David Gelernter, a comp-sci professor at Yale has a perceptive but biting editorial on the Democrat’s paternalism towards voters in The Los Angeles Times:

Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, minority leaders of the House and Senate, respectively, — kindly Mom and Pop to a nation of intellectually limited youngsters. (But thank goodness, they love us anyway.)

How could anyone be opposed in principle to private investment accounts within Social Security? I could understand Democrats arguing that “private accounts are a wonderful idea but the country can’t afford the transition costs right now.” But mostly I hear Democrats saying they’re a lousy idea, and that President Bush wants to wreck Social Security — because, after all, he wants to let you keep a great big whopping 4% of your payroll taxes in a private account instead of handing over every cent to the government. How on Earth could anyone be opposed in principle to letting taxpayers manage a minuscule fraction of their own money (their own money, dammit!) if they want to? Because private accounts violate the Infantile American Principle, so dear to Democratic hearts. Little kids should turn over their cash to the Big Smart Government for safekeeping.

But of course they can’t say that, so instead they say, “Bush wants to privatize Social Security” — as if government were going to wash its hands of the whole mess. The technical term that logicians use for this rhetorical gambit — applying a correct word for one part of a proposal to the proposal as a whole — is “lying.”

Gelernter has a point here. The Democrats have always been the party of big government, and behind their populist rhetoric lies a deep-seated sense of self-superiority. The whole Democratic point of view is predicated on the idea that you are who and what you are because of the state. The doctrine of redistribution of wealth holds that the government should be able to take from the “rich” because without the government the rich wouldn’t have gotten that way. There’s some element to truth to that, but the Democrats take it entirely too far. Such a worldview is analogous to serfdom (as F.A. Hayek noted) — you’re merely a vassal to the state under such a worldview.

The Democrats are a party that’s slowly self-destructing. The Democratic Party is becoming increasingly coastal, and increasingly consisting of two groups — those with a certain sense of noblesse oblige and those who see themselves as the beneficiaries of that predominantly white, urban guilt. The values of the Democratic Party have always been out of lockstep with mainstream America since the liberal takeover in 1968 — but now it’s even more apparent.

It’s one thing to be elitist if you’ve ideas worthy of elitism. However, where are the major Democratic policy proposals? What would the Democrats do to reform Social Security? Where are the energy plans of the Democrats? What have the Democrats achieved other than stamping their foot and saying “NO” to everything? A competent political opposition party would come up with a bold and forward-looking plan to differentiate themselves from the status quo. The Democrats have been unable to do so, and when they try it’s with programs that require more and more government control.

If the Democrats ever want to be an effective party, they have to drop their anti-Bush monomania and their dripping condescension for Middle American values. With only a few exceptions, the Democrats have gone the exact opposite way and have embraced more obstructionism, more overblown rhetoric, and more attacks on people of faith and Middle American values. It’s like the Democrats learned absolutely nothing from the last election.

If it weren’t for the lack of organization and message control coming from the current Republican leadership, the Democrats might be looking at an even bigger loss. The Democrat’s only hope at this point is that the Republicans screw thing up and get so sidetracked from the President’s agenda that nothing gets done — which was looking like a relatively safe bet, but now that Frist and Hastert are sticking to their guns on key issues may not be anymore. The Democrats do treat voters like children, which is why the voters are increasingly treating Democrats like yesterday’s trash. Until the Democratic Party wakes up to this, the marginalization of the Democratic Party will only continue.

Dr. Tom Coburn is known for being a royal pain in the ass… and for all the right reasons. Bob Novak has an article on how Sen. Coburn is getting on the nerves of the Senate leadership for his campaign against wasteful government spending:

During six years in the House, Coburn’s campaign against pork-barrel spending made him anathema to Republican leaders. He planned a lower profile in the Senate, but the ethics complaint made that impossible. He also had an agenda ensuring him more attention than ordinary freshmen: bringing free market principles to health care, oversight of federal programs (as chairman of the Federal Financial Management Subcommittee) and assaulting congressional pork. For the first time since Phil Gramm left the Senate, Sen. John McCain had an anti-pork partner.

