BASEBALL/ Mixing The Two

There’s a long tradition of your basic ceremonial honors between the White House and the National Pastime, all of which is well and good even during times when you may not like the current occupant of the Oval Office. But really, does the game need to do this?

The Chicago White Sox are aiming to release a President Barack Obama-themed version of their cap in time for the start of spring training.

The club has developed two prototype designs of its club hat with Obama marks on the side and back. The hats have been approved by MLB Properties, and the White Sox now are awaiting a formal blessing from the Obama administration before league licensee New Era goes into production. Both designs will be made if accepted by Obama.

Even for those of us who love baseball and love politics, it’s better to keep the two separate. It’s bad enough that Obama* is being merchandised like he’s the latest George Lucas character (I swear some of the newspapers are only staving off bankruptcy by selling Obama commemorative memorabilia to his fans), and that businesses all over the place seem completely unaware of the fact that 59 million Americans voted against the guy – but to go and stick Obama logos on the hats of an MLB team is going too far. It would have been cheesy for the Rangers to do that for Bush even though he used to own the team; it’s no different with Obama.
* – Kung fu grip not available on all models. Batteries sold separately.

Ten Lessons From the Bush Administration

There are many things – good and bad alike – to look back on from the Bush Administration, as befits only the 12th man in our history, and only the 7th since 1837, to serve a full 8 years in the Oval Office. Whether we like the task or not, conservatives need to continue defending the successes and good decisions of the Bush years, as the inauguration of Barack Obama will not cause Bush’s critics to relent in their campaign to keep his reputation from recovering and to try to discredit conservative ideas and philosophy with Bush’s unpopularity. But that doesn’t mean we should fail to draw lessons from Bush’s failures.I’d like to reflect here on ten lessons for future presidents, at least Republican ones, from things that went badly for Bush. (My lessons are different from those of Bob Woodward, who is amusingly unaware that his Lesson #10 would totally eviscerate his Lessons #2 and 4-6, as well as being unaware that saying “[i]nstead of a team of rivals, Bush wound up with a team of back-stabbers with long-running, poisonous disagreements about foreign policy fundamentals” is like saying “instead of a dozen eggs, Bush wound up with twelve eggs.”).

Continue reading Ten Lessons From the Bush Administration

You, Too, Can Date A Maxim Model

All you need is the writing brilliance to come up with penetrating lines like “Yes We Can.”
On the one hand, I should be proud of Favreau as a fellow Holy Cross grad. On the other, well, the Obama camp spent the election season spreading the fiction to gullible supporters and reporters that Obama writes his own vague, unmemorable, substanceless speeches, so any attention Favreau gets is a source of amusement all its own.

Focus on FOCA

I am pleased to announce that my political commentary will now be appearing at yet another outlet, the brand-newly-launched The New Ledger. More on TNL to follow.
As I have noted before, and as we saw previewed with Barack Obama’s executive order repealing the ban on taxpayer funding for international groups that perform abortions and Democratic plans to put federal matching funds for abortions and contraception into the stimulus package, there is no question that the new Democratic majority in Washington intends to go on the offensive in the culture wars in general, and in particular to use federal taxpayer money to subsidize and incentivize more abortions while bulldozing democratically-enacted state law restrictions on the practice and cracking down on private conscientious objectors who do not wish to participate in abortions. TNL contributor Christopher Badeaux takes an in-depth look at the Freedom of Choice Act, what it means and how it is likely to be pushed in Washington in stages rather than as a single omnibus assault that would trigger massive opposition by the Catholic Church, among others.
UPDATE: Obama appears to be backing away from Pelosi’s effort to put money for abortions in the stimulus bill.

“I have nothing against white male construction workers,” but….


H/T (I prefer a little less commentary on videos like this, but the transcriptions are useful).
Not that he’s calling for repealing the Jim Crow era Davis-Bacon Act, either. You know, there’s sort of an economic case for the government trying to do infrastructure investments counter-cyclically (i.e., spend more building roads and the like during periods of recession), when labor and materials are cheaper…but that case goes out the window when you have a statutory mandate like Davis-Bacon that precludes the federal government from taking advantage of a weak labor market to save taxpayer dollars.

