As always, Instapundit has more. Obama has a tendency to get tired, and when he gets tired he starts making mistakes. That isn’t a good trait in a Presidential candidate. The Democrats have fallen in political love with Obama, but that means that they’re not rationally evaluating him as a candidate. If they did, one wonders if he’d be the front-runner right now.
Being the immense nerd that I am, this scene from Doctor Who sprung to mind:
Don’t you think Obama looks tired?
Heather McDonald takes a probing look at whether America’s criminal justice system truly is racially biased. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the objective evidence does not match the conventional narrative:
Backing up this bias claim has been the holy grail of criminology for decades—and the prize remains as elusive as ever. In 1997, criminologists Robert Sampson and Janet Lauritsen reviewed the massive literature on charging and sentencing. They concluded that “large racial differences in criminal offending,†not racism, explained why more blacks were in prison proportionately than whites and for longer terms. A 1987 analysis of Georgia felony convictions, for example, found that blacks frequently received disproportionately lenient punishment. A 1990 study of 11,000 California cases found that slight racial disparities in sentence length resulted from blacks’ prior records and other legally relevant variables. A 1994 Justice Department survey of felony cases from the country’s 75 largest urban areas discovered that blacks actually had a lower chance of prosecution following a felony than whites did and that they were less likely to be found guilty at trial. Following conviction, blacks were more likely to receive prison sentences, however—an outcome that reflected the gravity of their offenses as well as their criminal records.
Another criminologist—easily as liberal as Sampson—reached the same conclusion in 1995: “Racial differences in patterns of offending, not racial bias by police and other officials, are the principal reason that such greater proportions of blacks than whites are arrested, prosecuted, convicted and imprisoned,†Michael Tonry wrote in Malign Neglect. (Tonry did go on to impute malign racial motives to drug enforcement, however.)
There’s no doubt that the incarceration rate in this country is shockingly and troublingly high. However the solution to this problem is not to pretend that it is the fault of the justice system, but to recognize that it comes from a culture of lawlessness. At some point, the crisis becomes self-perpetuating. A culture in which criminal activity is common is likely to be a culture that produces more crime. People live to the norms they see, and when violence, drug use, and crime become endemic, there is more likely to be more crime, violence, and drugs.
The problem with the idea of less vigorous law enforcement is that the ones who are hurt by increases in crime tend also to be disproportionately members of minority groups. Gang-bangers and drug dealers victimize their own communities, not the suburbs. The effects of out-of-control inner-city crime are not helped by efforts to concentrate resources in places where crime is not such an immediate and pressing problem.
What then is the solution? The neglect of America’s inner cities is a travesty made worse by a false sense of noblesse oblige on the part of well-intentioned outsiders. The only lasting solutions will have to come from within. The problem is not who is getting caught, but who are committing the crimes. Trying to solve the wrong set of problems helps no one.
Ed Morrissey rightfully goes after Sen. John McCain for his comments that pork-barrel spending caused the I-35W bridge collapse. It’s one thing to say that money spent on pork can’t be used for better purposes, like infrastructure repair. That’s a legitimate argument. However, money had nothing to do with the I-35W bridge collapse, either a lack of it or too much of it. The problem was that when the bridge was built in the 1960s it had a critical design flaw that wasn’t identified until after the collapse.
It’s bad enough when Democrats try to politicize the collapse—it does not behoove Republicans to do the same.
UPDATE: McCain is backing away from his comment, as well he should. Earmark reform is a serious issue—it doesn’t need to be tied to an unrelated bridge collapse to be good policy.
Barack Obama had never run a competitive campaign in his life before 2008, certainly not on the scale of a presidential run. For the last few months, he seemed to have an almost unnatural ability at it.
In the last 72 hours, the Obama campaign has begun to implode, and at the worst possible time. It may not be enough to sink him, but it’s becoming an increasingly large possibility.
The way in which the Wright scandal is being mishandled is not helping Obama. Here’s what he said just a few weeks ago:
And this helps explain, perhaps, my relationship with Reverend Wright. As imperfect as he may be, he has been like family to me. He strengthened my faith, officiated my wedding, and baptized my children. Not once in my conversations with him have I heard him talk about any ethnic group in derogatory terms, or treat whites with whom he interacted with anything but courtesy and respect. He contains within him the contradictions – the good and the bad – of the community that he has served diligently for so many years.
I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community.
I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother – a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.
