Columnist.
Almost exactly two months after Hillary Rodham Clinton's official announcement that she's running for president, she will give her first "official campaign announcement speech," on June 13, according to her Twitter account. In other words, the Clinton campaign wants a do-over. Her first rollout was the most disastrous nonfatal presidential campaign debut in modern memory, so she wants another. Her initial announcement video in April — which most outlets accurately reported as her official announcement — was well done. After that, everything went downhill; a steady stream of news stories and damning allegations about her family foundation and tenure as secretary of state has dogged her almost daily.
"[L]iberals are fond of claiming that Republicans are 'anti-science' on everything."
At a moment when many on the left are desperately trying to conjure up enthusiasm for Hillary Clinton's bid to become the first woman president, others on the left want to turn the word "woman" into a term of exclusion and oppression. This is just one of the more amusing ironies on display as what passes for liberalism today eats itself. No doubt you've heard: Bruce Jenner has become Caitlyn Jenner. I can't muster much outrage about this. If someone born a man wants to live as a woman, or vice versa, they are free to do so as far as I'm concerned. What does bother me is the way everyone is expected to celebrate Jenner's decision and courage. Why can't I just not care? Or, maybe I just don't want to be part of a massive public relations effort tied to the rollout of yet another reality show?
Last week, the Nebraska legislature voted to do away with the death penalty. I think that was a mistake. But that's a conversation for another day. Instead, I want to talk about a lesson we might take from the decision. Charles Murray (my colleague at the American Enterprise Institute) has written a book, "By The People: Rebuilding Liberty Without Permission." The first third of the book is the best diagnosis of America's governmental sickness ever written for the non-specialist. I say "diagnosis," but Murray might call it an autopsy. "The founders' Constitution has been discarded and cannot be restored," Murray writes. The framers never imagined — and would have never consented to — the massive welfare state we have today.
I keep thinking we're done with George Pataki — but like an order of bad clams, he keeps coming back up on me. The three-term Republican governor of a famously blue state seems like a serious 2016 presidential contender on paper — until you read the fine print. Pataki had a promising start. He beat Democratic icon Mario Cuomo in 1994. He cut income taxes 25 percent and trimmed other taxes as well. In his first two years in office, spending went down 2.5 percent. If you had stopped the Pataki show there, he'd be the next Reagan. Similarly, if Napoleon had quit before invading Russia, he'd be remembered very differently, too.
Let's say, just for kicks, you murdered your husband (or wife). Your neighbors have been suspicious ever since your nightly arguments suddenly stopped, right around the time you put something large in your trunk and drove off in the middle of the night. Now they see you driving his car and putting his suits and golf clubs up for sale on eBay. The police find your explanations implausible and contradictory, and then you tell the cops to direct all future questions to your lawyer. The good news is that you have fans. Some neighbors think you're the cat's pajamas. They come to you and say they want to defend you against this terrible accusation. What should you tell them to say on your behalf? Frankly, I don't know what you should say, but I do have a good sense of what you shouldn't say: "Tell them there's no smoking gun."
Mike Huckabee doesn't have a lot of prominent defenders, and I am not volunteering for the job. Huckabee has always struck me as a right-wing populist-progressive. A deeply religious — and by all accounts decent — man, Huckabee nonetheless has a view of the state that would have jibed almost perfectly with such forgotten titans of the Progressive Era as Richard Ely, Josephus Daniels and even William Jennings Bryan. Ely, a mentor to Woodrow Wilson and Teddy Roosevelt and the founder of the "Wisconsin school" of progressivism, believed that "God works through the state in carrying out His purposes more universally than through any other institution." It "is religious in its essence," and "a mighty force in furthering God's kingdom and establishing righteous relations."
There are plenty of reasons to believe 2016 will be a very ugly election year. Here's one more. Bloomberg Politics convened a focus group of Iowa Democrats. Nearly all loved Hillary. "She's a bad mama-jama," said one female participant. Bad mama-jama is good, by the way. The woman explained that Clinton is "not afraid to step up" or "afraid to say, 'No. I don't want to do it that way. I'm going to do it this way.'" Another participant insisted that Clinton is a "better woman than I am" — a great standard for selecting a president, to be sure — because of Clinton's ability to weather various scandals and humiliations. The awkward part came when Bloomberg's Mark Halperin asked the room, "What did she accomplish that you consider significant as secretary of state?"
