The Coming Tax Revolt?

Jonah writes:

Just something to ponder. For a couple years now, there's been a growing chorus of pundits, analysts and -- most significantly -- conservative reformers who've claimed to one degree or another that the GOPs anti-tax posture has lost its political salience. There are good arguments on that score, and bad ones. But it seems to me that the tax issue is on its way back. And while nothing is certain, I think it's reasonable to argue that the obituaries for tax cuts as a winning issue for Republicans were almost surely premature.

Speaking as one of those conservative reformers, I'd make two points. First, nobody was saying that tax cuts couldn't potentially become politically salient again if the Republicans got clobbered repeatedly at the polls and a sizable Democratic majority enacted large tax increases. The point - which Reihan and I started making in 2005, back when the GOP's hold on government still seemed reasonably strong - was that it would be nice to prevent that sort of thing from happening, and that an anti-tax message alone was insufficient to the task of forestalling a Republican collapse. In this regard, I don't feel like our obituary was premature; I think it's been largely vindicated by events.

Second, while I'm sure that the long-term costs of the Obama agenda will create space for a renewed anti-tax message, I'm less convinced about the short run - especially if the cap-and-trade bill, which seems like the aspect of his agenda most likely to court short-term backlash, goes down to defeat. Maybe Jonah's right, but I'd like to see his evidence.  

The Naive Opposition

Ezra Klein, on Paul Ryan's alternative budget:

It's not what you do when you're responsible for running the government. It's what you propose when you're responsible for running the messaging.

I understand what he's getting at, but this phrasing makes it sound like the House Republicans' budget is an exercise in cynicism and partisan political calculation - which is exactly the wrong way to look at what's going on with the House GOP. Sure, there may be some cynicism involved in how the Ryan proposal makes its numbers add up. But the overall outline - an across-the-board tax cut and a flatter tax code, substantial means-testing for Social Security and Medicare, and a five-year discretionary spending freeze - strikes me as the opposite of cynical. Rather, there's a kind of deep innocence about it: The purity of its small-government vision is more detached from the grubby realities of American politics than any similar document I can remember. It's as if the Democratic Party, in the aftermath of it's 2002 and 2004 defeats, had proposed an alternative to George W. Bush's wartime budgets that slashed defense spending dramatically, raised income taxes across the board, and invested all of the resulting revenue in a revivified AFDC, a massive cash grant to the UN, and a big new federal jobs program for "green-collar" workers, community organizers, and Planned Parenthood clinicians.

Now maybe the Democrats should have done just that. Certainly there are left-liberal voices who would have welcomed an explicitly social-democratic alternative to Bushism, as a means of widening the bounds of political discourse, and opening new vistas on the left. Sometimes naivete in the short run is wisdom in the long run. And maybe by providing such a rigorously small-government alternative to Obamanomics, the Congressional GOP will succeed in pushing the conversation rightward, and moving important but hard-to-sell ideas like means-testing entitlements into the mainstream where they belong.

But sometimes naivete is just naivete. Sometimes, putting your least-popular ideas together in one agenda just makes it easier for your opponents to run circles around you. And right now, I think the country could use a right-of-center party that paid a little more attention to its messaging, and a little less attention to its blueprints for the ideal small-government society.

Conservatives, Crime Policy, and the Black Vote

A little while ago, Shelby Steele wrote an op-ed discussing the problems that conservatives have appealing to minorities, and especially African-Americans. As long as the black experience is shaped by a sense of grievance and alienation, Steele suggested, there will always be an essentially "anti-conservative orientation" to minority politics, and liberals will always be able to outbid the Right for their votes. There's no way, in the end, for a conservative party to be more activist than the Left, more outraged about the sins of the past, and more redemptorist in its vision for what American politics should do to remedy injustices historical and structural. Instead of trying to out-liberal liberalism, Steele wrote, conservatives need to be true to their best selves as conservatives, and hope that minorities eventually come around to a political vision that treats them as individuals rather than members of a caste, offering "human rather than racial dignity," and "the discipline of ordinary people rather than the virtuousness of extraordinary people."

Treated as a view from 30,000 feet, I basically agree with this argument. You cannot expect the descendants of slaves and the heirs of segregation to embrace a conservative politics en masse until we're much, much further out of those institutions' shadow than we are today; by the same token, it would be bad for conservatism, and for America, if the Right were to seek black votes by jettisoning its core premises, and simply giving up (as the Bush Administration sometimes seemed eager to do) on its long-running critique of the diversity-and-dependency two-step that undergirds modern liberalism's approach to racial issues. Given where the two groups are starting from, in other words, conservatives shouldn't hope for more from African-Americans, and African-Americans more from conservatives, than either group is likely to deliver.

But drop down to ground level for a moment, and consider Ta-Nehisi's response to my post on prison reform. Here we have an issue - the design of our criminal-justice system - that's of burning concern to the African-American community. It's not an easy issue to wrestle with by any stretch: My preferred approach to reform, for instance, would marry a reduced incarceration rate to a substantial increase in the police presence on America's streets, which if implemented clumsily (as most policy shifts are) could mean fewer black men behind bars, but more tragedies like the death of Ta-Nehisi's friend. But it's also an issue where conservatives could embrace policy shifts without compromising their core beliefs - the question of where to strike the "build prisons or hire cops" balance is a practical rather than a philosophical one - and in the process, I think, substantially change the way the Republican Party is perceived in the black community. Also, it would be the right thing to do. 

This is something I think that arguments like Steele's - which are common on the American Right - lose sight of. As I remarked in the context of the Europe-or-America debate, there are a lot of big-picture political issues that boil down to philosophical differences, and that can't (and shouldn't) be resolved or finessed through clever policy thinking. But there are also a lot of political issues that boil down a question of resource allocation: We're going to spend X dollars on prisons and police (or on the military, or on the school system or the highways or what-have-you), and the question is how. And getting that "how" right can make an awfully big difference - to the African-American community, and to many other people as well.

The Tough-On-Crime Trap

Atul Gawande's New Yorker piece on solitary confinement deserves to be read in tandem with Cato Unbound's symposium on American incarceration rates. The former looks at a particular issue in prison policy, and the latter at the general trend toward ever-greater imprisonment, but both invite the reader to ponder the ways in which one of the biggest policy successes of the past twenty-five years - the large-scale reduction in the crime rate - has enmeshed us in a net of moral compromises from which it's difficult to escape.

The turn toward mass incarceration and tough sentencing was championed, largely by conservatives, in response to what amounted to a long period of emergency in American life: A murder rate that had doubled over twenty years, a robbery rate that had quintupled, an urban landscape that seemed increasingly ungovernable, and so on. And the turn worked: The estimates of its impact vary, but most scholars agree that increased incarceration played a substantial role in the plunging crime rates of the 1990s.

But as you might expect, a policy turn undertaken during a period of emergency will eventually produce diminishing returns - as Steven Levitt puts it, "the two-millionth criminal imprisoned is likely to impose a much smaller crime burden on society than the first prisoner" - even as it imposes substantial moral costs. And precisely because the tough-on-crime approach was largely vindicated by events, it's extremely difficult for elected officials to walk back from some of the dubious practices that have grown up around it - like, say, the possibly cruel-and-unusual use of long-term solitary confinement. As Gawande writes:

Commissioners ... could eliminate prolonged isolation with the stroke of a pen. So, I asked, why haven't they? He told me what happened when he tried to move just one prisoner out of isolation. Legislators called for him to be fired and threatened to withhold basic funding. Corrections officers called members of the crime victim's family and told them that he'd gone soft on crime. Hostile stories appeared in the tabloids. It is pointless for commissioners to act unilaterally, he said, without a change in public opinion.

This political dynamic explains why the chances for effective prison reform probably depend on Nixon-to-China conservatives, who can put the credibility the Right has built up on law and order to good use. (It wouldn't hurt if conservatives were willing to champion some alternative approaches to crime reduction as well.) But they probably also depend on crime rates staying flat, or falling - and in the current downturn that may be too much to hope for.

Kinsley and Stem Cells, Revisited

Michael Kinsley was kind enough to respond to this post, in which I objected to his suggestion that pro-lifers who oppose embryo-destructive research don't mean what they say, because if they did they'd want to forbid embryo destruction in fertility clinics as well. He writes:

Douthat's reply was that (a) opponents of stem-cell research do indeed oppose the creation and destruction of all embryos in fertility clinics, and not just the ones that are used for scientific research; but (b) accepting fertility clinics as a given is a compromise with reality, and stem-cell opponents deserve congratulations for playing democracy according to the rules; and (c) in particular, they were, and are, simply asking not to be coerced through the tax system into having their dollars spent in a way they find morally repugnant.

Let's start with (c). Although it's rarely put this way, coercion--especially financial coercion--is at the heart of any political system, including democracy. Almost the whole point of politics is to decide what money is spent communally, and how. Obviously the system can't work if everyone gets to withhold tax dollars from projects they disapprove of. I and many others, for example, would have preferred to not to have our tax dollars go to finance the Iraq war. I'm sure Ross Douthat would have had no problem seeing why that wouldn't work.

Well, sure. But policy choices aren't always a zero-sum game. In the case of the Iraq War, if the government didn't organize an invasion (using the anti-war minority's money to pay for it), it wasn't going to happen: Halliburton and the Blackwater Group weren't about to step up the plate with a private-sector alternative. But research on embryonic stem cell research could happen in the absence of government involvement, and indeed it has - thanks to my own alma mater, among other institutions.

This doesn't make a half-a-loaf compromise, in which the research is allowed but left unfunded, something that Michael Kinsley has to accept. He has every right to seek the coercion of his pro-life antagonists and the use of their tax dollars for the research that he favors; such coercion, as he says, is a normal feature of democratic life. But the fact that he prefers to seek the full loaf doesn't mean that a compromise isn't possible, or that pro-lifers, conscious of the unfavorable landscape in which they're operating, shouldn't be agitating in its favor. After all, some of the pro-life movement's bigger successes, post-Roe, have involved eliminating or reducing public funding for abortion, even as the procedure itself has remained legal and widely practiced. Fighting against government funding for stem-cell research is the equivalent of the Hyde Amendment approach to government funding for abortion: It may not work, but that doesn't mean it doesn't make political sense.

Kinsley goes on:

If it was a tactical compromise to make an issue of stem-cell research while ignoring the vast majority of surplus embryos produced in fertility clinics that are simply destroyed, this compromise was a mighty strange one. Ordinarily, if you intend to compromise, you start by playing up your maximalist position as much as possible, emphasizing how strongly you feel and how difficult it will be to accept half a loaf. Then you compromise. In this case, though, Douthat can only point to a couple of columns by Will Saletan in Slate--one about the octuplets controversy and the other about some law in Italy--to support his contention that pro-lifers "would like to heavily regulate fertility clinics." Maybe they would, but this has played absolutely no part in the stem-cell debate. In Bush's original speech announcing his stem-cell research restrictions eight years ago (now praised by conservatives as a masterpiece of moral reasoning the way liberals praise President Obama's speech on race in Philadelphia) Bush actually praised the work of fertility clinics, claiming--correctly--that in-vitro fertilization has brought happiness to many.

Actually, as Larison notes, Bush's speech came in for quite a bit of criticism from pro-lifers, many of whom eventually came around to defending it because it was clear from the political landscape that this was the best they could hope for. And is it really the case that with every new controversy and debate (and the stem-cell debate was very much a new one for pro-lifers in 2001), the thing to do is "play up your maximalist position as much as possible" before proposing compromises?

I think not. The maximalist pro-life stance - a Human Life Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which would constrain fertility clinics and abortion doctors alike - is already embedded in the GOP platform, and I can introduce Kinsley to plenty of pro-life groups that spend a lot of energy on whole-loaf campaigns, from the sponsors of Colorado's "personhood" amendment to the "Pill Kills" folks at the American Life League. But most pro-life successes, as I've noted before, involve incrementalism and compromise. If you're a pro-life group working on a partial-birth abortion ban, does it really make sense to kick off your campaign with an extended restatement of their opposition to abortion at every stage of pregnancy? If you're trying to pass a parental-consent law, do you really want to start out by proposing that abortion be banned outright for teenagers, and only work your way around gradually to the provision you actually hope might pass? Most Americans already know that the pro-life movement has a maximalist view of what abortion law should be, I think, which means that restating your maximalism at every opportunity isn't a savvy approach to negotiation - it's a good way to get people to tune you out.

What's more, politics is all about doing your best with the opportunities that present themselves. Kinsley's right that once you get beyond the funding question, there's no necessary reason for pro-lifers to focus more energy on embryo-destroying research than on the general embryo destruction that goes on in fertility clinics. (Though research on embryos created expressly for that purpose is another matter.) But the debate centered around research, rather than fertility clinics, during the Bush years in large part because the government's policy toward funding such research was on the table for review in 2001, creating an opportunity to nudge policy in a slightly more pro-life direction. No such opportunity, so far as I can tell, presented itself where fertility clinics were concerned - or at least, it hadn't until the public outrage surrounding the "Octomom" prompted some pro-lifers to see an opportunity to enact restriction on fertility clinics.

Which was, of course, the point of mentioning "some law in Italy" (as Kinsley puts it). The law in question, passed a while back amid Octomom-style outrage over Italy's freewheeling fertility clinics, is exactly the sort of restriction that Kinsley claims American pro-lifers don't really support, fearful hypocrites that they are. Maybe he's right: Maybe Italian pro-lifers are just more serious and consistent than their American counterparts. (Catholics do tend to be more rigorous in their opposition to killing embryos than, say, Mormons - hence Orrin Hatch's support for stem-cell research, for instance.) But it seems more likely that the Italian pro-lifers are just making the most of a more favorable political environment for clinic regulation than exists in the United States - and that if the American pro-life movement were suddenly transplanted to the Italian environment, its leaders wouldn't be shy about taking up the fertility-clinic issue.

Kinsley concludes by suggesting that he's harping on fertility clinics for essentially tactical reasons: He thinks that the "fertility-anomaly hasn't even occurred to most pro-lifers," and "that when they realize that their logic in opposing stem-cell research would condemn all IVF as well, it will give many reasonable pro-lifers pause--maybe even about their pro-life position in general, certainly about their opposition to stem-cell research." Speaking for all the "unreasonable" pro-lifers out there, I don't think this is a crazy view of the overall political dynamic. Just as lots of people who call themselves pro-choice blanch, for intuitive reasons, at abortions that take place after the first trimester, some Americans who oppose abortion don't really mind the destruction of embryos, and would look askance at a pro-life movement that sought to regulate fertility clinics. But there's a difference between this claim and Kinsley's initial one, which is that the people who are deeply involved in these debates don't understand their premises, and don't really mean what they say. I can assure him that we do. The attempt to apply one's principles pragmatically, and with an eye toward the art of the politically possible, isn't evidence that those principles don't exist.

Stem Cells and Moral Seriousness

Michael Kinsley, writing in praise of the Obama Administration's inevitable decision to get the government into the business of embryo-killing:

... let's be clear: There is NO "medical ethical quandary" involved in the decade-long dispute over stem cells. There is only the appearance of an ethical quandary, created by people who either don't understand or willfully misrepresent the facts. "Quandary" is a particularly insidious word. Compare it to "controversy." There is undeniably a controversy about stem cells: two sides, disagreeing strongly. But "quandary" suggests that the controversy is legitimate--that a fair-minded person would have to recognize some degree of merit in both sides of the argument, wherever he or she might ultimately come down. In a "quandary," there actually are (dread phrase) "no easy answers."

.... If you wish to believe that every fertilized egg is a human being with full human rights, that is your privilege. I disagree, which makes it a controversy. If I felt you were serious, we would have a quandary as well. But there's no quandary because you're not serious. Your actions are too different from your words. You are doing absolutely nothing about the millions of fertilized eggs that are destroyed naturally every year (in miscarriages so early that the potential mother is not even aware of them), or the thousands that are produced and unused by fertility clinics going about their normal work (which are either discarded or pointlessly frozen in the hope of some miraculous ethical breakthrough).

The anti-abortion forces who have delayed stem-cell research by a decade are not morally serious. If they were, they would be trying to get laws making the work of fertility clinics illegal, not concentrating on the tiny fraction of surplus embryos from those clinics that are going to a worthwhile purpose.

Kinsley has made this argument before, and time has not improved it. Pro-lifers are often damned for being uncompromising zealots; here Kinsley is taking a case where the pro-life movement pretty clearly has gone in for compromise - drawing the line at having their tax dollars used for embryo-killing, rather than trying to get the practice banned outright - and damning them for being morally unserious. Heads he wins, tails we lose, I guess.  As should be clear from other examples, at home and abroad, most pro-lifers would like to heavily regulate fertility clinics, and would support efforts to give every embryo a chance at life. (I will pass over his line about miscarriages, which seems to imply that a "serious" pro-life movement would be trying to pass laws against accidental deaths.) But that's not where the national debate is at the moment, to put it mildly, so instead pro-lifers have done what you're supposed to do in a democracy, which is to meet the general public where they are. This doesn't make them insincere; it makes them sensible. (By Kinsley's screwy logic, a supporter of universal health care in a country where half the country's uninsured and there's no chance of passing single-payer would be "morally unserious" if he concentrated his energy on, say, mandating health care for newborns; after all, what about the millions of people who aren't newborns?)

Also, to the extent that pro-lifers do accept the current fertility-clinic culture as a given, I still think there's a worthwhile moral distinction to be drawn between "pointlessly" freezing the embryos left over from an attempt to have children, and just handing them over to be killed. Yes, a frozen embryo will probably be destroyed eventually, and the pro-life gesture involved in freezing it is probably just an empty gesture. But there's still a difference between a situation in which death is probable and a situation where it's inevitable, and I think it's a mistake to efface that line as completely as Kinsley's argument would have us do.

Abortion Reduction Revisited

Will Saletan has a thoughtful response to my latest critique of his abortion-reduction proposals. You should read the whole thing, but here's the heart of the matter:

I don't have a brilliant program in mind. All I have is process of elimination: If most people in this country, including me, aren't willing to ban abortions (check), and if you can't stop people from having sex (check), and if contraception is the only other way to prevent pregnancy (check), and if providing access to contraception hasn't solved the problem (check), then the remaining factor is human failure to use the contraception. Target that problem. I don't care whether it's through the federal government, states, clinics, schools, churches, or Conan O'Brien. All that matters is sending a forceful message that if you're not prepared to become a parent, you must either avoid vaginal intercourse or use birth control religiously.

If sex-ed programs aren't getting this message across, come up with better sex-ed programs. Or go through churches, doctors, parents, Facebook, Webkinz--whatever. Keep trying until you find something that works.

Given his premises, this seems fair. Ultimately, I think Saletan's project founders on the difficulty of moralizing about something that you aren't willing to regulate in any significant way: Law and culture are intertwined, especially in a rights-conscious society, and if you want to teach people that they ought to use condoms because "unprotected sex can lead to the creation -- and the subsequent killing, through abortion -- of a developing human being," as Saletan's original piece put it, then you need a legal regime that treats the killing of said developing human being as something other than a constitutional right on par with freedom of speech, religion or assembly. But on this much, he and I agree: If you start with the premise that neither American abortion law nor American patterns of sexual behavior can be altered in any significant way, and you want fewer abortions nonetheless, then trying different ways to promote the use of birth control "until you find something that works" is really all you have left. 

A Final Word On Rush

Ruffini writes:

My overall sense is that the Frums and the Douthats of the world would be well served by staying away from this argument. As Ross himself has written, the grassroots needs elites -- and the elites need the grassroots. By trying to isolate Rush, the elites break down this elegant separation and veer into micromanaging the grassroots -- a losing proposition, particularly against a brand as sticky as Rush.

I take the point: I originally only meant to take a mild and passing swipe at Rush's CPAC speech, and I somewhat regret wading in deeper. (Such are the perils of blogging ...) But it's also worth remembering that Limbaugh's critics have ended up having this fight in part because Limbaugh has come after them. Rush was attacking David Frum as a sell-out and a surrender monkey before Frum was attacking him, and the CPAC speech was just the latest blast in Rush's long-running campaign to isolate would-be conservative reformers - a campaign that's seen him go after everyone from Jim Manzi to Newt Gingrich to yours truly.

Now obviously we're all big boys and we can take it, and Ruffini has a good point about discretion being the better part of valor in these kind of debates: Reformist takes on conservatism will survive even if Rush's attacks go unrebutted, and reformers might even win a few more converts if they aren't perceived as locked in a death-struggle with talk radio. But the deeper problem here isn't that a few conservative pointy-heads are getting their egos bruised by Rush's broadsides; it's that conservative politicians seem to be spending an awful lot of time looking over their shoulders these days, worried about what Limbaugh and company have to say about them. (Bobby Jindal's much-panned response to Obama, for instance, could have been ghost-written by Rush, and sure enough, Rush was the only one who liked it.) And this is something that reformers should be worried about: The GOP's leaders desperately need some space in which to experiment a little, on policy and otherwise, and they don't seem to have it at the moment. Maybe criticizing Limbaugh isn't the best way to open up that space - but at the very least you can see where the impulse comes from.

Small-Government Egalitarianism, Revisited

In my original post on Obama and starve-the-beast, I referenced this Yglesias item from a week or so ago - which offered, I think, an illuminating look at the roots of progressive thinking about taxation and income inequality. Drawing on this Lane Kenworthy post from last year, which considered the relationship between taxation, spending, and income inequality in developed countries, Yglesias wrote:

... if you look around the one at what it is countries do to mitigate income inequality, nobody is substantially equalizing things through the tax system, but many countries are substantially equalizing things on the spending side ... Not that progressive taxation is a bad thing, or meaningless in the contribution it makes, but clearly insofar as direct public policy interventions (as opposed to things like wider distribution of educational attainment) are going to reduce inequality, it needs to be done on the spending side. Now this raises the question how do you get the spending side to do more? Is it by "means testing" existing programs and creating new small-bore "targeted" programs aimed at the neediest? Well, not really ...for inequality reduction, it is the quantity of taxes rather than the progressivity of the tax system that matters most. Affluent countries that achieve substantial inequality reduction do so with tax systems that are large but no more progressive than ours.

As readers of Grand New Party know, one of the biggest things that separates my views on domestic policy from what I think it's fair to call the conservative mainstream is a concern about socioeconomic stratification (and, more exactly, its impact on socioeconomic mobility), and a belief that welfare-state spending should provide a safety net and promote upward mobility. What separates my views from progressives like Matt, on the other hand, is a belief that we should be able to pursue this goal without having the government swallow an ever-larger share of GDP. Of course the easiest way to reduce stratification is just to dramatically increase "the quantity of taxes" and let government spending do the rest - but if we're trying to strike a balance between liberty and equality, rather than just shrugging our shoulders and embracing a little more soft despotism and a little less voluntary association, then the idea of a means-tested and targeted welfare state looks like something worth pursuing.

Obviously, this kind of "small-government egalitarianism", to borrow Edward Glaeser's apposite phrase, isn't going to achieve the levels of equality, economic and otherwise, that prevail in small, ethnically-homogeneous social democracies. But that doesn't bother me: I don't want what Denmark has; I just want policies that do a bit more to mitigate what Clive Crook calls  the present "stickiness" of wealth and poverty in America - and I don't think it's implausible to imagine this happening within a welfare state that's no bigger than the one we have now. Look at this chart, for instance, which Matt borrowed from Kenworthy:



Yes, inequality reduction tends to go up with government revenue. But the countries are more scattered than the straight line indicates: Look at Australia, for instance, way over there on the left, taking only slightly more in taxes than the U.S. does at present, but doing a lot more than we do to mitigate inequality. (It's probably not a coincidence that Australia has been way out ahead of most of the developed world when it comes to means-testing.) There's no inherent reason, it seems to me, why the United States couldn't hold its position as the lowest-taxed country on the chart, while targeting and means-testing its way up the y-axis a bit. Small-government egalitarianism hasn't been tried and found wanting; it's just seemed too small-government-y for liberals, and a bit too egalitarian-sounding for many conservatives, and thus been left untried.

The Pursuit of Social Democracy

Barack Obama won the 2008 Presidential election on an agenda that tilted him further leftward than most recent Democratic nominees on nearly every issue. The one big exception was taxes, where he ran to the center, offering what was arguably a larger middle-class tax cut than the Republican candidate, and promising that the only tax increase he contemplated would fall on the richest Americans, and merely return tax rates to the levels of the Clinton years. This maneuver helped win him the election, by blunting the GOP's attempts to paint him as a tax-hiker - but it left him well short of a mandate for the kind of social democracy that many liberals see as their goal. That's because, as commenters across the spectrum agree, you can't fund social democracy just by making the tax code ever more progressive: At some point, you need to raise revenue from the middle class.

