Columnist.
Some columnists write New Year's columns chronicling the mistakes over the last year. I don't, but as this January has rolled on, it's become clear I've made many about the 2016 presidential race. One is that I assumed Mitt Romney and Jeb Bush wouldn't run. Now it seems both are. I thought that Romney would not mistake the affection Republicans have shown for his debate performances and now-vindicated criticisms of President Obama's foreign policy for a yearning for a third Romney candidacy. Evidently he has. And I thought that Bush would be deterred by concerns about his family, business ties and his rustiness (his last campaign was in 2002). I thought he would be deterred by the unease over nominating the son and brother of former presidents and the overshadowing, for many Republicans, of his fine conservative record as governor by his stands on immigration and Common Core. Wrong again.
Public policymakers and political pundits tend to focus on problems -- understandably, because if things are going right they aren't thought to need attention. Yet positive developments can teach us things as well, when, for reasons not necessarily clear, great masses of people start to behave more constructively. One such trend is the better behavior of the young Americans of today compared to those 25 years ago. Almost no one anticipated it, the exception being William Strauss and Neil Howe in their 1991 book, "Generations," who named Americans born after 1981 the Millennial generation and predicted that "the tiny boys and girls now playing with Lego blocks" -- and those then still unborn -- would become "the nation's next great Civic generation."
It's not in the printed text, but the most revealing words in President Obama's seventh State of the Union address came near the end. After the scripted line, "I have no more campaigns to run," elicited Republican applause, Obama ad libbed, "I know, because I won both of them." Thus the last quarter of Obama's presidency resembles the first quarter, when he shut off discussion with House Republicans by saying, "I won." But his second winning percentage was lower than his first -- the only American president of which that can be said -- and the House now has a record and the Senate a near-record Republican majority. The first half of Obama's speech was a deft attempt to, as he said, "turn the page." The year 2014, he said, was "a breakthrough year for America," the economy was finally growing at a respectable rate and U.S. troop deployments in war zones are nearly down to zero.
What caused the financial crisis? How can we prevent another one from happening again? The answers you most often hear to those questions are (1) greed and deregulation and (2) the Dodd-Frank law. But they're patently inadequate. Greed -- or the desire for monetary gain -- has always been with us and always will be. And no one has convincingly linked financial deregulation to the crisis. Dodd-Frank, enacted to increase regulation, confers too-big-to-fail status on very large financial institutions, which incentivizes unduly risky behavior and penalizes smaller competitors.
How far should a tolerant society tolerate intolerance? It's a difficult issue, one without any entirely satisfactory answer. And it's a current issue in the days after 40 world leaders and the U.S. ambassador to France marched together in Paris against the jihadist Muslim murderers who targeted the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. English-speaking peoples, to use Winston Churchill's phrase, have been dealing with this problem off and on for 300 years. In the late 17th century, most of continental Europe had established state churches and prohibited or disfavored other worship. England had an established church but also tolerated other forms of worship, including by Jews who were invited back into the country by Oliver Cromwell.
There are likely to be many surprises in a race for the Republican presidential nomination that has something like 20 plausible potential candidates. The first of those surprises came in the last hours before New Year's when Jeb Bush announced he was setting up an exploratory committee to consider running for president. The website of Bush's new PAC, Right to Rise, shows that he has been paying attention to the ongoing policy dialogue among conservative thinkers. "The central moral promise of American life," it declares, is the right "to move up the income ladder based on merit, hard work and earned success."
