Entries for August 2005

Alas, I was wrong about New Orleans in my post two days ago. The city evidently survived the hurricane winds but, as this is written, Wednesday morning, floodwaters are still coming in through the breached levees and are rising. Looting seems to be rampant. We may be watching the destruction of a historic and vibrant American city. New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin says residents may not be able to return to the city for 12 to 16 weeks. But the American impulse to rebuild is strong.

What can we do? The least we can do is to contribute to relief efforts. Instapundit has a list of organizations to which you can donate. My choice is the Salvation Army. In July 1967, I was working as an intern in the office of the mayor of Detroit when the city suffered one of the worst urban riots in American history. At one point I was asked to find 2,000 mattresses for the men who had been jailed. I called various organizations and could come up with nary a mattress. Then I called the Salvation Army. Before the day was over, the Salvation Army delivered. I do not share the Salvation Army's religious beliefs. But I know from experience that they can get things done. I've sent them $500. Please send as much as you can send to the Salvation Army or to one of the other worthy organizations on Instapundit. Or consider contributing to one of the churches identified by Hugh Hewitt. Some 78 blogs have signed up to make tomorrow (September 1) Hurricane Katrina: Blog for Relief Day. But I don't think anyone would mind if you contributed a day early.

"President's Poll Rating Falls to a New Low," reads the headline in this morning's Washington Post. The accompanying article by Dan Balz and Richard Morin seems to me a reasonable account of the poll results. But they need to be kept in perspective. A few points of my own:

The poll finds that 45 percent approve of George W. Bush's job performance and 53 percent disapprove. This is below the 50 percent approval Bush got in the Post poll just before the November election and the 52 percent he got in January. But only 5 percent below: not a huge movement by historical standards. As the Post's own chart shows, Bush's job rating zoomed upward after September 11 and again, to a lesser extent, during conventional military operations in Iraq. But apart from that it has tended to hover around the 50 percent level. This is in line with the view I have frequently taken that Americans are polarized and closely divided over this president and with the results of the 2000, 2002 and 2004 elections.

The Post poll samples adults and does not screen for voters or likely voters. The latter groups tend to be more Republican. Only 29 percent of the adults in the Post sample identify as Republicans, well below the 37 percent who did so in the 2004 NEP exit poll. So it's likely that if the Post had screened for likely voters, Bush's job approval rating would have been a few points higher, most likely just under 50 percent. This is much higher than the job approval ratings of Richard Nixon or Jimmy Carter at some points during their administrations, or for that matter of Ronald Reagan at some points in his. It may be Bush's lowest job rating in Post polls, but it's hardly a disastrous number.

Does this result suggest that, if the November 2006 elections were held today, the Republicans would do worse than they did in 2002 and 2004, when they won majorities of the popular vote for the House and, in 2004, for the presidency? Probably. But not by much. The key factor in those elections was one which is hard to gauge from polls: turnout. In both 2002 and 2004 Republicans won on turnout. You might take the Post results as an indication that Republicans would not have that advantage if the 2006 election were held today. But maybe not. And it doesn't provide much basis for concluding what the balance of turnout will be 14 months from now.

Another interesting thing about the Post poll is that it shows Bush getting similar ratings on Iraq to those he got six months ago–despite mainstream media concentration on casualties in Iraq and Cindy Sheehan's shrewdly staged demonstrations in Crawford. By 51 to 38 percent, the public said America is winning the war there. When given alternatives on troop levels, 21 percent of adults said we should send more troops there, 35 percent said keep the same amount of troops, 27 percent said reduce the number of troops but not withdraw immediately, and 13 percent said withdraw immediately. In other words, only 1 in 8 voters agrees with Cindy Sheehan on this issue. These numbers suggest that disapproval of Bush's course in Iraq is voiced not only by those who want troop reductions or withdrawal but also by those who want more troops and presumably a more aggressive prosecution of the military effort.