What Obama does have, though, is an atmosphere of crisis and a massively-unpopular opposition party, which grants him an unparalleled political opportunity to pass whatever spending the Democratic Party likes, and damn the short-term cost. And what you see in his budgeting proposals, I think, is the liberal equivalent of the conservative attempt to "starve the beast." In both the Reagan and Bush eras, Republicans passed tax cuts and ran up large deficits while hoping that by starving the federal government of revenue they would curb its long-run growth. Obama's spending proposals would effectively reverse that dynamic - they would create new spending commitments and run up large deficits, in the hopes that the dollars poured into health care and education will create a new baseline for government's obligations, which in turn will create the political space for tax increases on the middle class. Like the starve-the-beast approach, the Obama strategy puts off the hard part till tomorrow: Give them tax cuts today, conservatives said, and they'll swallow spending cuts tomorrow; give them universal health care, universal pre-K, subsidies for green industry and all the rest of it today, liberals seem to be thinking, and they'll be willing to pay for it tomorrow.

The fact that starve-the-beast didn't work out as well as small-governmenteers hoped doesn't make the Obama strategy misguided. Both political parties are living in the shadow of the hard choices that are going to be imposed by the insolvency of America's entitlements: At some point soon, liberals are going to have to accept somewhat less spending than they'd like, and conservatives are going to have to accept somewhat higher taxes. And if you can change the baseline of social spending that Americans expect from their government before that day of hard choices arrive - and once created, government programs are awfully hard to get rid of, whether they're actually effective or not - then you've tilted the landscape of negotiation in liberalism's favor, and ensured that a post-Obama entitlement compromise will look a lot more like social democracy than a pre-Obama compromise would have.

But of course none of this will work if the American economy doesn't escape its current downward spiral. If you're running enormous deficits and don't have any economic growth to show for it, it doesn't matter how popular your social-spending programs are in the short run, as more than a few ex-Latin American leaders will be happy to attest. And what does make the Obama strategy misguided is that it looks increasingly like a substitute for a depression-fighting strategy - and what's worse, a substitute that has the potential to actually make matters worse, when Obama, liberalism, and America all desperately need things to get better.  

Layer Cake

I liked Patrick Ruffini's attack on the Right's Joe the Plumber Wurzelbacher (enough with the nonsense, right?) fixation. But I also liked Daniel Larison's critique of Ruffini's post. And that's because it's useful to think of the problems facing the American Right in terms of layers of misapprehension.

The first layer is pure denialism - the kind of denial that Rush Limbaugh is practicing when he reads anyone who didn't like Bobby Jindal's speech out of his version of conservatism; the kind of denial that insists the Joe the Plumber gambit was a roaring success and that only snobs would have any problem with Sarah Palin's interview prowess; the kind of denial that boos Tucker Carlson for allowing that the New York Times has good reporters; the kind of denial that thinks the GOP can climb back to power on a tower of tea partys and cracks about volcano monitoring. And every attack on this sort of folly is to be welcomed.

But not every attack goes far enough. And I think Larison is right to see in Ruffini's post an essential faith that if you got rid of all the gimmicks and the nonsense and had sober-minded, eloquent people selling the current Republican message on the merits, the GOP would be "the natural governing party" of these United States. This is the second layer of right-wing misapprehension, which recognizes that conservatism has an image deficit and a seriousness deficit, but doesn't go far enough in allowing that it has a substance deficit as well.

The Right has a messaging problem, yes - but it also has a message problem. It could be America's natural governing party, sure - but as long as its economic agenda looks like Jim DeMint's alternative stimulus, full stop, nothing else to see here, it won't be. Republicans are in deep trouble because the economic meltdown was piled on top of George W. Bush's personal unpopularity - but they would be in some kind of trouble no matter what, because the right-wing message on domestic policy hasn't been resonating with "the people in the middle culturally and economically," who Ruffini rightly identifies as the backbone of any plausible conservative majority, for going on years and years now. The current crisis hasn't created the problem; it's taken an existing problem and throw it into sharp relief.

Recognizing that this problem exists is only the beginning of the argument, obviously. Once you allow that conservatism needs a renovated agenda, it's possible to feud endlessly about what that agenda ought to be. But even getting to that feud, and leaving the layers of misapprehension about conservatism's current prospects behind, would be a worthwhile achievement for the Right.

Abortion, Contraception and the States

To Reihan's objections (and those of some readers), I should say that I didn't mean to oversimplify the state-by-state picture on abortion, which is inevitably rather complex. (For instance, it's no doubt true that some of the extremely low abortion rate in Utah and Idaho is explained away by the extremely high abortion rate next door in Nevada, and obviously different dynamics are at work in states with low abortion rates and high out-of-wedlock birth rates, like Louisiana and Mississippi, and states with low abortion rates and lower-than-average out-of-wedlock birth rates, like Utah or Iowa.) All I'm saying is that it's hard to find support for the following propositions, which Will Saletan regularly advances - that a concerted governmental push to expand the use of birth control is the best way to dramatically reduce the number of abortions, and that the intransigence of religious conservatives on this question is keeping the abortion rate artificially inflated. At the very least, the picture is a whole lot murkier than that - and if you really want to prioritize abortion reduction, I think there's considerably more evidence to support a supply-side approach (i.e., making them harder to get) than the demand-side approach that Saletan and others champion.

I should add that I don't expect or want American social policy to reflect the Catholic Church's teaching on contraception, I don't have a problem with our public health services providing access to birth control (if the money in question isn't filtered through Planned Parenthood, that is), and I agree with Reihan that social conservatives shouldn't reject programs like the one in question out of hand. But I also think that an awful lot of the policies liberals like to champion in this area - expanded public-school sex ed programs chief among them - don't deliver anything remotely like the benefits they promise. And I'm extremely wary of defining "common ground" on abortion in terms that essentially require the pro-life movement to give up the store in the legal debate, in exchange for at best marginal returns where the abortion rate is concerned.

The Other Jindal

From Michael Gerson's (pre-speech) column on Bobby Jindal:

At a recent meeting of conservative activists, Jindal had little to say about his traditional social views or compelling personal story. Instead, he uncorked a fluent, substantive rush of policy proposals and achievements, covering workforce development, biodiesel refineries, quality assurance centers, digital media, Medicare parts C and D, and state waivers to the CMS (whatever that is).

Some have compared Jindal to Obama, but the new president has always been more attracted to platitudes than to policy. Rush Limbaugh has anointed Jindal "the next Ronald Reagan." But Reagan enjoyed painting on a large ideological canvas. In person, Jindal's manner more closely resembles another recent president: Bill Clinton. Like Clinton (a fellow Rhodes scholar), Jindal has the ability to overwhelm any topic with facts and thoughtful arguments -- displaying a mastery of detail that encourages confidence. Both speak of complex policy issues with the world-changing intensity of a late-night dorm room discussion.

It's great that he can give a speech like that to conservative activists. Seriously. But it would be even better if he had given a speech like that - a speech that suggests that Republicans are capable of actually running government, as well as running against it - to the American people last night. Instead, we got this:

Their legislation ... includes $300 million to buy new cars for the government, $8 billion for high-speed rail projects, such as a 'magnetic levitation' line from Las Vegas to Disneyland, and $140 million for something called 'volcano monitoring.' Instead of monitoring volcanoes, what Congress should be monitoring is the eruption of spending in Washington, DC.

Ch-ching! And hey, it worked for McCain, right? 

How Do You Solve a Problem Like Abortion?

I admire the persistence with which Will Saletan argues for common ground in the abortion debate, and attempts to sell his fellow liberals on the notion that reducing the abortion rate belongs in the Democratic Party's agenda. But I remain unconvinced that his preferred method for such reductions - a dramatic new push, whether political or cultural, to expand the use of contraception in the United States - would produce anything like the results that he envisions.

Consider, for instance, the idea that the government should dramatically expand eligibility for free contraception through Medicaid, a notion that conservatives objected to when it was tacked onto the stimulus package, and which Saletan links to as part of his latest proposed framework for an Obama abortion agenda. Here's Adam Thomas and Isabel Sawhill, both serious folks and proponents of the proposal, on the potential impact of such an initiative:

A recent Brookings Institution policy brief concluded that, in states that have already been granted income-eligibility waivers, this policy led to a significant reduction in the number of sexually-active women who have unprotected sex. We have incorporated this finding into a cutting-edge simulation model of family formation. Our results suggest that a similar expansion in contraceptive services in the remaining states would reduce the annual number of children born out of wedlock by more than 25,000, would reduce the number of pregnancies to unmarried teenagers each year by 19,000, and would reduce the annual number of abortions to unmarried women by nearly 12,000.

That sounds enormously impressive - until you consider that as of 2004, there were 2.8 million pregnancies among unmarried women in the United States, and roughly 1 million abortions. Which means that the universalization of this program, according to its supporters, might reduce the national abortion rate by somewhere between 1 and 2 percent. That's not nothing, obviously, but it's not a whole lot either - and in a country of millions upon millions, where countless trends shift the number of pregnancies and abortions around from year to year, it's perilously close to statistical noise. When you consider that there's good reason to think that Roe v. Wade raised the abortion rate by well over 50 percent, I think you can see why most opponents of abortion look at a "more birth control" strategy as a cop-out, rather than a cure.

But don't listen to me; listen to Will Saletan, in his recent Times op-ed on the same subject:

Eight years ago, the Alan Guttmacher Institute surveyed over 10,000 American women who had abortions. Nearly half said they hadn't used birth control in the month they conceived. When asked why not, 8 percent cited financial problems, and 2 percent said they didn't know where to get it. By comparison, 28 percent said they had thought they wouldn't get pregnant, 26 percent said they hadn't expected to have sex and 23 percent said they had never thought about using birth control, had never gotten around to it or had stopped using it. Ten percent said their partners had objected to it. Three percent said they had thought it would make sex less fun.

This isn't a shortage of pills or condoms. [emphasis mine - RD] It's a shortage of cultural and personal responsibility. It's a failure to teach, understand, admit or care that unprotected sex can lead to the creation -- and the subsequent killing, through abortion -- of a developing human being.

Well, yeah. But from this admirable premise, Saletan circles back, inevitably, to blaming conservatives yet again - not for supporting policies that cause a shortage of contraceptives, this time, but for cultural messaging that discourages people from using them. Pro-lifers need to recognize that "a culture of life requires an ethic of contraception," he writes. "Birth control isn't a sin or an offense against life, as so many girls and Catholic couples have been taught. It's a loving, conscientious way to prevent the conception of a child you can't bear to raise and don't want to abort."

This makes it sound like the long shadow of Humanae Vitae and the malign influence of the Quiverfull movement are a big part of America's abortion problem. But if religious-conservative objections to contraceptive use were actually a big part of the cultural background to our abortion and out-of-wedlock birth rate, you'd expect to see some actual evidence of it. For one thing, you'd expect evidence that the Catholic Church's position on birth control has a significant impact on American Catholic sexual behavior, let alone on sexual behavior in the society at large. But the vast majority of Catholics are already on board with Saletan's premises. Around 80 percent think the Church should change its teaching on contraception. 88 percent of Catholic doctors prescribe it. As many as 95 percent of married Catholics use it. And I'm pretty sure that the 5-10 percent of Catholics who do obey the Church's teaching aren't having all that many abortions.

Moreover, if Saletan's diagnosis were correct, you'd also expect the pockets of America most influenced by religious conservatism to provide object lessons in the folly of trying to build a culture of life without a culture of contraception. But look at American abortion rates by state: The states with the lowest abortion rates are places like the Dakotas, Utah, Kentucky, West Virginia, Kansas, and Mississippi; the states with the most are places like California, Connecticut, New York, Illinois, and Massachusetts. There are liberal states with low abortion rates (your Maines and Minnesotas), and right-tilting states with higher ones, but by and large the most religiously-conservative states seem to be doing a pretty good job on that whole culture of life business already, despite their failure to recognize the moral imperative of welcoming Planned Parenthood with open arms.

As I said, I applaud Saletan's search for common ground, and I recognize that the distance between his idea of compromise and mine reflects deep philosophical differences than no data set can bridge. But I also think it also reflects faulty empirical premises about what causes high abortion rates (and what produces lower ones), and I wish he'd reassess them.

Liberaltarianism, One More Time

Will Wilkinson was taken with this Mark Thompson post, and so was I - albeit for somewhat different reasons. The undercurrent in my frets about a future in which libertarians are absorbed into contemporary American liberalism, as you can probably tell, is my sense that there are real affinities between my own probably half-baked vision for conservative renewal and what the liberaltarians say they're up to; I see them as sparring partners on many issues, obviously, but as potential allies on many others.

So for instance, when Thompson writes that "by treating any and all social safety nets as irreversible steps on the Road to Serfdom, we allow liberals and progressives to shape those policies in ways that are inefficient, ineffective, and overbroad - even though Adam Smith, Hayek himself, and Friedman each advocated for a form of social safety net, demonstrating that social safety nets can be consistent with libertarianism," I think, this is exactly the way that conservatives more generally should be thinking about the welfare state. It's true that Grand New Party was written, in part, as a critique of a certain kind of "libertarianism" - the kind that sees Rudy Giuliani's "tax cuts plus nothing" primary campaign as a model for Republicans, for instance - and obviously the book partakes of a moralism that many libertarians find distasteful. But on a lot of fronts, our analysis was informed by what we (and especially Reihan, as you might expect) saw as the smartest libertarian thinking on policy issues. It isn't a coincidence that Reihan and I and Will Wilkinson all supported a payroll-tax cut as an alternative to the stimulus package, for instance: A smart right-populism and a smart libertarianism have a lot of disagreements, but a lot to talk about as well. And the whole idea of a libertarianism that engages with the welfare state as it actually exists, and seeks revolutions within the form that enhance liberty and opportunity, is roughly what I want to see from the American center-right at the moment - which makes me loath to see people who have ideas along similar lines fleeing into the center-left.

This doesn't mean that there aren't good reasons to flee! But I think that the liberaltarians shouldn't get too carried away by their sudden rediscovery of deep philosophical affinities between libertarians and left-liberalism. These affinities of course exist, but they exist in part because America is a liberal country, where almost everybody has philosophical affinities with everybody else. In a later post, Thompson argues that the Right might benefit from losing its libertarian component because "a conservatism that lacked libertarianism would be able to form around a more ideologically coherent set of beliefs akin to traditional conservatism ...  I can't think of a more appropriate counterweight to [the liberal worldview] than a political coalition formed around the idea of social, economic, and political stability, and a deep-seated sentiment for tradition." I respect the people trying to build a conservatism along these lines, but I just don't think it's possible in the American context: The appeal of dynamism, to borrow from Virginia Postrel, is too pervasive to admit of an effective political coalition organized in opposition to it. Which means that a Right that lost its smartest dynamists wouldn't suddenly be taken over by the Daniel Larisons and Patrick Deneens of the world. It would still be a pro-growth coalition - Rush Limbaugh is nothing if not a liberal in that sense - it would just be a much, much dumber one.

Yes, there's a best-case scenario in which the dumbening of the American Right works out fine for libertarians, because the infusion of "liberaltarianism" suddenly makes the left-of-center much smarter and more freedom-friendly about issues of economic policy. But I think the more likely scenario is that the liberaltarians vanish into the center-left without much of a ripple, leaving a right-wing rump to battle eternally with a fat, lazy, none-too-libertarian left-liberalism. And in fact, that worst-case scenario already exists: It's called the state of California.

Point-Counterpoint

On the one hand, Richard Florida's cover story in the latest issue of our magazine, on how the crash will incentivize the reurbanization of America, and benefit mega-cities over exurbs and small towns; on the other hand, David Brooks' column today, on Americans' persistent attachment to the suburbs and the Sunbelt. These two realities aren't always mutually exclusive, as partisans of the Northern Virginian suburbs will be happy to inform you, but the tensions between them - which are culture-war tensions, too, because of the way built environments shape and are shaped by family formation - will define a lot of domestic-policy debates across the next few decades.

Is The GOP Hopeless?

David Frum, pulling no punches:

Have you heard about the marsh mouse? The little swamp critter that got $30 million of stimulus bill spending thanks to Nancy Pelosi? Of course you have! The mouse was highlighted on Drudge and chortled over by Glenn Beck. One Republican congressman actually dandled a toy mouse in debate.

The story's not false exactly. The stimulus money really does contain money for wetlands restoration. One of the wetlands that might benefit really is located on San Francisco Bay. And the marsh mouse really does live there.

... The problem with the story is not that it was false. The problem with the story is that it was stupid.

The US economy has plunged into severe recession ... President Obama and the Democrats have responded by steering the US radically to the left ...And facing all this - we're talking about mice?

Could we possibly act more inadequate to the challenge? More futile? More brain dead?

We in fact have a constructive solution to offer, one that would deliver more jobs faster: the payroll tax holiday, an idea endorsed by almost every reputable right-of-center economist. But that's not the solution being offered by Republicans in Congress. They are offering a clapped-out package of 1980s-vintage solutions, including capital gains tax cuts. Capital gains! Who has any capital gains to be taxed in the first place?

I spent a lot of time during the election just past issuing complaints roughly like this one about the McCain campaign, and the GOP more generally. I've issued fewer over the last few weeks - partially out of exhaustion with the topic, and partially out of a sense that there's nobody to issue them to. At least during the 2008 election the party had a titular leader, from whose campaign a constructive new direction for conservatism might plausibly originate - even if the campaign in question seemed to have little interest in pursuing any such new direction. Whereas today's Republican Party has no leaders at all, if you define leaders as politicians with the credibility and power to chart a new course for the party, as opposed to having it charted for them by the GOP's most vocal constituents and most ideological backbenchers. John McCain was mistrusted by the base, but he at least had run, and won, a national primary campaign, and thus could claim some sort of a mandate to lead the party. Whereas the GOP's leaders in Washington, your Mitch McConnells and John Boehners, owe their power entirely to backroom politics: Nobody loves them, nobody trusts them, and as a result they're in no position to execute the kind of pivots that the party needs to make. One can reasonably expect them to do better than they've done to date when it comes to articulating an actual alternative to Obamanomics - i.e. more Larry Lindsey, less Jim DeMint - but one can't expect them to do much better. They simply don't have enough room to maneuver.

As I see it, there are a few ways to imagine the GOP acquiring the kind of innovative leadership it desperately needs. In one model, somebody who's already in the party's D.C. leadership builds up enough credibility with the conservative base - by successfully derailing some key Obama initiatives, for instance - to promote a new policy agenda without being dismissed as a sellout. The Grand New Party-reading Eric Cantor would be an obvious candidate for this role, and so might Michael Steele, if the GOP has a good midterm election cycle. Both men seem like forward-thinking politicians who are trapped, at the moment, by the need to say the things (and only those things) that the party's base wants to hear; both might become something more impressive if they get some victories under their belts.

But that's a big if - which is why the more likely road to revival for the GOP probably starts outside Washington, with politicians who can afford to be experimental without constantly worrying about what Rush Limbaugh would say about them. This is one of the ways reform happened in the Democratic Party of the '70s and '80s: You had a collection of distinctive and innovative political figures - your "Atari Democrats," your neoliberals, your "New Democrats" - who were testing out new ways of being liberal in statewide races long before their ideas were embraced by the party nationally. (Some of them still haven't been, of course, as Mickey Kaus will be happy to inform you.) What the Republican Party needs, above all, is a generation of politicians who can fill the "center-right" space currently occupied by time-servers like Arlen Specter and Susan Collins with a politics that's oriented around policy, rather than process. It needs a reform caucus that's actually interested in reform (as opposed to deal-cutting), and that's populated with politicians who have tried something new in difficult political terrains, and proven that it might work.

If such a caucus doesn't emerge in Washington, though, then the party has to hope it emerges in the statehouses - and that one such statehouse occupant has what it takes to win the party's nomination, the Presidency, and singlehandedly turn the GOP away from it's self-defeating, self-destructive habits along the way. This is both the easiest way for the party to acquire the leadership it needs, and the hardest: It's the easiest because it only requires the emergence of one great politician, rather than the slow cultivation of a generation of them; and it's the hardest because it depends on the skills and vision of a single reform-minded leader, rather than a pooled efforts of like-minded cohort. Some of the failures of the Bush Administration, it's worth noting, reflect precisely the latter set of dangers: You had a President trying, fitfully but with some sincerity, to create a new kind of conservatism (compassionate, big-government, whatever) without the kind of institutional and intellectual support that his project required. And it's easy to imagine the next Republican President - whether it's Jindal in 2016 or whomever - running into the same sort of problems, and running aground on them as well.
 
But those risks would be preferable to what seems to me like the worst-case scenario for a Republican revival, in which the party regains power without having developed any new leadership at all - as the beneficiary of a disastrous "Obama economy," but without any ideas for how to handle the situation save the same "clapped-out package of 1980s-vintage solutions," as Frum puts it, that too many Republicans are content to offer now. Which is why my watchword for now is patience: The only way conservatism is really going to come back is gradually, and the best thing for right-of-center thinkers to do is to call out bad ideas and promote good ones, and wait for politicians with the wit and courage to give some of the best ideas that bubble up a trying-out. This may not happen at all: The Republican Party could remain dysfunctional for years. But I'm trying not to get too discouraged if it doesn't happen in the first few months of Barack Obama's Washington.

The Future of Liberaltarianism

You've probably been following this conversation, but here's Will Wilkinson's response to Jonah Goldberg and John Hood on the question of what happens to the Wilkinson/Brink Lindsey theory of "liberaltarianism" in the age of Obama:

I'll let Brink speak for himself, but I'm not that interested in short-term partisan politics. I'm interested in a much longer-term project. I want to help create the possibility of a popular political identity that takes the value of human liberty, in all its aspects, really seriously. As I see it, this project involves an attempt to reunify the separate strands of the American liberal tradition. I'm not sure what it is about that project that would that lead Jonah to think Brink or I should be vexed by the behavior of the Democratic Party and it's operatives...

I think ... the romance of transformative hope is going to wear off pretty quick as all-but-uncontested Democratic policy deepens and lengthens the recession. There's a lot of culturally and psychologically liberal people out there who are, and are going to be, interested in a liberalism that actually works. I want to use this time of ferment to work on developing the missing option in American politics: an authentically liberal governing philosophy that understands that limited government, free markets, a culture of tolerance, and a sound social safety net are the best means to better lives.

So "whatever happened to liberaltarianism" is that it's an ongoing project to change who talks to whom, to freshen the stale dialectic of American politics, and to create new possibilities for American political identity.

This is consonant with what Will's written before on the subject, and as a fan of long-term, slightly quixotic political projects I wish him well. That being said, to become a viable form of political identity, as opposed to a theoretical one, liberaltarianism would need some actual liberals to jump on board the Rawlsekian train. It doesn't have to happen immediately, but it needs to happen at some point - and in that regard, the leftward trajectory of American liberalism at the moment ought to be at least somewhat discouraging to Wilkinson and Co. Yes, maybe when the Obama Administration fails to deliver the eschaton, there will be renewed interest on the American center-left in a libertarian-infused "liberalism that works." But sometimes statist failures only breed more statism. And just as I often fret that my hopes for a right-of-center majority lie somewhere back in the wreckage of the Bush years, I think the liberaltarians ought to worry, just a little, that their moment actually arrived in the Clinton years, and that it's already behind them - somewhere back in the vast obscurity of the political past, where the dark fields of the republic roll on under the night.

Greg Mankiw and the Republican Party

A couple of days ago, Yglesias dinged Greg Mankiw for suggesting elegant right-of-center alternatives to the stimulus package that are untethered from political reality. Mankiw responded with a defense of impractical ideas, and yesterday Yglesias responded in turn:

I think it's great for well-informed people to write about abstract policy ideals. At the same time, if you're going to comment on public affairs, it seems worthwhile to comment on what's actually happening. There are, right now, four ideas that have substantial support in congress. There's the House stimulus bill, the Senate stimulus bill, the Jim DeMint alternative that consists of large permanent tax cuts, and there's the idea of doing nothing.

... Based on what his ideal policy would be, it seems to me that Mankiw probably, like me, prefers the Democratic bills to doing nothing and prefers nothing to the DeMint plan. But Mankiw hasn't come out and said that. Instead, he's blogged about his ideal bill and linked-without-comment to lots and lots of stimulus opponents. And I haven't seen him offer any commentary or links on the main Republican alternative. One interpretation is that this is Mankiw being loyal to the abstract purity of the economics discipline. But it's unlikely that anyone so committed to the abstract purity of the discipline that he wouldn't offer an opinion on legislative options would have served as Chairman of the CEA. More plausibly, as a former CEA Chair who hopes to work again in Republican Party politics, Mankiw is hesitant to offer an honest opinion of the congressional GOP's legislation or the relative merits of their ideas and the congressional Democrats' ideas.

Jon Chait calls this a "fairly devastating critique." I'm not so sure, because I'm not so sure it's fair to call the DeMint plan the "main Republican alternative" to the stimulus. It's the alternative that liberals like to highlight, because it's the most ideologically-rigid and fiscally irresponsible, but you could just as easily call John McCain's proposal the main Republican alternative: It attracted more Republican votes than DeMint's, and its lower price tag, shorter-term horizons, and payroll-tax component puts it closer to Mankiw's ideal stimulus, I think, than either the House bill, the Senate bill, or the "doing nothing" option. (And there have been some other Republican amendments proposed as well, a few of which Mankiw might support - though none are as comprehensive as McCain's proposal, or DeMint's.)

