Category: Politics 2002-03

Starting here and scrolling down, you can catch some of Howard Dean’s blog entries as guest blogger last week at Prof. Lawrence Lessig’s blog. First of all, a nonpartisan hat’s off to Dean; while most presidential candidates are too busy to do a running blog, it’s a great way to showcase a candidate early in the race if it’s taken seriously, and Dean appears to have tried to be genuinely responsive to feedback.
But then there’s the substance of these posts. Where to begin?
People asked what can be done about media deregulation. I think we need to re-regulate the media that has clearly abused its authority by censoring information that should be made available to the American people.
OK, let’s get this straight . . . Dean wants to use government regulation to punish media outlets for their editorial decisions? So much for Mister Civil Liberties Man. Can you say, “Hugo Chavez” or “Vladimir Putin,” boys and girls?
Someone asked about the Patriot Act-we should repeal those parts that violate our constitution.
Well, it’s good to see that Dean understands that we should repeal things that are unconstitutional, whereas our current president has been known to sign things into law (ahem, McCain-Feingold) that he thinks are unconstitutional, and leave the courts to do the dirty work. But I don’t necessarily agree with Dean’s selections:
I have real problems authorizing the FBI to obtain library and bookstore and video store records simply by claiming the information is �sought for� an investigation against international terrorism. It�s also clearly unconstitutional to detain indivduals and deny them access to a lawyer.
Frankly, the library thing just doesn’t bother me that much. And it isn’t “clearly unconstitutional” to deny counsel to non-citizens or to combatants in a war.
I believe that the only way we are ever going to come to a real solution on any of these issues is if we all stand together against the special interests in Washington. There are now 33 lobbyists for every member of congress. How do we change that? By working together.
Actually, working together is precisely how you attract lobbyists, who love the smell of bipartisanship in the morning. The only known way to get rid of lobbyists is to get the power over their interests out of Washington.
Facts are a better basis for decisions than ideology.
Ah, “competence, not ideology.” Where have we heard that one before?

One thing that’s worried me for some time about Bush’s ability to get the economy moving again — both long-term for the national good and short-term for the 2004 election — is the fact that something like 1/6 of the economy is California, which remains under the hammerlock of the Democratic Party more than any state in the nation (Dem governor, Dems control both houses of the state legislature, Dem state AG, two Dem Senators, Dems dominate the Congressional delegation, etc.). And what a party it is: a governor who’s unprincipled and almost universally unpopular riding herd over a state party dominated by the hard cultural Left and the rent-seeking special interest groups (government employee unions, the plaintiffs’ bar, etc. — government by the people who make a living off of government). The result is a $38.6 billion budget deficit, a spiral of downgrading of California’s bonds, and a basket case of a state economy. (While the California GOP isn’t innocent of all this, they’ve been too powerless too long to bear much of the responsibility. But if you want to blame Pete Wilson — the man who did more for the Democratic party in the last 15 years than anyone else — go ahead).
Part of the problem, and one that reaches outside of California, is litigation and regulation run amok. For example, even Steven Breyer recently recognized that California has gone too far in handing over regulatory powers to the plaintiffs’ bar and that “[a]s far as I can tell, California�s delegation of the government�s enforcement authority to private individuals is not traditional, and may be unique . . . ”
Mark Steyn recently noted that the May employment figures showed a net gain of 4,500 jobs for the other 49 states — but a 21,500 job loss in California. I’d be fascinated to see a deeper analysis to show exactly how much of the nation’s lingering economic hangover is concentrated in the one place where the writ of conservative economic policies barely runs.
If this keeps up, look for the Democrats to blame Bush’s national policies for their own local problems. Maybe that’s why Bush wants Davis to stay on — so he can point to the source of the problem and say that things aren’t so bad anywhere else. But to my view, this is reason enough to support a recall: the rest of the nation can’t afford Gray Davis anymore.

Dorothy Rabinowitz of the Wall Street Journal draws a parallel I’ve often drawn myself, calling Ann Coulter “the Maureen Dowd of the conservatives.”

