Republicans' tug of war

By Deborah Simmons
Published: Friday, October 3rd, 2008

Originally published in the Washington Times.

The Republican Party ain't what it used to be. Sure, it still takes on the Democratic Party and can be counted on to fight the good fight when it comes to faith, family and freedom. But Republicans have lost considerable ground with the very working-class and middle-class Americans who have delivered resounding victories to them since Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush took on Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale in 1980. The shift in relationship with those same voters began in 2006, when Democrats gained control of Congress, and it continues as the election draws near. This doesn't bode well for the McCain-Palin ticket and the two dozen House Republican seats that are looking more purple than red.

Have Republicans lost their soul? Have they merely lost their way? Is the internal tug of war that began during the contentious primaries to blame?

The Huckabee-McCain-Romney split almost became too much to bear. And even after John McCain emerged from that brusing battle as the apparent nominee, many were left wandering.

The Moral Majority may be no more. But the moral majority remains those voters of all ethnicities who are pro-life, America-first, law-and-order, individual-freedom-loving, less-government-intervention, free-trade red-blooded Americans. Is the Republican Party paying attention?

First, Republicans proposed and supported a bailout of the financial system in all its unglorious corporate-welfare underpinnings. Then they didn't. Then they said, "We believe" - sounding more like underdog fans during the fourth quarter of a football game than politicians elected to maintain America's leading role in the 21st century. They fell in and out of love with Sarah Palin quicker than she could pluck a fast-wilting daisy and say, "They love me, they love me not."

Mr. McCain knew what he was getting his party into when the name Gov. Sarah Palin passed his lips that fateful day. While some commentators were giddy (I've never seen Pat Buchanan so happy), many others momentarily held their breath before fully exhaling. Doug Wilder had this to say about Mrs. Palin: "If that is the cream of the crop, God save the milk." Well-known voices are doubting Thomases, too. Syndicated columnist Kathleen Parker wrote: "As we´ve seen and heard more from John McCain´s running mate, it is increasingly clear that Palin is a problem." Andrew Sullivan called Mr. McCain's decision "the most irresponisble act any candidate has ever made." Conservative George Will also let his doubts become known.

It really doesn't matter what the Palin barometers register following the debate with Joe Biden. As Mr. McCain goes on Nov. 4, so goes the party.

What is happening of late raises questions about Mr. McCain's leadership qualities, Mr. McCain's coattails and the perception — and inside the Beltway perception is reality — the Republican leadership in both chambers.

Only in America would the president say there is a crisis at hand that needs the full time and attention of Congress, and then his own party - that would be the Republicans - fail to deliver to its leader. One chamber, the House, tells the president no and goes on holiday. Leadership, not experience, and hero-worship, not moral clarity, had a lot to do with that outcome.

Mr. McCain, aka Sir Anti-Earmark, was considered our knight in shining armor, coming off the campaign trail to the rescue of Main Street, Wall Street and both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue. In the end, his lack of leadership delivered disappointment. Mr. McCain's insertion into the deliberations either left his party brethen twisting in the wind or further stiffening their spines on the bailout. But then he turned around and did the unconscionble: Mr. McCain voted "yea" on the pork-laden Senate version of the bailout.

Mr. McCain broke his own rule and disavowed his own principle. His armor remains forever tarnished.

Mr. McCain cannot defend his support for this lard: Manufacturers for children's wodden arrows get $6 million; $192 goes to Puerto Rican and Virgin Islands rum producers; auto-racing tracks get $128 million. Of course, that isn't the entire list. But it's enough — $326 million — to let struggling Main Street American voters know that there is little that remains "grand" about today's Republican Party.

Two dozen Republican House seats are in the "voters' dunno" column. Poll numbers for President Bush are so low they no longer are of any consequence. Sure, Mr. Bush can help raise funding, after all he is the president. But Republicans need more than money between now and Election Day.

Republicans need to win over voters who have lost their jobs and their job prospects, who see their American dream being dashed by stinking rich Republicans and Democrats who gambled and lost and voters who — and this is key — have fallen inline behind Barack Obama (or the Clintons) and know that change and reform are not synomous.

Republicans need to remember Americans in red states are tuning in daily to WII-FM (what's in it for me) and the voices that they are hearing don't belong to Laura Ingraham, Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity.

The Democrats are peddling themselves as the change agents. Republicans need to retreat, regroup and re-emerge. Their soul-searching time is running out.

Dick Cheney, Role Model

New York Times Editorial

Published: October 3, 2008

In all the talk about the vice-presidential debate, there was an issue that did not get much attention but kept nagging at us: Sarah Palin’s description of the role and the responsibilities of the office for which she is running, vice president of the United States.

