really bad at venture capital.

On Not Rewarding Reactionaries

It is altogether reasonable, as I have said, for the Administration to insist that "The Innocence of Muslims" does not represent the views of the US Government or those of the American people. Such an insistence is unlikely to do any good, but neither does it do any harm. It is an appropriate disclaimer.

It is neither useful nor appropriate for the State Department to publically pass judgment on the merits of the video or its producers. In the first place, it enhances the status of these yahoos. They have everything to gain by being denounced from high levels of the Administration. What a fundraising tool!

More importantly, it sends an unambiguous message to the militants: because you behave as you do, you get special consideration. We will bend over backward to be sensitive to your feelings.

We might even be pushed so far as to shut the offensive video down (even here in the US). That is clearly what the Administration tried to do when it contacted YouTube. From The Politico:

The Obama administration asked YouTube to review the trailer for the anti-Muslim film 'Innocence of Muslims,' officials confirmed Friday.

"The White House asked YouTube to review the video to see if it was in compliance with their terms of use," White House press secretary Jay Carney said in an email.

White House officials emphasize that their inquiry was not a removal request, simply a review.

The "White House officials" were, of course, being disingenuous. They were obviously hoping that YouTube would take the damn thing off the net. It's hard to blame them and at least they recognize the boundaries of First Amendment protection.

The same cannot be said for the gaggle of authoritarians who appeared on MSNBC. From Jonah Goldberg at RealClearPolitics:

Over at MSNBC, a riot of consensus broke out when contributors Mike Barnicle and Donny Deutsch as well as University of Pennsylvania professor Anthea Butler all agreed that the people behind the video should be indicted as accessories to murder. "Good morning," declared Butler, "How soon is Sam Bacile [the alleged creator of the film] going to be in jail folks? I need him to go now."

Barnicle set his sights on Terry Jones, the pastor who wanted to burn the Koran a while back and who was allegedly involved in the video as well. "Given this supposed minister's role in last year's riots in Afghanistan, where people died, and given his apparent or his alleged role in this film, where . . . at least one American, perhaps the American ambassador, is dead, it might be time for the Department of Justice to start viewing his role as an accessory before or after the fact." Deutsch helpfully added: "I was thinking the same thing, yeah."

Let's get this straight: the pastor and the filmmaker should be prosecuted and jailed for their expressive activities because someone else reacted violently to them. We have seen this kind of thing before. Southern policemen tried to shut down peaceful civil rights marches because Whites reacted violently. This would be a grave threat to freedom of speech and assembly. I would like to believe that these MSNBC numbskulls have as little support as pastor Terry Jones, but I don't believe it.

Putting that aside, what if we did take the video off the net and imprison the goofballs responsible for it? Would that not mean that the terrorists win? All they have to do is burn enough American flags, invade enough embassies, and kill a few of our diplomats, and we will give them what they want.

Ps. Google acted to block access to the video in several Mideast countries. Craig Timberg has a pretty good piece at the WaPo on the issues for civil liberty and the problematic power that such sites as YouTube and Google have over public and private communications. It is an interesting question whether it violates free speech to block communications between an American citizen and persons in a foreign country as opposed to communications between citizens in the United States. Of course, Google is a private firm; however, it may have been acting at the request of the Federal Government. I am inclined to think that Google's action was proper and the Federal Government was allowed to encourage it to take the action. The firewall between domestic and foreign policy is enough in this case to protect First Amendment liberties.

A Reply to the Left Wing Archie Bunkers

I have been asked why I bother responding to some of the frequent commenters on this blog and that is a good question. One answer is that I have grown fond of them over the years. Another is that, from time to time, the exchanges are in fact pretty good on both sides. Finally, anyone reading this and bothering to follow the comments will know that both I and my critics reveal ourselves, for better or worse.

On the most recent post, frequent commenter A.I. gives me a multi-point list of complaints. I will respond to a few of them here.

One: Not all speech is protected speech, as in yelling fire in a crowded theater. The exact wording of the embassy statement may not have been the best it could have been, but under the circumstances, who are you (or Mitt Romney) to quibble. It certainly was not some over-arching statement of American foreign policy as Romney, you and others are trying to portray it.

I think that should have been two points. No, not all speech is protected; however, films making political and religious points are protected if anything is.