That being said, the DeMint proposal did attract thirty-six Republican votes, and it does reflect where a large portion of the American Right stands at the moment - i.e., appropriately firm in their opposition to the Democratic agenda, but disconnected from both fiscal and political reality in their proposed alternatives. Republican office-holders need to thread a needle where this landscape is concerned, but conservative intellectuals have an obligation to be forthright about it: I understand Mankiw's reluctance to muck around in the realm of the politically-feasible, but the Republican Party and the country alike would be better off if he and others like him didn't just propose good right-of-center ideas, but called out bad ones.

The Grabbing Hand

This strikes me as a rather odd argument from Michael Kinsley. He notes that as of 2004, the typical American couple aged 65-74 had accumulated a net worth of $691,000. He further notes that many of these couples will die well before they've spent their way through their nest egg, "passing hundreds of thousands of dollars on to the next generation in their wills." Then he points out that at least some of the money these well-heeled retirees pass on to the heirs will come, not from their own savings, but from Social Security and Medicare - which "are supposed to be insurance against the perils of old age," rather than "gifts or subsidies to the children of retirees." Which leads him to this conclusion:

... if our elderly woman dies with $691,000 in the bank, it's evident that she didn't need the government money to pay for her health care or to avoid plunging into poverty. She wasn't lying or cheating--she might have been legitimately worried--but her worries turned out to be unnecessary. And society, having kept its promise to her, should get at least part of that money back. Oh, yes, designing a system to achieve this would be a nightmare--maybe impossible. The incentive for old folks to squander their savings would be enormous. Maybe it can't work. But the point is worth keeping in mind as we enter President Obama's "new age" of "hard choices."

Maybe I'm missing something, but isn't Kinsley's premise just an argument for the well-worn but nonetheless-correct idea that we ought to keep entitlements solvent by means-testing them? And if that's so, why in God's name would you possibly want to devise some sort of cumbersome system in which "society" (i.e. the government) reclaims unspent Social Security checks after a retiree shuffles off this mortal coil, when you could just cut smaller checks to well-off retirees in the first place? With means-testing, people would pay Social Security taxes, and then be paid benefits proportionate to their ability to support themselves in old age. With Kinsley's system, people would pay Social Security taxes, be paid benefits once they retire, and then have those benefits reclaimed, somehow, after they die, to be re-spent on other worthy causes. In other words, the government would take your money, give it back to you, and then take it back again, this time permanently, if you don't spend it before you die. Which approach sounds more efficient and reasonable to you?

I understand that means-testing is anathema to many liberals, who want to keep the "middle class" in middle-class entitlement, lest public support for the system erode.  (And not, of course, because they have an ideological bias toward bigger government - perish the thought!) But Kinsley isn't one of them: He even argued for means-testing in the midst of great liberal freakout over Bush's Social Security reform package. So why would he trade an idea that makes all kinds of sense for an idea that's at once cockamamie and unworkable? It can't just be for the sake of having something new to say about the issue, can it?

The Trouble With Centrism

The liberals are angry, and not without reason. You can imagine a world in which "centrist" Senators used their awesome deal-making powers to forge compromises that incorporate ideas from the left and right alike. A world in which moderate "gangs," in David Brooks' formulation, actually put meat on the bones of Barack Obama's promise to end politics as usual. A world in which Susan Collins, Ben Nelson, Arlen Specter and Joe Lieberman emerged as ardent champions of, say, a stimulus approach divided evenly between billions in Keynesian spending and billions for the sort of payroll tax proposal that people like Larry Lindsey and Greg Mankiw have been championing - or some similarly wonky, high-concept policy compromise. A world of bipartisanship and postpartisanship and everything in between.

But that's not the world we live in. In this world, centrist Senators exist to take politics as usual - whether it's tax cuts in Republican eras, or spending splurges in Democratic ones - and make it ever so slightly more fiscally responsible. So if the GOP wants, say, $500 billion in tax cuts, the country clearly needs $400 billion in tax cuts - but not a penny more! And if the Democrats want $900 billion in stimulus, then the best possible policy outcome must be ... $800 billion in stimulus! To read this Arlen Specter op-ed, justifying both the stimulus package and the cuts the "gang of moderates" have attempted to impose, is to encounter a mind incapable of thinking about policy in any terms save these: Take what the party in power wants, subtract as much money as you can without infuriating them, vote yes, and declare victory.

Now fiscal responsibility is generally a good thing, and so a centrism mindlessly focused on tweaking legislation away from deficit spending has its uses. But what Nelson, Collins, Specter and Co. have done isn't a new kind of politics. It's the definition of politics as usual. And in this particular case, there's a reasonable argument that it's actively pernicious - that if you can't shrink the stimulus package much more substantially than the centrists have done, you shouldn't shrink it at all. There's a case to be made for a stimulus that's radically different than the one we have now; there's a case to be made for a stimulus that's like the one we have now, but a great deal smaller and more targeted; and there's a case to be made for a stimulus that's absolutely gargantuan. But thanks to the centrists, we're getting the cheapskate version of the gargantuan version: They've done absolutely nothing to widen the terms of debate about what should go into the bill, and they've shaved off just enough money to reduce its effectiveness if Paul Krugman is right - but not nearly enough to make it fiscally prudent if the stimulus skeptics are right. 

This means that if the damn thing doesn't work, we won't even know whom to blame. But it wouldn't be crazy to start by blaming the centrists.

Liberals, Ideology, and Big Government

Several years ago, in a piece that's long since vanished into The New Republic's world-devouring archives, Jon Chait suggested that liberalism was, by its very nature, more pragmatic and less ideological than conservatism. (As you may remember, this contention was not met with universal agreement from thinkers to his right.) The nub of his argument ran as follows:

We're accustomed to thinking of liberalism and conservatism as parallel ideologies, with conservatives preferring less government and liberals preferring more. The equivalency breaks down, though, when you consider that liberals never claim that increasing the size of government is an end in itself. Liberals only support larger government if they have some reason to believe that it will lead to material improvement in people's lives. Conservatives also want material improvement in people's lives, of course, but proving that their policies can produce such an outcome is a luxury, not a necessity.

The contrast between economic liberalism and economic conservatism, then, ultimately lies not only in different values or preferences but in different epistemologies. Liberalism is a more deeply pragmatic governing philosophy--more open to change, more receptive to empiricism, and ultimately better at producing policies that improve the human condition--than conservatism.

The piece concluded with a bold prediction, which seems worth re-examining now that the Democrats are actually running the government:

Bush's administration gives primacy to political advisers over policy wonks in large part because they have no need to debate their ends, only the means of achieving them ... The next liberal administration, whenever it happens, will not be nearly so certain. Aside from rolling back conservative excesses, its economic agenda will take its cue from external events, and the decisions it arrives at could, in time, be cast aside through experimentation. Ultimately, those policies, whether they move left or right, will be measured against their effect on people's lives, not the degree to which they bring the government closer to some long-ago agreed-upon vision. In time, those policies will be altered yet again to suit a changing world. This is known as progress.

We're only two weeks into the new age of liberalism, but so far, Chait's been utterly vindicated, don't you think? Indeed, the above paragraph strikes me as a near-perfect distillation of the process that has produced the current stimulus package: A clear-eyed, cool-headed, non-ideological pragmatism, untouched by any pre-existing wish lists or biases. 

I'm being sarcastic, obviously. Yet of course there are many, many smart liberals - from Paul Krugman to, well, Barack Obama - who would say that Chait has been vindicated, because whatever its faults the stimulus bill is ultimately non-ideological: Shoveling vast amounts of money out the door is simply what you do in circumstances like these if you want to avoid utter economic calamity. The money-shovelers are empiricists, in other words, and their opponents are know-nothings.

But this is one of the many, many cases where the Chait thesis breaks down, because of course the empirical conclusions that undergird the pell-mell rush to spend as much money as possible are eminently contestable, and the contest tends to break down along, well, ideological lines.So smart liberals are more likely to find the Keynesian model persuasive (and crack jokes about the need for "Keynesian reeducation camps" to get the voting public on board), smart libertarians and conservatives are more likely to raise doubts about its track record - and the question of which comes first, the ideology or the empirical analysis, is essentially unanswerable. Some people are Keynesians because they find the case for stimulus persuasive, presumably; some people find the evidence for Keynesianism persuasive because they're liberals, and thus predisposed to support government spending in general; and many people fall somewhere in between. And the same goes on the other side: I like to think that I'm interested in evidence-based policymaking, but I'm sure that I wouldn't find Tyler Cowen and Greg Mankiw's stimulus skepticism half so persuasive if I weren't already predisposed to tilt against trillion-dollar boosts to big government. In either case, where you place the burden of proof - about the stimulus, or about any government intervention to come - depends on the philosophical premises you start with.

This is not to say that there aren't degrees of ideology and degrees of pragmatism, or that some thinkers and some politicians aren't more empirical than others. And it's certainly possible to imagine - and hope for, from this administration - a liberalism that's more pragmatic and evidence-based than was George W. Bush's conservatism. But the debates that have dominated the first two weeks of the Obama Presidency ought to be an object lesson in why ideological preconceptions always matter, no matter how empirically-minded you aspire to be.

The Shadow of the Stimulus

Freddie DeBoer, disagreeing with my take on Yglesias's "what's wrong with filling the stimulus bill with non-stimulative liberal goodies?" argument:

To me, the central point of Matt's post isn't that deficits don't matter in a time of financial crisis and liquidity traps; the point is that, when Republicans aren't going to play ball no matter what, why not cram a bill full of things Democrats want? By refusing to vote for the stimulus package en masse, the Republicans have cut themselves out of the game. If some number of them would get on board, given the many large concessions that Democrats have made in hopes of enticing them, then they'd have something to bargain with. But by signalling that they were uninterested in compromise, they became an obstacle to work around or run over. If that's going to be the case either way, why not work to help the liberal cause?

Just to be clear, I don't think the Democrats need to be cautious about what they put into the stimulus in order to get Republican votes for it; I think they need to be cautious because when you embark on an enormously expensive gamble, you want to be sure that it's the gamble you really, really want to take. Given the choice, I'm pretty sure that most smart liberals would rather have a big-ticket health care reform - which is likewise a big political risk - than have the bill the House just passed. It's quite possible they'll be able to get both. But it's possible they won't - and the bigger (and more non-stimulative) the stimulus gets, the bigger a liability it will become for the Democrats if it isn't perceived as a success, and the more it will stand in the way, potentially, of the deeper reforms that liberals are hoping to attempt.

Chris Caldwell's analogy between the bill and the Iraq War is somewhat overstated, but I think he has the dynamic essentially correct:

The stimulus will be expensive, more expensive than the Iraq and Afghanistan wars combined and Nancy Pelosi, Senate majority leader, has called it a mere "down payment". The stimulus bill, whether it succeeds or fails, could be the Democrats' Iraq. Like Iraq, it is a long-standing partisan project that is being marketed as an ad hoc response to a national emergency. It reflects the pre-existing wishes of the party's most powerful interest groups more than the pre-existing wishes of the country. Democrats are now liable to be judged by the standard they created when they abandoned the Bush administration over the Iraq war: you break it, you own it.

As Caldwell suggests, the crucial issue here isn't how many Republican votes the stimulus package gets; the Iraq War got plenty of Democratic votes, and that didn't prevent it from becoming an albatross circling the Bush Administration's second term. The issue is the risk the Democrats are taking, period, by spending enormous sums that aren't obviously justified by the current crisis, at the start of an administration in which they're hoping to push through enormous structural reforms as well. Those reforms have something like a mandate, since Barack Obama campaigned, and won, on promises to fix the nation's health care system and reform the energy sector. But he didn't campaign promising to spend massively on existing government programs - and the more massive the forthcoming burst of spending gets, the bigger the risk that it will end up swallowing the broader ambitions of this administration's first four years. This doesn't mean liberals are wrong to take the stimulus money and run with it, but they should at least be clear-eyed about the political risks involved.

Deficits Don't Matter?

Here's Yglesias, responding to the complaints from conservatives (and some Democrats) that the stimulus bill is being larded up with spending on possibly-worthy but non-stimulative programs:

... a lot of this stuff whether or not it really "belongs in the stimulus" seems irrelevant to me. If you have a program that actually is worthy, then funding it will make the country better, whether or not it truly "belongs" in the stimulus. If you have a program that's worthy, and that doesn't really belong in the stimulus, and you have a Republican who doesn't think the program is worthy, and he'd be willing to vote for the stimulus if you stripped that program from the bill, then it seems to me that you have a decent case for dropping a worthy program. But if you're Ben Nelson and you think the program is worthy, then why not just support the worthy program? It's true that doing so doesn't fit a perfectly pristine notion of how the legislative process should work, but anytime the process is working in favor of worthy programs rather than crappy ones, that's a lot better than the normal functioning of the legislative process.

Well, sure. This is the basic liberal calculus at the moment: The stimulus bill is thick with non-stimulative spending increases because it's a chance to, well, pass spending increases that Democrats think are worthy. Which is fair enough; they did, after all, thump the GOP two election cycles in a row. But surely even the most deficit-happy liberal ought to worry a little about how all of this is going to be paid for - and by extension, whether a spending binge on existing programs today will make it harder to pass, say, an expensive overhaul of the health care system tomorrow. At some point, barring an economic miracle, the GOP will be able to get at least some traction by playing Ross Perot and arguing against out-of-control spending. Maybe the whole liberal wish list will be passed into law before that happens: As Yglesias says in a subsequent post, it's possible that at a time like this there's no "fixed sum of political capital" for liberals to spend down, and so the thing to do is go for broke, quite literally, instead of trying to prioritize health care reform over Pell Grants, or climate change legislation over Head Start. But there's also a chance that the Democrats will look back on the stimulus bill as an instance where they gained ground in the short run, but at the expense of their longer-term ambitions.

In Defense of Mitch McConnell

Well, sort of. As you might expect, I agree with a lot of Ambinder's caustic remarks about the Minority Leader's recent "whither Republicanism" speech. But McConnell, like all GOP leaders, is in an awfully difficult spot at the moment: He's heading up a party that desperately needs a new direction, but whose most loyal and vocal members want nothing to do with anything that smacks of compromise or centrism. In those circumstances, the thing for Republicans in Washington to do is to talk an awful lot about how conservative principles don't need to change (and they don't, broadly speaking), while eagerly embracing new policy options whenever possible. And here McConnell deserves at least a modicum of credit for coming out in favor of the best of the alternative stimulus plans floating around on the right-of-center - namely, some sort of payroll tax cut, which is precisely the sort of small-government populist, Sam's Club-meets-Cato idea that the GOP ought to be embracing, instead of resisting.

The key for Republicans, as Yuval notes today, is to offer not only opposition to Obamanomics but alternatives as well - but those alternatives needs to sound like something other than the Bush agenda redux, or else there's no point in offering them. And on that front, McConnell's doing a better job that some of his colleagues.

Small-Government Egalitarianism?

Speaking of week-old blog posts, here's a provocative argument from Edward Glaeser - one that foreshadows, I suspect, some interesting intra-conservative debates to come.

The Lefty Press in the Age of Obama

In my recent bloggingheads session with Yglesias, I talked a lot about the perils awaiting the progressive mediasphere in an age of liberal dominance - perils with which the conservative mediasphere became, alas, intimately familiar with in the age of Bush. And I meant to link to this post from Ezra Klein, written in the wake of Obama's big dinners with pundits of the right and left, as an example of what I had in mind:

... the important thing Obama could do for the "liberal" media is not have dinner with them. That's good for egos but meaningless for influence. It is, however, well within Obama's power to increase the influence of progressive outlets. Covering the presidency is the central concern of political reportage. And an outlet's ability to cover the presidency can be affected by the favor of the President. If The American Prospect and TPM Cafe and Huffington Post and others of our ilk were given the occasional interview with Obama, and fed useful scoops, that would rapidly increase our readership, our importance in the broader media ecosystem, and the likelihood that members of our outlets would go on to hold key positions in more mainstream institutions. To give just one example, if was understood that Mark Schmitt had more contacts with the Obama crew than Howard Fineman, the Sunday shows would be more likely to turn to Schmitt for analysis. In the long-run, that would be good for both Obama and for progressivism. And he wouldn't even have to waste time watching me chew my dinner.

Now obviously if I worked for The American Prospect or HuffPo I'd be thinking exactly along these lines: It would be absurd for a ideologically-motivated publication to turn down a shot at political influence to preserve its sense of purity. (And I'm all for Mark Schmitt on Meet the Press - or better, as a permanent replacement for David Gergen.) But it's still worth noting that this is roughly how the Bush Administration treated the conservative media - rolling out scoops to partisan outlets, wooing right-wing media types with Presidential face-time, bypassing mainstream outlets in favor of talk radio and Fox News, and so forth. And in the long run, it was good for neither the Bushies nor for conservatism. 

Infrastructure To Nowhere

I'm a great believer in the idea that the United States needs to spend more money on our aging infrastructure, which makes me one of those conservatives who are at least faintly hopeful that the Obama Administration will use the short-term atmosphere of crisis as an opportunity to push through some smart long-term investments. But I'm also someone who grew up in New Haven, Connecticut, whose downtown is in many respects a monument to the failures of a particular era of urban planning, and then spent four years at college in Boston in the midst of the Big Dig era. Which means that I don't find these cautionary passages that Tyler Cowen culls from a 2002 book on Japan all that surprising:

Few have questioned why Japan's supposed "cities of the future" are unable to do something as basic as burying telephone wires; why gigantic construction boondoggles scar the countryside (roads leading nowhere in the mountains, rivers encased in U-shaped chutes); why wetlands are cemented over for no reason...or why Kyoto and Nara were turned into concrete jungles...

Led by bureaucrats on automatic pilot, the nation has carried certain policies -- namely construction -- to extremes that would be comical were they not also at times terrifying...

Dozens of government agencies owe their existence solely to thinking up new ways of sculpting the earth.  Planned spending on public works for the decade 1995-2005 will come to an astronomical...$6.2 trillion, three to four times more than what the United States, with twenty times the land area and more than double the population, will spend on public construction in the same period.

...from an economic point of view the majority of the civil-engineering works do not address real needs.  All those dams and bridges are built by the bureaucracy, for the bureaucracy, at public expense.

...The construction industry here is so powerful that Japanese commentators often describe their country as doken kokka, a "construction state."...the millions of jobs supported by construction are not jobs created by real growth but "make work," paid for by government handouts. These are filled by people who could have been employed in services, software, and other advanced industries.

The good news is that the next generation of urban planners in the United States are unlikely to make precisely these kinds of mistakes - based on their likely reading lists, at least. The bad news is there's undoubtedly a whole new set of mistakes out there, just waiting to be made.

The "Insights" of Paul Ehrlich

Yuval Levin flags this footnote from a 2006 speech by Barack Obama's new science adviser, John Holdren; it's attached to a line in which Holdren references the threat that "continuing population growth" poses to human flourishing:

This was the key insight in Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb (Ballantine, New York, 1968), as well as one of those in Harrison Brown's prescient earlier book, The Challenge of Man's Future (Viking, New York, 1954). The elementary but discomfiting truth of it may account for the vast amount of ink, paper, and angry energy that has been expended trying in vain to refute it.

It is, I suppose, possible to find a "key insight" about population growth in Ehrlich's book that's anodyne enough to qualify as "elementary" and irrefutable. But there's a pretty good reason that the book is remembered primarily for its mix of hysteria and moral idiocy: When you kick off your argument by predicting that "the battle to feed all of humanity is over," and that "in the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now," and then proceed to argue for mass sterilization programs, the quarantine and abandonment of countries too overpopulated to save from total collapse, and various other "triage" methods (honestly, The Population Bomb has to be read to be believed), you pretty much forfeit the right to be praised for your prescience forty years down the line.

Unless, that is, one of your friends goes on to become the science advisor to the President of the United States. As John Tierney notes, Holdren and Ehrlich go way back:

Dr. Holdren, now a physicist at Harvard, was one of the experts in natural resources whom Paul Ehrlich enlisted in his famous bet against the economist Julian Simon during the "energy crisis" of the 1980s. Dr. Simon, who disagreed with environmentalists' predictions of a new "age of scarcity" of natural resources, offered to bet that any natural resource would be cheaper at any date in the future. Dr. Ehrlich accepted the challenge and asked Dr. Holdren, then the co-director of the graduate program in energy and resources at the University of California, Berkeley, and another Berkeley professor, John Harte, for help in choosing which resources would become scarce.

In 1980 Dr. Holdren helped select five metals -- chrome, copper, nickel, tin and tungsten -- and joined Dr. Ehrlich and Dr. Harte in betting $1,000 that those metals would be more expensive ten years later. They turned out to be wrong on all five metals, and had to pay up when the bet came due in 1990.

Now, you could argue that anyone's entitled to a mistake, and that mistakes can be valuable if people learn to become open to ideas that conflict with their preconceptions and ideology. That could be a useful skill in an advisor who's supposed to be presenting the president with a wide range of views. Someone who'd seen how wrong environmentalists had been in ridiculing Dr. Simon's predictions could, in theory, become more open to dissenting from today's environmentalist orthodoxy. But I haven't seen much evidence of such open-mindedness in Dr. Holdren.

Tierney goes on to talk about Holdren's war against Bjorn Lomborg, but honestly I think he's making too much of this: We all know that only Republican Administrations have a problem with politicized science, and since both Obama and his science adviser are Democrats there's really nothing to worry about here.

Is Planned Parenthood Pro-Life?

If you want a reason why an abortion compromise isn't possible, try this contrast: My idea of a plausible middle ground on the issue requires the overturning of Roe v. Wade, followed by a move toward a system in which abortion is legal but discouraged in, say, the first ten weeks of pregnancy, and basically illegal thereafter. Whereas Will Saletan and Freddie De Boer, both serious-minded pro-choicers, are convinced that a plausible middle ground would involve pragmatic pro-lifers throwing their support (and tax dollars) behind America's largest abortion provider, on the grounds that its commitment to preventing unplanned pregnancy makes Planned Parenthood "the most effective pro-life organization in the history of the world."

There are two things to be said about the latter notion, beyond what I said in my last post (and what John Schwenkler has to say here and here and here). The first is that just because it seems intuitive - to liberals, at least - that Planned Parenthood's efforts at making contraception available and affordable dramatically reduce the abortion rate doesn't necessarily make it so. Here I'd refer you to the extended, years-old argument between Megan (then "Jane Galt," of course) and Peter Northrup on contraception and abortion: Suffice it to say that the link between the availability of Planned Parenthood's services and the abortion rate is, well, non-obvious at best. Indeed, a quick gloss on the state-level data from the 1990s that Megan cited in her debate with Northrup would seem to suggest that the best way to reduce your abortion rate is to straightforwardly make abortions harder to get, through legal restrictions and cultural pressure. After all, liberal, well-off, Planned Parenthood-friendly Massachusetts, had a late-'90s abortion rate roughly twice as high as poor, socially-conservative states like Mississippi, Arkansas and Alabama, and more than three times as high as highly pro-life states like South Dakota and Utah.

Now of course correlation isn't causation, and there are presumably many other factors at work in these state-level numbers than just the legal and cultural climate - racial and ethnic disparities, urban and rural differences, and so forth. But at the very least I'd like to see a lot more rigorous, data-rich analysis on this subject before I'd even concede that Planned Parenthood's preventive efforts do have a bigger impact on the abortion rate than legal and cultural efforts to restrict abortion, let alone that they trim the rate of unintended pregnancies sufficiently to outweigh the organization's efforts to make the procedure as cheap and easy to obtain as possible.

But the deeper point is this: The interaction between public policy and social trends is highly complex, and very difficult to predict, and thus there are any number of policy choices that can be plausibly said bear on the abortion rate, for good or ill. The distribution of contraception is just a small part of the pantomime. Which means that once you take the legal debate over the rights of the unborn out of the picture, and start redefining being pro-life as "pursuing lower abortion rates through policy choices,"  almost any policy preference can be re-cast as "pro-life." Married women tend to have fewer abortions, so clearly ending the marriage penalty was the most pro-life measure of the last fifteen years! But wait: There's evidence that increases in state-level Medicaid funding correlate with lower abortion rates in the short term - so maybe liberal Democrats are real pro-lifers! But wait again: Welfare reform and the economic boom of the 1990s correlated with plunging abortion rates, so maybe free-market conservatives are the real pro-lifers! But wait again: Maybe the abortion rate fell in the 1990s because the sort of women who would have grown up to have abortions were themselves aborted in the post-Roe 1970s ... so people who favor maximizing the abortion rate, paradoxically, turn out to be the real pro-lifers!

You can play this game ad infinitum. If the definition of being pro-life is "desiring the sort of circumstances that tend to reduce the abortion rate," than almost everybody is pro-life, because almost everybody thinks that their favored positions on trade, government spending, tax policy, the minimum wage and so forth will lead to better socioeconomic outcomes overall - and better socioeconomic outcomes overall will probably lead to fewer women seeking abortions. Now I'm obviously happy to have broad debates about public policy, and I certainly think that pro-lifers should be interested in crafting a broadly pro-family politics in addition to seeking a more pro-life legal regime. But the pro-life cause is primarily about issues of law, morality and justice, and if pro-lifers treat the broader pursuit of socioeconomic progress as a substitute for, rather than a complement to, the pursuit of legal protections for the unborn, then they've given up on their movement's raison d'etre to no good effect. Pro-lifers can and should be willing to compromise within the debate about how the law should treat unborn human life, by agreeing to legal regimes that stop short of their ultimate goal. But a "compromise" that involves giving up on that debate entirely in favor of arguments over which domestic-policy interventions will reduce the abortion rate on the demand side is no compromise at all: It would strip the pro-life movement of its purpose, drain it of its idealism, and transform it into an advocacy group for, well, good public policy, which practically every other political movement and organization claims to be already.