A Dissenting Note on Gillibrand

I spoke too soon below in saying Kirsten Gillibrand was the non-nepotism choice for the NY Senate seat:

Gillibrand’s father, Doug Rutnik, is an Albany insider and lobbyist whose ties to former GOP powerhouses Joe Bruno, George Pataki and Al D’Amato are legendary. In fact, Gillibrand won her seat when a state police domestic violence report about the GOP incumbent, John Sweeney, was mysteriously leaked, ostensibly with the acquiescence of the Pataki administration, which had its own reasons to oppose Sweeney.

Wayne Barrett also looks at where Gillibrand’s voting record has diverged from her own party (his commenters are already hopping as well on Gillibrand’s opposition to same-sex marriage):

Continue reading A Dissenting Note on Gillibrand

Looks Like Gillibrand

The New York Senate selection process, while not as big a disaster for the Democrats as in Illinois, has looked at times like a family soap opera, as Basil Paterson’s son had to decide who should replace Bill Clinton’s wife in the Senate: John F. Kennedy’s daughter? Mario Cuomo’s son, who was once married to Robert F. Kennedy’s daughter? We also had the amusing spectacle of Democrats, fresh off the Obama victory, having to explain yet again why a completely unqualified candidate should get the job, and of the Kennedy family feeling cheated that Caroline wouldn’t get to join Uncle Ted in the Senate (he inherited his seat years ago) because she had tax and nanny problems.

Now, multiple sources are reporting that Albany-area two-term Congresswoman Kirsten Gillibrand, who isn’t related to anybody (but did work for Andrew Cuomo at HUD in the late 1990s), will be Paterson’s pick. As I have discussed before, this is a ticket-balancing choice: Paterson is a black urban liberal from Harlem (if that’s not redundant); to win statewide, he needs to draw support from upstate and reach out to white voters, while Gillibrand is relatively young (42), telegenic, Catholic, a mother of two young children and represents a traditionally Republican district she won in 2006 from the excessively hard-partying John Sweeney. Gillibrand might want to get out of Dodge – her district is sooner or later going to give her a tough re-election battle (in 2008, Gillibrand and her self-funding opponent combined to raise more money than the combatants in any other Congressional district in the country), and her district may be eliminated anyway in 2012, as New York is likely to lose Congressional seats. Democrats are reportedly shrugging off the possible loss of her seat on the grounds that hey, they have enough seats already, similar to the view they took in sacrificing the Governorship of Arizona and removing an incumbent Senator in Colorado.

Liberals may not that be happy with Gillibrand, who is no centrist but nonetheless in her career so far bears about the same relationship to a deep-blue-state liberal that Lindsey Graham does to a deep-red-state conservative: she’s a member of the Blue Dog caucus with a 100% rating from the NRA, opposed Eliot Spitzer’s plan to give drivers’ licenses to illegal aliens, is a sponsor of the SAVE Act and of employer verification of legal status of workers and, supports making the Bush tax cuts permanent. I’d expect her to drift leftward in the Senate, but if you’re a Democrat looking to install someone in a safe seat, you might want someone more reliable. On the other hand, her moderate positions on a few issues may make her a tough opponent in 2010, when she has to run for the last two years of Hillary’s term.

You can read the latest writeup here on possible GOP challengers for Gillibrand’s House seat.

Deficit Disconnect: A Farewell to Rubinomics

Riddle me this. One argument you hear tossed around these days is that Bush’s tax cuts somehow had something to do with the currently poor state of the economy. The argument is almost never backed by any serious attempt to explain how this is, simply that because the Bush critics don’t like his tax policy it must be to blame.

More to the point, the case for blaming low taxes for the economic downturn is diametrically opposed to the “Rubinomics” line that liberals everywhere spent the first seven years of Bush’s Administration pushing. The argument, at the time, was that low taxes would lead to big deficits, and big deficits would push up interest rates by “crowding out” private access to credit as safe federal borrowing sopped up all the available credit.

