Democrats' Struggles Demonstrate Pelosi Missteps

Yesterday's Los Angeles Times reported that Democratic leadership struggles in the transfer to majority power have raised questions about the political acumen of incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi:

Democrats returned to Capitol Hill on Monday to prepare for a transfer of power in Congress, but their postelection emphasis on unity quickly dissolved into power struggles and jockeying over the spoils of victory.

Much of the squabbling stemmed from the decision over the weekend by presumed House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to endorse a longtime loyalist to be her second-in-command. In backing Iraq war critic Rep. John P. Murtha of Pennsylvania for the post, Pelosi, of San Francisco, turned her back on another Democrat who is in line for the job and is favored by many of her party's more moderate members.

In her first high-profile move after the election, Pelosi signaled that she can be expected to prize personal loyalty as she oversees the fractious party.

The selection of Murtha is casting doubt on Pelosi's promise to restore integrity to Congress:

Some argued that by publicly siding with Murtha, Pelosi could undercut one of her boldest pronouncements in the wake of her party's victory — that they would run "the most honest, the most open and the most ethical Congress in history."

These critics point to Murtha's brush with the law in the 1980s, when he was investigated in connection with the Abscam bribery scandal on Capitol Hill. He was cleared in that probe, but some watchdog groups have continued to question his ethics. As a senior member of the House Appropriations Committee, Murtha has been an unapologetic master of "earmarking" money for local projects — a practice the critics say invites corruption."

John Murtha is not the right poster child" for a message that stresses ethics, said Thomas Mann, an expert on Congress at the centrist Brookings Institution think tank.

Ruth Marcus over at the Washington Post explains why:

For years Murtha has relied on the Abscam bottom line to argue that the case is not a problem for him: He wasn't indicted. But he was named a co-conspirator in the bribery scheme. The feckless House ethics committee didn't take action against him, though the outside investigator it hired quit in disgust after the panel rejected his recommendation to file misconduct charges.

"I am the guy that didn't take the money," Murtha said this summer when his opponent raised the issue.

Yes, but: He's the guy who, brought into the deal by two other House members -- Frank Thompson (D-N.J.) and John Murphy (D-N.Y.) -- agreed to meet with men offering money in return for official action. He's the guy who knew these two colleagues expected a payoff and even vouched for them with the would-be bribers ("Both of them are solid.").

He's the guy who, when offered a bribe, still wanted to do a deal. "I'm delighted to do business with him and do every goddamn thing I can within bounds, you know, so I don't get myself in jail, in order to get him into the country and whatever needs to be done," he says on the video, unearthed by the conservative American Spectator...He's the guy who -- as a member of the House ethics committee-- did nothing to stop the scheme.

Sorry, but I'm not buying Murtha's argument that he's the victim of a "Swift-boating attack" over "unfounded allegations that occurred 26 years ago." On its own, Murtha's Abscam conduct is disqualifying.

The Democrats haven't even taken power yet and Pelosi's already energizing Republican electoral prospects for 2008. Be sure to check out the lengthy discussion of House Democrats' ethical baggage over at Patterico's Pontifications.

Can the Democrats Steer the Economy?

This week's cover story at Business Week argues that the Democrats have little power to affect incomes though policies like a minimum wage boost, which they have promised to pass. Indeed, according to the piece, the U.S. government on the whole is losing its ability to manage economic outcomes in an age of increasing global integration:

Sometime next year--perhaps around Christmas 2007, if current trends continue--the U.S. will hit a milestone. For the first time in recent memory, the cost of imported goods and services will exceed federal revenues. In other words, Americans will soon pay more to foreigners than they do to their national government.

We're almost there now. Imports cost us about $2.2 trillion a year; the federal government collects $2.4 trillion in revenues. Why is that important? Because for the past 70 years, Washington has been the 800-pound gorilla, more powerful by far than any other force in the U.S. economy. That's not true anymore. The federal government remains plenty influential, but the global economy is more so.This will come as a rude shock to Representative Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), the presumptive Speaker of the House, Charles B. Rangel (D-N.Y.), the likely chairman of the House Ways & Means Committee, and other newly enfranchised leaders in the Democratic Party. Sure, they're likely to have the power to pass legislation, including boosting the minimum wage. But such a measure, even if President George W. Bush signed it, would help only a small fraction of the workforce. It would do almost nothing to ameliorate the weak wage growth that has plagued most Americans, including college graduates, in recent years. The broad-based drop in incomes is being driven more by the rise of China and India and the intensification of global competition. And there is little Democrats can do to reverse these trends.

No matter which party you belong to, or which Big Idea or school of economic policy you subscribe to, one thing is clear: Globalization has overwhelmed Washington's ability to control the economy. Whether you're a Republican supply-side tax-cutter, a Wall Street deficit hawk of either party, or a Silicon Valley techie type, your preferred levers of economic policy just don't work as well as they once did.

This is an intriguing article. The piece reviews four big areas of economic policy -- Keynesian economics, supply-side theory, Rubinomics (deficit reduction), and innovation policy (R&D) -- and suggests how well each policy strand performs amid relentless globalization processes.

While interesting, I don't find the argument 100 percent compelling. Certainly international determinants are increasingly affecting major segments of economic life in the country. The piece mentions how incomes have declined across all socioeconomic strata, including those with a bachelor's degree, where wages have dropped 8 percent since 2003. Also, global capital mobility has kept U.S. interest rates low, despite 17 rate increases by the Fed since 2004.

Still, I think the author leans toward the extreme "hyperglobalist" interpretation of world economic dynamics. That perspective claims essentially that the state is dead (or close thereabouts) -- continued economic globalization is bringing about the denationalization of state economies. Such a borderless world would make state governments relatively helpless in the face of powerful transnational flows of global goods and capital. Yet, it's important to remember that this era of globalilzation is not unprecedented (the pre-WWI era of the classical Gold Standard is often held out as an even greater period of financial interdependence). States today remain powerful actors influencing the direction of world commerce, through regulation, infrastructure, international agreements, and technology. Some have even argued that states' ability to tax, redistribute incomes, regulate economic activity, and monitor domestic populations have made them more powerful than ever.

University President Will Defy Civil Rights Measure

Abigail Thernstrom's one of the country's top experts on affirmative action. She published an essay on Michigan's Proposition 2 at OpinionJournal.com on Sunday. Thernstrom suggests that the real force behind the initiative was Jennifer Gratz, who was one plaintiff in the pair of 2003 Supreme Court rulings on racial preferences. The piece also indicates that University of Michigan President Mary Sue Coleman plans to defy the state's voters and implement racial preferences at the university by any means necessary:

While Mr. [Ward] Connerly is the father of the civil-rights initiatives, in Michigan his role was that of mentor and fund-raiser; Jennifer Gratz, MCRI's executive director, was in charge. She'd been the lead plaintiff in Gratz v. Bollinger, one of the University of Michigan cases decided by the U.S. Supreme Court in June 2003. The Court agreed that race-driven admissions policies were okay as long as they remained a bit subtle--but no naked point system for the color of an applicant's skin. The drive for the MCRI was launched immediately after the Gratz and Grutter decisions were announced.

The initiative's opponents enjoyed a fivefold funding advantage, which they used to broadcast a series of scary messages. The MCRI would be a tragedy on the scale of 9/11; it would perpetuate a "culture of inequity," and "endanger access to life-saving health-care services that apply only to women"--the language of the initiative to the contrary notwithstanding. Opponents even found basketball coaches to tout the importance of seeking "diversity." In response to that last stunt, the tiny band of full-time, young MCRI workers (five on the payroll) sent a staffer--a very short Korean immigrant, carrying a basketball and dressed for the court--to the coaches' press conference where he stated his eagerness to add "diversity" to the game.

Such episodes reveal the youthful idealism and commitment of Ms. Gratz, 24, and her staff, so reminiscent of the civil-rights movement in its heyday. They were all 20-somethings, ready to sleep under their desks and work nonstop. Despite the provocative ugliness of the MCRI's opposition, they stuck with an unwavering, positive message--leavened with wit.

The ban on preferences will affect the state and local government, but the University of Michigan will feel its impact most keenly. In the closing pages of "The Shape of the River," William Bowen and Derrick Bok's celebrated book on preferential admissions, the authors warn that, if barred from using racial double-standards, institutions of higher education will find another way to achieve the desired racial mix on campuses. Straight out of the Bowen and Bok playbook, University of Michigan president Mary Sue Coleman issued a statement on Tuesday night (even before the final results were in): "Regardless of what happens with Proposal 2, the University of Michigan will remain fully and completely committed to diversity. I am determined to do whatever it takes to sustain our excellence by recruiting and retaining a diverse community of students, faculty and staff."