Who am I to quibble? I am a citizen of the United States of America. It is not only my legal right to form and express my opinions on this matter but is also entirely proper. It seems to have escaped your memory, but this is a Republic. The people own it and have the final say on policy; the President just works here.

I would note that the Administration itself both denied and disavowed the language I criticize, but then we see it creep back into their statements. No one knows what the Administration's policy is.

Two: What transpired is likely the result of something far more sinister and organized than people protesting a film as I doubt the typical protester came armed with RPG's. The statement may or may not have impacted those simply protesting the film. It certainly would not impact a group using the protest as cover to launch full-blown attacks on the embassy.

Then what use was the statement in the first place, or the subsequent attempts to let them know that we don't like the film either?

Five: Criticism may be warranted at a later date. However, that is not a concession you and the Right ever made regarding the Iraq war and Bush foreign policy in general. You hid behind the notion that criticism of George Bush during a time of war was anti-American and treasonous and painted Democratic criticism as such. So what the hell is it when you and Romney say the kind of crap you're saying before we even know all the facts behind these attacks? You both should be ashamed but alas, I doubt either of you has that capability.

I know full well that you are offended by virtually any criticism of the President at any time. When would the time for politics be, A.I.? Perhaps after the first Tuesday in November? Sorry, but I can't agree. I think it would have better to know about Watergate before the 1972 election. If there are problems with the President's conduct of foreign policy, now is precisely the time to consider them.

To say that I "hid behind the notion that criticism of George Bush during a time of war was anti-American and treasonous and painted Democratic criticism as such" is a damn lie. I have never made such a claim, let alone "hid behind it," whatever that means. I have heard, over and over, that the Bush Administration may such claims. Several times I have invited readers to show me when and where any such accusation was made. I have yet to receive a single piece of evidence.

On the other hand, I have seen a clear example of this kind of accusation very recently. Here's Donald, commenting on the first post:

Your post didn't go over anyone's head, KB. It was anti-American, and evil. It's a pattern with you, and Romney by the way. It follows on several other similar anti-American screeds (your anti-American stance on the Chinese dissident Chen, for example).

See? It doesn't matter whether it's a crisis or not. It's anti-American and evil to criticize the President's foreign policy, at least when he is a Democrat and especially when he is The One. You are not so explicit, but you are making the same point. It is shameful to criticize the President and his Administration. What you accuse Bush of doing is exactly what you are doing now. Sorry to break this to you, A.I., but you guys are the people you have been warning us about.

The Cairo Statement

For my last I have been called an evil person and an idiot by two of my cherished interlocutors. If this keeps up, I could get my feelings hurt. My chief point was to criticize this now infamous statement issued from the Cairo embassy hours before the protest began.

The Embassy of the United States in Cairo condemns the continuing efforts by misguided individuals to hurt the religious feelings of Muslims – as we condemn efforts to offend believers of all religions.

That my criticism was correct is confirmed by the White House's efforts to distance itself from the statement. Josh Rogin at Foreign Policy has a revealing summary of the boondoggle.

President Obama commented on the controversy in an interview to be aired Wednesday evening on 60 Minutes. "In an effort to cool the situation down, it didn't come from me, it didn't come from Secretary Clinton. It came from people on the ground who are potentially in danger," Obama said. "And my tendency is to cut folks a little bit of slack when they're in that circumstance, rather than try to question their judgment from the comfort of a campaign office."

I gather from other reports that it wasn't cleared by the Ambassador either. In the Obama White House the buck doesn't stop, it drops like a stone.

Apparently the stone carries little weight.

Cairo senior public affairs officer Larry Schwartz, who wrote the release and oversees the embassy's Twitter feed, according to a detailed account of the Tuesday's events…

After the breach [of the embassy walls], as public criticism of the statement grew, the Cairo Embassy Twitter account continued to send out tweets defending the statement, some of which were later deleted. One deleted tweet, originally posted at 12:30 a.m. Cairo Time, said, "This morning's condemnation (issued before protests began) still stands. As does condemnation of unjustified breach of the Embassy."…

The White House says that it ordered Schwartz not to release the statement, but this apparently had no effect. Where was the ambassador and why is he not in trouble? Why did Secretary Clinton's statement contain a kernel of the same apologetic language? If it's all the fault of this one Twitter-twit, how are they dealing with him?

