Columnist.
"When the facts change, I change my mind," economist John Maynard Keynes said when charged with inconsistency. "What do you do, sir?" As President Obama threatens to stretch his power to faithfully execute the law to a breaking point by effectively legalizing some 5 million illegal immigrants, perhaps I owe readers an explanation of my own changes of mind on immigration. I tended to support the so-called comprehensive immigration bills passed by the Senate in 2006 and then rejected by the Senate in 2007, due to missteps by new Majority Leader Harry Reid. But I think the similar bill the Senate passed in 2013, which never came forward in the House, is a wrongheaded approach.
Were the polls wrong? It's a question asked after every election. Sometimes, as in 1948, the answer seems as obvious as the answer to the question, "Why did Custer lose at Little Bighorn?" Sometimes the answer is less obvious, as it is this year. "The polls were skewed toward the Democrats," writes Nate Silver, who as proprietor of FiveThirtyEight has earned the distinction of being the nation's most assiduous polling analyst. Silver gives short shrift to partisans -- Democrats this year, Republicans in 2012 -- who complained that polls were systematically biased against their side.
If you're a political junkie -- or at least if you're a conservative political junkie -- you've probably seen the map. It's a map of the United States showing the congressional districts won by Republicans in red and those won by Democrats in blue. It looks almost entirely red, except for some pinpoints of blue in major metropolitan areas and a few blue blotches here and there -- in Minnesota, Northern New Mexico and Arizona, Western New England, along the Pacific Coast. Of course, it's misleading. Congressional districts are of basically equal population, and Democrats tend to roll up big margins in densely populated areas. So while voters have elected at least 244 Republican congressmen and probably will end up with at least 247 -- more than in any election since 1928 -- the map overstates their dominance.
Looking back on the 2014 election cycle, I see two largely unnoticed turning points that worked against Democrats and in Republicans' favor. The first came in response to the October 2013 government shutdown. This was blamed, as shutdowns usually are, on Republicans, partly because of their skepticism about big government, and partly because media professionals tend to fault the GOP in any partisan fight. The shutdown occurred because about 40 Republican House members refused to support a continuing resolution funding the government without a proviso defunding Obamacare. Texas freshman Sen. Ted Cruz had been barnstorming the country arguing that this would somehow delay Obamacare from going into effect on schedule in October.
Some observations on the election: (1) This was a wave, folks. It will be a benchmark for judging waves, for either party, for years. (2) In seriously contested races, Republican candidates were generally younger, more vigorous, more sunny and optimistic than Democrats. The contrast was sharpest in Colorado and Iowa, which voted twice for President Obama. Cory Gardner and Joni Ernst seemed to be looking forward to the future. Their opponents grimly championed the stale causes of feminists and trial lawyers of the past.
Before the election results are in, and keeping in mind that there may be some unpleasant surprises for one party or the other -- or both -- it's possible to assess how the Democratic Party has fared under the leadership of President Obama. To summarize the verdict: not so well. By one metric it has done very badly indeed. When Obama took the oath of office in January 2009, there were 257 Democrats in the House of Representatives. Going into this election there are 201 (including two vacant Democratic seats). Psephologists universally agree Democrats will suffer a net loss of House seats, for reasons explained in an earlier column in this space. That will leave them with a number probably somewhere in the 190s.
Sherlock Holmes famously solved a mystery by noticing the dog that didn't bark in the night. Dogs that are not barking at night -- nor in prime time -- provide some useful clues to understanding the significance of this year's election. Contrary to the disparagement of some liberal pundits, this election is not about nothing. But is not about certain, specific things they might like to hear. President Obama recently said that Democrats in serious Senate and House contests this year back "every one" of his programs. But you hear very little about those programs in their ads.