In Thursday night’s debate, Ms. Palin was asked about the vice president’s role in government. She said she agreed with Dick Cheney that “we have a lot of flexibility in there” under the Constitution. And she declared that she was “thankful that the Constitution would allow a bit more authority given to the vice president also, if that vice president so chose to exert it.”

It is hard to tell from Ms. Palin’s remarks whether she understands how profoundly Dick Cheney has reshaped the vice presidency — as part of a larger drive to free the executive branch from all checks and balances. Nor did she seem to understand how much damage that has done to American democracy.

Mr. Cheney has shown what can happen when a vice president — a position that is easy to lampoon and overlook — is given free rein by the president and does not care about trampling on the Constitution.

Mr. Cheney has long taken the bizarre view that the lesson of Watergate was that Congress was too powerful and the president not powerful enough. He dedicated himself to expanding President Bush’s authority and arrogating to himself executive, legislative and legal powers that are nowhere in the Constitution.

This isn’t the first time that Ms. Palin was confronted with the issue. In an interview with Katie Couric of CBS News, the Alaska governor was asked what she thought was the best and worst about the Cheney vice presidency. Ms. Palin tried to dodge: laughing and joking about the hunting accident in which Mr. Cheney accidentally shot a friend. The only thing she had to add was that Mr. Cheney showed support for the troops in Iraq.

There was not a word about Mr. Cheney’s role in starting the war with Iraq, in misleading Americans about weapons of mass destruction, in leading the charge to create illegal prison camps where detainees are tortured, in illegally wiretapping Americans, in creating an energy policy that favored the oil industry that made him very rich before the administration began.

Ms. Couric asked Joseph Biden, Ms. Palin’s rival, the same question in a separate interview. He had it exactly right when he told her that Mr. Cheney’s theory of the “unitary executive” held that “Congress and the people have no power in a time of war.” And he had it right in the debate when he called Mr. Cheney “the most dangerous vice president we’ve had in American history.”

The Constitution does not state or imply any flexibility in the office of vice president. It gives the vice president no legislative responsibilities other than casting a tie-breaking vote in the Senate when needed and no executive powers at all. The vice president’s constitutional role is to be ready to serve if the president dies or becomes incapacitated.

Any president deserves a vice president who will be a sound adviser and trustworthy supporter. But the American people also deserve and need a vice president who understands and respects the balance of power — and the limits of his or her own power. That is fundamental to our democracy.

So far, Ms. Palin has it exactly, frighteningly wrong.

Talking in Points

By GAIL COLLINS

Published: October 3, 2008
Originally published in The New York Times

The Republicans were euphoric over Sarah Palin’s debate performance, particularly the part in which she stood tall and refrained from falling off the stage. “There are conservatives and Republicans across America who are ... breathing a sigh of relief,” said Pat Buchanan on MSNBC, adding that “of the four debaters we’ve seen, she was the most interesting, attractive of them all.”

Palin did indeed answer each question with poise and self-confidence, reeling off a bunch of talking points that were sometimes totally unrelated to the matter at hand. When she was asked to respond to Joe Biden’s critique of the McCain health care plan, she announced: “I would like to respond about the tax increases,” cheerfully ignoring the fact that tax increases had never been mentioned.

After the recent Katie Couric unpleasantness, Palin told the viewers that this time they were getting a chance to hear her “answer these tough questions without the filter.” And, indeed, her answers were murky in the extreme. She railed repeatedly about government regulations getting in the way of the private sector, then announced that the financial rescue plan “has got to include that massive oversight that Americans are expecting and deserving.” She said that she didn’t want to discuss what caused global warming, only how to ease its impact.

She appeared to agree with Dick Cheney’s manic theory that the vice president is a member of both the executive and legislative branches, although it’s hard to tell since she began her answer this way: “Well, our founding fathers were very wise there in allowing through the Constitution much flexibility there in the office of the vice president. And we will do what is best for the American people in tapping into that position and ushering in an agenda that is supportive and cooperative with the president’s agenda in that position.”

When the moderator, Gwen Ifill, asked under what circumstances the candidates would consider bringing America’s nuclear weapons into play, Palin said: “Nuclear weaponry, of course, would be the be-all, end-all of just too many people in too many parts of our planet, so those dangerous regimes, again, cannot be allowed to acquire nuclear weapons, period.”

It’s hard to remember that a month ago, very few people had ever heard of Sarah Palin. McCain sprung his vice-presidential selection on us at the last minute, possibly under the impression that the country felt things had gotten too boring lately, and would appreciate the excitement of having a minimally experienced political unknown serving as backup to a 72-year-old cancer survivor.