Despite his disregard of Washington's instructions and his actions throughout the day Tuesday, Schwartz has not yet been disciplined in any way and is still the lead public affairs officer at the embassy.

What do you have to do to get fired from this operation? Of course, if they fire him, he might tell us what actually happened.

I would add this piece from Evelyn Gordon at Commentary:

Just two weeks ago, a Cairo court sentenced 76 people indicted over last September's mob attack on Israel's embassy in Cairo. The net result is that not a single person is going to jail over that attack, sending the clearest possible message that mobs can attack foreign embassies in Cairo with impunity. Yet no world leader has lodged even a pro forma protest over this decision.

This is not just an Obama Administration problem; it is a global law and order problem. Embassies are a vital part of the diplomatic system and they are sometimes the only thing that stands in the way of chaos and war. To allow murderous thugs to violate them is an existential threat to world peace. To defend that system requires courage and force, not sensitivity.

ps. It seems that the Ambassor was in Washington while all this went down.  Good thing, that. 

The Only Thing the State Department Should Condemn

I suppose we all remember September 11^th, 2001 in our own way. Here is how it was celebrated in two faraway places. From the WaPo:

U.S. diplomatic compounds came under attack in two Muslim countries on Tuesday, with a State Department employee killed in the assault on a consulate in Libya…

The violence in Benghazi followed protests in neighboring Egypt, where a group of protesters scaled the wall of the U.S. Embassy in Cairo on Tuesday evening and entered its outer grounds, pulled down an American flag, then tried to burn it outside the embassy walls, according to witnesses.

In both Cairo and Benghazi, protesters said they were demonstrating against a U.S.-released film that insulted the Prophet Muhammad.

Oddly enough, I couldn't find the trailer on iTunes. The folks running the Embassy in Cairo did not acquit themselves well. First, they did what U.S. embassy staffs are best at: ignoring warnings.

The security breach in Cairo appeared to catch both the United States and Egyptian security forces by surprise even though the protest was announced in advance. Shortly before the protesters went over the wall, witnesses said few Egyptian police or military officers were nearby.

If you want to take American diplomats by surprise, the best plan is to tell them in advance exactly what you intend to do.

It is one thing to be inept, however, and another to be morally craven. From The Politico:

The U.S. embassy in Cairo put out a statement early Tuesday that apologized for an anti-Muslim film being circulated by an Israeli-American real estate developer.

"The Embassy of the United States in Cairo condemns the continuing efforts by misguided individuals to hurt the religious feelings of Muslims – as we condemn efforts to offend believers of all religions," the embassy said in a statement published online.

Is this really the position of the US State Departmentto "condemn efforts to offend believers of all religions"? Did the Cairo Embassy issue a condemnation of Christopher Hitchens' book God Is Not Great? The State Department should make every attempt to be respectful of the beliefs of all peoples and especially of peoples in close proximity to one of our embassies. It may be appropriate to announce that the work of a private film maker in America in no way represents the position of the United States Government. Film criticism, however, is outside the purview of the State Department. Taking sides even in a small way in an attack on freedom of speech in the hope that the militants will like us is craven. It is also useless. The Cairo Embassy's groveling did nothing to prevent the violence.

Secretary of State Clinton did better when she tried to walk back the Cairo position:

Some have sought to justify this vicious behavior as a response to inflammatory material posted on the Internet. The United States deplores any intentional effort to denigrate the religious beliefs of others. Our commitment to religious tolerance goes back to the very beginning of our nation. But let me be clear: There is never any justification for violent acts of this kind.

There is a lot of backbone in that statement, but not enough to add up to a whole backbone. Muslim militants have their ancient principles which they are obligated to defend and so do we. They are prepared to defend them with force and not just forceful statements. Are we?

Again, there is that "The United States deplores any intentional effort to denigrate the religious beliefs of others." Does the US officially deplore books by Darwinists that openly scoff at and denigrate creationist's views? No, and it should not even if, in the view of this committed Darwinist, such books are misguided and frequently offensive and counterproductive. It is the business of the American Republic to protect the rights of its citizens and to do what it can to promote the rights of all people abroad. It is not its business to make sure that no one's feelings are ever hurt.