On Oct. 27, 1964, 50 years ago Monday, a movie actor and television host delivered a 30-minute speech on primetime national television in support of the presidential candidacy of Barry Goldwater. There were no visual diversions, and the production values by today's standards were primitive. Few if any viewers realized it, but they were watching a future president of the United States. But perhaps Ronald Reagan, the man on screen, had an inkling. Higher-ups in the Goldwater campaign didn't want him on the air, for fear he would distract attention from the current candidate. But Reagan, using the negotiating skills he developed as president of the Screen Actors Guild, promised not to go on if Barry Goldwater called him and asked.
You probably haven't read much commentary about this year's elections to the House of Representatives. There's a good reason for that: The majority in the Senate is up for grabs, but it's clear to everyone who follows these things that Republicans will continue to control the House. But there are lessons to be learned from this year's House races, some of them relevant beyond this election cycle. The House math is fairly simple. Republicans won 234 House seats in 2012 and Democrats 201. There are three vacant seats now, but neither party has gained a seat in a special election or by a party switch. Put that together with the fact that we've become a straight-ticket voting nation now, no matter how many voters swear they're Independents. In 2012, 409 of the 435 congressional districts voted for the presidential candidate and House candidate of the same party. Only 26 voted split tickets. That's the lowest number since the election of 1920.
Francis Fukuyama picked an auspicious publication date for his latest book, "Political Order and Political Decay." The news is full of stories of political decay: the Centers for Disease Control and Ebola; the Department of Veterans Affairs' health service; the Internal Revenue Service political targeting. Europe gives us the dysfunctional euro and no-growth welfare states. Not to mention failed states in the Middle East and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Critics have lambasted Fukuyama for proclaiming, in the title of his 1992 book, "The End of History." That's not entirely fair. His argument there was that the battle of ideas was over since no one had advanced convincingly a superior alternative to capitalism and democracy. Challengers have emerged in recent years -- Islamist terrorists, Russia's Vladimir Putin, China's capitalist Communists. But their regimes lack broad appeal beyond the reach of their arms. Most of the world is still bent on "getting to Denmark" -- Fukuyama's shorthand phrase for an effective, accountable, tolerant and law-bound society.
It's looking like a tough offyear election for Democrats, with their Senate majority at serious risk and their chances of gaining House seats down toward zero. Every party has a bad offyear sometimes; Republicans did in 2006. Sooner or later they recover. But in the crosstabs of polls and in party strategists' moves I see evidence that one group Democrats have been counting on is moving away from them: Hispanics. Hispanics voted 71 percent for Barack Obama in 2012, 20 points above his national average of 51 percent. According to Gallup, Hispanics' latest Obama job approval has sunk to 44 percent, just 3 points above the national average.
One question I'm asked in every electoral cycle is, "What are the surprise races in this election?" My answer in recent years has been, "There are no surprises, because any unexpected development becomes universally known in seconds." There have been two such developments in this cycle. One in Kansas: the emergence about five weeks ago of independent Greg Orman (and the withdrawal from the ballot of the Democratic nominee) as a strong competitor against 34-year Capitol Hill veteran Republican Sen. Pat Roberts. The other was in South Dakota: a poll showing Larry Pressler, a former Republican senator running as an independent, within the statistical margin of error of Republican nominee Mike Rounds and ahead of Democrat Rick Weiland.
Things are spinning out of control. Out of control, at least, by government, and by the United States government in particular. You don't have to spend much time reading the news -- or monitoring your Twitter feed -- to get that impression. Armed fighting in Ukraine. Islamic State beheadings in Iraq and Syria. Hundreds of thousands of demonstrators in Hong Kong. Ebola spreading from Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea to Dallas, Texas, where 100 people were exposed to the Liberian who lied to airport screeners and arrived in the United States with the disease. Or the Spanish nurse who came down with the disease.
"Even opposition lawmakers who have spent the last six years fighting his every initiative have expressed deep worry for his security." So wrote the New York Times' Peter Baker in the lead paragraph of a story on the congressional hearing on the Secret Service. Baker is an excellent reporter and a good writer, and so it's useful to consider the implications of his framing of the story. And let's leave aside his hyperbole about Republicans opposition "every initiative" -- some presidential initiatives are uncontroversial and widely supported -- and look at that word "even." Contained within that word and in the snarky tone of the story is the assumption that if you are politically opposed to a president, you won't mind seeing him or his family murdered. After all, you're against him, so why would you feel "deep worry for his security"?