In fact, the conventional economic wisdom today is that precisely the opposite happened – that we had a credit bubble, and in particular a housing credit bubble, because interest rates were artificially low and private access to credit got too cheap, resulting in too many loans being made at rates that were not sufficient to cover the credit risks, especially systemic risks, being taken. When credit finally did get expensive, after the bubble burst and a lot of the lenders got essentially wiped out, the problem was less a market-wide lack of capital than a lack of faith in the ability to identify credit-worthy borrowers – interest rates didn’t shoot up uniformly so much as they rose in comparison to the rates for sovereign borrowers like Uncle Sam (in the parlance of the markets, spreads widened). And even that only happened after years of overexpansion of private credit side by side with low taxes and high deficits.

In other words, the Rubinomics crowd, who claimed so much credit for the tech boom of the 1990s on the theory that eliminating the deficit had created prosperity by lowering interest rates, turned out to have their diagnosis completely wrong, or at any rate so oversimplified given the many other variables involved as to be meaningless. Which was pretty much what the supply-siders had been saying all along: not that deficits are a good thing, but that in the grand scheme of things, the economic effects of deficits on access to cheap private credit is not one of the major drivers of economic prosperity, nor of economic downturns.

Of course, Rubinomics won’t have much if any influence in the Obama Administration, which is turning its back on the economic theory and practice of the post-1940 period and heading for old-fashioned Keynesian ‘pump priming’ and trillion-dollar deficits as far as the eye can see. And the onetime disciples of Rubin will simply declare that this is what they have always believed in, and that it still means low taxes are bad. Change, after all, means never having to say you’re sorry.

Fashion Question of the Day

Will Obama wear a stovepipe hat? Even some on the left think he’s overselling his campaign to convince people that he’s Abe Lincoln:

Simply put, some scholars think the comparisons have gone a bit over the top hat.
Sean Wilentz, a scholar in American history at Princeton, said many presidents have sought to frame themselves in the historical legacies of illustrious predecessors, but he couldn’t find any examples quite so brazen.
“Sure, they’ve looked back to Washington and even, at times, Jackson. Reagan echoed and at times swiped FDR’s rhetoric,” said Wilentz. “But there’s never been anything like this, and on this scale. Ever.”
Eric Foner, a Columbia historian who has written extensively on the Civil War era, agreed that comparing one’s self to Lincoln sets a rather high bar for success, and could come off like “a certain kind of hubris.”
“It’d be a bit like a basketball player turning up before his first game and saying, ‘I’m kind of modeling myself on Michael Jordan,'” he said. “If you can do it, fine. If you’re LeBron James, that’ll work. But people may make that comparison to your disadvantage.”

Actually, he has yet to prove he’s not the Harold Miner of presidential politics.

Vetting Not Included

One hopes the new Administration’s homeland security policy will be less porous than its inauguration invite list:

One of the religious leaders invited to address Barack Obama’s inaugural prayer service Wednesday heads an Islamic group named by federal prosecutors as a co-conspirator in a terrorism-fundraising trial in Texas.
Ingrid Mattson, president of the Islamic Society of North America, is scheduled to join Christian ministers and Jewish rabbis offering prayers for the new president and his family during a service at the National Cathedral in Washington, organizers announced Friday.
Mattson’s group calls itself “the largest Muslim umbrella organization” in North America. However, in May 2007, federal prosecutors included ISNA on a list of nearly 300 co-conspirators filed in a criminal case charging that the Holy Land Foundation of Richardson, Texas, funneled more than $12 million to Hamas.
The U.S. government designated Hamas as a terrorist group in 1995.
A trial in Dallas in 2007 for the foundation and five of its leaders ended with acquittals and mistrials. However, Holy Land and the five officials were convicted of all 108 charges in a second trial last year.

More background on Mattson herself here and here.
There are two possibilities here. One is that the Obama people simply didn’t check out Ms. Mattson’s background, which seems doubly implausible given that she spoke at the Convention in August. The other is that they have deliberately taken sides against DOJ’s view of the Holy Land case (that’s surely how the targets of that investigation will view the invitation – as a vindication that their activities are no longer frowned upon), and implicitly against the broader project of Justice’s efforts to shut down the laundering of funds through Islamic charity groups inside the U.S. That’s a very dangerous signal indeed.