Militant Islamists understand very well that they can silence speech they disapprove of by fire and murder. Writers and editors and filmmakers who never have to fear their own governments have to worry a lot about offending a Mufti. When the government takes the side of the offended fire eater in the name of sensitivity, all that tells him is that his strategy is working.

Debt & Deficits Under Obama

I have seen a number of attempts to show that President Obama has been more fiscally responsible than his Republican predecessors because deficits and debt have grown more slowly under his watch than theirs. If I follow these arguments, they are not without a point but they are also blatant attempts at denying the obvious.

The argument seems to go like this: between 1982 and 1989 (the years for which Reagan produced budgets) the public debt increased by 252%. From 2010 to 2013 (estimated, obviously), the Federal debt will increase by 130%. See! Obama increased the debt by a lot less than Reagan.

To see the problem with this argument, consider two businesses. One begins a four year planning period $100 dollars in debt and ends $150 in the hole. The other begins with a debt of $100 million and ends with a debt of $125 million. Since the former saw an increase in debt of 50% and the latter an increase of only 25%, the former must be doing twice as badly, no? Of course not. The former debt can be wiped out with a successful carwash. The latter will require a lot of carwashes to erase.

In fact, you can tell little or nothing about the financial condition of these two firms by the information given. You would have to know a lot more about their assets and revenues and whether the former are growing faster than their debt. A teenager mowing lawns might be crushed by $150 in debt whereas a large firm might find $25 million in an old coat pocket, metaphorically speaking.

There is a point to the comparison, however. The best way to measure federal debt is by the percentage of the GDP it represents. Federal debt declined from a high of 122% of GDP in 1946 (there was a war on) to a low of 33% in 1981. That's a little misleading, since in the sixties and seventies government financed unfunded spending by printing money, which led of course to inflation. Reagan, to his credit, broke the inflation cycle; however and not to his credit, under his watch the debt to deficit ratio began to grow. President Clinton, to his credit, managed to bring the ratio down from the high sixties to a low of 54% in 2001 (Bush 43's first year in office). It has climbed steadily since, from 59% in 2002 to 70% in 2008.

Now we can evaluate the Obama years. In 2009, as a result of Bush 43 efforts to combat the recession, the debt to GDP ratio jumped to 85%. In 2010, Obama's first year of budgeting, it jumped almost 10%. In 2014, the first year of the next presidential term, the OMB estimates the deficit at 108% of the GDP. We are already at WWII levels of federal debt with no comparable war on.

Of course Obama is not to blame for being in a much more difficult financial position than Reagan, or the Bushes, or Clinton. Likewise, he gets no credit for sophistic statistical comparisons. A 250% increase over a $1.1 trillion debt is a lot less severe than a 130% increase over a $14 trillion debt.

In constant dollars, Obama has piled on more debt in four years than Bush 43 did in eight. As a percentage of GDP, his deficits total more two to one over those of any president from Reagan on. The federal debt to GDP ratio is twice what it was during any Reagan year. In every budget or plan that the President has submitted to scoring by the CBO, the deficits will climb dramatically upward only a few years from now. To suggest that President Obama has been in any conceivable way fiscally responsible is to be in deep denial about our situation.

The Recovery That Wasn’t There

One thing that may have depressed Mr. Obama's enthusiasm as he gave his acceptance speech was that he knew what Friday's jobs report was going to say. What it said was awful. The only good news was that the unemployment rate dropped from 8.3% to 8.1%, and that was really bad news. The unemployment rate measures people looking for work. It dropped not because of job creation but because 368,000 people stopped looking and dropped out of the labor force. If the number of people still in the labor force were the same as in 2009, the unemployment rate would be over eleven percent.

There were 96,000 non-farm jobs added in August, well below expectations. The manufacturing sector contracted in August and lost 15,000 jobs. The Labor Department revised downward the number of jobs created in June and July by 41,000. We are nowhere near the rate of job creation we would need to get back to pre-recession levels, let alone resume typical post-recession progress, and job growth has been slowing. The average monthly gain in 2011 was 153,000 jobs per month. The average gain for 2012 so far has been 139,000. Workforce participation overall is back down to the 1981 level and the level for men has been this low since 1948. It gets worse when you dig deeper into the numbers. Here is Mortimer Zuckerman from the WSJ:

The alarming numbers proliferate the deeper you look: 40.7% of the people counted as unemployed have been out of work for 27 weeks or more—that's 5.2 million "long-term" unemployed. Fewer Americans are at work today than in April 2000, even though the population since then has grown by 31 million.

