Columnist.
Unexpectedly! As megablogger Glenn Reynolds, aka Instapundit, has noted with amusement, the word "unexpectedly" or variants thereon keep cropping up in mainstream media stories about the economy.
Question: What do the following have in common? Eckert Cold Storage Co., Kerly Homes of Yuma, Classic Party Rentals, West Coast Turf Inc., Ellenbecker Investment Group Inc., Only in San Francisco, Hotel Nikko, International Pacific Halibut Commission, City of Puyallup, Local 485 Health and Welfare Fund, Chicago Plastering Institute Health & Welfare Fund, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Tennessee, Teamsters Local 522 Fund Welfare Fund Roofers Division, StayWell Saipan Basic Plan, CIGNA, Caribbean Workers' Voluntary Employees' Beneficiary Health and Welfare Plan.
"The State Department is a fitting venue," declared Barack Obama at the beginning of his speech on the Middle East last Thursday. That's curious because in three-quarters of his speech Obama repudiated most of what has been traditional State Department Middle East policy. Only in the last page and a half of a six-page text, when he discussed the Israeli-Palestinian issue, did he revert to State Department mode. Not once did Obama mention the name of George W. Bush, but much of his speech sounded like it came from his predecessor.
Exit Mike Huckabee. Enter Newt Gingrich. Exit Donald Trump. It's been a busy week in the race for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination. A few questions remain to be answered. Enter Mitch Daniels? Exit Sarah Palin? But already two of the best-known candidates seem bent on ruling themselves out of contention. One is Newt Gingrich. He's being denounced for his comments on House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan's Medicare plan by the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Bill Bennett, the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Charles Krauthammer on Fox News.
Barack Obama's immigration speech in El Paso May 10 was an exercise in electioneering and hypocrisy. Hypocrisy because while Obama complained about "politicians" blocking comprehensive immigration bills, he was one of them himself. In 2007, when such a bill was backed by a lame duck Republican president and had bipartisan backing from Senate heavyweights Edward Kennedy and Jon Kyl, Sen. Obama voted for union-backed amendments that Kennedy and Kyl opposed as bill-killers.
When you get into discussions about the Middle East with certain people, you start hearing that the great mistake was the partition of Palestine and the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. If that had somehow just not happened, you hear, everything would be all right. That's not my view. I think the big mistake made in a British possession around that time was the partition of the Indian subcontinent into India and Pakistan in 1947. The British thought that Pakistan under the leadership of the secular lawyer Muhammad Ali Jinnah would turn out to be an acceptable counterbalance to an India led by Jawaharlal Nehru's Congress Party.
Some years ago, the columnist and editor Michael Kinsley sponsored a contest to come up with the most boring headline. The winner was, "Worthwhile Canadian Initiative." Well, Canada held an election last Monday, and the result was anything but boring. It amounts to something like a revolution in Canadian politics and has lessons, I think, for those of us south of the border.
Let's cheerfully and ungrudgingly give credit to Barack Obama for approving the military operation that resulted in the death of Osama bin Laden. In my column last Monday, I criticized Obama's foreign policy, which was characterized by one of his advisers in an interview with the New Yorker's Ryan Lizza as "lead from behind." That criticism still stands.
Sometimes a sympathetic and perceptive journalist paints a more devastating portrait of a public figure than even his most vitriolic detractors could. A prime example is Ryan Lizza's New Yorker article titled "The Consequentialist" and subtitled, "How the Arab Spring remade Obama's foreign policy." Lizza's article, characteristically well reported and well written, reads less like the story of an adult politician's evolving view of foreign issues and more like the story of the wildly oscillating opinions of a college student now in his junior year.
Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour's abrupt withdrawal from the race for the Republican presidential nomination -- after hiring a topnotch New Hampshire campaign manager and planning to fly around the country next week -- has naturally inspired a lot of punditry on the Republican presidential race. Some of it is nonsense. I read someone earlier this week confidently stating that Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee were the only Republicans who can beat Barack Obama because they're doing better than other possible nominees in polls.
