As published for The Wall Street Journal on March 9th, 2010:

How the president debates health care.

‘When I use a word,’” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.’”

Like the famously cracked egg in the Lewis Carroll fantasy, Barack Obama refuses to be bound by conventional English. Words like “choice” and “competition” are thrown around in ways that mean the opposite of how most Americans understand them. Once Americans do understand how he’s been using a word, moreover, it changes—in the way that a second “stimulus” suddenly becomes a “jobs bill.” Other words simply disappear.

The Dumpty dynamic is especially pronounced in the home stretch of the health-care debate. During a boisterous rally yesterday at Arcadia University outside Philadelphia, the president thumped that the time for “an up-or-down vote on health care” has come, and today he follows up with remarks in St. Louis.

In the interests of furthering understanding of this debate, here are five words Mr. Obama now avoids unless forced to comment by some reporter or Republican lawmaker:

• Reconciliation. Last Wednesday the president called for Senate Democrats to use reconciliation to ram a health-care bill through Congress. In the same way he called for a second stimulus back in November without ever saying it, however, “reconciliation” did not cross Mr. Obama’s lips as he endorsed it. Instead, he spoke of a vote that is “nothing more than a simple majority.”

The White House Web page suggests the last time the president uttered the word “reconciliation” in the context of health care was a dismissive answer to a question from John McCain during the bipartisan summit. “I think the American people aren’t always all that interested in procedures inside the Senate,” he told the Arizona Republican—notwithstanding that Americans seem very much interested in the procedures that led to the Cornhusker Kickback or a federal judgeship for a wavering House Democrat’s brother. Not to mention Mr. Obama’s own statement in October 2007 that “we are not going to pass universal health care with a 50-plus-one strategy.”

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As published for The Wall Street Journal on March 2nd, 2010:

Campus protesters get an economic reality check.

You don’t often hear complaints about large and unfair tax hikes issuing from the ramparts of America’s most progressive public university system.

Nevertheless, many faculty, students and staff on the 10 campuses of the University of California system are ticked off at how the state is handling its budget crisis. Last week, their anger over the resulting layoffs and tuition increases helped turn a dance party at Berkeley into a riot. The question now is whether on Thursday we will see more of the same at the protests, marches and teach-ins planned for what is being billed as a “Day of Action to Defend Public Education.”

Angry protests involving the UC community are nothing new. What’s interesting is the way some are characterizing their grievances. In an article for the Huffington Post earlier this month, Bob Samuels—a UCLA lecturer who also serves as a president for a faculty union—explained that “students have understood that the recent increases of student fees (tuition) by over 41% in one year is the same as a tax hike.”

Mr. Samuels is right: Some of these students do understand it that way. “Let’s call this what this really is,” Berkeley sophomore Robbie Bruens told his former high school newspaper. “A big fat Schwarzenegger tax hike on middle class students and their families.”

It’s hard to blame them when you don’t hear much better from people who ought to know better. A year ago, John Garamendi—then California’s lieutenant governor and a University of California Regent—issued a press release declaring that a proposal for higher tuition fees was “nothing more than a $662 a year tax increase on every student at the University of California.”

At an October Democratic rally at UC Davis, he was quoted as calling the tuition increases “the single biggest tax increase” in the last California budget. The next month he was elected to Congress.

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As published for The Wall Street Journal on February 23rd, 2010:

‘The voucher movement seems to have been born, or seems to have been started as a Republican idea. That’s the way Democrats look at it. That’s the way black lawmakers look at it. This is a Republican idea. This is what the Republicans want to push on us. . . . We don’t seem to see public schools not working in your area.”

The speaker was the Rev. James Meeks, explaining black resistance to vouchers. The venue was a sold-out lunch put on by the Illinois Policy Institute (IPI). The result? Something new in Windy City politics: a powerful black Democrat reaching out to a free-market think tank to force reform on the city’s most hidebound institution—the Chicago public schools.

James T. Meeks does not fit the usual stereotype of a voucher advocate. To begin with, he is founder and senior pastor of Salem Baptist Church of Chicago, the largest African-American church in Illinois. He serves as executive vice-president for Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow/PUSH Coalition. Oh, yes: He is a Democratic state senator who chairs both his chamber’s education committee and the legislature’s Black Caucus.

A few years back, Barack Obama named him someone he looked to for “spiritual counsel.” Now the man they call “the Reverend Senator” has done the unthinkable: He’s introduced a bill to provide vouchers for as many as 42,000 students now languishing in Chicago’s worst public schools. He tells me he thinks he can get enough Democrats on his coalition to get it through.

“I’m banking on the difficulty Democrats will have telling these parents, ‘No, you’re not going to have choice. Your kids are locked into these failing schools.’”

