As the New Jersey and Virginia governor's races head into the November 3 election, the ads are flying. Some are slick, some are stupid, and some are downright sleazy. Click through this TNR slideshow for a collection of spots from each race.
The first decade of this century was a dud for job creation nationwide. With a weak recovery from the 2001 recession followed by the Great Recession, the nation as a whole gained almost no jobs during the decade (actually, there was a 0.3 percent increase). That made the aughts the first decade since the Great Depression without any substantial job growth.
The controversy over the "deem-and-pass" strategy will probably end very quickly. (I expect Democrats to conclude it's not worth the hassle.) But it's another telling episode in the health care saga. Conservatives have spent the last day in a fit of outrage at the prospect that House Democrats might enact the Senate health care bill and changes to it in one vote rather than two.
In my new book The Death and Life of the Great American School System, I argue that the current movement to fix schools will not improve American education. In fact, it may very well harm it.
Ken Cucinelli, Virginia Attorney general (per First Read):
QUESTIONER: Um, what can we do about Obama and the birth certificate thing, 'cause that's--?
CUCINELLI: It'll get tested in my view when he signs a law and someone is convicted of violating it, and one of their defenses will be it's not a law if someone qualified to be president isn't signing it.
All across the country, Republicans are fantasizing about a gigantic electoral tide that will sweep out deeply entrenched Democratic incumbents this November. In their telling, this deep-red surge will be so forceful as to dislodge even legislators who don’t look vulnerable now, securing GOP control of both houses of Congress.
But could this scenario really come to pass? That will depend, in part, on what type of Republican Party the Democrats are running against in the fall.
All across the country, Republicans are fantasizing about a gigantic electoral tide that will sweep out deeply entrenched Democratic incumbents this November. In their telling, this deep-red surge will be so forceful as to dislodge even legislators who don’t look vulnerable now, securing GOP control of both houses of Congress.
But could this scenario really come to pass? That will depend, in part, on what type of Republican Party the Democrats are running against in the fall.
Say what you want about Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, but “he knows how to work a room.” So claims Flynt Leverett, the contrarian Iran analyst who, with his wife Hillary Mann Leverett, paid a visit to the Iranian president in New York City last fall. During the sit-down at Manhattan’s InterContinental Barclay hotel with a group of invited academics, foreign policy professionals, and other Iranophiles, the Leveretts marveled at Ahmadinejad’s attention to detail as the Iranian took copious notes and strove to pronounce their unfamiliar names correctly.
Harold Pollack is the Helen Ross Professor of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago and a Special Correspondent for The Treatment.
As someone who has long believed that there is something morally repellant about living in a country that prides itself on being the greatest democracy in the world but where the top one-tenth of one percent of the people "earn" as much money per year collectively as the entire bottom fifty percent of working people, I would like to offer a modest proposal that might "level the playing field," as the popular saying has it, and thus provide a foundation for a democracy worthy of the name. Instead of the old Marxist plan to redistribute property--and let's face it, that always took a bloody revolution and even then, it didn't always work out so well--how about redistributing babies at birth, a kind of big baby lottery?
Since it is a matter of sheer luck whether one is born into a rich family and then, as a birth-right, is entitled to first-class housing, top-flight health insurance, excellent schools, and, if need be, the best attorneys money can buy, or whether one is born into a poor or middle-class family and not be assured of getting any of these amenities, why not give rational order to what has been a wildly haphazard and obviously unjust state of affairs? A public program implementing the big baby lottery would at last make official what has in truth been the unspoken ethos of our government policy for decades and is in accord with the casino way of life--the stock market, the housing market, the state lotteries--to which so many Americans are wholeheartedly committed.
Europe is a mess. Greece is the country on the continent closest to utter wreck. (And, if not for statements yesterday by Chancellor Merkel and President Sarkozy, there would literally be no hope for a life raft anywhere near Athens soon. This morning's FT smothers even those wan hopes.) Spain, Portugal and Ireland are not far behind ... or under.
Each of these countries has views on how Israel deals with the Palestinians, and they don't like it at all. Neither do the past and present "foreign ministers"—so to speak, but not exactly—of the European Union. The previous one also a past foreign minister of Spain, Javier Solana, whose main claim to distinction is that he is the grand nephew of Salvador de Madariaga, historian, politician and chief of the ill-fated League of Nations mission for world disarmament. It's a shame, neither Hitler nor Mussolini (nor Tojo) wanted to cooperate. So Solana's blood runs thick with hope and thin with achievement. He did spend his six years as a physics graduate student at the University of Virginia, with a good deal of his energy there siphoned off to march against the Vietnam war. Ho! Ho! Ho Chi Minh! Ha. Ha.
Solana's successor, the Baroness Ashton of Upholland (neé Catherine Ashton), was Labor leader of the House of Lords, testimony to the diminishing stature of the peers. In the eighties, she was treasurer of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND); this was long after nutty but brilliant Bertie Russell was dead but in the midst of the deepest financial machinations of the Soviet Union in the atomic or anti-American atomic effort. Of course, she didn't know about that—although it is estimated that nearly 40 percent of the campaign's money came from Moscow. And, if she didn't know that, she is capable of knowing nothing.
The new governors that recently took office in Virginia and New Jersey are facing a challenging fiscal environment. Chief among thorny issues are the looming shortfalls on the transportation front for both states.
