South Dakota Politics

On the Anniversary of the March On Washington

There have been three movements in the history of the American Regime.  The first was the founding itself, crowning in the Philadelphia convention and culminating in the ratification of the Constitution.  The second began with the rise of the Republican Party, crowning with the election of Lincoln and the Civil War, and culminated in 13^th, 14^th, and 15^th amendments to the Constitution.  The last was the Civil Rights Movement.  That movement culminated in the Voting Rights Act and Civil Rights Act in 1964 and 65. 

The Civil Rights Movement had its crowning in the March on Washington fifty years ago today.  It gave us the last, as I suspect, of our founding fathers in Martin Luther King, Jr.  He gave us one of the greatest speeches in the canon of American rhetoric.  It is altogether proper that this event should observed in Washington today by our first African American president. 

I doubt that Mr. Obama’s speech will be long remembered, but it is worth noting now.  He got off to a good start. 

To the King family, who have sacrificed and inspired so much, to President Clinton, President Carter, Vice President Biden, Jill, fellow Americans, five decades ago today, Americans came to this honored place to lay claim to a promise made at our founding.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

In 1963, almost 200 years after those words were set to paper, a full century after a great war was fought and emancipation proclaimed, that promise, those truths remained unmet. And so they came by the thousands, from every corner of our country -- men and women, young and old, blacks who longed for freedom and whites who could no longer accept freedom for themselves while witnessing the subjugation of others. Across the land, congregations sent them off with food and with prayer. In the middle of the night, entire blocks of Harlem came out to wish them well.

That gets it right.  The central passage from the Declaration is what the United States has always been about.  Those principles were greatly advanced by Lee’s surrender but another century of apartheid would intervene before their promise could be realized.  As in 1863 so in 1963, that realization was advanced by the relentless march of vast numbers.  

The President unintentionally reveals the problem facing the contemporary civil rights movement in this passage:

To dismiss the magnitude of this progress, to suggest, as some sometimes do, that little has changed -- that dishonors the courage and the sacrifice of those who paid the price to march in those years. (Applause.) Medgar Evers, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, Martin Luther King Jr., they did not die in vain. (Applause.) Their victory was great.

But we would dishonor those heroes as well to suggest that the work of this nation is somehow complete. The arc of the moral universe may bend towards justice, but it doesn't bend on its own. To secure the gains this country has made requires constant vigilance, not complacency. Whether it's by challenging those who erect new barriers to the vote or ensuring that the scales of justice work equally for all in the criminal justice system and not simply a pipeline from underfunded schools to overcrowded jails -- (applause) -- it requires vigilance.

Yes.  It is unsound to argue that nothing much has changed or that the 1960’s movement did not fundamentally transform the nation.  Yet, the issues raised in the second paragraph, however you come down on them, just are not a part of that movement.  They are part of the ordinary business of politics in a country where African American voters can play a decisive role in nominating a candidate and getting him elected at the highest level. 

Perhaps the most surprising part of the speech was this:

And then, if we're honest with ourselves, we'll admit that during the course of 50 years, there were times when some of us, claiming to push for change, lost our way. The anguish of assassinations set off self-defeating riots.

Legitimate grievances against police brutality tipped into excuse- making for criminal behavior. Racial politics could cut both ways as the transformative message of unity and brotherhood was drowned out by the language of recrimination. And what had once been a call for equality of opportunity, the chance for all Americans to work hard and get ahead was too often framed as a mere desire for government support, as if we had no agency in our own liberation, as if poverty was an excuse for not raising your child and the bigotry of others was reason to give up on yourself. All of that history is how progress stalled. That's how hope was diverted. It's how our country remained divided.

The President did a very brave thing, there.  He acknowledged the legitimacy and to some extent conceded the point of the honorable opposition.  Almost any conservative could have put the matter in just that way. 

No, we are not a color blind nation, as if anyone ever said we were.  No, racism has not disappeared from America, even if is now a mere shadow of what one sees in such enlightened places as Europe.  Race continues to haunt us in our passions and imaginations.  It has become, however, just another of the issues that heat up pages and political rooms.  The President mentioned jobs in his speech.  Whatever we accomplish on that front, it is unlikely to be memorialized in granite. 

That is what the heroic period of the Civil Rights Movement accomplished: to make our politics less heroic and more ordinary.  It is a good day to recall how magnificent and achievement that was. 

