Published for www.nationalreview.com/corner, February 2, 2012

Amidst the assorted personal attacks and lunar colonization strategies in last Thursday’s Florida debate, Rick Santorum made an actual substantive argument that had oddly been largely absent from the debates until then: That Mitt Romney would have trouble making the case against Obamacare because the Democrats will point to Obamacare’s resemblance in some important respects to the health-care reform Romney helped enact in Massachusetts while he was governor.

The repeal of Obamacare is among the most pressing domestic priorities for the next president (second only to reviving the economy), and is among the most potent political weapons for Republicans in the coming election. The Democrats will certainly try everything they can to neutralize the advantage, and they have already started making the case that Obamacare was just the same thing as Romneycare. Romney’s answer last week—which focused on the fact that Obamacare was a one-size-fits-all federal law—suggests he is not well prepared to deflect that argument and make a wholehearted case against Obamacare. In fact, more than anything his answer suggests that he has not internalized the real case against Obamacare, and for an actual reform of our system of health-care financing.

In the latest NR, Ramesh and I have a piece (which is now up online here) that tries to suggest what his answer should have been, and should be in the fall should he win the nomination. As we note, the very argument that Obamacare was based on a state solution (let alone the amazing fact that Obamacare’s own champions make that argument) is itself proof that Obamacare was not even intended (let alone well designed) to address the actual problems with our system—problems that are caused by a series of badly misguided federal policies (above all Medicare’s fee-for-service structure, Medicaid’s state-federal structure, and the distorting influence of the tax exemption for employer-provided coverage), and which the states must all live with. Romneycare was one (in our view ill-advised and unsuccessful) attempt to live with those problems. But whatever you think of it as a state solution, surely a federal solution would not simply live with our badly broken federal health-care architecture but would fix it instead.

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Published for www.commentarymagazine.com, January 30, 2012

When even E.J. Dionne can’t quite bring himself to defend the Obama administration’s assault on religious liberty, you know the president must have a real problem. In his column today, Dionne tries his best to avoid making his point too clear. He spends most of his time laying out all the nice things Obama has said to liberal Catholics and only then turns to how Obama has now utterly betrayed them. But the point is straightforward: The president is willing to pay lip service to religious liberty, but when it comes time for action he wants to enforce the agenda of the radical left and to push civil society out of the government’s way. Dionne will presumably forgive the president as soon as he mentions income inequality again, but other religious voters who took a chance on him might not.

And they’re right to be angry and worried. The particulars of what the Obamacare insurance mandate rule does, and the unwillingness of the administration to exempt religious employers, are just stunning. Religious institutions are basically going to be fined for holding views regarding contraception, sterilization, and abortion that are different from the Obama administration’s views. For instance, Notre Dame University, which employs more than 5,000 people, is going to be given the choice of either expressly violating its religious convictions or paying a $10 million fine to the federal government. It’s bad enough that any employer with a moral objection has to spend his money this way, but it is especially egregious to compel religious institutions to do so.

As many have noted around here, the fact of the administration’s willingness to do this sheds light on its hostility to (or at the very least its contempt for) religious liberty. But it’s not quite that simple. This incident (and especially the nature of the exemption that the administration was willing to grant, which is essentially an exemption for actual houses of worship but not for other religiously-affiliated institutions) also sheds light on a very deeply rooted problem in our tradition of religious liberty itself—a problem that should cause those of us inclined to seek recourse in “conscience protection” and religious exemptions to pause and think.

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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 www.nationalreview.com/corner, January 25, 2012

Toward the end of his State of the Union address, President Obama delivered a paragraph that was so blatantly absurd and self contradictory as to actually become clarifying—so incoherent that it shed a bright light on his thinking and his grave dilemma. It’s hard to believe he actually said this, but he did:

I’m a Democrat. But I believe what Republican Abraham Lincoln believed: That Government should do for people only what they cannot do better by themselves, and no more. That’s why my education reform offers more competition, and more control for schools and States. That’s why we’re getting rid of regulations that don’t work. That’s why our health care law relies on a reformed private market, not a Government program.

