Columnist.
Someone who is determined to disbelieve something can manage to disregard an Everest of evidence for it. So Barack Obama will not temper his enthusiasm for increased equality with lucidity about the government's role in exacerbating inequality. In the movie "Animal House," Otter, incensed by the expulsion of his fraternity, says: "I think this situation absolutely requires a really futile and stupid gesture." Such thinking gives us minimum wage increases that do very little for very few. Meanwhile, there are farm bills, like the one Obama signed last month at Michigan State University.
In September 1958, a future columnist, then 17, was unpacking as a college freshman when upperclassmen hired by tobacco companies knocked on his dormitory door, distributing free mini-packs of cigarettes. He and many other aspiring sophisticates became smokers. Six years later -- 40 years ago: Jan. 11, 1964 -- when the Surgeon General published the report declaring tobacco carcinogenic, more than 40 percent of American adults smoked. Today, when smoking is considered declassee rather than sophisticated, fewer than one-fifth do. In June 1971, a New York couple decided their Bon Vivant brand vichyssoise tasted strange so they put aside their bowls, too late. Within hours he was dead and she was paralyzed from botulism poisoning. And within a month Bon Vivant was bankrupt, proof of the power of health-related information to change Americans' behavior.
What's been said of confession -- that it is good for one's soul but bad for one's reputation -- can also be true of testifying to Congress, so Lois Lerner has chosen to stay silent. Hers, however, is an eloquent silence. The most intrusive and potentially most punitive federal agency has been politicized; the IRS has become an appendage of Barack Obama's party. Furthermore, congruent with exhortations from some congressional Democrats, it is intensifying its efforts to suffocate groups critical of progressives, by delaying what once was the swift, routine granting of tax-exempt status.
One hundred years after a spark in Central Europe ignited a conflagration from which the world has not yet recovered and from which Europe will never recover, armed forces have crossed an international border in Central Europe, eliciting this analysis from Secretary of State John Kerry: "It's a 19th century act in the 21st century. It really puts at question Russia's capacity to be within the G8." Although this "19th century act" resembles many 20th century (and 16th, 17th and 18th century) acts, it is, the flabbergasted Kerry thinks, astonishing in the 21st century, which he evidently supposes to be entirely unlike any other. What is more disconcerting -- that Kerry believes this? Or that his response to Putin's aggression is to question Russia's "capacity" -- Kerry means fitness -- for membership in the G8?
In today's unforgiving politics, both parties often think: "If at first you don't succeed, don't darken our door again." Ken Buck, however, had another idea. In 2010, he peeved national Republican leaders by seeking the Colorado party's Senate nomination against a candidate preferred by those leaders. He won the primary but maladroit campaigning erased his mid-October lead against Democrat Michael Bennet, who won the election -- and now is chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. Last Wednesday, Buck complicated Bennet's task of helping Democrats retain control of the Senate.
The many jaundiced assessments of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act on the fifth anniversary of its enactment were understandable, given that the sluggish recovery, now drowsing through the second half of its fifth year, is historically anemic. Still, bleak judgments about the stimulus spending miss the main point of it, which was to funnel a substantial share of its money to unionized, dues-paying, Democratic-voting government employees. Hence the stimulus succeeded. So there. This illustrates why it is so sublime to be a liberal nowadays. Viewed through the proper prism, most liberal policies succeed because they can hardly fail. Each achieves one or both of two objectives -- making liberals feel good about themselves and being good to liberal candidates.
One hundred years ago this coming Aug. 4, the day Britain declared war on Germany, socialists in the German Reichstag voted for credits to finance the war. Marxists -- including Lenin, who that day was in what now is Poland -- were scandalized. Marx had preached that the proletariat has no fatherland, only a transnational class loyalty to proletarians everywhere. "In 1918," wrote Louis Fischer, Lenin's best biographer, "patriotism and nationalism, born of the 'subjectivism' Lenin so disliked, were ideological crimes in Soviet Russia." These are history-shaping virtues in Ukraine today. Because the nation-state is the necessary framework for durable political liberty, nationalism is a necessary, although insufficient, impulse sustaining liberty. Marx, whose prophesies were perversely predictive because they were almost invariably wrong, predicted the end of nationalism. Economic forces, he said, determine political, cultural and psychological realities. So capitalism, with its borders-leaping cosmopolitanism, would dilute to the point of disappearance all emotional attachments to nations. Ukraine's ferment is an emphatic, albeit redundant, refutation of Marxism.
This year's most important election will not occur in November, when more than 90 million votes will be cast for governors and national legislators. The most important election, crucial to an entire region's economic well-being and to the balance of the nation's political competition, has already occurred. Last week, at a Tennessee factory, workers rejected representation by the United Auto Workers union. The 712-626 vote -- an 89 percent turnout -- against unionizing the 3-year-old Chattanooga Volkswagen plant was a shattering defeat for the UAW, for organized labor generally, and for liberalism nationally. It was a commensurate victory for entrepreneurial federalism.
Distilled to their discouraging essence, Republicans' reasons for retreating from immigration reform reflect waning confidence in American culture and in the political mission only Republicans can perform -- restoring America's economic vigor. Without this, the nation will have a dismal future only Democrats can relish: government growing in order to allocate scarce opportunity. Many Republicans say addressing immigration will distract from a winning focus on Obamacare. But a mature party avoids monomania, and Obamacare's manifold defects are obvious enough that voters will not require nine more months of reminders. Many Republicans say immigration policy divides their party. If, however, the party becomes a gaggle of veto groups enforcing unanimities, it will become what completely harmonious parties are: small.
