Columnist.
Just a few days after Hurricane Sandy devastated parts of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, the New York Times' Paul Krugman crowed triumphantly about the federal government's response to the disaster. "[A]fter Katrina the government seemed to have no idea what it was doing; this time it did. And that's no accident: the federal government's ability to respond effectively to disaster always collapses when antigovernment Republicans hold the White House, and always recovers when Democrats take it back." What a fairy tale. Mature adults understand that earthquakes, hurricanes and other natural disasters are an unfortunate fact of life. They further know that government agencies are, by their very nature, slow and lumbering animals.
Following the fiscal cliff melodrama, Senator Richard Shelby appeared on television to declare that we are becoming European. "We're always wanting to spend and promise and spend and borrow but not cut. We've got to get real about this. We're headed down the road that Europe's already on." There's no "heading" about it. We're there. Prof. John J. DiIulio, writing in "National Affairs", outlined the true size of American government. When state and local government expenditures are added to federal outlays, government spending as a share of GDP easily competes with European nations. In fact, per-capita government spending in the U.S. is higher than in France, Germany and the United Kingdom, and our debt to GDP ratio is higher than most European states.
Lyndon Johnson, step aside. Barack Obama is far more deserving than you ever were of the term "credibility gap." The latest Benghazi lie to crumble like a cigar ash was the assurance from White House spokesman Jay Carney that four State department employees had been fired for their mishandling of the situation following an internal report that found security to have been "grossly inadequate." On Dec. 20, Carney told reporters "Accountability has been brought to bear with regard to four individuals, who are very senior." Major news organizations reported that Eric Boswell, assistant secretary of state in charge of security, had resigned along with three others. Less than a week later, the New York Post revealed that Boswell wasn't actually leaving at all. He had resigned his post as assistant secretary, a spokesman explained, but would continue his other duties at state. As for the other three, they were found to have "performance inadequacies" but not "willful misconduct" and would therefore face no discipline.
Who wants a fantastic job? Unemployment is high, so there ought to be many candidates. The job is leader of the Republican Party. As leader, you will be the spokesman for a philosophy of smaller government, more individual liberty, fiscal responsibility, free markets and budget cuts. You will speak up for the traditional family and strong community organizations. On one hand, you stand for keeping taxes low on the very richest Americans. On the other, you're for cutting programs that are broadly popular. Congratulations. What are you for that Americans support? That's what is so great about this job. It requires creativity. A sizable percentage of your caucus will balk at any increases in taxes ever on anyone -- even on those earning more than $1 million per year -- as John Boehner just discovered. So you'll have to seek balanced budgets exclusively by cutting spending. This will further confirm the public image of you as Scrooge.
Merry Christmas to the Fourth Estate! Hope you've enjoyed your goose or turkey or whatever your family tradition includes (latkes for those who are Jewish). When you return to work, there are a few loose ends on which you might want to follow up. "Follow up." It's a term that has gone out of style in the age of Obama. You members of the press have become remarkably uncurious since he's been in the White House. A blanket of benevolent uncuriousness smothers news about Obama administration wrongdoing. The Secretary of State, who took "full responsibility" for the Benghazi debacle, has not once been publicly questioned about it. Called to testify before a House committee this week, she pleaded illness -- a fall resulting in a concussion. She says she will testify in January. Perhaps members of Congress will ask what the press has not. Who made the decision to deny the requested additional security to our diplomats? Where is a copy of the order President Obama says he issued requiring that "everything possible" be done to save our personnel who were under attack? (Former Assistant Secretary of Defense Bing West notes that such orders are always written down.) Were Navy seals stationed in Benghazi told to "stand down" rather than render assistance? Who told Susan Rice to say that the attack grew out of a protest, when there was no protest?
The last time I saw Bob Bork was the Sunday before Election Day. His familiar baritone was faint. You had to sit close to hear him, and he seemed to have a little difficulty following the conversation. At one point, his son Bob directed his attention to an Obama ad that was running on the Internet. It warned darkly that if Romney was elected, he would nominate Robert Bork for the Supreme Court! Bob, who has inherited his father's wry sense of humor (as well as his intellect), played the ad on an iPad. Bob Sr. didn't react at first, and we wondered whether he'd even gotten the drift. But then, eyeing it with the mischievous look he so often wore, he gestured toward the 25-year-old photo of himself. "Awful picture, as you'd expect," he said. That was the Bob we knew and loved!
In the wake of past mass shootings, when the "national conversation" has focused exclusively on guns, I have argued that our appallingly inadequate mental health system was a better subject of reform. At least half of the shooters in the rampage killings that are ripping our hearts out are young men with serious mental illnesses, and our system has neither the legal nor the financial resources to get them the treatment and/or restraint that they, and we, desperately need. This time, mental health reform has received passing mention, along with the usual pleas for gun control, better security at schools, and so forth.
