L'Esprit d'Escalier at KPLU

Last night I went into the belly of the beast to the taping of a roundtable at the local NPR affiliate KPLU. I and five others listened to audio clips of presidents past, present and future talking about Social Security and welfare—safety nets—and then talked about our feelings to KPLU reporter Paula Wissel.

After an experience like that you always think of the zingers you could have delivered, but didn’t. The French have a word for it: l’esprit d’escalier, the spirit of the stairs.

No problem here though. We eevil conservative Republicans now have our blogs. So we get the last word.

For a conservative, the problem with the whole set-up is that it presumes, almost at an instinctive level, that the Democratic way of social safety nets is the only one thinkable.

You know how it works. It start with a pressing social problem. Concerned activists raise consciousness. Experts devise solutions. Politicians step in with a government program. Everyone cheers and the bureaucrats go to work--for ever.

But the conservative understanding of social safety nets is that, unless you base the safety net on the “mediating structures” of family, church, neighborhood, and private association, you are going to fray the social fabric and eventually break the safety net. Governments don’t do safety nets. They do wars and rumors of wars.

That is what we have seen in the seventy years since Social Security was passed. And it is women and children that get hurt the most.

As we pointed out yesterday, the biggest problem the United States faces is that in the last generation the percentage of children being raised by a single parent has gone up. Among college graduates, it has doubled from five percent to ten percent. But among parents with less than a high-school education it has nearly quadrupled, from around twelve percent to 40 percent, before declining, since welfare reform, into the high 30s.

Children being raised by a single parent are much more likely to live in poverty.

Children being raised by a single parent are much more lilkely to suffer abuse—up to 35 times more than a child living with married biological mother and father.

Children being raised by a single parent probably don’t have a father in the house. The presence of a father means, for boys, that they act out less, and for girls, that they have fewer emotional problems.

The way to avoid all these problems is to anchor people in the mediating structures, discussed by Peter Berger and Richard Neuhaus in To Empower People. But that would mean backing out of the government progams and reempowering the mediating structures between individuals and the megastructures of big government, big coporations, and big unions.

Don’t look for our liberal friends at NPR to be talking about that sort of thing any time soon.

And it’s not because they are deliberately avoiding a national conversation about the social safety net. They probably never heard of Berger and Neuhaus, or read Michael Novak’s Spirit of Democratic Capitalism. They probably don’t get the import of Hayek’s dictum that government just doesn’t have the bandwidth to do the things it tries to do and consistently does so badly. And why should they? What would be the point?

Reporter Paula Wissel did a fine job moderating the roundtable. Until it came to the very end. Everyone on the panel openly and freely admitted who they were going to vote for. But not Paula Wissel (who looks a bit like a younger and more intelligent Helen Thomas). Said she: Oh no, I can’t tell you that. Mumble, mumble, “objective journalist.”

Oh please!

Still, it’s salutary to be in the room when an MSM journalist actually utters that canard. The thing is: she isn’t fooling anyone. She is so obviously a second-wave feminist with a standard second-wave feminist political philosophy that it would clear the air for her to be honest and up front. As in, hey, I’m a dyed-in-the-wool liberal, and proud of it. Probably never voted for a Republican in my life.

You could respect someone like that.

The roundtable I attended is one of a series that KPLU is putting together for broadcast every Tuesday between Labor Day and the November election as “Looking Backward to Look Forward.” Florangela Davila, lately of the Seattle Times, is the project manager doing the heavy lifting to make the program series happen. News Director at KPLU is Erin Hennessey.

What Ails Education?

What’s wrong with education in the United States? It used to be that Americans were the most educated people in the world. Yet eduational performance seems to have peaked in the late 1960s, according to David Brooks.

[H]igh school graduation rates peaked in the U.S. in the late 1960s, at about 80 percent. Since then they have declined.

So what went wrong? Researcher James Heckman says that it’s not falling school quality.

Instead, Heckman directs attention at family environments, which have deteriorated over the past 40 years.



Heckman points out that big gaps in educational attainment are present at age 5. Some children are bathed in an atmosphere that promotes human capital development and, increasingly, more are not. By 5, it is possible to predict, with depressing accuracy, who will complete high school and college and who won’t.

What we need to do is boost educational attainment at the bottom, according to Brooks. And on this the GOP is largely irrelevant. It is in Barack Obama’s education proposals that you can find attempts to improve early childhood education. McCain talks about school choice rather than “human capital policies”

Óf course this takes for granted the old progressive template: problem + expert research + government program = solution. Is it, David Brooks?

Maybe the problem is not so much the education system but the decline in family environment. The Economist ran an article a year ago about marriage (sub) in the United States.

Since 1964 the percentage of children raised by single mothers has gone up from five percent to 10 percent — for college graduate mothers. But it’s gone up from 12 percent to 40 percent for mothers with less than high school education.

Now that sort of result goes beyond misfortune or even the monstrous injustice of the liberal welfare state.

