A Tale of Two States

In Florida, it is the best of times for Republicans. In Ohio, it is the worst of times.

In Ohio, writes Kimberley A. Strassel, the Republican gubernatorial candidate, Ken Blackwell, is down by double digits. The voters don’t like the GOP and you can’t blame them. The Republican governors for the past 16 years have delivered tax increases and scandal.

Republicans have practiced one-party rule in the state since 1994--more than enough time to lose one's principles. Former Gov. George Voinovich set the standard in 1992 by breaking his word and signing tax hikes. His successor, Bob Taft, with the help of the GOP legislature, in 2003 broke pledges not to raise taxes without voter permission. Some $3 billion in tax increases later, Ohio jumped to fourth place in the rankings for state and local tax burdens. (It was 23rd in 1994, when the GOP took over.) Over their first 10 years in power, Republicans increased Ohio's general operating budget by 71%--the highest increase in the nation.

Had enough? But in Florida the Republican gubernatorial candidate Charlie Crist is ahead by double digits. There’s no problem in figuring out why.

Florida Republicans have passed tax cuts every year of the eight Mr. Bush has held office--a whopping $19 billion, including the elimination of the infamous "intangibles" tax, levied on investments. While Florida's budget has grown at a rapid clip, Mr. Bush vetoed more than $2.1 billion in wasteful spending, earning him the nickname "Veto Corleone" among frustrated state lobbyists. He's trimmed 11,000 state jobs.

Tort reform? Did it. Overhauling the child welfare system? Done.

Education reform? You got it. Medicaid reform? How about a spot of privatization?

Florida today has the highest rate of job creation in the country, and an unemployment rate of 3.3%. It's bond rating hit triple A. Revenue is pumping into the state coffers, giving Florida $6.4 billion in reserves. Gov. Bush's approval rating stands at 55%.

Oh, and did you know? Florida doesn’t have a state income tax.

Really, there isn’t any mystery in all this. If you keep spending down and tax rates low and the playing field level, the economy will boom.

And Republican candidates will get elected.

Conservatives Must Hang Together

At the end of the Bush administration and after 12 years of Republican Congresses the members of the Republican coalition are getting a little testy. Some people in the coalition are even talking about splitting up.

That would be a mistake, writes Jennifer Roback Morse. The three parts of the Republican coalition, social conservatives, fiscal conservatives, and libertarians, need each other.

She’s reviewing Ryan Sager’s
Elephants in the Room,
which argues that “the future of the Republican party’s coalition of social conservatives and libertarians” depends on abandoning the agenda of the Christian Right.

He seems to say that the only way to win is for social conservatives to abandon the issues that matter to them, and become plain vanilla fiscal conservatives.

But back in 2001 Roback wrote

Love and Economics.

I hoped to convince my libertarian and fiscal conservative friends that they needed to pay more attention to the family.

Even though the work of mothers and fathers is private, it has public consequences, not least in the cost of single parenthood and family breakdown.

Family breakdown has been extremely expensive, not just to the individuals who suffer from it, but to the public sector as well.

...

Health care, mental health care, and educational remediation are all services taxpayers provide disproportionately to over-extended unmarried parents.

And so on.

Morse was surprised by the response to her book. Her libertarian friends paid almost no attention to it. Instead she found herself being invited to address social conservative groups.

When I wrote Love and Economics, it had never entered my mind to appeal to this audience. I literally didn’t know who they were. But they appreciated the fact that I was making their case in a way they had never heard before. I appreciated the fact that they’d talk to me.

Libertarians and fiscal conservatives had better understand that they and the social conservatives are joined at the hip, whether they like it or not. We high-class conservatives may be embarrassed by the simpleness of our social conservative allies, but we should be careful.

It might be prudent to think of social conservatives and the Religious Right as the conscience of the conservative movement.

Like it or not, a political movement must have at its core some moral purpose. The rational creed of fiscal conservatism and libertarianism doesn’t penetrate to that level. It does not address the ultimate purpose of life on this earth. It only deals with process.

Let us not learn that the hard way.

What It Means to be a Liberal

University of Chicago law professor Geoffrey R. Stone laments that the word “liberal” has become a pejorative in the 38 years since Richard Nixon was elected president. And he thinks that is a shame. Proud of being a liberal, he has published “What it means to be a liberal” in the Chicago Tribune for all to read and reflect upon.

We all owe Professor Stone a vote of thanks for setting forth “10 propositions that seem to me to define ‘liberal’ today.” And we should honor his courage. When you nail your principles to the mast then you are inviting people to compare theory with practice, and you are asking people to cry “hypocrite.”

Well, everyone is a hypocrite, and nobody lives up to their principles. But still, liberals might like to know just where conservatives think they fall down.

