South Dakota Politics

The Party of Enablers

If things are really as bad as they look for Democrats this year, there seems to be no shortage of explanations.  I will argue, however, that all the proffered causes fall a bit short of the whole. 

Things do look really bad.  Michael Barone has this

Here's an astonishing poll: David Freddoso at Conservative Intelligence Briefing links to a report by the Washington Post's Aaron Blake that West Virginia 3rd district incumbent Rep. Nick Rahall trails Republican challenger state Sen. Evan Jenkins by a 54-percent to 40-percent margin…

Rahall, first elected in 1976, is now the seventh most senior member of the House... Moreover, his district in southern West Virginia has historically been very Democratic; in its previous boundaries it voted for Walter Mondale over Ronald Reagan in 1984…

From 1978 to 2008, Rahall was re-elected with at least 64 percent of the vote, except in 1990 when he beat Republican Marianne Brewster by only 52 percent to 48 percent.

Put that together with a Republican leading in the Senate race in Michigan and the Republican victory in the Florida special election, and we may well be looking at an historic collapse.  Ben Highton puts it more mildly in the WaPo:

The chances that the Republicans will maintain control of the House are a near certainty.  Republicans also have a fair chance of winning a Senate majority, too.

So what are the causes?  Highton rounds up three of the usual suspects.

Part of the problem for Democrats is that it’s a midterm election year and the party that controls the White House typically loses seats. On top of that, national conditions do not look very promising if Democrats are to buck the usual tide against the president’s party.  At this point, national conditions look, at best, average for a midterm election, and in the case of presidential approval, not very good at all.

Okay, so we have the election cycle, national conditions (meaning the economy), and presidential approval, in order of increasing severity.  As for the latter, Gallop now has the President’s approval at 39% (vs. 55% disapproval).  His RCP average now has him down ten points, 43 to 53. 

Maureen Dowd identifies the fourth factor, which is obviously related to the third.

At the heart of all this, really, is that the White House totally blew the rollout of the health care law and Democrats have not recovered. It provided a huge opening for Republicans, who had just shut down the government and were tanking in the polls and in despair themselves.

This strikes me as too harsh and too kind.  The botched rollout was devastating, to be certain; but the effects would have faded if we weren’t constantly reminded that the Affordable Health Care Act is in utter disarray.  We are reminded of this as the Administration continually modifies, delays, or suspends various parts of the law. 

Dana Milbank notes that the “millennials,” who were a key part of Obama’s support, are not voting with their feet for ObamaCare. 

The administration announced last week that only 1.08 million people ages 18 to 34 had signed up for Obamacare by the end of February, or about 25 percent of total enrollees. If the proportion doesn’t improve significantly, the result likely will be fatal for the Affordable Care Act.

So if the Democrats do suffer a disaster this November, will ObamaCare be the determining factor?  Yes, in the sense that the proximate cause of a death by heart attack is that the heart stops beating.  That still raises the question of what caused the heart attack. 

Dowd points to the ultimate cause of the Democratic funk:

The state of relations between congressional Democrats and the administration has been deteriorating every week, but now it’s hitting a new bottom… Hill Democrats are seething at Obama, fearing that the onetime messiah is putting them in a slough that will last until — or through — 2016.

Top Democrats who were fans of the president and prone to giving him the benefit of the doubt now say they’ve completely lost confidence in the White House’s ability to advance an agenda and work with them in a way that’s going to give Democrats a fighting chance in November.

That would be the problem.  The White House’s inability "to advance an agenda and work with" Congressional Democrats, but the fact that they have, hitherto, for six years, given Mr. Obama “the benefit of the doubt”.  

The hard truth is that Congressional Democrats have been propping up a largely vacant administration since Mr. Obama took office.  That is political capital spent without any return.  The President’s allies in the mainstream press have been doing much the same.  Now that events both foreign and domestic have exposed his nakedness, the bill is coming due. 

 

Religious liberty is losing the battle for the minds of Americans

Here is my latest in the Pierre Capital Journal.  Here's the teaser before you read the whole thing:

According to religious freedom attorney Douglas Laycock, these RFRA laws were always intended to protect groups and businesses as well as individuals. Arizona was simply attempting to codify this understanding of the law.  

But Mr. Laycock has noted in other contexts that these are dark days for religious liberty.  Because of the clear conflict between same-sex marriage and the deep religious beliefs of many Americans, religious liberty conflicts are on the rise. We are already seeing business owners being sued successfully for refusing to work same-sex weddings and people are losing their jobs because of their traditional beliefs regarding marriage and homosexuality.

