Category: Politics

McCain’s Senate Speech On Iraq

The McCain Presidential campaign may be cratering, but no one can say that it’s because McCain isn’t standing firm on his principles. Ed Morrissey has Senator McCain’s floor speech at yesterday’s Democratic surrender-fest which does an excellent job of putting the defeatist Democrats in their place:

Mr. President, we have nearly finished this little exhibition, which was staged, I assume, for the benefit of a briefly amused press corps and in deference to political activists opposed to the war who have come to expect from Congress such gestures, empty though they may be, as proof that the majority in the Senate has heard their demands for action to end the war in Iraq. The outcome of this debate, the vote we are about to take, has never been in doubt to a single member of this body. And to state the obvious, nothing we have done for the last twenty-four hours will have changed any facts on the ground in Iraq or made the outcome of the war any more or less important to the security of our country. The stakes in this war remain as high today as they were yesterday; the consequences of an American defeat are just as grave; the costs of success just as dear. No battle will have been won or lost, no enemy will have been captured or killed, no ground will have been taken or surrendered, no soldier will have survived or been wounded, died or come home because we spent an entire night delivering our poll-tested message points, spinning our soundbites, arguing with each other, and substituting our amateur theatrics for statesmanship. All we have achieved are remarkably similar newspaper accounts of our inflated sense of the drama of this display and our own temporary physical fatigue. Tomorrow the press will move on to other things and we will be better rested. But nothing else will have changed.

In Iraq, American soldiers, Marines, sailors and airmen are still fighting bravely and tenaciously in battles that are as dangerous, difficult and consequential as the great battles of our armed forces’ storied past. Our enemies will still be intent on defeating us, and using our defeat to encourage their followers in the jihad they wage against us, a war which will become a greater threat to us should we quit the central battlefield in defeat. The Middle East will still be a tinderbox, which our defeat could ignite in a regional war that will imperil our vital interests at risk there and draw us into a longer and far more costly war. The prospect of genocide in Iraq, in which we will be morally complicit, is still as real a consequence of our withdrawal today as it was yesterday.

During our extended debate over the last few days, I have heard senators repeat certain arguments over and over again. My friends on the other side of this argument accuse those of us who oppose this amendment with advocating “staying the course,” which is intended to suggest that we are intent on continuing the mistakes that have put the outcome of the war in doubt. Yet we all know that with the arrival of General Petraeus we have changed course. We are now fighting a counterinsurgency strategy, which some of us have argued we should have been following from the beginning, and which makes the most effective use of our strength and does not strengthen the tactics of our enemy. This new battle plan is succeeding where our previous tactics have failed, although the outcome remains far from certain. The tactics proposed in the amendment offered by my friends, Senators Levin and Reed – a smaller force, confined to bases distant from the battlefield, from where they will launch occasional search and destroy missions and train the Iraqi military – are precisely the tactics employed for most of this war and which have, by anyone’s account, failed miserably. Now, that, Mr. President, is staying the course, and it is a course that inevitably leads to our defeat and the catastrophic consequences for Iraq, the region and the security of the United States our defeat would entail.

Yes, we have heard quite a lot about the folly of “staying the course,” though the real outcome should this amendment prevail and be signed into law, would be to deny our generals and the Americans they have the honor to command the ability to try, in this late hour, to address the calamity these tried and failed tactics produced, and salvage from the wreckage of our previous failures a measure of stability for Iraq and the Middle East, and a more secure future for the American people.

