Columnist.
Curious fact, unearthed by Gerald Seib of The Wall Street Journal. The average age of Republican House members in the new Congress convening this week is 54.9, younger than the Republicans' average age in the previous Congress, 56.5. But the average age of House Democrats has risen, from 58 to 60.2. That can be explained partly by the high turnover in the 2010 election. Many younger Democrats, first elected in 2006 or 2008, fell by the wayside. The old bulls from 65 percent-plus Democratic districts survived. Meanwhile, many young Republican challengers won.
Consider one conundrum in American politics. Income inequality has been increasing, according to standard statistics. Yet most Americans do not seem very perturbed by it. Barack Obama may have been elected president after telling Joe the Plumber that he wanted to spread the wealth around. But large majorities in polls approved when Obama and congressional Democrats abandoned oft-repeated campaign promises to raise taxes on high earners in the lame duck session. Why don't voters care more?
Back in June, Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniel, whom many think would be an attractive 2012 presidential candidate, was quoted by Andrew Ferguson in The Weekly Standard as saying the next president "would have to call a truce on the so-called social issues." That quickly attracted some harsh criticism from opponents of abortion and same-sex marriage. But Daniels has declined to back down, telling the Indianapolis Star the other day that such issues are secondary to the economy and foreign policy.
On the day after Boxing Day, it's worth noting that Barack Obama is down but not out. You could tell as much from the contrast between his petulant post-election press conference and his peppy pre-Christmas press conference. In the former, he was crabby about accepting Republicans' demands that income tax rates on all taxpayers not be raised. In the latter, he was celebrating the lame-duck Congress's acceptance of his stands on the New START treaty, repeal of don't ask, don't tell, and even the previously reviled tax deal.
For those of us who are demographic buffs, Christmas came four days early when Census Bureau Director Robert Groves announced yesterday the first results of the 2010 Census and the reapportionment of House seats (and therefore electoral votes) among the states. The resident population of the United States, he told us in a webcast, was 308,745,538. That's an increase of 9.7 percent from the 281,421,906 in the 2000 Census -- the smallest proportional increase than in any decade other than the Depression 1930s but a pretty robust increase for an advanced nation.
Elections have consequences. The consequences of the November 2010 elections -- and one might add the November 2009 elections in New Jersey and Virginia and the January 2010 special Senate election in Massachusetts -- became clear as lights shined over the snow at both ends of the Capitol on Thursday night. At the north end of the Capitol, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid abruptly withdrew the 1,924-page omnibus spending bill he had submitted two days before. Reid had hoped that the $8 billion worth of earmarks, including some for Republicans, would provide the Republican votes to pass a bill that financed Obamacare and otherwise furthered Democratic policy goals well into the next calendar year.
Reading "Masters and Commanders," Andrew Roberts's magnificent account of British and American leaders in World War II, I was struck by how many of them, working prodigious hours and under great strain, were struck down by heart attacks while in their 60s. This doesn't happen anymore, I thought, with the blood pressure and cholesterol medicines many of us routinely take.
"The single most important jobs program we can put in place is a growing economy." So said Barack Obama at his surly press conference last week defending the tax deal he made with Republicans. "The single most important anti-poverty program we can put in place is making sure folks have jobs and the economy is growing. We can do a whole bunch of other stuff, but if the economy is not growing, if the private sector is not hiring faster than it's currently hiring, then we are going to continue to have problems no matter how many programs we put in place."
Reality strikes. Barack Obama spurned the advice of columnists Paul Krugman and Katrina vanden Heuvel and agreed with Republicans to extend the current income tax rates -- the so-called Bush tax cuts -- for another two years. He got a few things in return, primarily extended unemployment benefits for another 13 months, and agreed as well to a 2 percent cut in the Social Security payroll tax.
We won't be able to say we weren't warned. Continued huge federal budget deficits will eventually mean huge increases in government borrowing costs, Erskine Bowles, co-chairman of Barack Obama's deficit reduction commission, predicted this month. "The markets will come. They will be swift, and they will be severe, and this country will never be the same." Bowles is talking about what the business press calls bond market vigilantes. People with capital are currently willing to loan money to the federal government, by buying U.S. bonds at low interest rates. That's because interest rates are generally low and because Treasury bonds are regarded as the safest investment in the world.
Some reflections on the revolution of 2010, based on extended examination of the election returns. Gentry liberals. The tsunami swept from the George Washington Bridge to the Donner Pass, but didn't wash away affluent liberals to the east and west of these geographic markers. Also surviving were the cannibals -- the public employee unions that are threatening to bankrupt states like California and New York, a prospect that doesn't faze the left-leaning gentry.
Is there any chance we can come to grips with our short-term and long-term fiscal problems -- the huge current federal budget deficit and the huge looming increases in entitlement spending? Maybe so. Or at least the chances seem a little better after the release of two sets of proposals in the weeks after the election.
I don't claim to be an expert on monetary policy or international finance, but I've been astonished by the degree of disrespect expressed here and abroad to the latest economic policies of President Barack Obama and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke. The policies in question are the Obama administration's attempts to convince other countries (especially China) to strengthen their currencies and the Fed's renewed bout of quantitative easing (generally referred to as QE2), which involves buying $600 billion in Treasury bonds by next June.
George W. Bush is sitting on a hotel sofa in front of a south-facing window on a sunny November morning. His presidential memoir, "Decision Points," is No. 1 on amazon.com and is expected to be No. 1 on the New York Times bestseller list. "I've got a very comfortable life," he says. "Decision Points," as the title suggests, does not purport to be the full story of Bush's life or his administration. It "provides data points for future historians."
For political junkies of a certain age, it was a given that the House of Representatives would always be controlled by Democrats. They won the chamber in 1954 and held on for 40 years -- more than twice as long as any party in American history had before. When Sam Rayburn died at 79, more than 20 years after first becoming speaker, he was succeeded by John McCormack, 70, who was followed by Carl Albert, 68, and Tip O'Neill, an energetic 64. Every House elected from 1958 to 1992 had at least 242 Democrats, well above the 218 votes needed for a majority.
Let's try to put some metrics on last Tuesday's historic election. Two years ago, the popular vote for House of Representatives was 54 percent Democratic and 43 percent Republican. That may sound close, but in historic perspective it's a landslide. Democrats didn't win the House popular vote in the South, as they did from the 1870s up through 1992. But they won a larger percentage in the 36 non-Southern states than -- well, as far as I can tell, than ever before.
Uncharted territory. Historic upheaval. The tallies are not all in as this is written. But it seems that the 2010 elections have produced results that are unprecedented in the lifetimes of most readers. Some numbers are clear. In nine of the 10 congressional election cycles between 1986 and 2004, no party gained or lost more than 10 seats in the House of Representatives, the one exception being 1994, when Republicans gained 54. Otherwise, the numbers were pretty static.
Heading into what appears to be a disastrous midterm election, the Obama Democrats profess to be puzzled. The president's record, they insist, is moderate, accommodating -- if anything, overcautious. So why do most American voters seem to be angrily rejecting it?
Who is the largest single political contributor in the 2010 campaign cycle? You can be pardoned if you answer, erroneously, that it's some new conservative group organized by Karl Rove. That's campaign spin by the Obama Democrats, obediently relayed by certain elements of the so-called mainstream media.
Out on the campaign trail, Barack Obama has given us his analysis of why his party is headed for significant losses in the election nine days hence. "Part of the reason that our politics seems so tough right now," said the president for whom politics did not seem so tough in 2008, "and facts and science and argument do not seem to be winning the day all the time is because we're hardwired not to always think clearly when we're scared. And the country's scared."