Brave words in the face of utter defeat. To be sure, Supreme Court opinions can often be circumvented behind closed admissions-office doors; that was certainly the story after the 1978 decision in University of California v. Bakke, which (on paper) sanctioned the use of racial identity only as a "plus" factor, one consideration among many in admitting students. But state constitutional amendments are seriously constraining, as the experience in California in the years since the passage of 209 suggests. Racial double-standards in college admissions has been markedly curtailed at the state's flagship schools.

Buried in a lengthy speech to University of Michigan students on Wednesday, Ms. Coleman did say, "of course the University of Michigan will comply with the laws of the state." It was far from her first thought, however, and she has asked the school's attorneys "for their full and undivided support in defending diversity." They'll waste their time. As George Mason University law professor David Bernstein notes, "the chances that the university would ultimately win such litigation approach zero."

Ms. Coleman's other problem is that the much-vaunted "diversity" of the university is something of a sham, as an editorial writer for the very liberal Daily Michigan newspaper has suggested. The campus "is starkly segregated. . . . We live in different student neighborhoods. We go to different bars on different nights. We join in different student groups. There are even separate Greek systems." While Ms. Coleman has made the usual noises about building a "community" and "creating a diverse, welcoming campus"--whom was she kidding? Apparently no one.

Dishonesty has always been the coin of the realm in this country when it comes to race--from the days of the Declaration of Independence to "separate but equal" and beyond. The use of race as a decisive factor in admissions at selective colleges and universities is no exception.

The modern-day survival of racial preferences depends on sympathetic judges willing to spin dubious arguments and ignore widely available data on the pernicious impact of such preferences. But, this time, the University of Michigan may find itself without judicial recourse. The Supreme Court has never said that universities are constitutionally obligated to institute "diversity" policies. Public universities are funded by taxpayers. And those taxpayers have spoken.

I blogged earlier this week on the Michigan vote, laying out a couple of arguments against racial preferences in university admissions.

Top Democrats Looking for Quick Iraq Troop Pullout

True to form, Democratic Senate leaders indicated this weekend that the open-ended commitment for American forces in Iraq is over and that U.S. troops would begin to redeploy in a few months. This New York Times piece has the details:

Democratic leaders in the Senate vowed on Sunday to use their new Congressional majority to press for troop reductions in Iraq within a matter of months, stepping up pressure on the administration just as President Bush is to be interviewed by a bipartisan panel examining future strategy for the war.

The Democrats — the incoming majority leader, Senator Harry Reid of Nevada; the incoming Armed Services Committee chairman, Senator Carl Levin of Michigan; and the incoming Foreign Relations Committee chairman, Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware — said a phased redeployment of troops would be their top priority when the new Congress convenes in January, even before an investigation of the conduct of the war.

Today's top story at the Los Angeles Times also has the Democratic push for an Iraq pullout.

Both articles make reference to the bipartisan Iraq panel led by James Baker and Lee Hamiliton, political realists expected to recommend a shift toward regional diplomacy and greater cooperation on Iraq from neighboring countries. Yet, Michael Rubin, in today' s Wall Street Journal, is skeptical of the Democratic agenda, dismissing this as "progressive realism" promoting short-term gain at the expense of long-term security. Reconciliation with Iran and Syria is silly, notes Rubin, for both countries harbor designs for regional hegemony, and Iran has pledged to wipe Israel off the face of the map.

John McCain appeared on Meet the Press Sunday, arguing for a continued presence in Iraq with additional forces as needed. This is the position that Robert Kagan and William Kristol take in yesterday's Finanicial Times. Kagan and Kristol recommend increasing the deployment by 50,000 troops, a force level predicted to fully secure Baghdad while leaving enough troop coverage in remaining areas around the country to keep stability. Kagan and Kristol, of course, are among the top neoconservatives who advocated toppling Saddam's regime back in 2003. While some neocons have since recanted their support for the administration (but have not apologized for the policy, which is what Michael Kinsley would like to see), Kagan and Kristol remain firm in their support for the deployment and remain optimistic on a U.S. victory.

As noted in a previous post, I am open to a partial Iraqi withdrawal that is combined with an increased support role for American advisors. I appreciate the resolve of those like McCain and others, and I'd like the U.S. to at least try a major push to stabilize the country before going to the phased drawdown option.

Republicans' Gerrymandering May Have Backfired

This Wall Street Journal article reports that Republican redistricting efforts coming out the 2000 census may have weakened the party's electoral chances this year:

Gerrymandering was supposed to cement Republican control of the House of Representatives, offering incumbents a wall of re-election protection even as public opinion turned sharply against them. Instead, the party's strategy of recrafting district boundaries may have backfired, contributing to the defeats of several lawmakers and the party's fall from power.

The reason: Republican leaders may have overreached and created so many Republican-leaning districts that they spread their core supporters too thinly. That left their incumbents vulnerable to the type of backlash from traditionally Republican-leaning independent voters that unfolded this week.

That helps to explain why three of four Republican incumbents in the Philadelphia area were beaten this week, while the remaining incumbent hung on by just a few thousand votes. In Florida, meanwhile, state lawmakers had shifted some Republican voters from the secure district of former Rep. Mark Foley in an attempt to shore up the re-election chances of Rep. Clay Shaw without risking the Foley seat. Instead, Democrats took both. In Texas, former Majority Leader Tom DeLay's decision to transfer thousands of stalwart Republican voters from his district in 2004 to boost a neighboring seat heightened the burden on the write-in candidate trying to hold Mr. DeLay's seat. She lost it.

"The trade-off in redistricting is between safety and maximizing the numbers," says Alan I. Abramowitz, a political scientist at Emory University in Atlanta. "You can't do both."

Redistricting, the traditionally once-a-decade process of redrawing of House districts to adjust to population trends, has always been a contentious procedure. But Republicans, under the leadership of Mr. DeLay, took the opportunity to use it as a reward or punishment to new heights in 2002.

In so doing, Republicans created two new vulnerabilities: the dangerous dilution of core voters and the nurturing of a sense of invulnerability that contributes to corruption and scandal.

Delay had led the GOP redistricting drive, working with state legislators to draw district lines maximizing potential gains for the Republicans. Delay also had the Texas legislature redraw district lines mid-decade, and by 2004 the Republicans had increased their majority in the House with a 232-202 margin over the Democrats. But as was the case with Delay's seat this election, Democrats elsewhere were able to focus on races in districts seen as closely matched between the parties:

In the summer of 2005, they created a target list for the 2006 campaign. The Philadelphia suburban seats of Mr. Gerlach, Rep. Curt Weldon and Rep. Melissa Hart were on it.

Combined, the lawmakers' districts are home to 182,000 union members. With direct-mail literature and telephone calls, the labor leaders attacked the incumbents for their stands on Social Security and a host of other issues working their way through Congress.

Meanwhile, MoveOn.org, the liberal online group, was working through similar calculations. They put Rep. Michael Fitzpatrick on their target sheet. He won two years ago by 1,500 votes. MoveOn members made 102,000 telephone calls to inconsistent Democratic voters urging them to get out on Election Day. Its members donated $90,000 to his opponent's campaign.

On Tuesday, Mr. Fiztpatrick lost 50.3% to 49.7%. Ms. Hart lost 52% to 48%. Mr. Weldon, who also was stung by late disclosure of a federal investigation of his actions, lost 57% to 43%. Mr. Gerlach, the last Republican standing whose district was custom-made for him, is ahead amid final vote counting, 50.5% to 49.5%.

The article notes that the Democrats' success in picking up seats in closely realigned districts was limited. In states like Ohio and Pennsylvania, GOP state legislators were more careful to spread their partisans around, and they suffered less dramatically at the polls last Tuesday.

Rahm Emmanuel and the Democrats deserve a lot of credit for their shrewed election strategy. Yet, the GOP was right to use partisan gerrymandering to their advantage coming out of 2000. While some seats may have been packed too tight with party supporters, the overwhelming factor determining election outcomes this year was the demand for change within the electorate.

Liberal Activists Pressure Democrats on Agenda

Today's Los Angeles Times reports that liberal interest groups are insisting on a hard left agenda in Congress when the Democrats take power in January. The demands of the party's activist wing are placing pressure on Democratic leaders as they seek to steer a centrist path on policy in light of the moderate mandate from the elections:

After toppling the long-dominant Republicans in a hard-fought election, the Democratic Party's incoming congressional leaders have immediately found themselves in another difficult struggle — with their own supporters.

Some of the very activists who helped propel the Democrats to a majority in the House and Senate last week are claiming credit for the victories and demanding what they consider their due: a set of ambitious — and politically provocative — actions on gun control, abortion, national security and other issues that party leaders fear could alienate moderate voters and leave Democrats vulnerable to GOP attacks as big spenders or soft on terrorism.

The conflict underscores the challenge facing the Democrats in line to lead Congress — Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco in the House and Harry Reid of Nevada in the Senate. Each has pledged in recent days to "govern from the center," after a campaign in which anger over the Iraq war and GOP scandals helped their party attract some unusually conservative candidates and a large share of independent voters.

Turning off those new voters could undermine Democrats' hopes of solidifying their new majorities and taking the White House in 2008. But to the leaders of interest groups who are core supporters of the Democratic Party, and who had been barred under Republican rule from the inner sanctums of power, the new Congress means a time for action, not compromise.

Lobbyists for the American Civil Liberties Union, for example, are all but counting on Democrats to repeal the most controversial provisions of the Patriot Act, the anti-terrorist law pushed by the White House that some critics call unconstitutional. They also want to end President Bush's domestic wiretapping program.

"We are not going to let them off the hook," said Caroline Fredrickson, the ACLU's legislative director, of the newly empowered Democratic leaders in Congress.

"We will hold their feet to the fire and use all the tools we can to mobilize our members."

Read the whole thing. The piece goes on to note a number of demands from the various hard left groups in the Democratic coalition: There's pressure for an Iraq withdrawal from antiwar elements, the scaling back of state-level abortion restrictions for Planned Parenthood, restoration of the assault weapons ban for the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, and various leftist economic proposals from the AFL-CIO.

The article also mentions how liberal netroot activists are wildly clammoring for a radical left congressional agenda:

A preview of the tussle that awaits Reid and Pelosi has been playing out on the Internet since election day, with liberal bloggers decrying party centrists as out of touch with the Democratic majority. The complaints have been serious enough to draw Reid's attention, prompting him to host a conference call after the election with more than a dozen of the country's most prominent liberal bloggers.

A look over at The Daily Kos' site reveals how much credit Moulitsas and company are taking for the Democratic election success. The outcome of all this angling for preferred policies will greatly influence Democratic prospects in the lame-duck 110th Congress. Yet, as I've noted before, the electorate expects centrist results on a number of key policy areas, rather than a radical realignment toward some whacked-out socialist policy juggernaut.

Democrats to Focus on Congressional Oversight

Congressional oversight is expected to make a big comeback with the new Democratic majority on Capitol Hill. Congress's traditional function of providing oversight of executive activities has declined dramatically in the last few years under unified Republican control of government. As Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann point out in the November/December issue of Foreign Affairs, vigorous oversight of the presidency has basically disappeared under George W. Bush and the GOP. Here's some background:

Vigorous oversight was the norm until the end of the twentieth century. During the Korean War, a special committee chaired by then Senator Lyndon Johnson strongly criticized the Truman administration....In the 1970s, there were the Church committee investigations of intelligence failures and secret illegal surveillance. In the 1980s, joint congressional committees scrutinized the Iran-contra affair. In the 1990s, authorizing committees and appropriations committees in both houses reviewed military operations in Kosovo. When the Republicans took control of Congress under President Bill Clinton, overall oversight declined....But there were still some visible and aggressive investigations, albeit often driven by an obsession with scandal.

But since George W. Bush has become president, oversight has all but disappeared. From homeland security to the conduct of the Iraq war, from allegations of torture at Abu Ghraib to the surveillance of domestic telephone calls by the National Security Agency (NSA), Congress has mostly ignored its responsibilities. The same is true of less publicized issues involving the United States and the rest of the world, including U.S. relations with trading partners and rivals, allies and adversaries. The year-and-a-half hiatus in the Republicans' control of the Senate, which came after 9/11 and during a nationwide surge in patriotism, did not noticeably reverse that pattern.

The numbers are striking. Examining reports of the House Government Reform Committee, the journalist Susan Milligan found just 37 hearings described as "oversight" in 2003-4, during the 108th Congress, down from 135 in 1993-94, during the last Congress dominated by Democrats. The House Energy and Commerce Committee produced 117 pages of activity reports on oversight during the 1993-94 cycle, compared with 24 pages during 2003-4. In the mid-1990s, the Republican Congress took 140 hours of testimony on whether President Clinton had used his Christmas mailing list to find potential campaign donors; in 2004-5, House Republicans took 12 hours of testimony on Abu Ghraib.

Ornstein and Mann focus on how GOP members of Congess have been hesitant to criticize a president from their own party. Indeed, in an era of intense partisanship, the Republican congressional leadership interpreted unified control of the presidency and Congress as making oversight unnecessary. This tendency was bolstered by the emergence of a powerful wartime presidency after September 11, 2001. The consolidation of presidential authority under President Bush following the attacks mirrored earlier eras of executive branch ascendency during wartime. President Bush's power was seen as rivaling that of even Franklin Roosevelt's during World War II.

But the Democrats are ready to flex their oversight muscles when the new session convenes in January. On the oversight agenda are the administration's prewar case for the invasion of Iraq (especially the flawed assessment of Saddam's WMD), the Department of Homeland Security's handing of Hurricane Katrina's rebuilding contracts, and the business practices of corporate America (including prescription drug prices and Halliburton's tenure in Iraq).

The Democrats will need to be careful with their newfound interest in oversight. Hard left activists will be on a vengeful warpath, looking toward congressional investigations as unearthing criminal behavior in the highest echelons of the "Bush war machine." Impeachment has been on the minds of many of the radical left, whose hatred of the Bush neocons knows no bounds. But a focus on criminal investigations would be mistake. Centrists Democrats know that the American people are looking for good government and progress on policy reform, not legal recriminations against the GOP.

Affirmative Action Rollback Lifts Conservatives

In a victory for conservatives principles, voters in Michigan approved Proposition 2, a measure eliminating the use of affirmative action in public education, hiring and promotion, and government contracting. According to this New York Times story, opponents of the ban have filed a suit in federal court challenging the constitutionality of the ballot initiative. In addition, Mary Sue Coleman, the president of the University of Michigan, promised "to 'consider every legal option available' to continue to fight for diversity on campus":

Michigan’s measure, an amendment to the state’s Constitution, was a response to the Supreme Court’s 2003 rulings preserving affirmative action in university admissions in cases involving the University of Michigan and its law school. The court upheld the law school’s admissions process, but struck down the undergraduate admissions process, which awarded minority students extra points towards acceptance.

As a result, the university changed its undergraduate admissions to look at broader criteria like essays and recommendations. Jennifer Gratz, one of the plaintiffs who challenged the university, began the campaign for Proposition 2 along with Ward Connerly, a wealthy black Republican and former University of California regent who helped push through the California initiative 10 years ago.

As the Michigan vote highlighted, affirmative action remains a polarizing issue in American life. Over all, Proposition 2 won a comfortable 58 percent majority, but the divide between male and female voters, and whites and blacks, was far greater.

CNN reported that a survey of 1,955 voters as they left polling places showed that almost two-thirds of the white voters questioned wanted to end affirmative action, compared with only about one in seven black voters. And while almost two-thirds of men supported the proposition, only a slight majority of women did. Michigan is roughly 81 percent white and 14 percent black.

At a news conference, Ms. Coleman said yesterday, “I believe there are serious questions as to whether this initiative is lawful, particularly as it pertains to higher education.”

She added: “I have asked our attorneys for their full and undivided support in defending diversity at the University of Michigan. I will immediately begin exploring legal action concerning this initiative....”

In an interview, Ms. Coleman said the proposition was so vague that without getting further legal clarity, it was difficult to know just how it would affect the university’s outreach and scholarship programs.

Ms. Gratz accused the university of trying to ignore the results of the referendum.
“I think it’s perfectly clear,” she said, “and I think it was perfectly clear to the voters. It’s now unconstitutional in Michigan to use racial preferences in public education, contracting or hiring.”

“The University of Michigan should stop trying to circumvent the law,” she said, “and we will fight to make sure they listen to what the voters have said.”

In a Newsweek essay this week, Ellis Cose argued that while imperfect, affirmative action remains a viable policy option to combat continuing patterns of inequality in American society:

Affirmative action was never meant to carry the weight society threw on its shoulders. It was never supposed to rescue the poor, enlighten the illiterate or feed the hungry. It was not meant to make up for the inadequacies of a bad K-12 education. It was a modest attempt to give a bit of a boost to a handful of folks from a race of people who had been unfairly held back for centuries. But because the nation lacked the will or knowledge to solve the big problems, we charged affirmative action with doing it all. So though the public often saw it as a powerful force, ruthlessly crushing white male aspirations and elevating hordes of minorities and women, its actual impact was rather small (albeit crucial in certain areas).