Obama's Failed Middle East Policy

Mr. Obama returned from his recent vacation just in time.  News had just broken of a possible chemical weapons attack in Syria’s capital, almost a year to the day after the President drew his infamous red line (or was it the dreaded periwinkle squiggle?  I forget) on the use of such weapons by the Syrian regime.  Meanwhile the UN Security Council convened an emergency meeting to discuss the news.  Our newly appointed U.N. Ambassador, Samantha Powers, skipped it.  She was vacationing in Ireland.  Never mind.  She tweeted:

Reports devastating: 100s dead in streets, including kids killed by chem weapons. UN must get there fast & if true, perps must face justice.

At any rate, no action was taken, which is surely what would have been the result if she or the President himself had attended. 

Well, back to the grind.  Mr. Obama and Ms. Powers would do well to consult Walter Russell Mead’s postmortem on the Administration’s “grand strategy” in the Middle East.  I am still not entirely sure that Mr. Obama really had a strategy, but Mead makes a plausible case. 

The Obama administration had a grand strategy in the Middle East. It was well intentioned, carefully crafted and consistently pursued. …The U.S. would work with moderate Islamist groups like Turkey's AK Party and Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood to make the Middle East more democratic. This would kill three birds with one stone. First, by aligning itself with these parties, the Obama administration would narrow the gap between the 'moderate middle' of the Muslim world and the U.S. Second, by showing Muslims that peaceful, moderate parties could achieve beneficial results, it would isolate the terrorists and radicals, further marginalizing them in the Islamic world. Finally, these groups with American support could bring democracy to more Middle Eastern countries, leading to improved economic and social conditions, gradually eradicating the ills and grievances that drove some people to fanatical and terroristic groups.

That has the advantage of at least sounding coherent and reasonable.  It has the disadvantage of having failed miserably. 

With the advantages of hindsight, it appears that the White House made five big miscalculations about the Middle East. It misread the political maturity and capability of the Islamist groups it supported; it misread the political situation in Egypt; it misread the impact of its strategy on relations with America's two most important regional allies (Israel and Saudi Arabia); it failed to grasp the new dynamics of terrorist movements in the region; and it underestimated the costs of inaction in Syria.

That strikes me as correct, though all five boil down to the same thing: a failure to recognize who is competent at what.  Any progress in the region depends on persons, parties, institutions, etc., that can deliver at least marginally competent government.  As Mead points out, the Administration hoped to make new alliances with the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government in Turkey.  The Brotherhood turned out to be miserably incompetent both at politics and at administration.  Erdogan seems to be sliding toward “tinfoil-hat” weirdness:

Prominent members of the party leadership look increasingly unhinged, blaming Jews, telekinesis and other mysterious forces for the growing troubles it faces.

With the exception of Iran, Islamists have shown very little aptitude for competent, let alone progressive governing.  What the radicals have shown an aptitude for is mischief and mayhem.  Defeated, at least temporarily in Iraq, they have reformed and renewed their strength across the region.  The Administration was not wise to speak of an end to the war on terror. 

Mead’s prescription is to renew our investment in allies that are forces for stability in the region: Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the Egyptian military.  Again, that seems right.  Mr. Obama has offended all three though, Mead tells us, he has been busy mending our relationship with Israel. 

On the issue of Syria, however, he repeats the conventional wisdom that Mr. Obama might have rescued the situation if he had intervened forcefully and early.  By dithering, he let the wounds fester and now Hezbollah is fighting for the regime while militants from around the region are getting training and experience fighting against it.  The violence is spilling over into Lebanon and other places.  Perhaps if the President had acted at the beginning, he could have forged alliances with genuine moderates. 

Here I have to come to Mr. Obama’s defense.  Dither he did, but is it really plausible that competent government would have emerged out of the spontaneous rebellion that ignited the war?  Mead’s own arguments suggest otherwise.  Syria is a mess and I do not know what policy would make sense there. 

It does seem to me that it was stupid to insist that Mr. Assad must go back when it looked like he was going anyway.  Battlefield events are hard to predict.  It was certainly a bad idea to draw a red line in the sand unless you have a very good idea of what you are going to do if the line is crossed.  Mr. Obama’s consistently insipid language sends the message that his words mean nothing.  Now that he is back from vacation, if indeed he is back, he would do well to tend to that matter. 

NPR v. South Dakota

Here is my recent column for South Dakota Magazine. 

In October 2011, National Public Radio aired a scathing critique of South Dakota’s child protection policies.  It alleged that the state is removing Native American children from their homes in disproportionately high numbers, “sometimes under questionable circumstances,” and that “the state is largely failing to place them according to the law.”  That last part means that the state is not making an effort to place such children in Native American homes, as required by the Indian Child Welfare Act. 

