Ronald Reagan v. the Tea Party Movement

In 1966, Ronald Reagan won his first political campaign in a landslide victory against the two-term Democratic Governor of California, Edmund Brown. What is sometimes forgotten is that the preceding Republican primary had been a highly contested one. According to Reagan, it was "very bitter at times, largely because of the lingering split between conservatives and moderates in the state party." The intra-party attacks became so heated that state Republican chairman, Gaylord Parkinson, proposed the Eleventh Commandment: "Thou shalt not speak ill of any fellow Republican," a rule that Ronald Reagan obeyed ever since because the intra-party strife he experienced in his first political contest left him with a bitter taste in his mouth. Henceforth, his political career was dedicated to building coalitions and fitting as many people as he could squeeze under the Republican tent.

Forty years later, on the day on which Reagan would have celebrated his 99th birthday, Sarah Palin called on his memory when she delivered the keynote address at the first National Tea Party Convention in Nashville, TN, rehearsing a litany of bumper sticker lines that the Old Gipper would have approved. But Sarah Palin is no Ronald Reagan.

While like Palin, Reagan exuded charm and a common touch; unlike Sarah Palin and the general tenor of the Tea Party movement, he was not categorically, viscerally, or paradoxically anti-estabishment. While Sarah Palin has admitted to being a pittbull with lipstick, Ronald Reagan was no pittbull. He was as as mellow and as measured as politicians came. He didn't feel dispossessed or victimized. And if he felt it, he never showed the one sentiment - even if it had been legitimate - that permeates the Tea Party Movement: anger. Red, hot, seething, Glenn Beck Fury.

Most illustratively, Sarah Palin and the Tea Partiers do not believe in the 11th Commandment. Next week, Palin is off to campaign for Texas Governor Rick Perry against his primary challenger, Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson. Palin has already campaigned against Dede Scoozzafava running for election in NY 23, where she had supported Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman because he had "not been anointed by any political machine." At Nashville, she reiterated her support for intra-party competition: "Despite what the pundits want you to think, contested primaries aren't civil war. They're democracy at work, and that's beautiful."

Democracy at work - grassroots movements without the backbone of a machine - has too often, in a dominant two-party system such as the US is, meant politicians out of a job. To survive after the surge of populist disaffection at a recession has subsided and to be more than a spoiler in elections, the Tea Party Movement must, paradoxically, go mainstream. And it should take it from a icon they have wrongly called their own. Ronald Reagan pulled the various factions of the Right together under a large, fusionist electoral tent that delivered him to victory. Sarah Palin and the Tea Partiers are trying to do the reverse and (perhaps inadvertently) break this tent up in a battle for ideological purity. If Reagan helped to turn a movement into a winning electoral coalition for three decades, the Tea Partiers are exerting a centrifugal force on the Right that may well counter-balance the considerable anti-Democratic bias going into the 2010 elections.

Obama is Liked but Not Supported

Most Americans still like Barack Obama, just not what he's doing, which is to say that while many still think he has good intentions, quite a few think that they are misdirected. And that is why the President waited to the second half of his State of the Union speech to address the issue of health-care reform which has dominated the airwaves in the last couple of months, because he wants his audience to understand that he now his list of priorities properly ordered - health-care reform after jobs.

All Presidents begin their terms in office liked and supported on their agenda - they score high on personal and job performance ratings. They then transition from being liked but not supported, and for those destined for one term, they tend to spend their fourth year in office disliked and unsupported. If President Obama wants a comeback, he first needs luck and in particular the business cycle to work in his favor in the coming months, and after that, he needs skill in managing fellow partisans in Congress.

The economy is so unchallengeably Issue Number One that no sooner after it brought a tidal wave of dissatisfaction against the Republicans in 2008, it is preparing a tsumami for Democrats in 2010. Democrats need job growth to begin in Spring and continue in earnest until November, because voters are not patient when they are in pain and they will thrash about to blame just about anyone in power. For politicians waiting in the wing, their posture will be one of impatience and disaffection. For incumbents in power, this has got to be a year of results (or short-term solutions).

That also means that the President must do more than hope for luck, for he must be seen to be doing something about creating jobs, and, so that it does not appear that he wasted all his political capital for nothing, he must also finish the race on health-care reform and produce something at least minimally worthy of the title "reform."

But he must tread carefully. His biggest asset is also his biggest liability: Democratic majorities in both chambers of Congress. That means he cannot blame the first branch of government for his failures (and perhaps that is why he took the unusual step of criticizing the third branch in his State of the Union address). Congress has been a favorite presidential punching bag at least since Andrew Jackson, but the ties of parties has made this tactic difficult to pursue with Barack Obama. Obama's and the liberal media's modified strategy thus far, as a result, has been to criticize not Congress as a whole but the Republican membership in Congress for being a "Party of No." The problem, however, is that the President's calls for bipartisanship have sounded empty and self-defeating as he has continued to chide congressional Republicans either for the failed policies of the past or their disagreement with his present proposals.

If the President hopes to be liked and supported, and in particular if he wants to get things done and to get some credit for it, he needs to solve the peculiar conundrum and mixed blessing of having one-party rule in DC. He needs to be his own person and act like a leader without alienating his colleagues in Capitol Hill; he needs to maintain congressional support without being tethered to a quid pro quo. Or, he could secretly hope to be relieved of such a dilemma in November 2010.