Lou Cannon has a nice remembrance in RealClearPolitics of Martin Anderson, the economist and adviser to Ronald Reagan who died last week at 78. He touches on all of Anderson's accomplishments, from his successful advocacy in the Nixon White House to abolish the military draft to his unearthing, with his wife Annelise Anderson and Kiron Skinner, the handwritten drafts of Ronald Reagan's radio speeches, which show the impressive breadth of Reagan's reading and depth of his thinking. Let me add one more item to the list: Anderson's 1964 book "The Federal Bulldozer: A Critical Analysis of Urban Renewal 1942-1962." When I first met Anderson at the Hoover Institution, his professional base after he left the Reagan administration, he was pleased when I mentioned the book and the influence it had on me. I had imagined that urban renewal was a good idea; Anderson demonstrated that it was a terrible one. The theory, promoted by New Dealers but endorsed by the conservative Republican Sen. Robert Taft, was that poor housing conditions blighted people's lives and that the free market would never produce adequate housing. This had some plausibility since very little housing was built in the United States between 1930 and 1945, because of depression and war; and since many New York tenements built around 1900 were notoriously dismal places.
How big a problem is family fragmentation? "Immense," says Mitch Pearlstein, head of the Minnesota think tank Center of the American Experiment. "The biggest domestic problem facing this country." So big he went out and interviewed 40 experts of varying ideology across the nation and relayed their answers in his book "Broken Bonds: What Family Fragmentation Means for America's Future." That's the good news. The bad news is that none of the experts is confident he has an answer, and neither is Pearlstein. What is family fragmentation? The facts are easy to state. About 40 percent of babies born in America these days are born outside of marriage. That's true of about 30 percent of non-Hispanic whites, more than 50 percent of Hispanics and more than 70 percent of blacks.
There is a widespread assumption that President Obama has expanded the electorate and inspired booming voter turnout. One could make a case for that based on the 2008 election. But since then, not so much. Looking back over the past 15 years, the biggest surge in voter turnout came during George W. Bush's presidency. In the Obama years, turnout actually declined in both the 2012 presidential and the 2014 congressional elections. In 2000, about 105 million Americans voted for president. In 2004, 122 million did. That's a 16 percent rise, the largest between two presidential elections since 1948 and 1952. Turnout increased further in 2008, to 131 million. That's a 7 percent increase over 2004.
Before Christmas, Arizona finished its 2nd Congressional District recount, showing Republican Martha McSally beating incumbent Democrat Ron Barber by 167 votes. This means there will be 247 Republicans in the House in the 114th Congress -- one more than was elected to the House in the 80th Congress in 1946. It's the most Republican House since the one elected in 1928, a year when very few of today's voters were alive. But while the party numbers are almost precisely the same in the Houses elected this year and 68 years ago, the composition of the two parties' caucuses (the Republicans call theirs a conference) is sharply different.
Too much power being grabbed by Washington -- Obamacare, environmental regulations, education standards. That's a constant complaint of conservatives not only during Barack Obama's presidency but during George W. Bush's as well. But power is also flowing out of Washington, largely unnoticed, and back to the states and localities. You can see that if you look at transportation policy, which is following the same path as the little remembered federal revenue sharing program enacted in the Nixon years and phased out during the Reagan presidency. Federal transportation spending has an even longer pedigree, dating from the Federal-Aid Highway Act signed by Dwight Eisenhower in 1956. A few states had already been building limited-access toll highways. The new law instituted a federal gasoline tax to pay for Interstates, as they became known, throughout the country.
The total discrediting of Rolling Stone's story on rape at the University of Virginia has shined a light on one of the least palatable features of American life: the so-called epidemic of rape on campus. Authorities from Barack Obama on down have cited the phony statistic that one in five college women is raped. Phony because it's based on a 2007 survey conducted in two Midwestern schools not of a random sample, but of a small number of self-selected respondents and includes unwanted touching and kissing as "sexual assault." A Department of Justice survey released this month presents a different picture. Between 1995 and 2013, it reports, an average of 0.61 percent of female students were raped or sexually assaulted every year -- 2.4 percent over four years, not 20 percent. Moreover, DOJ reports, that rate has been declining significantly in recent years, in line with a national decline in violent rape.