Since then, she has spent most of her time going from one Republican rally to the next, repeating chunks of her convention speech, which have grown more disjointed with every stop. (In an airplane hangar in Ohio recently, she told the people of Youngstown she was happy to be there because Alaska has, per capita, the nation’s most “small planes and small pilots.”)

For reporters hoping to question her, she has been determinedly unfindable, a Judge Crater from Juneau. And after the Couric debacle, you can bet your boots that the campaign is going to take Palin’s debate performance, declare victory and wrap her up until after the election.

This is all a terrible shame. For us, mainly. But also for Palin, whose intelligence and toughness may wind up buried under the legend of her verb-deprived ramblings.

Palin is, in many ways, a genuine heir to the women’s liberation movement of the 1970s, which tried to make sure that future generations of American women would grow up feeling they had every right to compete with men for all the best rewards and adventures the world had to offer. She never seems to have had a single doubt that she could accomplish whatever she set her mind to. When she got involved in politics, she used the time-honored male route of cultivating powerful mentors, then pushing them out of the way at the first possible opportunity. When she was governor, she did what very few female politicians do, and ignored all the subsidiary issues in order to put all her bets on one big policy payoff in the form of a new state energy policy.

Then, somehow, she concluded that her success in clawing her way to the top of Alaska’s modest political heap meant she was capable of running the United States.

This entire election season has been a long-running saga about the rise of women in American politics. On Thursday, it all went sour. The people boosting Palin’s triumph were not celebrating because she demonstrated that she is qualified to be president if something ever happened to John McCain. They were cheering her success in covering up her lack of knowledge about the things she would have to deal with if she wound up running the country.

That rubbish they talk about the credit crunch

Capitalism is dead. America has gone socialist. US leadership has collapsed. Europe has shown the way. Oh yes?

By Gerard Baker,
originally published in the Times of London

There's something curious about the human imagination. Confronted with unprecedented events of unfathomable scale, it seems to find the shocking reality insufficiently interesting and reaches instead for even grander, more cosmic explanations of what's going on.

The financial crisis is precisely that sort of moment. It's a vast drama, with consequences that will ripple steadily from immediate economic hardship to changes in short-term political fortune to a broad recasting of the way our economies and societies work.

But that's not enough, apparently, for the drama queens and kings of our political and media establishments. Hastily, they've constructed a grand historical narrative in the last couple of weeks, composed largely of overarching myths that are in danger of hardening into conventional wisdom.

So at the risk of being accused of missing the historical boat, let me try to take a few of them on.

Capitalism has failed and the US has embraced socialism

This one has adherents, surprisingly, on both sides of the Atlantic. In Europe, the birthplace, etymologically speaking, of Schadenfreude, the Germans and French have been eagerly stamping on the grave of Anglo-Saxon capitalism. In America they've found unlikely allies among a bunch of hardline conservative Republican politicians and commentators. These latter-day Bourbons claim the Bush Administration's $700 billion bailout plan for banks will rank with the October Revolution and Mao's Long March as seminal events in the history of human serfdom.

Let's take the latter claim first. Seven hundred billion dollars certainly sounds like a big chunk of the economy to be placed in the hands of the Government. It could, spent wisely, get you some way to the top of the commanding heights of America's $14 trillion economy.

But I doubt the Hank Paulson plan would win him plaudits with Marx and Engels. For starters, acquiring the financial equivalent of a junkyard is not quite what socialists have in mind when they urge nationalisation.

In any case the actual outlay will not be anything like $700 billion. The Government is merely proposing to use that money to buy the putrid assets that now clog the balance sheets of banks. When the frozen credit markets thaw, it will sell them back. It's unlikely the whole exercise will cost more than a couple of hundred billion dollars, which represents about 1.5 per cent of the US economy.

That leads us to the argument about capitalism's terminal failure.

As I've argued before, the current collapse owes as much to government intrusion into the free market (the abominable hybrid of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac; the regulatory requirement that banks lend money cheaply to those who couldn't afford to repay it) as it does to the madness of free market savagery. There's been precious little financial deregulation in the past ten years. The one big piece of liberalisation - the abolition in 1999 of Depression-era legislation that separated commercial and investment banks - has been a lifesaver, enabling investment banks to save themselves by merging with, or becoming, retail banks.

Capitalism's Cassandras might also want to consider that the crisis the current mess most closely resembles is the Swedish banking collapse of 1991-92. I don't remember Sweden being reviled in those days as a model of heartless capitalism.

The unpleasant truth is that financial excesses occur quite frequently in the capitalist system and always require modifications to it, not its abolition.