I have also listened to my colleagues on the other side repeatedly remind us that the American people have spoken in the last election. They have demanded we withdraw from Iraq, and it is our responsibility to do, as quickly as possible, what they have bid us to do. But is that our primary responsibility? Really, Mr. President, is that how we construe our role: to follow without question popular opinion even if we believe it to be in error, and likely to endanger the security of the country we have sworn to defend? Surely, we must be responsive to the people who have elected us to office, and who, if it is their wish, will remove us when they become unsatisfied with our failure to heed their demands. I understand that, of course. And I understand why so many Americans have become sick and tired of this war, given the many, many mistakes made by civilian and military leaders in its prosecution. I, too, have been made sick at heart by these mistakes and the terrible price we have paid for them. But I cannot react to these mistakes by embracing a course of action that I know will be an even greater mistake, a mistake of colossal historical proportions, which will — and I am as sure of this as I am of anything – seriously endanger the people I represent and the country I have served all my adult life. I have many responsibilities to the people of Arizona, and to all Americans. I take them all seriously, Mr. President, or try to. But I have one responsibility that outweighs all the others – and that is to do everything in my power, to use whatever meager talents I posses, and every resource God has granted me to protect the security of this great and good nation from all enemies foreign and domestic. And that I intend to do, Mr. President, even if I must stand athwart popular opinion. I will explain my reasons to the American people. I will attempt to convince as many of my countrymen as I can that we must show even greater patience, though our patience is nearly exhausted, and that as long as there is a prospect for not losing this war, then we must not choose to lose it. That is how I construe my responsibility to my constituency and my country. That is how I construed it yesterday. It is how I construe it today. And it is how I will construe it tomorrow. I do not know how I could choose any other course.

I cannot be certain that I possess the skills to be persuasive. I cannot be certain that even if I could convince Americans to give General Petraeus the time he needs to determine whether we can prevail, that we will prevail in Iraq. All I am certain of is that our defeat there would be catastrophic, not just for Iraq, but for us, and that I cannot be complicit in it, but must do whatever I can, whether I am effective or not, to help us try to avert it. That, Mr. President, is all I can possibly offer my country at this time. It is not much compared to the sacrifices made by Americans who have volunteered to shoulder a rifle and fight this war for us. I know that, and am humbled by it, as we all are. But though my duty is neither dangerous nor onerous, it compels me nonetheless to say to my colleagues and to all Americans who disagree with me: that as long as we have a chance to succeed we must try to succeed.

I am privileged, as we all are, to be subject to the judgment of the American people and history. But, my friends, they are not always the same judgment. The verdict of the people will arrive long before history’s. I am unlikely to ever know how history has judged us in this hour. The public’s judgment of me I will know soon enough. I will accept it, as I must. But whether it is favorable or unforgiving, I will stand where I stand, and take comfort from my confidence that I took my responsibilities to my country seriously, and despite the mistakes I have made as a public servant and the flaws I have as an advocate, I tried as best I could to help the country we all love remain as safe as she could be in an hour of serious peril.

Senator McCain may never be President, but he’s a valuable public servant nevertheless — and his clarity and perspective stand in direct opposition to the self-serving defeatism of the Senate Democrats who continue to push this country towards a unnecessary defeat for nothing more than their own political expediency.

This country needs more patriots like Senator McCain.

We Care About The Children (But Only For Five Years)

Wired reports on the Democrats plan to add $35 billion in new spending for children’s health insurance by dramatically raising federal excise taxes on tobacco products. The problem with this plan is that it makes no economic sense — they won’t be able to raise the money projected, and furthermore they only will be able to sustain the funding for five years.

Funding anything with tobacco excise taxes is a bad idea — because it isn’t a stable funding source. If you raise the price of cigarettes, more people will quit smoking. If you raise the price of luxury items like cigars (the current bill increases the maximum federal tax on cigars by over 20,000% to up to $10 a cigar) then people will stop buying cigars. For example, I’ll smoke at most a few cigars a month, no more than 1 per week. If the amount of tax pushes the price of cigars up to where even the cheapest cigars are north of $15 a cigar, I won’t smoke them at all. Instead of contributing a few dollars to the federal budget a year in excise taxes, it’ll be zero. Multiply that by the thousands or millions of causal cigar smokers, and it’s clear that the government simply can’t count on raising $35 billion solely on the backs of smokers.

By 2012, Congress either has to raise taxes elsewhere or the program dies. Either outcome is bad. It’s the sort of voodoo math that Congress gets away with all the time — pretending that they’re doing something to help by creating another program they can’t fund.

If Congress wants to fund children’s healthcare, that money should come out of the general fund and should be matched by commensurate reductions in discretionary spending. Spending a few million per district on pork-barrel projects should be a lesser priority than covering the insurance gap for children, right?