Never Considering The Consequences

My RedState colleague Moe Lane has https://www.redstate.com/moe_lane/2009/01/18/what-republics-really-cant-survive-happening-proscription-lists/an excellent point about efforts to criminalize differences over national security policy now that the Democrats have unchecked political power and are convinced they will never lose it:

I submit to all of you that the true reason that the American Republic has endured, public bribing by the legislature or no, is because of a very simple rule: political defeats do not end the game.
This cannot be emphasized enough, and it doesn’t get emphasized at all. Every time that the White House changes hands, we get to read self-congratulatory epistles about how wonderfully easy and simple and painless is the transfer of power. No tanks in the street, no tense moments at the various government agencies as the crop of old political appointees leave office to make room for the new crop of political appointees; there’s not even a mob. But do you know why that happens? It happens because the people leaving those jobs and positions are well aware that, when they get home, there won’t be a squad of masked gunmen from the opposing faction there to murder, rape, beat up, arrest, or drag into internal exile themselves and their families.

Folks who think that Republicans, upon returning to power, would have no possible basis for throwing a lot of Democrats in jail over policy differences…well, they’re the same people who back in about 1991 would have told you that sexual harrassment charges and the Independent Counsel statute would never be turned against the people who brought them into national politics.

Recount Limbo

My State Senator is still in limbo due to Democratic recounts and court challenges to his election. While we hear a lot of complaints these days about needing to have one president at a time, at least we have one; Frank Padavan’s constituents don’t entirely have a State Senator at all, nor do Norm Coleman’s constituents have a U.S. Senator. And it’s January 13.
You know, I haven’t followed all the twists and turns of the battle over Padavan’s seat, but one thing I have concluded from watching it, and the Al Franken, Christine Gregoire and Al Gore efforts to overturn Election Day results, is that we really do not have any way as a system to deal with these kinds of challenges in a way that gives the supporters of the losing candidate – especially a candidate who was ahead on Election Day – even the slightest bit of confidence that counting decisions made after the election, under the auspices of lawyers and partisans, are at all fair and honest. Which is, as I have been saying for 8 years now, the real point of the Supreme Court’s Bush v. Gore opinion. There are, to be sure, opportunities for ballot fraud and other shenanigans before and during an election, and the system has to provide some remedy for those, at least in provably serious cases. But before 2000 there was an ethos – not always respected, by any means, but to which politicians (most famously Nixon in 1960) at least needed to pay tribute – that the loser of an election did not open a second scorched-earth front designed at refighting every ballot that could conceivably be quibbled over, and that you needed a really serious reason to try to overturn the Election Day Count. That is Al Gore’s lasting legacy to our democracy, and it’s a deeply malignant one.
Machines, of course, can make mistakes, and if we had confidence that the counts produced by heavily lawyered recounting processes were really a more accurate and precise count, it would be worth the cost in money, time, disruption of transitions and hard feelings about democracy to review them. But we have no such confidence; we are, as a society, simply throwing resources at a series of additional counts that give us no reason to think they are any more accurate, and many reasons to think they are much less impartial than a machine count. A machine count is done behind your basic Rawlsian veil of ignorance: both sides may know they stand a chance of getting a raw deal in a close race, but they know it’s basically an even chance. When lawyers and partisan vote-counters get involved, all that goes out the window, and the race to amass a superior quantity of umbrage is on.
Or think about it this way: up until the day of an election, the forces of partisanship have limited resources, less than perfect information about which elections will be closest, and face the reality of having to spread those resources over races for different offices that may be close in different geographic locations. Thus, the sheer effort that has to go into stealing elections will naturally be disbursed. That doesn’t stop election fraud from happening, but it mitigates its influence, making it less practical to use as a routine tool of nationwide partisan combat. But recounts are just the opposite: once the initial counts are in, both sides know exactly which race results can be overturned in the courts, and exactly how many vote changes they need to do it. This is unhealthy in the extreme.
Restoring public confidence in the electoral system requires work on a lot of different fronts, but one major candidate should be a serious effort in state and federal races across the country to raise the showing required to trigger a recount or lawsuit over election results, to preserve the option only for the most serious and severe cases of malfeasance. The current system is unsustainable and ultimately dangerous to democracy.