Governor Christie is facing the reality that by 2011 all the revenue flowing into the New Jersey’s Transportation Trust Fund will be going toward debt payments. Virginia’s “three-alarm” transportation crisis is part of a $1.8 billion mid-year budget gap for fiscal 2010 that new Governor Bob McDonnell has to fix. Beginning next year Virginia will have scarce funding for primary, secondary, urban, and unpaved roads.
What’s to be done? The obvious answer to many is raise the state motor fuels tax. After all, neither state has raised its gas tax in over 20 years. Both are below the 50 state average of 20.8¢ per gallon. New Jersey’s, in fact, is the third-lowest in the nation (10.5¢). As a result, the most recent federal highway data shows that only two states have a lower share of their highway revenues coming from the gas tax than does the Garden State.
On the other hand--and as anyone who’s driven through the state can attest--New Jersey also takes advantage of tolling more than any other state. Nearly 30 percent of the revenue the state uses for highways comes from tolls, principally on the New Jersey Turnpike. Virginia is heavily-reliant on the gas tax but also depends on a range of state imposts.
Via Sarah Goodyear, it looks like a number of city and regional planners are starting to declare war on the cul-de-sac:
The Weekly Standard certainly knows how to attract readers. The magazine's new cover story, written by Charlotte Allen, is accompanied by a cover photo of a big-breasted woman in a red dress being approached from behind by a sleazy looking man. The cover text reads:
"Thousands of years of human mating rituals are vanishing. Cro-Magnons are once again dragging their mates into their caves by their hair--and the women love every minute of it."
Our political debates, our public discourse—on current economic and domestic issues—too often bear little or no relation to the actual problems the United States faces.
What is at stake in our economic decisions today is not some grand warfare of rival ideologies which will sweep the country with passion, but the practical management of a modern economy. What we need is not labels and clichés but more basic discussion of the sophisticated and technical questions involved in keeping a great economic machinery moving ahead.
The national interest lies in high employment and steady expansion of output, in stable prices and a strong dollar. The declaration of such an objective is easy; their attainment in an intricate and interdependent economy and world is a little more difficult. To attain them, we require not some automatic response but hard thought.
--John F. Kennedy, Commencement Address at Yale University, June 11, 1962
We deliberate, not about ends, but about means.
--Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics III. iii
Harvey Mansfield, the well-known conservative professor of political philosophy (and—full disclosure—a longtime friend) has penned a serious and civil critique of what he takes to be the animating impulse of the Obama administration. The nub of his argument is that Obama is a “progressive” whose purported non- (or post-) partisanship is designed to put certain issues “beyond political dispute” so that arguments are about means, not ends. And once the argument is about means, the door is opened wide to “rational administration” and the rule of experts.
Take health care. Mansfield interprets Obama’s statement that "I am not the first president to take up this cause, but I am determined to be the last" as an effort to take the issue out of politics once and for all—to decide, by side-stepping, the fundamental issue of principle. In his view, that issue is: “Should the government take over health care or should it be left to the private sphere?” The question precedes, and trumps, the myriad technical issues that transform the reform impulse into impenetrable, trust-destroying 2,000-page bills. By pursuing reform without dwelling on that question, he writes, Obama's worldview “wants to put an end to politics. It considers its measures to be progressive, and progress to be irreversible.” The problem with progress, so understood, is that it is at war with political liberty, rightly understood. One cannot seek to place matters of principle beyond politics without wanting “an imposed political solution.” Some human beings—and by implication, political parties—love progress more than they love liberty; others reverse the hierarchy. Mansfield stands with the party of liberty, the republican principle, against the party of progress, the party of rational administration, which is “more suited to monarchy than to republics.”
Since House Democrats remain fairly seized with terror at the political ramifications of passing health care reform, it's worth stepping back and thinking clearly about the Democrats' predicament. The November elections look bad for three basic reasons.
is ... Pete Wehner! I know -- you never saw it coming. Here is Wehner's winning entry:
Bill Clinton didn’t know he was in big trouble until the very eve of the November 1994 election. Barack Obama knows now, barely a year into his presidency. While the party loyalists can blame Martha Coakley’s defeat on her ignorance of Red Sox baseball, it was clearly a message to the president and his party. Yes, a less inept candidate might have beaten Scott Brown, but if Obama and his program had been more popular in Massachusetts, even Coakley could have won--and by ten points or more.
It's too bad the only newspaper reporters who understand how politics actually work are writing for the business page:
On July 2 of last year, Politico broke a startling story: The Washington Post was planning to host off-the-record salons at which sponsors would pay to mingle with D.C. eminences and Post writers. The dinners--the first of which had been advertised in Post fliers as an “exclusive opportunity to participate in the health-care reform debate among the select few who will actually get it done”--were to take place at the home of Katharine Weymouth, the Post’s publisher.
Politico has the House GOP plan:
Today is a momentous day in the history of The New Republic, and in the American literary world. We are proud to announce the appearance of The Book: An Online Review.
The literary pages of The New Republic have long been known as a home to high criticism and impassioned debate. It is our goal to extend these values to this new site, with new content--that is, new reviews, new criticism, and new arguments about fiction, history, art, politics, poetry, music, and all the other fields that matter to our culture--appearing almost daily.
Dear Friends of Books and Writers,
Over at the Spine, Marty Peretz writes about the struggles of Martha Coakley, Democratic candidate in the special election to fill the late Ted Kennedy's Senate seat. (Marty called this one a while ago.*) And the news is indeed alarming, according to Public Policy Polling:
