Who Wants to Make Sarah Palin the Leader of the Republican Party?
Could it be the Washington Post? Bannered across the top of the Post‘s op-ed page today is a piece titled “Copenhagen’s political science,” titularly authored by Sarah Palin. I’m delighted to see the Post publishing an op-ed critical of the questionable science behind the Copenhagen conference and the demands for massive regulations to deal with “climate change.”
But Sarah Palin? Of all the experts and political leaders a great newspaper might call on for a critical look at the science behind global warming, Sarah Palin?
What’s even more interesting is that the Post also ran an op-ed by Palin in July. But during this entire year, the Post has not run any op-eds by such credible and accomplished Republicans as Gov. Mitch Daniels; former governors Mitt Romney or Gary Johnson; Sen. John Thune; or indeed former governor Mike Huckabee, who might be Palin’s chief rival for the social-conservative vote. You might almost think the Post wanted Palin to be seen as a leader of Republicans.
I should note that during the past year the Post has run one op-ed each from John McCain, Bobby Jindal, Newt Gingrich, and Tim Pawlenty. (And for people who don’t read well, I should note that when I call the people above “credible and accomplished,” that’s not an endorsement for any political office.) Still, it’s the rare political leader who gets two Post op-eds in six months, and rarer still the Post op-eds by ex-governors who can’t name a newspaper that they read.
Not the Change We Hoped For
Barack Obama first became a credible presidential candidate on the basis of his antiwar credentials and his promise to change the way Washington works. But he has now made both of George Bush’s wars his wars. The Washington Post‘s front-page analysis began, “President Obama assumed full ownership of the war in Afghanistan on Tuesday night…” The cover of the tabloid D.C. Express was even more blunt.
Speaking of Iraq in February 2008, he said, “I opposed this war in 2002. I will bring this war to an end in 2009. It is time to bring our troops home.” Responding to Hillary Clinton’s criticisms in March 2008, he said, “I will bring this war to an end in 2009, so don’t be confused.” Now he is promising to end the Iraq war in 2011, and to begin a withdrawal from Afghanistan in that year. Not the change we hoped for.
President Obama promises that after all this vitally necessary and unprecedented federal spending, he will turn his attention to constraining spending at some uncertain date in the future. And now he says that he will first put more troops into Afghanistan, and then withdraw them at some uncertain date in the future (“in July of 2011,” but “taking into account conditions on the ground”). Voters are going to be skeptical of both promises to accelerate and then put on the brakes later.
Of course, John McCain thinks that even a tentative promise to get out of this war after a decade is too much. “Success is the real exit strategy,” he says. And if there’s no success? Then presumably no exit. Antiwar voters may still find a vague promise of getting the troops out of Afghanistan three years after the president’s inauguration preferable to what a President McCain would have promised.
But as Chris Preble wrote yesterday, this increase of 30,000 troops — or 40,000 — is not going to win the war. The U.S. military’s counterinsurgency doctrine says that stabilizing a country the size of Afghanistan would require far more troops than anyone is willing to invest. So why not declare that we have removed the government that harbored the 9/11 attackers, and come home?
The real risk for Obama is becoming not JFK but LBJ — a president with an ambitious, expensive, and ultimately destructive domestic agenda, who ends up bogged down and destroyed by an endless war. Congress should press for a quicker conclusion to both wars.
McCain: Interests of Defense Contractors May Conflict with US National Interest
USA Today reports that retired military officers join the boards of directors of, or become employees of, defense contractors and take home big bags of money doing so. Not surprising. At the same time, the paper reports, lots of them are being paid by the Pentagon to be “senior mentors” of their former colleagues. Not being government employees, but rather independent contractors, these folks aren’t subject to government ethics rules. To take one example, as chairman of BAE Systems, Gen. Anthony Zinni is clearing almost a million a year, in addition to his $129,000 per year government pension. In addition to all that, the Pentagon pays him about $2,000 per day to “mentor” people at DOD.
As the article points out, information is almost invaluable to the defense contractors in these contexts. The knowledge of what’s going on at DOD is extremely useful for planners at the defense companies, and so while the retired officers are protesting that being paid nearly $2,000 per day by DOD for their work as mentors is “way below the industry average,” it increases their value to, and presumably their compensation from, their military-industrial employers. As one coordinator of the mentors program told the retired officers, “you’re getting paid in two ways–monetarily and informationally.”