The State of the Union and the State of the Obama Presidency

It is going to be difficult for the President to give us an uplifting State of the Union message next week, because it is in effect going to have to be a confession of the state of the Obama presidency.

Between the attempted bombing on Christmas Day which has become something like Obama's Katrina, Martha Coakley's humiliating defeat in MA (and the symbolic extinguishment of the Kennedy torch), and the inauguration of a new era of presidential-press relations in which even the liberal media has turned against their hero, Obama has a very difficult task to perform on Wednesday night. A successful speech requires an accurate diagnosis of what has gone wrong for this presidency. So let’s examine the attempted bombing, Coakley, and the media in turn for the lessons they offer to the President.

The Christmas bombing and Coakley’s defeat in MA are related. (Her poll numbers dropped precipitously after Christmas.) The attempted Christmas bombing reinforced the perception that not only was the administration not focusing on job creation, now there was evidence that it had taken its eye off the ball on homeland security. The President must give us reason again to believe that he has his priorities right, and he has his eye on the target - jobs. To some extent he’s already smartened up. Knowing that the President cannot turn around the jobless numbers any time soon, his advisors have told him to get out to show people that he feels our pain. And that's why Obama has tuned back in, and on recent days has been on the road to vindicate populist rage at Wall Street. He should be mindful though that he is the President, not a travelling salesman.

Why didn't Obama's last minute campaigning for Coakley make a positive difference? Well, his comment about Scott Brown and his truck didn't help, a mistake he should have learnt after his remarks last year in San Francisco about bitter people clinging on to their guns. There is nothing like liberal condescension that turns off Republicans and Independents, and the President needs to show humility and contrition in his speech on Wednesday.

There is an endemic sense in the media that Massachussetts changed everything. Yet to give to one state the power to speak for the nation is patently at odds with our constitution, though it would seem that our pundits prefer to give weight to statistical sampling over constitutional propriety. Even liberal journalists are turning against him now, because no one will stand forever for the losing team, liberal bias or not. Obama has to stay focused on the big picture, remembering that while Massachusetts spoke, the nation did not. His job on Wednesday is not to be lost in non-generalizable minutiae, but to inform us of the State of the Union.

So here's the good news. For all the spate of unfortunate events the Obama administration had to endure since Christmas, it is still a golden rule of politics that no president polls well when the economy is in the doldrums, so it may have been this bad even if he had done everything right. As for the embarrassment in Massachusetts, it is worth remembering that 60 was never really 60 anyway, because Joe Lieberman and Ben Nelson were never really reliable. There is no need to over-react to the events in MA. A president must understand the Constitution, which asks him to speak to the Union and to the future, not just to the specific and the present.

The President has been chastened, but not defeated. Expectations for his second year in office are down from stratospheric heights for his first year, and therein lies the seeds for his political recovery. As no one ever overestimated George W. Bush, the president will soon learn that it is better to surprise than it is to disappoint.

On the Louisiana Purchase and the Cornhusker Hustle

To those disheartened by the compromises tagged unto the health-care bill before Congress, I say, c'est la vie.

When there is politics, there are bargains. To bargain is to attempt to purchase or acquire something at a steal or at a lower cost than usual. Because a bargain is by definition a transaction that would not normally have occurred without negotiation or haggling, all political bargains are corrupt to some extent. The Connecticut Compromise, the "corrupt bargain" of 1824, the Missouri Compromise, the Compromise of 1876, today's "Cadillac" Compromise - you name it - they all had something shady in them, though shadiness is in the eye of the beholder (usually the loser).

And so it is on the road to healthcare reform in 2010; among them are the new Louisiana purchase ($300 million for Mary Landrieu's vote) and the Cornhusker hustle or the Nebraska Compromise (Ben Nelson got Nebraska exempted from Medicaid increases). Ironically, the reason why these deals had to be brokered in the Senate is directly attributable to the Connecticut Compromise of 1787, which had proposed proportional representation in the House according to the population size of districts and equal representation of each state in the Senate in order to secure the support of the Constitution from delegates from states big and small. Out of the Connecticut Compromise was born the idea of a minority veto, and that's in part why the Senate has become the preeminent institution it is today even though the Founders had intended that the House be the first legislative branch.

One compromise always begets another. This is the story of politics. Consider the Bill of rights - the deal-making compromise or condition that allowed Anti-Federalists sitting on the fence to come on board with the new Constitution. The Bill, of course, wasn't so much a Magna Carta as it was an instrument to defend states' rights and peculiar practices such as slavery and segregation. One compromise begets another.

The Democrats will do whatever they need to to pass health-care reform. And the solution if one emerges will be imperfect and tainted by compromises, and even more so if Scott Brown wins in MA. It cannot be otherwise because we (democratic citizens) desire more to lead than to be led, and compromise allows each of us to find the tolerable medium between the two.

Whatever health-care legistion we pass will lock into place a peculiar settlement that is a reflection of the contingent set of circumstances that had to be addressed to deliver the current solution but in so doing it will also set up the conditions for a future political debate. And perhaps this is as it must be, for our founding document itself had paved the way in being little more than an elaborate list of compromises, article by article.

Why Republicans were Offended by Reid's Comments on Race

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has received a firestorm of crticism, mostly from Republicans, about his comments back in 2008 that Barack Obama's race was more likely to help than hurt his electoral chances because he was "light-skinned" and spoke "with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one."