Except for Congress, it doesn’t work that way. They want to have their pork and eat it too — and meanwhile the American taxpayer gets stuck with the bill.

UPDATE: I wonder how many uninsured children could get healthcare instead of Charlie Rangel getting a $2 million dollar taxpayer-funded shrine to himself in New York?

Hillary’s Pit Bulls For Hire

FrontPage Magazine has an in-depth look inside Media Matters for America, the “progressive” political outfit that’s become quite well known for their vitriolic attacks against anyone who doesn’t toe their party line. FrontPage notes that Media Matters is acting as Hillary Clinton’s personal media attack dogs, and how those political concerns played into their decision to flog the Don Imus story into a national frenzy.

It’s always interesting to note how Hillary used to decry the “vast right-wing conspiracy,” and yet she’s using the same tactics that she claimed the Right used in her quest for political power. The web of allied organizations from George Soros’ Open Society Institutes (as well as support of MoveOn.org, another group with deep ties to the Clintons) and John Podesta’s Center for American Progress which forms Hillary Clinton’s personal shadow cabinet.

The problem with Media Matters for America and the rest of these web of left-wing “think tanks” is that they’re not think tanks at all. They’re not driven by policy, they’re driven by politics. They are essentially cargo cult versions of right-wing institutions such as The Heritage Foundation, but designed not to advance a particular message but be the personal attack dogs of left-wing candidates. Media Matters, for instance, is so stridently partisan as to be unmistakable as anything but a political organization — so much so that they frequently seem to skirt the edge of what a 501(c)(3) organization can do.

Granted, any group of like-minded philanthropists is likely to have connections to a whole host of like-minded groups — that sort of analysis doesn’t prove anything. However, given that all of these organizations seek to advance political rather than policy objectives is telling. Media Matters is not a media watchdog, they’re a group of pit-bulls for hire, part of an attempt by liberal political operatives to create a left-wing analogue of the Right — but not the Right as it actually works, but the Right as they see it — which is why these organizations won’t have much impact once Hillary Clinton’s political future ends.

The reason why right-wing think tanks have been so successful is that they try to stay out of the political fray as much as possible. They’re not in it to support candidates or bash “the other side” but to advance a particular agenda and support that agenda with hard evidence and intellectual arguments. The left, for the most part, doesn’t follow suit. They’re more stridently ideological, less rigorous, and infinitely more political. It’s also why this movement won’t last — temporal politics are constantly shifting, and the “progressive” movement is simply the same old liberalism with a new veneer. It isn’t that their cannot be a legitimate and long-lasting left-wing think tank in this country — the Brookings Institution is a long-standing and very well respected center-left think tank, and the Institute for Policy Studies has been in existence for decades. The problem is that when what should ostensibly be an institute for the study of policy starts getting involved in politics, they lose all pretense of objectivity. Media Matters never even had the pretense, and while they managed to score one scalp with the Imus firing (which happened to hurt Democrats more than Republicans), the reality is that its clear even to other Democrats who pays their bills and why they’re not watchdogs but lapdogs who bark furiously at anyone who dare say an unkind word to their master.

That Depends On How You Define Successful…

William Kristol argues that the presidency of George W. Bush will be judged kindly by history. Certainly it will be judged in a better context than the self-serving political atmosphere of today, but will history look on Bush as being a successful President? Kristol has a fairly strong argument, but I’m less than convinced.

Bush’s real record is an economy that is one of the strongest in recent history, a successful defense against terrorist attacks (which seemed inevitable in the aftermath of 9/11), and the liberation of two nations from the grip of tyranny.

Yet that has to be measured against the general sense of economic doom that pervades the country (to no fault of the President, but his critics), our inability to destroy al-Qaeda, and the turmoil in Iraq. Not to mention the frequent political meltdowns of the Bush White House: Katrina, Harriet Miers, the Dubai ports deal, steel tariffs, etc. Bush’s stance on immigration has aliened many of those who have supported him thus far. If temporal popularity polls indicated historical success, Bush would be a very poor President indeed.