Further interesting information comes from Scott Rasmussen's daily polling. Rasmussen, unlike the Post, weights for party identification, which means that each day's sample is made up of the same proportions of self-identified Republicans and Democrats. His numbers proved to be very close to the 2004 election results. Rasmussen's three-day rolling averages showed Bush's job approval pretty steady most of the year and then dipping to 43 and 44 percent in mid-August—when mainstream media was o.d.ing on Cindy Sheehan. It's back up to 49 percent approval and 50 percent disapproval today. That's within the margin of error of the Post poll.

On Iraq, Rasmussen reports that "while 79 percent agree with President Bush on the importance of the Iraqi mission, just 48 percent believe that success is likely. . . . The public concerns about the War effort are primarily about competence, not ideology." In addition, 59 percent say it is very important and 20 percent say it is somewhat important "for Iraq to become a stable country that rejects terrorism."

These numbers taken together seem to me to show problems for both parties. For Bush and the Republicans, the problem is how to achieve success and how to convince Americans, in the face of a hostile, negative-minded mainstream media, that we have achieved success. For the Democrats, the problem is to determine what stance to take on Iraq when the stance of the party's vociferous left wing—immediate withdrawal—is unpopular and is seen as likely to produce results the great majority of the American people don't want to see.

The New Republic's Jeff Rosen has an interesting article in the New York Times Magazine on legal issues that may face a confirmed Justice John Roberts. He makes an interesting point on racial quotas and preferences, which he refers to as "affirmative action." (via the admirable www.theamericanscene.com). Rosen raises the following issue:

Affirmative-action programs may also be challenged by people other than disappointed white applicants. As America becomes increasingly multiracial, there may be debates over who, precisely, gets to qualify for racial preferences. Akhil Reed Amar, a colleague of [Peter] Schuck's at Yale Law School, told me that people might eventually resort to genetic tests to prove their racial heritage.

"I can imagine a predominantly white person who has been rejected because of an affirmative-action program saying, 'I should benefit from it because I am of mixed race, and I can prove it with sophisticated DNA analysis showing the percentage of my genes that came from Africa,' " he said. "The university might respond: 'It's not a genetic test but a social understanding test, and since people don't perceive you as black, you haven't been subject to discrimination.' "

In response to disputes like this, Amar suggested, state legislatures might conclude that "the social-understanding test is unacceptably fuzzy, and at least science can give us some rules. So the government might require a genetic test because it's easy to administer." If, however, a state legislature were to declare that anyone with a drop of African-American blood is entitled to be considered black, the policy might provoke a bitter Supreme Court challenge. "It would recall the shameful history in times of slavery and Jim Crow," Schuck told me, "in which one drop of blood was sufficient to render an individual black for the laws of slavery. And it would be extremely distasteful for blacks and whites." Still, Schuck acknowledged, the problem of deciding who is eligible for affirmative action will grow only more urgent in an era of shrinking public resources. "I think as pressure on affirmative-action programs increases," he said, "affirmative-action programs will have to make refined judgments about eligibility."

Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, as Rosen notes, in 2003 provided the decisive fifth vote to preserve racial quotas and preferences (provided they are slightly disguised) in university admissions in Grutter v. Bollinger. Near the end of the opinion she wrote, "We expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary." Roberts, he speculates reasonably, may take a different view and provide a decisive fifth vote for the proposition that racial quotas and preferences violate the 14th Amendment. But if he doesn't, the question of who qualifies for quotas will remain with us—and will get more and more dicey.

I would submit that it is already pretty dicey. I have read complaints that blacks admitted to elite universities were disproportionately of immigrant stock or from high-income families. These are not the kind of people, it is argued, for whom quotas were designed. So do we need subquotas for blacks who are the descendants of slaves or who come from low-income families? Should applicants be required to document that they had ancestors who were slaves?

The Hispanic category, invented by the Census Bureau for the 1970 Census, poses even more of a problem. Who is Hispanic? Presumably people with descendants from Spanish-speaking Latin America. But what about Brazilians, who speak Portuguese? What about Spaniards? When Crown Prince Felipe of Spain attended Georgetown University, did administrators there count him as one of their Hispanic students? I would bet they did. But he is also a direct descendant of Emperor Charles V and King Louis XIV: hard to see him as part of a victim class.