Many African Americans were rather baffled about the Republicans' uncharacteristic insistence on political correctness. As Ward Connerly writes, "For my part, I am having a difficult time determining what it was that Mr. Reid said that was so offensive." Or take it from Eugene Robinson, who wrote that Reid's comments were "crudely put, yet true." For many African Americans, as it was for Barack Obama, Reid's error was one of using "inartful" words, not of registering a falsehood or a racist belief.

So why are Michael Steele and John Cornyn so offended? My hunch is that for all the media coverage and hoopla, we are, as usual, avoiding the real topic. Republicans aren't really mad that there is (or is not) a double standard for when a Democrat or a Republican makes a racial statement. Their concern is that Reid's comments were really a back-handed criticism of white Americans, who he believed were more comfortable with electing a "light-skinned" African American than a "darker" one. Reid's comments were racist in the opposite sense (and hence resented by Republicans) - he charged some of his own race of an inability to vote for someone who looked and talked too differently from themselves.

"Light-skinned" African Americans tend to have it easier in public life. Yawn. But the logical entailment of this proposition is harder to swallow: it is only because some white Americans are still racist that "light-skinned" African Americans do better than their "darker" brethren. Put this way: firestorm. No one likes to be called a racist, and that's why this controversy has raged on even though President Obama, the Congressional Black Caucus, Al Sharpton and other civil rights leaders have readily accepted Reid's apology. Perhaps it is not principally to them that an apology is expected or demanded.

And so what was Reid's mistake? It was that in a private moment he thought would remain off-the-record, he forgot that at all times the politician's job was to flatter the people, and never to accuse them.

To Howard Dean: It is 2009, not 1965

The year is 1964, the high watermark of Liberalism. Lyndon Johnson takes 61.1 percent of the popular vote in his election contest against Barry Goldwater, an electoral feat that was bigger than Franklin Roosevelt's 60.8 percent in 1936 and one that has not been surpassed in the years since. The Democratic tsunami sweeps down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol, where Democrats would out-number Republicans two to one in the 89th Congress, and in the Senate they take 68 seats - the biggest supermajority held by any party to this day. The era of Liberalism had entered its Golden Age.

Unified by the inspiring memory of John Kennedy, Democrats were able to enact health-care legislation that even Franklin Roosevelt, the father of modern Liberalism did not have the stomach to attempt as part of his New Deal. It would be Lyndon Johnson, not Harry Truman, not FDR, and not his counsin, Theodore Roosevelt (running as the Progressive Party candidate in 1912) who would enact the single biggest health-care legislation in US history, offering single-payer, comprehensive health-care benefits to seniors over the age of 65 (Medicare) and an option for states to finance the health-care of the indigent (Medicaid) in the Social Security Act of 1965.

We remember the New Deal, and perhaps the Fair Deal, but it is the Great Society that is the apotheosis of 20th century Liberalism. And if 1965 is Liberalism’s high water-mark, then those who would stymie health-care reform today because of the lack of a robust (or indeed, any) public option have gravely gotten their decades mixed up.

There was a time when Liberals did not have to call themselves “Progressives.” That was four decades ago, when Lyndon Johnson attacked Barry Goldwater for wanting to roll back social security and openly campaigned for a further expansion of the welfare state. Times have changed. Today’s Progressives must cagily wrap their Liberal agenda with talk of choice, competition, and bending cost curves. And if the era of Liberalism as FDR, Truman, and Johnson knew it is over, The Age of Reagan lingers on in the Tea Party Movement. Despite his aspiration to build an even Greater Society than Johnson, Barack Obama’s electoral mandate is 18 percent short of what Johnson possessed in 1965; the Democratic majority is the House is much smaller; and, despite the new cloture rules post-1975 in the Senate which has reduced the fraction of votes needed to end debate from 2/3 to 3/5, Joe Lieberman et al remind us every day that the Senate is anything but filibuster-proof.

To Governor Dean and his compatriots, it is 2009, not 1965.

Assessing Obama's Nobel Acceptance Speech

By saluting "citizens of America" before "citizens of the world," President Barack Obama's Acceptance Speech for the Nobel Peace Prize was addressed to the conservative side of his domestic audience, who have waited and waited and finally heard him say what they wanted to hear, "For make no mistake: evil does exist in the world." No surprises then, that even though this speech contained a good number of potential appplause lines, it generated much less applause from his audience at Oslo City Hall than it did back home. Obama wasn't trying to flatter his immediate audience.

In this speech, Obama was justifying his war in Afghanistan to a European audience, but he did it so artfully that to a domestic audience, he sounded like he was indicting the Europeans for their arm-chair theories of peace. Thus the first paragraph of his speech delivered Obama's dual-pronged opening shot:

"I receive this honor with deep gratitude and great humility. It is an award that speaks to our highest aspirations - that for all the cruelty and hardship of our world, we are not mere prisoners of fate. Our actions matter, and can bend history in the direction of justice." If the end goal of our time on earth is justice, then even peace must give way to a just war, which is of course the theme of Obama's speech. A justfication of war and an ode to justice at the same time.

A complex rhetorical two-step well played, if anything because Obama will need the slight bump he's gotten in the polls if he hopes to complete the final lap of health-care reform(which, unlike foreign policy, requires partisan savvy more than bi-partisan equipoise).