However, historical success has nothing to do with temporal popularity: the theme is that the big things have been done right, and the things that only scholars care about have been done wrong. Generations from now, nobody will give a damn who Harriet Miers was or why we were so mad about immigration in 2007. What will be remembered is that the US faced the biggest attack on its soil since the War of 1812, embarked on a war to find those responsible and tried to push the Middle East towards democratic peace.

The problem for the left and for the right is that George W. Bush isn’t really important in the grand scheme of things. Whether he’s popular or not is truly irrelevant: he will probably be remembered fondly if the US wins, and poorly if not. What matters is that the United States wins — there are three outcomes of this war, two of them untenable: the first is that we win, the democrats win in the Middle East, and there’s a slow process of reform that cuts the fuel to the fire of Islamic terrorism. The second is that Bush’s successors (either Democratic or Republican) try to continue the status quo, in which case the best we can hope for is for the Middle East continues to be a dysfunctional breeding ground of terrorism and we all live under the specter of the next mass casualty attack. The final, and most terrifying, is that the Middle East fragments. Iran obtains nuclear weapons, there’s a nuclear arms race in the Middle East, and the chance that someone decides to push the button becomes far too great. Meanwhile, terrorism expands dramatically, and Islamist radicals eventually pull off an attack of such magnitude that the West has absolutely no choice to respond. At that point, the clash of civilizations becomes complete: make no mistake, while pacifists abhor war under any circumstances, the US is not a pacifist nation. If al-Qaeda starts pulling off a couple Beslan-style attacks in the US or suicide bombs a few shopping malls, America’s latent Jacksonian impulses will kick into overdrive. The prospect of massive American retaliation in the Middle East is the one situation that al-Qaeda truly fears. They have every reason to believe that we won’t go that far, but they miscalculated in our response to the September 11 atrocities — they may well miscalculate again.

Only the first option is the one in which the United States has a chance to live free from the specter of terrorism and the Middle East does not continue to be the world’s biggest powderkeg. That happens to be the option that reflects the best on President George W. Bush, which seems to rankle the left to no end. The problem that the left faces is that their hatred of the man is leading to defeat of the country.

In the end, I think that Kristol is right, although everything hinges upon Iraq. The silly political scandals of today won’t matter a whit in years to come: the cottage industry of Bush bashing will be as irrelevant tomorrow as the cottage industry of Clinton bashing was a decade ago. History is not written by the temporal critics. If Iraq ends well, and we should all hope it does, then history will see this generation as the one who finally faced down a grave threat and transformed the world for the better. If Iraq fails, it will lead to further failures: the US will end up being forced out of Afghanistan as well, and al-Qaeda will become a much more potent force than it has been since the collapse of the Twin Towers. At the end of the day, Bush isn’t the issue that truly matters, and his presidency will be as much at the mercy of events as it seemingly has always been.

McCain Meltdown

NRO’s Campaign Spot has details on the departure of 5 high-level staffers from the John McCain campaign. Combined with the paltry fundraising over the last quarter, it doesn’t seem like McCain will be able to keep going for much longer.

It’s a shame in many ways. I cannot tolerate McCain’s position on campaign finance reform as I find it to be an unconstitutional abridgment of freedom of speech. I dislike his position on immigration. I don’t believe his position on torture is appropriate, although I respect his moral stance on the issue.

However, when it comes to fiscal discipline and the global war on terror, McCain has been one of the most stalwart and principled leaders. He has never backed down from these fights, and even now that the war is incredibly unpopular, McCain won’t change his tune for the sake of political expediency. Senator McCain has more backbone than anyone in the Senate, and at the end of the day when it comes to the two most crucial issues for the future of the Republic, McCain is on the right side.

McCain may not be Presidential material, but he is a leader of principle and strength, and even when he’s on the wrong side of an issue, it’s because he believes in that position. We need more like Senator McCain, even if not in the Oval Office.

UPDATE: Jim Geraghty thinks that McCain won’t bow out yet, which seems right. The big question is how long McCain can go without picking up more momentum — and the field just doesn’t have much room for him at this point. There doesn’t seem to be a way for McCain to truly turn things around, absent a major fallout with one of the other candidates. That certainly is possible, but can McCain bank on it?