As a New Hampshirite, Mark Steyn has had the opportunity to watch Howard Dean up close for the past decade. To no one’s surprise, he’s unimpressed:
Vermont . . . was colonised in the Sixties by ponytailed granola progressivism and summed up by a remarkably prescient 1972 article in Playboy, headlined ‘Take Over Vermont’: ‘Get 225,000 counterculturalists to settle in the Green Mountain State and exercise their franchise — and you’ve begun a unique social experiment.’ Or more to the point: just because these ideas are a surefire vote-loser everywhere across the country doesn’t mean they won’t catch on if enough of the tiny minority that believes in them moves to one small underpopulated jurisdiction.
So 30 years on, the unique social experiment is almost complete, and Howard Dean’s state is not terribly friendly to any kind of business other than folksy boutique capitalism as represented by the Vermont Teddy Bear Company and Ben & Jerry’s, the hippy-dippy ice-cream-makers who sell ‘Peace Pops’ in flavours like ‘Cherry Garcia’. And even these most famous exemplars of the Green Mountain State’s caring capitalism flopped out. A couple of years ago, Ben & Jerry’s got taken over by Unilever, even though one of them – Ben or possibly Jerry – wasn’t too happy about it. But the one who was – Jerry or maybe Ben – insists that UniBen or Jerrylever or whatever it’s called now is still just the same bunch of committed activists raging at the greed of multinational globalised capitalism, even though they’re now a wholly owned subsidiary thereof. . . . In other words, Ben & Jerry’s are full of it. And so’s Howard Dean. In Ben & Jerry terms, he’s a thousand pints of Lite, a masterful Clintonian triangulator who’s taken the but-I-didn’t-inhale approach to political viability into far more ambitious territory. Although he did part of his medical training at an abortion clinic, he’s always claimed he never actually performed one himself: he may have dilated, but he never extracted. Hardcore Vermont liberals – especially the environmentalists – got sick of Dean’s slipperiness long before he decided to run for president.
But out of state the activists don’t know that, and in a field split between five lacklustre Congressional compromisers . . . and three fringe wackos . . . , Dean’s done a superb job at positioning himself as the heart of the party. . . . The reason he’s piling up all the big money from out of state boils down to two words: civil unions. Three years ago, Vermont became the first state in the nation to recognise a form of legal union for same-sex couples, and that puts Dean on the cutting edge of the issue du jour. . . . Dean now says bringing civil unions to Vermont was ‘the most important event in my political life’. At the time, he was going round the state telling folks he was only doing it because the Vermont Supreme Court made him, and, instead of the usual showboating public ceremony, he signed the legislation behind closed doors. But out in Hollywood all Barbra Streisand and the other high rollers know is that, if gay marriage is your big priority rather than Iraq and national security and all the other peripheral junk, then Dean’s your man. In a way, he’s the first gay candidate, the first beneficiary of a prominent, organisationally effective, big-money gay bloc in the Democratic party. This year, gay is the new black.
* * *
I’d say the south will be a bridge too far for Dean and the Vermontification of the Democratic party. In electoral terms, Vermont is a polarising state. It’s the Hillary Rodham Clinton of states. . . . As for the man with the plain-spoken candour of John McCain and the electability of Bill Clinton, before it’s over it’ll be looking more like the electability of John McCain and the plain-spoken candour of Bill Clinton.

Speaking of Hillary, one of the common lines from Bill’s defenders (like Sid Blumenthal) is that hatred of Bill Clinton was all about his “progressive” politics; meanwhile, Hillary’s defenders often argue that people who hate Hillary “have a problem with strong women” or some such. Talk to a lot of dyed-in-the-wool Clinton-haters (I’ve mislaid my card, but it’s around here somewhere), and you’ll quickly realize that the psychoanalysts on the Left have it precisely backward. The people who hate Bill hate him, first and foremost, for his character; talk to them about another “New Democrat” like John Edwards or Joe Lieberman, and you won’t hit anywhere near the same vein of animosity that accompanied Bill from the very beginning. The problem with Bill is a problem we all have with that one guy we know who can get away with damn near everything, and with the way in which he symbolized all the worst aspects of a generation that was, as it so happened, second to none in its generational self-image.
As for Hillary, there are certainly plenty of people — even liberals — who hate her for her personality, but few of them focus on her as an abstract generalization. The real core of Hillary-hating relates to her politics more than her character; people didn’t hate her for trying to be Lee Hart to Bill’s Gary; they hated her from the outset out of fear that she was disguising her perceived role as the voice of the Left in Bill’s ear.
I overgeneralize, of course; my own least favorite fact about Hillary is her tendency, and that of her defenders, to recast every criticism of this emeninently criticizable public figure as being an Attack On All Women — she’s effectively tried to hijack the sympathies of an entire gender, which is one reason why the depth of Hillary-hatred among men is childs’ play compared to the way some women (not all of them conservatives) hate her. But the generalization, I submit, is true: people first came to hate Bill mostly for his character, and Hillary mostly for her politics.