The defined benefit is dying. Barack Obama is struggling to keep it alive, but it's apparent that it's something that even as bounteously rich a society as ours can't afford. Yes, I know that "defined benefit" is not a common household phrase. But most people know what a defined benefit pension is. It's when your employer promises to pay you a certain amount of money, pegged to your salary or according to some other formula, when you retire.
Did Barack Obama take Tax 1 in law school? I did, and I remember the first day of classes, when mild mannered Professor Boris Bittker asked a simple question, "What is income?" I was pretty confident I could come up with a quick answer, and so were a lot of other students. By the end of the hour, after Professor Bittker had politely punched huge holes in every student's definition, it was pretty clear that none of us could. Income is a slippery concept -- especially slippery when you're trying to tax it.
Barack Obama is a politician who likes to follow through on long-term strategies and avoid making course corrections. That's how he believes he won in 2008, and since then he's shown that he's not much into details. So he was happy to let congressional appropriators fill in the blanks in the 2009 stimulus package, and to let congressional leaders know he would be happy whether there was or wasn't a public option in the 2010 health insurance legislation. Whatever. In the long run, the big things would work out his way. Except right now they aren't. And his partisan and petulant speech last Wednesday is unlikely to move things in the direction he wants.
One of the things that fascinate me about American politics is how the voices of the voters as registered in elections and polls are transformed into changes in public policy. It's a rough-and-ready process, with plenty of trial and error. But for all its imperfections, the political market seems to work. Three developments during the past week illustrate this process -- developments, not results, because each is part of an ongoing struggle that will not be resolved soon.
"My worst experience was the financial crisis of September 2008," responded House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan yesterday to a reporter's question about Democrats' attacks on the budget he unveiled earlier in the day. "What if the president and your representative saw it coming and could have prevented it from happening?" Ryan said. "What would you think of them if they didn't?" A hush came over the audience at the American Enterprise Institute, where I am a resident fellow.
Are whites on the verge of becoming a minority of the American population? That's what some analysts of the 2010 Census results claim. Many go on, sometimes with relish, to say that this spells electoral doom for the Republican Party. I think the picture is more complicated than that. And that the demise of the Republican Party is no more foreordained than it was a century ago when Italian, Jewish and Polish immigrants were pouring into the United States in proportions much greater than the Hispanic and Asian immigration of the past two decades.
Has the wind gone out of the sails of the smaller government movement? Is the tea party movement going through a hangover? You can find some evidence for these propositions. In Washington, Democrats like former National Chairman Howard Dean look forward gleefully to a government shutdown, and Sen. Charles Schumer thinks he can drive a wedge between Speaker John Boehner and "extremist" tea partiers. And in state capitals some new Republican governors are getting hostile receptions to their plans for cutting spending and curtailing the power of public employee unions.
The Census Bureau last week released county and city populations for the last of the 50 states from the 2010 Census last week, ahead of schedule. Behind the columns of numbers are many vivid stories of how our nation has been changing -- and some lessons for public policy, as well. Geographically, our population is moving to the south and west, to the point that the center of the nation's population has moved to Texas County, Missouri. That sounds like the familiar story of people moving from the Snow Belt to the Sun Belt, but that's not exactly what's happening. Instead, the fastest growth rates in the 2000-10 decade have been in Texas, the Rocky Mountain states and the South Atlantic states.
Let's imagine that all goes well in Libya. The rebels, protected by air strikes, recapture lost territory and sweep into Tripoli. Moammar Gadhafi and his sons one way or the other disappear. Leaders propose a democratic and secular constitution that voters overwhelmingly approve. The first act of the duly elected government is to issue a proclamation of thanks and friendship to the United States, Britain, France and others who prevented Gadhafi's mass slaughter. Well, we can all dream, can't we?
One thing on which there seems to have been agreement during the monthlong debate about how the United States should respond to the uprisings in the Middle East -- in particular to the anti-Moammar Gadhafi rebels in Libya -- is that we must not act unilaterally. It is a terrible thing, Barack Obama and his leaders have implied, for the United States to do anything by itself. We must have allies and the approval and imprimatur of some multinational institution -- it doesn't seem to matter much which one -- before we take anything in the nature of military action.