These people are a part of me. And they are a part of America, this country that I love.
Today, it’s a different story. It looks like Sen. Obama really can disown Rev. Wright. Not only that, it certainly seems like he did disown Rev. Wright.
Obama has a huge credibility problem right now. Rev. Wright was his pastor for 20 years. Rev. Wright officiated his marriage and baptized his children. And just now he finds out that Rev. Wright is a race-baiter? That all of a sudden Rev. Wright went from perfectly reasonable to abjectly bugnuts just as Obama was running for President. As Jim Geraghty puts it: you buy that? That kind of argument isn’t going to play with the American people, who have the common sense to spot when someone’s being a patent phony from a mile away.
Obama himself has said that Rev. Wright issue is a legitimate political issue. Obama himself has said that he could no more disown Wright than he could disown the entire black community. Obama himself said that he had no idea that Rev. Wright was this crazy, even though he attended his church for 20 years.
That kind of thing is what can kill a campaign. You can’t keep changing the story, and you can’t expect the American people to believe you when your explanations are so patently unrealistic. Obama has run a well-oiled campaign, but the fact that he’s a political neophyte is starting to show at the worst time for him.
It’s doubtful that Obama really didn’t know who Rev. Jeremiah Wright really was for 20 years. It would be hard not to notice such things. Obama barely dodged the Wright issue the first time, and now his self-inflicted wounds are even worse.
This won’t necessarily kill him in the primary, but it will in the general election. For all Sen. Obama’s great political talent, a presidential election is not the time to start learning the ropes. A defter hand at campaigning would not have made these basic mistakes, but Obama’s inexperience is showing. Either he was willing to ignore Wright’s racism or he’s an incredibly poor judge of character. Regardless of which is the truth, it reflects poorly on him, and since he admits it’s a legitimate issue for discussion, he has to live with the consequences.
UPDATE: The New York Times has a transcript of Obama’s remarks. I didn’t see the press conference live, but from the end it reads like Obama was getting snippy with the reporters. We’ve seen that before from Obama, and in a crisis the last thing that you want to do is alienate the press.
Karl Rove has an interesting column in Newsweek giving advice to Barack Obama. Perhaps knowing that Sen. Obama isn’t going to listen, Rove’s ideas are actually quite good.
Sen. Obama’s appeal is starting to wear, and the problem with that is that his whole campaign is predicated on his personal appeal. The Obama movement isn’t an “issues” movement, but a “personality” movement. With Rev. Wright continuing to make things difficult for Obama, Obama’s double-digit loss in Pennsylvania, and his subsequent inability to stay above the fray, Obama is facing a major inflection point in his campaign. The fact that polling is showing Clinton outperforming him in a battle with McCain doesn’t help much.
None of this is likely to sink him—the Democrats have by and large made their choice—but no matter what happens in the primaries Obama will face an uphill battle in the general election. He’s already established himself as a man of the Left, and despite his valiant efforts on Fox News Sunday this weekend, he’s going to have a hard time shaking that image.
Obama’s strategy to stay above the fray and run on a campaign of not being George W. Bush isn’t going to cut it. For one, he can’t stay above the fray because he will be attacked, and what the Clinton people are hitting him on is just a fraction of what he’ll face in the general election. This weekend he even said that the Wright issue is a legitimate issue for debate—which is odd since the McCain camp doesn’t seem to want to push the issue. Obama can’t fight Clinton and stay above the fray forever—not unless he wants to seem weak.
As for trying to turn John McCain into a clone of George W. Bush, good luck with that. The two issues where this is being done are issues that aren’t going to hurt McCain very much. On the war, the war doesn’t seem to be hurting McCain with anti-war Republicans. The constant “100 years of war” distortions from the left don’t help, especially since they’re take so far out of context. It’s going to be hard to call McCain a “warmonger” and the like when he has personally witnessed the horrors of war in a way that only a few have, and two of his sons are members of the U.S. military who have done tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan. McCain can’t be pegged as “chickenhawk” or slurred as Bush was for lack of service—and if the Democrats try they’ll end up looking foolish.
The same holds true for taxes. Yes, McCain wants to extend the Bush tax cuts even though he wasn’t for them previously. That’s not inconsistent. There’s a huge difference between enacting a new tax cut and raising current taxes. The last thing that anyone should do in an economic downturn is take more money out of the people’s pockets. Obama would be foolish to argue for more taxes in a time when people are getting squeezed at the pump and the grocery store—and saying that he’d only tax the “rich” won’t cut it anymore. It’s amazing how people suddenly become “rich” for the government’s purposes when April 15 rolls around.