Smoke And Mirrors

Brendan Nyhan notes the unfounded assumption that there’s some sinister conspiracy behind the Libby commutation:

Note how quickly the tables have turned here. People (like Marshall) who bemoaned the guilty-until-proven-innocent attitude of Republicans during the Clinton years have now decided — based on no hard evidence — (a) there was an underlying crime and (b) that President Bush “is a party to” it. To believe this to be true, you have to believe that Richard Armitage innocently leaked Valerie Plame’s status to Robert Novak before other Bush officials could unleash a plot that demonstrably violated the relevant statute. In addition, you have to believe that Libby’s testimony would reveal this plot. While it’s possible that all of this happened, assuming that it did is completely unreasonable.

Nyhan speculates about what really happened:

Libby is by all accounts a loyal servant. Couldn’t he just be protecting his superiors from exposure of embarrassing but non-criminal conduct? In the end, we have no idea what happened. There is no proof of a criminal conspiracy. Asserting or speculating that one took place is irresponsible.

There’s another potential scenario that fits as well: despite what the jury thought, Libby didn’t lie or obstruct anything. He simply didn’t remember the timeline for who he talked to when, and couldn’t get a clear enough story to satisfy the jury. Everyone seems to assume that there’s something to this case, when the reality is that at every point, there seems to be less and less. We know that the White House wasn’t the source of the leak to Novak. We know that Joe Wilson’s NYT op-ed is contradicted by his own statements, and we know that he and Plame are making out like bandits from this whole escapade. Nobody was charged with violating the IIPA, and there’s no evidence which suggests that there even was such a violation or surely Fitzgerald would have nailed someone with it.

It’s a lot easier to believe that Robert Novak got his info from Richard Armitage than it is to believe in some sinister and labyrinthian White House conspiracy — but some people so fervently want there to be some big story that they’ll assume one based on nothing more than their own presumptions.

Let’s face it, the White House that bungled Harriet Miers, the Dubai ports deal, and just about everything else couldn’t keep a secret without everyone and their dog knowing about it. At this point, the only way that there could be some big coordinated conspiracy to “out” Plame and attack Wilson is if the White House actually managed to keep a secret this long without some former Cabinet member smearing it all over his or her autobiography — which would be rather unprecedented for this Administration.

Occam’s Razor cuts this story to shreds — despite what many want to believe about the Bush White House, the idea that they could keep this whole thing under wraps just doesn’t jibe with reality. It’s a lot more likely that Scooter Libby couldn’t keep his story straight than it is to believe that Scooter Libby somehow is the fall guy for some vast right-wing conspiracy. While the latter would play into the general atmosphere of hyperbole and paranoia that surrounds the White House Press Corps when it comes to the President, the former is the most likely scenario.

The Libby Commutation’s Political Fallout

Captain Ed finds that neither the right nor the left are particularly happy about it. That’s not surprising, as the left wants anything they can to destroy the Bush Administration and the right thinks that the Libby prosecution was nothing more than a politically-oriented witch hunt by an overzealous prosecutor that should have never happened.

In the end, Bush did what he thought was right. A jury convicted Libby of perjury, and perjury is a serious charge. Even though the case was weak, unless there is grave injustice the decisions of juries should be respected if the rule of law is to be preserved. One can argue that Libby deserves a full pardon, but the reality is that he was found guilty of a crime. A pardon is appropriate in cases where the jury should never have voted to convict and the appeals process has failed to rectify the error: which is why pardons should be relatively rare.

At the same time, a 30 month sentence is outrageous, and not allowing Mr. Libby to remain free until the appeals process was complete was entirely unnecessary. All those on the left arguing that Libby’s actions were injurious to national security forget that Libby was not the leaker, Richard Armitage was, and that no one has been charged with violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act. Fitzgerald knew the entire time what had really happened and that there was no substance to the allegations. Furthermore, Libby’s case has to be taken into the context of someone like Sandy Berger, who stole documents from the National Archives and destroyed evidence so that the 9/11 Commission would not have access to it: an act which was unquestionably injurious to national security and for which Berger got a slap on the wrist. Justifying throwing Libby in prison on national security grounds is unwarranted by the facts: Libby wasn’t the leaker, he was never prosecuted as such, and the jury was never presented with any facts to that regard. It is a gross violation of due process to sentence someone based upon factors that were not presented to the jury. If Fitzgerald believed that Libby was the leaker he should have prosecuted him under the IIPA — which he did not because there was no evidence that anyone in the White House had leaked Plame’s identity.