1. Liberals believe individuals should doubt their own truths and consider fairly and open-mindedly the truths of others. This is at the very heart of liberalism.

Forgive me, Professor Stone, if I remark that I haven’t noticed too many liberals doubting their truths lately. To me they seem embattled and closed-minded in their devotion to their liberal shibboleths.

2. Liberals believe individuals should be tolerant and respectful of difference.

Forgive me, Professor Stone, if I remark that in my experience the hallmark of actual liberals is the striking lack of respect and tolerance they display towards people that disagree with them. Indeed, in my experience, they are ruthless in using institutional power to persecute those who disagree with them.

3. Liberals believe individuals have a right and a responsibility to participate in public debate.

Forgive me, Professor Stone, if I remark that in my experience liberals believe that only liberals and their clients have a right and a responsibility to participate in public debate. Other people better watch what they say, because liberals like to silence people that disagree with them by calling them “racists” and “bigots.”

4. Liberals believe "we the people" are the governors and not the subjects of government, and that government must treat each person with that in mind.

Forgive me, Professor Stone, if I remark that I find it hard to believe that any government that spends about 35 percent of national income, that is the income created by the work of the American people, is treating the people as anything other than “subjects.”

5. Liberals believe government must respect and affirmatively safeguard the liberty, equality and dignity of each individual.

Forgive me, Professor Stone, if I remark that the experience of a lifetime prompts me to say that in my experience liberals have absolutely no regard for the liberty, equality, and dignity of people like the white working class and “fundamentalist” religious believers. In fact there has been research done on this.

At the Democratic convention of 1992, Bolce and De Maio reported in The Public Interest, over half the delegates rated Christian fundamentalists on a “feeling thermometer” graduated from 0 to 100 —at an ice cold zero.

Half of the active liberals assembled at the Democratic Convention couldn’t have imagined having a more negative opinion of Christian fundamentalists. They must, one assumes, rate them equal to rapists and axe murderers.

6. Liberals believe government has a fundamental responsibility to help those who are less fortunate. It is liberals who have supported and continue to support government programs to improve health care, education, social security, job training and welfare for the neediest members of society.

Forgive me, Professor Stone, if I remark that over the last twenty years it is liberals who have utterly refused to consider any attempts to improve the government programs you mention. Education? Liberals are standing in the schoolhouse door. Health care? Liberals refuse to reform it. Social Security? Liberals use it as a way to scare seniors into voting Democratic.

7. Liberals believe government should never act on the basis of sectarian faith.

Forgive me, Professor Stone, if I remark that liberals act on the basis of their sectarian faith all the time, call it what you will: liberalism, secular humanism, modernism. Let us tell truth and shame the devil. People bring their faith to the public square, even liberals, and they usually want the government to legislate their faith into law, especially liberals.

8. Liberals believe courts have a special responsibility to protect individual liberties. It is principally liberal judges and justices who have preserved and continue to preserve freedom of expression, individual privacy, freedom of religion and due process of law.

Forgive me, Professor Stone, if I remark that liberals only seem interested in the protection of their own liberties and the liberties of their clients. But if you study the history of law you discover that the great weight of legal precedent deals with the slow and painful development of developing rules to govern transactions between people, the broken fence, the damaged goods, the contract gone wrong. Liberals seem to have little understanding of the difficulty of securing justice in the common vicissitudes of life.

9. Liberals believe government must protect the safety and security of the people, for without such protection liberalism is impossible.

Forgive me, Professor Stone, if I remark that I have to try very hard to give liberals credit for concern about the safety and security of average American citizens from enemies foreign and domestic.

10. Liberals believe government must protect the safety and security of the people, without unnecessarily sacrificing constitutional values.

Forgive me, Professor Stone, if I remark that I have always been led to believe that liberals believed in a living constitution. So what constitutional value are we protecting this week?

Oh, I forgot. The constitutional right of Al-Qaeda telephone callers to be free from unreasonable search and seizure.

Peggy Noonan: Left Lacks Grace

Today, on Friday 13th, America’s Mom Peggy Noonan asks Democrats to ask themselves a question:

Why are we producing so many adherents who defy the old liberal virtues of free and open inquiry, free and open speech? Why are we producing so many bullies? And dim dullard ones, at that.

She produces as evidence four anti-free-speech events of the last ten days:

1. The silencing of Jim Gilchrist, immigration activist, at Columbia University. Gilchrist is head of the Minutemen, a group that patrols the Mexican border.
   
2. The outrage over the comments on CBS News’ “Free Speech” segment by the father of a boy killed at Columbine High School. He said
   “For over two generations the public school system has taught in a moral vacuum... We teach there are no moral absolutes, no right or wrong, and I assure you the murder of innocent children is always wrong, including abortion. Abortion has diminished the value of children.”
   
