Published for www.nationalreview.com/corner, January 26, 2012

It’s true that Newt Gingrich used to go around with an empty ice bucket in 1996. It was a symbol of his efforts to cut congressional perks and costs. For decades prior to 1995, every congressional office would receive a daily delivery of ice from a central freezer on the Capitol grounds. It was a holdover from the days before easy refrigeration, and it made for a nice demonstration of the sort of silly and costly perks that members of Congress received. When he became Speaker, Gingrich ended the practice and (in large part because that meant eliminating several staff positions) saved some $400,000 a year. Gingrich liked to use the ice bucket as a metaphor for Democratic governance: expensive, wasteful, and out-of-date. Whatever you think of the metaphor, it was something Gingrich talked about constantly, including on many occasions in the presence of Bob Dole.

One could point to any number of erratic, undisciplined, and peculiar statements or actions by Newt Gingrich during his speakership. He was in many ways a disastrous manager and leader. But Dole’s example in his statement today reflects more poorly on Dole than on Gingrich, I’d say. And putting out this statement from Dole frankly doesn’t reflect well on the political judgment of the Romney campaign.

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Published for online.wsj.com, January 25, 2012

As this election year begins, a lot of people are wondering what we can do to restore America’s prosperity and create more jobs. Republican presidential candidates are offering their ideas, and at his State of the Union message on Tuesday President Obama presented his. I believe the fundamental answer is simple: Government policies must adhere more closely to the principles of economic freedom upon which the country was founded.

At their most basic level, these principles are that families, individuals and entrepreneurs must be free to decide what to produce, what to consume, what to buy and sell, and how to help others. Their decisions are to be made within a predictable government policy framework based on the rule of law, with strong incentives derived from the market system, and with a clearly limited role for government.

The history of American economic policy displays major movements between more and less economic freedom, more and less emphasis on rules-based policy in fiscal and monetary affairs, more and less expansive roles for government, more and less reliance on markets and incentives. Each of these swings has had enormous consequences. Taken together, they make for a historical proving ground to determine which policy direction is better for restoring prosperity.

A big move toward more interventionist policies started in the mid-1960s, after more activist Keynesian economists came to town in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, and it lasted through the 1970s in the Nixon, Ford and Carter administrations. We saw short-term stimulus packages, temporary tax rebates or surcharges, go-stop monetary policy with inflationary overexpansion followed by severe contraction, wage-and-price guidelines and controls. The eventual result was high unemployment, high inflation and slow economic growth.

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Published for www.washingtonpost.com, January 26, 2012

Francoise, age 16, talks quietly, revealing a shy smile only after praise for her tight cornrows. While walking to school four years ago, she and some classmates were captured by the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). The girls were distributed to soldiers as “wives.” In the mornings, Francoise cooked. In the afternoons, she carried packs on the march. When she tried to escape, the soldiers melted a water container and poured the plastic on her shoulders. Once, when the fighters saw two infants along the path, they crushed them with a pestle. “I witnessed that,” she says.

She recalls seeing Joseph Kony “maybe once a year.” Kony is the leader of the LRA and perhaps the most hated and hunted man on earth. His followers, she explains, think that “he is a supernatural being. He has a power over them.”

Francoise describes a six-week walk to an LRA camp in a remote part of the neighboring Central African Republic (CAR). Then the sounds of an attacking plane and helicopter. In the chaos, she escaped, arriving home just before Christmas.

Her story is eyewitness confirmation of an important event. During the summer, Kony recalled his commanders to the CAR for his first major leadership meeting in two years. On Sept. 12, forces of Uganda’s military (known as the UPDF) scattered the LRA fighters. Kony survived and fled. But the net around him tightens.

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Published for www.online.wsj.com, January 27, 2012

Only three months ago, we would have violated U.S. secrecy laws by sharing what we write here—even though, as a former director of national intelligence, secretary of homeland security, and deputy secretary of defense, we have long known it to be true. The Chinese government has a national policy of economic espionage in cyberspace. In fact, the Chinese are the world’s most active and persistent practitioners of cyber espionage today.

Evidence of China’s economically devastating theft of proprietary technologies and other intellectual property from U.S. companies is growing. Only in October 2011 were details declassified in a report to Congress by the Office of the National Counterintelligence Executive. Each of us has been speaking publicly for years about the ability of cyber terrorists to cripple our critical infrastructure, including financial networks and the power grid. Now this report finally reveals what we couldn’t say before: The threat of economic cyber espionage looms even more ominously.

