Columnist.
NEWPORT, R.I. -- Scholars at the Naval War College here probably nodded in vigorous agreement with a recent lecture delivered at another military institution 130 miles away. Speaking at West Point to leaders of tomorrow's Army, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said "any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should 'have his head examined,' as General MacArthur so delicately put it." This underscored Gates' point that "the most plausible, high-end scenarios for the U.S. military are primarily naval and air engagements -- whether in Asia, the Persian Gulf, or elsewhere." Here at this 127-year old college, where the American practice of war-gaming began in 1887, the faculty members are professional worriers, especially about Asia, meaning China. Its naval doctrines, procurements and deployments invite inferences about its geopolitical intentions. Faculty members were interested that when Libya descended into chaos, China sent a frigate through the Suez Canal to be in position to assist Chinese nationals in distress. This was the first time the People's Republic had positioned a high-end combatant ship for a possible evacuation.
WASHINGTON -- When the Supreme Court considers whether Congress has the constitutional power to compel individuals to buy health insurance, the argument supporting Congress may rest on a non sequitur and a semantic fiat. A judge's recent ruling argues that the insurance mandate must be constitutional because Obamacare would collapse without it. A forthcoming law review article agrees with this and with the judge's idea that, regarding commerce, being inactive is an activity. Obamacare does indeed require the mandate: Because the law requires insurance companies to sell coverage to people regardless of their pre-existing conditions, many people might delay buying insurance until they become sick. But is the fact that the mandate is crucial to the law's functioning dispositive?
WASHINGTON -- In September 1941, Japan's leaders had a question for Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto: Could he cripple the U.S. fleet in Hawaii? Yes, he said. Then he had a question for the leaders: But then what? Following an attack, he said, "I shall run wild considerably for the first six months or a year, but I have utterly no confidence" after that. Yamamoto knew America: He had attended Harvard and been naval attache in Japan's embassy in Washington. He knew Japan would be at war with an enraged industrial giant. The tide-turning defeat of Japan's navy at the Battle of Midway occurred June 7, 1942 -- exactly six months after Pearl Harbor.
WASHINGTON -- If pessimism is not creeping on little cat's feet into Republicans' thinking about their 2012 presidential prospects, that is another reason for pessimism. This is because it indicates they do not understand that sensible Americans, who pay scant attention to presidential politics at this point in the electoral cycle, must nevertheless be detecting vibrations of weirdness emanating from people associated with the party. The most recent vibrator is Mike Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas who won the 2008 Republican caucuses in Iowa and reached that year's national convention with more delegates than Mitt Romney, and might run again. Huckabee, now a Fox News host, was asked by Steve Malzberg, a talk radio host, this:
WASHINGTON -- During his first 18 years in Congress, the view from Lamar Smith's office was of a parking lot. Now, in his 13th term, he looks out upon the Capitol dome. Seniority confers perquisites. Today he chairs the House Judiciary Committee that has custody of the immigration issue. When first elected, his Texas district -- then 42,000 square miles, five times larger than Massachusetts -- included 400 miles of the border with Mexico. His district has meandered north and now is 150 miles from the border. It includes portions of San Antonio and Austin. But Smith still looks south, toward the flow of illegal immigration, which he considers a uniquely comprehensive problem, affecting schools, health care, employment and the culture.
WASHINGTON -- For Princetonians, the senior thesis is a high hurdle before graduation. For Wendy Kopp, class of 1989, it became a career devoted to transforming primary and secondary education. What began as an idea for a teacher corps for hard-to-staff schools, urban and rural, became Teach for America. At first it was merely a leavening ingredient in education; it has become a template for transformation. Back then, Kopp's generation was stigmatized by journalistic sociology as "the 'me' generation" composed of materialists eager to be recruited into careers of quick self-enrichment. She thought the problem was not her peers but the recruiters. So she became one.
MADISON, Wis. -- Hitherto, when this university town and seat of state government applauded itself as "the Athens of the Midwest," the sobriquet suggested kinship with the cultural glories of ancient Greece. Now, however, Madison resembles contemporary Athens. This capital has been convulsed by government employees sowing disorder in order to repeal an election. A minority of the minority of Wisconsin residents who work for government (300,000 of them) are resisting changes to benefits that most of Wisconsin's 5.6 million residents resent financing.
WASHINGTON -- The wrestling room at Graham High School in St. Paris, Ohio, where Jim Jordan, now 47, began the athletic career that took him to the University of Wisconsin and two NCAA wrestling championships, contains this sign: "Discipline is doing what you don't want to do when you don't want to do it." Today, as a third-term congressman from Ohio and chairman of the Republican Study Committee, Jordan leads what looks like an ongoing insurgency to discipline his party's leadership in the House of Representatives. The RSC is the caucus of the most conservative Republicans in the House. Its members are determined to find whether their party's frugality is operational or merely rhetorical. Jordan is serenely confident that those in the caucus mean what they say.
WASHINGTON -- At first, the banquet audience at the 38th annual Conservative Political Action Conference paid Mitch Daniels, Indiana's Republican governor, the conventional compliment of frequently, almost reflexively, interrupting his address with applause. But as they realized they were hearing something unconventional -- that they were being paid the rare compliment of being addressed as reflective adults -- they reciprocated his respect with quiet attention to his elegant presentation of conservatism for grown-ups.