The political fallout will undoubtedly hurt Bush, but he’s already politically irrelevant as it is. It no longer matters how much the President tweaks the Democrats, they’ve long treated him as their Emmanuel Goldstein and will go after him no matter what. The President tried to be judicious in rectifying an unjust sentence without contradicting the determination of a fair and open trial. Commuting Libby’s sentence is unquestionably bad politics from an Administration whose political standing could not possibly be lower, but as a matter of law and policy it was the correct choice. That may not mollify the President’s many critics on both the left and the right, but what is popular is not always right and what is right is almost never popular.

Drifting Leftward?

E.J. Dionne makes the argument that the center in American politics is drifting to the left. There’s some merit to that analysis, but in context, it comes after years in which the American center has drifted to the right.

I don’t think that the American people’s ideological makeup has changed at all — it rarely does. What has changed is the political outlook. The Republicans had years of complete control and failed to deliver on their key values. However, the country has had nearly 30 years of center-right governance. Reagan was an unabashedly conservative President with a liberal Congress, but managed to take the country out of the malaise of the Carter years and transform the American economy — and he was instrumental in defusing the Cold War, which only 20 years prior had threatened the destruction of the nation. He was followed by the center-right George H. Bush who was less effective, but still continued his policies. His successor, Bill Clinton, ran as a “New Democrat” and his key initiatives ended up being center-right ones: welfare reform, NAFTA, a massive capital gains tax cut, founding the WTO, and law enforcement. Clinton may have been a liberal, but his Presidency gave little for liberals to win. It was his initial attempts to govern from the left that helped the Gingrich Revolution — the voters soundly rejected HillaryCare, were angered at the social experimentation of gays in the military, and found Clinton’s 1993 tax hike unpalatable.

The collapse of the Republican Revolution last year wasn’t because people were sick and tird of conservatism, it’s because the Republicans lost their moorings. They became part of the Washington establishment that they had initially run against, and they got punished for it. Sadly, they’re only barely learning the lessons of those failures.

Dionne points to healthcare, inequality, and Iraq as signs of a leftward drift. However, where is the policy consensus? Some states are experimenting with universal health care plans, but these experiments won’t work any better than previous experiments have. Even if such a plan were passed on a national level, it would collapse within a matter of years — if that long. The American people are used to completely open access to healthcare. The second stories of months-long waiting lists for routine medical procedures — common in Canada — start happening, the system will lose all popularity. The reason HillaryCare collapsed is because consumers realized that their freedom of choice would be gone — HMOs are already bad enough, but having the government serve as the HMO from hell is hardly a better alternative.

Gov. Romney’s Massachusetts experiment was less about government control and more about making insurance portable from employer to employer — which is what a well-designed system should do. The Massachusetts plan isn’t perfect, but it’s not the sort of Canadian-style socialized medicine that the left really wants.

Not to mention that now that Michael Moore, the Castro-suckling propagandist, is making an issue of health care, having Democratic plans associated with Castro’s Cuba is not likely to make them much more popular.

As for inequality, the reality is that it has never been the sort of issue that the Democrats would like it to be — mainly because it only exists on paper. The United States has a vibrant middle class — something that doesn’t exist in Europe. If “inequality” were such a potent issue, John Edwards wouldn’t be sinking. The reality is that an economy is not a zero-sum game. The fact that Steve Jobs is filthy rich doesn’t mean that John Smith is forever limited to making $30,000. The “two Americas” schtick isn’t taking, because it doesn’t match the reality of life for the vast majority of the American people.

People are annoyed with the exorbitant CEO benefit packages, but that doesn’t mean that they’re prepared to pay higher taxes themselves for some harebrained Democratic social engineering scheme. Again, the American people aren’t going to take back the progress of the last 30 years and return to the days of “stagflation”, gas lines, and 28% APR home loans.