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As published for the Wall Street Journal on February 16th, 2010:

It’s easy to pile on Joe Biden. Vice presidents, after all, acquire reputations in Washington they never really shake. Dick Cheney was Darth Vader, and now Joe Biden is the embarrassing uncle you try to keep away from the microphone.

Neither is entirely fair. Still, when Mr. Biden claims success for a victory won by a surge he and Barack Obama opposed, you wonder what he’s up to. When this same genius is then dispatched to counter Mr. Cheney on the weekend talk shows, you wonder what the administration is up to.

Start with Mr. Biden’s first whopper: telling CNN’s Larry King last week that “one of the great achievements of this administration” may well be a democratic Iraq. “You’re going to see a stable government in Iraq that is actually moving toward a representative government. . . . I’ve been impressed how they have been deciding to use the political process rather than guns to settle their differences.”

Now, many have jumped on Mr. Biden for claiming this as an Obama achievement. Perhaps more striking, however, is that the same Iraqi government that so impresses him today is something he once declared impossible.

That was back during a Democratic presidential debate in 2007, when Mr. Biden told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos it was a “fundamental strategic mistake” to believe “there is any possibility in the lifetime of anyone here of having the Iraqis get together, have a unity government in Baghdad that pulls the country together. That will not happen, George.”

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As published for The Wall Street Journal on February 9th, 2010:

‘We’re not handling any of these cases any different from the Bush administration.’

This weekend, Americans were treated to something new: Barack Obama defending his war policies by suggesting they merely continue his predecessor’s practices. The defense is illuminating, not least for its implicit recognition that George W. Bush has more credibility on fighting terrorists than does the sitting president.

Mr. Obama’s explanation came in an interview with Katie Couric just before the Super Bowl. Ms. Couric asked about trying Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in New York. After listing some of the difficulties, the president offered a startling defense for civilian trials:

“I think that the most important thing for the public to understand,” he told Ms. Couric, “is we’re not handling any of these cases any different than the Bush administration handled them all through 9/11.” Mr. Obama went on to add that “190 folks”—folks presumably just like the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks—had been tried and convicted in civilian court during Mr. Bush’s tenure.

Leave aside, for just a moment, the substance. Far more arresting is that Mr. Obama now defends himself by invoking a man he has spent the past year blaming for al Qaeda’s growth. You know—all those Niebuhrian speeches about how America had gone “off course,” “shown arrogance and been dismissive,” and “made decisions based on fear rather than foresight,” thus handing al Qaeda a valuable recruiting tool.

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As published for The Wall Street Journal on February 2nd, 2010:

Inner-city parochial schools are not the only ones struggling.

Tim Busch has an answer to the epidemic of closing Catholic schools. And it has nothing to do with vouchers.

It couldn’t come at a more critical moment. Over the next few days, nearly 2.2 million students and their families will celebrate Catholic Schools Week. Though the Catholic school system remains America’s largest alternative to public education, the number of both schools and students is roughly half what they were at their peak in the mid-1960s. According to the National Catholic Education Association, the trend continued last year, with 162 Catholic schools consolidating or closing against only 31 new openings.

Amid the gloom Mr. Busch offers a prescription for revival: End the financial dependence on parish or diocese. Build attractive facilities. And compete for students.

If that sounds like a business formula, it is. Mr. Busch is a good friend I came to know through Legatus, an association of Catholic CEOs. Spend any time around him, and you’ll find he believes that America needs Catholic schools more than ever, and that they can compete with the best. To prove it, he’s helped start up two privately run Catholic schools—St. Anne elementary school and JSerra high school, both in southern California.

Now, there are plenty of upscale Catholic schools with waiting lists—especially those run by religious orders. But here’s a fact that gets little mention: a Catholic education is in danger of becoming a luxury for the middle class. It’s hard to be optimistic about the future of Catholic schools in our inner cities if Catholics cannot make a go of these schools in the suburbs, where most Catholics live.

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As published for The Wall Street Journal on January 26th, 2010:

The former president casts a shadow over the State of the Union.

He’s baaaaack.

When the president enters the House chamber tomorrow night to deliver his maiden State of the Union address, members of Congress, the press, and the public will see Barack Obama at the podium. But they will have Bill Clinton on their minds.

Specifically they will be thinking of 1995, when a humbled Mr. Clinton addressed a newly Republican Congress after his own health-care proposals went down in flames. Though President Obama’s party still holds the majority in both houses, it is a scared majority that has been unnerved by the unpopularity of the president’s signature policy issue (health care) and terrified by the loss to Republicans of what they all, with David Gergen, regarded as the “Kennedy seat.” So whatever Mr. Obama says tomorrow night, his words will inevitably be compared with the speech Mr. Clinton used to rescue his own presidency.

You see it in the return of words such as “pivot” and “triangulate,” all evocative of a Clinton-like shift, in the pre-State of the Union commentary. Even those urging Mr. Obama to come out swinging rather than compromise are forced into a Clinton comparison. Thus the headline over Democratic strategist Robert Shrum’s story in the magazine The Week last Friday: “Is this Clinton’s Third Term?”