THIS is a must-read — PJ O’Rourke’s review of Living History is good enough to make you forget that the Weekly Standard already had Matt Labash write a savage review of this book:
There’s “the trip to Russia when Hillary and Mrs. Boris Yeltsin ‘laughed our way through a day of public appearances and private meals with local dignitaries.’ I hesitate to think there was a logical explanation, but Hillary does say, ‘Ireland invigorated and inspired me, and I wished we could bottle up the good feelings and take them back home.’ It’s been done before.”
“We must recognize Hillary’s principled outspoken feminism as elucidated in her U.N. Conference on Women speech: ‘It is a violation of human rights when women are doused with gasoline, set on fire and burned to death because their marriage dowries are deemed too small.’ . . . And understand her stupidity. Now, Hillary’s stupidity is of a Monday’s-homework-done-on-Friday-night, 1,400 on her SATs kind, but nonetheless stupid for all that. She has lunch with Jackie Onassis, who ‘cautioned me that Bill, like President Kennedy, had a personal magnetism that inspired strong feelings in people. She never came out and said it, but she meant that he might be a target.’ Was Jackie talking about the grassy knoll or about a different kind of mons?
Hillary serves roasted eggplant soup and sweet potato puree to Jacques Chirac and doesn’t get the joke when Chirac says, ‘Of course, I love many things American, including the food. You know, I used to work in a Howard Johnson’s restaurant.’ After listening to Jiang Zemin explain that the Tibetans had been liberated by the Chinese, Hillary concludes, ‘I don’t think Jiang . . . was being quite straight with me on Tibet.'”
O’Rourke’s vicious conclusion:
“[I]t says something unflattering about our era that prominent political figures–who used to write declarations of independence, preambles to constitutions, Gettysburg addresses, and such–now use the alphabet only to make primitive artifacts, like the letter-inscribed tablet that Charlemagne is said to have put under his pillow each night, in the hope he’d wake up literate.”
(Link via The American Scene).

If you’re inclined to waste your time on Sidney Blumenthal and Whitewater, this is an amusing battle in which Blumenthal accuses the New York Times of being part of a right-wing attack machine (re-read that carefully, I’m not kidding), mostly on grounds that the Times reported Whitewater at all (in March 1992) and then failed to report on various Whitewater developments later that purportedly cast the original article into doubt. Former editor and current interim editor Joseph Lelyveld responds by tearing Blumenthal’s smoke-and-mirrors critique to pieces. (I noted Lelyveld’s review of Blumenthal’s book here).
Dick Morris, meanwhile, charges Lelyveld’s Times with pro-Clinton bias on Whitewater, and as usual with Morris’ charges, he himself is a prime conspirator. (Take anything Morris says with a grain of salt, although the evidence he cites of the puff piece he describes is certainly supportive.) Ironically, Morris and Blumenthal both cite the Times’ non-reporting of Whitewater stories as indicative of bias.
The funny thing is how Clinton partisans try to attack the Times and investigative reporter Jeff Gerth for bringing Whitewater to light at all. Why is that so important? Well, because much of the Clintons’ subsequent misbehavior in response to the investigation can only be justified if you start with the premise that there was nothing at all that should ever have been investigated.

This Washington Post profile of John Kerry, which opens with an account of him hunting, is obviously intended to show that he’s a regular guy and not some ivory tower Massachusetts anti-gun nut.

This is just savage (and justifiably so) — Matt Labash of the Weekly Standard, on the unreadable Hillary memoir:
Who else could seriously write of her grade-school appointment as “co-captain of the safety patrol” “This was a big deal in our school. My new status provided me my first lesson in the strange ways some people respond to electoral politics.” . . . Every detail of her life is wrapped in a tidy little pre-package–containing all sorts of do-goodnik asides ready for a campaign bio or a stump-speech moral. Conceiving Chelsea? “We weren’t having any luck,” she writes, “until we decided to take a vacation in Bermuda, proving once again the importance of regular time off.” Most people would just be happy to be having sex in Bermuda. She has to prove the importance of taking regular time off. Her delivery of Chelsea? An excellent opportunity to work in the factlet that Bill accompanied her into the operating room for her C-section–an “unprecedented” move at Baptist Hospital, though “soon thereafter the policy was changed to permit fathers in the delivery room during cesarean operations.”
A hike through Yellowstone with Chelsea and Bill? “America’s national parks have provided a model and an inspiration for other nations to protect their national heritage,” and oh, by the way, she almost forgot to mention: “Bill announced a historic agreement to stop a large, foreign-owned gold mine on the border of Yellowstone from threatening the pristine environment.” Vince Foster, one of Hillary’s best friends in the world, committing suicide? She interrupts news of his death to tell us that right before she was notified, she’d been on a trip to Japan, where she “met with a group of prominent Japanese women–the first of dozens of such meetings that I held around the world–to learn about the issues women were facing everywhere.”
Even when Hillary is going through her lowest moments, she manages to find a sanctimonious silver lining. . . . Remember the Rose law firm billing records that turned up in a White House closet months after they were subpoenaed by prosecutors? They got lost in the shuffle when “we found ourselves in the midst of a major renovation of the heating and air-conditioning systems to bring the White House up to environmental energy standards.”
Even the failure to stop genocide can be turned to political advantage. The death of one million Rwandans which the administration did nothing to stop? “It would have been difficult for the United States to send troops so soon after the loss of American soldiers in Somalia and when the Administration was trying to end ethnic cleansing in Bosnia,” she explains. “But Bill publicly expressed regret that our country and the international community had not done more to stop the horror.” Public regret? How do you say “thanks for nothing” in Tutsi?