The choice America faces is not about ending affirmative action—at some point, as both its critics and defenders agree, the affirmative-action tugboat will run out of steam. The question is whether, before that happens, society will find the will and resources to vanquish the problems that gave rise to it in the first place. No child chooses to be born into poverty with parents who are semiliterate or to live in neighborhoods where the schools are little more than holding pens. The cause of early-childhood education would seem a natural for the proponents of anti-affirmative action initiatives. Yet, for the most part, they seem uninterested in that fight which, if successful, really could render affirmative action irrelevant

In a sane world, the battle in Michigan, and indeed the battle over affirmative action writ large, would offer an opportunity to seriously engage a question the enemies and defenders of affirmative action claim to care about: how do you go about creating a society where all people—not just the lucky few—have the opportunities they deserve? It is a question much broader than the debate over affirmative action. But until we begin to move toward an answer, the debate over affirmative action will continue—even if it is something of a sideshow to what should be the main event.

Michigan voters clearly disagree with this view, that opportunity is available only to "the lucky few." Americans stress equality of opportunity rather than equality of result. Affirmative action programs violate expectations of racially impartial treatment in all areas of life.

Cose is right to stress early childhood education, but he also need to address the absence of a culture of achievement among large segments of black America. It's been forty years since the civil rights movement. We don't need more government programs to help blacks. Black advancement will come when blacks themselves tackle the debilitating problems of the breakdown of the black family and the anti-education, oppositional culture of the black nihilist youth.

Election Results Bode Well for Women in Politics

Women as a group were one of the biggest winners coming out of Tuesday's elections. Not only is Nancy Pelosi poised to become the nation's first woman Speaker of the House, but the number of women in the Senate will increase to 16 in the 110th Congress, after Amy Klobuchar won in Minnesota and Claire McCaskill picked up a seat in Missouri.

Most importantly, though, Hillary Clinton's fortunes progressed significantly with the Democrats' electoral victories, and her own reelection to the Senate. As this New York Times story notes, Clinton is widely considered the Democratic front-runner for 2008 and she can resist demands for a formal announcement of her presidential bid for only so long:

After insisting for months that she was merely focusing on her re-election, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton emerged from her landslide victory yesterday morning with a new excuse for sidestepping questions about the 2008 campaign: She said that she was too exhilarated from the midterms to talk about the future.

“All I’m thinking now is how excited I am that we’ve had a great election for the country and for our state and for our city,” Mrs. Clinton said after trouncing her opponent, former Yonkers Mayor John Spencer, by capturing 67 percent of the vote.

On a victory tour of the state, Mrs. Clinton attended a breakfast with firefighters in Midtown Manhattan, met with supporters on Long Island, then traveled upstate by plane, with stops in Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse and Albany.

Now that she has secured a second term, Mrs. Clinton is expected to announce a decision about her presidential plans within the next few months. In the meantime, she has kept all of her options open by raising millions of dollars that could be used toward a national campaign and hiring important staff members who could run her race — all without openly discussing her thinking or even acknowledging a White House bid as a next step.

Although she tops some public opinion surveys among potential Democratic nominees, some in the party have expressed doubts that Mrs. Clinton, a polarizing figure in national politics, could win a general election. And even some voters who supported Mrs. Clinton in New York in this election were less than convinced that she should run for national office. About three-quarters of the people who voted for her for Senate said they thought that she would be a good president; about one-quarter did not.

Over all, 57 percent of voters questioned when leaving the polls in New York said that she would make a good president, but 39 percent said she would not. In the 2000 election, Vice President Al Gore won 60 percent of New York’s electorate. In 2004, Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts won 58 percent in the state.

Asked the same about Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, 46 percent of the people who were questioned after leaving the polls in New York said that he would make a good president. George W. Bush, then governor of Texas, won 35 percent in New York in 2000; the president improved to 40 percent in 2004.

Regarding the 2008 presidential campaign, 55 percent of New Yorkers questioned said that they would vote for Mrs. Clinton if she were the candidate, while 36 percent said they would vote for Mr. Giuliani.

In national polls, Clinton is doing well against Senator John McCain as well as Giuliani. It will be interesting to see how long Clinton waits to make a formal announcement of her candidacy. As the Times piece notes, there's some concern among top Democrats over whether Clinton should run. Perhaps the fear is that she'll be too liberal, despite her move to the center since taking office in 2001. Or, perhaps there's worry of Clinton fatigue, especially whether voters have residual issues with Bill Clinton's improprieties during his administration.

I like Hillary Clinton, although I'll vote for the GOP candidate in 2008 should she win the Democratic nomination. She should definitely run, in any case. Very few people have opportunities like this. The timing of the current political environment is near perfect. Clinton's in such good shape for a run at the White House that a decision to seek the majority leader post instead (as the article points out) would seem utterly insane. She's geared up for this since seeking a Senate seat in the first place -- it'd be strange if she threw away her chance now.

I'd like to see a woman elected president at some point. The United States needs to have its own Margaret Thatcher. I don't think Clinton fits that mold, but her candidacy -- whether or not she herself wins the office -- will be a milestone for the advancement of women in American politics.

Taking the Heat: Republicans Get Burned for Abandoning Ideological Middle

It was hot yesterday in Southern California. Downtown Los Angeles reached 97 degrees, breaking a hottest day record that had been standing since 1956, when Dwight Eisenhower was in the White House. I thought a heat metaphor would be appropriate in commenting on yesterday's election results. The Democrats were blazing hot, and the Bush White House and the Republicans took the heat in their dramatic election losses around the nation.

In the weeks ahead I'll be posting and commenting on the historic implications of the 2006 midterms. My initial reaction to the results is that the vote was a mandate for change, and not a dramatic realignment of party fortunes. Voters are unhappy with the pace of progress in Iraq and they're tired of the stultifying partisanship in Washinton, D.C. The Democrats in Congress have been given a mandate for performance, plain and simple. There is a national need to see movement on issues of importance to the electorate, and in that there a silver lining for the GOP, whose members can get back to stressing values of discipline and trust as they seek to resurrect their political fortunes heading into 2008.

As the Democrats take power in Congress, they need to be mindful about alienating middle-of-the-road voters. According to Ronald Brownstein in his analysis of yesterday's vote, the Bush administration strayed from the ideological center, and got burned in its attempt to govern by emboldening the conservative base and resisting partisan compromise on key issues:

For six tumultuous years President Bush has provoked intense opposition while mobilizing passionate support for an ambitious conservative agenda.

On Tuesday, that perilous strategy crumbled — and triggered his party's abrupt fall from power.

Republicans lost control of the House, and teetered on the edge of losing the Senate as well. The widespread losses will present Bush and the GOP with a sharpened challenge from congressional Democrats eager to command attention for their policy priorities, such as raising the national minimum wage, and to investigate the administration's performance on Iraq, global warming and other issues.

In the long run, the reversals raise fundamental questions about the viability of the strategy Bush and his chief political advisor, Karl Rove, have pursued to build a lasting Republican political majority.

Bush and Rove placed their main emphasis on unifying and energizing Republicans and right-leaning independents with an agenda that focused squarely on the goals of conservatives.

But Tuesday's broad Democratic advance underscored the risks in that approach: In many races, Republicans were overwhelmed by an energized Democratic base and a sharp turn toward the Democrats by moderate swing voters unhappy with the president's performance."

The story line really is that the Democrats are winning the middle," said Democratic pollster Al Quinlan.Veteran GOP pollster Bill McInturff said: "Iraq is front and center of this election, and people voted for change. The GOP base held — was motivated and voted — but the margins among independents and moderates [for Democrats] was too much to overcome."

The National Election Pool exit polls conducted by Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International showed that 80% of voters who disapproved of the Iraq war voted Democratic for Congress, while 80% who approved voted Republican. But only about two in five voters approved of the war, while nearly three-fifths disapproved, according to figures posted by CNN....

John C. Green, a political scientist at the University of Akron, said the erosion Republicans faced among affluent and working-class swing voters underscored the risks of Bush's decision to push an agenda opposed by nearly half the country on even his best days."

The Bush people chose to put up with a very high level of conflict," Green said. "They didn't try to build a large consensus majority."Bush wasn't on the ballotTuesday, but he loomed as a decisive factor. Attitudes toward Bush powerfully shaped the results.

Once burned, people tend to be pretty careful around fire. Republicans have a chance now to step back and take in the ramifications of their defeat. President Bush shows an admirable resolve on the issues, and there are times when the party in power ought rightly to pursue an aggressive electoral agenda as a responsibility to its constituencies.

Yet, governing also involves choosing battles and making deals, often requiring a willing nod to bipartisanship. Bush still has the institutional prerogatives of the executive branch, and he shouldn't be shy about weilding the veto pen, though he might be smart to bend a bit to the public's preferences for change and progress. Perhaps today's resignation of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld marks the beginning of such a shift.

Election Hype Could Leave Democrats Demoralized

This morning's New York Times suggests that the Democrats could be left deeply dejected if they fail to meet the high expectations set for them in today's elections:

In most midterm elections, an out-of-power party picking up, say, 14 seats in the House and five seats in the Senate could call it a pretty good night.

But for Democrats in 2006, that showing would mean coming up one seat shy of taking control of both the Senate and the House. And it would probably be branded a loss — in the case of the House, a big one.

For a combination of reasons — increasingly bullish prognostications by independent handicappers, galloping optimism by Democratic leaders and bloggers, and polls that promise a Democratic blowout — expectations for the party have soared into the stratosphere. Democrats are widely expected to take the House, and by a significant margin, and perhaps the Senate as well, while capturing a majority of governorships and legislatures.

These expectations may well be overheated. Polls over the weekend suggested that the contest was tightening, and some prognosticators on Monday were scaling back their predictions, if ever so slightly. (Charlie Cook, the analyst who is one of Washington’s chief setters of expectations, said in an e-mail message on Monday that he was dropping the words “possibly more” from his House prediction of “20-35, possibly more.”)

Some Democrats worry that those forecasts, accurate or not, may be setting the stage for a demoralizing election night, and one with lasting ramifications, sapping the party’s spirit and energy heading into the 2008 presidential election cycle.

“Two years ago, winning 14 seats in the House would have been a pipe dream,” said Matt Bennett, a founder of Third Way, a moderate Democratic organization. Now, Mr. Bennett said, failure to win the House, even by one seat, would send Democrats diving under their beds (not to mention what it might do to all the pundits).

“It would be crushing,” he said. “It would be extremely difficult.”
Mr. Cook put it more succinctly. “I think you’d see a Jim Jones situation — it would be a mass suicide,” he said.

On election eve, the rough consensus among officials in both parties was that the Democrats would win the House but come just short of capturing the six seats they needed in the Senate. There was wide disagreement, though, about how many House seats Democrats might win.

Many of these predictions had been based on polls showing that President Bush, the Republican Party and Congress were extraordinarily unpopular. But going into Election Day, at least 20 House seats and probably 3 Senate seats were tied or close to it, no matter what the national polls say.

So, what if Democrats just squeak to victory in the House by a seat or two? What if Democrats win just three seats in the Senate or — unlikely but not impossible — even two?

“I’m not getting into the Washington expectations game,” said Representative Rahm Emanuel, the Democrat from Illinois running his party’s effort to capture the House, in what he said would be a very brief minute he would devote to commenting on this subject. “My job is to deliver north of 15 seats and that’s what I am going to do.”

Howard Wolfson, a Democratic consultant advising candidates in some of the most competitive races in upstate New York — and one of his party’s biggest optimists this year — said the size of the margin would not matter, assuming, of course, that Democrats win. “It’s not a question of 25 or 35,” Mr. Wolfson said. “It’s a question of 14 or 15. Would you rather have a bigger margin? Of course. But if you take back the House, the world changes.”

But any casual reader of a newspaper, or watcher of television news, or consumer of polls could be forgiven for thinking that the nation was about to witness its biggest shift in power since Republicans seized control of Congress by capturing 54 House seats in 1994. In the past week, analysts like Mr. Cook and Stuart Rothenberg, as well as on-the-record Democrats and Republicans, were talking about the Democrats’ racking up as many as 35 seats. (Republicans, of course, may have decided that they have a Machiavellian interest in setting up Democrats with inflated expectations.)

I blogged about Charlie Cook's election forecasts a couple of weeks ago (click here). Not only will the Democrats be demoralized, but election analysts who've made dramatic predictions of Democratic Party gains will by lying low for awhile, with some even apologizing for their errors. It's going to be an interesting night, whatever happens.

Down to the Wire: Swing Voters Key to Elections

Today's Wall Street Journal has a front page article on the remaining hours of the 2006 campaigns for Congress. The piece notes that voters are angry at the unbridled partisanship in Washington, and many are hopeful for a new degree of cooperation among government officials:

The negative tone and angry partisanship of many campaigns could yet keep voters away from the polls or drive them into the arms of this year's third-party alternatives. "I am the middle... Notice the purple tie please," says Eric Eidsness, a frustrated Republican who has swept up Colorado newspaper endorsements as a Reform Party House candidate in Colorado's Fourth District. "There is really such an undercurrent of anger at the two parties."

Registration numbers bear out this disaffection with the number of voters signing up as "independent" rising across the country. But the emotional interest stirred by the election could also mean the highest turnout rate for any midterm election in the past 25 years.

"I would be shocked if it isn't higher than 1982," says Curtis Gans, who had tracked turnout numbers for 30 years and is now a researcher at American University in Washington, D.C. That would put the number above 42.1%, a significant increase above the last midterm election in 2002.

Most important is turnout among the great swath of "middle" voters, a group comprised of independents and loosely affiliated members of both parties. In the latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News Poll, 42% of registered voters said they were "independent," compared with 28% who called themselves Democrats and 24% who called themselves Republicans. Often, independents, with less attachment to the political process, vote less than partisan loyalists. Given the number of large and emotional issues, this year could be different.

"The theme of this election could well turn out to be 'the revenge of the middle,' " says Geoffrey Garin, a Democratic pollster.

Strategists in both parties say that if "the middle" turns out to vote, Democrats will be better able to ride the wave for change. Yesterday's Pew poll showed Republicans making some gains in that group, cutting the Democrat lead among them from 18 points to 11 points.

Read the whole thing. The article has a nice discussion of the top national issues of concern to voters: national security, immigration, taxes and jobs, and scandals.

Be sure to check out this additional article up at the Wall Street Journal website, which looks at this season's vicious television campaign advertisments, and includes videos from hot races around the nation.

System in Crisis: Will Electronic Voting Be an Election Day Nightmare?

Yesterday I watched HBO's "Hacking Democracy," a film documentary on the problems of electronic voting in the United States.

I'm normally wary of these types of programs, considering the bias of the liberal media. Yet the film is so well done -- and the documentary's main protagonists, especially Seattle grandmother and writer Bev Harris, are so compelling -- that I'm convinced that the problems of e-voting raise fundamental questions about the integrity of the American democracy. This should not be a liberal or conservative issue. No party or candidate can govern with full effectiveness if the very legitimacy of their administration is threatened by claims of voting irregularities.

Friday's Los Angeles Times had an article on the implications of e-voting for this year's elections:

After the 2000 presidential election in Florida exposed the dangers of relying on punch-card ballots and other vintage voting systems, the federal government spent more than $3 billion to help state and local authorities overhaul the way Americans record their votes. When the polls open for Tuesday's midterm election, 90% will be equipped with new high-tech systems.

But instead of bringing the accuracy, efficiency and reliability of the corner ATM, the wholesale makeover of the nation's voting system has brought a new set of concerns: the possibilities of software bugs, freeze-ups, vulnerability to hackers and new forms of human error that could bring their own chaos and controversy.

In Maryland, for instance, doubts about the state's touch-screen system are so serious that Republican Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. has urged voters to cast absentee ballots instead of going to neighborhood precincts. And in Pennsylvania, one-third of voters believe it would be easy to rig touch-screen machines to change election results, a recent university-sponsored poll found.

Both states are battlegrounds in the struggle for control of the Senate.

The six states that are considered most likely to determine which party controls the Senate all have adopted touch-screen voting systems, but they differ widely in the safeguards they require. According to the nonpartisan Election Reform Information Project, four of the states don't insist on what experts consider the most fundamental protection — a paper trail.

Though Missouri and Ohio mandate a paper backup of each vote, Pennsylvania, Tennessee and Virginia do not. New Jersey's decision to require paper backups will not be fully implemented until 2008.Meanwhile, questions have been raised about the reliability of Ohio's paper backup. An audit of a primary election this year in the Cleveland area found that the machine-counted vote total didn't agree with the backup paper ballots. Because of printer jams and other problems, the paper count was significantly lower."

The election system, in its entirety, exhibits shortcomings with extremely serious consequences, especially in the event of a close election," analysts from the Election Science Institute said in their report to Ohio officials.

