The Man Who Made the New York Times

The Man who made the New York Times into the greatest newspaper in the United States, A.M. Rosenthal, has died aged 84.

And in his passing he has given us a glimpse of his achievement. The son of an indigent fur trader turned a stuffy metropolitan newspaper into a vibrant national institution. As Wes Pruden puts it in the Washington Times:

Abe died at 84 Wednesday in New York, where he made the New York Times in his image (for a time), writing the book on how a newspaper ought to cover the world, giving new life to a newspaper on its uppers, and winning Pulitzer Prizes as if they came from boxes of Cracker Jack.

Reading the obituaries lets you see the genius of the man. He was a great reporter, with the ruthlessness and the courage the job required and when he became an editor he ruthlessly and courageously rebuilt the Times. It is in the echoes of the praise that you can grasp how far the Times has fallen in the years since. William F. Buckley, Jr. tells the critical story.

I once posed a hypothetical question. What would be the discipline, at The New York Times back when he was its boss, against a delinquent reporter? He seemed mystified by the question. He thought he was answering it when he said that no reporter at the Times would be guilty of such an offense as I described: "They are all professionals."

They were all professionals when Rosenthal ran the paper. And the reason that Rosenthal could not imagine a “delinquent” reporter is that, on his watch, nobody would have dared.

You can say what you like about Rosenthal’s anger and his brusque treatment of employees. Under his leadership the New York Times was great.

GOP Extends Tax Cuts; What Have You Done for Me Lately?

It’s a start. Yesterday Congress extended the 2003 tax rate cuts on dividends and capital gains. As the Washington Times reported:

The Senate yesterday approved $70 billion in tax-cut extensions, sending President Bush one of his top tax priorities and securing a key election-year accomplishment for Republicans fighting to keep control of Congress.

And they extended them to 2010. (Suppose we have a President Clinton and a Democratic Congress by then. What do you call an IED? An expiring Republican tax cut.)

That’s good. That’s great. Now, Congress, what have you done for me lately?

Of course, the truth is that our Republican leaders in Washington DC are playing the Republican base like master fishermen. Here we are, all down in the dumps after a solid year of disappointment and humiliation. Iraq is going badly, or seems to. President Bush got the blame for Hurricane Katrina. Now we have $3.00 gasoline. What’s the point of being a Republican?

Well, I’d say that we are going to see non-stop judicial nominees from now till the election. I’d say we are going to give the Democrats plenty of opportunity to vote against ANWR one more time. And I expect we are going to see the House Republicans’ suburban Agenda popping up from time to time.

And of course we are going to see Gen. Hayden explain to outraged Democratic Senators how the NSA “domestic spying” program is entirely constitutional, and moreover that they have known about it all along.

With all that red meat on the floor, you’d think that someone would have thought to bring a barbecue.

"You Must Suggest an Alternative" -- Lady Thatcher

Author and journalist James Bartholomew got to present a copy of his book The Welfare State We’re In to Baroness Thatcher on Wednesday. He explained to her the argument of the book.

I told her that the book argues that we would be better off if the previous welfare systems had been allowed to develop instead of being replaced by the welfare state.



She announced, "You must suggest an alternative. If you say the welfare state is no good, you must suggest an alternative."

But it’s too hard, he whined to the 80-year old grande dame.

She was having none of that, saying words to the effect: "If you can't think of a good way of communicating it, then you must find a way of communicating it."

That is what it must have been like to be a junior minister in Thatcher’s government in the 1980s, he mused.

The paperback edition of The Welfare State We’re In is coming out soon. Writes Bartholomew:

The paperback edition of the book with many updated figures, a special preface and two extra sections (one titled 'The NHS: so did it get better?') will, officially, be published on Monday.

Meanwhile we can all get to thinking about Margaret Thatcher’s challenge. If the welfare state is so bad then what are we going to replace it with?

It was easy for the progressives and the Fabians a century ago to say: Just trust us with our rational, competent, and scientific ideas for reform. We have a much bigger problem. We know that the bureaucratic method is a failure. But we also know that the replacement will be much harder to conceive, to develop, and to sell to the public.

But there is no excuse for not trying! And there is no excuse for not getting started.

A Briton Talks About the Erosion of Liberty

Although the Brits don’t have a real conservative movement, they do have conservative politicians—like Alan Duncan, for instance, who visited the Cato Institute to talk about the erosion of freedom in Britain. As described by James Pinkerton it involves three problems.

First of all, there is Tony Blair. His style of headline government lowers the tone of debate: "the headline matters more than the deed." The danger of this sort of thing becomes obvious when the government gets to be good at spin but fails at the boring stuff of keeping people safe from criminals. It thows money at schools and hospitals without doing the boring stuff of reforming them.

Then there is the brute power of government, made more acute by the special powers we have given to government to prosecute the war on terror. This is a

trend that was visible even before 9-11: the short-circuiting of due process. That is, raison d'etat was displacing the rights of Englishmen.

Thirdly, there is the problem that, with all these powers, government doesn’t do anything very well. In fact it tends to encourage the opposite of what it intends. For instance,

The redistributionist welfare state was created to narrow inequalities, but in fact, in the way that it works, it ends up widening those inequalities. That is, if people are rendered ill-equipped to work, they will likely end up with even less earning power.

Duncan has written a book about it: Saturn’s Children: How the State Devours Liberty, Prosperity, and Virtue. Oh, and by the way, Duncan is gay.

Gay? In the Conservative Party? How did that work? “It just wasn't an issue -- no special privileges, no special penalties. Everybody minds their own business.”