For a good laugh, go to Democrats.org, click on “Supreme Court Countdown” New Flash Animation about half way down the page toward the right.
This is really, really going to get ugly, considering how nasty this stuff is before Bush has even announced a Supreme Court pick. Much uglier than the partisan smear campaigns against Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer (oh, wait . . . ). The funny thing is how the Democrats may be arguing that a Supreme nomineee is a right-wing lunatic compared to Rehnquist. I bet the Chief Justice gets his reputation rehabilitated in one heck of a hurry if he steps down.

Let’s face it: there’s really nothing the Democrats can do to defeat George W. Bush in 2004. Which is not to say he can’t be beaten, just that what can do him in is mostly a combination of external circumstances (the economy, setbacks in the war) and missteps by the Administration. The only Democrat I’d feared in terms of his ability to create his own buzz independent of pre-existing anti-Bush sentiment was John Edwards, but Edwards increasingly looks like just a pretty face who’s in over his head.
Rand Simberg notes the more interesting question, one that the Democrats have to think long and hard about: how will the presidential ticket affect the rest of the ticket, in terms of turning out the Democratic base without turning off the mainstream? Among other things, this is one reason I’m not excited about the idea that Al Sharpton could run an independent campaign: who do you think Sharpton’s voters will support for Congress?
I suspect, contrary to Simberg’s speculation, that a far-Left candidacy like Howard Dean’s would be a bad thing for the Dems, since it could convince a lot of voters that the party has lost its mind, and put a lot of moderate candidates in the same bind that swallowed so many moderate Senators in 2002. I’ll have more thoughts as we go about what the best answer is.
Of course, if you wanted to design a perfect candidate to challenge Bush, you’d want someone who could pose as a moderate; who had impeccable national-security credentials; who’s got a long record as a spending hawk; and who is personally identified with opposing the cozy relationship of big money to power in Washington.
Then again, we’ve seen that perfect candidate already, and he lost to Bush in the primaries in 2000.

Lileks compares Bill O’Reilly to Morton Downey jr. (if you don’t remember the late 80s, let’s just say that Downey was the original right-wing TV populist, and he smoked like a chimney). Vodkapundit still thinks Pat Buchanan is a better analogy. I tend to agree with Lileks that O’Reilly’s the classic example of a guy who rises, and falls, for a reason. If he’s lucky, like Rush Limbaugh, he’ll survive passing his prime without crashing and burning like Downey.

Gearing up for the 2004 election, this weekend’s newspapers have a slew of articles providing background information on presidential candidates: the Boston Globe on local favorite, John Kerry; the Washington Post on Joe Lieberman ; and the NYTimes on a potential GOP candidate in 2008, George Pataki. Note that, for the Democrats, 2004 may be the year of John Kennedy — both Lieberman and Kerry are claiming a connection to JFK.

From Will Saletan at Slate:
Correction: In Monday’s “Ballot Box,” referring to presidential candidate Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, I wrote, “Somebody toss a dollar in his guitar case so he can buy a quart of milk.” Kucinich, a vegan, does not drink milk.

A piece in last Sunday’s New York Times had some fascinating details about the decline in the number of hours worked by the average European, its connection to the decline of the European economies, and a possible explanation: the demise of the Protestant Work Ethic. Of course, this raises some chicken-and-eggery with regard to the European cradle-to-grave welfare state . . .
Here are the key numbers:

According to a recent study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the average working American spends 1,976 hours a year on the job. The average German works just 1,535 � 22 percent less. The Dutch and Norwegians put in even fewer hours. Even the British do 10 percent less work than their trans-Atlantic cousins. Between 1979 and 1999, the average American working year lengthened by 50 hours, or nearly 3 percent. But the average German working year shrank by 12 percent.
Yet even these figures understate the extent of European idleness, because a larger proportion of Americans work. Between 1973 and 1998 the percentage of the American population in employment rose from 41 percent to 49 percent. But in Germany and France the percentage fell, ending up at 44 and 39 percent. Unemployment rates in most Northern European countries are also markedly higher than in the United States.
Then there are the strikes. Between 1992 and 2001, the Spanish economy lost, on average, 271 days per 1,000 employees as a result of strikes. For Denmark, Italy, Finland, Ireland and France, the figures range between 80 and 120 days, compared with fewer than 50 for the United States.

1,535 hours; by my count, that means that if the average German worked an 8-hour day 5 days a week, he or she would get . . . 14 weeks of vacation??? (Yes, I’m aware that part of the issue is shorter workdays and sick leave and part time jobs, but still).