Lest we miss the significance of all this, we are reminded that “Years ago, thousands of Native American children were forcibly removed from their homes and sent to boarding schools, where the motto of the schools' founder was "Kill the Indian, Save the Man."”  The implication here is that South Dakota is continuing racist policies of the past, atrocities that aimed to destroy Native American culture and that resulted in terrible abuses. 

The story alleges, moreover, that South Dakota has an additional, venal motive for its mistreatment of Native children.  We are told that the state receives $100 million a year for foster children, implying that the state profits by removing Native children from their homes. 

If the NPR journalists had made their case, it would be a damning indictment of South Dakota.  Did they?  NPR’s Ombudsman, Edward Schumacher-Matos, doesn’t think so.  An ombudsman is hired precisely to keep an institution honest.  This he does by utterly demolishing the story.  He finds that the series violated NPR’s code of ethics and standards in the following ways:

1. No proof for its main allegations of wrongdoing;

2. Unfair tone in communicating these unproven allegations;

3. Factual errors, shaky anecdotes and misleading use of data by quietly switching what was being measured;

4. Incomplete reporting and lack of critical context;

5. No response from the state on many key points.

I will mention only a few of the misleading elements that Schumacher-Matos uncovers.  Consider that $100 million.  It includes all children in foster care not, as inferred, just Native children.  It includes Medicaid and other medical reimbursements and doesn’t count the state spending that matches federal funds.  It is very unlikely that the state makes money by removing anyone from their homes. 

Or consider this statistic presented in the story: nine of ten Native children removed from their homes are being placed in White families.  You aren’t told that four of those nine were placed by tribal courts or that tribal judges put Native children in White homes at a higher rate than state judges. 

According to NPR, Native American children “make up less than 15 percent of the child population, yet they make up more than half of the children in foster care.”  That is the basis for the charge that Native children are removed in disproportionate numbers.  Yet NPR’s own website shows that the disproportion is greater in Minnesota and Washington.  What does that mean? 

It means that all three state governments are simply responding to the cases with which they are confronted.  Some populations of residents have higher rates of social dysfunction than others.  One might suspect that Minnesota and Washington are acting more vigorously, with greater resources, to protect children in peril.  If South Dakota removed fewer Native children from their home, that would “correct” the disproportion.  It would also leave us open to the charge that we don’t care about the most vulnerable children. 

Protecting children is one of the most important tasks of state governments.  Sometimes that means removing them from dysfunctional families and placing them in any safe environment you can find.  Almost everyone agrees that it would be better to place Native children in Native American foster homes, but there is an acute shortage of these homes.  When a child becomes the custody of the state, surely the real question is where to find a safe environment to place the child. 

There is no reason to believe that South Dakota has done a less conscientious job of this than any other state or that racism or greed drove our policies.  That doesn’t mean that there aren’t abuses in our system.  I am sure that there are and we need to know about them.  NPR’s slanderous yellow journalism serves only to make it easier for real abusers to escape scrutiny. 

http://www.npr.org/2011/10/25/141672992/native-foster-care-lost-children-shattered-families

http://www.npr.org/blogs/ombudsman/2013/08/09/186943929/s-dakota-indian-foster-care-1-investigative-storytelling-gone-awry?utm_medium=referral&utm_source=t.co

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2011/11/slandering-the-red-states-part-i.php

http://www.npr.org/2011/10/25/141475618/disproportionality-rates-of-native-american-children-in-foster-care

 

When You’ve Lost Eugene Robinson…

Eugene Robinson is about as reflexive a liberal and as defensive a defender of Mr. Obama as one can imagine. Yet he even he has come to understand how little the President's words mean.

President Obama's message about the government's massive electronic surveillance programs came through loud and clear: Get over it.

The president used more soothing words in his pre-vacation news conference Friday, but that was the gist. With perhaps the application of a fig leaf here and a sheen of legalistic mumbo jumbo there, the snooping will continue.

Unless, of course, we demand that it end.

The modest reforms Obama proposed do not begin to address the fundamental question of whether we want the National Security Agency to log all of our phone calls and read at least some of our emails, relying on secret judicial orders from a secret court for permission. The president indicated he is willing to discuss how all this is done -- but not whether…

As part of its public relations campaign, the administration released a 22-page white paper outlining its legal rationale for collecting and keeping a detailed log of all our domestic phone calls. The document depends on novel definitions of words whose meaning, I always thought, was fairly clear.