Many "Downton Abbey" watchers are nostalgia gluttons who grieved when Lord Grantham lost his fortune in Canadian railroad shares. There are, however, a discerning few whose admirable American sensibilities caused them to rejoice about Grantham's loss: "Now perhaps this amiable but dilettantish toff will get off his duff and get a job." This drama's verisimilitude extends to emphasizing that his lordship had a fortune to squander only because he married an American heiress. By battening on what they disdained, this republic's commercial culture, many British aristocrats could live beyond their inherited means -- actual work being, of course, unthinkable.
Barack Obama, the first president shaped by the celebratory culture in which every child who plays soccer gets a trophy, and the first whose campaign speeches were his qualification for the office, perhaps should not be blamed for thinking that saying things is tantamount to accomplishing things, and that good intentions *are* good deeds. So, his presidency is useful after all, because it illustrates the perils of government run by believers in magic words and numbers. The last progressive president promised Model Cities, with every child enjoying a Head Start en route to enjoying an Upward Bound into a Great Society. Today's progressive president also uses words -- and numbers -- magically emancipated from reality.
Because it is this year's first federal election, attention must be paid to the March 11 voting to fill the congressional seat vacated by the death in October of Florida Republican C.W. "Bill" Young, who served in Congress 43 years. If Democrat Alex Sink wins, the significance will be minimal because she enjoys multiple advantages. Hence if Republican David Jolly prevails, Republicans will construe this as evidence that Barack Obama has become an anvil in the saddle of every Democratic candidate. Matters are, however, murky. Tip O'Neill's axiom that "all politics is local" has been rendered anachronistic by the national government that liberals such as O'Neill created. Today's administrative state touches everyone everywhere, so all politics is partly national. Politics in Florida's 13th Congressional District today concerns the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP).
"There is a certain relief in change, even though it be from bad to worse; as I have found in traveling in a stage coach, that it is often a comfort to shift one's position and be bruised in a new place." -- Washington Irving Rep. Chris Gibson has tested Irving's theory. Gibson, whose closely cropped graying hair announces his Army pedigree, believes he should be in the Guinness Book of Records for having moved so swiftly -- in 10 months -- from membership in America's most admired to its least admired institution. On March 1, 2010, he ended a 24-year military career and on Nov. 2 was elected to Congress. This fall, he will participate in perhaps the year's most interesting congressional contest.
Someone you probably are not familiar with has filed a suit you probably have not heard about concerning a four-word phrase you should know about. The suit could blow to smithereens something everyone has heard altogether too much about, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (hereafter, ACA). Scott Pruitt and some kindred spirits might accelerate the ACA's collapse by blocking another of the Obama administration's lawless uses of the Internal Revenue Service. Pruitt was elected Oklahoma's attorney general by promising to defend states' prerogatives against federal encroachments and today he and some properly litigious people elsewhere are defending a state prerogative that the ACA explicitly created. If they succeed, the ACA's disintegration will accelerate.
As undignified as it is unedifying and unnecessary, the vulgar State of the Union circus is again at our throats. The document that the Constitutional Convention sent forth from Philadelphia for ratification in 1787 was just 4,543 words long, but this was 17 too many. America would be a sweeter place if the Framers had not included this laconic provision pertaining to the president: "He shall from time to time give to the Congress information of the state of the union." "Information"? Not exactly.
Disabusing the Republican Party of a cherished dogma, thereby requiring it to forgo a favorite rhetorical trope, will not win Clark M. Neily III the gratitude of conservatives who relish denouncing "judicial activism." He, however, and his colleagues at the libertarian Institute for Justice believe America would be more just if judges were less deferential to legislatures. In "Terms of Engagement: How Our Courts Should Enforce the Constitution's Promise of Limited Government," Neily says America is not "a fundamentally majoritarian nation in which the ability to impose one's will on others through law is a sacred right that courts should take great pains not to impede." America's defining value is not majority rule but individual liberty.
The Democratic party is the party of government because it embraces a proposition it has done much to refute -- that government is a nimble, skillful social engineer -- and because government employees are a significant component of the party's base and of its financial support through government employees unions. Franklin Roosevelt, architect of the modern party, believed unionization would be inappropriate in the public sector. Today's party, however, aggressively uses government coercion to create supposed "government employees" from whom unions can extract money, some of it for the party. On Tuesday, the Supreme Court will hear arguments about whether the Illinois government's policy of herding home-care workers into unions violates the workers' First Amendment rights. It does.
Viewed from Washington, which often is the last to learn about important developments, opposition to the Common Core State Standards Initiative still seems as small as the biblical cloud that ariseth out of the sea, no larger than a man's hand. Soon, however, this education policy will fill a significant portion of the political sky. The Common Core represents the ideas of several national organizations (of governors and school officials) about what and how children should learn. It is the thin end of an enormous wedge. It is designed to advance in primary and secondary education the general progressive agenda of centralization and uniformity.
Constitutional arguments that seem as dry as dust can have momentous consequences. On Monday, the Supreme Court's nine fine minds will hear oral arguments about the meaning of "the" and "happen." What they decide could advance the urgent project of reining in rampant executive power. "The president," says the Constitution, "shall have the power to fill up all vacancies that may *happen* during *the* recess of the Senate" (emphasis added). Monday's case concerns whether Barack Obama made recess appointments when the Senate was not in recess, and made them to fill vacancies that did not happen during a recess.
The era of Gesture Liberalism is at hand. It may be more amusing than consequential. Americans who exercise consumer sovereignty wherever Barack Obama still tolerates it are constantly disappointing him. For generations they persisted in buying what he calls "substandard" policies from what he calls "bad apple" health insurers. They stopped only when he forced them to stop -- when he rescued them from their ignorance by banning their benighted preferences.