But I would like to think that Obama's reasons were more than strategic. If Obama's receipt of the Peace Prize was premature, so are emerging theories about the Obama Doctrine in foreign policy. There is no Obama Doctrine, for saying that he is neither a pure realist nor a pure idealist does not make him self-consciously both. Our search for a presidential doctrine reveals our implicit inversion of the meaning of democracy so that presidents rule and set the formula for policy, while citizens follow. In fact, all President Obama did at Oslo was to represent not only Democrats, which he has done for most of his presidency, but also Republicans, who are also his fellow countrymen even if they did not vote for him. In mirroring the full diversity of opinion of his fellow citizens, he did not articulate an Obama Doctrine but represented an American one. And this is why Bill Kristol, Sarah Palin, and Newt Gingerich have given the speech their nods of approval.

Understanding "Broad Partisan Support" for Health-care Reform

By most accounts, President Barack Obama's proposed surge in Afghanistan has won broad bipartisan support from both parties. It might be worth examining this elusive idea to determine the conditions for it, and why it is, as a goal for health-care reform, an unachievable contradiction in terms.

Let’s start with “partisanship.” It is clear that the purists on either side of the political aisle are not pleased with Obama's decision to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan for 18 months. The anti-war wing in the Democratic Party does not approve of an escalation in Afghanistan, while the neo-conservative hawks in the Republican Party do not like the fact that the president set a timeline for troop withdrawal. What is important to note here is that Obama has achieved bipartisanship by making some friends angry, and making some foes happy. Both ends of the ideological extreme had to be spurned in order that “broad bipartisan support” be found. Bipartisanship, traditionally understood, captures our intuition about fairness that no side should ever asymmetrically receive the short end of the stick.

If the president managed to find broad bipartisan support for his Afghanistan strategy, it is nearly impossible that he will achieve the same in health-care reform, because he and Senator Harry Reid seem quite determined not to have to resort to the Reconciliation tactic (which requires only 51 Democratic votes in the Senate) to pass health-care reform. So they must contend with a potential Senate filibuster. A switch from majority to supermajority decision-making changes everything, even the meaning of "bipartisanship."

Unlike the decision to send in more troops in Afghanistan where the political center is the median voter or the 50th Senator (assuming the Vice-president casts the tie-breaking vote), the center of the political spectrum for health-care reform is the 60th Senator who could potentially break a Republican filibuster. In other words, unless the Democrats use Reconciliation, which will restore the applicability of the normal spatial metaphor governed by the median voter / politician, bipartisanship as traditionally understood will not deliver health-care reform. It’ll only get Democrats 5/6th of the way there.

In part because majorities have become an elusive thing in Washington, we have tended to conflate “broad support” with “bipartisan support,” as exemplified in the well-worn phrase, “broad bipartisan support.” But the two can be very distinct in certain circumstances. The rules of the Senate, and by extension of the Constitution, dictate that a preference for supermajority decision-making is necessarily a bias against bipartisanship. In practice, if a supermajority is ever to be found in the Senate, at least one end of the ideological extreme must always be on board. That means that our traditional understanding of bipartisanship that no one side should be forced to receive the short end of the stick becomes a road-block to finding a supermajority. (Notice that this is not the case for the “broad bipartisan support” for Obama’s surge in Afghanistan, where extremists on both sides were symmetrically spurned and so the President could find a way to walk a tight-rope.)

There’s no way to walk a tight-rope toward the public option, so either Obama must give it up or he must forget about or redefine “bipartisanship” as traditionally understood as symmetrically exacting on both Democratic or Republican partisans. If he wants a pure public option, the President must get off the tight-rope and walk on the left side of the rope to reach his destination, with the help of a few moderates like Olympia Snowe and Mary Landrieu. In doing so he would be taking sides, as indeed he already has, and the opposition, who will have to be asymmetrically spurned for the mathematics to work out, will cry foul. And that is why we no longer hear much aspirational talk about “broad partisan support” for health-care reform. All this might seem obvious, but amazingly, it has taken the President a long time - including an agenda-distracting summer of health-care town halls - to realize this basic insuperable decision-making fact of the august body from which he only recently departed.

Unconscious Sexism and Racism in New Moon

Children are, if they are lucky, taught at home and in schools. But they are also taught with books and movies, where retrograde social conventions and meanings are reinscribed under the guise of good clean fun.

The Twilight Saga: New Moon is a romantic fantasy fusing teen lust and fantasy, but in the story of vulnerable girls swooning over powerful vampires, and rabid werewolves fighting the undead (who nevertheless retain their human form), we have a movie genre best reserved for Halloween.

Critics have been much better at picking up the retrograde gender subtext of the screenplay, at how it exploits the fine line between rape and lust, and how Bella Swan plays a terrible role model for teenage girls. Bella, the female protagonist, is portrayed as weak, vulnerable, virginal, and young while Edward Cullen, her male vampire love interest is portrayed as supernatural, more powerful than he dares admit, 17 and yet over a hundred, young but wise. Throughout the first half of the movie, Bella is depressed because Edward has left her, and she ultimately attempts a pseudo-suicide by going cliff-diving and nearly drowns, but lucky for her, another supernatural male, Jacob Black, who plays a werewolf, swoops in for the rescue. Throughout the movie, young girls are comforted and encouraged in mixing sexual desire with sexual vulnerability, that to be loved is to be rescued. As a preview of the next sequel, we are tantalizingly promised the consummation of Bella's and Edward's love, that he will finally agree to change her into a vampire. He would then take everything that is hers, no less than her life and her soul, and shockingly, it is everything that Bella ever wanted.