Even for the comeback kid, this is quite a turnaround. Almost two years ago to the day, Bill Clinton was a pariah in polite Democratic society—blamed for his wife’s loss in the South Carolina primary, where he had compared Mr. Obama to Jesse Jackson. That followed a similar storm in the New Hampshire primary, where he also created a stir by characterizing Mr. Obama’s antiwar credentials as “the biggest fairy tale I’ve ever seen.”

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As published for The Wall Street Journal on January 19th, 2010:

New Jersey’s new Republican governor rules out a tax increase.

Chris Christie knows no one is ever going to confuse him with Arnold Schwarzenegger. In contrast to the sculpted body of the actor-turned-California governor, Mr. Christie’s girth even became an issue in last year’s gubernatorial contest in New Jersey. Arguably it was a winning issue for Mr. Christie, given the humorous way in which he turned a snarky attack ad to his advantage.

At 11:30 a.m. today on the steps of the War Memorial Building in Trenton, Mr. Christie will take the oath of office. His election as governor signals voter frustration with a political class that spends too much, taxes too much, and can’t seem to help itself. Mr. Christie is where he is for one reason: The public’s hope that this Republican governor has the solutions this blue state needs—and that he will not end up like Mr. Schwarzenegger, who came in like a lion and is going out like a sham.

Certainly the future looks bleak. Within two months, Mr. Christie must produce a new budget for 2011. To put this in context, that means balancing a budget in a state whose spending has given New Jerseyites a per capita debt load that is among the highest in the nation, whose income and property taxes are among the most crushing in the nation, and whose rankings in state-by-state comparisons of the business climate typically rank last or near last in the nation.

The encouraging news is that Mr. Christie has ruled out raising taxes as a means for solving this problem. He has done so publicly and repeatedly. People close to the new governor say he has done this deliberately, as a message to the legislature and even his staff not to come to him with the same old solutions that have people fleeing the state. And he has done so knowing full well that if he reneges on so public a pledge, he will be crucified for it.

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As published for the Wall Street Journal on January 12th, 2010:

The president wants to spend more, but don’t ask him what the money is for.

Assuming that Barack Obama holds another White House press conference—his last was back in July—here’s a question worth asking: If the stimulus is truly the success you and your team claim, why are you so reluctant to use the word?

It’s a timely question, with Congress returning to Washington this week after a year of record spending. Right now the spotlight is on the effort by the Democratic leadership to ram through a health-care bill—any health-care bill—in time for the president to declare victory in his State of the Union. But a second stimulus may not be far behind, with the House having already passed a version before members left for Christmas.

The House approved its $154 billion second stimulus package in its last vote of 2009, little more than a week after a policy address Mr. Obama delivered at the Brookings Institution. In that Dec. 8 speech, he reviewed the progress of the earlier stimulus—the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009—and used the occasion to call for additional congressional spending. The headlines rightly described what he was proposing as a “second stimulus.”

Yet perhaps the most intriguing part of that speech is what the president did not say.

Not once did he use the word “stimulus.” If you search under “speeches and remarks” on the White House Web site, it will tell you that the last time the president used the word “stimulus” in public remarks was in an offhand reference in a speech about clean energy in October. A month before that he used the term once in a speech that was about the stimulus.

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As published for The Wall Street Journal on January 5th, 2010:

Even in the age of emails, blogs and tweets, the formal letter can still command attention. Especially when it bears the signature of the Superintendent of the United States Military Academy at West Point—and congratulates the recipient on his appointment.

Along with hundreds of other anxious high-school seniors, my nephew opened such a letter over the Christmas holidays. For his family, it brought back many memories. Just about all of us live within an hour’s drive of West Point. For most of our lives, the academy has been a beautiful backdrop: for football games, wedding receptions, the occasional drive up for lunch at the Thayer Hotel, and so on.

Now the beauty mixes with apprehension. For me it was brought home in 2006, when I attended the commencement as part of the president’s entourage. Theirs was the first class to enter West Point after the attacks of Sept. 11. As I watched these happy graduates, I thought: In a few years, some of those celebrating today will not be with us. Thus far, alas, war has claimed two young men who received the gold bars of a second lieutenant that day: Lt. Nick A. Dewhirst, killed in Afghanistan; Lt. Timothy W. Cunningham, killed in Iraq.

Can my nephew comprehend the sacrifice he commits himself to? The critics say we romanticize war and hide the realities from those who will do the dying. I’m not so sure. At West Point this past autumn for a football game, I went to the refrigerator of a helicopter pilot-turned-instructor in search of a Diet Coke. On the door I found a yellow ribbon with the name of the officer’s West Point roommate, an infantry captain named Doug DiCenzo who was killed by a roadside bomb in Baghdad when his son was just 16 months old.

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