This is nothing less than a disaster. Forty percent of kids of high-school dropouts being raised without a father?

It’s not just a question of fairness you know. It’s a question of safety. A child living with mother and boy-friend is 35 times more likely to suffer abuse that a child living with its married biological mother and father.

This is not a question about who has the best policy analysis of recent research in education. It goes back to the enormous social changes that have been visited on the poor by the last forty years of liberal social policy.

And every year that we just sit and do nothing the liberal welfare state dumps another cohort of kids in the garbage.

Who Cares About Inner City Schools?

According to Sen. Barack Obama, the conservative solution to pervasive school failure is "tired rhetoric about vouchers and school choice."

That’s what he told the American Federation of Teachers.

Of course, he’s right. Conservatives flog away at pushing for more school choice and more access to vouchers for the children of the poor in lousy inner-city school districts and the Democrats keep cold-cocking them. You get really tired after being cold-cocked for the tenth or eleventh time.

In any case, Democrats and teachers unions are still standing in the schoolhouse door with the tired rhetoric the you don’t care about kids unless you pay them more money.

It’s the great civil-rights issue of the twenty-first century, and as usual, Democrats are on the side of injustice and want to keep blacks enslaved on the liberal plantation.

In the Wall Street Journal today there’s an editorial criticizing Obama’s union-friendly approach to education.

Mr. Obama told an interviewer recently that he opposes school choice because, "although it might benefit some kids at the top, what you’re going to do is leave a lot of kids at the bottom." The Illinois Senator has it exactly backward.

Kids at the top already have school choice. Maybe their parents can afford to live in a ritzy area with decent schools. Or maybe they can afford private school. Sen. Obama should know. His kids go to a fancy private school.

[The Obama] daughters attend the private University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, where annual tuition ranges from $15,528 for kindergarten to $20,445 for high school.

But just a few blocks south of tony Hyde Park in South Chicago kids don’t have the kind of choices that the rich Obama kids have.

And don’t forget, the Obamas are “the rich.” Based on Michelle’s $400,000 salary at the University of Chicago Hospital alone the Obamas are in the richest one percent of income earners.

You wonder. Why do we conservatives bother. Black parents are never going to vote for Republicans. So why should we bother to help their kids get a decent education?

Because it’s the right thing to do.

Because it’s a question of justice for the poor.

President Bush and Blacks

President Bush’s domestic signature in 2000 was “compassionate conservatism,” resulting in two domestic initiatives: No Child Left Behind and “faith-based” outreach to the poor, writes Mona Charen.

In other words the Republican president was concentrating his programmatic domestic agenda not on helping and paying off Republican voters but on trying to make a dent in the awful mess in the underclass.

So black and poverty leaders are ecstatic, right? Can’t get enough of the compassionate conservative George W. Bush?

Er no. Quite the opposite. Of course, this is nothing new. Black leaders didn’t like Reagan and Bush 39.

But from the beginning, George W. Bush was painted as the devil by many black leaders. It’s remarkable that this was so, considering Mr. Bush’s steadfast and unwavering interest in the poor and minorities, but there it is.

Now, of course the results are in and test scores are up in inner-city schools.

Education Week reported last month that student achievement in math and reading has risen over the past several years, with particularly strong improvements noted among fourth-graders in both subjects. Significantly, the gap between minorities and other students has narrowed.

Where’s the grudging acknowledgement of respect? Well, it’s nowhere, of course.

The thing is this. We conservatives don’t expect to get an even break from traditional Democratic groups, even when we go out of our way to help the poor and the marginalized. So we console oursleves with the notion that we do the right thing anyway.

But when political activists and voters don’t recognize and don’t understand who is helping them and who is hindering there is a price to be paid. The price, of course, does not get paid by the suits. It gets paid by the poor and the vulnerable. And that’s worse than a shame. It’s an injustice.

Obama's Secret Mission

It can now be told. The reason for Barack Obama is simple. He has been sent down to Earth to drive conservatives to distraction.

Today Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) spoke to the German people (and really the people of Europe, for Germany is the center of Europe). Evoking the “soft power” of the Berlin airlift when (hint, hint) the US turned back the Soviets without firing a shot, he told them that this is the moment: to dry up the well of terrorism, rid the world of nuclear weapons, free ourselves of the shadows of yesterday, build on the wealth of open markets, create a new dawn in the Middle East, save the planet, give hope to those left behind, and so on.

The infuriating thing for conservatives is that this is exactly what President Bush has been trying to do, and what liberals here and in Europe have spent the last 7 1/2 years doing everything they can to stop him from doing.

• Liberals wouldn’t concede the 2000 election and insisted ever after that President Bush was illegitimate.
  
• Liberals encouraged Europeans in the idea that President Bush was an idiot and a Texas cowboy.
  
• Liberals encouraged Chancellor Schroeder and President Chirac in their sabotage of President Bush’s diplomatic efforts at the UN before the invasion of Iraq.
  