WASHINGTON -- Tall, affable Buck McKeon sits, gavel in hand, at the turbulent intersection of two conflicting Republican tendencies. The chairman of the House Armed Services Committee embodies the party's support for a "strong" defense, which is sometimes measured simply by the size of the Pentagon's budget. But the 35 Republicans on his 62-member committee include 13 first-term legislators, some of whom embody the tea party's zeal for cutting government spending. The United States spends almost as much on military capabilities as the rest of the world spends, and at least six times more than the second-biggest spending nation (China). But McKeon says, "A defense budget in decline portends an America in decline." And: "I've been around a long time and I've seen us cut defense investments over the years after wars. ... But I've never before seen us make cuts during a war. Cuts to defense investment in the midst of two wars is unacceptable." Asked, however, about the immediate future of the defense budget, he says, after a long pause: "It's probably going to be smaller."
WASHINGTON -- Sixty years ago, American politics was embittered by an accusation couched as a question: "Who lost China?" The implied indictment was that America had fumbled away a possession through incompetence or sinister conniving. In 1949, when communists came to power there, America bestrode both hemispheres shattered from war. Americans thought their nation was at the wheel of the world and that whatever happened, wherever, happened at America's instigation, or at least its sufferance, or was evidence of American negligence.
In 1997, when Republicans controlled the U.S. House of Representatives and John Kasich chaired the Budget Committee, he set his sights on the GOP's 2000 presidential nomination because "there just aren't enough hours left in my life that I can get everything done that I want to get done." He was 44.
In 1994, when Rick Santorum was a second-term Pennsylvania congressman seeking a U.S. Senate seat, a columnist asked him how he was going to win. "Guns," he replied serenely. Pennsylvania's legions of deer hunters do not use assault weapons, which President Bill Clinton was trying to ban, but the hunters suspected that this, like Clinton's wife's health care plan, reflected a pattern of assaults on liberty.
WASHINGTON -- Disregard Barack Obama's rhetorical cotton candy about aspiring to be transformative. He is just another practitioner of reactionary liberalism and champion of a government unchastened by its multiplying failures. The word "entitlements" was absent from his nearly 7,000-word State of the Union address -- a $183 million speech that meandered for 61 minutes as the nation's debt grew $3 million a minute. He exhorted listeners to "win the future" by remembering the past.
WASHINGTON -- What America needs, says one American parent, is more parents who resemble South Korean parents. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, 46, a father of a third-grader and a first-grader, recalls the answer Barack Obama got when he asked South Korean President Lee Myung-bak, "What is the biggest education challenge you have?" Lee answered: "Parents are too demanding." They want their children to start learning English in first rather than second grade. Only 25 percent of U.S. elementary schools offer any foreign-language instruction. Too many American parents, Duncan says, have "cognitive dissonance" concerning primary and secondary schools: They think their children's schools are fine, and that schools that are not fine are irredeemable. This, Duncan says, is a recipe for "stasis" and "insidious paralysis." He attempts to impart motion by puncturing complacency and picturing the payoff from excellence.
WASHINGTON -- America is a creedal nation and the creed is, as Robert Penn Warren wrote, the "burr under the metaphysical saddle of America." It is a recurring source of national introspection, discontent, self-indictment and passionate politics. We are in the midst of a recurrence. The tone of today's politics was anticipated and is vindicated by a book published 30 years ago. The late Samuel Huntington's "American Politics: The Promise of Disharmony" (1981) clarifies why it is a mistake to be alarmed by today's political excitements and extravagances, a mistake refuted by America's past.
WASHINGTON -- It takes a worried man to sing a worried song, and in a recent speech that seemed like Larry Summers' swan song, the president's departed economic adviser warned that America is "at risk of a profound demoralization with respect to government." He fears a future in which "an inadequately resourced government performs badly, leading to further demands that it be cut back, exacerbating performance problems, deepening the backlash, and creating a vicious cycle." The idea that America's problem of governance is one of inadequate resources misses this lesson of the last half-century: No amount of resources can prevent government from performing poorly when it tries to perform too many tasks, or particular tasks for which it is inherently unsuited.
WASHINGTON -- Unlike most of the 111 that preceded it, the 112th Congress must begin the process of restoring the national regime and civic culture the Founders bequeathed. This will require reviving the rule of law, reasserting the relevance of the Constitution, and affirming the reality of American exceptionalism. Many congressional Republicans, and surely some Democrats with institutional pride, think Congress is being derogated and marginalized by two developments. One is the apotheosis of the presidency as the mainspring of the government and the custodian of the nation's soul. The second is the growing autonomy of the regulatory state, an apparatus responsive to presidents.
WASHINGTON -- It would be merciful if, when tragedies such as Tucson's occur, there were a moratorium on sociology. But respites from half-baked explanations, often serving political opportunism, are impossible because of a timeless human craving and a characteristic of many modern minds. The craving is for banishing randomness and the inexplicable from human experience. Time was, the gods were useful. What is thunder? The gods are angry. Polytheism was explanatory. People postulated causations.
WASHINGTON -- Consensus is scarce but almost everyone agrees with this: The government is dysfunctional and the Internet is splendid. But last month, the Democratic-controlled Federal Communications Commission, on a partisan 3-2 vote, did what a federal court says it has no power to do: It decided to regulate the Internet in the name of "net neutrality." The next morning, a man who can discipline the FCC said: Well, we'll just see about that. "We are going to be a dog to the Frisbee on this issue."