Though the old voting systems were far from uniform — or free from errors or corruption — the stakes in next week's elections to decide who controls the House and Senate, as well as the statehouses and legislatures, are too high to shrug off the possibility of serious problems.

Thursday's Wall Street Journal also addressed the issue in their piece, "Can Electronic Voting Be Trusted?" Also, Lou Dobbs has been running a CNN series on "Democracy at Risk," which overlaps closely with the main points of HBO's documentary.

The Interest Group Logjam on Immigration Policy

In my classes this semester I've been using the current immigration reform stalement as an example of hyperpluralist politics in the U.S. Hyperpluralist theory claims that the interest group system is out of control. All group demands on government are legitimate, and government's job is to advance them all -- a situtation that often leads to confusing policies or outright political gridlock. The political scientist Theodore Lowi called this "interest group liberalism."

Jonah Goldberg, in an essay earlier in the week, provides a nice example of how the logjam on immigration is explained as a case of hyperpluralism:

This weird logjam, as the word implies, has a lot of logs to it. The first log is corporations, which like illegal immigrants. Corporations generally support Republicans and centrist Democrats, and that makes the pols wary of tackling the issue head-on.

Then there's a whole set of logs on the left. Identity-politics fanatics have welcomed the undocumented as the Coalition of the Oppressed. Major universities, the editorial pages of the leading newspapers, some Christian denominations, Latino activists and various allied groups have bought into the idea that there's something fundamentally illegitimate or icky about trying to stem the tide of immigrants who come here illegally.

There are other random logs. There are libertarians who think that the principles and benefits of free trade apply to the unrestricted movements of workers just as surely as to wheat and transistors. There are neoconservatives of Jewish or Irish Catholic descent who believe that the heroic narrative of the United States as a nation of immigrants will be desecrated if the U.S. actually performs one of the minimal requirements of a modern nation-state and controls its own borders.

Jam all the logs together and you have campus leftists aligned with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Nancy Pelosi with George W. Bush and MoveOn.org with the Wall Street Journal, all standing shoulder-to-shoulder to block serious immigration reform.

With the important exception of working-class Latinos (legal and illegal), one thing that unites all of these people is that they are members of the economic and social elite. It doesn't matter that most of them can't stand each other on most issues. When it comes to immigration, they have settled on a marriage of convenience.

The worry is that this leaves a lot of room for populists, rabble rousers and opportunists to exploit immigration — as Jean-Marie Le Pen and his ilk have done across Europe. This vacuum is unsustainable. More than anything else, politicians like popular issues. Eventually someone will figure out how to claim the emotional power of the immigration issue, for one party or the other.

For Goldberg, CNN's Lou Dobbs is the current immigration debate's most vocal populist. Yet in moving forward, Goldberg notes that the conservative emphasis on preserving civic culture allows room for continued immigration to the country. With their economic nationalism, it's harder for populists to make the same case.

"The Drawdown Option": The Way Forward in Iraq

In his November 6 Newsweek essay, "Rethinking Iraq," Fareed Zakaria suggests that Americans might recall how the Korean War ended when weighing the future of the Iraq deployment. Korea was not a defeat for the U.S., and a similar costly stalemate in Iraq may be the best Americans can hope for. Critical of Bush administration optimism on the war's progress, Zakaria argues that while we haven't lost there, Iraq has completely collapsed as a state and nation:

The most significant new reality in Iraq—in fact, the country's defining feature—is sectarian violence. By any reasonable definition, Iraq is mired in a low-grade civil war between its Sunni and Shia communities. Communal tensions are high, and rising—everywhere. Violence has been mounting in all areas where these communities are mixed. Ethnic cleansing, either forced or voluntary, is increasing rapidly, with 365,000 people having fled or been forced from their homes since last February's bombing of a Shia mosque in Samarra. In Baghdad alone more than 2,600 Iraqis died in September, most of them as a result of communal attacks.

Virtually everything about Iraq today must now be seen through this sectarian prism. President Bush says that we are building an Iraqi Army and police force and that as their troops stand up, America's will be able to stand down. In fact, we are building a largely Kurdish and Shia force. As its ranks have swelled, Sunnis have felt more threatened, not less, and as a consequence have fought harder. Shia militias, many of whose members are now enlisted in the Army and especially the national police, feel empowered. They have routinely rounded up groups of Sunni men and slaughtered them in gruesome fashion. Even the country's much-lauded elections have not proved an unmitigated good in this context. Last December's vote empowered religious parties with their own militias, such as Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army, and, as a result, made it more difficult to disband them.

The most difficult fact about the sectarian conflict is that there is little hope competing groups will seek accomodation:

The Shia leadership remains extremely resistant to any concessions to its former Sunni overlords. The Shia politicians I met when in Baghdad, even the most urbane and educated, seemed dead set against sharing power in any real sense. In an interview with Reuters last week, Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki also said he believed that if Iraqi troops were left to their own devices, they could establish order in six months in Iraq. It is not difficult to imagine what he means: Shia would crush Sunni, and that would be that. This notion—that military force, rather than political accommodation, could defeat the insurgency—is widely shared among senior Shia leaders. Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the head of the single largest political party in Parliament, has made similar statements in the past. While they will occasionally say the right things, as Maliki did in his first week in office, their reluctance to fund projects in Sunni areas, or to investigate death squads, suggests they have little appetite for broader national reconciliation.

The Sunnis, for their part, seem consumed by their own anger, radicalism and feuds. They remain so incensed with the United States for their loss of power that they have been, until recently, blind to the reality that if not for U.S. forces, they would be massacred. What political leadership the Sunnis have is weak and does not appear to have much leverage with the insurgents. There is no Sunni with whom to make a deal.

All sides in Iraq are preparing for the day the United States leaves. They are already engaged in a power struggle for control of the post-American Iraq. The Kurds have ensured that their autonomous region is governed essentially as a separate country with its own army. The largest Shia parties want to maintain their militias to bolster their own power base, independent of the state. And the Sunnis do not want to wind down the insurgency, for fear that they will be impoverished or killed in the new Iraq. Nobody believes that, after the Americans, this power struggle will be resolved with ballots. So they are all keeping their bullets.

Read the whole thing. To move forward, the Iraqi leadership must realize that political compromise is a prerequisite for a continued American presence in the country. Zakaria suggests that to preserve America's interests in Iraq, the administration should implement a phased drawdown from the country, eventually leaving troop levels in the 40,000 to 60,000 range, and bulking up the number of military advisors backing the Iraqi military and police.

In an earlier post I suggested that we need to think about a rational withrawal from Iraq. As Zakaria notes in his conclusion, the U.S. deployment to Iraq has had it successes -- liberation from tyranny, Kurdish political ascendance, and the flowering of pluralist democratic institutions not seen anywhere else in the Middle East -- but these gains need to be consolidated before they are lost.

Can the Neocons Get Their Groove Back?

Joshua Muravchik's got a blueprint for a neoconservative revival in the November/December issue of Foreign Policy.

Muravchik's plan has five elements: First, neocons must learn from their mistakes, taking back the proudest elements of their legacy, and making adjustments where policies have failed. Two, the movement needs to focus less on military power, highlighting more the role of nongovernmental organizations in democracy promotion worldwide. Three, public diplomacy needs to be retooled to better counteract global anti-Americanism. Four, the neoconservatives need to start making the case for the bombing of Iran:

Make no mistake, President Bush will need to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities before leaving office. It is all but inconceivable that Iran will accept any peaceful inducements to abandon its drive for the bomb. Its rulers are religio-ideological fanatics who will not trade what they believe is their birthright to great power status for a mess of pottage. Even if things in Iraq get better, a nuclear-armed Iran will negate any progress there. Nothing will embolden terrorists and jihadists more than a nuclear-armed Iran.

The global thunder against Bush when he pulls the trigger will be deafening, and it will have many echoes at home. It will be an injection of steroids for organizations such as MoveOn.org. We need to pave the way intellectually now and be prepared to defend the action when it comes. In particular, we need to help people envision what the world would look like with a nuclear-armed Iran. Apart from the dangers of a direct attack on Israel or a suitcase bomb in Washington, it would mean the end of the global nonproliferation regime and the beginning of Iranian dominance in the Middle East.

This defense should be global in scope. There is a crying need in today’s ideological wars for something akin to the Congress for Cultural Freedom of the Cold War, a global circle of intellectuals and public figures who share a devotion to democracy. The leaders of this movement might include Tony Blair, Vaclav Havel, and Anwar Ibrahim.