We are still almost five million payrolls shy of where we were at the end of 2007, when the recession began. Think about that when you hear the Obama administration's talk of an economic recovery.

This is supposed to be an economic recovery. It is the recovery that isn't there. Incomes have declined more during the recovery than they did during the actual recession. The unemployment rates are higher for every part of the country than before the recession began.

The point is not whose fault this is. The point is what it is. It is dreadful. The great American engine of job creation has all but shut down. The fun part comes when you consider what happens next. It is possible, of course, that we are only in the midst of an elongated recovery. Soon now economic growth will pick up and, if does not soar, it will at least rise steadily. In that case the winner of this year's election will enjoy a great gift through no fault of his own.

It is also possible that this is all the recovery we are going to get and that what comes next is another recession. If that is the case, then the lucky guy may be the guy who loses this year. It bears mention that we have been running deficits of $1.3 trillion dollars per year. The federal debt crossed the sixteen trillion mark while the Democrats were celebrating in Charlotte. That figure doesn't include, of course, the fiscal insolvency of many of our great states. Money borrowed is wealth that can't be spent on something else. Perhaps we have reached the point that there are simply no resources left to fuel a traditional economic recovery.

Notes On The Convention

We will know in a few days whether Obama got a bounce out of his convention. Gallup shows his best numbers in some time, with his approval rating over 50%. I find it surprising that, apart from the usual cast of cheerleaders, many Obama-friendly venues were underwhelmed. Here is Dana Milbank:

The Democratic National Convention was to have opened here Monday with a festival at the Charlotte Motor Speedway, where, convention officials said, some 100,000 people would participate in a Labor Day festival that demonstrated the party's openness and inclusion.

After a couple of nights at the Time Warner Cable Arena, the convention was to have closed with President Obama's acceptance speech at the Bank of America Stadium, where convention officials were planning to squeeze nearly 6,000 seats onto the field to expand the stadium's capacity beyond its usual 74,000.

But the speedway event was canceled — ostensibly because of logistical problems but more likely because convention fundraising was running low. Then the Democrats canceled the stadium event in favor of the smaller arena — ostensibly because of "severe thunderstorm" concerns but more likely because they couldn't be sure enough people would come to fill the stadium.

In fact, the forecast hadn't called for severe weather, and conditions were fine Thursday night. The change caused thousands to be turned away, and the crush of crowds at the arena led authorities at one point to lock down the building for a second straight night – leaving some delegates on the street while lobbyists enjoyed the proceedings inside.

And then there is the sticky business of financing the convention. From Bloomberg:

Democrats ended their convention in Charlotte $5 million short of their budget even after being forced to draw down a $10 million line of credit from Duke Energy Corp. (DUK), according to a Democratic Party fundraiser.

The President's big speech gave a lot of Democrats a downsized feeling. Timothy Noah, writing in The New Republic, detected the odor of Cartesian malaise (that's Jimmy, not René). The Washington Post was disappointed by Mr. Obama's "hazy agenda".

He vowed, "I will never turn Medicare into a voucher," but he gave his audience no indication that his solution — controlling health care costs — might involve sacrifice on the part of seniors. He promised "responsible steps to strengthen" Social Security, which he has neglected throughout his first term. As to which steps those might be, not a word. "My plan will continue to reduce the carbon pollution that is heating our planet," Mr. Obama said. What plan would that be?...

Mr. Obama sketched a tempting array of expensive benefits and changes… But he did not offer a whiff of explanation of how those programs can be paid for and the mounting national debt brought under control…

[T]he attractiveness of [his] vision made all the more frustrating Mr. Obama's refusal to fill in any substance, his once again promising hard truths that he did not deliver. "They want your vote, but they don't want you to know their plan," he said of the Republicans. If Mr. Obama has a plan, Americans who listened Thursday don't know how he would achieve it.

