Columnist.
The election eve mood is tinged with sadness stemming from well-founded fear that America's new government is subverting America's old character. Barack Obama's agenda is a menu of temptations intended to change the nation's social norms by making Americans comfortable with the degradation of democracy. This degradation consists of piling up public debt that binds unconsenting future generations to finance current consumption.
WASHINGTON -- The death of George McGovern on the eve of the presidential candidates' foreign policy debate underscored a momentous political reversal spanning four decades. McGovern's nomination for president in 1972, a consequence of the Democratic Party's recoil against the Vietnam War and the riotous convention four years earlier, made the country uneasy about his party regarding national security. Four decades later, however, voters may be more ambivalent about America's world role than at any time since the 1930s. Hence the sense of tediousness Monday evening. The candidates -- who really do not differ all that much about foreign policy, although they constantly pretend otherwise -- sort of argued for 90 minutes about matters concerning which most voters do not really care very much, although they occasionally pretend otherwise.
America's bold premise is the possibility of dignified self-government -- people making reasonable choices about restrained appetites. But three decades ago, Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington postulated that America suffers regularly recurring political convulsions because the gap between the premise and reality becomes too wide to ignore.
DALLAS -- In the 1920s, in the wee small hours of the mornings, employees at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas sang while they worked. One, Jack Culpepper, went into vaudeville, where he teamed up with a dance partner named Ginger. They married and performed as "Ginger and Pepper." But show business marriages are perishable, so Ginger Rogers found another dance partner, Fred Astaire. Richard Fisher, president of the Dallas Fed, who calls the legendary dance team "Fed and Ginger," defends the Fed as an institution as vigorously as he questions its current policy. He prefers policies more suited to the Fed as it was before it acquired the burden -- and temptation -- of the dual mandate. Hence his praise for legislation by another Texan, Republican Rep. Kevin Brady.
If in four weeks a president-elect Mitt Romney is seeking a Treasury secretary, he should look here, to Richard Fisher, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. Candidate Romney can enhance his chance of having this choice to make by embracing a simple proposition from Fisher: Systemically important financial institutions (SIFIs), meaning too-big-to-fail (TBTF) banks, are "too dangerous to permit."
WASHINGTON -- When on Jan. 20, 2009, Barack Obama swore to defend the Constitution, he did not mean all of it. He evidently believes that the provision quoted above merely expresses the Framers' now anachronistic anxieties about abuses of executive power. (Jefferson's lengthy catalog of George III's abuses is called the Declaration of Independence.) So on Jan. 4, 2012, Obama simply ignored the Recess Clause. He was in his "We can't wait!" -- for Congress and legality -- mode, as he was when he unilaterally rewrote laws pertaining to welfare, immigration and education. On Jan. 4, he used recess appointments to fill three seats on the National Labor Relations Board, even though the Senate said it was not in recess. Obama's cheeky Humpty Dumpty rejoinder was: *I* decide what "recess" means. Now a court must decide whether the Constitution means what it says.
WASHINGTON -- The presidential campaign, hitherto a plod through a torrent of words tedious beyond words, began to dance in Denver. There a masterfully prepared Mitt Romney completed a trifecta of tasks and unveiled an issue that, because it illustrates contemporary liberalism's repellant essence, can constitute his campaign's closing argument. Barack Obama, knight of the peevish countenance, illustrated William F. Buckley's axiom that liberals who celebrate tolerance of other views always seem amazed that there are other views. Obama, who is not known as a martyr to the work ethic and who might use a teleprompter when ordering lunch, seemed uncomfortable with a format that allowed fluidity of discourse.
WASHINGTON -- In baseball, a game without a clock, each player on a team that is behind by a bunch of runs is advised to "stay within yourself." That baseball lingo means: Do not try to do too much. Instead, get 'em on, get 'em over, get 'em in. There are no five-run home runs. Small, incremental gains matter because the game goes on until someone makes the 27th out. Until then, there is hope. Unfortunately for Mitt Romney, presidential politics is, like football, a game with a clock, one with just five weeks of ticks remaining. In football, a team behind by lots of points late in the game must take gambles. Romney is behind -- in the important swing states, with the national electorate regarding who would best handle the economy and health care, and in national measures of favorable voter perceptions.
The spectacles we persist in dignifying as presidential "debates" -- two-minute regurgitations of rehearsed responses -- often subtract from the nation's understanding. But beginning this Wednesday, these less-than-Lincoln-Douglas episodes might be edifying if the candidates can be inveigled into plowing fresh ground.
RALEIGH, N.C. -- North Carolina is giving Steve Cooksey some choices. He can stop speaking. Or he can get a Ph.D. in nutrition, or a medical degree, or a bachelor's degree in nutrition and then pass an examination after completing a 900-hour clinical internship. Or he can skip this onerous credentialing, keep speaking, and risk prosecution. He has chosen instead to get a lawyer. His case, argued by the libertarians at the Institute for Justice (IJ), will clarify the First Amendment's relevance to an ancient human behavior and a modern technology.