The last element of Muravchik's plan is to recruit Joe Lieberman for the GOP presidential ticket in 2008, as John McCain or Rudy Giuliani's running-mate. I've long thought that Lieberman needs to switch parties, though if I were him, I'd change parties after reelection to the Senate in November, and then start laying the groundwork for a run at the Iowa Caucuses and the New Hampshire primary. The Republicans may need Lieberman's moral credibility if they hope to make a push for an attack on Iran. There's not likely to be much public stomach for military options in the near future, although should Tehran become even more belicose toward its neighbors, a preventive strike may be necessary.

Homestyle Cafeterias Coming to the End of the Line

Saturday's Los Angeles Times ran an interesting story on the last of the great Southern California cafeterias. Here's the introduction:

It's getting harder to find that plate of green jello.

There was a time when the cafeteria was the undisputed king of Southern California dining. Before World War II, the cheap food and sprawling dining halls brought together strangers new to the region and created lasting bonds.

The meals were inexpensive, and there was something altogether modern in the dining experience, which did without menus, waiters and tablecloths. Restaurant-goers could load their trays with cold foods and then hot, delicacies like ambrosia salad and coleslaw, liver and onions and mac and cheese, and then sidle up to the cash register to pay — all without waiting.

Dozens of cafeterias once peppered the Southland, so many, in fact, that city directories listed them separately from restaurants. But today, the cafeteria is a dying breed, a victim of changing tastes, an aging population and urban sprawl.

On Wednesday, one of the last of the grande dames shut its doors after 50 years: Beadle's in Pasadena.

"I want to pinch myself and hope it suddenly opens. It really hurts," said longtime diner Bob Malsman, 57, who already misses the grilled salmon he always got. "It's real food. Real comfort food. Everything now is fast food. It's all garbage. It's cheap. You just go in and out."

A few cafeterias survive — Clifton's in downtown and Arnold's in Long Beach — but even there, patrons say they worry about the future.

"The average person would rather see their food fixed for them," said Benjamin Alsop, a Clifton's regular, who was quietly eating fried rice and an egg roll at a table on the mezzanine level of the woodsy themed restaurant, a few steps away from the indoor waterfall.

Beadle's was a relative latecomer to the area's cafeteria scene when it opened on Colorado Boulevard in 1956 — a time when many cafeterias were already being shuttered, in part because their faithful customers were moving to the suburbs and being wooed by fast-food franchises.

The cafeteria's longtime owner, Gordon Hammond, had spent years working for the famed Boos Brothers cafeteria, and then the Clinton family, which ran a chain of cafeterias from Laguna Hills to Century City.

Along with its sister restaurant, the Pasadena Cafeteria, Beadle's fed a generation of Pasadenans comfort food: green jello — which almost defied gravity — chicken pot pie and Thanksgiving-style turkey with stuffing on almost any day of the year. Gourmet chefs would complain that they could not get a high-end restaurant off the ground in Pasadena because residents' tastes were tempered by years of Beadle's food.

But the cafeteria fell victim to changing tastes and a series of missteps. Long-loyal clientele had begun to die off, and were not being replaced by enough younger patrons. Beadle's began to falter after moving from Colorado Boulevard to an out-of-the way location in the early 1990s. The Hammond family sold the restaurant, and subsequent owners were not able to resurrect the cafeteria. They tried a salad bar and then Chinese and Japanese food. But it made little difference.

This is one of those newspaper stories that brings back bittersweet memories. I used to visit Clifton's Cafeteria when they had a restaurant in Lakewood, nearby my college. I just happened to find it one day when I was visiting the mall. I started having lunch there just about every Tuesday and Thursday. The food reminded me of some of the family meals my Dad used to serve up -- real soul food, like pork chops, potatos, and corn bread, or fried chicken with black-eyed peas, and pie for dessert.

I remember calling my Dad to tell him about the restaurant and how it reminded me of his cooking! We laughed about it, but I never got a chance to take Dad over there. The Lakewood Clifton's closed in 2001. I visited the original Los Angeles downtown restaurant one afternoon after a shopping trip. Dad worked in downtown for a while when I was a kid, and he took me once to another Los Angeles landmark, Philippe's, where one can get the best French-dip sandwiches on the West Coast. Oh, what memories all that comfort food rekindles!

The Economic Impact of Minimum Wage Hikes

Congressional Democrats have promised an increase in the minimum wage should they take power, and six states have voter initiatives to increase the minimum wage on the ballot Tuesday. This Wall Street Journal story has an analysis of the likely economic effects of such wage increases. Examining the case of Oregon's 2002 law, which mandated automatic annual minimum wage increases, the article suggests that the most negative predicted consequences of the law have not come to pass, and that the state's unemployment rate has fallen from 7.6% in 2002 to 5.4% today. That's not to say there's been no economic dislocation in the Oregon business sector:

Some employers are being squeezed, for sure, and their experiences will become ammunition for those who will fight any increase in the federal minimum wage. Agriculture is pinched because sellers can't raise prices, set on global markets, when labor costs go up. Some businesses say they have avoided expanding in Oregon because labor costs have risen, the sort of change in behavior at the margin that foes of a minimum wage worry about.

At Petite Provence eatery in Portland, co-owner Didier Blanc says the minimum wage, while paid only to servers, has had an "aftershock effect," forcing him to raise wages for all employees. While servers earn the minimum, bakers and cooks earn between $9 and $12 an hour. The costs are passed on to customers.

"After it goes up, everybody at $9 an hour and above will want some kind of raise," says Mr. Blanc. "We have to pass it on in our prices because it goes straight to our bottom line."

So far, though, customers have been willing to pay. Mr. Blanc and his partner have two successful shops and are talking of opening a third. "I don't worry about it," he says of the higher wages, "because if I have to raise prices, next door will have to do the same thing, too."

Chris Dussin, owner of Old Spaghetti Factory, a Portland-based chain with 38 restaurants in 16 states, sees it differently. "You can only raise prices so much before you're going to chase the customer away," he says. Costs at his three Oregon restaurants have gone up $300,000 since the minimum-wage increase -- more than revenues. Mr. Dussin says his bottom line "is eroding" and his profit margin has fallen to 2% or 3%. He raised prices on some items, cut the number of hostesses and has increased the number of tables for each server.

"It's important to take care of people in minimum-wage jobs, but what's missed is the impact on the economy and job creation," he says. "It's not feasible to hire 10 people, so I'm just going to hire seven." He says labor costs scotched plans to open a restaurant in Bend, Ore., a tourist hotspot. The next Old Spaghetti Factory will be in Boise, Idaho, which has a minimum wage of $5.15 and -- unlike Oregon -- allows employers to pay less to workers who collect tips.

Read the whole thing. The article looks at the academic research debate on whether an increase in the minimum wage leads to a reduction in hiring among employers. The piece also cites additional perspectives on Oregon's 2002 law. Especially interesting is the article's mention of the type of folks making a living at base wage levels, with some workers complaining that the state's $7.50 an hour minimum is barely enough to survive.

It's hard for me to sympathize. I worked minimum wage jobs while I was in high school, and for a time in college at Fresno State I pumped gas for the minimum wage as well. I realized early on that I was never going to able to support a middle class family lifestyle making $4.25 an hour (the minimum back in 1989, when I started at Fresno State). The minimum wage provides an entry level pay structure for younger, upwardly mobile individuals -- it's not designed as a living wage generous enough to support a family, despite what "living wage" advocates say.

Democrats Desert 50th Congressional Candidate

The Democratic Party has deserted its one-time hopeful Francine Busby, who is running against Brian Bilbray in San Diego's 50th congressional district. The Busby-Bilbray matchup in June's primary generated national attention as a bellwether race on party control of Congress this year.

Yet, as this Los Angeles Times story indicates, Busby has been cut loose by the national party, amid slimming possibilities for victory:

Francine Busby, the Democratic nominee in the 50th Congressional District, was hot in the spring.

In the fall, she's not.As her party's choice to grab the vacancy created when Randy "Duke" Cunningham (R-Rancho Santa Fe) resigned last year and was imprisoned for bribery, Busby was lavished with help from fellow Democrats.

The national party rushed the district money, advice, consultants and prominent personages to help in fundraising and media coverage.

Busby blanketed local television with commercials, many attacking the Republicans for a "culture of corruption." The GOP was worried enough to launch counterattack ads.

The national press came running to see if the June runoff between Busby and former Republican congressman Brian Bilbray could be the beginning of a campaign year trend favoring out-of-power Democrats.

The results did not cut that way: Bilbray 49%, Busby 45% and two right-of-center candidates 5%. Bilbray went to Congress to finish the final six months of Cunningham's term.