Let's summarize. The Obama Campaign planned on a big venue for Mr. Obama's speech and then cancelled it because they doubted they could fill the stadium. They lied about the reason for cancelling it. Moving to the smaller venue left thousands outside. They went $15 million into the hole. Mr. Obama's speech may not have depressed most Democrats as much as it did Mr. Noah, but the reaction seems to pale in comparison to that which resulted from Clinton's speech (Bill, that is; Hilary wasn't there). The speech was full of vision and talk about the importance of hard truths but it didn't actually include any hard truths and if Obama has any plans, he is keeping them a secret.

It's not fair to say, as the Economist has said, that Obama has given us no idea what he will do with another four years. He has told us exactly what he will do: the same as his first four years. He will acknowledge the need for fiscal responsibility and will appoint commissions and jobs councils. He will ignore the findings of the one and neglect to meet with the other. If you like that, you should vote for Mr. Obama. That is what you will get.

God & Jerusalem at Charlotte

National conventions are the political equivalent of fashion shows. Unscripted moments, for better or worse, represent a loss of control. The Republicans had theirs the other night when Clint Eastwood briefly steered the stage right into the Twilight Zone. The Democrats had theirs tonight. Unlike the Eastwood moment, this one involved a question of substance.

I was baffled that the Democrats removed God and Jerusalem from their 2010 platform. Here, from The Hill, are the two passages from the 2008 platform that were removed from the one presented to this year's convention:

[W]e need a government that stands up for the hopes, values and interests of working people and gives everyone willing to work hard the chance to make the most of their God-given potential.

Jerusalem is and will remain the capital of Israel. The parties have agreed that Jerusalem is a matter for final status negotiations. It should remain an undivided city accessible to people of all faiths.

Removing or amending the first passage to excise the word "God", changes nothing of substance. "God given" here could mean an expression of faith or just an old-fashion way of indicating innate talents. If it hadn't been there, there would have been no compelling reason to include it. Likewise, removing it accomplished nothing and ran the risk of offending some people and gave the Republicans a small issue. Call it a small, unforced error.

The second passage states a vital foreign policy position and one which the President has taken before. Removing that one surely looks like a policy change. If it doesn't indicate that, it was a major unforced error. If it does indicate that, the President might as well have boldly stated it in a campaign speech.

What happened is that the issue blew up in the face of the Obama campaign. This evening Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland, apparently acting on orders from Mr. Obama, offered amendments to the platform reinstating the passages. Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa who was chairing the proceedings called for a voice vote. Two thirds ayes were required to confirm.

Villaraigosa apparently wasn't sure about the first round of ayes and nays and so called for a second vote and then a third. After the last one, he declared that the motion had carried. The Hill and The Politico confirm my impression after listening to two separate recordings: it was difficult to tell whether there were more ayes than nays.

Two things are apparent here. The first is bad. It was a major failure of leadership on the part of the Democratic Party's captain. Let us assume that he was not so out of the loop that he didn't understand what was in the platform. He approved of the initial excisions. Then Mr. Obama forcefully acted to disrupt his own convention in order to restore the excisions. This came at the cost of a manifestly fraudulent act. Mr. Villaraigosa could not have honestly concluded that two thirds of the conventioneers voted aye. When he declared that he did so, he cheated and insulted something like half of the delegates.  From the WaPo:

The vote was far from decisive, however, and angered many delegates who opposed the reinstatement of the language. Some stood up from their seats inside the Time Warner Arena, shaking their fingers at Villaraigosa.

The second is worse. While Mr. Obama has stated his recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel in the past, it has been difficult to get any of anyone from the administration to confirm that position lately. That makes the initial excision of the Jerusalem language look like an inept attempt to sneak in a policy change without acknowledging it. His restoration of the excision confirms the view that any support Mr. Obama shows toward Israel is mere expediency in the domestic arena rather than any genuine conviction that Israel is strategically important to the U.S., let alone any fondness for our most loyal Middle East ally.

If Mr. Obama was considering a shift in policy regarding Jerusalem, we now know that such a move has strong support within the core of the Democratic Party. Those shouting nay to putting the Jerusalem language back in may have constituted half the delegates or even more than half. Allow me to suggest that they are not friends of Israel. That is one cat that the Democrats would have been advised to keep tightly tied up in the bag.

For Whom the Bell Polls

The worst poll yet for Obama was released by The Hill this week. The poll of 1,000 likely voters begins with an unusual question:

Based solely on job performance, does President Obama deserve to be reelected?