Back in the 1980s, California Rep. Tony Coelho, who is of Portuguese descent, sought to become a member of the Hispanic Caucus. When asked how he could consider himself Hispanic, he presented a map of the Roman Empire in which the entire Iberian peninsula was labeled "Hispania." The caucus let him in, either because his argument was persuasive or, perhaps more to the point, because he was chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

Coelho might also have argued that Portugal was ruled for 60 years (1580-1640) by the kings of Spain. I have considered classifying myself as Hispanic for a similar reason. Some of my ancestors came from Sicily, and Sicily was ruled for 300 years by the kings of Spain. By my calculation that makes me five times as Hispanic as Tony Coelho.

The problem of racial classification raised by Jeff Rosen can be addressed in only two ways. One is self-classification: Everybody gets to say what category he or she falls into. The other is classification by someone else—the government, the college, or the university.

If we choose self-classification, which seems to be the case today, the system is waiting to be gamed. Boston University Prof. Angelo Codevilla is the descendant of a 17th-century Spaniard who was sent to Milan, which was then ruled by the king of Spain, and remained there. He considers himself to be of Italian descent, but he told me some years ago that he didn't know whether his children classified themselves as Hispanic when applying to college.

If we choose classification by someone else, then we need a model. History provides us with examples: the race classification laws of apartheid South Africa, the post-Reconstruction racial code of Louisiana. University administrators could make up their own. For that is where racial quotas and preferences take us: to race codes. Silly me, I thought the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was taking us in the other direction.

Here's hoping Justice Roberts spares us all from this problem.

In my August 25 post I made a mistake.

Austin Bay, syndicated columnist, novelist, blogger, and reserve Army colonel who has served in Iraq, is always worth reading. Here, in response to a challenge by blogger Jeff Jarvis, he argues that the Bush administration should try to engage the mainstream media, despite its bias and hostility, rather than engage in what he and Jarvis agree is a policy of "rollback."

The blogger I cited was not Jeff Jarvis, of www.buzzmachine.com, but Jay Rosen, of New York University. Since I linked to the correct post, many readers may well have caught the error and therefore were not materially misled. Still, I'm sorry for the sloppiness, and I apologize to Jay Rosen and to Jeff Jarvis. In his courteous E-mail pointing out my mistake, Rosen notes that many people confuse him and Jarvis and wonders why. My reply was that both have first names starting with J and both seem (to me anyway) to specialize in intelligent press criticism not from a right-of-center perspective—a small category, I think.

If you want to read something truly alarming about Vladimir Putin's regime in Russia, read Anders Aslund's report published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Aslund, who has been writing perceptively about Russia since the late 1980s, says that Putin since the March 2004 election has succeeded in removing all centers of power but his own, and that he has made one public blunder after another—launching the Khodorovsky prosecution, botching the Beslan school hostage seizure, intervening unsuccessfully in the election in Ukraine and ineffectively reforming social benefits. He writes that "the positive status quo ante can hardly be restored" and speculates that Putin may be forced to step down before his term ends in 2008, by a coup of KGB veterans or by a popular uprising.

Aslund is more hopeful on some points. He says that Russia, thanks in part to Putin's first-term economic reforms, has a market economy and should be welcomed by the United States into the WTO. And, he says, the United States should cooperate with Russia on energy production. But overall the picture he paints is bleak. And this in a country which, as he does not note, is in deep and dangerous demographic decline.

I have made three trips to Russia, in October 1989, July 1996, and March 2000. In October 1989 there was a feeling of great hope, as the somewhat freely elected Supreme Soviet convened and the old system was being challenged. Ordinary Russians for the first time in years felt comfortable sharing their hopes and views with American reporters. In July 1996, there was more guarded hope, as Boris Yeltsin ran against Communist Genadi Zhuganov and, with the help of the newly rich oligarchs who controlled the media, won. Voters were more guarded now, and there were signs that economic reforms had been botched; but things seemed headed in a good direction.

In March 2000, as Vladimir Putin ran for president with no serious opposition, voters were more guarded. They were supporting Putin mostly, but with the resigned air; they seemed to be saying, "I hope the new czar is a good czar." Now the picture Aslund paints is eerily similar to the autocratic, terrified, potentially violent Russia depicted by Alexis de Tocqueville's contemporary, Astolphe de Custine, in Empire of the Czars. Deeply depressing.