Ann Coulter is your classic preaching-to-the-choir polemicist, a columnist who bypasses argument and goes straight to the invective (much like the New York Times’ Maureen Dowd). Coulter can be very entertaining sometimes when she’s locked on a deserving target, but she’s justifiably viewed with some suspicion both for her rhetorical excesses and her sometimes cavalier attitude towards fairly and accurately presenting the facts.
Her recent and much-discussed expose of professional “man on the street” Greg Packer, though, is just good journalism:
Another average individual eager to get Hillary’s book was Greg Packer, who was the centerpiece of the New York Times’ “man on the street” interview about Hillary-mania. After being first in line for an autographed book at the Fifth Avenue Barnes & Noble, Packer gushed to the Times: “I’m a big fan of Hillary and Bill’s. I want to change her mind about running for president. I want to be part of her campaign.”
It was easy for the Times to spell Packer’s name right because he is apparently the entire media’s designated “man on the street” for all articles ever written. He has appeared in news stories more than 100 times as a random member of the public. Packer was quoted on his reaction to military strikes against Iraq; he was quoted at the St. Patrick’s Day Parade, the Thanksgiving Day Parade and the Veterans’ Day Parade. He was quoted at not one � but two � New Year’s Eve celebrations at Times Square. He was quoted at the opening of a new “Star Wars” movie, at the opening of an H&M clothing store on Fifth Avenue and at the opening of the viewing stand at Ground Zero. He has been quoted at Yankees games, Mets games, Jets games � even getting tickets for the Brooklyn Cyclones. He was quoted at a Clinton fund-raiser at Alec Baldwin’s house in the Hamptons and the pope’s visit to Giants stadium.
Are all reporters writing their stories from Jayson Blair’s house?
(Mickey Kaus has more).

The Boston Globe has a story about a terrible idea at Cambridge Rindge and Latin High School: “heterogeneous classrooms” mixing the best, worst and every other student in between in terms of ability, to cure the problem of “a pattern in which Cambridge’s white students — the minority in the school — were succeeding while African-American and Hispanic students were falling farther behind.”
Well, I’m sure they’ll cure the first part . . . as one student puts it:
“The worst [teachers] are the ones who try to teach to the middle,” says Lang. “Because there’s no one there.”

One of the joys of being a civil litigator is that my job gives me mechanisms to catch and expose lies by adversaries. To do that effectively, of course, you need to keep something of a ‘grudge file’ — keep careful track of past statements in writing and orally (take good notes), and know when to pull it all out to expose flip-flops and outright whoppers. Sometimes you catch the other guy in an obvious one, and sometimes you just get to show some inconsistency.
Every now and then, though, you run across somebody who’s such an exceptional and prolific liar that the job of keeping opposing counsel honest winds up all but overwhelming the actual litigating of the case — the lies come in too fast and too varied, and require refutation that’s too lengthy and detailed, to effectively rebut them all without the judge thinking you’ve gotten lost in some vendetta. After a while, this gets exhausting, and demoralizing.
This, basically, is how I feel about the Clintons at this point, particularly Hillary (Bill, thankfully, seems unlikely to wind up with any responsibility ever again). You need enormous reserves of energy to keep up with their serial deceptions; no matter how clearly you debunk something they or their defenders say, it pops back up a few years later and you need to go back to the file. And if you wade into a debate with their bitter-ender supporters, you need to go back to the grudge file to keep straight all the various charges (which is not to say everything pinned on the Clintons was true, but there’s plenty enough there) or get accused of being some sort of fraud; if you do keep it all straight, they say you’re obsessed and living in the past.
At least with litigation, I get paid to do this; I don’t get paid to keep a grudge file on the Clintons, and I refuse to spend the time necessary to revisit again all those controversies. But I’m glad there are professionals out there who haven’t forgotten. As for me, and I think a lot of conservatives, I just wish the Clintons would go away.

Byron York had a funny story last week about the Democrats’ willingness to put their stock in Clinton-bashing Larry Klayman’s Judicial Watch just to tar a GOP judicial nominee.

I’ve decided that Bob Graham is the Orrin Hatch of 2004. You remember Hatch – almost certainly the most qualified of the GOP presidential contenders in 2000, a distinguished and dignified senator of longstanding who spent his entire campaign mounting increasingly harsh attacks on Bill Clinton. Granted, they were justified, and I was certainly one of the people who argued at the time that a tougher line on the Clinton-Gore camp was a prerequsite to the job. But Hatch wound up expending some of his good will with the press for the benefit of a marginal campaign. (Jay Nordlinger takes a similar view).

You may recall Kevin Drum’s plea of a few weeks ago for “liberal cranks like [conservative Richard Mellon] Scaife willing to fund liberal think tanks?” Well, leaving aside the Sulzbergers, one such liberal crank has been thoroughly investigated by Stephen Hayes of The Weekly Standard: Bill Moyers. In fact, typically, Moyers does Scaife one better: he not only funds left-wing causes and conspiracy theories, he also showers them with taxpayer-funded publicity.
(I noted the last round of Hayes’ battle with Moyers here).

Don Regan has died at the age of 84; Regan was a colorful character, although as with a lot of Reagan-era figures besides the President himself, I wasn’t really old enough at the time to judge the man independently of his caricatures in the press.
Regan took up painting in his retirement:
“After Wall Street and the government, I decided there had to be more to
life than the stock market, golf and drinking,” he said in explaining his
new passion for landscape painting.