Somewhat less kind was Jeffrey Rosen at the New Republic:

President Obama's repeated comments that "there is no spying on Americans" and that "we don't have a domestic spying program," as he told Jay Leno, were contradicted by two revelations at the end of last week. On Thursday, the New York Times reported that the NSA is "searching the contents of vast amounts of Americans' e-mail and text communications into and out of the country," looking not only for Americans who communicate with foreigners under surveillance but also for those who mention information about them. On Friday, The Guardian reported that the NSA has a previously secret backdoor allowing it to query the names of American citizens in the course of searching phone calls and emails collected about foreign targets.

These revelations led news outlets like the Huffington Post and others to ask: "Did Obama lie on national television?" And it's certainly true that the evasive language the administration uses to describe what it's doing is increasingly corrosive. The administration feels it can't reveal the details about its surveillance program, so it uses funny language and then gets caught "lying," creating an atmosphere of dishonesty and distrust. Obama's Clintonian equivocations have made this the administration of what James Clapper called the "least untruthful answer," and that seems troubling.

Rosen is being rather bashful with his scare quotes, but the title of the piece is "The Lies Aren't What Makes Obama's NSA Stance So Awful."

I'm not sure that the kind of data mining that the Administration is doing is indefensible. I think it might be possible to do it in a way that protects privacy. I am sure that the Administration has shameless lied about what it is doing, in both artful and very clumsy ways.

I remember a lot of exchanges on this blog with A.I. and others about the Administration's mendacity. I was right.

Close to the point is Mr. Obama's habit of declaring that something must be done about something which he then does nothing about. One case in point is the reform of our entitlement programs. He and nearly everyone else recognize that reforms are desperately needed. The managers of Social Security and Medicare constantly cry out in alarm. So what are the President's proposals? Don't hold your breath.

A more recent case is his speech on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. From Meagan McArdle:

U.S. President Barack Obama just gave a speech saying that he wants to reform the housing market, pulling back on the government's role as the primary backer of your mortgage. And about time.

The government currently backs about 90 percent of newly issued mortgages, through Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, the Federal Housing Administration and Department of Veterans Affairs. To all intents and purposes, except for very large loans to very affluent people, there is no private mortgage market in the U.S.

The president said today that he wants to change that -- to make it so that investors, not the government, are bearing more of the default risk. A fine sentiment, but he's a little vague on the details of exactly how government involvement in the mortgage market will be wound down.

That's our man. He's got a great idea there. Now: how does he propose to actually do what he says needs to be done? He doesn't. He ain't gonna. He never does. His words are cotton candy, sweet on the tongue but utterly insubstantial.

SD Legislature is right to favor reinstatement of Glass-Steagall Act

Here's my latest in the Pierre Capital Journal.  A snippet:

If we don’t like bailing out banks, then we can’t let banks get so large. Presently, five banks hold “assets equal to 56 percent of the country’s economy” according to David Rohde. One way to reduce the risk to the public is to separate commercial and investment banking.

Some, including Sen. Johnson, believe that the Dodd-Frank banking reform bill passed in 2009 is enough regulation. This complicated morass of regulatory confusion accomplishes precisely what it was intended to do. Sponsored by two members of Congress, Chris Dodd and Barney Frank, deeply involved in banking corruption, Dodd-Frank favors big banks at the expense of smaller banks who find compliance with byzantine rules difficult and expensive. It also keeps in place “too big to fail.” There is an implicit guarantee that if large banks start to go under, the taxpayer will bail them out.

Those interested in both economic justice and sound policy should stand with the South Dakota Legislature and favor a reinstatement of the Glass-Steagall Act.

South Dakota Slandered by NPR

Here's a bit of real South Dakota Politics! From John Hinderaker at Powerline:

In October 2011, NPR aired a three-part series of programs on its investigation of foster care for Native American children in South Dakota. The series, reported by Laura Sullivan, made the sensational claim that South Dakota welfare agencies take (the word "kidnap" was used more than once) Indian children from their homes, and place them in foster care with white families so that they can collect money from the federal government.

Hinderaker produced a series of posts that demolished the NPR story. You can find links to his posts at the above site.

NPR's ombudsman Edward Schumacher-Matos has released his own review of the story and it confirms what Hinderaker has been saying. Schumacher-Matos tears the NPR story into shreds.