• Liberals have cold-cocked every domestic reform proposed by President Bush, mostly, it seems, out of spite, a determination to deny him any domestic political victory (after all, domestic issues are what liberals do).
  
• Liberals said that the war in Iraq was lost, and refused to support President Bush’s new strategy, calling it a failure even before it began.
  
• Liberals are the authors of the mortgage meltdown, as prime sponsors of the disfunctional government sponsored mortgage giants.
  
• Liberals are the authors of $4.50 gasoline having tried to stop development of any and all practical energy development in the United States for the last generation.
  

Yet now we are to believe that “we,” Obama and his liberal elite crew, are the ones we have been waiting for.

What a talent! How To Infuriate Conservatives Without Really Trying.

The Mess in the Academe

In her latest article marriage advocate Maggie Gallagher takes out after the fake Obama world tour. Even Andrea Mitchell, she writes, realizes that Obama is faking it, faking press conferences when no media was actually there.

"Let me say something about the message management. He didn’t have reporters with him, he didn’t have a press pool, he didn’t do a press conference," either in Afghanistan or Iraq, noted Mitchell on the air. Instead Obama manufactured "what some would call ’fake interviews,’ because they are not interviews from a journalist[.]"

The problem is that the candidate is all symbolism and impressions, not grounded and critical.

This ties in with some mournful comment about the halcyon days of the university—before the PC era. Paul Greenberg writes about the extraordinary professors he studies under at Columbia, Missouri.

The remarkable thing about those teachers was not their scholarship, though theirs was indeed remarkable, but the immense care and patience - the tenderness almost - that they took with us students.

Of course, these professors were almost all liberal. But they wanted their students to know both sides of the story. In The New Criterion historian Alan Kors writes elegiacally of the “sadnesss” of today’s university education.

The problem is that professors today are in a hurry. They have only four years to demolish the US-centric world-view of their students so they don’t have time for scholarship and development of a critical mind. They must just push their agenda, every day.

The problem with this sort of thing is that, in the end, you end up hurting yourself, not your students. And the folks powering Sen. Barack Obama’s fake world tour will find that out too, sooner or later.

Today’s generation of liberals won’t listen to conservatives, and won’t give them the opportunity to contribute to the academic conversation. That means that the mistakes of today’s generation of liberals will not be exposed until they have actually been enacted into law and into foreign policy.

We can see a preview of what is in store from the current energy flap. It’s all very well to confidently predict a new Flood a century from now as global warming engulfs the planet. These prophecies may be right or they may be wrong. But what about the impact of $4.50 per gallon gasoline on working Americans right now? Our liberal friends seem not to have thought about tha. Indeed they seem not to care.

Conservatives have been worrying about it for a while. In part, we care because liberals have taught us to care.

So when the current liberal generation comes face to face with reality, whether in 2009 or 2013, it ain’t gonna be pretty.

What the NYT Wouldn't Print

The flap over The New York Times refusing to print an oped by John McCain is a gem. Their refusal to print McCain’s responding to an Obama oped published last week is the sort of thing that conservatives love.

And the absurd rationale offered by the NYT editor was a gem. David Shipley didn’t like the oped because it didn’t mirror Obama’s oped but instead criticized Obama.

But now the New York Post has published McCain’s oped and concerned voters can compare the two political documents side by side.

I’d have to say that Obama’s oped is the more tendentious. After all, he has to wriggle through the fact that he thought that Iraq was lost a year ago, and now it turns out that it isn’t.

The difference in narrative is substantial. Writes Obama:

Ending the war is essential to meeting our broader strategic goals, starting in Afghanistan and Pakistan, where the Taliban is resurgent and Al Qaeda has a safe haven. Iraq is not the central front in the war on terrorism, and it never has been.

The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he writes, says that we can’t step up the effort in Afghanistan until we draw down the troops in Iraq.

That’s true, but now that we are winning in Iraq we can spare the troops needed in Afghanistan. And that is exactly what President Bush proposes to do.

McCain points out the obvious. Obama doesn’t seem interested in winning.

I’m dismayed that he never talks about winning the war - only of ending it. But if we don’t win the war, our enemies will - and a triumph for the terrorists would be a disaster for us.

That is true. Obama does not mention the word “win” in his oped. But when you are in a war, it’s a question of winning or losing. When Obama says he would “pursue a new strategy, and begin by providing at least two additional combat brigades to support our effort in Afghanistan,” you have to ask: Well, what’s the point of those combat brigades? Are they there just to pursue a strategy or are they there to win the war?

Thirty years ago, liberals insisted that the US “end” the war in Vietnam. That meant, in fact, losing the war in Vietnam. It took Ronald Reagan to turn the US around and erase the defeat in Vietnam with a “surge” that ended up winning the Cold War and putting the Soviet Union on the ash heap of history.

Do we have to go through the whole process again with the war on Islamic extremism?