This isn’t too surprising a story, but the crowning irony comes as Sen. John McCain calls for an ethics rewrite and offers his view that “the important thing is that [the involved officers] avoid the appearance of conflict.” This is a puzzling remark coming from a man whose top foreign-policy adviser was collecting hundreds of thousands of dollars from the Georgian government to lobby McCain at the same time he was being paid by McCain to advise him on foreign policy.
McCain’s thoughts about conflict of interest in that instance? He was “so proud” of his lobbyist-cum-adviser. Presumably once McCain issued his ridiculous “today we are all Georgians” fatwa it became a patriotic duty to take money from foreign governments to represent their interests. But in the case of the proposed reforms–which would attempt to institute some semblance of transparency in these mentoring deals–one can only wish the senator from Arizona the best.
Good News: 9/11 Didn’t ‘Change Everything’
On the eighth anniversary of the terrorist attacks on New York and D.C., things are going much better than most of us dared hope in the initial aftermath of that horrible day. We’re still a secure, prosperous, and relatively free country, and the fear-poisoned atmosphere that governed American politics for years after 9/11 has thankfully receded.
Not everyone’s thankful, however. Boisterous cable gabber Glenn Beck laments the return to normalcy. The website for Beck’s “9/12 Project” waxes nostalgic for the day after the worst terrorist attack in American history, a time when “We were united as Americans, standing together to protect the greatest nation ever created.” Beck’s purpose with the Project? “We want to get everyone thinking like it is September 12th, 2001 again.”
My God, why in the world would anyone want that? Yes, 9/12 brought moving displays of patriotism and a comforting sense of national unity, but that hardly made up for the fear, rage and sorrow that dominated the national mood and at times clouded our vision.
But Beck’s not alone in seeing a bright side to national tragedy. Less than a month after people jumped from the World Trade Center’s north tower to avoid burning to death, David Brooks asked, “Does anybody but me feel upbeat, and guilty about it?” “I feel upbeat because the country seems to be a better place than it was a month ago,” Brooks explained, “I feel guilty about it because I should be feeling pain and horror and anger about the recent events. But there’s so much to cheer one up.”
‘We Don’t Put Our First Amendment Rights In the Hands of FEC Bureaucrats’
I (and several colleagues) have blogged before about Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the latest campaign finance case, which was argued this morning at the Supreme Court. The case is about much more than whether a corporation can release a movie about a political candidate during an election campaign. Indeed, it goes to the very heart of the First Amendment, which was specifically created to protect political speech—the kind most in danger of being censored by politicians looking to limit the appeal of threatening candidates and ideas.
After all, hard-hitting political speech is something the First Amendment’s authors experienced firsthand. They knew very well what they were doing in choosing free and vigorous debate over government-filtered pablum. Moreover, persons of modest means often pool their resources to speak through ideological associations like Citizens United. That speech too should not be silenced because of nebulous concerns about “level playing fields” and speculation over the “appearance of corruption.” The First Amendment simply does not permit the government to handicap speakers based on their wealth, or ration speech in a quixotic attempt to equalize public debate: Thankfully, we do not live in the world of Kurt Vonnegut’s Harrison Bergeron!
A few surprises came out of today’s hearing, but not regarding the ultimate outcome of this case. It is now starkly clear that the Court will rule 5-4 to strike down the FEC’s attempt to regulate the Hillary Clinton movie (and advertisements for it). Indeed, Solicitor General Elena Kagan — in her inaugural argument in any court — all but conceded that independent movies are not electioneering communications subject to campaign finance laws. And she reversed the government’s earlier position that even books could be banned if they expressly supported or opposed a candidate! (She went on to also reverse the government’s position on two other key points: whether nonprofit corporations (and perhaps small enterprises) could be treated differently than large for-profit business, and what the government’s compelling interest was in prohibiting corporations from using general treasury funds on independent political speech.)
