If Democrats Win in November

What if Democrats win in November? What will they do? Richard E. Cohen runs down their agenda.

[Democratic House Leader Nancy] Pelosi has also promised that within 100 hours after taking control of the House on January 3, Democrats will pass legislation to increase the minimum wage, mandate the negotiation of Medicare prescription drug prices, fully implement the recommendations of the 9/11 commission, and repeal tax benefits for big oil companies.

OK. Those are all policy initiatives that will help Democratic voters in the short term. What else?

Barbara Boxer wants to legislate reductions in greenhouse gases; Ted Kennedy wants to reduce student loan interest rates. Charles Rangel “wants a more bipartisan policy on international trade, including better protections for U.S. workers.”

Then there is this:

For many key Democrats, the emerging strategy -- should they win some congressional control this November -- appears to be to try to score legislative victories where possible, thwart GOP initiatives, and wage an aggressive oversight campaign to expose what they see as Bush administration shortcomings and neglected national problems.

Er, isn’t that what they have been doing for the last six years? Democrats have always been good at oversight, that is when it involves public hearings with eevil corporate executives brought to the bar of browbeating. You can bet that Rep. Henry Waxman will be a “barracuda”
in this department, according to Republican Rep. Tom Davis.

It is interesting, though, that there is nary a word in Cohen’s article about Iraq and the war on terror.

I wonder why?

The Path to Censorship

Imagine the following news item in your friendly local newspaper.

A furious former President Bush is warning ABC that its mini-series "The Path to Kuwait" grossly misrepresents his actions in the first Iraq war - and he is demanding the network "pull the drama" if changes aren't made.

Imagine the screams. Imagine the outrage. Censorship! Abuse of power!

Actually it would never have happpened. Republicans know better than to even whisper a suggestion that a broadcast TV network should edit, or, God forbid, withdraw a drama on network TV.

But when ABC puts up a mini-series “The Path to 9/11” that dramatizes the ineffective policies and actions of the Clinton administration in the happy-go-lucky Nineties, the old Clinton War Room swings into action. As reported in The New York Post:

A furious Bill Clinton is warning ABC that its mini-series "The Path to 9/11" grossly misrepresents his pursuit of Osama bin Laden - and he is demanding the network "pull the drama" if changes aren't made.

But wait. I thought the Democrats believed that the war on terror was a Bush Lie, a put-up job to scare the American people. I thought that President Clinton believes that Global Warming is the number one problem in the world.

Why should the Clintonoids and the former president care about 9/11? It’s just a law-enforcement problem, isn’t it? Really not that important when compared to global warming, institutional racism, gay marriage, and embryonic stem cell research.

So maybe the Democrats are misleading us on the war on terror as well. They know it is important, and they know that the American people think it is important.

The problem is that they can’t appear to take the war too seriously. Their base won’t let them.

The Election Campaign Begins

With Labor Day behind us we can expect to see, in the next couple of weeks, how the Bush administration intends to fight the mid-term elections.

Many people have noted how the Bushies seem to manage to pull themselves out of the ditch every election cycle—just after “everyone” has consigned them to electoral disaster.

The reason for this is not remarkable. In normal times the informal alliance of Democrats and liberal media means that the liberal world view occupies most of the public square. Only in the conservative subculture does an alternative view exist.

Come the campaign season the Bushies can engage the American people and advance their ideas and policies against the Democrats using the president’s bully pulpit and the paid media of campaign commercials.

With two speeches under his belt it is clear that President Bush and his staff have prepared a full-scale campaign to win the hearts and minds of the American people. They intend to confound those who have already conceded the election to the Democrats.

In his speech Tuesday, the president called for Congress to pass new legislation to clarify uncertainties in the legal status of unlawful combatants. Specifically, he declared:

I'm sending Congress legislation to specifically authorize the creation of military commissions to try terrorists for war crimes.

In addition, and perhaps for patriotic Americans this is the most important, the president said:

I'm asking Congress to pass legislation that will clarify the rules for our personnel fighting the war on terror. First, I'm asking Congress to list the specific, recognizable offenses that would be considered crimes under the War Crimes Act -- so our personnel can know clearly what is prohibited in the handling of terrorist enemies. Second, I'm asking that Congress make explicit that by following the standards of the Detainee Treatment Act our personnel are fulfilling America's obligations under Common Article Three of the Geneva Conventions. Third, I'm asking that Congress make it clear that captured terrorists cannot use the Geneva Conventions as a basis to sue our personnel in courts -- in U.S. courts. The men and women who protect us should not have to fear lawsuits filed by terrorists because they're doing their jobs.

These are important issues that have needed attention for some time. Some have complained that the Bush administration has not addressed them earlier. Obviously it is best to send them up to Congress in the weeks before an election. It helps concentrate the mind—of Congress and the American people. That is what the Bush administration is doing.

You can complain about the timing as a naked attempt to politicize the war on terror. But timing is everything. The president has a responsibility to advance his agenda at the best moment. Otherwise, why bother?

The Democrats have had a fine old time for the last year traducing the president and our war on terror, specifically against the Islamist movement that would like to overturn the Pax Americana. It has been very difficult to counter their careless and vindictive talk.

The time to engage with them in a battle is at election time, and that is what the president is doing.

The Two Nations in Education

How come if the US education system is so poor, asks Robert Samuelson, that the economy is so good? How do you answer the following riddle:

Why do Americans do so badly on international educational comparisons and yet support an advanced economy?