In October 2011, NPR aired a three-part investigative series by and alleging abuses in the foster care system for Native American children in South Dakota. With a mix of statements by the reporter and much innuendo, the series unmistakably alleges that the state's Department of Social Services was systematically removing Indian children from their families in order to collect federal reimbursements. The series further alleges that cultural bias — it stops just short of saying racism — was behind the overwhelming placement of these children in white homes, in possible violation of federal law…

My finding is that the series was deeply flawed and should not have been aired as it was.

The series committed five sins that violate NPR's Code of standards and ethics. They were:

1. No proof for its main allegations of wrongdoing;

2. Unfair tone in communicating these unproven allegations;

3. Factual errors, shaky anecdotes and misleading use of data by quietly switching what was being measured;

4. Incomplete reporting and lack of critical context;

5. No response from the state on many key points.

No doubt the investigative team was driven by the history of injustices suffered by Native Americans. There is much to be outraged about. But good intentions are not enough. Specifically, there is no whistleblower, no document — no smoking gun even — to support the unmistakable allegation that for nearly the last 15 years, state social workers have been so evil as to take Indian children from their families as a way to reap federal funds for the state government. The charge is so shocking and such a potential insult to many dedicated social workers that the burden of proof should have been especially high.

There is more that is wrong, too. The reported federal reimbursement numbers are badly inflated. That is a factual flaw. Perhaps more upsetting to many of us is a moral one: concern for the centrally relevant matter of child neglect is simply dismissed. That many of the foster decisions, meanwhile, are in fact made by the tribes' own independent judges goes unreported altogether. The crucial context of social ills and a crisis of Indian family breakdowns on the state's reservations are also all but missing.

Apparently NPR is "standing by its story" even though there is not enough left of it to bury in a coke spoon. I close with Hinderaker's conclusions.

I don't believe I have ever seen a representative of a media outlet take apart his own outlet's story with the care and thoroughness displayed by Mr. Schumacher-Matos. The one thing he doesn't do is address the motivations of those who reported and produced the false and misleading series, but it is easy to fill in that blank. The reporter and editors spoke from the liberal perspective that is taken for granted by pretty much everyone at NPR. They had a narrative that they wanted to push for political reasons.

Hoodwinked About Fort Hood

When a lone gunman shot U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords and eleven others in a Safeway parking lot in Tucson, Arizona, killing six people, the New York Times was quick to jump to conclusions. The shooter, the editors explained, "is very much a part of a widespread squall of fear, anger and intolerance that has produced violent threats against scores of politicians and infected the political mainstream with violent imagery." In fact, there was never any evidence that Jared Lee Loughner was part of anything outside his own paranoid delusions. The Times' mixed metaphor (squalls blow, pathogens infect) suggested a pathetic desire to connect the Tucson rampage to the Tea Party or maybe Sarah Palin.

The Times had been more circumspect a year earlier, after the Fort Hood shooting. On November 5, 2009, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan murdered 13 people and wounded 32 others. The Times warned against jumping to conclusions. "Until investigations are complete," the Newspaper of Record cautioned, "no one can begin to imagine what could possibly have motivated this latest appalling rampage. There may never be an explanation."

In fact any idiot could tell exactly what Hasan's motives were. He shouted "Allahu akbar!" he pulled the trigger. The Senate Committee on Homeland Security released a report on their investigation of the incident. What is most appalling about the Committee's report is that the Army and the FBI had plenty of reason to know well in advance what Hasan was and what he might do.

Major Hasan, an army psychiatrist, was promoted in spite of the fact that his performance was poor. He was promoted even though his superiors and pretty much all the soldiers who knew him recognized that he was adopting a radical, militarized version of Islam. A couple of his evaluators called him a "ticking time bomb". They were ignored. Maj. Hasan wrote a paper detailing his radical views and his sympathy for suicide bombers and he presented it to his fellow soldiers. His official evaluations explain that he had an interest in terrorism research.

The FBI knew that Hasan was in contact with known terrorist Anwar al-Awlaki. Awlaki's specialty is encouraging individuals to commit terrorist acts from afar, by means of online communications. He may have trained the Christmas Day Bomber. His writings inspired the Times Square Bomber, among many others. President Obama authorized the targeted killing of Awlaki by drone in 2011. Two Joint Terrorism Task Force units in FBI field offices in San Diego and Washington D. C. monitored Hasan's contact with Awlaki, but they did a poor job of pooling and sharing their information with one another. No serious investigation was carried out and by the middle of 2009, a few months before the attack, the FBI had lost all interest.