By now everyone has had their say about Jeb Bush's terrible, horrible, no good, very bad week. The consensus is that Bush misheard Megyn Kelly's "knowing what we know now" question about the Iraq war. I'm not convinced. Politicians routinely answer the question they wish they were asked rather than the question they were actually asked. Indeed, those are the only kinds of questions some politicians — particularly ones with the last name Clinton — ever answer. The question Fox News' Kelly asked is the tougher one, at least for Bush, so perhaps he opted to answer in a way that let him take a shot at Hillary Clinton, who also supported the war? But it doesn't matter. Bush should have murder-boarded every possible variant of that question. His team should have run drills on it, as if he were prepping for a presidential debate. And, he should have given a speech specifically about the Iraq war months ago to inoculate himself against all of this.
These are not good times for the Republic (and if you laughed or scratched your head at me calling America a republic, I rest my case). But they are amusing times, at least for those of us capable of extracting some measure of mirth and schadenfreude from the president's predicament. With the sand running out on the Obama presidency, it's finally dawning on the president's friends and fans that he can be a real jerk. Consider the Washington Post's Dana Milbank. For the last six years, he's spent much of his time rolling his eyes and sneering at Republicans. His subspecialty is heaping ridicule on conservative complaints about, well, everything and anything. If it bothers conservatives, it must be irrational, partisan, churchy, fake, hypocritical — or all of the above. Meanwhile, poor Barack Obama, while not always without fault in Milbank's eyes, is the grown-up, the good guy trying to do good things amidst a mob of malcontents and ideologues.
Imagine it's 2007 and a prominent journalist is interviewing then-Sen. Barack Obama. "Senator, people are really interested in you and your identity. I just wanted to ask you as a historical matter, when you filled out your application to Columbia, to Harvard Law School, did you list yourself as an African-American?" Imagine he pressed further. Do you have a favorite traditional black food? Who's your favorite African-American performer? It's a safe bet that journalist would be lucky to have a job today as a greeter at Wal-Mart. Mark Halperin isn't in danger of losing his job — nor should he be — even though he did pretty much question Texas Sen. Ted Cruz that way last week.
Why aren't liberals offering Pamela Geller a federal subsidy? Geller is the blogger-activist who organized the "Draw Muhammad" exhibition in Garland, Texas, which inspired some DIY jihadists to attack the event. The would-be terrorists chose poorly: They were cut down by Texas lawmen shortly after wounding a security guard. Let's hop in the WayBack Machine for a moment. In 1986, the National Endowment of Arts paid about $20,000 for Andreas Serrano's "Piss Christ." Serrano peed in a glass, plunked a plastic icon of Jesus on the cross into it and then snapped a picture. I will say the lighting was lovely. But, as strange as it seemed to the "arts community," some people were offended.
"If absolute power corrupts absolutely," the actor Harry Shearer once asked, "does absolute powerlessness make you pure?" The answer, according to a lot of people, is yes. Upon receiving the George Polk Career Award last month, Gary Trudeau, the creator of the satirical comic strip Doonesbury, attacked the staff of the French magazine Charlie Hebdo: "By punching downward, by attacking a powerless, disenfranchised minority with crude, vulgar drawings closer to graffiti than cartoons, Charlie wandered into the realm of hate speech, which in France is only illegal if it directly incites violence. Well, voilà — the 7 million copies that were published following the killings did exactly that, triggering violent protests across the Muslim world."
Neighborhoods matter. That's the upshot of two fascinating new studies from Harvard economist Raj Chetty and his colleagues. In the 1990s, the federal government launched an experiment, called the Moving to Opportunity project. It created a lottery for housing vouchers that would allow the winners to move out of high-poverty neighborhoods into low-poverty ones. The project's initial findings were a disappointment for people — like me — who argue that culture matters quite a lot. It did find that neighborhood poverty was a big factor in determining economic mobility, but researchers saw little evidence that getting poor people out of poor communities and into thriving ones helped them all that much. But Chetty et al. revisited the data, looking at how a move affected young children. The changes were enormous. The earlier kids got out of impoverished neighborhoods, the better they did over their lifetimes.