The report is a summation of the catastrophic impact cyber espionage could have on the U.S. economy and global competitiveness over the next decade. Evidence indicates that China intends to help build its economy by intellectual-property theft rather than by innovation and investment in research and development (two strong suits of the U.S. economy). The nature of the Chinese economy offers a powerful motive to do so.

According to 2009 estimates by the United Nations, China has a population of 1.3 billion, with 468 million (about 36% of the population) living on less than $2 a day. While Chinese poverty has declined dramatically in the last 30 years, income inequality has increased, with much greater benefits going to the relatively small portion of educated people in urban areas, where about 25% of the population lives.

The bottom line is this: China has a massive, inexpensive work force ravenous for economic growth. It is much more efficient for the Chinese to steal innovations and intellectual property—the source code of advanced economies—than to incur the cost and time of creating their own. They turn those stolen ideas directly into production, creating products faster and cheaper than the U.S. and others.

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Published for www.csmonitor.com, January 26, 2012

America is deep in debt. But how deep?

That question seems simple, yet analysts and pundits give answers that differ by trillions of dollars. Sometimes tens of trillions. That confusion arises because there are various ways to tote up America’s debts.

Many observers often focus on the publicly held debt – the bonds that the Treasury has sold into financial markets. By that measure, the federal government owed a bit more than $10 trillion at the end of last fiscal year.

That figure is important because it measures how much the federal government has had to rely on outside investors. For that reason, it does not include the special Treasury bonds in the Social Security Trust Fund and similar accounts owned by the federal government itself. From an accounting perspective, those bonds net to zero – a part of the government owes money to another part. But they are important to Social Security legally and politically. Some analysts use a measure that includes the trust funds, bringing the federal debt to more than $14 trillion.

That’s not the only measurement disagreement. Social Security and Medicare reflect a major commitment to seniors in the years ahead, but the government hasn’t identified enough dedicated financing to pay for them. Some analysts believe these unfunded amounts should be viewed as debts as well. Their size depends on technical factors like the future growth rate of health spending and how far you look into the future. Depending on their choices, analysts can get huge measures of indebtedness: $50 trillion or more.

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Published for www.commentarymagazine.com, January 27, 2012

Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney had perhaps his best debate last night in Jacksonville. He was, for the most part, forceful and in command. He damaged his main rival, Newt Gingrich, on answers ranging from immigration to Gingrich’s investment portfolio. And Romney was particularly strong at turning the tables on the attacks on his wealth, saying this:

And I know that there may be some who try to make a deal of that [Romney’s wealth and investments], as you have publicly. But look, I think it’s important for people to make sure that we don’t castigate individuals who have been successful and try and, by innuendo, suggest there’s something wrong with being successful and having investments and having a return on those investments. Speaker, you’ve indicated that somehow I don’t earn that money. I have earned the money that I have. I didn’t inherit it. I take risks. I make investments. Those investments lead to jobs being created in America. I’m proud of being successful. I’m proud of being in the free enterprise system that creates jobs for other people. I’m not going to run from that. I’m proud of the taxes I pay. My taxes, plus my charitable contributions, this year, 2011, will be about 40 percent. So, look, let’s put behind this idea of attacking me because of my investments or my money, and let’s get Republicans to say, you know what? What you’ve accomplished in your life shouldn’t be seen as a detriment, it should be seen as an asset to help America.

This answer reframes the issue of Romney’s success, away from a defensive, apologetic stance to a confident, assertive one. It also helped that Romney was right on the substance. It is quite important to push back against the mindset that assumes success and excellence are things for which one ought to apologize. I understand that many modern-day liberals believe people who are wealthy are by definition of a suspect class (unless, say, their wealth comes via Hollywood). The task of the rest of us is to shatter that myth, which is not only wrong but can also be pernicious. Governor Romney, I think, did a very good job explaining why achievement in business is, in fact, impressive (it’s often the result of hard work, persistence, creativity and drive) and an asset to America. This is a theme Romney needs to continue to build on. Rather than accept the premise of the attack, he decided to shred it.

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Published for www.commentarymagazine.com, January 26, 2012

I had some critical things to say about President Obama’s State of the Union address. But the evening was not a total waste, thanks to the response by Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels.

Looking at it simply from the craftsmanship of speechwriting, it’s quite impressive. Several things stand out about it, starting with its tone at the opening, which showed genuine good will toward the president. Grace notes like these are not in oversupply these days. There’s also an economy of words in Daniels’s address, which helps create a sense of movement. One paragraph builds on another.