Republicans seem to be pulling away in the race to win a majority in the U.S. Senate. At least this week. In mid-September, several polls seemed to be going the other way. The well-informed Washington Post analyst Chris Cillizza wrote that for the first time in this election cycle, odds favored the Democrats keeping their majority. Two weeks later, he was singing another tune. Analysts at the Post, the New York Times and FiveThirtyEight, in addition to psephologists Charlie Cook, Stuart Rothenberg and Larry Sabato, all agreed.
President Obama's speech at the United Nations last week was "an important turning point in American foreign policy -- and in his presidency." That's the verdict of Brookings Institution scholar and former Clinton White House aide William Galston, a Democrat who has not been an unqualified admirer of this Democratic president's foreign policy. Whether Obama's decision to launch air strikes against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria and Khorasan terrorists is a turning point, it was at least a move in the direction of a tradition in American foreign policy that has been conspicuously lacking in his administration. That tradition was christened by Walter Russell Mead in his 2001 book, "Special Providence," as the Jacksonian Impulse, one of four that have together shaped American foreign policy since the founding of the republic. The others, named after American leaders, are the Hamiltonian, Wilsonian and Jeffersonian traditions.
Last week, the voters of Scotland, in a heavy turnout and from age 16 up, decided not to disunite what has been arguably one of the most successful and beneficial nations over the last 307 years, the necessarily clunkily named United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. It was a relatively close-run thing: 45 percent voted for an independent Scotland, just 383,000 fewer than voted for Scotland to remain part of the now-not-necessary-to-be-renamed UK. Had Queen Elizabeth II not allowed herself to be overheard telling a churchside crowd that Scottish voters should "think very carefully" about the issue, the result might have been closer, as polling suggested it would be.
What should we do about immigration policy? It's a question many are asking, and some useful perspective comes from an article in Foreign Affairs by British-born, California-based historian Gregory Clark, unhelpfully titled, "The American Dream Is an Illusion." The dream to which Clark refers is the idea, promoted by Emma Lazarus's poem at the Statue of Liberty, that this is "a country of opportunity for all, a country that invites in the world's tired, its poor and its huddled masses." The problem, says Clark, is that upward mobility is something of a myth, in America and elsewhere. In his recent book, "The Son Also Rises: Surnames and the History of Social Mobility," he shows that advantages that some families have over others -- in social position, genetic endowment, traditions of literacy and numeracy -- tend to be passed on, not inevitably from parent to child, but persistently and to a considerable extent to descendants for seven and 10 generations.
Which of our two great political parties is the stronger? Maybe it makes more sense to ask which of the two is weaker. The case that the Republicans are weaker is easy to state. Democrats have won four of the last six presidential elections, from 1992 to 2012, and won a plurality of the popular vote in a fifth. This is a vivid contrast from the period 1968 to 1988, when Republicans won five of six presidential elections. The case that the Democrats are weaker is not much harder to make. Democrats have failed to win a majority in the House of Representatives, the branch of government closest to the people, in eight of the last 10 elections, from 1994 to 2012. That's quite a contrast from the period, from 1954 to 1992, when Democrats won House majorities in 20 consecutive elections.
Iraq, immigration, inversion. On all three of the issues referred to, President Obama finds himself forced by events to do something he dislikes -- and he's in trouble with much of his Democratic Party base for doing so. Obama seemed ill at ease before the camera and teleprompter on the evening of Sept. 10. Sending troops into Iraq and Syria is probably the last thing he expected to do when he set out running for president in 2007. He still insists that he will send in "no ground troops," though it appears that hundreds of U.S. military personnel are literally on the ground in Iraq. He seems still not to understand that publicly ruling out an alternative means that your enemies know your plans -- and can take advantage of them.