There is growing concern, well founded in my view, that same-sex marriage will be used as a bludgeon to force all dissenters into conformity. There is some precedent in law that religious schools, hospitals, social service organizations, and other entities can be stripped of licensures and legal privileges (such as tax exempt status) for reasons of “public policy.” Laycock, himself a same-sex marriage advocate, notes support for religious liberty is at an unprecedented low due to the growing support of same-sex marriage over religious liberty. Increasingly the law is saying sexual liberty is more fundamental than religious liberty.  

Ultimately, it’s a poor return on investment

The Pierre Capital Journal has printed a couple of my columns.  Here's a link to one.  It's on college sports.  Here's a snippet. 

In his new book “The King of Sports: Football’s Impact on America,” author Gregg Easterbrook notes that except for a very small handful of very elite institutions, most college athletic programs take money out of the general fund of the university to pay for sports. This is especially true of student activity fees which are used to fund athletic facilities that the average student is not allowed to use.

Ohio University economist Richard Vedder notes a Knight Foundation study of the 100 largest college athletic programs found that while those schools increased academic spending per student by 8 percent from 2005 to 2011, they increased athletic spending per athlete by 38 percent. The mean academic spending per student was about $13,000, while spending per athlete was about $96,000.

So while we complain mightily about the cost of college education, colleges are charging students to pay for athletics that are only tangentially related to actual education. As Easterbrook puts it, college athletics often acts as a not-for-profit business that takes money from tax payers and students to pay for its own operation, often paying employees quite well.

Hit the link and read the whole thing. 

Mr Obama's Feckless Foreign Policy

I don’t expect the Crimean crisis to turn into a major disaster, but I can easily imagine how it might do that.  All that has to happen is for Putin to be the worst of Putin and Obama to be the typical Obama. 

The worst of Putin would be a Russian invasion of the Ukraine.  There is a precedent for this in the war in Georgia.  The worst-Putin scenario involves a major Russian occupation of eastern Ukraine or maybe all of that nation. 

The first half of the worst-Obama scenario is already in the can. 

We are now deeply concerned by reports of military movements taken by the Russian Federation inside of Ukraine. Russia has a historic relationship with Ukraine, including cultural and economic ties, and a military facility in Crimea, but any violation of Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity would be deeply destabilizing, which is not in the interest of Ukraine, Russia, or Europe.

That is from the President’s address on the issue today.  Notice what it leaves out?  No mention of American interests.  Is the President really interested?  What would a “violation of Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity” represent?

It would represent a profound interference in matters that must be determined by the Ukrainian people. It would be a clear violence of Russia’s commitment to respect the independence and sovereignty and borders of Ukraine, and of international laws. And just days after the world came to Russia for the Olympic Games, it would invite the condemnation of nations around the world. And indeed, the United States will stand with the international community in affirming that there will be costs for any military intervention in Ukraine.

You have to admire that phrase “there will be costs”.  What is the subject of that proposition?  What costs are alluded to?  No clue.  If you look up feckless in a picture dictionary, you might find a picture of the President giving this speech. 

Unfortunately, there is precedent for this.  Mr. Obama spent years dithering about the war in Syria and then, without noticing what he was doing, drew a red line over chemical weapons.  When it became clear that the Assad had crossed that line, he tried to back pedal.  At that point someone in his inner circle convinced him that he was going all Jimmy Carter and looking like a coward and he panicked.  He decided that military intervention was necessary to save his face and asked Congress for permission to do something manly.

At that point Putin intervened and a deal was struck.  We wouldn’t intervene militarily, which we weren’t going to do anyway, and the Syrian regime would hand over its chemical weapons, which it isn’t going to do either.  Such is foreign policy under Barack Obama. 

So what happens if Mr. Putin invades the Ukraine?  Probably nothing.  Obama spouts a lot of pious fluffdoodle and Mr. Putin does what he wants.  Yet that will remind the world and the electorate in the U.S. that our President is less substantial than a piece of toast soaking up lukewarm coffee.  What if the President panics again?  He might decide to order U.S. warships into the Black Sea, just to show that he is not what he in fact is. 

I don’t think that this scenario is likely.  I think it is entirely possible because we have at the national helm an empty suit.  Putin has figured this out.  He may want to get all he can get just now, before someone competent replaces the current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. 

UPDATE

The Russian Parliament has approved the use of force in the Ukraine.  I do not see this as significant in itself.  Russian forces are already in the Crimea and they are moving about.  How far they move is what matters. 

I doubt very much whether Putin needs the approval of Parliament to do anything he damn well pleases, let alone that there was any chance he wouldn't get what he asked for.  What was this about?  He is rubbing our President's face in his own wee wee.  This, Mr. Putin is saying, is how a real man handles a legislature.