The results were devastating. Men said no by 57%. Women said no by 51%, as did voters 18-39. All three groups showed a yes vote of 40%.

Obviously the question is designed to isolate the voter's judgment of Obama from the influence of their judgment of Romney. The poll also estimates likely voters as 2% more Republican than Democrat (36-34%). Both factors weigh slightly against Mr. Obama, but the second is in line with most estimates of voter enthusiasm and the impact of the second depends on how voters favor Romney. Neither, I think, is likely to make enough difference to overcome the numbers above. If this poll is correct, Obama is a one term President.

Charlie Cook thinks that voter enthusiasm is a big problem for the President. He continues to score very well among blacks, Hispanics, younger voters. Of the three, only blacks seem likely to turn out in relatively large numbers. Meanwhile, the voter blocks that favor Romney are the groups most likely to turn out.

The other group that Obama is counting on is women voters. Here the CNN poll has some good news. It has the race tied 48-48% among likely voters. The lean Obama/Biden v. Romney/Ryan numbers among women were 54-42%, the mirror image of the numbers for men. I guess that explains the tie. Of course, it is hard to square these numbers with the Hill poll above.

So what about favorability? TPM's poll tracker shows a spike in Romney's favorable ratings across a range of polls. Measured in terms of horse race numbers, Romney enjoyed a small but historically disappointing bounce from the Republican Convention. In past elections a convention bounce seems to come from shifts in undecided voters as they absorb the two sales pitches. The prevailing theory now is that there just aren't a lot of undecided voters.

In the current environment, Romney needed to improve his favorable enough to hold onto all his leaners and attract every last voter still in play. Judged by that standard, Romney seems to have enjoyed a very good bounce from the convention. His favorable ratings are generally above 50% and he has pretty much caught up with Obama.

If I were part of the Romney organization, which I am not, I would be hopeful but worried. If I were part of the Obama organization, which I am not, I would be very worried but hopeful. The only thing I would project from the above is that there is very little that Obama can do to improve his position. The only thing he can do is to try to beat Romney back down. For evidence of my proposition, consider the subtitle of a recent LA Times editorial:

Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan are pinning the election on the proposition that Obama has been a disappointment. The president must explain how his second term would be different.

The LAT implicitly concedes Romney's point. Obama's first term was a disappointment, so he has to convince voters that his second term won't be like his first one. If the left coast Times is right, Obama's ass is oatmeal.

Is Obama Better Off Than He Was Four Years Ago?

I spent this holiday weekend camping and hiking in the Theodore Roosevelt National Park, North Unit. When I powered up my laptop this evening, I was interested to see what might have changed in three days. The answer is: not much. Romney and Obama are tied for the first time in a while in the RCP average. That is mostly on the strength of the Rasmussen poll, which gives Romney a four point advantage. Gallup continues to hold stable, with a one point advantage for Obama. It doesn't look like the Republicans got any bounce out of their convention.

Can the Democrats get a bounce? I don't know, but the current currents don't seem favorable. Here's The Politico:

Delegates at the Democratic National Convention here are the truest of true believers, decked out in red, white and blue "Obama '12" buttons and energized for the fall campaign.

But even they are echoing the question Mitt Romney and the Republicans posed at their convention: Are Americans better off than they were four years ago?

These delegates are worried about the still-sluggish state of the economy and want to know what President Barack Obama is going to do about it in a second term.

The "are you better off than four years ago" is a very unfortunate meme to have buzzing around the Obama campaign. If you don't believe me, ask Governor O'Malley. From the National Journal:

A day after saying, no, the country was not better off than it was four years ago, Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley reversed course on Monday and said, yes, indeed it was.

Obviously, the general situation of American is not better after four years of Barack Obama in the White House. See Forbes. While Obama has spent much of that time blaming Bush, the next President will have no one to blame but Obama.

The problem Obama now has is this: his faithful want him to explain how he will right the ship over the next four years. So far, this has been something of a mystery. Either he has a good answer or not. If not, then the best he can offer is four more years of the same. If he does have an answer, then the obvious question is why he didn't figure it out, say, two or three years ago.

Mr. Obama is obviously hoping for a change in economic trends after he is safely reelected. That's what I would be hoping for if I were on his staff. That doesn't leave him much to run on now.