If this is what causes teenage girls (and not a few self-confessed middle-aged feminists) to swoon at the movie, the unconscious racism in the movie takes us to a new league of egregiousness.

A google with the search terms "Twilight," "full moon" and "racism" only turned out less than 10 germane hits, with one of them addressing the fact that some fans were agitated that the character, Laurent, was played by a black man. They charge that vampires, whose skin sparkle in the sun (according to author Stephenie Meyer) surely have to be white. These fans probably felt that fidelity to the book (or art) was sacrificed at the altar of political correctness. I'll tell these fans to lighten up (no pun intended) though, since the author as well as the movie's casting director is clearly on their side, because Laurent, the sole black vampire in the screenplay, was conveniently dispatched by the werewolves early on in the movie.

Laurent, in any case is just the side-show to the movie's considerable moral insensitivity. The main battle in the movie is between the vampires and the werewolves, who are ALL native Americans of the Quilette tribe. The vampires are all wealthy, dress well, and live well. They are rational (read human) creatures rather than animals, and vampires do not not, as one puts it in the movie "smell ... like dogs." They abide by a code of rules, and even have a deliberative body seated at the palatial Volturi Tower in Italy. The werewolves, on the other hand, are hot-headed natives running around (half-naked) in packs ready to give in to their rage at any moment. Jacob Black drives a beat-up truck and not a cool black Volvo as Edward does.

Here is the easily missed factoid central to Jacob's angst and hence the plot. We learn that the leader of the pack disfigured his wife in a fit of rage but clearly loves her still. In political theory we would call this the cultural defence of domestic abuse. The author, Stephenie Meyer, would have us believe that wolves / native Americans are less rational and more posessed by rage / spirits. Jacob withdraws from Bella for he fears that he would harm her, conceding that it is in his nature to get violent; while Edward Cullen pursues her because the author believes that he can control his lust for her blood. With every little detail in the movie, we are told that it is better to be a dead human than a live animal; and this is certainly Bella's preference and her chosen future.

One would hope that this type of romantic sub-genre should be kept from our kids. After all, some of us think that Harry Potter should be kept from out kids because there is magic involved. Well, The Twilight Saga: New Moon, was released November 20, and boasted the largest single day domestic gross at $72.7 million. The book rose to the top spot in the New York Time's bestseller list for Children's Chapter books and stayed there for eleven weeks. Unconscious sexism and racism are much more dangerous to pre-pubescent minds than Voldemort, because the former exist outside of books and movies.

On Scientists v. Politicians on Mammograms

Last week, the United States Preventive Services Task Force, a government-appointed group of 16 outside experts recommended that women should undergo routine mammograms only after the age of 50 and not 40, against the advice of the American Cancer Society and consistent with the recommendations of the American College of Physicians.

Medicine is not a precise science, so the task force could be right but it could also be wrong. Researchers and scientists make probabilistic claims from the data to offer recommendations, in this case, to the Department of Health and Human Services.

To prevent one additional breast cancer death, 1,000 women would have to get mammograms starting at age 40 rather than 50. But doing this would allegedly result in roughly 500 of the 1,000 women getting false positive results at least once, and 33 of them getting unnecessary biopsies, according to Jeanne Mandelblatt of Georgetown University.

According to researchers on the side of the Task Force, the adage that prevention is better than cure loses its intuitive force when one scrutinizes the risks associated with preventive care such as radiation or hormone therapy on abnormalities that may never have become cancerous tumors as well as the anxiety they provoke.

Now, other experts looking at the same data disagree on its interpretation. "We respect the task force, but we do not agree with their conclusions," says Leonard Lichtenfeld, deputy chief medical officer of the American Cancer Society. "We are concerned the same evidence we think supports beginning at age 40 is being interpreted by others as not supporting mammography."

Scientists looking at the evidence can disagree, but when they do, they point to the data in order to support their conclusions. Most politicians, on the other hand, do not look at the data and they can in good faith either accept or reject the experts' recommendations since the experts do disagree. Only a few, however, grab one set of these recommendations, and then leap a few light years ahead, with uncanny certitude, to a conclusion solar systems away from the data on which the recommendations were originally offered.

"This is how rationing begins. This is the little toe in the edge of the water," Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) said Wednesday on Capitol Hill. "This is when you start getting a bureaucrat between you and your physician."

This is when you put a politician between the people and responsible government. They will offer answers, explanations, and analogies with more certititude than the scientists who perused the data, and if their golden tongues wagged with enough vigor, people will believe them because it is easier to acquire information via gossip than it is to collect it ourselves.

Our indifference to doing our civic homework would not be a problem but for the fact that demagogues are able to synthesize our indifference with their certainty to create political slogans but not political solutions. Resolution and confidence are virtues only when the answers are always obvious and unambiguous. But in the world of statistics in which researchers on both sides of the mammogram debate inhabit, and in the world of politics where the meaning of public opinion and the general will fluctuates, unsubstantiated certitude is the one cancer on democacy we should be screening for, every day.

