Published for www.online.wsj.com, March 5, 2012

Not since Herbert Hoover has a party out of power had such an opportunity to run against everything that troubles the American family—prices, interest rates, unemployment, taxes, or the fear for the future of their old age or the future of their children—than is now presented to the Republican Party.

The Republicans, however, haven’t figured this out. This is their basic problem. They have no strategy for defeating an Obama administration that is highly vulnerable on both domestic and foreign policy.

That’s the conventional wisdom in a nutshell, isn’t it?

It will come as no surprise that these words appeared in a Feb. 29 column in the New York Times. They are reproduced here exactly as written, save for one small adjustment.

The president whose failings they describe is Jimmy Carter, not Barack Obama. The lines were written in 1980, not 2012. The author was the then-dean of conventional wisdom, James “Scotty” Reston. The headline was “Jimmy Carter’s Luck,” a reference to Reagan’s victory in the New Hampshire primary three days earlier.

It appears the conventional wisdom hasn’t changed much. Today’s narrative holds that however weak President Obama’s hand, Republicans find themselves in no position to capitalize on it. A glance back to where we were at this exact point in the 1980 primaries suggests otherwise.

Then as now, the Republican primaries opened with a bang, when George H.W. Bush upset Ronald Reagan in the Iowa caucuses. By late February, this loss would lead to Reagan’s firing of his campaign manager, John Sears, in a disagreement over strategy.

Then, as now, Republicans feared that an unhappy contender might bolt the party to mount an independent campaign. In 1980, that was liberal John Anderson, not libertarian Ron Paul. Mr. Anderson did end up running as an independent, whereas Mr. Paul will likely be constrained by the effect a third-party run would have on the future prospects for his Republican son, Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul.

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

As Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum force Republican voters to make their choice in a hotly contested Michigan primary, once again we hear the great lament that we have looked at the candidates and found them all unworthy. Not everyone puts it as harshly as the headline over Conrad Black’s piece in the National Post: “The Republicans Send in the Clowns.” But it’s a popular meme in the campaign coverage.

Like so many others who find the field wanting, Mr. Black laments that “the best Republican candidates—Jeb Bush, Mitch Daniels, Chris Christie, Marco Rubio, Paul Ryan and Haley Barbour—have sat it out.” We’ll never know, will we? Because the “best” Republicans opted not to put their records and statements up for national scrutiny, commit themselves to a grueling campaign trail, and subject themselves to TV debates moderated by media hosts who often seem to be playing for the other team.

So say this for the final four: They had the guts to put themselves out there—and stick with it. That’s something a winner needs.

As this campaign has progressed, we’ve also seen the traditional tensions emerge among the party’s different constituencies. The lines cannot always be neatly drawn. For example, though Mr. Romney comes from a blue state and represents the business wing of the party, his positions on social issues are similar to Mr. Santorum’s. Mr. Santorum, a former senator from Pennsylvania, boasts a pro-Israel, pro-freedom foreign policy in addition to uncompromising stands on issues such as abortion and same-sex marriage. Mr. Gingrich offers something to all three GOP constituencies and adds an engaging ability to turn questions back on his liberal interlocutors.

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Published for www.online.wsj.com, February 21, 2012

When Barack Obama was campaigning for president in 2008, he declared that marriage is between a man and a woman. For the most part, his position was treated as a nonissue.

Now Rick Santorum is campaigning for president. He too says that marriage is between a man and a woman. What a different reaction he gets.

There’s no mystery why. Mr. Santorum is attacked because everyone understands that he means what he says.

President Obama, by contrast, gets a pass because everyone understands—nudge nudge, wink wink—that he’s not telling the truth. The press understands that this is just one of those things a Democratic candidate has to say so he doesn’t rile up the great unwashed.

It’s arguably the most glaring double standard in American life today. It helps explain why candidates with social views that are fairly conventional among ordinary Americans—the citizens of 31 states including California have rejected same-sex marriage when put to a vote—find themselves depicted as extreme. It also speaks to why even some who share Mr. Santorum’s social views nonetheless fear that his outspokenness on these issues will only undermine his candidacy.

That has led some folks to suggest that Mr. Santorum simply drop these issues altogether. Their hope is that by concentrating his energies solely on Mr. Obama’s management of the economy and foreign affairs, Mr. Santorum might avoid dividing his party and America. However reasonable the argument may be on paper, it is simply not practical.

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Published for www.online.wsj.com, February 14, 2012

Back in the dog days of George W. Bush’s second term, when each month seemed to bring new lows for the president’s approval ratings, there was almost always this consolation: The surveys would show that Congress was even less popular than he was.

In general, that’s going to be the advantage an executive enjoys over a collective body such as a legislature. Hence the decision by Barack Obama to take a page out of Harry Truman’s 1948 playbook and campaign for re-election against a “do-nothing Congress.” Given his record, it may be his wisest course.