Deep Throat’s Puppets

I had meant to link to this earlier – Stratfor had a tremendous writeup, on the occasion of the death of Mark “Deep Throat” Felt, on the real meaning of the revelation that Felt was Woodward & Bernstein’s source. Basically, it’s a reminder that anonymous sourcing is just another way for the media to be beholden to powerful figures, usually in the government, who are often acting in unsavory ways even when they tell the truth (and when a news report is anonymously sourced, there’s no way to have any conifdence that it is true). Stratfor focuses on the fact that Woodward and Bernstein were basically naive pawns in Felt’s continuation of J. Edgar Hoover’s power game – particpants in, not opponents of, the dirty tricks of the era. Here’s the key takeaway:

Continue reading Deep Throat’s Puppets

The Democrats Play To Type

I argued during the general election campaign that the single most scandalously under-covered story of the campaign was Barack Obama’s thorough immersion in machine politics in Chicago. And I confidently predicted, on November 3, that Obama, if elected, would continue to be haunted in office by those and other ties to his Chicago past. But even I didn’t imagine that the continuing saga of Chicago political corruption and Obama’s role as a willing tool of machine politicians would explode so quickly that the Governor of Illinois would be arrested for trying to sell Obama’s Senate seat just five weeks after Election Day. Now, we have Bill Richardson withdrawing from his appointment as Obama’s Secretary of Commerce due to a federal grand jury investigation of pay-to-play practices in his administration in New Mexico. Of course, while the exact nature and timing of the Blagojevich and Richardson scandals came as a surprise, it was inevitable that the foul odor of political corruption – and not just from Chicago – was going to settle over Democrat-controlled Washington. It would have been shocking if it didn’t. Anyone who believed that the election of Obama would mean even the slightest bit of “new politics” was a fool of the highest order; Obama’s constant harping on that theme, given his longstanding willingness to avoid rocking the boat in Chicago and DC, was simply a cynical fraud.
In Blagojevich’s case, the first instinct of various Democrats has been to argue that this has nothing whatsoever to do with Obama. Other than, among other things, the fact that Obama endorsed Blago for re-election in 2006, knowing full well that Blagojevich was up to his eyeballs in corruption probes (go watch Blagojevich’s opponent’s final commercial from that campaign, to say nothing of the extent to which those probes focused on Obama’s and Blago’s mutual close patron Tony Rezko, eventually convicted of corrupting the Blagojevich Administration); while Illinois’ Democratic Attorney General Lisa Madigan, among others, declined to endorse Blago at that point, Obama assured the voters that “We’ve got a governor in Rod Blagojevich who has delivered consistently on behalf of the people of Illinois” and told the press that “If the governor asks me to work on his behalf, I’ll be happy to do it.” Then there’s the fact that it was Obama’s own Senate seat for sale, or that one of the apparent prospective buyers was Jesse Jackson Jr., recently seen as the national co-chair of Obama’s campaign. Or that Obama political guru David Axelrod, who got himself in hot water by admitting to contacts between Obama and Blago, is a former adviser to Blagojevich and Rahm Emanuel as well as Mayor Daley’s spokesman on corruption issues (a busy job if ever there was one). Or that Emanuel, Obama’s very first staff hire and himself Mayor Daley’s former chief fundraiser, was in close contact with Blago and had taken over Blago’s House seat in 2002 with the help of Blago’s other main patron (at the time), his powerful father-in-law Alderman Dick Mell (Rahm apparently inherited a good bit of Blago’s Congressional staff) and was talking to Blago about arranging another transfer of their House seat to a stooge who would keep it warm (note: this was the seat vacated by Dan Rostenkowski’s federal conviction). Meanwhile, Obama had been pressing initially to give the Senate seat to Valerie Jarrett, another Rezko-linked housing developer who got Michelle Obama her first political job working for Mayor Daley.


The more you spin this stuff out, the more you are forcefully reminded that what was most of all missing from the media’s pre-election reportage was context, the kind of context that makes the disparate threads of this stuff hang together. (See this Michael Barone column for an example of how that works). Look at this NY Times article on Chicago’s dolorous history of political corruption and ask why it could not have run before the election.

Take one of my favorite examples, Obama’s run for Congress in 2000. Follow the chronology (more here and here):

1999: Congressman Bobby Rush challenges Mayor Daley in a primary. Daley’s great fear is a candidate who will unify the African-American vote; Rush, who is black, fails to defeat Daley.