Hasan's court martial finally began last week, almost four years after his crime. "The evidence will clearly show that I am the shooter," he declared at the outset. It is said that someone who represents himself in court has a fool for a client. Hasan is no fool. He does not seem the least bit confused about what he did nor does he show any sign of wishing to deny it.

The Pentagon does seem confused. It refused to classify the shooting as an act of terror, preferring instead to call it "workplace violence." This has some unfortunate consequences for Hasan's victims. If this was not an act of terror then they are ineligible for Purple Hearts and can be denied certain benefits. The Pentagon sheepishly explained that classifying the crime as terrorism would make it harder to convict Hasan, something that is very hard to believe. What the military is doing is what it has long been doing with this self-described foot soldier in the mujahedeen: trying to ignore what is starkly obvious.

There is a pattern here. The Army and the FBI refused to see a terrorist hiding in plain sight, except for the hiding part. The New York Times remained in denial even after the self-professed Solider of Allah murdered a dozen soldiers of the United States. His military prosecutors would refuse to call him a terrorist if he had the word tattooed on his chest.

This is multicultural sensitivity run amok. More to the point, it is an example of the appalling timidity our elites in the press and the Administration are seized with when dealing with militant Islam. No, most Muslims are not terrorists and no, we aren't at war with Islam. We are in fact at war with various camps of mujahedeen scattered about the world. Those forces represent an existential threat to everything that our liberal democracy is about. When we try to be sensitive about this, it only sends the message that we are weak and that their murderous violence pays dividends.

We don't have religious tests for citizenship, or service on juries, or service in our armed forces. That is a very good thing. If you are prepared to obey the law and to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, we don't care in which direction you turn when you pray or if you pray at all. It is a good idea to encourage American Muslims to join the military and to give them the respect that all Americans are entitled to. However, it is far more important to recognize a ticking bomb before it goes off. Getting that backwards cost us dearly at Fort Hood.

http://www.cnn.com/2013/08/06/justice/hasan-court-martial

The Man Who Isn’t There

I occasionally listen to the New Yorker Political Scene podcast to find out what liberals say when they think they are talking only to one another. In a recent podcast on Obama's speeches, including the one he gave shortly after the Zimmerman verdict, one of the guests said something that was unintentionally revealing. He described interviewing the President concerning racial issues. Mr. Obama said [I am quoting David Remnick here] that "the most important thing I can do on race, I've already done. I'm the first elected African American President."

That reveals a lot about how Obama understands his job. It is to be something more than to do anything. Mr. Obama thinks that from his presence in the Oval Office or at the many podiums policy and change will radiate out without his having to bother much with the details. So when he decides to "pivot" to some new topic in his speeches, that alone is presidential action.

For a case in point, Mickey Kaus considers the President's recent speech on the economy.

"Washington's taken its eye off the ball. And I'm here to say this needs to stop. … Our focus has to be on the basic economic issues that the matter most to you — the people we represent. (Applause.) That's what we have to spend our time on and our energy on and our focus on.

… [R]educing poverty, reducing inequality, growing opportunity. That's what we need. (Cheers, applause.) That's what we need. That's what we need right now. (Cheers, applause.)

That's what we need to be focused on." [E.A.]

Okay, Obama is here to say that "Washington" needs to keep its eye on the ball. But as Kaus points out, it's Obama himself who has been focusing on issues that have nothing to do with the economy.

Since his reelection, the President's policy agenda has included the following:

1. Gun Control
2. Immigration
3. Climate Change

It is reasonable to think that all three are important and that they may have long term economic consequences. None of them, however, is likely to have any effect on the economic problems we face right now. Climate change may have some long term effects on poverty, inequality, and opportunity, but wind power and the war against coal aren't going to return any dividends in the near term. In poll after poll, these issues rank at the bottom of those that "matter most" to most Americans.

Now that the President has decided to pivot to the economy, what proposals does he offer? Kaus teases them out of the speech, and the result is a list of trivialities.

If the President understood his job as setting the agenda for policies to be enacted by Congress, he might want to step back and ask why the present economic recovery has been so terribly anemic with regard to job creation. He might want to ask why labor force participation has decline precipitously, or why so many of the jobs recently created are part time. He might want to direct his advisors to offer some remedies. That's a tall order and it's not clear that anyone knows what to do. Still, we might expect our chief executive to at least make an effort. That's not our man.

Summer Travel

The Pierre Capital Journal has posted my comedy stylings on traveling with kids.