Obama needs to distinguish himself, and he isn’t doing it. His campaign based on the force of his personality will probably get him to the Democratic nomination, but it won’t carry him in the general. Rove notes that Obama is weak on the issues, has little record of accomplishment in the Senate, and needs a real record of working in a bipartisan fashion. Those are things you generally can’t build on the campaign trail.
Obama had a promising start as a new kind of candidate—and there was something to that formula. But as the campaign season wears on, he’s going to need something more. Sen. Obama would be wise to follow Rove’s advice (after all, if there’s one thing Karl Rove knows, it’s retail politics). It is highly unlikely that he will, given how deeply hated Rove is among the Democratic base, but if Obama wants to win the White House, he’s going to have to do better than winning over a plurality of Democrats.
Hillary Clinton is challenging Barack Obama to a series of one-on-one debates in Indiana, in the style of the Lincoln/Douglas debates in the 1850’s:
So here’s my proposal – I’m offering Senator Obama a chance to debate me one-on-one, no moderators.
Just the two of us going for 90 minutes asking and answering questions. We’ll set whatever rules seem fair. I think that it would give the people of Indiana, and I assume a few Americans might tune in because nearly 11 million watched the Philadelphia debate, and I think they would love seeing that kind of debate and discussion.
As much as it pains me to agree with Senator Clinton, that is a rather good idea. The moderated debate format is stale and insipid, and the result of these debates are generally candidates spouting the same canned responses that they do on the stump. It’s rare that a candidate says anything interesting—the risks are usually too great, and the moderates rarely push them far enough to get them to truly go off script.
A one-on-one debate allows the candidates to really clash with each other. It lets them demonstrate their real mastery of the issues and it ensures that just reciting the same canned answers won’t fly.
Of course, that’s why such a debate has a snowman’s chance in Hades of happening. No candidate is going to take that risk in today’s world of blogs and YouTube. Candidates live in perpetual fear of saying something in a debate that might turn into the next “macaca” or “global test” moment.
Sen. Obama has no real reason to want to take up Sen. Clinton’s challenge—he’s still the frontrunner, and his best move is to let the clock run out and ensure that Clinton doesn’t receive any additional momentum. Even though he’s the more rhetorically gifted of the two, the cost/benefit calculus to him just doesn’t add up.
Still, if we really want a debate that puts political candidates on notice, that would be the format to do that. We want political leaders that can think on their feet and respond to the harshest criticism. We want political leaders who can face a challenge. We want political leaders who can give us answers that haven’t been processed and focus-grouped and analyzed to death.
In fact, Sen. Clinton’s idea should be extended to the general election debates. Let Sen. McCain debate the Democratic nominee one-on-one, with no moderators. Let us drop the artificial rules and let the candidates challenge each other rather than speaking past each other. These people are auditioning to be the leader of the world’s preeminent superpower—the very least of their challenges will be their political opponent. If they can’t take the heat of an unmoderated debate, how can we ask them to take the heat of leading the nation?
TalkLeft has some interesting criticisms about how Barack Obama is handling the press. Obama hasn’t held a press conference in 10 days, has limited his appearance to friendly outlets like The Daily Show, and snapped at a reporter who gave him a foreign-policy question at a Pennsylvania diner.
Senator Obama has never run a truly competitive campaign in his life, and while Hillary Clinton is hardly a model of transparency, John McCain certainly is. Even though the press is on Obama’s side, he can’t expect to dodge them forever—especially if he wins the nomination and has to face up against someone who knows how to work the press corps.
Democrats are taking a risk on a candidate who is likable, but untested. It’s their choice to make, but the kneejerk defenses of Obama aren’t exactly the way a party should vet a candidate for national office.
Wired‘s Lore Sjoberg has this excellent video on how to avoid common logical fallacies on the Internet:
Jonah Goldberg has a perceptive column about the peril of judicial activism based on the recent Supreme Court ruling on capital punishment, Baze v. Rees, 553 U. S. ____ (2008). In a separate concurrence, Justice John Paul Stevens makes an argument that demonstrates a profound disrespect for the rule of law in this country:
In sum, just as Justice White ultimately based his conclusion in Furman on his extensive exposure to countless cases for which death is the authorized penalty, I have relied on my own experience in reaching the conclusion that the imposition of the death penalty represents “the pointless and needless extinction of life with only marginal contributions to any discernible social or public purposes. A penalty with such negligible returns to the State [is] patently excessive and cruel and unusual punishment violative of the Eighth Amendment.†Furman, 408 U. S., at 312 (White, J., concurring).