3. Barbra Streisand’s outburst against a man who voiced an objection to her anti-Bush segment at her Madison Square Garden concert.
   
4. Anti-gun Rosie O’Donnell’s tirade against a mom who said that women have a right to defend themselves.
   

Peggy Noonan speculates that there seems to be missing from the left in America “an element of grace” that accepts that disagreement is part of the fabric.

What also seems missing is the courage to ask a question. Conservatives these days are asking themselves very many questions, but I wonder if the left could tolerate asking itself even a few.

Well, yes. Because when you start asking questions you have to accept the risk that you may not like the answer.

Progessives Tire of White Working Class

In Britain as in the United States the progressives have gone sour on the white working class. Writes Andrew Gimson.

Our rulers do not think of themselves as being in the slightest bit prejudiced. They know they are the most open-minded people since records began.

But when it comes to the white working class, they have gone on the bigger and better things. Like race.

The white working class is an inconvenient relic, and the sooner it ceases to exist, the better. That is the underlying assumption of our political establishment. The white working class is not just expected to seek salvation by acquiring bourgeois virtues: it is blamed for failing to acquire those virtues more quickly.

It sounds like the United States where Democrats got impatient with the white blue collar class during the school busing crisis a generation ago. Remember? The Southies of South Boston wanted to keep their children going to school in their Irish neighborhood. But the judges and the politicians had other ideas.

The result is that the working class in Britain is expected to keep voting for Labour just as they always have for a century, but they are beginning to flirt with the right-wing BNP. Here in the United States the white ethnics have been slowly leaving the Democrats for a generation.

In Britain, the Conservative Party is self-consciously moving to gain the votes of the moderate educated metropolitan vote and seem to be ignoring the working class completely. In the United States, the Republicans seem to be doing better.

Let us not be patronising. But the problem is that the white working class has more or less sold its soul to the welfare state. A century ago the white working class proudly belonged to labor unions and friendly societies and drinking clubs that they had built with their own hands. Today they get all their social safety net from the government. And it shows.

Sometime soon, some politician is going to figure out how to win the votes and the enthusiasm of the white working/blue collar class. Why shouldn’t it be a conservative?

Federal Deficit Cut in Half

Of course Democrats are not impressed, according to Stephen Dinan. They look at the budget surplus inherited by President Bush’s administration and see nothing but failure.

"No amount of Republican Party spin can obscure the bottom line: The Bush administration and congressional Republicans inherited a projected 10-year budget surplus of $5.6 trillion in 2001, and in just 70 months turned that surplus into a projected deficit of $4 trillion," said House Minority Whip Steny H. Hoyer, Maryland Democrat.

It’s their right to ignore the recession and the tech crash and imagine that President Clinton gave the economy to President Bush in fine fettle.

But it certainly is impressive that, despite the huge increases in federal spending over the last six years, and despite the huge tax rate decreases, and despite the three years of economic flatline after the NASDAQ took its tumble we are back to a federal deficit of 1.9 percent of GDP.

Of course the real story on the federal budget is the $10 trillion unfunded deficit on Social Security and the $40 trillion unfunded deficit on Medicare. The smart assumption to make is that the government will renege on its promises. That is going to cause a lot of suffering.

But meanwhile President Bush can savor a small victory.

"We have now achieved our goal of cutting the federal budget deficit in half and we've done it three years ahead of schedule," the president said, crediting his 2001 and 2003 tax cuts with spurring economic growth and thus more tax revenue.

As he should, of course, he doesn’t take all the credit. It’s not just his fiscal policies but “the hard work of the American people” that did the trick.

Don’t forget supply-side economics, either. That’s the idea that when you reduce marginal tax rates you speed up the economy.

Dems Deathbed Conversion to Missile Defense

Twenty years ago Democrats poured scorn on President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative. They called it Star Wars.

In the Clinton Administration Democrats forced a slowdown in missile defense research and development.

According to WorldNetDaily,

RNC research notes that during the Bush administration, Democrats have voted against missile defense nine times, while Chairman Mehlman notes, 'It is simply not credible that the same Democrats who've opposed missile defense for decades have in the month before the election discovered North Korea's long-range missile capability.'

And according to Sheryl Gay Sholberg in The New York Times missile defense is starting to get traction on the campaign trail.

Democrats, including [Senate candidate] McGavick’s opponent, Senator Maria Cantwell [D-WA], say they would support a missile defense program if one were proven effective.

So that’s all right.. After twenty years of opposition to missile defense research and development, Democrats now say they would support a system if it “were proven effective.”

It all reminds me of the two attitudes that Scientic American magazine used to have towards defense programs. It was opposed to effective systems on the grounds that they would be destabilizing. And it was opposed to ineffective programs on the ground that they were a waste of money.

And Democrats wonder why serious people don’t take them seriously.