Jay Cost: It's Still Hard For Dems to Win in 2006

Budding political scientist Jay Cost takes another look at the 2006 mid-term elections. He reiterates his previous analysis. It is going to be difficult for Democrats to do a 1994 and nationalize the election like Newt Gingrich and Tom DeLay did 12 years ago. Here’s why

1. It is very difficult to beat incumbents. House members are political professionals. They are expert at taking credit for good news, and dodging responsibility for bad news.
   
2. There aren’t that many open Republican House seats, only 5 so far. In 1994 there were 22 Republican open seat victories.
   
3. In 1994 Republicans ran against Democratic incumbents in Republican-leaning districts who had voted for tax increases, gun bans, and national health insurance. A total of 22 Democrats lost their seats. But this year there haven’t been any bills where Republicans have voted against their constituents. “Unlike Democrats in the 103rd Congress, Republicans in the 109th have not voted against their constituents on salient issues.”
   

Since it is very difficult to beat incumbents, and since the Republican Congress has not forced its members to vote against their constituents, Democrats face a much harder task in 2006 than Republicans faced in 1994.

This is not to say that the Democrats cannot take the House, or that they cannot find a way to "nationalize" the election. It is only to say that 1994 cannot be their model. There are too many differences - in both the broader political environment and the actions of incumbent Republicans. To take the House, the Democrats are going to have to develop and implement a new strategy, one that we have never seen before.

And it must be said that there is no sign of that strategy yet.

Liberals Don't Think Laws on Race Apply To Them

The trouble is that you know that nothing good is going to come of this.

Columnist John Leo reports on how liberals believe that they don’t have to obey laws they don’t like. Particularly when the laws say that the government cannot discriminate on the basis of race.

• The American Bar Association is pressuring law schools to grant racial preferences in admissions in defiance of the law.
  
• California government at all levels has refused to abide by Proposition 209 that bans preferences and quotas in state jobs.
  
• In Michigan, “[a]t one point the board of state canvassers refused to put MCRI [Michigan Civil Rights Initiative] on the ballot, despite a court order to do so.”
  
• In Massachusetts a school district refused to allow a kindergarten boy to be excused from a sex education class despite a state law that mandated it.
  

You could say, as a conservative: Good, the worse the better. But that isn’t really true.

Because we know that when a segment of the people believe that the laws don’t apply to them, then there is nothing but trouble ahead.

And if the nation’s elite think that the laws don’t apply to them, that is even worse. The great benefit of law is that it provides protection for the weak. But the law must start with the submission of the powerful to its letter and its spirit.

Treating The Kos-ites as Mainstream

Back during the Vietnam War the liberal media treated the anti-war movement as mainstream and presented activists like John Kerry as responsible critics of the war.

But they weren’t. The anti-war movement was a left-wing group that, had it been on the right, would have been presented as a bunch of dangerous kooks.

Now we have another war, and now we have another anti-war movement. And nobody can tell to what extent this new movement is aided by the terror masters, just as nobody knew in the Vietnam era whether the John Kerrys were coordinating their activities with the North Vietnamese.

Day after day, week after week, the mainstream media treats the left-wing kooks as mainstream activists. So Newsweek’s Jonathan Darman does a piece on Markos Moulitsas Zuniga and presents him as a intimate of the powerful. “Maureen Dowd and Tim Russert [ask him] what the Democrats ought to do to win.” Moulitsas “chats with Senate leadership aides several times a week and has brainstormed with Democratic operatives about the fall campaign.”

Well, it’s a free country. But you can imagine what the MSM would be writing if the Kos-ites were a right-wing group that was raging away at the Republicans. Actually, you don’t have to imagine. You just have to remember the drumbeat of media hate against Pat Buchanan in 1992.

How would you rate Buchanan on a kook scale of 1 to 10? Maybe a 5? But you’d have to put the Kos-ites at 8 or 9.

Back in the 1970s the MSM used the anti-war movement as a catspaw to scratch the hated Richard Nixon. Now they are using the Kos-ites as a catspaw to scratch George W. Bush.

But what if the Kos-ites only draw blood on moderate Democrats like Joe Lieberman, and drive the rest of America into the Republican Party?

To The Trans-National Elite the Nation State is a Dirty Word

Remember this. The folks at the New York Times really don’t buy into all this stuff about nation states and fighting against evil-doers. They belong to the secular trans-national elite that subscribes to a faith that we are beyond atavisms like nationalism. Or at least we soon will be.

For these advanced folks, cycles of violence are caused by roots causes such as oppression. In fact, if you look at any conflict in the world, you will discover that at the root of it is the oppression of some marginalized group, whether people of color, gays, or the Palestinian people.

So we really should not be surprised or even outraged about the revelation of the “secret program of combing through a vast international data base containing banking transactions involving thousands of Americans,” as Eric Lichtblau and Sheryl Gay Stolberg put it.

If you work for the New York Times you probably believe that the War on Terror is a put-up job, a Pentagon plan hatched up with the Religious Right to take over the world.

The outrageous thing is that the disclosures of secret information about tactics and methods used by the United States government in pursuing terrorists makes the task of our fighting men more difficult. Maybe it will even result in people being killed.

The nation state has been a boon to the ordinary people of Europe and North America. It has freed them from the face-to-face community of blood kin, and created a successful, though abstract locus for their loyalty and belonging. And even in the bloody twentieth century only 5 percent of males were killed in wars, as opposed to 20-40 percent in primitive societies.