2000: Obama retaliates against Rush by running against Rush in a primary for his seat. Obama loses, and is saddled with large campaign debts after having put surplus campaign expenses on his personal credit card.

2001: Obama, a sitting State Senator with a background as a “civil rights litigator”, gets $8,000 a month to provide unspecified legal advice to Robert Blackwell, a Chicago entrepeneur – more than Obama’s State Senate salary and 81% of Obama’s income from his law practice. Campaign debts get paid off.

2002-04: Obama helps steer $320,000 in earmarked state grants to Blackwell’s company to subsidize ping-pong tournaments.

If you pull together these facts – and I didn’t see a single mainstream media outlet put them all in one place the whole campaign – they present a pretty clear picture of Obama as a cog doing the bidding of the Daley machine, being paid back for his duty and then paying off the backer with public money: old-school Chicago politics that fit in neatly with the similar stories that play out over and over in the careers of Daley, Blagojevich and other Obama allies like Emil Jones. And when you have the context, the actions of Obama and Emanuel over the years regarding Blagojevich are not so easily explained away. Illinois has a corrupt governor, and now possibly a Senator selected by that governor, in part because men like Obama saw nothing wrong with keeping one, as well as because Illinois Democrats refused to strip Blagojevich of his appointment power even after his arrest. Harry Reid’s hilarious effort to avoid seating the man Blago finally chose may be incompetent or simply a charade, but in neither case does it excuse how we came to this pass.

Perhaps the most ridiculous effort to distance liberalism and the Democrats from Blagojevich was penned a few weeks ago by Thomas Frank for the Wall Street Journal. Frank’s column is perhaps the most egregious example of partisan hackery I have seen in recent years, and that’s a field that includes powerful competition; it’s the kind of column filled with things that make you think ‘I know why he would say that, I just don’t know why anyone would believe it.’
First, Frank argued that Blagojevich isn’t really a liberal. The same Blago who jacked up the Illinois minimum wage, making it the highest in the nation. The same Blago who in 2007 proposed a $7.6 billion tax hike package, the largest in Illinois history, to pay for increased education, healthcare and pension spending during a state financial crisis. Blago’s tax hike proposal was so far left it caused an open rift with Mayor Daley, who blasted it as business-unfriendly, and was essentially unanimously rejected by Illinois’ Democrat-controlled legislature. He’s also the same Blagojevich who was involved in a very public and successful shakedown of a major national bank just the day before he was arrested (see here and here), with what sounded (when translated out of typically gaseous Obama-ese) like the tacit support of Obama. Blagojevich may not be far enough left for Thomas Frank’s taste, but if words like ‘liberal’ and ‘progressive’ have any meaning to the rest of us, Blagojevich certainly qualifies, at least as far as his fiscal and economic policies are concerned.

Frank’s second and even more hilarious contention is that the Blagojevich scandal “interrupts, in spectacular fashion, a long stretch in which most of the Beltway scandal-makers had an “R” after their names.” Now, certainly the Capitol Hill Republicans had more than their fair share of scandals the last four years, for which they have been duly punished, but to suggest that Hill Democrats are a clean-government crowd is just laughable. Without mentioning Frank by name, Kimberley Strassel ran a column in the WSJ a few days later naming a sampling of the Congressional Democrats with serious ethics problems right now – Rangel, Jefferson, Mollohan, Dodd, Guitierrez, Reyes, Kanjorski, Murtha (she missed Tim Mahoney, who got booted over a sex scandal just two years after winning his seat due to a Mark Foley sex scandal that Rahm Emanuel helped keep quiet until a month before Election Day). And that’s just Congress. We at RedState.com started up a “Corrupt Democrat Watch” last summer, samples here and here, and we eventually had to put it on ice for a while for lack of manpower; the sheer volume of this stuff from Democratic governors, Mayors, state legislatures and city councils is practically a full-time job to follow (we never did get around to a full roundup on corrupt Mayors like Kwame Kilpatrick of Detroit of Sheila Dixon of Baltimore or late-breaking news on Birmingham’s Larry Langford). And now, of course, Bill Richardson. The best you can say of Frank’s argument is that most of the recent scandals trumpeted by the media involved Republicans.