On whether KSM deserves Vengeance or Justice

There are four reasons which have been supplied to suggest that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) does not deserve a civilian trial in New York:

1. This is what KSM wants - a show trial, and he should not get what he desires.
2. The trial will increase the risks of a terorist attack in New York.
3. Classified information will be released in a civilian court trial, to the benefit of potential future terrorists.
4. The injury KSM has inflicted is a war crime, and not a domestic criminal matter.

1-3 are unverifiable predictions, sub-points to the main point, 4, which is the motive force behind the considerable agitation behind Attorney General Eric Holder's decision. Those who oppose a civilian trial for KSM want vengeance more than they want justice. This is exactly what Michael Goodwin has argued:

"Either try the detainees in military courts on secure bases or, best of all, give them death now. Mohammed and some others already acknowledged guilt and said they were ready to die.

I say we take yes for an answer."

Well, there we have it. Goodwin wants vengeance primarily, and justice only incidentally. Now, vengeance and justice are not unrelated. Vengeance presumes the existence of guilt, so the pursuit of vengeance can lead to justice. Indeed, in an anarchic, godless world of all against all, vengeance is the closest thing there is to justice. To speak of justice would be a categorical mistake because without the apparatus of sovereignty and law, it is a standard that stands on stilts. We say Justice under the Law because without law justice is a meaningless concept.

Goodwin and others like Mayor Rudy Giuliani who want to deny KSM a civilian trial believe, though they have not fully articulated their reasons, that the international milieu exists as a state of nature in which there is no universal law and no universally accepted sovereign law-giver, and as such the pursuit of justice is folly and the pursuit of vengeance necessary. If there is neither legality nor illegality, then there is only strength and weakness. Vengeance will have to do. This is why Rudy Giuliani insists on the frame that we are a nation at war, that we are dealing with terrorists or "enemy combatants" and not what John Yoo called "garden-variety criminals."

To be sure, in a government of laws such as in a liberal democracy, justice takes on higher attributes that vengeance does not (and cannot). While justice is about law; vengeance is about necessity because it privileges immediate judgment over the process that would deliver such a judgment. While vengeance gives solace to those who were injured, justice assures all citizens that the system in which they conduct themselves works - ie. while vengeance is pointed and specific, justice is blind and universal, and while vengeance is preponderant, justice is proportionate.

Well and good. But as we consider whether or not KSM should have been granted a civilian trial, we need to determine the context in which we make this judgment: is terrorism a domestic criminal matter or an act of war? If the former, then the Constitution takes precedence and it makes sense to speak of justice and that is what KSM deserves. If the latter, then because there is neither universal law nor a sovereign law-giver in the international milieu, KSM will have to suffer our vengeance because justice is not an alternative.

We have not settled on an answer to this question of whether or not terrorism is a criminal or a war crime because our historical definition of war has not caught up with its modern incarnation in which de-territorialized non-state actors perpetrate acts of violence. Our discussion over what KSM deserves is a footnote to this larger debate.

On The Disrupted Sequence of Health-Care Reform

Democrats must be thinking: what happened to the halcyon days of 2008? It is almost difficult to believe that after the string of Democratic electoral victories in 2006 and 2008, the vast momentum for progressive "change" has fizzled out to a mere five vote margin over one of the most major campaign issues of 2008, a health-care bill passed in the House this weekend. If you raise hopes, you get votes; but if you dash hopes you lose votes. That's the karma of elections, and we saw it move last Tuesday.

Democratic Party leaders scrambled, in response, to keep the momentum of "Yes, we can" going, by passing a health-care reform bill in the House this weekend. But despite claims of victory, Democratic party leaders probably wished that their first victory on the health-care reform road came from the Senate and not from the House. President Obama and Speaker Nancy Pelosi have always hoped to let the Senate pass its health-care reform bill first, initiating a bandwagon effect so that passage in the House would follow quickly and more easily, and a final bill could be delivered to the president's desk.

Instead, the order of bill passage has been reversed, making a final bill less likely than if things had gone according to plan. If even the House, which is not subject to supermajority decision-making rules, barely squeaked by with a 220-215 vote, then it has now set the upper limit of what health-care reform will ultimately look like. Potentially dissenting Democratic Senators see this, and there might now be a reverse band-wagoning effect. Already, we are hearing talk from the Senate about the timeline for a final bill possibly being pushed past Christmas into 2010. This is just what Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama were hoping against, by pushing the Senate to pass a bill first. Unfortunately for them, the Senate took so long that to keep the momentum going (and amidst the electoral losses in NJ and VA last week), they felt compelled to pass something in the House to signal a token show of progress.

But the danger is that the move to regain control may initiate a further loss of control. The less than plenary "victory" in the House bill has only made it clearer than ever that if a final bill is to find its way to the President's desk, it will have to be relieved of its more ambitiously liberal bells and whistles. Even though the House Bill, estimated at a trillion dollars, is more expensive than the Senate version being considered, and it has added controversial tax provisions for wealthier Americans earning more than $500,000, what the House passed was already a compromise to Blue Dogs. On Friday night, a block of Democratic members of Congress threatened to withhold their support unless House leaders agreed to take up an amendment preventing anyone who gets a government tax credit to buy insurance from enrolling in a plan that covers abortion. If even the House had to cave in some, there will have to be many more compromises to be made in the Senate, especially on the "public option."