An amusing correction: somebody evidently bothered to write in to Slate to correct the misimpression that NY Times reporter James Bennet was a friend of Sidney Blumenthal. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a correction before that denied a friendship.

Lately I’ve been thinking that the one good thing about Hillary! and her presidential ambitions is that it would keep Bill from campaigning for a repeal of the 22d Amendment.
Naturally, I was wrong.
I’m actually not opposed, in principle, to Clinton’s proposal (changing the limits to two consecutive terms rather than two terms per lifetime). But still . . . I mean, please, just go away.

You may have seen some of these:
Andrew Sullivan: “The choice at the Times is between frauds and ideologues.”
From the Ombudsgod: a link to Edward Jay Epstein with a battery of factually-challenged NY Times stories.
David Pinto on how the Times scandals are affecting the sports page.
Lileks:
“Yes, you can take some stringer’s notes and compose a story, but the difference between that an[d] a piece you wrote from your own research is the difference between a Penthouse Forum letter and your recollection of your wedding night.”

Not that he went anywhere, but a classic Jonah Goldberg column yesterday on the NY Times’ latest attempt to determine whether young Republicans are actually human. Jonah’s work has tended to be more serious lately, as befits the times; this one’s more of the old G-File style of full-out mockery.

Reading the New York Observer’s bizarre interview with Jayson Blair and its story on his quest to make money off his own misdeeds brought to mind a few points:
1. I had initially been deeply skeptical of why the U.S. Attorney’s Office would get involved in something like this, where you’d think that Blair had been punished enough by being fired, publicly humiliated, and almost certainly never working in journalism again. Now, I’m not so sure; at a minimum, there’s got to be a way to keep him from laughing all the way to the bank with the proceeds from a book based on his fraud.
2. Consider Blair’s taunt: “I fooled some of the most brilliant people in journalism . . . They�re all so smart, but I was sitting right under their nose fooling them.” Maybe Tim Blair’s theory was right: “if I worked for the NY Times, I’d be tempted to destroy its credibility too. Here’s to Jayson, the Evil Blair, bringing them down from the inside!.”
3. An alternative and banal explanation for the federal prosecutors’ interest in the case: Blair freely admits he was using cocaine. Let’s say they drop the anvil of a big grand jury investigation on him over the fraud on the Times, then they start asking: hey, maybe you can tell us who your dealer was. A plausible explanation of the feds’ motives? Maybe.

Christopher Hitchens’ review of Sid Blumenthal’s new book is now available online. Fortunately, adherents of the permanent campaign to the contrary, someone still remembers what the battles of that sorry era were all about. Hitchens details the extent to which Blumenthal has given himself over so thoroughly to Clinton that he is unable to even address many of the most inconvenient facts. My favorite passage:
I always thought that it was very clever of Clinton to make a mystery where none existed about when, and even where, he had touched Monica Lewinsky. Since his denial was made partly under oath, and involved a legalistic definition even of certain orifices and appendages, it necessitated a minute inquiry. And this allowed Clinton’s defenders to paint his critics-his critics-as “obsessed with sex.”

Or, as Glenn Reynolds would put it, oh, that liberal media: Michael Kinsley admits what conservatives have been complaining about for years: the vast influence of the New York Times in setting the agenda for news organizations everywhere, a position of “near-universal dependence” that gives the increasingly left-leaning Times power far beyond its own circulation:
[M]uch or even most American news reporting and commentary on national issues derives – uncredited – from the New York Times. . . Even if you don’t read the Times yourself, you get your news from journalists at other media who do. The Times sets the news agenda that everyone else follows. The Washington Post and maybe one or two other papers also play this role, but even as a writer who appears in the Washington Post — a damned fine newspaper run by superb editors who are graced with every kind of brilliance, charm, and physical beauty – I would have to concede that the Times is more influential. . . it is the imprimatur of the Times or the Post that stamps the story as important before sending it back down to other papers – as well as up to the media gods of television.
In fact, I would go so far as to cite both the Times’ longstanding liberal slant and its influence on the national media agenda as Conservative Truth #2 in my continuing series.

Instapundit cites an article worrying about Bush’s ability to motivate the conservative base. This is mostly bunk. The article cites conservative worries about the GOP’s tepid efforts to cut spending and the growth of government, but this isn’t nearly as important to the base voters as war, judges and taxes. Concerns about the judiciary are more significant, but I have no doubt that that issue will escalate as we grow closer to 2004, especially if one or more Supreme Court slots open up. And the idea that Bush’s foreign policy is unpopular with the GOP base is just unhinged from reality.

Great G-File yesterday wrapping up a 3-part series on media misunderstanding and abuse of the term “neoconservative.” Money quote: “Victory has many neocons, failure few – and all Jewish.”

A lot of liberal bloggers have been trying to get Tacitus, their favorite conservative, to switch sides. In this excellent post, he explains why he can’t and won’t.
My own list would put the judiciary a clear second (behind national defense).