But beyond the rhetoric is the analysis, which is both sophisticated and honest. Governor Daniels resists the temptation to overstate the blame that rests with the president, even while offering a substantive, and at times a withering, critique of Obama’s failures. And Daniels offered something the president’s State of the Union address didn’t, which is an actual theory of government. And Daniels did all this in a fraction of the time and words used by Obama.

Mitch Daniels turns out to be not only the best governor in America, but also perhaps the best writer among America’s major political figures. George Will, in describing Daniels, refers to his “low-key charisma of competence.” True enough, but there’s also an understated elegance to Daniels’s words.

Needless to say, those of us who wanted Daniels to run for president this year were reminded why. In that sense, listening to Daniels’s speech left some of us more depressed than listening to Obama’s speech.

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Published for www.commentarymagazine.com, January 26, 2012.

Matt Drudge links to several stories and videos (see here, here, here and here) highlighting Newt Gingrich’s past criticisms of President Reagan. This line of attack has clearly enraged Gingrich, who argues that he was certainly more of a Reaganite than Mitt Romney ever was.

What Gingrich says is true, but in some respects it’s beside the point. What these episodes reveal about Gingrich isn’t that he’s not a conservative; it’s that during the course of his career he’s been intemperate and erratic. He views himself as almost alone when it comes to understanding the world-historical moment he always seems to be living in. He has the courage that others, including Ronald Reagan, lacked. He possesses the insights that others, including Ronald Reagan, were deprived of. Gingrich’s comments were not those of a “loving critic,” to use a phrase from Madison. The former House speaker used words that were lacerating, extreme, and at times insulting.

One Gingrich quote is particularly revealing and hasn’t, to my knowledge, yet been highlighted. But in Steven Hayward’s wonderful book, The Age of Reagan: The Conservative Counterrevolution, Hayward quotes Gingrich as telling the Wall Street Journal that Reagan was “in some danger of becoming another Jimmy Carter.” That is about as wicked a rhetorical blow as one Republican could level against another. And this statement came after Reagan’s first term, in which he achieved historically important reforms.

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Published for www.washingtonpost.com, January 23, 2012

Some persistence is merely doggedness. Newt Gingrich’s persistence is a form of confidence — the firm belief that, given enough time and enough debates, his skills will prevail. He knows how to probe an opponent’s weakness, how to humiliate a journalist, how to employ an applause line and how to parry an uncomfortable question. The anti-Romneys who came before him were chosen more or less at random. Gingrich has earned his surge that produced a 13-point victory in South Carolina on Saturday.

Yet Gingrich is more than a performer. He is the GOP’s chief diagnostician, specializing in the vivid explanation of public challenges. Other candidates struggle to recall three points on a 3-by-5 card. Gingrich struggles to suppress the dissertation that might emerge at any moment. The ability to think in public is a rare political gift — more common in Britain than in America. Bill Clinton would shine during prime minister’s question time. So would Gingrich.

But Gingrich regularly gets into trouble when moving from analysis to prescription. Nearly every problem that crosses the threshold of his attention becomes historically urgent, requiring a fundamental solution. This is the reason for his most revealing verbal habit. Systems are “fundamentally broken” and require “fundamental change.” Opposing views are “fundamentally a lie” and “fundamentally alien to American tradition.” Only the biggest ideas are sufficient to his self-regard.

So Gingrich diagnoses the genuine threat of terrorism and radical Islam. Then he calls for a federal law against sharia, which would address a nonexistent crisis while stigmatizing an entire faith.

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Published for http://online.wsj.com, January, 26,2012

In a rare moment of senior-presidential-adviser-to-senior-presidential-adviser telepathy, I overheard the private thoughts of David Axelrod as he prepared to appear on television Tuesday night, following President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address:

Well, this is about as pleasant as a dentist appointment. Sure hope we’re right that no matter what the question is, all I need to say is, “President Obama believes everyone should get a fair shot, everyone should do their fair share, and everyone should play by the same set of rules.” Say it loud, say it proud, say it again and again.

Speaking of which, I love that line about “asking a billionaire to pay at least as much as his secretary.” Sure, the top 10% pay 70% of federal income taxes, so billionaires already pay more taxes than their secretaries, and no one’s really for doubling capital gains taxes. But it sounds so good, and stokes so much anger toward the rich.

I did enjoy how Barack went after Congress. A couple of times it looked like he was going to turn around and slap Boehner for obstructing his agenda. Hope it helps voters forget we Democrats controlled both chambers for two years and got pretty much everything we wanted. Now we have to pretend it never happened.

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