My Tax Dollars At Work

Inquiring liberal minds want to know why pro-lifers are eager to have the government stop giving Planned Parenthood hundreds of millions of dollars every year. After all, writes Ezra Klein, "abortion services comprise three percent of the services" that Planned Parenthood delivers, which means that if you cut their funding "you're mainly cutting contraception funding, thus ensuring more unwanted pregnancies and more abortions ... This is how the pro-life movement also becomes, in effect, the pro-herpes movement and the anti-birth control movement."

Just three percent, hmm? Why, that makes it sound like Planned Parenthood almost never performs abortions. Of course, the reality is rather different, as Charlotte Allen noted last year:

The 3 percent pie slice in the 2005-06 financial report, representing 264,943 abortion customers served, can only be described as deliberately misleading.

One way Planned Parenthood massages the numbers to make its abortion business look trivial is to unbundle its services for purposes of counting. Those 10.1 million different medical procedures in the last fiscal year, for instance, were administered to only 3 million clients. An abortion is invariably preceded by a pregnancy test--a separate service in Planned Parenthood's reckoning--and is almost always followed at the organization's clinics by a "going home" packet of contraceptives, which counts as another separate service. Throw in a pelvic exam and a lab test for STDs--you get the picture. In terms of absolute numbers of clients, one in three visited Planned Parenthood for a pregnancy test, and of those, a little under one in three had a Planned Parenthood abortion.

And even if they weren't massaging the numbers - even if their non-abortion business were enormous enough to make that three percent claim legitimate - they would still be performing more than 250,000 abortions a year. That's a 2, a 5, and four zeros - a figure that accounts, by Allen's reckoning, for somewhere north of $100 million in annual revenue for the organization, and that contrasts rather strikingly with the number 1,414, which is how many women the organization referred to an adoption agency in 2004-2005. (They've since stopped even reporting the adoption-referral number, apparently.).

If you're not against abortion, obviously, there's no reason any of this should bother you: Planned Parenthood's commitment to performing hundreds of thousands of low-cost abortions annually is a feature, not a bug. But telling people who are against abortion that they're "pro-herpes" because they don't support channeling three hundred million public dollars a year to America's largest abortion provider is the equivalent of me accusing a fierce and moralizing anti-theist like Sam Harris of being "anti-education" because he doesn't want his tax dollars being used to, say, fund the Catholic school system. The phenomenon of an institution that does good with one hand and evil with another is a familiar one in human history - even Hezbollah does a lot of impressive humanitarian work, I believe - and it does not by any means follow that those who oppose the evil are morally obligated to support the institution anyway just because it does other, less morally problematic things besides.

Pragmatism They Can Believe In?

Chris Hayes critiques the Obama-as-pragmatist meme from the left ...

The chief failure of Bushism, according to Sunstein, is not its content but its form. Not the substance of ideology but the fact that he was too wedded to it, too rigid and dogmatic. It's a view widely held in Washington. Many, like Sunstein, have drawn a lesson from the past eight years that is not about the failure of conservatism - neo or otherwise - or the dangers of the particularly toxic ideological disposition of the Bush administration ... No, through a kind of collective category error, they have alighted on a far more general moral to the story: ideology, in any form, is dangerous. "Obama's victory does not signal a shift in ideology in this country," wrote Roger Simon in Politico. "It signals that the American public has grown weary of ideologies." No less an ideologue than Pat Buchanan has come to this same understanding. "If there is a one root cause of the Bush failures," he wrote, "it has been his fatal embrace of ideology."

If "pragmatic" is the highest praise one can offer in DC these days, "ideological" is perhaps the sharpest slur. And it is by this twisted logic that the crimes of the Bush cabinet are laid at the feet of the blogosphere, that the sins of Paul Wolfowitz end up draped upon the slender shoulders of Dennis Kucinich.

... but also holds out hope for it:

Obama could do worse than look to John Dewey, another onetime resident of Hyde Park and the founder of the University of Chicago Laboratory School, which Obama's daughters attend. Dewey developed the work of earlier pragmatists in a particularly fruitful and apposite manner. For him, the crux of pragmatism, and indeed democracy, was a rejection of the knowability of foreordained truths in favor "variability, initiative, innovation, departure from routine, experimentation."

Dewey's pragmatism was reformist, not radical ... Nonetheless, pragmatism requires an openness to the possibility of radical solutions ... Dewey understood that progress demands that the boat be rocked. And his contemporary Franklin Delano Roosevelt understood it as well. "The country needs," Roosevelt said in May 1932, "and, unless I mistake its temper, the country demands, bold, persistent experimentation. It is common sense to take a method and try it: if it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something. The millions who are in want will not stand by silently forever while the things to satisfy their needs are within easy reach."

That is pragmatism we can believe in. Our times demand no less.

And the experimentation will start, of course, with bold, persistent attempts to pour massive amounts of taxpayer money into failing industries, while demanding that said industries begin investing in even-less-profitable ventures than the ones they're currently engaged in! Hurrah! Next up: The Blue Eagle makes a comeback ...

Sorry, sorry. All snark aside, Chris's "optimistic" scenario strikes me as reasonably plausible: After all, a regnant ideological liberalism that cloaks its ideological assumptions in the insistence that it's really pragmatic, results-oriented, and anti-ideological was the default setting for American politics for an awfully long time, and indeed remained the default setting for the political establishment on a great many questions even during the post-Reagan conservative ascendancy. It's pretty easy to imagine the country settling back into a groove that it never completely left.

The big question for progressives, I tend to think, isn't whether Barack Obama ends up draping the language of non-ideological "experimentation" around a succession of proposals that would shift American policy distinctly leftward and make John Dewey smile: He's already done that. It's whether the policy shifts he embraces will go far enough to reconcile progressives to the fact that a "non-ideological" liberalism, in our era as in the earlier liberal ascendancy, requires an ideological Left as its foil. In practice, this means that Obama will probably often end up defining himself against progressivism, rhetorically, even when he's embracing progressive ideas. (See his campaign's extremely effective health-care ads for an example of how this works in practice.) The President-elect's ability to hold his coalition together, then, may depend in no small part on whether the Democratic Party's left wing feels that it's getting enough out of his Presidency in practice to justify playing the bad guy in the narrative Obama will be selling to the country as a whole, in which post-partisan "whatever works" pragmatism triumphs over ideologues of the left and right alike.

Update: Reihan weighs in here.

Our Enemy, The Payroll Tax (Revisited)

Incidentally, just because conservatives need to think hard about infrastructure doesn't mean that they necessarily need to embrace infrastructure spending as stimulus. (See Brooks today, for instance.) On the that front, the case for pushing a payroll-tax holiday seems pretty strong to me - but then again, I'm always up for weakening the payroll tax.

Bill Kristol and Big Government

Obviously I sympathize with many of the notes Bill Kristol strikes in his column today. But I think he's ultimately taking the argument too far, to the point where he seems to be suggesting that the modern Right can succeed by disentangling itself from "small government conservatism" entirely - which is as implausible as the notion that the GOP can succeed by ceasing to be the party of social conservatism. (In both cases, you need a baseline of idealism - about the proper role and the proper size of government, in this case - or else America's conservative party will just drift toward me-tooism.) What's needed isn't less small-government conservatism, full stop; rather, it's a smarter, better, more adaptable version of small-government conservatism - one that's more realistic about what can be accomplished in a welfare-state society, perhaps, and savvier about how to go about it, but one that doesn't give up on the central small-is-beautiful premise.

For instance, Kristol writes:

Five Republicans have won the presidency since 1932: Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and the two George Bushes. Only Reagan was even close to being a small-government conservative. And he campaigned in 1980 more as a tax-cutter and national-defense-builder-upper, and less as a small-government enthusiast in the mold of the man he had supported -- and who had lost -- in 1964, Barry Goldwater. And Reagan's record as governor and president wasn't a particularly government-slashing one.

Even the G.O.P.'s 1994 Contract With America made only vague promises to eliminate the budget deficit, and proposed no specific cuts in government programs. It focused far more on crime, taxes, welfare reform and government reform. Indeed, the "Republican Revolution" of 1995 imploded primarily because of the Republican Congress's one major small-government-type initiative -- the attempt to "cut" (i.e., restrain the growth of) Medicare. George W. Bush seemed to learn the lesson. Prior to his re-election, he proposed and signed into law popular (and, it turned out, successful) legislation, opposed by small-government conservatives, adding a prescription drug benefit to Medicare.

All true, and all important. But the fact that cutting government has proven politically difficult doesn't mean that small-government conservatives should despair, and it certainly doesn't mean that the small government tendency should be marginalized in right-wing politics. Rather, it counsels greater prudence in political salesmanship than some small-governmenteers display, and greater pragmatism and savvy about policy - because when the small government spirit is joined to prudence and savvy, it can actually accomplish quite a bit. As I wrote upon the death of William F. Buckley, the story of the modern GOP is only a story of small-government defeats if you define victory in absolutist terms:

Around the time that Buckley founded National Review, the federal government's share of GDP had been rising steadily for more than thirty years, from 3 percent in 1925 to 18.8 percent in 1962. In the Sixties and early Seventies, it seemed extremely plausible that the United States was a glide path to European-style social democracy. Then came the conservative ascendancy - and thirty years later, in 2001, government's share of GDP stood at ... 18.4 percent of GDP. (It's inched up somewhat, of course, under George W. Bush.) Now obviously there are a variety of reasons why the size of government stopped rising after the Seventies, but far from least among them is the influence that Buckley-style small-government conservatism has wielded over public policy lo these many years. (And remember that he promised to stop history, not to roll it back.)

And a philosophy of small government, properly understood, extends well beyond the immediate size of the government's annual budget to include the hidden welfare state of mandates and regulation - all those corvées that Reihan likes to talk about. Here the small-government Right has gained considerable ground over the period Kristol's talking about; here, too, there are plenty of important arguments conservatives can make that don't require the political suicide involved in a frontal assault on Medicare.

Oh, and about Medicare ... Come what may, some sort of serious small-government thinking is going to be required as Republicans and Democrats alike struggle with the looming entitlement crunch.  Again, this will require prudence and savvy and creativity, and it may require a kind of right-wing class warfare that conservatives are currently uncomfortable with (though we can learn!). But nothing good will come of the entitlement mess for the Right if the GOP becomes indifferent to small-government aspirations and arguments.

Then we come to Kristol's conclusion:

So: If you're a small-government conservative, you'll tend to oppose the bailouts, period. If you more or less accept big government, you'll be open to the government's stepping in to save the financial system, or the auto industry. But you'll tend to favor those policies -- universal tax cuts, offering everyone a chance to refinance his mortgage, relieving auto makers of burdensome regulations -- that, consistent with conservative principles, don't reward irresponsible behavior and don't politicize markets.

Similarly, if you're against big government, you'll oppose a huge public works stimulus package. If you think some government action is inevitable, you might instead point out that the most unambiguous public good is national defense. You might then suggest spending a good chunk of the stimulus on national security -- directing dollars to much-needed and underfunded defense procurement rather than to fanciful green technologies, making sure funds are available for the needed expansion of the Army and Marines before rushing to create make-work civilian jobs. Obama wants to spend much of the stimulus on transportation infrastructure and schools. Fine, but lots of schools and airports seem to me to have been refurbished more recently and more generously than military bases I've visited.

Again, I agree with parts of this. But the first paragraph's claims are too sweeping (for one thing, a smart small-government conservatism should be able to distinguish more explicitly than Kristol does between necessary bailouts and unnecessary ones - which is why the prospect of the auto bailout has been greeted very differently among the smartest libertarian bloggers than the financial bailout was), and the second paragraph's claims are ... well, frustrating is a word that springs to mind.

Too often, when domestic-policy debates come up, conservatives are far too eager to change the subject: The public says education; the Right say "let's talk about capital-gains tax cuts." The public says health care; the Right says "let's talk about terrorism." The public says infrastructure; the Right says ... "let's refurbish military bases"?? Apparently so.

There are very, very good reasons to think that the United States has a serious problem with aging transportation infrastructure, which happens to be an area where government by necessity has a substantial role to play. It would behoove conservatives, then, to join the debate over how to modernize our infrastructure - as, to their credit, some are - rather than just ceding the field completely to Barack Obama. Whereas trying to turn a conversation about highways, roads and rail into an conversation about why we need to spend more money on the military seems like a good way to convince Americans that the Right is pretty much only interested in talking about warfare and taxation, no matter what else happens to be on the country's mind.

Update: See Yuval in Kristol's defense.

Christina Romer, Tax Cutter?

Of the three big economic-team appointees Obama announced today, Christina Romer is the most obscure; she's also, as Mankiw, Wilkinson and Pethokoukis point out, the one who should give Americans the most hope that Obama won't be significantly hiking their taxes any time soon.   

Things That Could Have Been Brought To My Attention Yesterday

In today's Journal, Newt Gingrich and Peter Ferrara argue that instead of Barack Obama's hodgepodge of tax credits, we should have a straightforward middle-class tax cut that lowers the 25 percent bracket to 15 percent. It would also be nice, they note, to cut taxes for everyone else as well, and to lower corporate rates and capital gains rates. But "in the current political climate," they allow, "we should focus on the middle-income tax rates that are attractive to cut ... This would continue the tax cuts for low- and moderate-income workers Republicans have been adopting for 30 years now."

I'm very glad to see Newt Gingrich coming around to the idea that Republicans shouldn't just say "cut capital-gains taxes!" in response to every political and economic circumstance. I would have been even gladder, though, if he had come around during the 2008 Presidential campaign, when it might have made a difference. "Tax cuts for low- and moderate-income workers" was exactly the kind of thing the McCain campaign needed to be selling, and wasn't. Yet you can search Gingrich's pre-election commentary in vain for any hint that the "current political climate" might require that the GOP present a slightly different tax message than the one McCain was offering. Indeed, less than a month before the election, Gingrich and Ferrara took to the pages of the Weekly Standard to critique Obama's tax plan, and offer a conservative alternative to "benefit middle-America." Their alternative consisted of  ... corporate tax cuts, capital-gains tax cuts, and private accounts carved out of Social Security. 

I'm glad, as I said, that defeat seems to have had a clarifying effect upon Newt's views on tax policy. I'm just wish that his change of heart had happened when the GOP was still in a position to profit from his advice.

The When and the Why of Abortion

Ed Kilgore:

Here is the real deal on abortion policy: activists on both sides of the abortion debate understand yet rarely acknowledge that a critical plurality of Americans don't much like abortion but care a whole lot about when and why abortions occur.  That plurality position, especially from the point of view of anti-abortion activists, is morally and metaphysically incoherent; if a fertilized ovum is a full human being with an immortal soul, and putative constitutional rights, then it doesn't much matter when or why it is aborted; the result is homicide. 

The RTL movement's focus over the last decade on restricting late-term abortions has thus been morally dishonest, but politically smart.  But they've missed the connection between "when" and "why" concerns.  Much of the popular support for so-called "partial-birth" abortion bans has flowed from a common-sense concern that unwanted pregnancies could and should have been avoided in the first place through birth-control methods that many RTL activists view as abortifacients, or through earlier-term clinical abortions. In other words, from a RTL point-of-view, the prevailing popular opinion is that women seeking late-term abortions should have instead committed homicide earlier, through either pharmaceutical or surgical means. 

But there's still another disconnect between RTL and popular opinion that goes beyond "when" questions: "why" questions. While public opinion research on this subject is terribly insufficient, I think it's plain that Americans care as much about why as when abortions are undertaken. Abortion-as-birth-control is unpopular (again, excepting the RTL presumption that many birth-control methods actually involve abortions). So, too, are "convenience" abortions: those undertaken for "lifestyle" reasons. But short of mandatory sodium pentathol doses for applicants for abortion services, it's very hard to legislate against the kinds of abortions that a majority of Americans would actually want to prohibit. 

A couple of points. Philosophically speaking, it may be true that there's a gulf between pro-lifers and some inhabitants of the mushy middle on the when/why issue Kilgore identifies: Pro-lifers obviously wouldn't endorse a "she should have aborted earlier!" theory of late-term abortions, but perhaps many Americans who support some abortion restrictions would. I'm not certain, though, whether this matters in practice when it comes to imagining legislative compromises that might be possible in a non-Roe/Casey world. Some Americans, myself included, would support a ban on second-trimester abortions because they favor any restrictions that expand the protections afforded to the unborn; others might support such a ban because they think unwanted pregnancies should be disposed of in the first trimester or not at all. But the end result would be the same - a shift toward a philosophically unstable but politically plausible middle ground on abortion - and of such inconsistencies are successful coalitions and compromises made.

It's harder, for the reasons Kilgore lays out, to envision a compromise based on the "why" issue - but perhaps not as impossible as he imagines. You could imagine, for instance, an America in which second-trimester abortions are straightforwardly illegal, and a series of surmountable impediments to abortion - for instance, a requirement that women obtain pre-abortion counseling that actively discourages the procedure - are thrown up in the first trimester, as they are in some Western European countries. (A commenter in the Schwenkler thread recommends Mary Ann Glendon's Abortion and Divorce in Western Law on this subject, and I second the motion.) Again, you could imagine pro-lifers supporting such measures on the grounds that they bias the law in a pro-life direction, and Kilgore's "when/why" pro-choicers supporting them on the grounds that they'd presumably help discourage abortions of convenience without actually preventing abortions of necessity. (In a similar "no abortions of convenience" vein, you could also imagine a law that banned repeat abortion - which is to say, almost half of all abortions in the U.S. - though obviously enforcement would be extremely difficult.)

As you might expect, given the foregoing, I don't see anything "morally dishonest," as Kilgore puts it, about the pro-life approach to partial-birth abortion. Yes, of course, the pro-life movement's goals extend well beyond restricting one particularly barbaric third-trimester procedure. But you take restrictions - and the opportunities to highlight the inhumanity of abortion - where you can get them, and there's no reason why pro-lifers have to preface every single argument they make against partial-birth abortion with oh, and by the way, you know we want most other forms of abortion banned as well. (It's not like the movement's goals are some big secret!) Consider: Would it have been "morally dishonest" for opponents of slavery to promote, say, laws prohibiting the flogging or castration of slaves, even though such laws didn't actually do away with slavery? Surely not - and even if such laws didn't directly free anyone from bondage, they would have been a plausible way of highlighting the basic inhumanity involved in owning slaves. And so it is with partial-birth abortion. All abortions involve the dismemberment and destruction of a growing human life; it's just that the partial-birth procedure makes the thing more explicit, and more horrifying. And even if all that a ban does is call attention to what's involved, more generally, in "terminating a pregnancy," that's a pro-life goal worth pursuing.

I think Kilgore is on stronger ground, though, with his critical references to pro-life attacks on the morning-after pill and (especially) the birth-control pill. My views on this subject are colored by the fact that I don't find the argument that either pill should be classified as an abortifacent particularly convincing, and I don't think the pro-life movement is helping its cause by blurring the lines between actual abortifacents, like RU-486, which are taken with the intent to abort an embryo, and contraceptives that are designed to prevent conception, but may have the secondary effect of preventing implantations on rare occasions. (At the moment, moreover, the evidence that this ever actually happens is relatively thin.) I think a pro-life movement that expends a great deal of energy campaigning against the pill is essentially assuming the permanence of Roe and Casey, and placing its hopes in a much broader cultural transformation that seems extremely unlikely at the present pass. It's behaving like a Church, in a sense, rather than a political movement, and I already have a Church: The point of the pro-life movement, as I see it, is to seek discrete and plausible political change, not to seek a revolution in the post-Sexual Revolution human heart.

On The Possibility of An Abortion Compromise

A fine post from John Schwenkler:

... if the pro-life position on abortion is unpopular, then so is the pro-choice one; or rather, each is unpopular under certain descriptions and popular under others, in ways I'll make more precise in just a moment. When you look at the polling on the issue, what you see is that while there may be a slightly higher preference for the "Always Legal" position than the "Never Legal" one, both of those positions together only make up somewhere between a quarter and a third of the electorate, the vast majority of which occupies the mushy territory in the middle. But - and this is the crucial observation here - the first of these views just is the view of the Democratic Party, since so long as Roe v. Wade and the body of jurisprudence that follows in its wake remains in place it is necessarily the law of the land that there can be no meaningful abortion restrictions whatsoever. And so to the extent that the GOP is the anti-Roe party while the Democrats represent the pro-Roe constituency, it is the latter position that is in fact the extreme one, while the former position is itself a mild step that is pretty much a prerequisite to the sort of compromise that Freddie suggests pro-lifers should be agitating for. (On which more, again, in just a moment.)

Secondly, however, the above observation is complicated by the way voters respond to questions about abortion rights when they are couched in terms of Roe itself: somewhere between a half and two-thirds of the electorate seems to be committed to the claim that Roe should not be overturned, despite the fact that such a position is directly at odds with many of those voters' commitment to the need for legal restrictions on abortion rights and the fact that Roe rules such restrictions out of court. The reasons for this inconsistency are manifold and not worth delving into at the moment, but the crucial point at present is just that the Democratic position in support of Roe is one that is popular despite the incompatibility of such a position with the middle-ground stance on abortion that is occupied by the vast majority of American voters. Put slightly differently, and by way of an entirely reasonable bit of speculation about the source of this inconsistency, the point is that the pro-life position on Roe is one that is unpopular only because voters think that overturning Roe would mean eliminating abortion rights altogether, whereas in reality it would make possible exactly the sorts of compromises that most voters claim to want.

Thirdly, and bringing both of these points together, I for one would be happy to see conservatives couch their arguments against Roe (or for a constitutional amendment that would disembowel it, on which topic see my exchange with reader Ed Baird toward the bottom of the comments here) in terms of the sorts of federalist or possibility-of-compromise language that I've been using here, but the fact is that I think Ross was right when he recently remarked (somewhere; I can't find the reference) that such a position would be politically untenable because it would jettison the support of the "extreme" pro-lifers whose dollars and voices presently keep the movement going. But if Freddie and others like him would really like to work toward some sort of compromise, the fact is that the first step will have to come from the Left, not by way of hollow talk of "reducing the need for abortions" (imagine if Civil Rights leaders were told to focus their attention only on the "underlying causes" of racism!), but by working to actualize the sorts of legal frameworks that would make genuine compromise - that is to say, the sorts of late-term-with-exceptions restrictions that Americans overwhelmingly support - possible.

Actually, I don't think I've said anything about the untenability of pro-lifers speaking the language of compromise, federalism, etc; indeed, I think given how adept many pro-life groups have become at pursuing the very, very incremental goals that are possible within the Roe framework (restrictions on partial-birth abortion, parental notification laws, etc.), it's not implausible to imagine them being willing to talk compromise more often on the bigger issues as well. Obviously it's a movement that tends to attract absolutists, but I think pro-lifers have been far more flexible and pragmatic in how they've pursue their goals - especially over the last decade - than they're often given credit for.

Meanwhile, Schwenkler's larger point is especially worth keeping in mind when confronted - as pro-lifers often are - with arguments like this one, from P.J. O'Rourke:

Take just one example of our unconserved tendency to poke our noses into other people's business: abortion. Democracy--be it howsoever conservative--is a manifestation of the will of the people. We may argue with the people as a man may argue with his wife, but in the end we must submit to the fact of being married. Get a pro-life friend drunk to the truth-telling stage and ask him what happens if his 14-year-old gets knocked up. What if it's rape? Some people truly have the courage of their convictions. I don't know if I'm one of them. I might kill the baby. I will kill the boy.

If we take O'Rourke's hypothetical on its own terms, it reads as an argument for, say, a legal regime that makes abortion available to women/girls below the age of consent - and I think I speak for many pro-lifers when I say that I would gladly entertain that sort of compromise, as part of a broader package of restrictions, if we were drawing up abortion law from scratch. But it's not even close to an argument for the legal regime we have, in which no middle ground is even possible. And so long as Roe remains inviolate, those who urge pro-lifers to "compromise" without providing any legal ground on which a compromise could be forged are effectively telling them to just give up on their movement's goals entirely.

Souls On Ice

"Few issues," Ronald Green writes, "are likely to generate more emotional opposition than federal funding of stem cell research." Fortunately, he has a plan for how Barack Obama should proceed:

Obama should minimize opposition by following the lead President Bush established in 2001. In justifying his policy of funding research on a limited number of human embryonic stem cell lines, Bush stated that "the life and death decision" had already been made on the embryos used to create those lines.

This is true of thousands of frozen embryos stored in fertility clinics around the country. More than 500,000 embryos created by in vitro fertilization to help couples have children are being stored. A large percentage of those embryos will never be used, because the couples have succeeded in having children, have given up or have grown too old to try. There is very little market for embryo adoption, so most of these embryos are destined to be destroyed. Circumstances have rendered the "life and death" decision on them almost as certain as it was on the embryos used before 2001 to make the stem cell lines that were approved to receive federal research funding.