It’s also a gift to Republicans—if the party’s presidential nominee has enough wit to turn it to his advantage.

Let’s take the politics first. However useful the “do-nothing Congress” theme may be for Mr. Obama, it’s not exactly a ringing endorsement of Harry Reid in an election when the Democratic majority he enjoys in the Senate is up for grabs. To the contrary, it opens the door for Republicans to turn the tables in a way that squeezes Mr. Reid and his fellow Senate enablers: between a Democratic president attacking them implicitly, and a Republican presidential contender attacking them explicitly.

Ed Gillespie, a former chairman of the Republican National Committee who was a colleague in the Bush administration, sums up the challenge this way. “Our nominee,” he says, “needs to talk about the do-nothing Senate, and remind voters that Harry Reid and the Democrats are in control there. Republicans need to constantly remind voters that the problems in our economy and with the health-care bill are the result of Democratic control—and that in the Senate this control continues to block reform and advance the Obama agenda.”

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Published for www.online.wsj.com, February 6, 2012

Whatever else the controversial new contraceptive mandate may have done, already it has achieved the unthinkable: Joe Biden is now as silent and reclusive as a Trappist monk.

Mr. Biden, of course, occupies a historic place as our first Catholic vice president and the country’s most prominent Catholic layman. Never before has he been shy about talking about his faith. So it tells you something that two weeks after the Department of Health and Human Services issued this new rule, Mr. Biden has apparently taken a vow of silence.

Mr. Biden knows that he has been left with nothing to say. He knows that beyond the problem of requiring Catholic institutions to provide free health coverage for contraceptive and sterilization services, his president has furthered the impression that the Obama administration is at war with the Catholic Church.

No doubt the vice president also appreciates the potential electoral consequences. Catholics went for Mr. Obama in the 2008 elections, at least partly because of a candidate who professed to be welcoming to people of faith in a way no Democrat had been in decades. Now Mr. Obama faces a much more skeptical Catholic public—which happens to be concentrated in key battleground states such as Michigan, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Wisconsin.

How could the administration so miscalculate the fallout from its action? At the political level, they assumed that the bishops are not popular, that American Catholics do not follow their church’s teaching on contraception, and that contraception is far less controversial than abortion.

On all this, they were right. The difference is that abortion does not affect the way the president of Notre Dame, the bishop of Peoria, or the head of Catholic Charities runs his organization. The mandate does.

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Published for The Wall Street Journal, January 9, 2012

A funny thing happened on the way to the New Hampshire primary: ABC moderator George Stephanopoulos embarrassed himself on national television with questions plainly intended to embarrass the Republican candidates. Therein lies a lesson.

On Saturday night, Mr. Stephanopoulos stepped outside the role of honest interlocutor when he pursued Mitt Romney with the issue on nobody’s lips or legislative agenda: whether states have the right to ban contraception. Likewise, fellow moderator Diane Sawyer, who asked Republicans what they would say, “sitting in their living rooms,” to a gay couple.

As the audience appreciated—they booed after Mr. Stephanopolous’s sixth follow-up—these questions were designed less to illuminate than to paint Republicans as people who hate gays and are so crazy they might just ban contraception if elected.

For conservatives, this is nothing new. Conservatives are used to a world where the referees often seem to be playing for the other team. In this case, however, the responses from the candidates were revealing.

Rick Santorum essentially answered directly, opposing the Supreme Court’s definition of privacy and defending traditional marriage. On the question about gays, Newt Gingrich called marriage between a man and a woman a defining part of our civilization. He then turned the question back on Ms. Sawyer, wondering why the press never asks about how same-sex marriage is driving the Catholic Church out of the adoption business. As for state bans on contraception, Mr. Romney noted that no state was in fact proposing to do so, “and asking me whether they could do it or not is kind of a silly thing.”

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Published for The Wall Street Journal, January 3, 2012

This new year, spare a thought for that most underappreciated class of citizen: American expatriates.

In a world where 95% of consumers live outside our borders, Americans working abroad serve as the sales and marketing force for Brand USA. All things being equal, people go with what they know: An American engineer will turn to American technology, an American businessman will hire fellow Americans, and an American contractor will likewise prefer American goods and services. In a nation trying to reach President Obama’s goal of doubling exports by 2014, that makes the expat a pretty valuable resource.

Alas, the U.S. tax code—the ugliest of ugly Americans—doesn’t work that way. To the contrary, new changes in tax law regard foreign financial institutions (banks, pension funds, etc.) as colonial subjects who must be dragooned into enforcing ill-thought-out U.S. regulations, or face huge fines. Indeed our tax code appears to rest on the assumption that the American expat is a criminal and must be treated that way.