Chivalry is back in the news. The always-alert Charles Murray of the American Enterprise Institute draws our attention to an item in the Psychology of Women Quarterly. A new study on what the authors are pleased to call "benevolent sexism" (which, as Murray translates, seems to mean gentlemanly behavior) found that both women and men are happier when men behave like gentlemen. This being a sociological publication, though, the findings are not written in English, but rather in academic argot. It's full of sentences like this: "A structural equation model revealed that benevolent sexism was positively associated with diffuse system justification within a sample of 274 college women and 111 college men." If you spend more than $100,000 on an undergraduate and graduate education in women's studies, you can learn to be this impenetrable, too.
I'm in the camp that believes Republicans have no choice but to agree to raise taxes on the top 2 percent of earners. The party has been successfully caricatured as the servant of the rich. This is unjust, yes, but justice is imperfect in this life. It's political suicide for Republicans to stand fast on maintaining current rates for high earners even at the cost of raising taxes for everyone else. Imagine if we went over the fiscal cliff. In January, Obama would call upon Congress to pass a law restoring the tax rates for 98 percent of filers. What could Republicans do then, refuse? There is a time for strategic retreat. Republicans are not without tactical opportunities, though. They can reply, as my friend Michael Medved has suggested, that if the Clinton tax rates are desirable, so are the Clinton spending rates. They could resurrect a budget from 1998 and pass it. Democrats would protest that 1998 spending rates are not remotely commensurate with our needs. But wait, don't they argue that the Clinton years were economic utopia? Were people living in cardboard boxes on the streets in the 1990s? While they're at it, they could propose Clinton levels of regulation, too.
Discussing the role of single people in the election of 2012 on my weekly podcast with Jay Nordlinger "Need to Know" (available on Ricochet.com or Nationalreview.com), your humble columnist chose the insensitive way to address it. Chatting with Jonathan V. Last of The Weekly Standard about his piece "A Nation of Singles," I popped off that "Single mothers want the state to be their husbands and father to their children." Jonathan put it better: "Well, let's say that single mothers are more vulnerable to economic shocks and are more concerned about the safety net." Much more diplomatic. Single voters were a key demographic in 2012 (if the percentage of married voters had been what it was in 1980, Romney would have won) and there is little reason to imagine that their importance will wane in the future. Singles increased their share of the vote from 2008 by 6 points.
The incomparable Walter Russell Mead, writing in the American Interest, offered a glimpse into the coming dystopia: "Things are getting worse in San Bernardino. The city filed for bankruptcy earlier this year, but its financial situation has continued to deteriorate. And now with what promises to be a heated court battle over payments to the state pension fund in the offing, further cuts are likely. "Things are getting so bad that at a recent city council meeting, the city attorney advised residents to 'lock their doors and load their guns' because the city could no longer afford to keep up a strong enough police force."
Republicans find themselves in the unenviable position of being forced to agree to raise taxes on those earning more than $200,000 (the actual cut off for those Mr. Obama refers to as "millionaires and billionaires"), or risk being blamed for a tax increase on all taxpaying Americans. They will probably agree, which means it's a politically unavoidable policy, not a good policy. Why does Obama insist upon raising taxes? Not because he believes it will improve the economy, and not because he believes it will increase receipts to the Treasury. The proposed taxes would bring in about $80 billion a year, a trivial number compared with our 1.3 trillion deficits. Making the books balance is (obviously) not Obama's goal. In 2008, when it was pointed out to him that President Clinton's *cut* in the capital gains rate increased the revenue from the tax (because lower rates encouraged more transactions), Obama was unmoved. He'd still favor an increase in the capital gains rate, he explained, for the sake of "fairness." In another famous and revealing moment, he told Joe the Plumber that he prefers to "spread the wealth around."
Post-election season is a time for healing, for putting aside the rancor of a long campaign and rediscovering what unites us. It has not been that way this year. Prudence, one would think, if not generosity of spirit, should impel Democrats to be magnanimous in victory. Romney did receive about 48 percent of the vote. A little modesty among the winners would seem to be in order. Instead, the gloating has been extravagant. Worse, liberals have gorged themselves on the same junk food they enjoyed during the campaign and cannot seem to resist under any circumstances -- slandering their opponents. The smears are so casual and commonplace that we become weary of responding. But we must protest, or someone new to politics may assume that we concede the point.
Realistic Republicans understand that President Obama and the Democrats head into fiscal cliff negotiations in a far stronger bargaining position now than in 2011. When voters were asked on Nov. 6 whether they favored raising taxes to reduce the deficit, a total of 60 percent said yes (47 percent favored increasing taxes for those who earn $250,000 or more, and 13 percent approved tax increases for all). So taxes will be going up. As a matter of political strategy -- not to say survival -- Republicans will have to agree to raise taxes on those defined as rich. It's more than just the exit poll on support for tax increases. Republicans must also contend with the Pew poll that asked who would be more to blame if a fiscal cliff deal were not reached. Before a single meeting has been held or talking point fed to the press, 29 percent said they'd blame President Obama, while 53 percent said they'd blame Republicans in Congress.