By executive order, Obama could authorize the NIH to invite couples who planned to discard their frozen embryos to donate them for research. The couples would have to affirm that they no longer intended to use the embryos and had already decided to destroy them. Instead of the embryos merely being thawed and incinerated, as happens today, their cells could be used to produce lines for stem cell research. The moral parallel here is organ donation after death. In this case, the embryo's death is an unavoidable result of its creation and subsequent non-use for reproductive purposes. The production of stem cells from these embryos could easily be accomplished without federal support, and the resulting stem cells could be donated for federal research.

Like President Bush, President Obama could limit federal research to embryos created for reproductive purposes and abandoned before the statement of his policy. There are more than enough of these embryos to create all the lines we need for research. Under such a policy, there would be no use of embryos created with the intent of stem cell research.

Of course, when Bush talked about stem cell lines from embryos for whom "the life and death decision" had already been made, he was referring to embryos that were actually already dead. Whereas Green is redefining the phrase so that it refers to over 500,000 embryos that are very much still alive, and whose killing and subsequent dissection for (federally-funded) research is to be licensed on the grounds that "circumstances" have made their deaths "unavoidable." I think there's at least a slight difference between the two approaches.

Here I would ordinarily make some withering comment about the hollowness of the supposed "pro-life" case for Barack Obama, but in this instance it has to be allowed that John McCain's position was no better. Instead, as a counterpoint to Green's blithe and breezy take - "the embryo's death is an unavoidable result of its creation and subsequent non-use for reproductive purpose" - let me recommend (not for the first time) Liza Mundy's 2006 story in Mother Jones on America's embryo glut, and the moral dilemmas facing parents with offspring on ice. A few quotes:

... As with ultrasound technology--which permits parents to visualize a fetus in utero--ivf allows many patients to form an emotional attachment to a form of human life that is very early, it's true, but still life, and still human. People bond with photos of three-day-old, eight-cell embryos. They ardently wish for them to grow into children. The experience can be transforming: "I was like, 'I created these things, I feel a sense of responsibility for them,'" is how one ivf patient put it. Describing herself as staunchly pro-choice, this patient found that she could not rest until she located a person--actually, two people--willing to bring her excess embryos to term ...

... Dr. Robert Nachtigall, a veteran San Francisco reproductive endocrinologist, directed a study of patients who had conceived using ivf together with egg donation, another rapidly growing niche of fertility medicine ... Hard as it was deciding whether to go ahead with egg donation, these parents said, it was harder still deciding the fate of their leftover embryos

... Struck by these unprompted revelations, [Nachtigall] and fellow researchers decided to do a new study, this one looking explicitly at the way patients think about their unused, iced-down embryos ... Strikingly, Nachtigall found that even in one of the bluest regions of the country, which is to say, among people living in and around San Francisco, few were able to view a three-day-old laboratory embryo with anything like detachment ... Couples, he found, were confused yet deeply affected by the responsibility of deciding what to do with their embryos. They wanted to do the right thing. All of the 58 couples in his study had children as a result of treatment, so they knew, well, what even three-day-old embryos can and do grow into ... "Some saw them as biological material, but most recognized the potential for life," Nachtigall told colleagues at the asrm meeting. "For many couples, it seems there is no good decision; yet they still take it seriously morally."

For virtually all patients, he found, the disposition decision was torturous, the end result unpredictable. "Nothing feels right," he reported patients telling him. "They literally don't know what the right, the good, the moral thing is." In the fluid process of making a decision--any decision--some try to talk themselves into a clinical detachment. "Little lives, that's how I thought about them," said one woman. "But you have to switch gears and think, 'They're not lives, they're cells. They're science.' That's kind of what I had to switch to." Others were not able to make that switch, thinking of their embryos as almost sentient. "My husband talked about donating them to research, but there is some concern that this would not be a peaceful way to go," said one woman. Another said, "You start saying to yourself, 'Every one of these is potentially a life.'"

... Of the 58 couples Nachtigall and his group interviewed, the average couple had seven frozen embryos in storage. The average embryo had been in storage for four years. Even after that much time had elapsed, 72 percent had not decided what to do, and a number echoed the words of one patient: "We can't talk about it." The embryos keep alive the question of whether to have more children, a topic on which many spouses disagree. "I still have six in the bank," said one woman, who had not given up the idea of bearing them. "They call to me. I hate to talk about it. But they call to me."

Read the whole thing.

Jindal Tackles Health Care

This will bear watching. 

Provocation of the Day

Alex Tabarrok:

The Federal Government owns more than half of Oregon, Utah, Nevada, Idaho and Alaska and it owns nearly half of California, Arizona, New Mexico and Wyoming.  See the map for more.  It is time for a sale.  Selling even some western land could raise hundreds of billions of dollars - perhaps trillions of dollars - for the Federal government at a time when the funds are badly needed and no one want to raise taxes.

More, and the map, here.

Newt and New Ideas

Those inclined to support Newt Gingrich's apparent bid to chair the RNC on the grounds that he's always flush with new ideas should go back and re-read the former Speaker's list, from back in May, of policy proposals that the GOP ought to embrace to avoid disaster in November. If you find Newt's manifesto - which urged Republicans to "overhaul the census and cut its budget radically," to "implement a space-based, GPS-style air traffic control system," and to double down on porkbusting, among other ideas - to be a plausible blueprint for a Republican revival, then he's your man. If you have the same reaction I did, though, you might want to root for Michael Steele instead.

Liberal or Conservative?

McClatchy has a piece on the Bush Administration's successes curtailing homelessness - a subject I've written about before. Because spending has risen even as homelessness numbers have fallen, the reporter describes the policy shift as "radical" and "liberal." Ed Morrissey basically concurs:

Was this one of Bush's more liberal policies?  I'd say yes. By providing a housing solution free of charge, federal and state governments had to cough up a lot of money.  As McClatchy notes, though, that saved money that would have gone to acute-rescue efforts like shelters and crisis treatment centers. Housing gave the previously homeless an opportunity to seek employment, creating a net revenue gain rather than a funding drain. Whether or not anyone wants to call it liberal, it certainly proved more cost effective than the other liberal plans in place during the previous generation.

The trouble is that this logic takes you halfway to describing welfare reform - probably the biggest conservative domestic-policy success of the post-Reagan era - as a "liberal policy" as well. After all, it merely replaced AFDC with a more "cost effective" program, TANF - one oriented, like the Bush Administration's homelessnes policies, around moving people from straight-up welfare into the paid workforce - rather than doing away with the welfare system entirely. It's true that at the national level, welfare reform reduced spending along the way (though Tommy Thompson's reforms in Wisconsin, the model for the national reform, boosted funding during the transition to workfare), whereas the Bush anti-homelessness push has required an infusion of roughly $500 million (less, I believe, if you adjust for inflation) over what HUD provided for homelessness policy in 2002. But the payoff in terms of conservative goals - reducing dependency, increasing workforce participation - has been pretty impressive. And responding intelligently to homelessness seems like exactly the kind of thing that a more minimalist, means-tested welfare state ought to be doing.

Morrissey goes on to wonder why the rest of the media isn't reporting on the Bush Administration's success. It's an excellent question - but it would be an even better question if conservatives were willing to take credit for the success, instead of disowning it.

The Absence of Policy

One of the many fascinating things about Robert Draper's Times Magazine story on the McCain campaign is what isn't included in its account of the attempts to brand (and rebrand, and rebrand) John McCain's candidacy: Namely, any real discussion of policy. From Draper's account, the McCain campaign staff has gone around and around trying to figure out how to sell their candidate - as a fighter! as an experienced leader! as a maverick! etc. - but hardly ever seemed to have spent much time thinking about how these narratives would mesh with or be reinforced by the actual policy agenda the campaign was advancing.

Now, obviously Draper's piece isn't the whole story of the campaign, and obviously he was focusing on the strategy apparatus, rather than the policy apparatus. (Douglas Holtz-Eakin doesn't make an appearance in the piece.) And yes, of course, those of us with wonkish inclinations tend to dramatically overestimate the impact that actual policy choices, as opposed to narratives and symbolism, have on the outcome of presidential elections. But I don't think it's a coincidence that McCain's successful sales pitch to GOP primary voters was built around a specific policy - namely, his support for the surge. And I suspect that his unsuccessful general-election sales pitches have suffered badly from being untethered to specific popular policy proposals that the candidate himself was interested in defending. Think about 2000: George W. Bush's brand identity, if you will, as a "compassionate conservative" dovetailed perfectly with his near-obsessive focus on education policy and his promise to work across the aisle on a prescription drugs bill. Whereas the McCain camp's stabs at crafting a brand identity only beg the question: He's a maverick ... who'll do what? He's a bipartisan reformer ... but what reforms will he deliver? Etc.

To the extent McCain's policy agenda has been branded in the public mind, Obama has done it for him - with a series of health-care ads that are among the most dishonest of this cycle, but among the most ubiquitous and effective as well. Meanwhile, Obama has aggressively branded himself as the guy who'll cut taxes for 95 percent of Americans. Would the Democratic nominee be winning without these successful policy-related gambits? Probably. But they certainly haven't hurt.

McCain's Mistake?

David Frum, on his primary-season choices:

While nobody could have predicted that a global financial crisis would erupt in the fall of 2008, it was observable a year ago that the incomes of the middle class had stagnated during the Bush years. (I know because I observed it--in fact, in 2007 I published a whole book largely on this very point.) McCain previously had expressed doubts about many Bush policies, from the tax cuts of 2001 to the administration's easy indulgence of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in 2005. He could have continued that theme in 2007 and 2008. He could have campaigned as Nicholas Sarkozy to Bush's Jacques Chirac--a critic from within the party who offered change combined with practical experience and a moderate worldview.

... The moment at which such a message became impossible for McCain was his decision to embrace the full re-enactment of Bush's tax cuts. It must have seemed an easy decision back in the primary. It was a litmus test for many conservative voters and, after all, with Democrats poised to expand their majorities in the next Congress, there was zero likelihood those tax cuts would ever be enacted.

Trouble is, by founding his campaign on a full supply-side message, McCain denied himself the opportunity to say anything new. Worse, because that message originally took shape as a (correct) response to the problems of the 1970's, McCain's attempt to dust it off and reuse it as a response to the very different problems of the 2010's only made him look more out of date.

It's possible that McCain simply couldn't have won the GOP nominations without endorsing the complete extension of the Bush tax cuts - and I think his deeper mistake (to the extent that any policy decision has really mattered in this election) was failing to make his new tax proposals more explicitly middle-class friendly. But if I'd been advising him during the pre-primary period on which of his various heterodoxies to abandon and which ones to keep, I would have suggested that he consider going further to the right on immigration and cap-and-trade - instead of sorta-kinda going to the right on the former (but not really), and rarely talking about the latter at all - while staying slightly to George W. Bush's left on taxes. In an election that's being fought on domestic issues, this would have allowed McCain to attack Obama from the right on global warming legislation ("I support sensible measures to combat climate change, but I've decided we just can't afford Barack Obama's costly regulations") and border security ("I have a long pro-immigrant record, but we need to have law and order on our southern border, and Obama can't deliver"), while blurring the differences between the two on tax policy ("I broke with my own party to support a more middle-class-friendly tax agenda!").

The fact that McCain more or less did the reverse could be attributed - as Jon Chait would doubtless attribute it - to the awesome power of supply-side orthodoxy over the GOP. But I think the simplest answer is that McCain really cares about immigration and climate change, and doesn't care that much about tax policy (save insofar as it relates to earmarks, I suppose). So he flip-flopped heavily on the issue that doesn't matter to him, and tried to stick closer to his true beliefs on the issues that do. It's a choice that speaks well of his principles, even if it's hurt his chances in November.

Imagining An Obama Administration

At The Next Right and Culture11, they're having a symposium on best and worst-case scenarios for the GOP this fall, and beyond. Here's part of Poulos's contribution:

[Given the current polling], conservatives will really want to know how an Obama blowout and a seized-up Congress could also make for a best-case scenario. Simple: a narrow McCain win or loss will keep Republicans locked in a death struggle over the true meaning of conservatism and the identity of the party. So long as Congress doesn't flip completely and utterly into Democratic hands, a landslide for Obama will do conservatives much more good than harm. Without an all-powerful Democratic House and Senate behind him--or, more likely, in front of him, pulling him along -- a President Obama (even with an apparent mandate) would be high on inspiration and togetherness but low on power and ambition.

Hemmed in by the realities of an overstretched and strained economy, intense yet delicate military commitments abroad, and the broad but vague longing among the American people for a simple change in political tone, Obama would function largely as a figurehead -- something conservatives wary of executive Bridezillas could appreciate. Liberals would get all the catharsis they wanted without really being able to effect much substantive change. The left would get the healing, the right would keep the hope. And as the Obama administration became consumed in the patient, laborious, and incremental task of leading a nation unified mostly in exasperation and exhaustion, conservatives would be able to clear their minds and clean their house -- their most important task of all.

I almost buy it in theory, but as a live possibility it seems increasingly remote. The problem, as I've argued before, is that it's very difficult to decouple a party's fortunes at the Presidential level from its fortunes at the Congressional level these days. And as a result, the looming Obama landslide seems almost certain to push Congress - and especially the Senate - well beyond anything that could be described as "gridlock," leaving the GOP perilously close to a rump position. In that scenario, my biggest fear is that the economic crisis ends up tying  Obama's hands somewhat on issues of spending and taxation - and related fronts like cap-and-trade as well, perhaps - which in turn forces him to placate the feeling-its-oats Democratic base by expending political capital on other, less immediately-expensive liberal projects. Like, say, the immigration reform of La Raza's fondest dreams. Or the Freedom of Choice Act, and various other unpleasant items on the pro-choice wish list. Or a run of judicial appointees who make John Paul Stevens look like Clarence Thomas.

To some on the Right, I imagine this sort of prioritization would be treated as relatively good news. But as someone who would take Barack Obama's agenda on taxes over his agenda on certain other fronts any day of the week, it seems pretty close to a worst-case scenario to me.

The Liberal Media's Conservatives

Various folks have already gone round on this subject, but I think it's worth saying something further about the way figures like Mark Levin, Mark Steyn, Victor Davis Hanson and others have responded to those right-of-center pundits who have harshly criticized the McCain-Palin ticket and/or the GOP in general lately. I think this Hanson line is worth quoting:

... with Obama now with an 6-8 point lead, some in the DC/NY corridor these last three weeks figure it's time now to jump on, or at least sort of jump, since the train they think is leaving the station and there might be still be some space at the dinner table on the caboose. They also believe as intellectuals that the similarly astute Obamians may on occasion inspire, or admire them as the like-minded who cultivate the life of the mind-in contrast to the "cancer" Sarah Palin, who, with her husband Todd, could hardly discuss Proust with them or could offer little if any sophisticated table-talk other than the chokes on shotguns or optimum RPMs on snow-machines.

I've always found the class-war element in inter-pundit sniping a little bizarre: Whether it's the netroots types hating on center-left columnists, or paleocons whining about how neocons get invited to all the cool parties, or Hanson's peculiar vision of David Brooks and Barack Obama chatting about Proust on the Acela (or something like that), it usually seems to involve the implication that successful newspaper columnists or think tank fellows live the lives of Hollywood starlets - or maybe Gilded-Age robber barons, maybe. (My favorite example in this vein: Daniel McCarthy capping off a blog post on paleocon successes by writing, "that sound you hear is Bill Kristol choking on his foie gras... ")

But leaving that issue aside, I think it's worth taking Hanson's larger point seriously. There is unquestionably a sense in which center-right scriveners who work for institutions more liberal than they (or merely exist in a climate more liberal than they) have both personal and professional incentives to criticize their own side as often as they do the other one, and to advance arguments and strike attitudes that drive more committed partisans up the wall. I'm flattered that Julian Sanchez's list of conservative writers in this position includes David Brooks and, well, me, but I think it's pretty easy to come up with a longer tally - it would include everyone from Rod Dreher (one of the very few explicitly-conservative writers at Beliefnet and the Dallas Morning News, I believe) to Christopher Buckley (Forbes FYI editor, New Yorker contributor, and now Daily Beast blogger) to various other (Peggy Noonan, Tucker Carlson, Joe Scarborough, etc.) with one foot in the right-wing intelligentsia and one foot in the MSM. Not coincidentally, this list happens to overlap in many cases with a list of right-of-center pundits who have been highly critical of the McCain campaign and the GOP recently. And while I'm sure that these writers and talkers are striving for objectivity in all things and at all times, I'm also acutely aware, from my own experience, of the way that peer effects - the desire to be perceived as the "reasonable conservative" by friends and peers, the positive reinforcement from liberal readers, etc. - can subtly influence the topics one chooses to write about and the tone one chooses to take. It's not a matter of wanting a seat at the table in the Obama Administration, or anything absurd like that; it's just a matter of being aware of your audience, and wanting to be taken seriously by people who don't necessarily share your views, but who exert a significant influence over your professional success even so.

Now of course similar incentives are also at work for people who make their living writing and talking to a more partisan audience: If you run, say, a right-wing talk radio show, or work for an explicitly conservative magazine, stoking partisan fervor is almost always in your professional interest - and if you're going to accuse David Brooks of pandering to his liberal audience, what would you say about a Levin or a Limbaugh? But I want to make a different point. Suppose that you accept the most cynical account of, say, Peggy Noonan's uncertainty about whom to vote for in this election, or Christopher Buckley's Obama endorsement - that they're just craven, self-interested bandwagon jumpers who want to keep getting invited to all those swanky cocktail parties I keep hearing about. Suppose that you regard every right-of-center writer - or single-issue fellow traveler with the Bush Republicans, in the case of Christopher Hitchens - who's publicly hurled brickbats at the McCain campaign as a quisling and a coward, a stooge for liberalism and a rat fleeing a fast-sinking ship. In such circumstances, what's the best course of action - denouncing the rats, or trying to figure out why the hell the ship is sinking? Even if Brooks and Noonan and Buckley and Dreher and Kathleen Parker and David Frum and Heather Mac Donald and Bruce Bartlett and George Will and on and on - note the ideological diversity in the ranks of conservatives who aren't Helping The Team these days - are all just snobs and careerists who quit or cavil or cover their asses when the going gets tough and their "seat at the table" is threatened, an American conservative movement that consists entirely of those pundits with the rock-hard testicular fortitude required to never take sides against the family seems like a pretty small tent at this point. And if I were Hanson or Levin or Steyn I'd be devoting a little less time to ritual denunciations of heretics and RINOs, and at least a little more time to figuring out how to build the sort of ship that will make the rats of the DC/NY corridor want to scramble back on board, however much it makes you sick to have them back. Who knows? It might just be the sort of ship that swing-state voters will want to climb on board as well.

The GOP and the Investor Class

While I'm on the subject of capital-gains tax cuts and political strategy, this seems like a good time to cite my friend Matt Continetti's 2005 profile of Eliot Spitzer, which included a prescient explanation of why a growing "investor class" doesn't guarantee a growing share of the vote for the GOP:

... while universal stock ownership may be desirable for other reasons--most economists believe that lower-income Americans would benefit from having at least some of their savings in stocks--it hardly guarantees political catnip for Republicans. For one thing, if 80 or 90 percent of Americans own stocks and bonds, "investors" will no longer be a class at all--unless it's the class of all voters, in both parties. Furthermore--and more immediately--there's a corollary to the investor-class thesis that favors Democrats. As more people enter the market, they may turn to politicians who offer protection from rapacious capitalists and irresponsible money managers. Burned by market downturns, they will want politicians to go after those who did them harm. And those politicians, in turn, will say they are "saving" markets in the process. Politicians like Eliot Spitzer.

Spitzer is gone, of course, and this isn't an exact summary of how the current financial crisis has played out for the GOP. (And as I've said before, I don't think that a straightforward focus on punishing the bad guys, as opposed to finding solutions, plays that well with voters caught up in an economic calamity.) But the broad point is timely, and true: When the stock market drops, the average middle-class investor may be more likely to look to the Democrats than to the Republicans for answers, and an ever-larger investor class may actually be more supportive of regulation - the better to minimize the short-run risks their portfolios and 401(k)s face, even at the expense of long-run gains - than a middle class that isn't heavily invested in the stock market.

A Bailout For The Middle Class

All this talk about "what McCain should do" is growing increasingly academic - he'll keep doing what he's doing, and even if he did something else events are in the saddle now - but it's still worth quoting Sebastian Mallaby:

How should government demonstrate concern for regular people? John McCain's plan to refinance mortgages shows that he has the right impulse, but this is not the best approach. Rearranging home loans one by one would be a slow process when what's needed is quick action. It would be almost impossible to rearrange the loans fairly: Prudent home buyers who have kept up with their payments might lose out to imprudent ones who stretched too far; folks who rented while saving for a home would get nothing. Besides, McCain's plan could exacerbate the financial crisis in a perverse way. Help for families who are behind in their mortgage payments could encourage others to stop paying, too, in which case loans that are now good would quickly turn rotten.

The fastest and fairest way to help ordinary people is via a budget stimulus package. Part of the extra spending should be distributed to state governments, which are having trouble maintaining Medicaid and other programs as recession eats into their tax revenue. Part of the extra spending could go to infrastructure projects, though this tends to be a slow way of getting cash into the economy. But much of the stimulus should be in checks made out directly to citizens. Wall Street is getting its bailout. Main Street deserves one also.

Once upon a time, conservatives won elections by promising to give middle-class America back its tax dollars. In the teeth of a recession, staring defeat in the face, that's a far better message to run on than earmarks, or energy independence, or William Ayers.

The Limits of McCainism

Patrick Ruffini on the debate:

To me one thing stood out. John McCain's maverickness is not gone. McCain doesn't need to return to his old maverick self.  If anything, McCain's maverickness is the problem.

I noticed this whenever someone would ask about the economy. McCain would launch into a tirade against the greedy special interests on Wall Street. Obama would tend to lead with how it affected the voter. Two very different reactions. And I can't help but think that Obama's response connected better.

McCain has long tried to appropriate the populist, muckraking instincts of TR and the progressive Republicans. But there's a reason why these tactics haven't worked since, well, TR and the progressive Republicans.

Yes, voters may say they are mad about corporate pay, and Wall Street, and a do-nothing, self-aggrandizing Congress. But they are ultimately looking out for #1. The most relevant questions are and have always been: what are you going to do my taxes? my health care? my job?

This is why populism ultimately has such weak appeal. Sticking it to corporate CEOs and greedy politicians doesn't in and of itself put food on the table.

Conservatives have long understood populism as a weakness in liberal economic rhetoric, allowing us to win debates we otherwise would not have won by deploying more grounded, solution-oriented arguments (e.g. populist rants against trade and greedy CEOs who outsource vs. the direct benefits to the consumer of cheaper goods and services). But now this populist rhetoric is being visited on our own house.

In a time of crisis, people especially want to know what this means to them. And in this light, I can't help but think that John McCain's rush to indict distant bogeymen and his Senatese reminiscences about fighting the good fight against the bums in Washington fell a little flat.

I would quibble with what I think is Ruffini's somewhat narrow definition of populism, but overall he's right. This has always, always been a problem for McCain: His strongest instinct, when confronted with any domestic-policy problem, is to find a black hat to pin the blame on and then punish them for it, rather than looking for the smartest possible solution. And in a crisis that nobody really understands, and where the blame for what's happened runs through Main Street as well as Wall Street and Washington, McCain's usual "punish the bad guys" message just doesn't seem like what voters want to hear.

Home Economics

I can't believe Yglesias beat me to excerpting this snippet from George Packer's much-praised essay on the working class:

"These days, you have to struggle," she said. "As a kid, I used to be able to go to the movies or to the zoo. Now you can't take your children to the zoo or go to the movies, because you've got to think how you're going to put food on the table." Snodgrass's parents had raised four children on two modest incomes, without the ceaseless stress that she was enduring. But the two-parent family was now available only to the "very privileged." She said that she had ten good friends; eight of them were childless or, like her, unmarried with kids. "That's who's middle-class now," she said. "Two parents, two kids? That's over. People looked out for me. These kids nowadays don't have nobody to look out for them. You're one week away from (a) losing your job, or (b) not having a paycheck."

Matt goes on to reference Grand New Party's focus on precisely this issue, and then writes:

Of course the problem is that once you recognize the truth of this line of analysis, you're still left wondering what, exactly, you're supposed to do about it. Stopping committed gay and lesbian couples from getting married won't, in the real world, help people build the sort of stable family structures that are an important part of emotional and economic support and security for those who have it. Nor does it really seem plausible to me that any government safety net, no matter how generous, could realistically fully make up the gap. And it's hard for me to imagine a government "marriage promotion" initiative that's heavy-handed enough to be effective, but not so heavy-handed as to be frighteningly authoritarian. But as a pure matter of electoral politics, I think it would probably be easy enough for an enterprising politician to talk a little bit more explicitly about this kind of thing and that would probably help candidates connect with people who, not wrongly, see linkage in their lives between "cultural issues" about family life and the economic challenges facing their family.