One hundred years ago, John Pierpont Morgan singlehandedly rescued a financial system near collapse. The experience led directly a few years later to the creation of the Federal Reserve, America's central bank (greeted then, by the way, by the same sort of extremists, as a harbinger of socialism). In the 1930s the Depression resulted in reforms that changed but did not destroy the free market. In the early 1990s the Government spent a couple of hundred billion dollars bailing out the savings and loans industry. That didn't noticeably undermine capitalism.

America's political leadership has collapsed

Let us acknowledge first that this is not a week to earn many American politicians a chapter in a future volume of Profiles in Courage. The vote on Monday was a failure of management as much as anything.

John McCain has rightly taken a lot of stick for making a big deal out of returning to Washington to save the world. There was nothing wrong with his Superman act except that he didn't execute it. When you dive into the telephone box and don the suit with the S on the chest, you can't simply sit quietly and listen sympathetically to everyone's concerns, say you hope it all works out and head back to the office.

Barack Obama's performance was even less inspiring. His message to Washington in the midst of the worst financial crisis in 75 years was (I'm not making this up): “Call me if you need me.”

But - and I'm loath to excuse politicians - could we have expected them to fall into line, without a struggle, with the plan the Bush Administration handed them? If you asked the top 200 economists what they thought of the plan, I guarantee that a clear majority of them would say it was riddled with flaws.

In any case, all the indications are that the House will pass the plan - with amendments - today. Not a straight path to a resolution, but certainly not one to perdition either.

Europe has shown how to deal with the crisis

This myth strikes me as the most dangerous and delusional of all. Its first incarnation a few months back was that social democratic Europe had avoided the financial disasters of the Anglo-Saxons. Little local difficulties at Fortis and Dexia have taken care of that, so now the claim is that cool-headed Europeans have saved the day.

Really? Ireland's bold move to protect depositors is producing a competitive run on other European banks and seems to have mortgaged the entire eurozone to an open-ended commitment from a government that is already fiscally challenged. Over to you, Mr Sarkozy and Mrs Merkel.

The bigger problem with the Europeans is their steadfast refusal to recognise the severity of the crisis. While the Federal Reserve has slashed interest rates, the ECB and the Bank of England continue to worry about inflation and refuse to cut interest rates.

Capitalism is flexible enough to bend when the financial hurricanes blow. Let's hope we can say the same for Europe's policymakers.

Abolish the vice presidency

By Bruce Ackerman
October 2, 2008
Originally published in the Los Angeles Times

The founders messed up. We should do away with the office.

Sarah Palin is the product of a design flaw -- the unintended consequence of the founders' decision to create the vice presidency.

For two centuries, presidential nominees have used the office to balance the ticket by naming a running mate from a different region, or one who speaks with a different ideological accent to a specific constituency. This means that a president's death generates a double shock: The nation not only mourns a fallen leader, it must deal with a replacement who may push politics in a new direction.

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FOR THE RECORD:
Vice presidency: An Op-Ed article Wednesday on doing away with the office of vice president indicated that President Lincoln's motive for choosing his second-term running mate, Andrew Johnson, was to carry Tennessee. In fact, his motive was to attract votes from the border states; Tennessee was contested between the Confederacy and the Union; it was not counted in the Union presidential election.

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Teddy Roosevelt -- who replaced William McKinley when he was assassinated in 1901 -- may have been a great progressive president, but he had been named as vice president by the arch-conservative McKinley simply to carry New York. The country elected a right-winger but ended up with something else entirely.

Similar perverse logic led Abraham Lincoln to choose Andrew Johnson as a running mate. Lincoln knew that Johnson was a racial conservative, but he was more interested in carrying Tennessee. This tragic blunder clouds Lincoln's claim to greatness. When Lincoln was killed, Johnson's bitter opposition to Reconstruction helped poison race relations for generations.

Recent elections have lulled us into a false sense of security. Both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush nominated like-minded, known-quantity running mates, as has Barack Obama this time around. But John McCain's surprising choice should lead us to think again. Mexico and France see no need for a vice president. We should designate the secretary of State to be in charge until a special election can be held to replace a president.

This isn't a question on which the founders deserve any deference. They designed their system for a very different political world.

Their electoral college aimed to give the power to choose the president to wealthy, important men in each state. But politics was emphatically local in the 18th century, and the founders feared that each state's electors would cast their ballots for a favorite son -- depriving the leading candidate of a majority.

To solve this problem, they hit upon an ingenious scheme. The original Constitution gave presidential electors two votes, not one, and provided that they could only vote for one nominee from their own state. The idea was that electors would use one vote to flatter a local favorite and the other to select a national leader like, say, George Washington, giving him a strong majority.