As for Iraq, it is like Vietnam in many ways — the Democrats will to see defeat at all costs will continue to tag them as the party of weakness. Especially when Americans see the costs that such ignominious defeat would bring. Fortunately, I don’t think it will happen. The Democrats can’t force a withdrawal, and we finally have the right strategy. This is a case where even if the political consequences are ruinous — which, for the GOP, they are — doing what’s politically correct would be national suicide. We cannot afford a loss in Iraq, and if we win, we’ll have a peace dividend that will be crucial to this war.

What if Dionne is right? What if the nation really is trending left?

Leftism and reality don’t mix well. Even if there is a leftward turn in this country, it won’t last long because at the most basic level, left-wing policies simply don’t work. Protectionism would cost millions of Americans their jobs. Higher taxes would dramatically slow down the economy, and again cause massive job losses. Socialized medicine would lead to waiting times and lack of access to lifesaving procedures. A surrender in Iraq would make a large-scale terrorist attack inevitable — and it would likely lead to a death toll far greater than the attacks of September 11.

The problem is that all of those things would be greatly injurious to our nation, including costing thousands of lives. It would once again discredit leftism in this country, but the price would be far higher than we should bear.

Fortunately, I don’t see that happening. The reality is that the Democrats won not on the strength of their ideas, but on the weakness of the competition. The Republicans are embracing the center, but at the same time rediscovering their core values. (If far too slowly.) There’s a far greater chance of a tax-cutting, spending-reducing, strong-on-defense conservative being elected in 2008 than there is on a closet socialist whose monogram is HRC — or any of her liberal ilk. The reality is that nearly 30 years of center-right rule in this country has led to nearly unprecedented peace and prosperity, and even if there is a jag to the left, this country is not going to return to the failed policies of the 1970s in which liberalism was ascendant.

“A Crisis In Public Confidence”

Mark Tapscott takes a look at the incredibly low ratings given to all branches of government and sees a crisis in public confidence in the political class. The recent Gallup poll reveals that the American people only have 14% confidence in Congress and their approval rating is only 24%. Every government institution except the military has been given a vote of no-confidence by the American public. Tapscott has a theory as to why:

The opposition to the Bush/Kennedy/McCain immigration reform appears to be hardening, too, as indicated by this UPI/Zogby International survey that finds only three percent – three percent! – of those surveyed approve of the way Congress is handling the issue. Bush gets only a nine percent approval rating on the issue in the survey, which has a 1.1 percent margin of error.

This is why there is no evidence of increasing public support for the GOP in recent weeks despite the failling ratings of the Democratic majority in Congress. The root problem is a bipartisan inability – or refusal – to adopt policies supported by clear majorities of the American people.

Those policies for the most part involve a significantly lower level of government activism, whereas the political class for the most part seeks only a higher level because it benefits, financially and otherwise, from the higher taxes, greater federal spending and heightened importance of public institutions.

I think that analysis is right. The crisis in confidence in government isn’t a partisan issue — Democrats want to frame it as being opposition to the war, Republicans want to frame it as opposition to Democrats, but the reality is that it is opposition to a political system that has gone off the rails. The Democrats in Congress have taken the abysmal ratings of the Republicans and managed to lower them, while the Republicans have yet to offer anything resembling a coherent alternative. This is a bipartisan failure, and the same old partisan solutions just aren’t going to cut it.

The question is how this may effect American politics. John Podhoretz suggests that it could signal more frequent changes in political control. That’s certainly not to be discounted, but it would be something we’ve never really seen in American politics. Nor am I certain such an outcome would be good — that might erase partisan lines, but I doubt that it would do much to change the sort of back-room dealmaking that’s the longstanding tradition of Washington politics.

What I hope this will do is spring the country into a reformist mindset. Our problem is that we have a government that grows and grows and grows and demands more and more power. Even the left is taking the anti-government side (which would certainly change if a Democrat were elected in 2008) — there is a wide cross-partisan belief that government is too big, too greedy, and too powerful.