Now It's Republicans Chasing Soccer Mom Vote

Yesterday House Republicans unveiled their “Suburban Agenda,” reports Laura Litvan of Bloomberg. It is a grab bag of close-to-home issues that Rep. Mark Kirk (R-IL) says will give surburban families a “chance to have a voice in Congress.”

The issues in the agenda include:

• Create tax easements for charitable donations for open space
  
• Establish local grants to protect undeveloped suburban green spaces
  
• Require the Justice Department to identify the nation's top three most-violent street gangs
  
• Let school districts screen potential teacher hires to ensure they're not convicted pedophiles by linking state and national databases
  
• Create tax-free savings accounts to help children save for their first homes
  

You can see what this is aimed at: Mothers. And it’s not before time for Republicans to target the Mom vote. Tax cuts and Roth IRAs are guy stuff. But the close-to-home issues are girl stuff.

Whether the federal government should be getting into such local issues is a good question. But Bill Clinton did it when he needed the Soccer Mom vote for his reelection in 1996, so why shouldn’t Republicans do the same to tip the balance in close suburban House races?

Letter for Letter, Mr. President

Most people seem to be bemused or insulted by the letter Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad recently sent to President George W. Bush.

But it certainly hit home among the Democrats and the media who seem to think that Ahmadinejad’s letter is an invitation to dialog.

Iranian expatriate Amir Taheri is the chap to provide background on a matter like this, and he doesn’t disappoint.

Ahmadinejad's move fits into a 14-century-long Muslim tradition, initiated by the Prophet Muhammad himself, of writing letters to "the rulers of the world."

The usual gambit is to “call on 'the infidel' to abandon their faith and submit to Islam.” And that is exactly what Ahmadinejad’s letter does.

In 1987 Ayatollah Ruhallah Khomeini offered to help the Soviets in their quagmire in Afghanistan if they would convert to Islam.

No thanks, responded Mikhail Gorbachev, leader of the atheist Soviet Union.

But the call from Iran to convert to Islam provides the United States with a platform on which to articulate its own message in response, that the union of church and state in the Islamist movement is a disaster waiting to happen, a reactionary mass movement that will bring misery to the Middle East much as Communism brought misery to Russia and China, Nazism brought misery to Germany, and left-wing Latin American Bolivarism is in the middle of bringing misery to Venezuela and Bolivia.

So President Bush should respond to the Iranian leader’s letter, writes Taheri, and invite Ahmadinejad

to abandon Khomeinism and convert to liberal democracy. For, when all is said and done, the fight over Iran today is not about real or imagined nuclear weapons; it is about the kind of Iran with which the Middle East, indeed the whole world, can feel comfortable.

And it is about whether the Islamist dream of a new Caliphate is a vision or a delusion.

How Could Welfare Reform Have Gone So Right?

This year is the tenth anniversary of Welfare Reform, the Republican-passed Clinton-signed reform that put a cap on unlimited welfare benefits in the summer of 1996. How has the reform turned out?

It seems important to ask because the usual suspects have gone quiet on us.

Fortunately Kay S. Hymowitz at City Journal has written a report on the aftermath of welfare reform. And it really has been a stunning success. The number of people on welfare has plummeted from 14 million to 5 million (see graphic). There has never been anything like it.

What went right? And why were the “unreformed” so wrong, wrong enough that when Andrew Cherlin, family scholar addressed the American Sociological Association he said:

“[T]here may be something to the idea that long-term dependency on public assistance is detrimental,” he conceded, though he had always “rejected this idea out of hand prior to 1996.” Poor mothers “derive a basic dignity” from work. In fact, he continued, “as a result of what I have seen, I now think the term “dead-end job” is a label that often doesn’t fit the perceptions of low-income workers; and I will not use it again.”

Well now. So let’s look at what happened, so that we can remind ourselves when people forget about what was achieved in the Great Welfare Reform of 1996. We will remember; we were there.

There were four major “concerns” of opponents to reform, according to Hymowitz.

• First, would welfare leavers find jobs?
  
• Second, would they sink even deeper into poverty?
  
• Third, would their children be harmed?
  
• And fourth, would the states take advantage of the wide flexibility the bill gave them on implementation to join what many anticipated would be a “race to the bottom”?
  

The answer is no. No, No, No, and No. Welfare leavers did find jobs. And they did not sink deeper into poverty.

[F]our years off welfare, only 4 percent of working single mothers — and only 8 percent of high school dropouts who were single mothers — were earning minimum wage or less.

So welfare mothers found jobs, and are overwhelmingly doing better than minimum wage. What about the children? The result is amazing. Child poverty rates went down after reform and “by 2001, they hit all-time lows for black children.”

Finally, what about a “race to the bottom?” The news is good there too. States spent a lot of money on work support for the former welfare mothers instead of abandoning them to their fate.

Given how wrong the social services experts were about welfare reform, someone needs to do some serious thinking.

It is not simply that they were wrong in making a few isolated predictions; after all, there were bound to be legitimate questions about how to transform welfare and about what would happen afterward. It’s that those predictions rested on a scaffold of moldy assumptions not just about poverty but about what kind of country we live in, how human beings decide to live their lives, and what role government plays in those decisions — in other words, about our politics in the deepest sense.

Said Bill Clinton, who signed the welfare reform bill:

“I’ve always known poor folks... I’ve just never thought they were helpless.”

It’s good to know you were on the side of the angels, Mr President. But let Hymowitz have the last word.

Human beings tend to do pretty much what they are expected to do. When the culture expects self-sufficiency, people will try to achieve it. When the culture sends mixed messages about self-sufficiency, as it did during the old welfare regime — particularly to the minority poor — some will not try to become self-sufficient.

As helpless as some people may seem they are, after all, the survivors: descendents of people who struggled to survive since the dawn of life on this planet. It is well to keep that in mind.