The examples he chose of course jump out as ludicrous: K-12 education in America is thoroughly dominated by the government, and the president has not proposed to make it less so. (And state governments, by the way, are also governments.) “Getting rid of regulations that don’t work” is certainly an unusual way to describe the regulatory agenda of this administration, which has involved a series of unprecedented delegations of authority to regulators (especially in health care and financial regulation) and which continues every day to spew forth an interminable array of costly, complex, and highly assertive rules that will give the federal government (and the executive agencies in particular) previously unimagined discretion over vast swaths of our economy. And “relies on a reformed private market, not a government program” is surely the most unabashedly dishonest and Orwellian way yet devised to describe Obamacare—a law that begins from the premise that the solution to our health care financing problems is to make the government an even greater provider and purchaser of health insurance, would spend well over a trillion dollars in the coming decade on yet another health care entitlement program and on the expansion of an unreformed Medicaid system, would micromanage the insurance industry in ways likely to make it even less efficient, would employ even heavier price controls in an otherwise unreformed Medicare system, and would raise half a trillion dollars in taxes on employment, investment, and medical research.

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Published for www.nationalreview.com/corner, January 20, 2012

Dan, bless you for the nourishing respite from breaking news about open marriages and effective tax rates. A great post on equal rights and equal abilities. And let’s not overlook Hobbes’s brilliant little joke in the passage you cite: When he argues that we know that reason is equally distributed because every man is satisfied with his own share, he’s saying that in fact it is vanity, not reason, that is equally distributed. And it is the equal distribution of vanity that is at the heart of his liberal project—for good and for ill.

It’s also worth noting that the claim that reason is equally distributed and, as Hobbes suggests, prudence is merely a function of experience and learning “which equal time equally bestows on all men in those things they equally apply themselves unto” is actually an argument for social inequality, not for social equality. It suggest that those men who have more time to apply themselves to the study and practice of politics, for instance, will be better suited to rule—and in practice, the people who will have that kind of time are likely to be wealthy leisured people. That can’t be what the left in Britain intends, but it’s what they’re implying.

Edmund Burke made this case very explicitly, arguing that he believed that everyone had more or less the same natural potential but different people had different opportunities to develop their potential, and only those who had the most such opportunity should be trusted with government. In the Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs, Burke writes:

To be bred in a place of estimation; To see nothing low and sordid from one’s infancy; To be taught to respect one’s self; To be habituated to the censorial inspection of the public eye; To look early to public opinion; To stand upon such elevated ground as to be enabled to take a large view of the wide-spread and infinitely diversified combinations of men and affairs in a large society; To have leisure to read, to reflect, to converse; To be enabled to draw the court and attention of the wise and learned wherever they are to be found; To be habituated in armies to command and to obey; To be taught to despise danger in the pursuit of honor and duty; To be formed to the greatest degree of vigilance, foresight, and circumspection, in a state of things in which no fault is committed with impunity, and the slightest mistakes draw on the most ruinous consequences—To be led to a guarded and regulated conduct, from a sense that you are considered as an instructor of your fellow-citizens in their highest concerns, and that you act as a reconciler between God and man—To be employed as an administrator of law and justice, and to be thereby amongst the first benefactors to mankind—To be a professor of high science, or of liberal and ingenuous art—To be amongst rich traders, who from their success are presumed to have sharp and vigorous understandings, and to possess the virtues of diligence, order, constancy, and regularity, and to have cultivated an habitual regard to commutative justice—These are the circumstances of men, that form what I should call a natural aristocracy, without which there is no nation.

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Published for www.nationalreview.com/corner, January 14, 2012

For at least the third time this month (the other two are here and here) the Wall Street Journal this weekend says that Rick Santorum “wants to triple the per-child tax credit.”

As a champion of the Ponnuru-Stein tax reform, I would back such a move, assuming it could be done in a revenue-neutral way, and given his past positions it’s possible that Santorum would too. But that is not what he has proposed. As his website makes clear (and as he has said), he proposes “tripling the personal deduction for each child” while leaving the tax credit unchanged. The difference between tripling the credit and the deduction is no small matter. In fact, given lower rates Santorum proposes more generally, I’m not sure tripling the personal deduction is worth the trouble. But in any case, if the Journal is going to write about his proposal (and especially if they’re going to criticize it at some length in an editorial, as they did here) they ought to get it right.