Sequencing matters in drama as it does in politics. It is at the heart of the Obama narrative, the soul and animating force behind the (now unravelling) Democratic majority in 2009. "Yes, we can" generates and benefits from a self-reinforcing bandwagon effect that begins with a whisper of audacious hope. From the State House of Illinois to the US Senate, from Iowa to Virginia - the story of Barack Obama is a narrative of crescendo. "They said this day would never come" is a story of improbable beginnings and spectacular conclusions. The structural underpinnings of the Obama narrative are now straining under the pressure of events. To regain control of events, the President must first regain control of his story.

All Politics is Not Local

As we follow the NJ and VA gubernatorial races, and the special election for the 23rd congressional district in New York (NY23), the debate has overwhelmingly been about whether or not these races are wind vanes for the electoral weather to come.

So some thoughts in this vein, before the main point of this post. Obama is campaigning hard for NJ Governor Jon Corzine because he needs to show errant Democratic members of Congress that he still has coat-tails. If Corzine pulls off his re-election bid, members of Congress seeking a presidential endorsement in 2010 will at least think twice about voting against the president in 2009. If both Creigh Deeds and Corzine lose (and in the former's case, it is practically a foregone conclusion) in their respective gubernatorial races, then the rationale for party unity suffers and it is every politician for her/himself here on out. If this happens, Obama will face an even more recalcitrant Democratic aisle of Congress than he does now.

Meanwhile, with the exit of Dede Scozzafava from the race in NY23, the conservative movement looks set to shake up the Republican establishment, as Sarah Palin has promised. The soul-searching of the Republican Party continues; may the most powerful faction win.

Notice that none of these observations pay any attention to local concerns and local consequences. The significance of these races is entirely predicated on their potential impact on the balance of power in Washington, DC. When the punditry agrees without acknowledging that they do, their consensus is worth examining. There was a time when all politics was local. When the media establishments were not yet centralized in a few major outlets and the coverage of issues nationalized. A time when voters came out to vote for candidates at the local and state levels. Such races did not depend on huge television advertising budgets or endorsements by nationally elected officials, and they were not seen merely as divinizing tea leaves for the future but as important contests in their own right.

Today, voter turnout for local and state elections is paltry, and turn-out for off-year elections is abysmal. An army of national media, however, has descended in Virginia and New Jersey and even in upstate New York, to cover the races not for the benefit of local and state residents, but for the impact it will have on the balance of power in Washington. Even conservative, states-rights oriented politicoes understand that all local politics is national. (The revealing contrast is the high turnout for national elections in Europe and the low turnout for elections to the European parliament owing to the different balance of power between the center and its confederal parts in Europe.) Power resides in Washington, not in states, cities, or communities, because Washington's potential reach into every state and locality is extensive. Even those who want to invert this balance of power have been compelled to concentrate their attention and energies to the Federal City. We are all Federalists now.

Politics is no longer local because the return to turn-out is minimal at the state and local levels. In the 19th century, local party workers toiled to get the vote out because there were patronage jobs to be earned if their candidate won. Parades, torch-light processions, rallies, barbeques, banners, buttons, and insignia got people worked up and ready to go to polling booths. Contrast this level of enthusiasm for a 22 year old voter in Virginia who had voted for Obama last year. "Politics is boring," he said. "I know Obama is making changes, but it takes so long to make things happen." And that is why he is probably not going out to vote next Tuesday.

The lesson to be learnt in next week's contests is not what they will predict about the future, which will be endlessly debated even if only time will tell, but what they reveal about the transformation of American democracy, which time has already told.

Sarah Palin Goes Rogue in New York

Last Thursday, former Governor of Alaska endorsed Conservative Party candidate, Doug Hoffman, over Republican Party candidate, Dede Scozzafava, in New York's 23rd Congressional District's special election.

This is a pre-book launching publicity stunt, leaving no doubt that Sarah Palin is Going Rogue. She has now erased all remaining speculation that she retains personal political ambitions, at least within the Republican Party.

Ironically, it is not Barack Obama who has become a self-centered celebrity, but Sarah Palin, who is wowing the conservative crowd with her personal, anti-party appeal. Celebrities are most popular when they stand beyond and outside party - consider the sharp dip in Oprah Winfrey's popularity when she campaigned for Obama - and this is exactly what Palin has done. On Facebook, she explained her endorsement of Hoffman:

"Political parties must stand for something. When Republicans were in the wilderness in the late 1970s, Ronald Reagan knew that the doctrine of "blurring the lines" between parties was not an appropriate way to win elections. Unfortunately, the Republican Party today has decided to choose a candidate who more than blurs the lines, and there is no real difference between the Democrat and the Republican in this race. This is why Doug Hoffman is running on the Conservative Party's ticket."

Palin must know that her support of the Conservative candidate will split the Republican vote, and could end up giving the election to Democrat Bill Owens. If she had wanted to play the endorsement game without stepping on anyone's shoes, she could have thrown in her support for the Republican candidates in the NJ and VA gubernatorial races, but she hasn't. Instead, she has become the Frankenstein maverick the McCain campaign created, biting the very hand that fed her. Here is how she concluded her Facebook note: "Republicans and conservatives around the country are sending an important message to the Republican establishment in their outstanding grassroots support for Doug Hoffman: no more politics as usual." Palin doesn't so much stand for Doug Hoffman as she stands against "the Republican esablishment," fanning the conservative sentiment that the Republican Party performed poorly in 2008 not because it had become too conservative but because it wasn't conservative enough. She left out, in her account of Reagan, that his 11th commandment was thou shalt not speak ill of another Republican. Hers is the anti-median-voter theory of elections, better read as the ideological theory of losing elections.