Now Bilbray and Busby are fighting for a full two-year term in Tuesday's election. Bilbray, 55, has the power of incumbency. Busby, also 55, a Cardiff school board member, is largely on her own."

Every one of my volunteers is local," she said.

The national party is providing none of the money and other assistance it lavished in the June runoff. Busby waited until 10 days before the election to air a television commercial.

Still, she soldiers on, believing that voters in the suburban district north of San Diego are soured on the war in Iraq (she opposed the invasion), are distrustful of Republicans on issues such as Medicare and offshore oil drilling and are still not convinced that Bilbray, whose prior district was to the south, is really one of them.

To win, Busby would have to buck a California trend going back four decades, maybe longer.

Gary Jacobson, a congressional scholar at UC San Diego who has studied 40 years' worth of California congressional elections, said no Democrat has beaten a Republican in a district where the GOP holds a registration edge of 4 percentage points or more.

Although that record could be broken in Northern California, where Rep. Richard Pombo (R-Tracy) is endangered because of scandal and his environmental record, Jacobson does not see Bilbray losing.

One prime reason: In the 50th District, which includes coastal communities and parts of several inland ones, the Republicans have a 14 percentage point advantage: Republicans 44%, Democrats 30% and independents 22%.

I wrote earlier about Busby and the 50th congressional district, here and here. The national party -- in a year with loads of tight races around the country -- obviously considered Busby's 45 percent showing in June too long a shot to continue spending precious campaign resources in her support.

The New Soft Money Campaign Finance Regime

According to this Los Angeles Times article, outside interest group organizations -- known as 527 committees under federal law -- have received close to $300 million in contributions from a variety of sources in the 2006 election cycle.

The piece refers to the 527s as "unregulated political groups" who are accepting "special interest" contibutions while "skirting" campaign limits. This is an amazing display of journalistic spin. A close look at the article's tabular data reveals a very healthy competition between the parties in the contribution game. Not only that, 527 groups are perfectly legal and entirely legitimate within our Madisonian system of governance.

This new group financing regime is the direct result of the 2002 McCain-Feingold legislation, which prohibited unlimited contributions to the national parties (who had tended to funnel these monies back into national campaigns through issue advocacy advertisments, violating the spirit if not the letter of the law). But the resulting loss for the parties was a gain for groups:

Unions, corporations and wealthy individuals have pumped nearly $300 million this year into unregulated political groups, funding dozens of aggressive and sometimes shadowy campaigns independent of party machines.

The groups, both liberal and conservative, air TV and radio spots, conduct polls, run phone banks, canvass door-to-door and stage get-out-the-vote rallies, with no oversight by the Federal Election Commission. Set up as tax-exempt "issue advocacy" committees, they cannot explicitly endorse candidates. But they can do everything short of telling voters how to mark their ballots.

Because they can accept unlimited donations from any source, the committees — known as 527s — have emerged as the favored vehicle for millionaires and interest groups seeking to set the political agenda."It's become the new way to do business in politics," said Pete Maysmith, a national director of Common Cause, a nonprofit that lobbies for more transparency in campaign finance.

Named for a section of the IRS code, 527s have been around for years but became a political force in 2004 after the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 — also known as the McCain--Feingold Bill — limited donations to political parties. Groups such as Swift Boat Veterans for Truth on the right and America Coming Together on the left contributed $600 million that year, with a heavy focus on the presidential race.

The cash flow is lower this year because it's a midterm campaign, but 527s and a related type of organization known as 501(c)s have expanded their reach. With the Nov. 7 election days away, the groups are flooding the airwaves in state and local races as well as congressional contests.

By far the largest chunk of unregulated money — nearly $60 million — comes straight out of union treasuries and is used mostly to benefit Democratic candidates and causes. Conservatives are fighting back with multimillion-dollar donations from a California TV executive and the Texas developer who financed the Swift Boat ads.

In California, unregulated funds — mostly donated by New York developer Howard S. Rich — are bankrolling the campaign for Proposition 90, which would limit the government's ability to seize private property. In Missouri, such money paid for a celebrity-studded TV ad opposing a ballot initiative on stem-cell research....

The campaign finance reforms that took effect for 2004 limit individuals to about $100,000 in total contributions to all candidates, parties and political action committees per election cycle. Parties and PACs remain extremely influential. PACs, for instance, are expected to funnel more than $1 billion to candidates this year by bundling contributions from trial lawyers, beer wholesalers, pharmaceutical makers and other groups.

But more than 70 individuals have maxed out their PAC and party contributions; if they want to pump more cash into the election, they must donate to 527s and 501(c)s. Many prefer that approach because they can control how the money is used.The 501(c) groups do not have to disclose donors or itemize spending. The 527s must report donors and expenses, but the groups are often ephemeral, forming under a generic name for a few months and then dissolving. That makes it all but impossible to sort through IRS filings and pick out which organizations will get involved in which races. By law, these groups cannot coordinate their activity with candidates.

I imagine there's a "good government" motivation for the tone of the article. Since campaign finance reform is usually pushed by left-leaning organizations - like Common Cause -- one might see a liberal agenda in exposing the pattern of interest group influence under the 2002 reforms.

But check the data at the end of the piece: Seven out of ten of the top individual contributors gave to the Democrats, and three out of the top five 527 committees lean toward the Democratic Party.

Additionally, as the elections near, the Democrats have seen a surge in corporate contributions, as businesses have starting hedging their bets amid the possibility of a Democratic takeover of Congress.

All of this activity is evidence that the American pluralist democracy is healthy -- and working as the founders intended.

Does John Kerry Owe the Troops an Apology?

Senator John Kerry is taking heat for the remarks he made at a campaign rally Monday at Pasadena City College. This Los Angeles Times story has the background.

Kerry said:

You know, education, if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don't, you get stuck in Iraq.

Karen Tumulty, at Time Magazine, provides some perspective on Kerry's decisionmaking:

You've got to wonder about John Kerry's eye-hand coordination. His career is falling into a pattern. Whenever Kerry is confronted with a big decision, he tries to compensate for his last mistake. He voted against the first Iraq war, which turned out to be a success. So when the second one came around, he swallowed his misgivings and voted for it. That also turned out to be a mistake. So when it came time to vote for the $87 billion to fund the war that he had voted for, he produced what must be the single most damaging sound bite in modern political history by voting for it before he voted against it.

So now, when U.S. troops are suffering their worst casualties in nearly two years, he insulted them. Could Karl Rove have dreamed up a better October surprise than having the Democrats' most recent choice for Commander in Chief suggest that the men and women are dying there because they weren't smart enough to get into law school?

His initial impulse, predictably enough, was to fight back against the criticism. He didn't want to fall again into what turned out to be the biggest trap of 2004, when he failed to understand that a relatively small ad buy from a group that no one had ever heard of could be more damaging than he imagined. He was determined not to be "swift-boated" again. So he declared: "If anyone owes our troops in the fields an apology, it is the President and his failed team and a Republican majority in the Congress that has been willing to stamp — rubber-stamp policies that have done injury to our troops and to their families." But even Rand Beers, his national security adviser in the 2004 campaign, said: "It's unfortunate that Senator Kerry misspoke. No one who has ever been in combat would intentionally impugn our brave troops."

In other words, Kerry has managed on the eve of what could be a watershed election to remind pretty much everyone what it was they didn't like about the Democrats, and especially what they didn't like about him. It might have made more sense just to say he was sorry — for once to get ahead of a mistake, instead of trying to compensate for it the next time.

Kerry so far has resisted making an apology. Jonah Goldberg, at the Salt Lake Tribune, explains why:

Kerry insists he was making a joke about President Bush, not a joke about students who aren't smart enough to do better than the military. While there's virtually nothing in the text or video of his remarks to lend support for this, save for a wan smile he offered to the mute audience, it's possible that was his intent. After all, Kerry is an awful politician, a human toothache with the charisma of a 19th-century Oxford Latin tutor. One can't rule out the possibility that he simply botched a joke.

Actually, Kerry meant to say that if students didn't get a good education, they'd end up like President Bush, making big mistakes like the Iraq War (or at least what Kerry thinks was a big mistake).

The truth is Kerry can't get right with the Iraq War no matter what he says -- for it, against it, who knows? Now he's staked out this tough position where he won't apologize for remarks -- which he claims are attacks on administration policies -- though a cursury glance at the text of his words shows how badly he stumbled.

Tumulty's right: Kerry should apologize early and move on. We all make mistakes. By apologizing he could show some class -- and he still might be able to preserve some political future for himself. He'll feel a whole lot better, in any case.

Update: Senator Kerry has now apologized.