For the last 20 years, give or take another 50, one of the most cherished baubles of Beltway conventional wisdom has been that the Republican Party has moved too far to the right. We'll come back to that in a moment. Another beloved trinket in the nest of notions that make up elite groupthink is that liberals not only haven't moved left, but they aren't even liberals at all. A week doesn't go by without Barack Obama insisting that he's merely a pragmatist and problem-solver, with nary an ideological ax to grind. Shortly after he was re-elected, Obama told David Gregory, then the host of "Meet the Press," the obvious takeaway of his presidency is that, "I'm not driven by some ideological agenda. I'm a pretty practical guy and I just want to make sure that things work."
I once had a boss who gave me some great advice, not just for managing people but for judging politicians: You forgive mistakes; you punish patterns. Everybody screws up. But if someone won't learn from his mistakes and try to correct his behavior, then he either doesn't think it was a mistake, he just doesn't care or he thinks you're a fool. The one indisputable takeaway from Peter Schweizer's new book, "Clinton Cash," is that Bill and Hillary Clinton fit one or all of those descriptions. Let us recall Marc Rich, a shady billionaire indicted for tax evasion and defying trade sanctions with Iran during the U.S. hostage crisis. Rich fled to Switzerland to escape prosecution. He hired Jack Quinn, a former Clinton White House counsel, to lobby the administration for a pardon. Quinn sought help from then-Deputy Attorney General Eric Holder, who advised Quinn to petition the White House directly — advice Holder later regretted. On the last day of his presidency, Bill Clinton pardoned Rich.
How should one think about the unfolding allegations rocking the Clinton Industrial Complex (which includes both her campaign and her foundation)? By now, you may have heard about Peter Schweizer's book, "Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich." The book isn't even out yet, and Clinton's team is already sheltering in place like Churchill's cabinet during the Blitz. That's in part because Schweizer, a conservative author and dogged investigative journalist, has teamed up with notorious right-wing rags The New York Times and The Washington Post to essentially re-report and expand on allegations made in the book.
Former Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley is thinking about running for president on the Democratic ticket by appealing to Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren's populist fans. Warren is a very bright former Harvard law professor. So it is interesting that O'Malley thinks the best way to reach out to her fans is to say remarkably stupid things. Steve Inskeep, host of NPR's "Morning Edition," recently interviewed O'Malley, asking him to respond to something GOP presidential contender Sen. Marco Rubio had said. Inskeep: "[Rubio] argues that an active government actually keeps people frozen at their economic status because if you are well off, if you can afford a lawyer, if you can deal with regulations, you can maneuver through government and stay prosperous. And if you are not so well off, it's harder to work the system. Is there some truth to that? You were a big-city mayor; you know how government works."
So far, of the declared candidates for president, the only one who voted for the Iraq War is the Democrat. I recently made that observation on Twitter and the response was instructive. I will refrain from reprinting the more piquant language from Hillary Clinton's supporters, but one common theme was that I am a fool. Sens. Ted Cruz, Rand Paul and Marco Rubio weren't in the Senate for the Iraq war vote, many shrieked. Well, exactly. In case you haven't been paying attention, you might be interested to know that the Iraq War was not popular, especially among Democrats. If you had to pick a single position that allowed Barack Obama to pull ahead in the 2008 Democratic primaries, his opposition to the war would almost certainly be it.
In news only slightly more surprising than this morning's sunrise, Hillary Rodham Clinton announced she is running for president again. The announcement came in the form of a clever video in which Clinton says she wants to be a champion for "everyday Americans" -- an obviously focus-grouped term intended to replace "middle class." I like it, but unless they're very careful, "everyday" has a condescending tinge that could backfire (synonyms include: "dull," "unexceptional" and "commonplace"). One can already imagine a "Saturday Night Live" version of Clinton looking out the window of her private jet: "Wow, those everyday Americans look like ants down there."