In the final analysis, Blago’s style of graft, while heavier-handed than usual, is inseparable from liberalism as a political ideology and the Democratic Party as an institution. Government, by its very nature, involves giving some people power over the liberty and property of others. Because some government is necessary and because human nature is what it is, there will always be some people who abuse that power, and many of those will do so for personal gain. As a result, we will always have some level of scandal on both sides of the aisle. The root of influence peddling, after all, is the influence, not the peddling.

But there are a number of features of liberalism and the Democratic Party that make them especially and uniquely prone to corruption, always have and always will:

Ideology and Power: Contemporary liberal/progressive ideology stresses, at every turn, that government officials should be given an ever-increasing share of public money to control and disperse, and an ever-increasing role in telling people and businesses how they can use the money and property they are left with. Government officials are, we are to believe, better able to make the ‘right’ decisions about who gets what and how businesses are permitted to operate. A lot of this is out-and-out substitution of government for the private sector, but for the most part, rather than an avowedly socialist model (in which the state owns resources and their distribution is directly controlled by the politically powerful), American liberals/progressives since Woodrow Wilson have preferred to run what remains of the private sector through a corporatist model in which Big Government and Big Labor, acting in tandem, purport to get the buy-in of Big Business to ‘responsible’ business regulation. In practice, no matter which system is used, it ends up being a short step from believing you have the right and wisdom to direct other people’s property to more deserving recipients and better uses to believing that you are one of the more deserving recipients, and a short trip from telling business how to do its business to telling it who to do business with based on the desire to reward yourself and your friends. The root of money in politics, after all, is politics in money.

Accountability: Republicans, as a rule, get elected by promising to be more faithful stewards of public money (Republicans promise to leave people alone, and it’s hard to bribe a man with his own money), and so naturally they tend to get un-elected when they fail to deliver that. Also, even in high-watermarks of Republican power like the 2002-06 period, there are a lot fewer long-term one-party GOP strongholds than there are Democratic ones. By contrast, Democrats who get elected by promising to give people free stuff with other people’s money are a lot harder to hold accountable simply because they gave some of it to different people. If you look at a list of Republicans felled by scandal in the past decade, few of them would have lost their jobs if they’d been Democrats.

Urban Machine Politics: It’s always been true of American (and not only American) politics that big-city governments are bigger, more intrusive and more corrupt, and it’s also always been true that Democrats have, at any given time, long-term headlocks on the great majority of such governments. Machines of that nature are not so much ideological as they are coalitions of self-interest in which political power and political favor are inseparable. Michelle Obama grew up in such a machine – her father worked a coveted City job and worked for the Democratic ward – and it was only natural when she went to work herself for Mayor Daley, and from then on served as a conduit of favors between her career, her husband’s career and the Daley machine. It’s no accident that the list of corrupt Democrats is usually dominated by big-city politicians who are insulated from challenge to their job security. And of course, the best way to get such insulation, as machine politicians since Tammany Hall have known, is to run on ethnic/racial solidarity, since it’s easier to stay Irish (or black, or whatever) than it is to stay honest or competent at your job. Regardless of what the Democratic party’s brain may want at any given time, its body is an organism composed of political favor-trading with other people’s money.

All of which is why Blagojevich and Richardson should not in any way be seen as an anomaly, any more than Charlie Rangel (the political successor of Adam Clayton Powell, who the House unsuccessfully tried to expel for corruption) and Chris Dodd (whose father was censured by the Senate on ethics grounds) are anomalies among Congressional Democrats. These two scandals at the outset of Obama’s term (as well as those held over from Clinton Administration scandals) are not the end of scandal under Obama, or even the beginning of the end; they are, as Churchill would say, only the end of the beginning.

An Offer You Can’t Refuse

My RedState colleague Jeff Emanuel looks at the health insurance industry’s effort to get Congress to make it mandatory to buy their product. Matthew Continetti notes that the corporatist involvement of the industry is a key difference from the landscape that confronted HillaryCare in 1994 (it’s much more like the conditions that gave us Bush’s Medicare Part D plan in 2003).