I definitely agree with the last point, and I also agree about the limits of straightforward "marriage promotion" programs. But while there's clearly no domestic-policy silver bullet for the problem of high divorce rates and out-of-wedlock birth rates, I think there are things the government can do to sharpen the incentives - a favorite phrase of Reihan's - and have an impact on the margins. Some of the ideas we kick around in Grand New Party - a more family-friendly tax code; more support, through tax credits and subsidies, for parents who want to work part time or not at all while their kids are young; etc. - fall into this category: They're proposals that have the potential to ease the financial burden on working parents, a burden that's quite often at the root of family breakdown, and create a virtuous cycle in which parents are more likely to stay together, and their kids, down the road, are more likely to become responsible parents as well - since the children of stable families are more likely to form stable families themselves. The goal would be a short-run decrease in working-class divorce rates, and perhaps a long-term decrease in out-of-wedlock births as the benefits of greater familial stability are passed on to the next generation. Again, I'm under no illusions that tax policy and/or subsidization can have a massive impact here, but I think a family-friendly politics could offer at least a nudge, if you will, in the right direction.

The other half of the equation, in our view, would be reforms targeted at low-skilled males. One of the biggest reasons poor women have children out of wedlock is that the men in their demographic aren't really marriageable - they don't earn enough, they aren't working in the formal labor market, they're in and out of prison, etc. And it might be possible to improve their prospects (again, on the margins) - by reducing unskilled immigration, by reforming prisons while putting more cops on the beat, or even by developing a program of straightforward wage subsidies. (Though the last of these is a non-starter in the current fiscal climate: Of the big ideas we floated in GNP, it's the most expensive and the hardest to imagine the contemporary GOP - or the Dems, for that matter, though they'd probably be marginally more receptive - actually adopting.)

The Missing $7,000

Here's Joe Biden last night on the McCain health care plan:

... do you know how John McCain pays for his $5,000 tax credit you're going to get, a family will get? He taxes as income every one of you out there, every one of you listening who has a health care plan through your employer. That's how he raises $3.6 trillion, on your -- taxing your health care benefit to give you a $5,000 plan, which his Web site points out will go straight to the insurance company. And then you're going to have to replace a $12,000 -- that's the average cost of the plan you get through your employer -- it costs $12,000. You're going to have to pay -- replace a $12,000 plan, because 20 million of you are going to be dropped. Twenty million of you will be dropped. So you're going to have to place -- replace a $12,000 plan with a $5,000 check you just give to the insurance company. I call that the "Ultimate Bridge to Nowhere."

This is an argument you hear frequently from liberals: That McCain's plan will tax employer provided health insurance, which is worth roughly $12,000 for a typical family, which in turn will lead many employers to stop offering said health insurance; meanwhile, the plan will give the same family a tax credit worth only $5,000 to pay for the same plan they used to have through their employer. This makes the whole thing sound like a pretty rotten deal, but it also begs a pretty big question: What happened to that extra $7,000 that employers were spending on health care under the old dispensation? To hear Biden tell it, it'll just vanish into thin air. But that's just absurd. Right now, that $12,000 plan is part of your compensation; it's just that the current tax code incentivizes employers to pay you in health insurance rather than in cash, because the health insurance is tax free. But that doesn't mean that if health insurance stops being tax free and employers stop including it in your package of salary and benefits, they'll suddenly cut everyone's compensation by $12,000; they'll cut it by the cost of the tax deduction, presumably, and wages will rise to roughly where they would have been if employers had never been incentivized to pay their workers in health care. So the typical family will get their $5,000 credit from the government, and something like the remaining $7,000 they need to buy health insurance will show up in their paycheck. Except that a lot of Americans will actually come out ahead, rather than just breaking even, since McCain's plan offers a flat credit regardless of income, whereas under the current system the dollar value of your tax deduction - and thus the compensation your employer is incentivized to give you - goes up as your income rises.

An assessment of McCain's plan from the Tax Policy Center (no right-wing ideologues, they) put it this way: "Workers offered insurance through their employers lose the value of the income tax exclusion but gain the credit; the combination leads to higher effective costs of insurance for some (those in the higher tax brackets or who have relatively high-cost employer-sponsored  insurance) and lower costs for others (those in lower tax brackets or who have less expensive  insurance)." In other words, the middle and working classes actually tend to gain at the expense of the wealthy.

This is not to say that there aren't more reasonable liberal critiques of McCain's plan: That it focuses on affordability rather than universality; that the tax credit is indexed to the consumer price index, and might not keep up with rising health care costs; and especially that it doesn't have a strong plan for how to deal with people - especially people with pre-existing conditions - who would have trouble getting coverage during the transition from employer-based to individually-purchased insurance. But the critique Biden offered last night is possibly the most common, probably the most damning, and certainly the most flatly untrue.

Update: See also Yuval.

The Conservative Con?

Tim Noah thinks he has our number:

The central con of the political coalition assembled by Ronald Reagan and maintained by his successors was that government was a common enemy. Middle-class social conservatives loathed the government for legalizing abortion, forbidding prayer in schools, and coddling minorities through welfare and affirmative action. Upper-class libertarian conservatives loathed the government for soaking the rich through the income tax and weakening businesses through burdensome regulation. The only useful function of the federal government was to provide for the common defense. This was a con for two reasons. First, the middle and upper classes were both dependent on the federal government for a variety of benefits, including Social Security, trade protection, scientific research, and assorted localized spending (termed "pork barrel" by those who don't receive it and "economic development" by those who do). Second, the distribution of this government largesse greatly favored the rich. In the April 1992 Atlantic, Neil Howe and Philip Longman, citing unpublished data from the Congressional Budget Office, reported that U.S. households with incomes above $100,000 received, on average, slightly more in federal cash and in-kind benefits ($5,690) than households with incomes below $10,000 ($5,560). This was four years before the Clinton administration eliminated Aid to Families With Dependent Children, the principal income-support program for the poor. When tax breaks were added to the tally, households with incomes above $100,000 received considerably more ($9,280) than households with incomes below $10,000 ($5,690). Clinton subsequently expanded tax subsidies to the poor through the Earned Income Tax Credit, but not enough to undo this disparity. "[I]f the federal government wanted to flatten the nation's income distribution," Howe and Longman concluded, "it would do better to mail all its checks to random addresses."

The Reagan coalition survived because nobody wanted to believe this ...

The caricature of the conservative coalition that takes up the beginning of this passage is a novel variation on Thomas Frank's vision of unlettered rubes being tricked by a sinister GOP into voting against their economic self-interest. Here, instead, we have a vision of middle and upper-middle-class Americans being tricked by a sinister GOP ... well, how, exactly? It doesn't seem like a contradiction in terms for a middle-class voter to believe that the government of the 1970s imposed too many regulations and too high a tax burden, inappropriately closed off democratic debate on issues like abortion and school prayer, and imposed an unjust racial quota system and ran an increasingly dysfunctional welfare system, while simultaneously supporting the federal government's role in Social Security, the National Academy of Sciences, and the interstate highway system. In fact, that's probably why Ronald Reagan usually couched his criticisms of government in relatively nuanced terms, rather than sounding like the sort of absurd anti-government absolutist that Noah apparently remembers him as. (When Reagan called, in his first inaugural address, for a government that "can and must provide opportunity, not smother it; foster productivity, not stifle it," and so forth, who, exactly, was he conning?)

Then consider that Howe and Longman piece from 1992 on our pro-rich welfare state, which Noah apparently believes (I say "apparently" because I can't completely follow the argument he thinks he's making here) to be conclusive evidence that conservatives claim to want limited government, but really support a big government that subsidizes the middle class and the rich.

Continue reading "The Conservative Con?" »

Who Opposes the Bailout?

Interesting stuff, summed up by Ambinder:

Pew Research ... finds this week that public support has dropped; only 45% support a "government plan to invest or commit billions to secure financial institutions." 38% say they're opposed; the rest don't know.  Independents are the least likely to support it (42%); Republicans are the most likely (49%)  Two thirds say they're "angry" about the plan, which independents being the angriest and Republicans being the least angry.

You could argue that this props up my suggestion that anti-bailout sentiment is unlikely to redound to the GOP's benefit in a future campaign, since the people who are maddest about it are Democrats and independents. On the other hand, you could argue that it undercuts my prediction - and any other prediction, for that matter - by demonstrating just how fluid and unpredictable the politics of this issue are, since the partisan gap on the issue is extremely slim by the standards of contemporary politics and the landscape is no doubt shifting even as I write. It would be nice to know which Democrats support the bailout, and which Republicans do the same: At the moment, my instinct is that the bailout is supported by self-conscious moderates of all stripes, whether they call themselves Dems, Repubs or independents, and that anti-bailout sentiment unites talk-radio-listening conservatives, Nation-reading lefties, and the radical-center types who rallied around Ross Perot. This dynamic would seem to make it an ideal issue for a primary-season insurgent in either party, or for a third-party candidate in a general election - but somewhat less ideal as a wedge issue for the purposes of the national GOP, or the national Democratic Party. But all of this could change, obviously, depending on what happens in Washington in the next week, and then what happens to the economy after that.

Three Scenarios

The best case: This is an example of America's democratic institutions reasserting themselves in the face of the attempt by a panicked technocratic elite to prop up reckless institutions that richly deserve to fail.

The worst case: You know what.

The most likely scenario, as of 3 PM this afternoon: The stock market continues to drop. Some version of the bailout passes in the next week. The American economy staggers into a recession, but passes through the storm without 1930s-style suffering; the Republican Party is not so fortunate. Even though most Americans claim to oppose the bailout [update: not anymore], the House GOP's obstructionism is widely viewed as having worsened the economic situation; the fact that these are contradictory positions does not faze an electorate that wraps all of the country's current troubles up, ties them with a bow, and lays them at the feet of the Bush-led GOP. John McCain loses by a landslide in November. The Democratic Party regains years or even decades worth of ground among the white working class, consolidates the Hispanic vote, and locks up a large chunk of highly-educated voters who might otherwise lean conservative. The much-discussed liberal realignment happens. And a politician running on a Ron Paul-style economic platform does very, very well in the GOP primaries of 2012.

If Obama Won ...

... with undecideds, I think Nate Silver's explanation makes the most sense:

My other annoyance with the punditry is that they seem to weight all segments of the debate equally. There were eight segments in this debate: bailout, economy, spending, Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Russia, terrorism. The pundit consensus seems to be that Obama won the segments on the bailout, the economy, and Iraq, drew the segment on Afghanistan, and lost the other four. So, McCain wins 4-3, right? Except that, voters don't weight these issues anywhere near evenly. In Peter Hart's recent poll for NBC, 43 percent of voters listed the economy or the financial crisis as their top priority, 12 percent as Iraq, and 13 percent terrorism or other foreign policy issues. What happens if we give Obama two out of three economic voters (corresponding to the fact that he won two out of the three segments on the economy), and the Iraq voters, but give McCain all the "other foreign policy" voters? ... By this measure, Obama "won" by 14 points, which almost exactly his margin in the CNN poll.

If these numbers show up in wider polling, it seems like awfully bad news for McCain. If he can't get a bump from last night's showing, which struck me as a pretty strong, I think it's going to be awfully difficult for him to get a bump of any sort across the run of debates. It's hard to envision him turning in a vastly better performance where the focus is explicitly on domestic policy (if you thought we heard a little too much about earmarks last night, just you wait ...), and of course there's the looming Palin-Biden fiasco for his campaign to weather as well. If undecided voters didn't like what they saw from McCain last night, I don't know what, exactly, his campaign can do - given his range and limitations as a politician, and the obvious weakness of his running mate - to win them over going forward.

An Election About Something

One the other hand, if John McCain is really planning to oppose and/or torpedo the bailout, instead of just trying to swoop in and claim credit for getting it through Congress ... well, then we'll have something substantive to talk about.

A Note On The Economic Situation

I'm refraining from commenting on what's obviously the most important story of the last week, and possibly the most important story of the next decade or more, because I have no expertise on a subject that requires real expertise to discuss intelligently, and thus nothing useful to add to the reams of commentary being produced by people who understand the situation - to the extent that anyone does - far, far better than I do. Like James Poulos, I stand ready to offer vaporous commentary on American culture and society that may or may not relate to the current crisis - but only after the crisis itself is at least some distance in the rearview mirror. 

What Should McCain Be Saying?

A couple days ago, I suggested a few ways that John McCain could have put together a more ideological creative campaign - running as a Sam's Club candidate, running as a Rockefeller-Repub centrist on issues like health care, or running as a Perotista deficit hawk and entitlement reformer. Now Daniel Henninger has his own suggestion - more porkbusting, but with greater specifics than McCain has offered to date:

The problem isn't standard political corruption. The problem is that the $2.8 trillion federal budget is a vast ocean of Beltway pilot fish feeding off scraps from the whale -- lawyers, lobbyists, ex-Members of Congress. No one runs the Sea of Washington. It's too big, too deep.

Barack Obama wants to dig a deeper hole. John McCain should ask the American people if they want this to go on, because it's nonsense to vote for government to do "more" and then whine when it doesn't work or degrades into sweetheart-deal hell.

Unfocused "reform" rhetoric from Mr. McCain isn't enough. The public has been there, heard that. Sen. McCain should talk about what he knows -- fat Fannie and Freddie, farm-bill bloat, the ethanol subsidy fiasco, the federal procurement mess. Show people Gov. Palin's 18 single-spaced pages of 2007 vetoes. Then identify Congress's bipartisan supporters of the Legislative Line-Item Veto Act and ask the voters' support. Appear with GOP congressman from Sarah's new generation who want to help -- Eric Cantor of Virginia, Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, Kevin McCarthy of California. There are others.

Promise to spend the first two years on this historic political reform effort, and if a Democratic Congress laughs, promise to barnstorm in 2010 for a Congress willing to act, from any party.

George Will, meanwhile, thinks that McCain should be making the case for divided government, by running against the awful things the Democrats might do:

The 22nd Amendment will banish the president in January, but Congress will then be even more Democratic than it is now. Does the country really want there to be no check on it? Consider two things that will quickly become law unless McCain is there to veto them or unless -- this is a thin reed on which to depend -- Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has 40 reliable senators to filibuster them to deserved deaths.

The exquisitely misnamed Employee Free Choice Act would strip from workers their right to secret ballots in unionization elections. Instead, unions could use the "card check" system: Once a majority of a company's employees -- each person confronted one-on-one by a union organizer in an inherently coercive setting -- sign cards expressing consent, the union would be certified as the bargaining agent for all workers. Proving that the law's purpose is less to improve workers' conditions than to capture dues-payers for the unions, the law will forbid employers from discouraging unionization by giving "unilateral" -- not negotiated -- improvements in compensation and working conditions.

Unless McCain is president, the government will reinstate the equally misnamed "fairness doctrine." Until Ronald Reagan eliminated it in 1987, that regulation discouraged freewheeling political programming by the threat of litigation over inherently vague standards of "fairness" in presenting "balanced" political views. In 1980 there were fewer than 100 radio talk shows nationwide. Today there are more than 1,400 stations entirely devoted to talk formats. Liberals, not satisfied with their domination of academia, Hollywood and most of the mainstream media, want to kill talk radio, where liberals have been unable to dent conservatives' dominance.

I agree with Will and Henninger on the policy substance here, but with the exception of Henninger's mention of Fannie Mae - where McCain is already trying to make hay - all of these ideas seem like classic examples of the contemporary conservative tendency to offer answers to questions Americans aren't asking. Voters are worried about the financial crisis, the broader economic downturn, and the rising cost (or unavailability) of health care - and McCain is supposed to talk about the farm bill? About the menace of the Fairness Doctrine? Really? The GOP nominee is up against a candidate who's promising near-universal health care and a middle-class tax cut, and while that may well be an unaffordable combination, it's a one-two pledge that at least addresses itself to the issues that voters are most concerned about. Whereas line-item vetos and stopping card-check are red meat for a slice of the electorate that John McCain already has all locked up. I can see some of these issues - especially the attacks on corporate welfare - being woven into a broader populist narrative, but the notion that the McCain-Palin ticket is going to vault over Obama by attacking ethanol subsidies and defending Rush Limbaugh from as-yet-hypothetical regulation seems fanciful at best.

Palin, Bush and the Establishment

I thought that David Brooks' column on populism, elitism and Sarah Palin was quite good (even if I'm not sure my qualms about Palin's preparedness have been expressed strongly or frequently enough to merit my being placed on a list of Palin-skeptics that includes, say, a hardened doubter like David Frum). But I agree with Poulos that this Brooks line deserves to be unpacked a bit:

In the current Weekly Standard, Steven Hayward argues that the nation's founders wanted uncertified citizens to hold the highest offices in the land. They did not believe in a separate class of professional executives. They wanted rough and rooted people like Palin.

I would have more sympathy for this view if I hadn't just lived through the last eight years. For if the Bush administration was anything, it was the anti-establishment attitude put into executive practice.

To which Poulos responds:

Regrettably, I have not an inkling of how Bush's management style embodied anti-establishmentarianism. Bush simply tried as hard as possible to ignore, brush off, and sideline criticism. It just so happened that the establishment media was one such source of criticism, and Paul O'Neill was another, and there are lots of examples to draw from of 'insidery' voices being silenced and establishment dissent frowned upon. But these things are like peas clustered at the base of a mountain of evidence that Bush had no problem at all with establishmentarianism so long as it suited his basic purposes. For every Scowcroft that was left out on the doorstep there was a Cheney given the run of the house. We can try as hard as we like to insist that cronyism, secrecy, and vindictiveness are anti-establishmentarian, but as a rule they are the products of establishments, and the pathologies of bureaucratic institutions.

Let me split the difference, and suggest that the Bush Administration has displayed a distinctive ability to merge the worst features of establishmentarian and anti-establishmentarian politics. Those establishment figures to whom Bush bent a ready ear - the Cheneys and the Rumsfelds, certain members of the military brass, etc. - were relied upon to the point of immense folly; meanwhile, any establishment figure, institution or organ that found itself outside the Bushian inner circle, and that offered criticism (constructive or otherwise), ended up ignored, attacked, or dismissed as out-of-touch. This "worst of both worlds" problem had something to do with Bush's own limitations as an executive, but I think it may also be a structural difficulty with anti-establishment politics in general: As a politician, you can run against the establishment all you want, but whether you're a traitor-to-your-class figure like Bush, or a more genuine outsider (like Mike Huckabee or Sarah Palin), you're going to need to co-opt at least part of the establishment if you're going to actually govern. The danger, then, is what we saw with Bush: An overreliance on the establishment figures whom you've co-opted - or, just as likely, who've co-opted you - joined to a doubling-down on the hostility and suspicion you direct outward, toward the rest of the political, intellectual and media elite. (Which is a sobering thought, to say the least, for observers like myself, who are drawn to outsider candidates out of the belief that American politics - and especially conservative politics - needs to be dramatically shaken up.)
 

Getting Culture War Ads Right

A few days ago, Jim Geraghty complained that my critique of McCain's sex-ed ad relied more on how the ad "feels" than on what the ad actually said. Today, Byron York marshals an extended defense of the ad's accuracy. And Rich Lowry writes that McCain's ads "are no worse than Obama's spots ...Obama just ran an ad saying McCain would cut education funding -- with no evidence. His response to McCain's supposed out-of-control negativity is a new negative ad misleadingly creating the impression that McCain aides are currently lobbying for special interests."

Here's the thing, though: The reason that the sex-ed ad touched such a nerve, and helped create the current "McCain is a lying liar" narrative in the press, is that it's a culture war ad. It isn't about funding or lobbying or any of the other issues where truth-bending ads get cut all the time without the media freaking out; it's about values, and children, and sex. Obviously, I think such topics are completely fair game for attack ads, but a large slice of the commentariat doesn't, and a conservative campaign that runs a culture-war ad has to expect that it will come in for a higher level of scrutiny than your typical attack ad - and a higher level of blowback if it shades the truth at all. In its relationship to the facts, the sex-ed ad wasn't all that different from, say, Obama's semi-mendacious education ad - but given its subject matter, it needed to meet a higher standard.

This ad, meanwhile, seems to meet those standards, while taking up an even hotter-button subject. It'll be interesting to see if and how the press reacts:

 

Will McCain Ruin Palin, Revisited

At this point, I'm no longer that all that worried about Sarah Palin crashing and burning, Quayle-style, because John McCain plucked her from obscurity before her time. Now I'm worried about one of the GOP's most interesting talents being absorbed, and formed as a national politician, by a McCain campaign that's been deeply unimaginative on every front except the wars to win the weekly news cycle - and that seems happy, after the brief burst of risk-taking and creativity that produced the Palin pick and McCain's strikingly post-partisan acceptance speech (and gave them a big bounce in the polls, not coincidentally), to slip back into a cynical and deeply unimaginative style. I know that the people who've decided she's Monica Goodling with a shotgun aren't going to be persuaded by me on this point, but I think Palin really does have the potential to embody the kind of change the GOP desperately needs: In a party that's dominated by entrenched interests, she demonstrated that it's possible to take on the establishment and win; in a party increasingly riven by ideological feuds, she's demonstrated that it's possible to be a populist and a pragmatist, a social conservative on some fronts and a libertarian on others. But a vice-presidential run isn't the ideal place to develop that potential in the best of times, and a vice-presidential run under the tutelage of the McCain campaign is likely to produce a lot more of what we saw from Palin in her interview last night: Rigorously memorized, carefully regurgitated talking points, a determination to avoid making enormous gaffes, and not much else. Like Jonah Goldberg, I want to see Palin operating outside her comfort zone; like Ed Morrissey, I want to see a more fleshed-out vision of what McCain-Palin reformism would mean; like Noah Millman, I've been less than enthused with how the McCain camp has used her thus far. But based on the kind of campaign that McCain - or Steve Schmidt, more aptly - has run to date, I think what we've seen is exactly what we're going to continue to get: They've taken their one "different kind of Republican" risk, it's given them the boost they'd hoped for, and now it's just going to be a war of talking points and spin from here on out.

If Palin's smart - if she's the politician I hope she is, rather than an Alaskan Goodling with snazzy glasses - she'll push back against this tendency, and try to use the next two months as an opportunity to define herself substantively as something more than a careful memorizer of the briefing books she's handed. That's more or less the advice I offer her in this week's NR - but with the recognition that it's much, much easier said than done.

Overreach

It's been a good week for the McCain campaign, to put it mildly, but I think yesterday's "lipstick on a pig" faux-outrage was "win the news cycle, undercut your long-term appeal" mistake, for exactly the reasons Ramesh outlines:

... there may have been good ways to take shots at Obama over the "lipstick on a pig" comment. But the Republicans are coming across as whiny grievance-mongers. Don't they realize that this harping on ambiguous slights is what people hate about political correctness? It was bad enough when liberals were trying to destroy Palin. Now Republicans are trashing her brand. They're undermining the basis of her appeal as a different, tougher kind of female politician.

And then there's the sex-ed ad, which feels more appropriate to a failing, flailing right-wing campaign than a confident, rising conservative ticket. Jim Geraghty marshals the strongest defense of the ad here, which you can compare to Factcheck.org's critique. The bill that Obama supported did, in fact, seek to amend the school code so that the state guidelines for "comprehensive sex education" would apply to grades K-12, rather than grades 6-12 (as had previously been the case); on the other hand, it also required that "course material and instruction ... shall be age and developmentally appropriate." The Obama campaign has argued, and the press has reported, that the only age-appropriate sex ed the bill envisioned for kindergarten involved the distinction between appropriate and inappropriate touching. I'm not sure I quite buy that, since the bill includes provisions like the following: "Whenever such courses of instruction are provided in any of grades K-12, then such courses also shall include age-appropriate instruction on the prevention of sexually transmitted infections." This could be read to suggest that STDs as well as "good touch, bad touch" were being treated as a potentially appropriate topic for kindergarten, which ups the measure's creepiness factor in my book. But the language is somewhat ambiguous, and certainly there's no reason to think that the bill envisioned five-year-olds putting condoms on a banana, which is the image that the McCain ad seems designed to summon up. Moreover, Obama didn't write or co-sponsor the legislation (he voted for it in a party-line vote) and it never became law, so calling it "his one accomplishment" on education is just false. And even if aspects of the sex-ed claim are technically defensible, the whole thing just feels bullshitty and gross - like a parody of a culture-war ad. I have no problem with campaigning on culture war issues, and God knows Obama has vulnerabilities, but there's a right way and a wrong way to do it, and this ad falls into the second category.

Pro-Lifers and "Fecundity"

Leon Wieseltier:

Some commentators have detected moral relativism in the untroubled, even edified conservative response to the obstetric developments in the McCain campaign; but I see something even more sinister. I see the teleological suspension of the ethical. You remember the teleological suspension of the ethical. It is the recognition that, whereas there is morality in religion, religion is not the same as morality, and may justify an exemption from morality. I know of no religion in which this handy power of extenuation is not used. The telos, in the case of Bristol Palin, is life; and a fine telos it is. The casuistry goes something like this: since there are no unwanted babies, there are no unwanted pregnancies. "It can sometimes result in the arrival of new life and a new family," Gerson cheered. For "evangelical Christianity (in most modern forms) is not about the achievement of perfection." If evangelicals are so exquisitely conscious of our creatureliness, why have they devoted so many decades to reviling the imperfections of others? If they are, as Gerson says, "about the acceptance of forgiveness," why do they diabolize difference? The fecundity of Bristol Palin is a windfall for Jesus, but the fecundity of black girls is the doom of the republic.