Ted Olson, arguing for Citizens United, quickly recognized that he had his five votes, and so pushed for a broader opinion. That is, the larger — and more interesting — question is whether the Court will throw out altogether its 16-year-old proscription on corporations and unions spending their general treasury funds on political speech. Given the vehement opposition to campaign finance laws often expressed by Justices Scalia, Kennedy, and Thomas, all eyes were on Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Alito, in whose jurisprudence some have seen signs of judicial “minimalism.” The Chief Justice’s hostility to the government’s argument — “we don’t put our First Amendment rights in the hands of FEC bureaucrats” — and Justice Alito’s skepticism about the weight of the two precedents at issue leads me to believe that there’s a strong likelihood we’ll have a decision that sweeps aside yet another cornerstone of the speech-restricting campaign finance regime.
Obama Administration Sides With Special Interests and Status Quo on Sugar Imports
Pardon me while I pile on the post earlier today by my colleague Sallie James about the Obama administration refusing to allow more sugar to be imported to the United States. The U.S. Department of Agriculture this week declined to relax the quotas the federal government imposes on imported sugar despite soaring domestic prices and understandable complaints from U.S. confectioners and other sugar-consuming businesses about potential shortages.
For all his talk about change, President Barack Obama has shown no inclination to pursue meaningful reform of U.S. agricultural programs. He supported the subsidy-laden and protectionist farm bill that finally passed Congress in 2008. On the eve of the U.S. presidential election in October 2008, he wrote a letter to the U.S. sugar industry reminding growers that they were one special interest that had nothing to fear from an Obama administration.
In his letter, he offered the sugar lobby this assurance:
With respect to the sugar program specifically, while it’s true I have had concerns about the program, I will commit to listening and working with you in the future to ensure that we have a safety net that works for all of agriculture.
He then went on to criticize his opponent John McCain for opposing the farm bill and voting consistently against the sugar program (or, as Obama put it, “against sugar growers”).
In my new Cato book, Mad about Trade: Why Main Street America Should Embrace Globalization, I call the sugar program “the poster boy for self-damaging protectionism.” As I write in the book,
When the program is not raising prices for consumers at the store, it is savaging the bottom line for American companies. Artificially high domestic sugar prices raise the cost of production for refined sugar, candy and other confectionary products, chocolate and cocoa products, chewing gum, bread and other bakery products, cookies and crackers, and frozen bakery goods. Higher costs cut into profits and competitiveness, putting thousands of jobs in jeopardy.
If the president is looking for good bedtime reading on why he should dump the sugar program, I suggest he go straight to pages 147, 154-55, 160-62, and 170-72.
Cheney vs. Obama: Tale of the Tape
In case you missed it, President Obama and former Vice President Dick Cheney spoke separately today on terrorism and national security. Like two boxers at a pre-fight press conference, they each touted their strength over their opponent. They espoused deep differences in their views on national counterterrorism strategy.
The Thrilla in Manilla it ain’t. As Gene Healy has pointed out, they agree on a lot more than they admit to. Harvard Law professor and former Bush Office of Legal Counsel head Jack Goldsmith makes the same point at the New Republic. Glenn Greenwald made a similar observation.
However, the areas where they differ are important: torture, closing Guantanamo, criminal prosecution, and messaging. In these key areas, Obama edges out Cheney.
On Taxing Employer Health Benefits
Democrats in Congress are reportedly considering taxing employer-provided health insurance benefits as a way to pay for their health care reform plan. And, even though he brutally attacked John McCain for something similar (see below) during the campaign, President Obama may now go along with the idea.
Much of the media coverage around the idea has equated this tax hike with the McCain plan and other proposals by advocates of market-based health reform over the years that would shift the tax break from employer-provided insurance to individual insurance. However, there is an important distinction. The market-based proposals would have taxed employer-provided health benefits (treating them as taxable compensation), but would have provided workers with a deduction or credit for purchasing insurance regardless of whether they receive it through work or pay it on their own. The result, for all but a handful of workers with the most expensive gold-plated employer plans, would have been tax neutral. In fact, many workers would receive a net tax cut. The shift in tax treatment was simply part of a larger strategy to move from a system of employer-provided insurance to one where health insurance was personal, portable, and owned by workers.
The plan being discussed by Congress, on the hand, is simply a tax hike. It is not revenue neutral—it is a $1 trillion tax increase that will fall heavily on the middle-class. It is designed not to change the system, but simply to raise revenue.
That’s a very different thing!
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