But alas, the two-vote system could be sabotaged. Electors could simply vote for their favorite Joe Schmoe and cast a blank second ballot, thereby maximizing Schmoe's chance for success. Enter the vice presidency, a consolation prize for favorite sons (or whoever polled second in the electoral college). It was meant to assure the election of a proper president; providing a replacement executive was a distinctly secondary objective.

This clever scheme did not survive the rise of political parties. By 1800, electors followed the instructions of the national Democratic-Republican and Federalist parties, generating a crisis. The Democratic-Republicans won the election, and their 73 electors all wrote the names of Thomas Jefferson and his running mate, Aaron Burr, on their ballots, without having the power to say that they wanted Jefferson to be president. This created a tie for the top spot, and Jefferson and Burr were obliged to compete for the presidency in what turned out to be a bitterly contested runoff in the House of Representatives.

After the smoke cleared, Congress and the states merely tinkered with the election system. Their 12th Amendment simply told electors to cast one ballot for president and one for vice president. This made a repeat of the Jefferson-Burr crisis impossible, but it paved the way for the vice presidential shocks that have redirected our national history.

If McCain wins the presidency, we can only wish him a long life. But however the race turns out, we should recognize that the founders didn't have the slightest idea that the vice presidency would episodically explode in our face, and it's about time we fixed it.

Bruce Ackerman is a professor of law and political science at Yale and the author of "The Failure of the Founding Fathers."

Learning From Others: The Swedish Experience

By Kathy Gill, About.com Guide to US Politics since 2004

If you aren't crazy about the proposed bailout of Wall Street (you'd be in the majority, by the way), then learn how Sweden recovered from a similar housing-related financial crisis in 1992.

Sweden did not just bail out its financial institutions by having the government take over the bad debts. It extracted pounds of flesh from bank shareholders before writing checks. Banks had to write down losses and issue warrants to the government.

That strategy held banks responsible and turned the government into an owner. When distressed assets were sold, the profits flowed to taxpayers, and the government was able to recoup more money later by selling its shares in the companies as well.

From Jack Handy, The Master

"To me, it's always a good idea to always carry two sacks of something when you walk around. That way, if anybody says, 'Hey, can you give me a hand?,' you can say, 'Sorry, got these sacks.'"

"If I ever get real rich, I hope I'm not real mean to poor people, like I am now."

"If you go flying back through time, and you see somebody else flying forward into the future, it's probably best to avoid eye contact."

"You know one thing that will really make a woman mad? Just run up and kick her in the butt. (P.S. This also works with men.)"

"I remember how my Great Uncle Jerry would sit on the porch and whittle all day long. Once he whittled me a toy boat out of a larger toy boat I had. It was almost as good as the first one, except now it had bumpy whittle marks all over it. And no paint, because he had whittled off the paint."

"You know something that would really make me applaud? A guy gets stuck in quicksand, then sinks, then suddenly comes shooting out, riding on water skis! How do they do that?!"

"Instead of a trap door, what about a trap window? The guy looks out it, and if he leans too far, he falls out. Wait. I guess that's like a regular window."

"Children need encouragement. So if a kid gets an answer right, tell him it was a lucky guess. That way, he develops a good, lucky feeling."

"Here's a good thing to do if you go to a party and you don't know anybody: First, take out the garbage. Then go around and collect any extra garbage that people might have, like a crumpled-up napkin, and take that out too. Pretty soon people will want to meet the busy garbage guy."

"How come the dove gets to be the peace symbol? How about the pillow? It has more feathers than the dove, and it doesn't have that dangerous beak."

"Somebody told me it was frightening how much topsoil we are losing each year, but I told that story around the campfire and nobody got scared."

"One day one of my little nephews came up to me and asked me if the equator was a real line that went around the Earth, or just an imaginary one. I had to laugh. Laugh and laugh. Because I didn't know, and I thought that maybe by laughing he would forget what he asked me."

"Even though he was an enemy of mine, I had to admit that what he had accomplished was a brilliant piece of strategy. First, he punched me, then he kicked me, then he punched me again."

"If your kid makes one of those little homemade guitars out of a cigar box and rubber bands, don't let him just play it once or twice and then throw it away. Make him practice on it, every day, for about three hours a day. Later, he'll thank you."

"If I come back as an animal in my next lifetime, I hope it's some type of parasite, because this is the part where I take it EASY!"

"I bet the main reason the police keep people away from a plane crash is they don't want anybody walking in and lying down in the crash stuff, then when somebody comes up act like they just woke up and go, 'What was THAT?!'"