This makes it sound like social conservatives are sitting around reading Lothrop Stoddard in their spare time, and perhaps Wieseltier thinks they are. In reality, when it comes to African-American "fecundity," pro-lifers are more likely to talk about abortion's disproportionately negative impact on the black birth rate than they are to fret about the rise of the colored empires. Yes, I'm sure you can find the odd racist crank who fits Wieseltier's stereotype, but for the most part isn't the fecundity that worries social conservatives; it's the fatherlessness. Which is why our side, to Jacob Weisberg's dismay, doesn't usually talk about reducing the birth rate when the subject turns to teen and out-of-wedlock births; that's Planned Parenthood's bailiwick, and always has been. We talk about maintaining (or increasing!) the fecundity, and raising the marriage rate to keep up with it.

And again, for the moment fatherlessness doesn't seem like an issue in the Bristol Palin pregnancy. If Levi Johnston doesn't live up to his obligations, though, I'll happily write a blog post denouncing him, if that will improve Leon Wieseltier's opinion of pro-life consistency on this front.

Conservatives and Inequality

Speaking of Frum, his Times Magazine piece on inequality and the decline of the GOP is very much worth your time.

Abortion and the Two-Parent Family (II)

David Frum makes a more nuanced, less offensive version of the Weisberg argument:

As the stigma attached to unwed motherhood has diminished, the United States has seen both a huge increase in the proportion of babies born out of wedlock -- now reaching almost 37% --and a striking decline in the incidence of abortions.

In 1981, 29.3 abortions were carried out for every 1,000 women of childbearing age in the United States. By 2005, that rate had tumbled to 19.1 per 1,000 women.

The experience of the Palin family symbolizes the effect of the pro-life movement on American culture: Abortion has been made more rare; unwed motherhood has been normalized. However you feel about that outcome, it is not well-described as either left-wing or right-wing.

I'm obviously not the most trustworthy person to evaluate these claims, committed as I am to the goals of reducing and restricting abortion and shoring up the two parent family. But again, I just don't think this argument holds up. There is a correlation, seemingly, between the teen birth rate and the abortion rate, but it's roughly the opposite of what Frum and Weisberg's argument would suggest - the two rose together into the Nineties, and have basically declined together since. Meanwhile, there's no obvious correlation at all between the abortion rate and the out-of-wedlock birth rate: The two rose in tandem until the beginning of the Clinton era, at which point the out-of-wedlock birth rate continued to rise, but more slowly than in the '70s and '80s (see Figs. 12 in this report), while the abortion rate fell precipitously - too precipitously, I think, for the post-1990 increase in out-of-wedlock births to account for the post-1990 drop in abortion, though I'm obviously no statistician.

As I've written before, I suspect that serious restrictions on abortion would lead to a short-term increase in out-of-wedlock births (and thus any serious pro-life politics would have to accept the need for serious experimentation with the American welfare state in response to the challenge). But my supposition is just that - it's unsupported by the existing evidence, which suggests that the relationship between abortion law, sexual conduct, and out-of-wedlock births is far more complicated than any simple "more abortions = less illegitimacy" equation. That equation was plausible in the late 1960s, and indeed represented an important line of argument for advocates of legal abortion. But the evidence of the last few decades hasn't been kind to it.

Sarah Palin on Sex Ed

Terrifying stuff. Truly, the Inquisition is upon us.

Abortion and the Two-Parent Family

Jacob Weisberg explains how conservatives supposedly sold out their pro-family principles for the pro-life cause:

... these two conservative social goals--ending abortion and upholding the model of the nuclear family--were always in tension. The reason is that, like it or not, the availability of legal abortion supports the kind of family structure that conservatives once felt so strongly about: two parents raising children in a stable relationship, without government assistance. By 12^th grade, 60 percent of high school girls are sexually active or, as Reagan put it, "promiscuous." Teen-pregnancy rates have been trending downward in recent years, but even so, 7 percent of high-school girls become pregnant every year. And the unfortunate reality is that teenagers who carry their pregnancies to term drastically diminish their chances of living out the conservative, or the American, dream.

... Give the anti-abortion extremists credit for living their principles. If they weren't deadly serious, they wouldn't sabotage their party's political prospects or sacrifice so many other values they hold dear for the sake of denying exceptions in cases of rape and incest. But Sarah Palin's pro-life extremism is as ethically flawed as it is politically damaging to the GOP. By vaunting their pro-life agenda over everything else, conservatives are abandoning one of their most valuable insights: that intact, two-parent families are best for children and for the foundation of a healthy society.

Let's boil this down to its essence: Weisberg is saying that if conservatives were really serious about wanting more intact families, we'd want young women to have many more abortions, not many fewer. After all, the steady rise in abortion rates from the '70s to the '90s correlated with a steady drop in teen pregnancy, out-of-wedlock births, and divorces, while the slow fall of abortion rates from the Clinton era to the present correlated with a spike in divorce rates and births to teens and unwed mothers.

Oh, what's that you say? In fact, roughly the opposite happened? Divorce rates, abortion rates, and teen pregnancy rates all peaked around the same time (1990 or so) and then fell together, while out-of-wedlock births have inched up much more slowly in an era of falling abortion rates than they did in an era of rising abortion numbers? Why, maybe that's because the incredibly simplistic model of human behavior Weisberg is sketching out here bears very little relationship to reality. Maybe it's because the availability and perceived moral acceptability of abortion has an impact on how and when and with what degree of caution teenagers and unmarried people have sex. Maybe it's because lots of people who think of abortion as the birth control of last resort, and let that thought inform their sexual conduct, don't actually want to have abortions when it comes right down to it. Maybe it's because the availability and acceptability of abortion makes men, in particular, more cavalier about sex, even though the women they're having sex with may not share their "just get rid of it" mentality.

Or maybe Weisberg is right, the evidence of the last thirty years should be thrown out, and we should just persist in the assumption that the two-parent family can only survive on a foundation of large-scale feticide - starting, one presumes, with Bristol Palin's unborn kid.
 

Two Views of Palin's Speech

First, Brooks:

... what was most impressive was her speech's freshness. Her words flowed directly from her life experience, her poise and mannerisms from her town and its conversations. She left behind most of the standard tropes of Republican rhetoric (compare her text to the others) and skated over abortion and the social issues. There wasn't even any tired, old Reagan nostalgia.

Instead, her language resonated more of supermarket aisle than the megachurch pulpit. More than the men on the tickets, she embodies the spirit of the moment: impatient, fed up, tough-minded, but ironical. Even in attack, she projected the cheerfulness of someone confident about the future.

Then, Noonan:

Which gets me to the most important element of the speech, and that is the startlingness of the content. It was not modern conservatism, or split the difference Conservative-ish-ism. It was not a conservatism that assumes the America of 2008 is very different from the America of 1980.

It was the old-time conservatism. Government is too big, Obama will "grow it", Congress spends too much and he'll spend "more." It was for low taxes, for small business, for the private sector, for less regulation, for governing with "a servant's heart"; it was pro-small town values, and implicitly but strongly pro-life.

This was so old it seemed new, and startling. The speech was, in its way, a call so tender it made grown-ups weep on the floor. The things she spoke of were the beating heart of the old America. But as I watched I thought, I know where the people in that room are, I know their heart, for it is my heart. But this election is a wild card, because America is a wild card. It is not as it was in '80. I know where the Republican base is, but we do not know where this country that never stops changing is.

Can they both be right? Well, no, not entirely, and to the extent that their readings can't be reconciled I incline slightly more toward Noonan's take. But I think these dueling interpretations capture a real duality in the speech. Palin's tone, her self-presentation, were as Brooks describes them - fresh, unpretentious, cheerful, forward-looking, and blessedly unencumbered by the burdens of Reagan nostalgia that hung so heavily over the GOP primary campaign. Her substance, though, was much more as Noonan describes it: Palin mainly hit old-time conservative notes on taxes and size of government, and it was left to John McCain to talk, with his characteristic uncomfortability, about health care and education, globalization and job retraining, and the other issues the party's base doesn't want to talk about, and the Democrats do. This may have been the right call for the convention; going forward, though, I don't think that division of labor plays to the two candidate's strengths. And for the sake of Sarah Palin's long-term prospects, especially, I hope the Vice-Presidential debate showcases a different side of her conservatism.

Palin On The Issues

Richard Starr writes:

I've heard a fair amount of morning-after caviling from conservatives that Sarah Palin didn't spend more of her speech talking about public policy and issues. David Frum, for one, asks: "Where does she stand on immigration - an issue to which a President McCain will surely return? How reliable is she on free trade?"

Okay, let's grant there is natural curiosity about her political philosophy, particularly among people who care about political philosophy. But, as Gov. Palin might phrase it: Here's a little newsflash for all those reporters and commentators: She's not going to Washington to implement her political philosophy and her agenda. She's going to Washington to serve as John McCain's vice president. And the position of any good vice president is that he (or she) supports the president.

George H. W. Bush didn't give a convention speech in 1980 on how Reaganomics was Voodoo economics, even though that was where he stood on that issue, as everyone had learned earlier that year.

My prediction: Sarah Palin will stand on immigration and free trade where John McCain stands on those issues, and if she disagrees with him, I can imagine a spirited, private discussion between the two of them in the Oval Office. But it would be highly unusual, not to say inappropriate, for her to be announcing any positions on issues except the positions of the McCain-Palin campaign.

This is all very true. But Palin didn't have to make the case for her own positions last night in order to talk about policy; she could have made the case for her running mate's positions, especially in those areas where voters want to hear something from the candidates, and where McCain seems uncomfortable talking about his actual stances on the issues. As I said, I can see why the speech needed to tack in a different, more combative directions. But as much as this suddenly feels like a culture-war election, all of those kitchen-table concerns are still out there, and so are the Obama campaign's issue-by-issue advantages on domestic policy. The nomination of Palin, who's a potential kitchen-table candidate in a way McCain can never be, ought to be a clarifying moment for the McCain campaign - a chance to hit reboot on their domestic agenda, and find a way to at least poach some of the domestic-policy terrain the Democrats currently own. The McCain health care plan and tax plans, in particular, should be either defended or rewritten - and either way, the subjects should find their way into Palin's speeches going forward, if not into McCain's. (Though no, I'm not holding my breath ...)

My Obama Problem (But Maybe Not Yours)

Now that Sarah Palin has demonstrated that she can speak fluently on the biggest stage of her life - one hurdle down, a lot more to go! - I thought I'd turn back to Obama's speech for a moment. Here's Isaac Chotiner, echoing Jon Cohn's comment that "the agenda Obama laid out tonight is bolder than anything Democrats have seriously proposed since the 1960s":

Indeed. I was (not unpleasantly) surprised by the boldness of Obama's proposals and the degree to which his campaign--and Democrats more generally--feel that they are free to move sharply to the left on economic issues and the role of government. As the speech wore on, Obama talked more about personal responsibility, but his fundamental message on the necessary role of the state in providing for its citizens struck me as remarkably bold, and rhetorically distinct from the Clinton years...

...Which leads me to a related point: I imagine this speech was frusturating for conservatives. All of Obama's moves to the center were symbolic, while the policies he actually outlined were decidedly liberal.

Yep, that's about right. In a related vein, Rod Dreher does yeoman's work comparing lines and phrases and paragraphs in Obama's speech to Gore's 2000 address and Kerry's '04 acceptance speech - and finds, as I more or less expected, that the nuts and bolts of last night's address were roughly the same kind of Democratic talking points that we've heard many times before.

Now that's not a huge surprise - he was addressing the Democratic Convention, obviously - and it may not be a bad thing politically. This is, after all, the most favorable political climate that Democrats and liberals have enjoyed in years if not decades - and yet Barack Obama is currently running behind the generic Democrat on the ballot. Given that reality, why shouldn't he present himself as an acceptable Dem, as a Gore or a Kerry with bigger plan and more charisma, rather than trying to play the post-partisan, national-unity candidate and run the risk of being unable to even consolidate his own base? If the public wants to vote for a generic Democrat, there's definitely a case to be made for just being a generic Democrat - especially when your biggest liability is your perceived exoticism and celebrity status.

But from where I sit, to the right of the political center, Obama the generic Democrat is a big disappointment. He started this campaign with two promises: That he'd tell us what we needed to hear, rather than what we wanted to heart, and that he wouldn't be captive to the old left-right divide in American politics. But there were no tough choices presented in last night's speech, no hard truths told. There was just the promise that we can have it all: Energy independence (within ten years, no less!), universal health care, an army of new teachers, tax cuts for the middle class, the working class, and the upper-middle class, zero capital gains taxes on small business owners, a perpetually solvent safety net, plus a dose of protectionism - and all of it paid for by (unspecified) spending cuts, and tax hikes on just five percent of America. Meanwhile, the speech's concessions to conservatism were largely pro forma - an acknowledgment that fathers matter, that programs can't solve every problem, and that government "can't turn off the television and make a child do her homework" - and its proposals for common ground (reduce unwanted pregnancies, keep AK-47s out of the hands of gang members, etc.) were equally thin. 

Again, if you're a liberal, none of this is going to sour you on Obama's speech, or on the candidate: Why should he concede anything to the Right, you might say, given the disasters of Bushism, and given that the political wind is finally blowing liberalism's way? Which is fair enough. But for those who aren't liberals, but who have been drawn, in varying ways, to Obama's transformational promise anyway, his claim to stand for "new ideas and new leadership, a new politics for a new time" looks a lot more hollow today than it did a year ago.

Photo by Flickr user NewsHour used under a Creative Commons license.

No Party For Pro-Choicers?

Nicholas Beaudrot (along with several emailers) wants to know why I'm calling out the Democrats for being rigid and unyielding on abortion when the Republicans have just as rigid a posture on the issue, if not more so. Certainly he's right about the two parties' respective platform language; on the other hand, I think that some of what Beaudrot describes as the Democrats' bigger tent on abortion (the presence of notional pro-lifers in the House and Senate leadership, for instance) is just a function of the fact that the political action on abortion tends to happen on ground that's extremely favorable to pro-lifers, because that's the only ground where the Supreme Court allows legislation of any sort. So yes, there are more Democrats who vote for partial-birth abortion bans, for the born-alive laws, and for limits on government funding of abortion than there are Republicans who vote against the pro-life cause on these issues. But saying that the Democrats are a big-tent party on abortion because they tolerate members who vote against partial-birth abortion is like saying that the Republicans are a big-tent party on the environment because they tolerate members who would vote against, say, dumping radioactive waste in drinking water: It implicitly accepts a very pro-choice reading of what counts as the middle on abortion, and what counts as the extremes.

Such a reading of the abortion issue is, of course, the law of the land, thanks to Roe and Casey, which is why the real action on abortion happens in court appointments and the Presidential elections that produce them. And on that terrain, I do think that there's slightly more space for pro-choice politics in the GOP than there is space for pro-life politics in the Democratic Party. The most important abortion votes that the "pro-life" Harry Reid has cast have been his votes against John Roberts, Sam Alito, Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas; no pro-choice Republican Senator took a similar stand against Bill Clinton's high court nominees, needless to say. Meanwhile, it's true that the Republican Presidential primary is inhospitable to pro-choice candidates, but the reverse is true in spades: It's awfully hard to imagine a reliably pro-life Democrat getting the kind of traction that Rudy Giuliani temporarily enjoyed, and even poor daft Dennis Kucinich felt the need to flip-flop on abortion when he ran for President in 2004. Likewise, it's hard to imagine Barack Obama toying with the idea of a staunchly pro-life running mate, the way John McCain seems bent on toying with the idea of Tom Ridge (or even Joe Lieberman) as his veep. And serious GOP presidential contenders generally keep the pro-life lobby at arm's length to a much greater extent that Dems do with NARAL and Planned Parenthood.

There are good political reasons for this disparity: When the abortion debate turns from specific restrictions to the question of whether to uphold or overturn Roe, the ground shifts in the Democrats' favor. But it's a disparity nonetheless: When the stakes are highest and the potential consequences for abortion law are sweeping, as opposed to marginal, the GOP tends to have a weaker litmus test (though a stronger one than the party used to have) on the issue than the Democrats.

Of course how you approach this question depends in large part on your personal biases about abortion. If you're like me, and think that any middle-ground, "compromise" position on abortion would have to entail returning control over abortion policy to the legislative branch, and implementing, at the very least, more European-style restrictions on second and third-trimester abortions, then the GOP looks like a bigger-tent party than the Democrats. But if you're a pro-choicer who believes that the Roe-Casey settlement is already a middle-ground take on abortion - a sensible-centrist alternative to the anti-abortion extremists who would have the government ban the practice and the pro-abortion extremists who would have the government actively promote it - then I suppose that yes, Democrats are going to look like the bigger-tent party.

In any case, the main point of my original post wasn't to argue that the Democrats are way more inflexible than the Republicans; it was just to highlight the Dems' inflexibility in the context of claims from figures like Douglas Kmiec that it's possible to advance a serious pro-life agenda within the Democratic tent. I don't think that there's really any pro-choice equivalent to the handwringing that regularly takes place among pro-life Catholics (and evangelicals, to a lesser extent) over whether they can legitimately vote Democratic, and it was that handwringing that I was addressing - by arguing that yes, pro-lifers can legitimately vote for Democrats, but that such a vote shouldn't be accompanied by self-deception about the compromises that it entails.

Validation

Frankly, if the reliably-ridiculous Linda Hirshman hadn't been inspired to write an absurd attack on Grand New Party, I would have been pretty disappointed.
 

Manzi And His Critics

This Cato Unbound exchange on global warming promises to be stimulating.

Can Conservatives Govern?

Sometimes, yes. Via David Frum (and not, as he points out, the front page of either the Times or the Post), the latest figures show that homelessness dropped by 12 percent between 2005 and 2007, with a particularly sharp decrease in the "chronically homeless" population. As Frum notes, a large share of the credit should probably go to the Bush Administration's homelessness czar, Philip Mangano, whose innovative approach to the problem earned him a profile in the Atlantic four years back:

Mangano believes that many professional activists, though well intentioned, have given up on ending homelessness. They have accepted the problem as intractable and fallen back on social work and handouts as a way to make broken lives more bearable. In doing so, he says, they have allowed "a certain amount of institutionalism" to take root. The Bush Administration proposes to solve the problem by beginning with the hardest cases: the 10 percent who are severe addicts or mentally ill, and consume half of all resources devoted to homeless shelters. Mangano believes that by moving these chronic cases into "supportive housing"--a private room or apartment where they would receive support services and psychotropic medications--the government could actually save money, and free up tens of thousands of shelter beds.

And sure enough, four years later ...

Housing officials say the statistics, which are collected annually from more than 3,800 cities and counties, may reflect better data collection and some variation in the number of communities reporting. But officials also attribute much of the decline to a policy shift promoted by Congress and the administration that has focused federal and local resources on finding stable housing for homeless people suffering from drug addiction, mental illness or physical disabilities, long deemed the hardest to help in the homeless population.

In Grand New Party, we cited the Bush Administration's homelessness policy as a possible bright spot in an otherwise lackluster domestic-policy record, and an example of the sort of "applied neoconservatism" that the Right desperately needs - a politics that seeks ways to reform the welfare state in conservative directions, rather than just me-tooing liberalism or demanding government's abolition. It's good to see at least modest evidence that we were right.

The Table At Aspen

We've been taping The Table here at Aspen, with distinguished guests taking part as well as the usual Atlantic crew. Here are the first two segments of a conversation with C. Daniel Mote, Paul Verkuil, and Michael Bennet, on the subject: "Is Higher Education For Everyone?"

Continue reading "The Table At Aspen" »

Flexibility and Family

I don't want to be that guy who relates everything back to his book, but ... this passage from Russell Shorto's Times piece on fertility in Europe and elsewhere dovetails awfully well with what Reihan and I talk about in Grand New Party vis-a-vis work-life balance, and the sort of policies social conservatives should champion:

Last year the fertility rate in the United States hit 2.1, the highest it has been since the 1960s and higher than almost anywhere in the developed world. Factor in immigration and you have a nation that is far more than holding its own in terms of population. In 1984 the U.S. Census Bureau projected that in the year 2050 the U.S. population would be 309 million. In 2008 it’s already 304 million, and the new projection for 2050 is 420 million.

“Europeans say to me, How does the U.S. do it in this day and age?” says Carl Haub of the Population Reference Bureau in Washington. According to Haub and others, there is no single explanation for the relatively high U.S. fertility rate. The old conservative argument — that a traditional, working-husband-and-stay-at-home-wife family structure produces a healthy, growing population — doesn’t apply, either in the U.S. or anywhere else in the world today. Indeed, the societies most wedded to maintaining that traditional family structure seem to be those with the lowest birthrates. The antidote, in Western Europe, has been the welfare-state model, in which the state provides comprehensive support to couples that want to have children. But the U.S. runs counter to this. Some commentators explain its healthy birthrate in terms of the relatively conservative and religiously oriented nature of American society, which both encourages larger families. It’s also true that mores have evolved in the U.S. to the point where not only is it socially acceptable for fathers to be active participants in raising children, but it’s also often socially unacceptable for them to do otherwise.

But one other factor affecting the higher U.S. birthrate stands out in the minds of many observers. “There’s much less flexibility in the European system,” Haub says. “In Europe, both the society and the job market are more rigid.” There may be little state subsidy for child care in the U.S., and there is certainly nothing like the warm governmental nest that Norway feathers for fledgling families, but the American system seems to make up for it in other ways. As Hans-Peter Kohler of the University of Pennsylvania writes: “In general, women are deterred from having children when the economic cost — in the form of lower lifetime wages — is too high. Compared to other high-income countries, this cost is diminished by an American labor market that allows more flexible work hours and makes it easier to leave and then re-enter the labor force.” An American woman might choose to suspend her career for three or five years to raise a family, expecting to be able to resume working; that happens far less easily in Europe.

If I may wax chauvinistic for a moment, I think the American model is self-evidently better: As Reihan suggests, a more flexible approach to work and childrearing represents a place where feminism and social conservatism don't have to be at odds, and indeed can reinforce each other's insights. This means that to the extent that we should consider doing more, a la Europe, to ease the burdens on working parents, we should be forging pro-family policies that strengthen our existing flexibility - as opposed to expanding the more inflexible, Europe-style policies that effectively penalize women (or men) for taking time off when their children are young, rather than outsourcing their care to strangers and going back to work.

My Big Idea: Supreme Court Supermajorities

Like my colleagues, I'm out at the Atlantic-sponsored Aspen Ideas Festival for the next few days, and last night I attended the opening ceremonies, where a parade of worthies stood up to offer their "big idea" for the week. Matt's already taken note of the evening's most interesting moment: Shelby Steele choosing "the case against white guilt" as his big idea, which led to a certain amount of seat-shifting among the predominantly-liberal audience, who are after all attending a Festival that frequently partakes of precisely the spirit Steele was criticizing. Which is to say: Good on the organizers for having him. (Though I agree with Matt that Steele largely lost me when he concluded by arguing that "white guilt" is largely responsible not only for the failures of affirmative action, but for our military difficulties in Iraq as well.)

Steele was followed to the podium by Sandra Day O'Connor, who delivered rather less memorable remarks about civic engagement, which included her usual bit about how we need more respect for the judiciary and fewer attacks on activist judges in our public life. She seemed like a perfectly nice, perfectly intelligent person, but listening to her I experienced something like the feeling Jim Manzi expresses here: Namely, a mix of annoyance and outrage at how many significant controversies in American life have come down to the question of what Sandra Day O'Connor (and now Anthony Kennedy, of course) thinks about the matter.

With this in mind, here's my big idea for the week. Over the past few years of court-watching, I've gradually moved from supporting some version of Scalia-style originalism to a much more radical judicial minimalism, in which the Court would be obliged to show far greater deference to the other branches of government than either liberal or conservative jurists show today. (I have, of course, no qualifications to argue seriously for any theory of jurisprudence, but set that aside.) Of course, judicial nominees' fine-sounding theories of minimalism have a way of collapsing upon contact with the kind of power the Supreme Court wields, so perhaps we ought to consider enforcing it - for instance, by requiring a supermajority of the Justices (either 6-3 or 7-2) to deem any existing legislation unconstitutional.

Essentially, this model would mean that whenever there are strong arguments on both sides of a given constitutionality question - the sort of situation that produces most of the 5-4, "how will Kennedy vote this time?" decisions - the Court would be forced to defer to the legislative branch. The theory would be that in a polarized Court, if you can't convince at least one Justice who doesn't share your ideological preconceptions to side with you - and there are plenty of recent cases where John Roberts has done exactly that, so it isn't a pipe dream - the issue should be left to the public and their representatives to hash out. (And note that I'm arguing against interest here, because this rule would leave my least-favorite ruling - Roe, decided by 7-2 - in place, while overturning recent decisions - on guns and affirmative action, among others - that I agree with.)