But the trans-national elite is above all that. They sneer at the miraculous nation state. They want to move on to bigger and better things, a global state without all the mess of democracy, a state that they will control, or think they will.

Ordinary people would do well to resist the plans of the trans-national elite and shame the newspaper that broadcasts to terrorists the operational plans and intelligence methods of the United States government.

Education Myths

Do you believe in myths? Of course you do. Everyone does. Especially if you define myth the way that Eric Voegelin does, as compact knowledge.

But we are talking here about education myths, which means things you know that ain’t so. And probably you know them because some special interest has made sure you know what isn’t so.

The American Enterprise Institute’s Jay Greene has put together some education myths that we have all been carefully taught.

Myth One: Education is Underfunded. Not so. We’ve been putting more and more money into education over the last half century. Fortunately we have an assessment method to tell us if the money we’ve been spending has improved educational outcomes.

For twelfth-grade students, who represent the end product of the education system, NAEP [National Assessment of Education Progress] scores in math, science, and reading have all remained flat over the past 30 years.

Myth Two: Teachers are Underpaid. No they are not.

Data from the U.S. Department of Labor show that in 2002, elementary school teachers averaged $30.75 per hour and high school teachers made $31.01. That is about the same as other professionals like architects, economists, biologists, civil engineers, chemists, physicists and astronomers, and computer systems analysts and scientists.

Of course, teachers only work 7.3 hours per day and have three months off in summer. They therefore have an option that the rest of us do not have. They can work or take the three months off.

Myth Three: Insurmountable Problems. Schools are helpless in the face of social problems. No they are not. Some states punch above their weight, for instance Texas, which does better than you would expect given the social problems in the state. And some states do worse: Louisiana, for example. And then there is accountability and choice. Schools do better when they are held to account and when students have a choice.

Myth Four: Class Size. Research shows that small classes may improve student performance. But according to Greene, the research is difficult to evaluate because of methodology problems. What is clear is that significant class size reduction would be enormously expensive.

Myth Five: Teacher Certification. Everyone wants to make sure that teachers are certified to teach their subject matter. But studies show that certification and masters’ degrees don’t make any difference.

One of the strongest and most consistent findings in the entire body of research on teacher quality is that teaching certificates and master's degrees in education are irrelevant to classroom performance.

Myth Six: Rich Schools. “[P]rivate schools do better than public schools only because they have more money, recruit high-performing students, and expel low-performing students.” Not true.

According to the U.S. Department of Education, the average private school charged $4,689 per student in tuition for the 1999?2000 school year. That same year, the average public school spent $8,032 per pupil.

Catholic schools, of course, spend even less per student.

Myth Seven: Voucher Don’t Work. The media is reporting the voucher experiment as though the results aren’t yet in. But they are. Vouchers improve student performance. The only question is, by how much?

The truth is that, so long as there is a government education monopoly, there will be education myths. The stakes are too high to let the truth alone. So every one of us is called to witness to the truth. And the truth is: government education stinks.

Are You Boring or Bonkers?

Which would you rather be? Boring or bonkers? According to Peggy Noonan, the Republican Party honchos think their base is boring. But the Democratic Party leaders think their base is bonkers.

She’s probably right. It is probably true that the Republican leaders think that:

They know the higher wisdom on such issues as immigration... have a more nuanced sense of reality. And as for conservative social issues groups, the politicians resent those nagging, whining pushers-for-the-impossible who are always threatening to stay home or go elsewhere. (Where?)

Nothing there that a good sharp blow between the eyes won’t cure. But pity the poor Democratic leadership.

They don't only think they're more sophisticated than their base, more informed and aware of the complexities. I believe they think their base is mad.

OK. So all this makes for a good article when you can’t think of anything else to write about. But let us not be misled by our cynicism. Peggy Noonan is telling us that the system is working.

Despite their annoyance, our political elites have to think about what the people are thinking, they have to keep themselves aligned with the irritating activists in their respective parties. That is good and healthy.

You do not get that impression, for instance, when reading about politics in Britain. In that crime ridden country, the Labour Party has almost completely forgotten its working-class base in its frantic effort to make itself palatable to Middle England. And the Tory Party under David Cameron is steering dangerously far away from its conservative, middle-class base in an effort to woo the upscale professionals who deserted the “nasty” party to vote for Tony Blair.

In Britain, the two major parties take their bases completely for granted. In the US, the two major parties only wish they could.

And that may be as good as it gets.

School Choice, Inch by Inch

There are three million children in America condemned to attending failed schools. Republicans are trying to do something about it. Sometimes even Democratic governors lend a hand.

In Arizona this year, the legislate is “enacting four new or expanded programs allowing disadvantaged children to attend private schools,” according to Clint Bolick of the Alliance for School Choice.

Bolick presents the Arizona gains as representative of a new strategy for the school choice coalition.

Instead of taking the unions and their massive resources head-on, advocates are adopting toe-hold strategies, pursuing small programs addressing specific problems that are difficult for politicians to oppose.

And so inch by inch, school choice is moving the chains up the field.

But what about those three million children in failing schools? Under the No Child Left Behind Act they are supposed to be allowed to transfer to another school within the district. Only there typically aren’t enough places.

For Democrats who truly believe in social justice, that presents a terrible dilemma: Either forcing children to remain in schools where they have little prospect for a bright future, or enlisting private schools in a rescue mission.

Which is, Republicans would say, exactly where we want them. And it is part of the Republican grand strategy: forcing Democrats to choose between social justice, helping kids and poor people, or hanging onto their power and their sinecures.