In the April 20 debate on the supplemental appropriations bill, Coburn was the only senator to support McCain against Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, who was mandating that a $40 million project go to a “Philadelphia-based company.” “I believe this is the wrong way we should be doing things,” Coburn told the Senate. “We need to stop. Our future depends on the integrity of a budgeting and appropriations process that is not based on politics but is based on having the future best will for our country.”

Of course, standing on principles in the Senate usually meets with punishment, as the Senate Ethics Committee is investigating Coburn for his principle of being a citizen-legislator. Coburn hasn’t quit his day job, and when he’s done in the halls of Congress he goes back to Oklahoma to deliver babies. Novak notes the hypocrisy of censuring Coburn for such actions:

It is hard to exaggerate how much Coburn’s rhetoric riles pork-loving colleagues, explaining the absurd ethics proceeding against him. In answering charges that he is a part-time senator, Coburn wrote constituents last week that he will continue to “devote at least 60-70 hours per week to my Senate duties.” Other senators spend as much time as Coburn back home but mainly for fund-raising. They are not stopped from padding their bankrolls with book royalties, farm income and investments.

I would rather have a Senator performing his normal job then out fundraising and shilling like most Senators do. Coburn is absolutely unwilling to bend on his principles of smaller government, fiscal discipline, and the concept of the citizen-legislator. He’s challenged the comfortable pork-barrel politics of the Senate, something which badly needs to be done. This country needs more Senators willing to put principles above pork, and Coburn’s bluntness is a breath of fresh air in the stodgy chambers of the US Senate. Rather than focusing on trumped-up and illegitimate ethics charges, both Senate Democrats and Republicans should be following his example and putting the needs of the country above petty porkbarrel politics.

Brendan Nyhan has an intresting piece on why he doesn’t think that there will be a centrist third party. He brings up Duverger’s Law, a theory in political science that states that in a winner-take-all situation, voters will usually winnow the choices down to two major parties. Nyhan points out:

The dynamics of Duverger’s Law are what Brownstein doesn’t understand. It’s a giant coordination game. Even the voters who would prefer a centrist third-party candidate have no incentive to support him if he is in third place because doing so will hurt their second choice. Absent extraordinary circumstances, it’s almost impossible to dislodge the parties and create a dynamic where a third party candidate can become one of the top two contenders. This is why so few liberals supported Nader in 2004, and why Perot lost by large margins in 1992 and 1996.

I’m a big fan of the political analysis of Anthony Downs, an economist who wrote a book called An Economic Theory of Democracy. Downs argued that voters fall along a bell curve. Ideologues on either side are a decided minority, while the most voters lie along the center. Studies have shown that this analysis is more or less correct. The exact distribution may change (for years Democrats had a higher rate of partisan identification than Republicans, only recently have Republicans reached rough parity), but the principle has always remained the same.

That doesn’t leave an opening for a moderate third party because the goal of both parties is to capture more centrist voters. That’s why neither Howard Dean nor Pat Buchanan tend to garner more than a minor percentage of the vote — they only appeal to the far ends of the bell curve where there’s a paucity of voters.

Indeed, that’s why John Kerry became the Democratic nominee in 2004 — because the Democrats made the strategic determination that he was the candidate who could best capture the moderate vote. Dean captured the Democratic base, but the base of any given party represents only a minute fraction of all voters. Radicals like Barry Goldwater or Howard Dean excite the base, but they can’t capture the rest of the country.

And that’s why American politics tend to be less radical than say, Italian politics. Both parties are shooting for the same target — the middle. Excessively ideological parties tend not to make enough of a difference to swing results. Even a moderate party can’t necessarily take up the slack unless both parties abandon the middle, which almost never happens. Our political system has been based on a two-party equilibrium system from the start, even before we had official political parties. The Federalists and the Democratic-Republicans were political parties in fact if not in organization long before America had political parties — from the very birth of the Republic.

The only way a third party can come to prominance is if one of the big two completely and utterly collapses. The last time this happened was when the Whigs folded before the Civil War. The chances of it happening again is slim. Our parties are designed to appeal to the masses, not ideological cliques. If they go to far to one side of another, they invariably try to recapture the center. One can argue that this makes American politics cautious and “mushy” as parties try to appeal to Joe and Jane Sixpack – I’d argue that’s an important feature of the system. A two party equilibrium acts as a bulwark against radicalism in politics and keeps the system stable. Without dramatically changing our system of government, a third party is only rarely going to have a significant effect on a Presidential election, and then not enough to unseat one of the major parties.