Christopher Caldwell, on Jayson Blair and the Times:
The Times has been drifting more and more towards front-page stories on trends and passions and tough-to-capture states of mind. This is what leads to all the talk about “resonating pain” and “acute hurt” and (as the Times puts it elsewhere in its Blair account) “emotionally charged moments.” Some of these stories are backed up with polling numbers, some with a handful of sources speaking in the abstract. And many are excellent. But they do not stand and fall on facts and they are the farthest thing from all the news that’s fit to print. They’re the door through which Jayson Blair’s devious idea of journalism entered the nation’s greatest newspaper.

Following up further on my post on Conservative Truth #1 – that the results of government initiatives will inevitably be affected by how the initiative changes individual incentives – I couldn’t have asked for a bettter illustration of how some purportedly mainstream liberals completely ignore this point than this op-ed piece in last Thursday’s New York Times by Yale Economics Professor Robert J. Shiller. Shiller argues that inequalty of wealth is “truly frightening”:
According to the Census Bureau, the bottom 40 percent of American families earned 18 percent of the national income in 1970, but by 1998 they earned only 14 percent � and that figure could fall to 10 percent before too long. On a global scale, too, inequality is a problem. Per capita gross domestic product in India in 2000 was only 7 percent of that of the United States, and for China the figure was 11 percent. Such a difference could increase the possibility of greater inequality within America.
(Note that he identifies America’s wealth relative to other nations as a problem, which becomes more ominous when you examine his proposed solution). The “cure”:

Continue reading Ignoring Incentives

I was debating whether to write more on the Jayson Blair affair. The bottom line: yes, as I’ve already explained, race was a legitimate story here even before Howell Raines admitted it, even though I don’t think it was the only or necessarily even the main reason for the problem. This was clearly something of a perfect storm of blind spots at the Times (affirmative action, the “star” system, Blair’s sucking up to top management, etc.), but two additional features of the modern workplace have attracted perhaps too little notice:
1. The union. Blair belonged to a guild with a collectively-bargained contract:
In April 2002, according to Raines, the Times issued Blair a formal warning saying that further errors “could lead to your separation.” Raines notes that people on the outside have wondered why Blair wasn’t fired at that point. However, says Raines, the Times’ guild contract prohibits summary dismissal for anything short of plagiarism for personnel, like Blair, working in the “intermediate reporter” program.
I’m not totally against unions, which have important uses, but one of their worst features is the tendency to protect the incompetent and the corrupt from being fired.
2. The ADA culture. The Times’ own exhaustive account (now archived – you can’t read it online anymore) points in two directions on this. On the one hand, there’s at least the implication that Blair may have had severe emotional problems and/or a drinking problem (note the passage that says Blair “was unavailable for long stretches” without further elaboration); it is left unexplored to what extent this was known and ignored. Since the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act, a company that knows an employee has such problems actually finds itself less able to discipline that employee for fear of legal liability, even when common sense says that the guy’s problems getting the facts straight are probably not coincidental.
But here’s the whopper: when Blair was assigned to the sniper case, under national editor Jim Roberts, Howell Raines and Gerald Boyd – the men who run the Times
did not tell Mr. Roberts or his deputies about the concerns that had been raised about Mr. Blair’s reporting. “that discussion did not happen,” Mr. Raines said, adding that he had seen no need for such a discussion because Mr. Blair’s performance had improved, and because “we do not stigmatize people for seeking help.”
You see the problem: it’s not just that Raines didn’t tell Blair’s new boss that he had personal problems, but that he didn’t tell him about Blair’s problems with the truth because it might lead to questions about his personal problems or somehow relate to his “seeking help.” In other words, by seeking psychological help, Blair – just like many of the worst offenders in the Catholic Church sex-abuse scandals (an apt analogy made by many commentators) – was able to build a protective shield around his professional problems.
I could say more; but Lileks has the last word on two other loose ends from the Blair scandal.