Mia Love, 37, is running against incumbent Democrat Jim Matheson, 52, in a district created when the 2010 census gave a fourth representative to this booming state -- imagine Utah's growth if the federal government did not own 58 percent of the land.
WASHINGTON -- In every year divisible by four, the dominant superstition of American politics -- faith in the magic of presidential words and deeds -- reaches an apogee that feeds national narcissism: Everything that happens anywhere is about us, is a response to something America did or did not do, and can be controlled by a president doing -- even just saying -- something. This self-absorption was evident as Mitt Romney and the Obama administration sparred about violence directed at U.S. facilities in the Middle East and elsewhere. Romney called this the fruit of administration weakness; the administration blamed it on a video. It would require exquisitely precise intellectual calipers to gauge which idea is silliest.
Elaine Huguenin, who with her husband operates Elane Photography in New Mexico, asks only to be let alone. But instead of being allowed a reasonable zone of sovereignty in which to live her life in accordance with her beliefs, she is being bullied by people wielding government power.
KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- Fortunately, not everything is up to date in Kansas City. Esther George, president of the regional Federal Reserve Bank here, is refreshingly retrograde regarding what less-circumspect people welcome as the modernizing of the nation's central bank into a central economic planner. She has concerns, both prudential and philosophical, about the transformation of the Fed in ways that erase the distinction between monetary policy, which is the Fed's proper business, and fiscal policy, which is inherently political. The basic interest rate -- i.e., the federal funds rate minus the inflation rate -- was negative during about 40 percent of the disastrous 1970s and the 2000s, which ended disastrously. Because today's rate is negative, the Fed's stimulus repertoire is reduced to "quantitative easing." That phrase, which is how government speaks when trying not to be understood, means printing money.
WASHINGTON -- With two extravagant entertainments under way, it is instructive to note the connection between the presidential election and the college football season: Barack Obama represents progressivism, a doctrine whose many blemishes on American life include universities as football factories, which progressivism helped to create. Higher education embraced athletics in the first half of the 19th century, when most colleges were denominational and most instruction was considered mental and moral preparation for a small minority -- clergy and other professionals. Physical education had nothing to do with spectator sports entertaining people from outside the campus community. Rather, it was individual fitness -- especially gymnastics -- for the moral and pedagogic purposes of muscular Christianity -- *mens sana in corpora sano*, a sound mind in a sound body.
CHARLOTTE, N.C. -- Four years ago, Barack Obama was America's Rorschach test upon whom voters could project their disparate yearnings. To govern, however, is to choose, and now his choices have clarified him. He is a conviction politician determined to complete the progressive project of emancipating government from the Founders' constraining premises, a project Woodrow Wilson embarked on 100 Novembers ago. As such, Obama has earned what he now receives, the tribute of a serious intellectual exegesis by a distinguished political philosopher. In "I Am the Change: Barack Obama and the Crisis of Liberalism," Charles Kesler of Claremont McKenna College rightly says Obama is "playing a long, high-stakes game." Concerning the stakes, Obama practices prudent reticence, not specifying America's displeasing features that are fundamental. Shortly before the 2008 election, he said only: "We are five days away from fundamentally transforming" America. Tonight, consider Obama's acceptance speech in the context that Kesler gives it in the American political tradition.
With Americans, on average, worth less and earning less than when he was inaugurated, Barack Obama is requesting a second term by promising, or perhaps threatening, that prosperity is just around the corner if he can practice four more years of trickle-down government. This is dubious policy, scattering borrowed money in the hope that this will fill consumers and investors with confidence.
WASHINGTON -- Now begins the final phase of this cognitive dissonance campaign. America's 57th presidential election is the first devoted to calling the nation's bluff. When Mitt Romney selected Paul Ryan, Republicans undertook the perilous but commendable project of forcing voters to face the fact that they fervently hold flatly incompatible beliefs. Twice as many Americans identify themselves as conservative as opposed to liberal. Nov. 6 we will know if they mean it. If they are ideologically conservative but operationally liberal. If they talk like Jeffersonians but want to be governed by Hamiltonians. If their commitment to limited government is rhetorical or actual. If it is, as Daniel Patrick Moynihan suspected, a "civic religion, avowed but not constraining." This is the problem for uneasy Republicans. The Democrats' problem is worse because they are not uneasy about their dissonance, being blissfully unaware of it.
Conventions are the seventh-inning stretches of presidential politics, a pause to consider the interminable prelude and the coming climax. Republicans gathering in Tampa face an unusual election in which they do not have a substantial advantage concerning the most presidential subject, foreign policy.
WASHINGTON -- Because the possibility of effectively supervising government varies inversely with government's size, so does government's lawfulness. This iron law of Leviathan is illustrated by a dispiriting story that begins with the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, aka the stimulus, that supposedly temporary response to an economic emergency. Because nothing is as immortal as a temporary government program, the Communities Putting Prevention to Work (CPPW), a creature of the stimulus, was folded into the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010, aka Obamacare. And the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), working through CPPW, disbursed money to 31 states and the District of Columbia to fight, among other things, the scourge of soda pop.