New Orleans has survived Katrina, it seems, and thank goodness. There's lots of damage, but a direct hit might well have destroyed the city, as the National Weather Service projected. We Americans tend to think we can handle any contingency. But sometimes nature can inflict destruction we cannot prevent. San Francisco was destroyed by an earthquake 99 years ago. New Orleans evidently narrowly escaped destruction by a hurricane today.

So why did Americans build a major city on land mostly below sea level and largely surrounded by water? We could try to blame the French, who established Nouvelle Orleans in 1718; but of course New Orleans became an American city in 1803, and we wanted it before that. Thomas Jefferson, as Christopher Hitchens reminds us in his splendid short biography, as early as 1786 wrote, "The navigation of the Mississippi we must have." In 1803 he wrote to his negotiators in Paris a passage he intended them to show Napoleon and Talleyrand: "There is on the globe one single spot, the possessor of which is our natural and habitual enemy. It is New Orleans, through which the produce of three-eighths of our territory must pass to market, and from its fertility it will ere long yield more than half of our whole produce and contain more than half our inhabitants." The French, unable to defend New Orleans after they were driven out of Haiti, took the hint.

At the outbreak of the Civil War, New Orleans was our sixth-largest city, behind New York, Philadelphia, Brooklyn (until 1898 a separate city), Baltimore, and Boston, and far larger, at 168,000, than any other city in the Confederate South; Charleston had 40,000 and Richmond 37,000. Today metro New Orleans, with 1,274,000, ranks much lower in population. But it's still economically vital because of oil. The hurricane forced the shutdown of the Louisiana Offshore Oil Port, the largest such port in the country, of offshore oil rigs which usually produce 600,000 barrels a day and of refineries which process 1.6 million barrels a day. Oil prices in the Asian markets shot up over $70 a barrel.

But the American economy can take the hit. What is more important is that thousands of people who might have died will go on living and that this unique and fascinating city has not been reduced to rubble.

Read if you want those beach thrillers in the last two remaining summer weekends. But be ready for more serious reading fodder in the weeks ahead. Here are four recommendations:

• Tony Blankley's The West's Last Chance: Will We Win the Clash of Civilizations? You should already know Tony from his work as a columnist, panelist on The McLaughlin Group and editorial page editor of the Washington Times. Here he takes several steps back from his daily work and looks at how Europe, America, and Islamists have developed in different and dangerous ways, and he recommends specific steps to prosecute the war against those who seek to destroy our civilization. Publication date is September 12; with any luck it's in your bookstore now.
• Pedro Sanjuan's The U.N. Gang: A Memoir of Incompetence, Corruption, Espionage, Anti-Semitism and Islamic Extremism at the UN Secretariat. The title seems to pretty much say it all. This book by a former U.N. staffer comes with blurbs from Jeane Kirkpatrick, Abraham Foxman, and Lawrence Eagleburger, is slated for release September 13, just in time for the September session of the United Nations. Champions of the U.N.-as-it-is are already squawking about U.S. Ambassador John Bolton's moves to reform this ailing institution.
• Laurent Murawiec's Princes of Darkness: The Saudi Assault on the West. Murawiec is analyst at the Hudson Institute in Washington and the book was published in French in 2003 and ruffled a lot of Saudi feathers. The Saudis may argue that they've cleaned up their act since the book was written. Even if so, it's good to know what they've been doing for so many years.
• Thomas Barnett's Blueprint for Action: A Future Worth Creating. This is the PowerPoint guru's follow-up to The Pentagon's New Map, in which Barnett presents his recommendations for "A Department for What Lies Between War and Peace." Barnett argues that the military wasn't ready for peacekeeping in Iraq and that it has made mistakes. But, he goes on, "no public institution responds to failure better and more quickly than the U.S. military. And it has." This book will be widely read in the Pentagon, and should be widely read beyond. It's pre-order right now, but see if you can get (as I did) a reviewer copy.