Of course there are all sorts of reasons why this wouldn't work - but hey, it's an Ideas Festival, dammit! I'm just throwing it out there!

Blogging GNP

The nice thing about having a co-author is that he can help shoulder the load of responding to comments on your book - and with that in mind, here's Reihan responding to Ezra Klein, to Ramesh, to Norm Ornstein (by way of Jonah Goldberg), and of course to Rush Limbaugh.

E. Coli Conservatives?

Al Gore, endorsing Obama:

If you care about food safety, if you like a T on your BLT, you know that elections matter. If you bought poisoned lead-filled toys from China or adulterated medicine made in China, if you bought tainted pet food made in China, you know that elections matter. After the last eight years, even our dogs and cats have learned that elections matter.

Sounds like he's been reading Paul Krugman on how Milton Friedman poisoned your food, and Rick Perlstein on "e. coli conservatives." So far the only attempt I've seen to actually quantify the Bush-era decline in food safety belongs to Alex Tabarrok, who pulls up numbers suggesting that, well, it hasn't declined at all. There are obviously a lot of variables at work here, and I wouldn't call Tabarrok's chart dispositive - but I'm curious if there are any actual numbers, as opposed to anecdotes, to support the Gore-Krugman-Perlstein thesis.

The Relevance of ANWR?

Ramesh responds:

I agree that by itself ANWR is not the stuff presidential elections turns on. But widen the lens a little bit and look at energy policy as a whole. A candidate who wanted to allow drilling in ANWR and other restricted areas and opposed increasing energy prices to fight global warming would have, all else equal, a political advantage over a candidate who opposed drilling and supported cap-and-trade. That's what is driving the frustration on the Right with McCain right now, and the political judgment that underlies that frustration seems to me to be correct: He is missing a good opportunity.

Point taken. But McCain's embrace of cap-and-trade didn't happen in a vacuum: It was an attempt, albeit a misguided one, to break with the heads-in-the-sand approach to energy and climate change that far too many conservatives have been taking for far too long. And the right-wing zeal for drilling in ANWR has been part of the problem, not part of the solution: It's licensed conservatives to posture about energy independence while sidestepping the global-warming debate entirely. If the argument for drilling in ANWR were embedded in a broader Jim Manzi-meets-Shellenberger-and-Nordhaus approach to the dual imperatives of cheaper and cleaner energy, then I'd be all for it. But for the most part, that isn't how it's being framed. It's just "drill here, drill now, pay less," full stop. Which is bad policy and bad politics.

McCainomics

My take on McCain's big economic policy speech is over at the Current.

A More Equal Capitalism

Instead of fretting about the isolationist menace, John McCain should consider listening to Jim Manzi.

McCain's Domestic Policy Problem

Ramesh writes:

If he’s the nominee, I actually don’t think repairing relations with conservatives is going to be his biggest problem. His biggest problem is going to be the one that Romney has identified over the last few weeks – he doesn’t seem to care about economics enough to have developed and internalized a compelling message on it, and he isn’t a particularly credible messenger either. He may have a weakness on domestic policy as a whole. He has played a big role on some issues, but typically his interventions have not required a great deal of study. I’m not sure he can pull that off all year.

One irony of the talk-radio right’s antipathy to McCain is that despite all his years of deviationism, if you look at the issues he’s emphasized since comprehensive immigration reform blew up in his face last year, he’s actually hewed as closely as any of his rivals to the “back to basics” line that many movement conservatives have insisted (wrongly, in my view) represents the GOP’s best path forward in the wake of the ’06 debacle. Yes, his heretical views on climate change and sundry other issues have come up here and there, but for the most part, McCain’s been running as the candidate of victory in Iraq, porkbusting at home, and … well, not all that much else.

Continue reading "McCain's Domestic Policy Problem" »

The "Myth" of Welfare Queens

In one of his slew of Republicans-are-racist posts earlier in the year, Paul Krugman wrote, sarcastically:

When [Reagan] went on about the welfare queen driving her Cadillac, and kept repeating the story years after it had been debunked, some people thought he was engaging in race-baiting. But it was all just an innocent mistake.

Of course, there couldn't be a third option - like, say, that Reagan was indulging in his typical fondness for using vivid Reader's Digest-style anecdotes to illustrate his arguments, and that the "welfare queen" story drew on real-life incidents to get at the underlying reality of an easily-abused welfare system, even if the Gipper's details were fuzzy. No, it's racism or nothing.

I thought of the Krugman line while reading (via Rod Dreher) the story of protests in New Orleans over a plan to demolish several public housing complexes. Here's a snippet:

Sharon Jasper, a former St. Bernard complex resident presented by activists Tuesday as a victim of changing public housing policies, took a moment before the start of the City Hall protest to complain about her subsidized private apartment, which she called a "slum." A HANO voucher covers her rent on a unit in an old Faubourg St. John home, but she said she faced several hundred dollars in deposit charges and now faces a steep utility bill.

"I'm tired of the slum landlords, and I'm tired of the slum houses," she said.

Pointing across the street to an encampment of homeless people at Duncan Plaza, Jasper said, "I might do better out here with one of these tents."

Jasper, who later allowed a photographer to tour the subsidized apartment, also complained about missing window screens, a slow leak in a sink, a warped back door and a few other details of a residence that otherwise appeared to have been recently renovated.

If you click through to the story, you'll find a photo of Ms. Jasper's digs, paid for out of the public purse, which in addition to having been recently renovated appear to house an absolutely enormous flat screen television. There was, admittedly, no Cadillac in evidence, so calling her a "welfare queen" is a tad unfair. "Welfare duchess," though, seems like a reasonable term of art ...

Anti-Intellectualism, the Right, and Rudy

David Frum, on populism and anti-intellectualism:

Conservatives have drawn strength from populism. But you can overdo any good thing —and I am beginning to think that on this one, we've zoomed the car into the red zone.

For me, the lights started flashing in 2005, during the battle over the nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court of the United States. Defenders of the president's under-qualified nominee began attacking the concept of qualification. One wrote: "The GOP is not the party which idolizes Ivy League acceptability as the criterion of intellectual and mental fitness. Nor does the Supreme Court ideally consist of the nine greatest legal scholars." Harriet Miers, we were told, had a good Christian heart. That was enough ... In the end, it was not quite enough for Ms. Miers. But it may be enough for many voters in 2008.

The currently front-running candidate in Iowa, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, has built his campaign on a plan to abolish the Internal Revenue Service and replace the federal income tax with a national sales tax ... Economists and tax experts virtually unanimously agree that the plan is beyond unworkable -- that it is downright absurd.

... Just a little lower down in the polls is a libertarian candidate named Ron Paul. Paul is best known for his vehemently isolationist foreign policy views. But his core supporters also thrill to his self-taught monetary views, which amount to a rejection of everything taught by modern economists from Alfred Marshall to Milton Friedman.

Huckabee and Paul have not the faintest idea of what they are talking about. The problem is not that their answers are wrong -- that can happen to anyone. The problem is that they don't understand the questions, and are too lazy or too arrogant to learn.

Fair points all: Huckabee's Fair Tax zeal and Paul's anti-Fed enthusiasm are genuinely foolish; there is a touch of Miers-ish identity politics in the evangelical community's Huckaphilia, and Frum's larger worry about anti-intellectualism in the contemporary Right is one I share in spades. But if you're going to be hard on the current crop of Republican candidates for making bogus claims about public policy, it seems awfully unfair to leave out the candidate given to running ads in which he announces: "I know that reducing taxes produces more revenue. The Democrats don't know that. They don't believe that." (They don't believe it, of course, because in the current fiscal landscape you can't find a serious conservative economist who thinks it's true.) Or penning op-eds in which he explains that "the meaning of fiscal conservatism" includes the principle that "lower taxes can result in higher revenue." Or telling a GOP debate audience, in response to a question about whether we need to raise taxes to fix up our nation's transportation infrastructure, that the way “to do it sometimes is to reduce taxes and raise more money.”

Now it’s true that occasionally Rudy Giuliani hedges his bets (“sometimes,” “can,” and so forth) on this topic, and it’s true as well that he may not actually believe the extreme supply-side talking points he’s spouting, in the way that Huckabee presumably believes in the Fair Tax and Paul in the gold standard. On the other hand, neither of those ideas are likely to serve as the basis for economic policy in the United States any time soon, and both are marginal even within the right-wing coalition; the “tax cuts raise revenue” canard that Giuliani keeps promoting, on the other hand, is a staple of Bush Administration rhetoric and probably the dominant view among movement conservatives. If you’re looking for cases where the Right’s anti-elitism has shaded into outright anti-intellectualism - for cases where, in Frum's words, a GOP politician has deliberately failed to "study the problem, master the evidence, and face criticism" - Giuliani’s frequent channeling of Larry Kudlow seems like at least as telling an example as anything Mike Huckabee and Ron Paul are peddling.

Who Needs Marriage?

A couple weeks ago, remarking on the coexistence of steadily rising illegitimacy with relative social peace over the last decade, Andrew wrote:

... social conservatives have long argued that the breakdown in traditional family structure is the core reason behind other social ills, such as crime. Perhaps it isn't in all social settings. Perhaps living in sin for a while before marriage is actually a social good for some; perhaps lower rates of marriage are not the end of the world - as many victims of awful marriages can attest. Perhaps child-birth outside marriage is not necessarily a bad thing if the relationship is solid and care for the child is secure. Perhaps, in other words, holding the family of the 1950s up as the standard by which all family structure should be measured is not, in fact, very helpful. I don't know, but it seems one obvious inference from the data worth exploring further.

It seems clear from looking at Europe that Andrew's right, up to a point: Child-birth outside marriage doesn't necessarily lead to negative social outcomes "if the relationship is solid and care for the child is secure," which it usually is in countries like Sweden where most children born out of wedlock are still raised in two-parent households. Unfortunately Americans aren't Swedes, and marriage qua marriage tends to be a much more important indicator of well-being, both for children and for parents, in the United States than it does in Europe. Perhaps this will not always be so; perhaps the coexistence, in the 1990s and early Oughts, of falling crime and higher rates of out-of-wedlock births are a leading indicator of the Swedenization of American social norms. But I doubt it, not least because the secondary consequences of family breakdown, persistent inequality and social immobility chief among them, appear to have worsened over the last decade, while support for an expanded welfare state - Swedenization of a different sort! - has risen over the same stretch. It seems more likely that the lesson of the Nineties is that a long economic boom and the end of willfully counterproductive poverty policies can make up for growing social disarray in other areas. And counting on another tech boom or another poverty-fighting reform as successful as the shift from AFDC to TANIF seems like a poor guide to social policy.

All of this is a long way around to noting that the latest numbers on out-of-wedlock births have been released (though they're only receiving attention from immigration opponents, so far as I can tell), and the news is, well, not good: Up among blacks, up among whites, way up among Hispanics. Here's hoping Andrew's right about what this portends, or what it doesn't. But here's betting that he isn't.

The Trouble With Heroic Conservatism, Cont.

I think these remarks from Yuval Levin (in an EPPC discussion of Heroic Conservatism with Michael Gerson and David Brooks) nail the problem as well as anything I said. I'll quote at length:

I think it has to be said that the book is terribly unfair to fiscal conservatives. It treats them as essentially devoid of principle and idealism and lacking concern for the poor. Mike calls them at one point “small minded, cold, and uninspired.” I think ... this dismissive attitude is really a consequence of something more general that’s missing in the vision that’s laid out in Heroic Conservatism ...

For me, this was crystallized most fully in the last chapter of Mike’s book ... where Mike really lays out, more than anywhere else, what he really means by “heroic conservatism.” He begins the chapter…the first sentence of the chapter is, “At various stages in my life, like many idealists of a serious turn of mind, I have dabbled in despair.” And Mike lays out the ways that he’s seen the partial appeal of a kind of conservatism of deep pessimism – of beauty in the twilight. And I think we all have an idea of what he means and of the kind of appeal that [it] sometimes does have. But he writes that in the end, “My skepticism and pessimism have been confounded by my heroes.” And he describes the heroic deeds and the struggles against slavery and tyranny and on behalf of the weak and the needy that make up so much of the rest of this book.

But here I think is the choice that’s presented to us by Mike most clearly: it’s despair or nobility, it’s the lowest or the highest. And I think that this arrangement of the options lays out a profoundly tragic view of life, that even where it’s hopeful, it’s an other-worldly kind of hope, a hope for the suffering and wretched to be redeemed by dramatic acts of heroism. It’s noble and it’s very inspiring, and I think it has to have a place in our politics, but I think that is can’t be the foundation of our politics.

Continue reading "The Trouble With Heroic Conservatism, Cont." »

Dubai Ports Redux

If Lou Dobbs is winning the free trade debate, as David Brooks says, stories like this one aren't going to help matters.

As Goes the Family ...

Those African-American social mobility numbers I mentioned earlier are depressing enough to deserve to be unpacked a little:

Forty-five percent of black children whose parents were solidly middle class in 1968 -- a stratum with a median income of $55,600 in inflation-adjusted dollars -- grew up to be among the lowest fifth of the nation's earners, with a median family income of $23,100. Only 16 percent of whites experienced similar downward mobility. At the same time, 48 percent of black children whose parents were in an economic bracket with a median family income of $41,700 sank into the lowest income group.

If you're looking for a reason to be pessimistic about the future of the American social fabric - and particularly the fabric of working-class life - in the face of a decade's worth of good news, it's right here. Why are African-Americans more likely to be downwardly-mobile than non-blacks? Probably because of two inter-related factors: The weak cultural capital afforded by the black community's disastrous family structure, which in turn reinforces the black-white wealth gap that's a legacy of slavery and segregation. Now consider that the first factor, the decline of marriage and the rise of illegitimacy, is increasingly visible in white and (especially) Hispanic America as well. This raises the possibility that what's true of African Americans today - that they have a hard time making it to prosperity and a harder time staying there - may be true of the rest of working-class America further down the road. The United States as a whole has a higher same out-of-wedlock birth rate at present - around 37 percent as of 2005 - that black America had in the 1960s, when Daniel Patrick Moynihan first sounded the alarm about family dissolution in the African-American community. If that number inches higher, or even if it stays constant, it's going to be harder and harder for working-class Americans to compete in the global economy, and harder, as a result, for them avoid stagnation and downward mobility at home.

As I said, this is a pessimist's forecast, and the pessimists' forecasts of the early 1990s were proven wrong in spite of the steadily rising white and Latino illegitimacy that has characterized the fifteen years since. But the problem is still there, and still real, even though crime and drug abuse and many other negative social indicators have gone into eclipse of late. The U.S. isn't likely to suddenly morph into Scandinavia, which has managed to maintain impressive family stability - and the social stability and economic competitiveness that comes with it - without high marriage rates. Nor are we likely - though never say never, where the U.S. economy is concerned - to enjoy another period of expansion like the Nineties boom. Enormous wealth-generation can (and seemingly did, in the last decade) cover over a variety of social ills, but it's easy to imagine the reverse happening over the next few decades, with the decline of the American family making any era of diminished expectations self-reinforcing, so that the country, as well as its working class, becomes downwardly-mobile over time. This isn't a future we should expect, by any means - but it's a possibility we should be aware of, and one that we should strive to avoid.

I should note, as well, that Reihan's post today on a politics of "infinite demands" dovetails with this pessimistic vision in interesting and not-so-obvious ways.

The Republicans and the Black Vote

Stories like this one, about black evangelicals' flirtation with the GOP, are a reminder that the declining salience of racial politics - which Paul Krugman thinks will deliver the country back to the Democrats - could theoretically end up cutting in the GOP's favor in certain respects, as middle-class, socially-conservative African-American voters become more comfortable with the idea of voting for Republicans. So are blog posts like this one, from Fred Siegel, who notes that even at a moment rife with bad news about downward mobility among African-Americans, old-fashioned racial politics are playing almost no role in the Democratic primary campaign. And so are numbers like these, from a Pew survey on African-American public opinion:

A 53% majority of African Americans say that blacks who don't get ahead are mainly responsible for their situation, while just three-in-ten say discrimination is mainly to blame. As recently as the mid-1990s, black opinion on this question tilted in the opposite direction, with a majority of African Americans saying then that discrimination is the main reason for a lack of black progress.

One of these years, these kind of shifts will produce a spike in the Republican Party's miniscule share of the black vote. But I'm pretty sure that 2008 isn't going to be that year.

Ignorance Isn't Strength

Fred Thompson has a tax plan:

Speaking on Fox News Sunday, the presidential candidate recommended extending President Bush's tax cuts, due to expire in 2010, eliminating the estate tax, repealing the alternative minimum tax and lowering the corporate tax rate to no more than 27 percent from the current 35 percent.

Thompson also said that he would adopt the approach of the conservative Republican Study Committee in the House of Representatives that would offer, as an alternative to the current income tax, a two-rate income tax system stripped of deductions and credits.

Here's Ramesh, in response:

I see two possible problems with this plan. The first is that it would have to be coupled with a plan to restrain spending, or even to cut it, to avoid a large expansion of the deficit. The second is that, as presented, it shifts the tax burden onto parents. Indeed, it shifts it from corporations onto parents. If I were Mike Huckabee or Mitt Romney, I might have something to say about that.

Good points both, but Ol' Fred doesn't buy into that whole "expansion of the deficit" business:

Estimates devised earlier this year by the nonpartisan staff of the Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation indicate that major parts of Thompson's plan would lose at least $2.5 trillion over ten years, nearly as much as the entire federal government is expected to spend this fiscal year.

In the interview, Thompson said such official estimates are often wrong and that his tax cuts would stimulate "growth in the economy" and bring in more revenue than expected.

Obviously, affluent business-class types are deserting the GOP primarily because of its stance on social issues. But I can't help thinking that this sort of transparently bogus supply-side dogmatism - which fits into a larger narrative, sometimes fair and sometimes not, of the Republicans as the know-nothing party - has more than a little to do with it as well. Business-class voters want lower corporate tax rates, sure, but they also want a party that acts like it knows how to manage the economy more generally, particularly as the dollar weakens and the country edges toward recession. And sound economic management would seem to require, at the very least, demonstrating an understanding of basic principles like how tax cuts affect revenue.

If I'm right, this raises the possibility that the party's commitment to supply-side orthodoxy is hurting the GOP coming and going: To savvy business-class voters, the Thompson-style magical thinking it requires makes Republicans look ignorant and untrustworthy; to middle-income families, meanwhile, the emphasis on estate taxes, corporate tax rates and upper-bracket cuts makes the party look out-of-touch with kitchen-table concerns.

But hey - at least it keeps the Club for Growth from bolting to the Democrats.

Race, the GOP, and Paul Krugman

His latest column is yet another broadside in the whole "does race explain the Republican realignment" argument, and as you might expect, it combines convincing specific examples of Republicans playing the race card in the South with totally unconvincing macro-level analysis. For instance, there's this:

... everyone knows that white men have turned away from the Democrats over God, guns, national security and so on. But what everyone knows isn’t true once you exclude the South from the picture. As the political scientist Larry Bartels points out, in the 1952 presidential election 40 percent of non-Southern white men voted Democratic; in 2004, that figure was virtually unchanged, at 39 percent.

First, as Matt has pointed out, the fact that the bulk of the white-male shift occurred in the South doesn't mean that white males were simply changing their party allegiance in response to GOP race-baiting. Most white Southerners were conservatives - on God, gays and guns, among many other issues - who happened to vote for the more liberal party in the '30s and '40s because it was the segregationist party, and once that issue receded, and the Republicans moved rightward, you would have expected them to shift to the more conservative party even in the absence of dog-whistle politics.

More importantly for the sake of this example, 1952 is a really poor baseline to use for comparisons to present-day politics, since it was an exceptional year - a Republican landslide in a Democratic era, created by Eisenhower's celebrity and ostentatious moderation, Truman's unpopularity and Stevenson's mediocrity as a candidate. Ike took 55 percent of the vote to Stevenson's 44 percent, meaning that the GOP vote was much higher than the FDR-to-LBJ norm in almost every demographic category - and for Bush to match Eisenhower's share of the non-Southern white-male vote fifty years later while winning only 51 percent of the vote to Kerry's 48 suggests that conservative have made gains between then and now in that demographic, rather than just treading water as Krugman suggests.

Moreover, even if the Republicans had merely tread water it would still be an impressive achievement, given that a rightward shift - all other things being equal, which they weren't - would have been expected to produce a 1964-style result, in which the GOP consolidated the South and lost ground everywhere else. Arthur Schlesinger famously announced that the results of '64 proved that "if the parties were realigned on an ideological basis ... the Democrats would win every election and the Republicans would lose every election." It was an entirely plausible contention at the time, and Krugman's "race explains everything" narrative doesn't explain why he was proven wrong.

Continue reading "Race, the GOP, and Paul Krugman" »

What Compassionate Conservatism Did

I'm working on a review of Michael Gerson's book, so I basically want to keep my powder dry on the subjects that everyone's talking and talking about. But this, from Matt, seems worth a rejoinder:

It's clear that there's a strain of Republican Party rhetoric that's similar in spirit to the Catholic-inspired Christian Democratic parties of the European center-right. Gerson, both as a speechwriter and as a columnist, clearly falls into that tradition. So, too, for most of his presidency has George W. Bush. And now on the campaign trail Mike Huckabee has taken up that banner.

But what neither Bush nor Huckabee nor anyone else seems to have offered is a policy agenda that cashes the rhetorical checks they're spreading around. If the libertarian tradition in the GOP mostly consists of a free-market agenda that's friendly to the interests of rich people and big companies, the Bushian deviations from the free-market line have overwhelmingly been aimed at advancing lobbyist-friendly policies. Similarly, Mike Huckabee talks a good game about inequality, but his distinctive policy proposal is a massively regressive (and phenomenally stupid) National Retail Sales Tax. There's just no there there. In practice to find Republicans likely to support programs that help poor people, you need to look to the generically "moderate" (i.e., vulnerable) Republicans representing culturally liberal coastal areas — Susan Collins, Gordon Smith, etc. — and Christian Democratic talk remains just that: talk.

I don't entirely agree. Bush did have a pseudo-Christian Democratic policy agenda: It consisted of the faith-based initiatives, No Child Left Behind, the prescription drugs bill, and immigration reform. The first was small potatoes, but the rest weren't small at all. Now it's true that both the prescription drugs bill and the immigration bill were friendly to business interests as well as to seniors and recent immigrants, which is what you'd expect from an administration where both Gerson and Dick Cheney had the President's ear. But there's no inherent contradiction in giving more money to schools or seniors and to corporations (though there's the problem of how you pay for it all); or in helping illegal immigrations toward citizenship and helping businesses keep their supply of cheap labor. And those combinations constitute a large chunk of the Bush domestic-policy record - or the attempted record, in the case of immigration reform.

I should add that I think it's a record that points to a significant problem with any "compassionate" or "big government" or "Christian Democratic" conservatism - the tendency to just co-opt liberal ideas and make them more business-friendly, while leaving anything distinctively conservative by the wayside. But I don't think you say there's no there there and leave it at that.

The New Class Warfare

Maybe it isn't a conscious strategy for the Democrats, but it makes a certain sense: Take from the super-rich, who aren't tax-sensitive, and the pretty-damn-rich, who will probably vote for the GOP no matter what, and give to upper-middle class professionals, a constituency where the Dems have been making inroads for a while now. Greg Mankiw reports, Reihan comments.

Foreign Aid and Tax Credits

Justin Muzinich is a friend of mine, but don't let that dissuade you from reading the very sharp op-ed he's co-penned in today's Times.

Debating RomneyCare

Cato and Heritage discuss how it's working out so far.

Losing the Tax Issue

Ramesh, in today's NYT:

What Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani — who have made the most detailed remarks on taxes of the top-tier candidates — are really saying is that they will make sure that taxes on capital gains, dividends, estates and high earners will stay low. Not many middle-class taxpayers will benefit directly from any of those policies.

... Both Mr. Romney and Mr. Giuliani speak vaguely about making sure the alternative minimum tax doesn’t affect any more middle-class families. That is a step in the right direction. But it isn’t a tax cut.

Mr. Romney has also proposed an initiative to make the return on middle-class savings tax-free. It may also be a step in the right direction, but it’s small change. The primary focus of the Romney and Giuliani tax plans remains high earners.

What would be a serious middle-class tax cut? One answer is to expand the tax credit for children. But none of the candidates is proposing to do so, or any other big tax relief for regular folks. You might think that Mr. Giuliani would want to do everything he can to appeal to social conservatives short of actually becoming one himself. But why should he offer a pro-family tax cut when even the hard-core social conservatives in the race aren’t interested? Mike Huckabee wants a national sales tax and Sam Brownback wants a flat tax. Either proposal would increase taxes on a lot of middle-class families.

The Republicans in Congress are no better. For much of the right, the great passion of the moment is to make sure that the carried interest at hedge funds is taxed at what look an awful lot like preferential rates. For years, liberals have said that Republicans talk about “family values” but won’t do anything to meet the economic needs of families. Right now, on taxes, that charge hits home.

Read the whole thing. I would only add that while smart liberals may not think much of Barack Obama's tax plan, it seems likely to have a lot more mass-market appeal than anything the GOP candidates are proposing.

Update: Reihan adds his two cents here.