Entries for November 2006

In 2004 George W. Bush carried 31 states, which elect 62 U.S. senators. Yet there will be only 49 Republicans in the Senate that takes office January 3. Why the shortfall? The answer, I think, is unforced errors. Let me make a list of them here.

Let's start with Who Really Cares: The Surprising Truth About Compassionate Conservatism: America's Charity Divide; Who Gives, Who Doesn't, and Why It Matters, by Arthur Brooks of Syracuse University's Maxwell School. Brooks, a political scientist who grew up in Seattle in what he says was a liberal home, examined the data and came up with a conclusion that he found unlikely enough that he went back and checked the data again: Conservatives give more to charity than liberals. As he explains, it's a little more complicated than that. Fact 1 is that Americans give a lot to charity:

Sunday's Washington Post had an excellent front-page story on Medicare Part D, the new Medicare prescription drug benefit. Part D, which took effect at the beginning of this year, seems to have been a success. Some 22.5 million seniors have enrolled, and the cost–$26 billion–has turned out to be lower than projected. And "Medicare has received new bids indicating that its average per-person subsidy could drop by 15 percent in 2007, to $79.90 a month." Polls indicate that about 80 percent of enrollees are satisfied with the program.

I've just finished reading Robert Gates's memoir, From the Shadows: The Ultimate Insider's Story of Five Presidents and How They Won the Cold War. It's a well-written, thoughtful book, leavened by occasional injections of nerdy humor. Gates was a career CIA employee on the analysis rather than the operations side of the agency, and the only CIA analyst ever to become director of Central Intelligence. He specialized in the Soviet Union, though he never set foot in the U.S.S.R. until May 1989. His rapid ascent was amazing. Recruited while a graduate student at Indiana University, he served in the Air Force from 1967 to 1969, at the CIA from 1969 to 1974, at the National Security Council from 1974 to 1979, back to the CIA again from 1979 to 1989, where he became deputy director for intelligence in 1982. He was nominated to be director of central intelligence in 1987, but withdrew his nomination after it became clear that a Senate obsessed with Iran-contra would not confirm him. He was deputy national security adviser from 1989 to 1991 and then director of central intelligence from 1991 to 1993.

There's a great article by John Lyons on the front page of today's Wall Street Journal, headlined "Populism Loses Appeal for Voters In Latin America." At this time last year, with elections looming in Bolivia, Chile, Costa Rica, Peru, Mexico, Brazil, Nicaragua, and Ecuador, many analysts were predicting victories for candidates of the left, and Venezuela's Hugo Chávez was salivating at the prospect of gaining numerous anti-American allies in the region. But the only Chávez-backed candidates to win were Evo Morales in backward Bolivia and Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua, and the latter claimed to be much more moderate than in his Sandinista days. Alan García and Felipe Calderón won in Peru and Mexico after running ads tying their opponents to Chávez. Lula da Silva, re-elected in Brazil, and Michele Bachelet, elected in Chile, are both center-leftists whose policies are not significantly out of line with the "Washington consensus" favoring free markets and free trade. I've written on this subject before.

Rep. Charles Rangel, now about to become a member of the majority party again after 12 years, has revived his proposal for a military draft. This is about as absurd a public-policy proposal as I can imagine. Contrary to Rangel's claims–talking points recycled from the Vietnam era, when we did have a draft–military recruits are not drawn predominantly from the lower economic ranks of society. Quite to the contrary, as a recent report from the Heritage Foundation makes clear, military recruits tend to come from above the national economic median. Here's my earlier post about the Heritage report. Moreover, when you take a look at the numbers, there is no need for a draft. In World War II, we were a nation of 130 million that needed a military of approximately 12 million–nearly 1 in 10 of the entire population. Today, we are a nation of 300 million that needs a military of, at most, about 3 million–1 in 100 persons in the entire population.

The lead story on the front page of Monday's Washington Post will not come as a total surprise to readers of this blog. In that post six days ago I focused on the review of military operations in Iraq initiated by Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Peter Pace last September. The Post story by reporter Thomas Ricks focuses on this review, whose proceedings, it says, "are so secret that officials asked to help it have not even been told its title or mandate." Bottom line, citing unnamed "officials": "The group conducting the review is likely to recommend a combination of a small, short-term increase in U.S. troops and a long-term commitment to stepped-up training and advising of Iraqi forces." Ricks goes on to speculate: "The hybrid version of 'Go Long' may be remarkably close to the recommendation that the Iraq Study Group, led by former secretary of state James A. Baker III and former representative Lee H. Hamilton (D-Ind.). That group's findings, expected to be issued next month, are said to focus on changing the emphasis of U.S. military operations from combating the insurgency to training Iraqis, and also to find ways to increase security in Baghdad and bring neighboring countries into talks about stabilizing Iraq."