This assumption is embodied in the IRS’s new Form 8938, which requires Americans who live abroad to report any foreign financial assets from stocks to partnerships to derivatives above a designated threshold. It comes on top of another form (the FBAR, or Foreign Bank Account Report) already required if a citizen has any foreign accounts that add up to more than $10,000. In some cases, you can be fined for failing to file even if you don’t owe the IRS any money.

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Published for The Wall Street Journal, December 27, 2011

Poor Kim Kardashian. Well, poor may not be the right word. By all accounts—especially those she televises for her reality shows—Ms. Kardashian manages quite comfortably on her income. According to the New York Post, that includes as much as $17.9 million that she raked in for her well-publicized August wedding to NBA star Kris Humphries.

Public morality can be a tricky thing, however, and apparently Ms. Kardashian has now crossed a line.

It’s not her split from Mr. Humphries only 72 days after their wedding, which raised questions about whether the marriage was simply one big publicity stunt. Nor was it the earlier sex tape that earned her celebrity and riches. Only a prude would object to that.

No, Ms. Kardashian’s sin is this: She pays what she owes in state taxes under California law, instead of the much larger amount that some self-appointed advocacy group thinks she ought to be paying.

The organization is called Courage Campaign and its website reveals it to be a California mélange of activist groups and labor unions. In a video that presents Ms. Kardashian in some of her more conspicuously consumptive moments, Courage Campaign claims that while Ms. Kardashian made more than $12 million in 2010, she paid only one percentage point more in taxes (10.3%) than a middle-class Californian (9.3%).

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Published for The Wall Street Journal, December 20, 2011

When Jews begin their Hanukkah celebrations this week, they will commemorate a 2,200-year old revolt led by Judah Maccabee against a Greek empire attempting to crush the Jewish faith. For some, the holiday holds an added resonance, linking their military service to one of the greatest Jewish warriors of all time.

These are the Jews of the United States Marine Corps.

In the popular mind, a Jewish Marine may sound exotic. In fact, Jews have their own chapters in the history of the Corps. In his book “Semper Chai!” Howard J. Leavitt explains the compatibility with a refreshing lack of nuance: “[M]any Jews were—and are—Marines, and the basic and lofty precepts and spiritual underpinnings of the United States, the U.S. Marine Corps and Judaism are one and the same, without any differences or conflict.”

In my life, Jews and Marines just go together. Maybe it started with my sister’s father-in-law, Harold Green. Having grown up in a family whose first song was “The Marines’ Hymn,” none of my brothers were surprised that when our sister gave her heart to a nice Jewish boy, he would be one whose dad—like hers—had been a Marine.

There are also the children of friends. When Bill Kristol’s son was graduated from Harvard two years ago, many of his classmates went on to law school or hedge funds. Lt. Joseph Kristol deployed to Afghanistan, where he led Marines in the fabled 3/5 (3rd Battalion, 5th Marines) during combat in Helmand province. Another Ivy Leaguer who also exchanged Harvard Crimson for Marine Crimson is Lt. Matthew Blumenthal, son of Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D., Conn.).

Then there’s the Ledeen family. Among my most memorable evenings was a farewell for Marine Lt. Gabriel Ledeen, who was shipping off to pre-surge Iraq. That night we brought our three young daughters to his mom and dad’s house, so they might remember the pride and anxiety of families whose sacrifices enable ours to sleep safely at night. Gabriel Ledeen is no longer on active duty but has been followed into the Corps by a brother who is: Lt. Daniel Ledeen.

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Published for The Wall Street Journal, December 13, 2011

In the church of Kathleen Sebelius, there is little room for dissent. “We are in a war,” the Health and Human Services Secretary declared to cheers at a recent NARAL Pro-Choice America fund-raiser. Give the lady her due: Her actions mostly match her words.

Mrs. Sebelius’s militancy explains the shock her allies are now feeling after last Wednesday’s decision to overrule the Food and Drug Administration on Plan B, a morning-after pill. The FDA had proposed allowing over-the-counter sales, which would give girls as young as 11 or 12 access without either a prescription or a parent. Now the secretary’s allies are howling about her “caving in” to the Catholic bishops.

On this score they needn’t worry. Notwithstanding the unexpected burst of common sense on Plan B, the great untold story remains the intolerance so beloved of self-styled progressives. In this Mrs. Sebelius has proved herself one of the administration’s most faithful practitioners: here watering down conscience protections for nurses and doctors who don’t want to participate in abortions; there yanking funding for a top-rated program for victims of sexual trafficking run by the Catholic bishops, because they will not sign on to the NARAL agenda; soon to impose a new HHS mandate that will require health-insurance plans to cover contraception, sterilization and drugs known to induce abortion.

Alas for her president, her zeal for this agenda has yielded two unintended consequences. Within her party, it is creating a rift between the Planned Parenthood wing and the president’s Catholic and religious supporters. Outside her party, it is illuminating the danger of equating bigger government with a more just society.

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