Earlier this week, Jeb Bush announced he was setting up a political committee to explore a presidential candidacy. Hillary Clinton has been exploring a presidential candidacy for months and perhaps years. Polls show Clinton with a wide lead for the Democratic nomination and Bush as a leading competitor for the Republican nomination. All of which leaves many people, some of them admirers of one or both potential candidates, queasy. Out of 319 million people in America, will our 45th president be the son of the 41st and brother of the 43rd or the wife of the 42nd? The United States is a republic. Have we developed a dynastic, royal form of politics?
In an earlier column, I looked at the role the abortion issue would play in the 2016 election -- not very much, I concluded -- and promised another column on other cultural issues. Here goes. On anyone's list of cultural issues that have been debated over the last decade, same-sex marriage ranks just behind abortion. And unlike abortion, opinion on same-sex marriage has changed dramatically in recent years. Not long ago, it wasn't a political issue at all. The gifted writers Andrew Sullivan and Jonathan Rauch were making an intellectually serious, and interestingly conservative, case for same-sex marriage. But the large majority of Americans weren't buying it -- yet.
The defeat of Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu by Republican Rep. Bill Cassidy in last weekend's Louisiana runoff ends an election year that has been very successful for Republicans -- and has implications for 2016. Some observations: (1) Democrats relied heavily on legacy candidates -- and lost nevertheless. Mary Landrieu's father, Moon Landrieu, was elected to the Louisiana legislature in 1960 and as mayor of New Orleans in 1970 and 1974. Her father's anti-segregationist legacy helped Mary Landrieu appeal to black voters and win narrow victories in 1996, 2002 and 2008. It wasn't enough in 2014.
Americans are divided politically along cultural, not economic, lines. Partisan preference is highly correlated with views on non-economic issues and only loosely related to economic status. This is the norm rather than the exception in American political history. Party preference has run along regional, racial and ethnic lines more than the divisions along economic lines that became dominant in the New Deal era and began petering out in the late 1960s.
Is the market in Hillary Clinton futures collapsing? Quite possibly so. A year ago Clinton seemed likely to become the next president. Presumably she and her husband had not yet started to call themselves, Bush style, 42 and 45. But she had an overwhelming lead in the polls for the Democratic nomination and was getting 50 percent or more in most polls against possible Republican candidates in general election pairings. Ratings of Clinton's performance as secretary of state were positive. She seemed poised to hold and add onto Barack Obama's 2008 and 2012 majorities.
Even as Republicans are about to regain a majority in the Senate after eight years in the minority, the conventional wisdom around Washington is that Democrats are likely to win back that majority again in 2016. That's certainly possible, but it's short of a slam dunk. Superficially, the field of Senate seats up in 2016 looks as unfavorable for Republicans as the field of Senate seats up this year looked for Democrats. Of the 36 seats up in 2014, Democrats were defending 21, including seven in states carried by Mitt Romney. Of the 34 seats currently up in 2016, Republicans will be defending even more, 24, including seven in states Barack Obama carried in 2012.
No one in Washington much cares what House Democrats do these days. House rules tend to ensure that the main job of members of the minority is to show up, vote "no" and lose. And in the next Congress, Democrats will have fewer seats in the House than they've had since 1929 and 1930. So not too much notice was directed last week at Nancy Pelosi's first major intraparty defeat since she became House Democratic leader in 2003. She won that post by defeating colleague Steny Hoyer (they worked as interns in the same Maryland senator's office in the early 1960s) and has been winning fights ever since. Until now.
Last spring, you may remember, the French economist Thomas Piketty was all the rage in certain enlightened circles. His book "Capital" shot up to the No. 1 spot on bestseller lists, and many economists praised his statistics showing increased income and wealth inequality. Piketty argued that, absent a world war, returns to capital will exceed economic growth, inevitably producing growing inequality in the 21st century. There are problems with Piketty's -- or anyone else's -- statistics. Reliance on U.S. income tax returns overlooks the fact that tax cuts encourage people to realize income and misses non-taxable income such as welfare and Social Security payments.