The Democrats are realizing that their Social Security obstruction strategy isn’t working out for them politically:

House Democrats have decided to quit emphasizing that they will not negotiate changes to Social Security until President George W. Bush drops his idea for private accounts. The strategy switch comes after Democrats learned from focus groups that people frown on obstinate lawmakers.

“People feel like it doesn’t show a good-faith effort,” said a top House aide, who like several others spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the internal data. “It makes us seem like we’re’typical politicians.’ “

The shift in tactics comes with Democrats and Republicans unsure what will happen after the end next month of a campaign-style, 60-day travel blitz by the president and administration officials who are promoting his plan.

“It may seem like a long time to you, but realistically, we’ve really just started,” Bush told the American Society of Newspaper Editors last week.

There are two lessons that can be derived from this: first, that the Democrats can’t count on the same obstructionism that has led them to devastating defeats in two straight electoral cycles, and second that if the Republicans stick to their guns on Social Security, a plan can be passed that provides choice and security for the system well into the future. The Democrats have been successful in stalling Bush’s Social Security agenda, but they haven’t stopped it. Bush is employing the same strategy he did during the elections: forgetting about the horribly biased major media and hitting local media outlets, going directly to the people. The status quo is that private accounts are DOA — when in reality plans like the Hagel plans that combine optional private accounts with some structural changes to the program remain politically viable.

The Democrats are no longer the politically savvy party of the Clinton spin machine, and their attempts to stall Social Security are beginning to backfire on them. Now is the time for the President to make a major push on this issue while the Democrats are vulnerable. The future of Social Security rests on reforming the system now, and allowing Social Security reform to languish only emboldens the Democrats to continue their patterns of obstructionism.

Mike Krempasky has a piece at Red State on the proposed Online Freedom of Speech Act introduced in the House by Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-TX) that acts as a companion to the similar bill introduced in the Senate by Minority Leader Harry Reid.

Both parties — and America as a whole — has every interest in ensuring that political speech is not stifled by excessive government regulation, and it’s nice to see a bipartisan effort dedicated to preserving free speech rather than further restricting it.

James Madison warned us back in the Federalist #10 that engaging in attempts to limit faction by stifling free speech is contrary to a healthy democracy — at least some people in Congress still understand that, even if the FEC apparently does not.

Glenn Reynolds has more on former Clinton National Security Advisor Sandy Berger’s guilty plea over stealing documents from the National Archives. He quotes The Washington Post‘s story on the sordid affair.

The terms of Berger’s agreement required him to acknowledge to the Justice Department the circumstances of the episode. Rather than misplacing or unintentionally throwing away three of the five copies he took from the archives, as the former national security adviser earlier maintained, he shredded them with a pair of scissors late one evening at the downtown offices of his international consulting business.

The document, written by former National Security Council terrorism expert Richard A. Clarke, was an “after-action review” prepared in early 2000 detailing the administration’s actions to thwart terrorist attacks during the millennium celebration. It contained considerable discussion about the administration’s awareness of the rising threat of attacks on U.S. soil. . . .

Berger’s archives visit occurred as he was reviewing materials as a designated representative of the Clinton administration to the national commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The question of what Clinton knew and did about the emerging al Qaeda threat before leaving office in January 2001 was acutely sensitive, as suggested by Berger’s determination to spend hours poring over the Clarke report before his testimony.

So here we have a former National Security Advisor stealing classified documents related to a major government investigation and shredding them to protect his former boss. If a Republican had done something like this, the press would be demanding his head on a platter — but when a Clinton-era official does it, off to the memory hole it goes.

Berger deserves to get the book thrown at him for this kind of absolutely irresponsible behavior — yet all he’s getting is a slap on the wrist. One would think that a former National Security Advisor would have more respect for the law and for ensuring that classified documents aren’t lost, stolen, or destroyed. Then again, perhaps given the tenor of his former workplace, that’s asking too much.