Palin is going to drive the legitimacy crisis of conservatism if she continues on this road. Harold Hotelling and Anthony Downs have showed us that in single-member districts moderate parties targeting median voters win elections. This is a mathematically provable proposition. That is why Mike Huckabee and Tim Pawlenty are not yet weighing in on the New York race, because they are trying to do exactly what Sarah Palin is accusing the Republican Party of doing - blur the line between conservatism and Republicanism so that they can appeal to as many potential primary voters as possible should they choose to run in 2012. Ideologues (and celebrities) are too intoxicated by their ideas (or themselves) to care about winning elections, and Huckabee and Pawlenty want to keep that option open.

There was a time when liberals were proud to be liberals, and that spelt the beginning of liberalism's end. Pride and ideological purity drove liberalism's legitimacy crisis, as will be the case for modern conservatism's demise. Democrats, folllowing the lead of the "third-way" Bill Clinton, learned after the excesses of the War on Poverty not to stand on ideology alone - which is always extreme and uncompromising - but also on programmatic commitments that could appeal to the median voter.

Sarah Palin would not remember it, but there was a time, at the turn of the 20th century, when "conservatism" was a bad word coterminous with "stand-patting." She is in danger of recycling history, not that she cares, because she has a personal agenda, not an institutional one. She said it best herself - she is self-consciously Going Rogue. When a party allows those who do not care about winning elections to speak for its base, it courts trouble. Behind every anti-Republican establishment hurrah Palin provokes is a voter ready to Go Rogue on election day. Republicans, beware.

On the Balloon Side Show, the Infotaining Media, and Representative Democracy

Last week, America came to a stand-still as we stood enraptured by television images of a runaway balloon carrying, so we thought, a six-year-old boy. Flimsy as the silver contraption appeared, we gladly suspended all disbelief that the balloon contained enough helium to be carrying a boy within so we could enjoy the side show. (Just as we did for Pixar's animated movie, "Up," which featured an old man who used balloons to move his house to a South American paradise.) So for almost two hours, most of the major news networks displaced all coverage of "hard" news to cover what Latimer County Sheriff Jim Alderman has now concluded to be a "publicity stunt." And I'm going to argue that this was not a bad thing.

As the Balloon Boy story continued to dominate the weekend news cycle, the president and his advisors continued to deliberate on whether or not to send more troops into Afghanistan, and Senators worked behind the scenes to reconcile two different bills on healthcare. So let it be said that our "watchdog" media will switch its attention as soon as it is thrown an infotaining bone. But this is not necessarily a bad thing as long as we are clear-eyed about the media's priorities. Instead, I think there is something strangely comforting that we allow ourselves such trivial pleasures. If we do not need an ever-vigilant watchdog, it is because we believe - by revealed preference - that government will mind government's business, and we can tend to our own. Better no coverage of "hard" news than bad coverage, I say.

And this is exactly what the media did at least momentarily last week even as the President and Congress debated world and country-changing policies. Instead of another round of predictable punditry, or fact-checking of the CBO's estimates of heath-care reform, we were fed images of a helium-filled balloon shaped like a UFO traversing the Colorado landscape. As we are with car chases, we, and therefore the media, were drawn to the balloon chase like flies are drawn to a light. We weren't so much interested in the outcome - indeed knowledge of the outcome would have waken us up from our trance - as we were in the process, which was visually enrapturing.

For over a year we have watched a presidential campaign turn into a permanent campaign, and the American public is fatigued. We see this in Barack Obama's dwindling approval numbers; and we also see it in our captivation by a drifting balloon. We are tired, and we are withdrawing from the public poltical sphere. The infotaining media detected this, and gave us a welcome reprief.

And perhaps this is as it should be. Ours is a representative, and not a direct democracy. We vote and delegate; they, the elected officials, decide. The constitutional calendar is very clear that the people speak only every 2, 4, and 6 years. As far as the US constitution is concerned, our voices do not matter when we speak at any other time at the federal level. (Though our voices do matter at the state level where such devices as recall and refederanda are sanctioned by state constitutions.) If we didn't believe this, than we have to deal with the conundrum that if last year's elections were held in the second week of September, John McCain would have won. Clearly then, what you and I believed on November 4, 2008 matters much more than what you and I believe in October, 2009 (or September, 2008). Opinion polls may capture majority or minority sentiment at any moment in time, but these sentiments (should) have no import on constitutionally sanctioned officers exercising their delegated powers.

The deliberation of troop increases and health-care reform involve complex proceedings in closed-door war room meetings and conference committees reconciling details many Americans know and care little about. Such decisions make bad television, so maybe we shouldn't try to force a message into an unreceptive genre lest we alter the message. Maybe those we put in charge should simply be let alone to do their job, for our constitution envisioned and sanctioned a low-effort, Rip Van Winkle approach to citizen participation. Sometimes we care a lot and we participate, but other times we tune out; and perhaps that is just as it should be. Last week, as we sat enraptured by the alleged antics of Balloon Boy, we embraced the implicit satisfactions of a representative democracy.