(Emphasis mine)
Now, Justice Stevens does not dispute that Supreme Court precedent makes it quite clear that the death penalty is constitutional. And indeed, one can make a perfectly legitimate argument that the Supreme Court got it wrong and that the death penalty is a violation of the Eighth Amendment’s ban on “cruel and unusual” punishment. Such an argument is almost certainly wrong and is unlikely to prevail, but it’s not an unreasonable argument to make.
Justice Scalia points out what is unreasonable about Justice Stevens’ argument:
As JUSTICE STEVENS explains, “‘objective evidence, though of great importance, [does] not wholly determine the controversy, for the Constitution contemplates that in the end our own judgment will be brought to bear on the question of the acceptability of the death penalty under the Eighth Amendment.’†Ante, at 14 (quoting Atkins v. Virginia, 536 U.S. 304, 312 (2002); emphasis added; some internal quotation marks omitted). “I have relied on my own experience in reaching the conclusion that the imposition of the death penalty†is unconstitutional. Ante, at 17 (emphasis added).
Purer expression cannot be found of the principle of rule by judicial fiat. In the face of JUSTICE STEVENS’ experience, the experience of all others is, it appears, of little consequence. The experience of the state legislatures and the Congress—who retain the death penalty as a form of punishment—is dismissed as “the product of habit and inattention rather than an acceptable deliberative process.†Ante, at 8. The experience of social scientists whose
studies indicate that the death penalty deters crime is relegated to a footnote. Ante, at 10, n. 13. The experience of fellow citizens who support the death penalty is described, with only the most thinly veiled condemnation, as stemming from a “thirst for vengeance.†Ante, at 11. It is JUSTICE STEVENS’ experience that reigns over all.
This is about as sharp a criticism as you’ll find between Supreme Court justices. Goldberg puts it all into context:
Supreme Court justices must “solemnly swear that I will administer justice without respect to persons, and do equal right to the poor and to the rich, and that I will faithfully and impartially discharge and perform all the duties incumbent on me as a justice of the Supreme Court of the United States under the Constitution and laws of the United States, so help me God.â€
Note the bit about doing right to poor and rich alike. Feeling sorry for the poor guy who violates the Constitution or the law has no role in how a Supreme Court justice is supposed to make a decision. Legislators can write laws based on empathy. They can invoke their pet theories about “how the world works.†They can even, as Justices Stephen Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsberg are fond of doing, consult foreign laws and court decisions in their efforts to make a more perfect union. But Supreme Court justices are supposed to decide what the written law requires, not pick winners and losers based upon some sense of noblesse oblige. That’s why all of those statues of Lady Justice show her standing blindfolded, not bent over kissing the boo-boos of the unfortunate and the downtrodden.
In a very real sense, this election year we face the question: Do we want to live in a monarchy or a nation of laws? Is this to be a country where justices serve as a reliable backstop against encroachments upon the constitutional order, or is this to be a country where the most undemocratic branch of government serves as the tip of the spear for such intrusions?
The judiciary is supposed to be “the least dangerous branch” of government. The proper role of judges in our democratic system is not to make law, but to decide what the law is. That means that judges are supposed to be inherently limited to working with the text of the Constitution and statutes. The Supreme Court is not supposed to be a roving agent of justice that goes looking to right problems. That is the role of the legislature, a body which is directly accountable to the people.
If we have a system in which the judiciary can start overturning the rules of democratically-elected representatives based not on the Constitution, but on their own feelings then we have become not a democracy, but an enlightened despotism. Such power is too easily abused, which is why the Founders of this nation specifically did not want that to happen.
This nation is based upon the rule of law, not the rule of men (or women). Justice Stevens may be entirely right that the death penalty doesn’t work, but as Justice Scalia rightly observes, that is a question for the legislature, not the courts. Our system of justice must never be allowed to become a replacement for our system of government, and Justice Stevens’ comments displays exactly the sort of imperialist thinking that harms the rule of law in this country.
The story of these hilariously violent animations is the subject of this Wired article.