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Published for www.nationalreview.com/corner, January 12, 2012

The fall issue of National Affairs included an essay by Peter Skerry about the evolution (for good and for ill) of the leaders and institutions of the American Muslim community and the complicated challenges they pose to the larger society. On January 25, the American Enterprise Institute will be hosting a discussion of the piece, in which Skerry will be joined by four prominent experts on various sides of the subject: Souheil Ghannouchi, Hillel Fradkin, Justin Vaisse, and NR’s own Andy McCarthy. The conversation will be moderated by AEI’s Gary Schmitt. The event is free and open to all, but you need to register, which you can do here.

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Published for www.nationalreview.com/corner, January 12, 2012

NRO readers presumably don’t need any help knowing that the latest book by Richard Brookhiser, whatever it happens to be, is well worth their time. But having just finished the superb new biography of James Madison he published a few months ago, I have to offer a word of praise anyway.

Madison, like a lot of Brookhiser’s subjects, is someone about whom so much has been written that it’s hard to imagine a new biography being genuinely new. But by telling his story through the lens of an appreciation for (indeed a love of) politics, warts and all, Brookhiser manages to tell a fresh and powerful story. We’re used to Madison the political thinker, and this book conveys the power of his ideas of course, but what it does better than anything I’ve read on the father of the Constitution is tell the story of Madison the political actor. And it tells it in a highly readable, crisp, lean way that only a historian with utter confidence in his grasp of his subject could manage. If you haven’t read it yet, do.

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Published for www.nationalreview.com, January 11, 2012

I know we’re all supposed to think that the primaries are poised to turn out a weak Republican nominee and that President Obama will swoop in this fall and carry the day with some brilliant pincer move that simultaneously dubs the Republican too extreme, too moderate, too boring, and too weird. And I suppose it’s possible that the president and his team will suddenly turn out to possess keen political skills they have been hiding somewhere for the past three years. But can we spend a moment pondering the approach that team Obama seems to be hatching so far? Looking at what the administration and the Obama campaign have been doing and saying in the buildup to the general election, it has been awfully difficult to find evidence of a plausible strategy.

Obama has some very daunting problems to contend with, of course. His record of accomplishments, amassed mostly in his first two years in office, is extremely unpopular and so could not be the centerpiece of a reelection campaign. He has presided over the largest deficits in American history and nearly doubled the national debt. He pushed through a large stimulus bill in 2009 that is taken to have been a failure (in no small part because the administration defined metrics for success, like keeping unemployment from rising above 8%, that have plainly not been met) and a health-care reform in 2010 that started out quite unpopular and has gotten only more so with time. Meanwhile the economy remains weak, unemployment remains high, and 80 percent of voters are dissatisfied with the direction of the country.

This has left the president in an exceptionally challenging political position in a re-election year. At the beginning of November of 2010, on the day Republicans took 63 House seats and 5 senate seats from the Democrats, Obama’s job approval in Gallup’s daily tracking poll was 44 percent; today it is 43 percent. Party identification in November 2010, according to Gallup, was 31 percent Democrat, 26 percent Republican, and 41 percent independent; in December 2011 it was 27 percent Democrat, 30 percent Republican, and 42 percent independent. Republicans held a 5 point lead in Rasmussen’s generic congressional ballot that November, and today they have a 6 point lead.

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Published for The Corner at www.nationalreview.com on November 4, 2011

Having long criticized Mitt Romney for being too vague and risk averse in laying out how he would address the country’s major fiscal problems, I have to say that I was very impressed with what he had to say in today’s speech on spending, and especially with what he had to say about Medicare reform.

Some further thoughts and details below the fold:

A willingness to speak plainly about the scope of Medicare’s immense fiscal problems and to offer serious solutions is an absolutely essential test of seriousness for anyone who wants to be a leader on the national stage today. Our long-term debt problem is almost entirely a health-care cost problem, and therefore in turn a Medicare problem. Most congressional Democrats deny the very existence of the problem, or insist that Obamacare will fix it when in fact Obamacare promises only more of the same inefficiency and price controls that have caused Medicare’s woes. President Obama has at times noted the scope of the problem and acknowledged that, despite Obamacare’s enactment, “If you look at the numbers, then Medicare in particular will run out of money and we will not be able to sustain that program no matter how much taxes go up.” But he has refused to consider any steps that could actually address that problem.

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