Our large cruise ship sailed within view of Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, as a gathering of conservatives sponsored by National Review magazine considered the wreckage of the 2012 election. Most of the writers and commentators on board agreed with Ralph Reed of the Faith and Freedom Coalition that the last thing conservatives need to do now is to form a "circular firing squad." But lessons must be learned. Was Mitt Romney, as some suggested, "our best foot forward" -- a highly intelligent, photogenic, generous, public-spirited, articulate man of great integrity whose loss can only be chalked up to the poor judgment of 2012's voters? Or was he, as Midge Decter described him, "the sort of person you'd love to have as your next door neighbor," but who couldn't inspire political passion?
Even when the economy is terrible, when the incumbent Democratic president has not been able to demonstrate success on job creation or growth, and even when the standard of living for Americans is declining on his watch, the country will choose a Democrat "who cares about the problems of people like me" over the Republican. That alone is enough to make Republican heads spin for some time. Many established beliefs about presidential politics have been proved false by Obama's reelection: 1.) The idea that, when unemployment is above 7 percent, incumbents fail; 2.) The notion that incumbent presidents who are reelected always increase their percentage of the vote over their first race; 3.) The idea that late deciders break for the challenger; 4.) The belief that if majorities say the country is on the "wrong track," the incumbent will be defeated. All wrong.
The pundit world will now eviscerate Mitt Romney, a man who, had he garnered just a few hundred thousand more votes in a few key districts, would have been hailed as political genius. Instead, his every fault will be examined, his mistakes magnified and his defeat decreed to be, in retrospect, inevitable. Romney was not my first choice. I had been hoping for Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels. But in the course of the long campaign, I had come to admire Romney immensely. Everyone who is now picking over his bones should remember that he was a conquering hero after the first debate. I grieve mostly for the country in the wake of Obama's victory, but also a bit for Romney. He deserved to win. He would have been a good president. And this much is certain -- the assassination of his character by the Obama machine was disgusting. Obama won ugly. We should never forget that. This too is likely: If Romney had won and Republicans had carried the Senate, the United States would be poised for an economic boom, a return to world leadership, a workable reform of health care and a mature and responsible resolution of the entitlement crisis.
"I don't know," a very wise and skeptical Washington political analyst confided to me on Sunday as I limned the Romney victory I foresee. "I'd like to believe it," she said, "but I have to overlook a lot. If you're right, then a whole lotta state polls have to be wrong." Very true. But I'll climb all the way out onto a limb and assert that the state polls are wrong -- or at least misleading. Every four years we complain that the press covers the presidential contest as a horse race. This year sets some sort of new standard. This is the year that polls ate the campaign. I can't recall a presidential election that featured so many surveys or so much analysis of polls. We've been so focused on the numbers, the poll sample sizes, the partisan mix of respondents, poll biases and what we've all learned to call "the internals" that we've almost forgotten what the election is about. Every ad, slip of the tongue and peanut butter sandwich has been polled about. If married, white women in the suburbs of Philadelphia react positively to words like "bipartisanship," we've heard about it. People who cover politics are more familiar with the names Pew, Gallup, Rasmussen and Susquehana than with the names of their own children.
You could, without stretching, make an aesthetic case for voting against Barack Obama. Leaving aside the hobbled economy, the promised second term "flexibility" with Putin, the job-diminishing Dodd/Frank act, the Benghazi debacle, the train wreck called Obamacare, the assault on the free exercise of religion, the pretense that the Lilly Ledbetter Act codified equal pay for equal work, the limp response to Iran's nuclear threat, the many Solyndras, kicking Bowles/Simpson to the curb, the "free" contraceptives, the recommendation that Israel do some "serious self-reflection," the preening over bin Laden's assassination, the Bill Clinton ad saying Romney wouldn't have approved the mission, the pretense that Gabby Giffords' shooting should put us on the path to political civility, the savaging of Paul Ryan in a speech to which he had been specifically invited, and the fact that Obama didn't know the number when David Letterman asked about how big the national debt has become -- there are grounds for firing Obama that rest upon seemliness.
The first statements from the Obama administration about what happened in Benghazi seemed plausible. There were, after all, protests throughout the Muslim world on the anniversary of 9/11 -- some incited by Islamists using an obscure video to arouse anti-American fervor in the mobs, and some, no doubt, just pelting U.S. embassies on general principles. When the administration explained that one of those protests had spun out of control and led to the murder of our ambassador and three other Americans in Libya, there seemed no reason to doubt it. For a day. But within hours, the administration account deflated like a punctured balloon. CBS reported that there was no protest outside the consulate in Benghazi. Members of Congress who were briefed said the attack was a military-style assault. We learned that an al-Qaeda affiliate claimed responsibility for the attack. It was reported that Ambassador Stevens had noticed increased al-Qaeda activity, had feared for his safety, and had requested additional security, only to be turned down. Yet day after day, the administration continued to distort reality by referring to the Internet video.