Some commentators have argued that there’s something wrong or pernicious in raising questions about whether affirmative action had anything to do with the New York Times’ willingness to keep promoting Jayson Blair in the face of mounting evidence that he was incompetent and/or dishonest. There are, to my mind, two obvious reasons why this is a story:
1. It is awfully hard to explain, rationally, why he got away with this, given the huge number of people who expressed doubts or even called for him to be fired. When rational motives fail, try invidious ones. If the shoe fits . . .
2. Had this happened at a less self-righteously PC publication than the Times – say, The New Republic, for example, let alone a conservative paper like the Wall Street Journal – the race point might have been ignored by most commentators. Scam artist being black: not a story. Scam artist being black and working for a paper that loves to talk about its own ‘diversity’ and editorialize in favor of affirmative action: story. I guarantee that’s why people like Kaus and Howard Kurtz are quick to read it this way. In that sense, conservatives have jumped on the Times for this for precisely the same reason liberal commentators jumped on Bill Bennett (albeit with the difference that a massive fraud on the public is a wee bit bigger deal than a guy spending his own money on slot machines): because the Times has been such a scold on issues of race and trumpeted its own willingness to promote “diversity,” there’s a natural impulse to put them on the spot when a beneficiary of such programs blows up in the paper’s face.
And in one very important respect, that instinct has been dead-on: although its now-famous probe of itself referred, among other things, to the fact that “[t]he Times offered him a slot in an internship program that was then being used in large part to help the paper diversify its newsroom,” the Times has steadfastly resisted the idea that any preference was given to Blair that would not have been given had he been white.
You must see the problem for the Times: the paper has repeatedly editorialized that it’s perfectly OK to use even the stark racial preferences exposed in the Michigan affirmative action cases – but when pressed, the Times is unwilling to admit that it would give preference to an inferior journalist on the basis of race! In other words, when the paper’s own credibility is on the line, it won’t stand up for racial preferences, even when the alternative explanation is that the Times just doesn’t give a damn about the quality of its newspaper.
Can there be a better illustration of why racial preferences are immoral? When even their most determined champions won’t admit to them in the harsh light of day? Bill Bennett, at least, never preached in favor of gambling. The Times wants to discriminate on the basis of race – but only in secret, wink-wink, nudge-nudge. That, in the end, is a much bigger story than one reporter.

Part of the goal of kicking off the Conservative Truths series was as a way to distinguish the sane and reasonable types of people on the left from the bitter-enders who refuse to concede an inch to reality. There are Liberal Truths as well, and perhaps I’ll post some if I can’t get someone to bite on running an opposing series that has some sense to it.
The first response I got was revealing of the kind of attitude that conservatives often make fun of, usually to the response from liberal commentators that “nobody really thinks that.” But here it is in print, and I swear I’m quoting this guy directly:
Liberal Truth #1: Tax cuts are government spending just like the military and welfare are government spending. It takes government revenue and spends in on a certain program. In this case, the money is spent every year on certain income earners in order to (supposedly) get them to reinvest the money in businesses and production. Tax cuts allot a certain portion of government revenue to supplanting taxed income, leaving the government with less money than it had before – in other words, the government’s money is spent on tax cuts.
Wow. Cutting taxes lets you keep “government revenue.” Your income, or the return on your investments, is “the government’s money.” Only out of the goodness of the government’s heart does it let you keep any of it at all.
Sanity check: who is it that works for the money? And, come to think of it, whose government is it anyway? If I quit my job, can the government come after me next year and say I still owe the same amount of taxes? This ain’t child-support we’re talking about; I don’t owe the government any obligation, and there’s no Platonic ideal of 37% or 50% or 75% marginal tax rates that’s being defiled by rate cuts. It’s my money, and while society has a right to ask me to chip a portion of it in to pay for various necessities, that doesn’t mean that the government has a claim on howsoever much it wants.
Now, when you move away from tax rates to some of the more complicated deductions (“do this and you can keep X that we otherwise would have taxed”), I’m more sympathetic to the argument that you’ve really got a spending program in disguise as a tax cut. But the basic idea that cutting taxes gives away “the government’s money” — well, that’s a sign of a complete loss of perspective on which of us exists for the other’s benefit. It’s our money, and it’s our government.

Well, looks like the kickoff of my “Conservative Truths” series really knocked over the beehive, attracting a bunch of comments here and over at CalPundit’s site, and we had by far our biggest traffic day ever on Monday (391 unique visitors), which had to be the result of the link from Kevin Drum (although we’d set records on Thursday and again on Friday, in part due to a link from Steven Den Beste).
The buzz is a good thing; the long-term goal here is to build a framework for making sense of political arguments. (Some people weren’t happy with the level of generality in my observation about incentives, but the idea here is mostly to work on a general level and refer specific posts back to the theory).
If I made one mistake, it was picking the dividend tax cut, which is intensely controversial and on some level unpredictable in its effects, as the prime example; a more obvious example is simply the Congressional Budget Office scoring system, under which you traditionally assume that there will be no changes in behavior resulting from a tax cut and no economic growth flowing therefrom; the Democrats must be quite aware that these projections are bogus, and yet they and their friends in the media have tended to treat these numbers as gospel truth. And, of course, the entire Great Society welfare system was constructed essentially without regard for how the system would change incentives to work and to keep families together; the failure to account for the incentive effect of such programs was the Achilles heel of the entire initiative.
Another famous example was the luxury tax imposed during the Bush I years; the Democrats argued that they could soak the rich buyers of yachts, but instead, yacht consumption dropped by 70%, with devastating effects on the yacht-building industry, and had to be swiftly repealed. (Granted, The American Prospect argued that the tax still brought in several times more revenue than projected, but that didn’t do the guys at the dock much good). The refusal of Democratic policy-makers to consider incentive effects in the way they develop and promote their initiatives remains one of the critical dividing lines between the two major parties.