I know. The answer to the riddle is simple: Democrats and Republicans. Democrats are the cause of the lousy school system, and Republicans are the cause of the advanced economy. But let us allow Samuelson to suggest a more nuanced explanation.

The short answer is that the US has two systems for the education of the American people.

In trying to explain the riddle, let me offer a distinction between the U.S. school system and the American learning system.

The school system is the formal system of schools and colleges. What some of us call the “education blob.”

The American learning system is more complex. It's mostly post-high school and, aside from traditional colleges and universities, includes the following: community colleges; for-profit institutes and colleges; adult extension courses; online and computer-based courses; formal and informal job training; self-help books.

Exhibit A in the learning system is the for-profit University of Phoenix founded in 1976.

Now it has about 300,000 students (half taking online courses and half attending classes in 163 U.S. locations). The average starting age: 34.

Samuelson reckons that “the American learning system” is effective for two main reasons. As he puts it:

• First, it provides second chances.
  
• Second, it's job-oriented.
  

What we Americans need to think about is how to transfer the successful features of the American leaning system over to the US school system. Problem is that the US school system costs a ton of money and it doesn’t deliver too much to the bottom line.

(No I don’t mean eevil capitalist profits. I mean outcomes, as in educated, productive people.)

My own view is, first, that there is a lot of value in getting basic literacy and numeracy, but that parents understand that so deeply that we don’t need the government enforcing it.

Second, I think that most teenagers should be out in the job market. And it wouldn’t hurt if they were experiencing some mild-to-moderate exploitation. Because that is what will get them off their duffs and into some job-oriented learning.

Third, I’m inclined to support some sort of government-backed second-chance operation. As bureaucratic and unionized as community colleges have become, they do perform an important function. Probably it’s a function that would be better performed by a private-sector, government-subsidized operation.

As for the current US schools sector. You tell me: What’s the point?

The Real Plame Story

For perennial hawk Frank J. Gaffney Jr. the astonishing thing about the Plame game was the identification of leaker Richard Armitage as “no partisan gunslinger.” What do you mean, he writes.

Rich Armitage in truth is the consummate partisan gunslinger. It's just that his partisanship is... the other sense of a partisan: one who wages war from behind enemy lines.

But that is not what astonishes me. What astonishes me is that the unmasking of Armitage as the leaker who put the name of Valerie Plame, CIA wife of former Ambassador Wilson into the public square unmasks something much bigger. “A conspiracy so vast...” as the saying went in another time when the loyalty of the State Department was in question.

It shows that the State Department has been blocking and hindering the Bush Administration’s foreign policy ever since 9/11, and that nobody has paid the price for this disloyalty.

Indeed, it is the Bushies who have paid the price with three years of investigations and humiliations—while everyone else looked on and sniggeringly knew what had really happened all the time.

I would say that many senior revolving-door Republicans, the kind who occupy presidential sub-cabinet appointments in a Republican adminsitration, are going to be taking a long, slow look at the State Department and CIA operations of the past few years. The next Republican president will have a State Department task group whose job it will be to make sure, at any cost, that enough of the president’s men get jobs at State to keep it on-side, or at least prevent it from actively working to sabotage the president’s foreign policy.

Don't Look For Education Reform From Within

When you have been president of Harvard, as Derek Bok has been, or dean of Harvard College, as Harry Lewis has been, you ought to have some ideas about how to fix higher education.

But according to Robert Kagan himself a former president of Yale, neither Derek Bok in Our Underachieving Colleges nor Harry R. Lewis in Excellence Without a Soul: How a Great University Forgot Education has a clue what to do about the “imperial faculty.”

They wield their statistics and show how much trouble colleges are in. And they understand it is a problem of leadership.

Both Harry Lewis and Derek Bok have entered a devastating judgment on contemporary university leadership — more devastating, and more self-incriminating, than they appear to know.

But neither of them are really willing to tackle the real problem, an education system taken over by its producers.

As things stand now, no president appears capable of taming the imperial faculty; almost none is willing to try; and no one else from inside the world of the universities or infected by its self-serving culture is likely to stand up and say “enough,” or to be followed by anyone if he does. Salvation, if it is to come at all, will have to come from without.

But this is hardly surprising. When people have the power to control their terms of employment they abuse that power damnably. The only thing that gets the powerful to reform is the threat of disaster, the moment when Attila the Hun gallops over the horizon.

That moment seems as yet a long way off.

Mortgage Moms Feel the Heat

Back in the Nineties it was the Soccer Moms who voted for Bill Clinton. Then after 9/11 it was the Security Moms who voted for President Bush.

Now, according to Jeffrey H. Birnbaum and Chris Cillizza in the Washington Post, it’s the Mortgage Moms, people who are up their eyeballs in debt.

Flat wages and rising debt nationally have converged to leave millions of middle-class households feeling acutely vulnerable to bumps in their financial planning.

Debt. The numbers are huge.

The amount of mortgage debt alone has more than doubled since 2000, to nearly $9 trillion.
...
Among the most exposed are those who bought into one of the great fads in mortgage lending in recent years -- adjustable rates. Next year, $1 trillion worth of adjustable-rate mortgages -- about 11 percent of all outstanding mortgage debt -- is scheduled to readjust to a higher interest rate for the first time, according to LoanPerformance, a research company.

Right now we are at the stage in the business cycle where people are still talking about a “soft landing.” Humans are, by their nature, hopeful.

But that puff of smoke you see when an airplane lands at your local international airport is a reminder that on any landing, soft or hard, someone gets burned.

And the Mortage Moms, who are getting burned by the ratcheting adjustable mortgage rates, are not likely to be voting for the party in power this fall.