The problems with American democracy are structural — politicians are doing what politicians always do, and that is do whatever it takes to get elected — even if it means skirting the law. The only fix for this problem is to limit the size and scope of government so that there are fewer cookie jars for politicians to get their grubby little mitts into. Libertarians and conservatives don’t have much problem with that, but the liberals generally want more and more government. It’s hard to reconcile a general distrust of government with a party that wants to centralize healthcare into another government agency.

As a conservative, this mistrust of government is welcome news. The problem is that as a Republican, it isn’t. The way forward for the GOP is to regain their core convictions and stand with the American people against an ever-growing government. However, the current GOP leadership doesn’t seem at all interested in doing this.

If the GOP could get their values back, 2008 could be a bloodbath for the Democrats in the way that 2006 was for the Republicans. People are sick and tired of a dysfunctional government, and they want something better. The Republicans have to show them that big government isn’t the only way to go, but that requires a commitment to less spending, less government, and an end to the comfortable culture of entrenched power that ended the Gingrich revolution after 12 years.

American government stands at a crossroads — and partisan bickering won’t solve the nation’s problems. The American people are rightly sick and tired of it all, and if the GOP can’t provide an acceptable alternative, someone else will.

Why Can’t The Democrats Get Traction?

E.J. Dionne wonders why the Democrats can’t get any political traction despite an incredibly weakened GOP:

It’s been clear for months that large majorities of Americans have given up on the Republicans. They’ve turned decisively against President Bush and, in principle, want him replaced in 2008 by a Democrat.

But there’s a major gap between the desired outcome and the will to bring it about. The electorate is more pro-Democratic in theory than in practice. And Democratic congressional leaders will have a hellish time changing that, given their narrow margins of control and President Bush’s possession of a veto pen.

Do not envy House Speaker Nancy Pelosi or Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid their supposed power. It would be easier to manage Bush’s former baseball team, the Texas Rangers (26 wins, 43 losses as of this morning). Expectations for the Rangers are a lot lower.

The Democrats’ problem is that they got elected because the Republicans, quite frankly, couldn’t get their shit together. The Republicans lost the independent vote, and that relatively small shift was enough to cause an electoral bloodbath. The problem is that the Democrats really aren’t doing any better.

Name one major Democratic policy proposal that’s actually passed. Other than the minimum wage (which had support from many Republicans), none of them have. The Democrats are doing no more than did their Republican predecessors, and that’s the approval numbers for Congress are just as bad as the President’s.

ABC News also notes that the lefward tilt of the Democrats is hurting them with independent voters. The Democrats have bought into the convenient fiction that their poor poll numbers are because they didn’t get their Iraq surrender plan passed. That’s like the GOP blaming their losses in 2006 on not doing enough to court evangelicals — it’s a way of dodging blame from policies that have utterly failed. Iraq isn’t the issue that’s keeping the Congress’ numbers down. It’s the fact that nothing is getting done. Even if the Democrats had gotten their surrender, their numbers wouldn’t be better because the problem isn’t Iraq, it’s a climate of poisonous political partisanship.

Both parties are in deep trouble. The President is an albatross around the neck of the Republicans, and the Democrats are being pushed further and further away from the political mainstream. Barring a meltdown, it still looks like Hillary Clinton will be the Democratic candidate in 2008. While a meltdown is always a possibility, the Democrats are likely to pick one of the most divisive candidates in recent political history while the Republicans seem likely to reach out to a more centrist candidate. That’s why despite the Democrats winning the generic ballot, they still don’t have any candidates who can get close to that generic preference.

The reality is that neither party can get much traction because the system is broken. We need less pork, less influence trading, less partisanship and less government overall. The reason why there’s such a strong subculture behind candidates like Ron Paul is because they’re candidates who are pushing against the status quo — and even though they have no chances of winning, that sentiment is a lot broader than one might think.

American politics is in a shameful state, and unless this idiotic partisan divide ends, it will remain so for some time. The American people are rightly sick of the same cronyism and ineptitude coming from both sides, and unless one party can break the deadlock and appeal to the center, neither party is going to have much success in advancing any kind of agenda.