Entries for June 2008

Blogger extraordinaire Mickey Kaus notes the defeat of Republican Rep. Chris Cannon by a 60 percent to 40 percent vote in Utah's Third Congressional District, by many measures the most Republican district in the nation. This was the third time Cannon had faced tough primary fights from opponents who had attacked him for his stands on immigration. Cannon sponsored a bill to provide in-state tuition for the children of illegal immigrants who graduate from high school and supported comprehensive immigration laws (with guest worker and legalization as well as border and workplace enforcement provisions). Cannon's 2004 and 2006 primary opponents were poorly funded and poorly organized; his opponent this time, Jason Chaffetz, a former aide to Gov. Jon Huntsman, was poorly funded but well organized.

Kaus quotes me as writing, after Cannon survived the 2006 primary, that his type of stand on immigration was "not political death." His defeat this year makes it clear that while such stands are not always political death, they can be sometimes; and I should add that you don't see many 12-year incumbents defeated 60 percent to 40 percent in a primary.

The Supreme Court on June 26 ruled that the Second Amendment to the Constitution confers, as it says, a right to keep and bear arms and that the District of Columbia law effectively prohibiting the possession of handguns by most citizens is unconstitutional. I've written on this issue in a column that appeared shortly after the Virginia Tech massacre, in this blog twice. In the column I noted Judge Laurence Silberman's strong opinion in the D.C. Circuit, which the Supreme Court has just affirmed, and went on:

Limited regulation is allowed, Silberman wrote, but not a total ban. Somewhere on the road between a law banning possession of nuclear weapons and banning all guns, the Second Amendment stands in the way. This is the view as well of the liberal constitutional law scholar Laurence Tribe.

And now it is the view of the Supreme Court itself.

Not Exactly a Crime is the title of a book on America's vice presidents published in 1972—a year before Vice President Spiro Agnew was forced to resign for actually committing a crime. The office of vice president has long been the butt of jokes—you know the punch lines—but as we await Barack Obama's and John McCain's choices for vice president, we do so with the knowledge that vice presidents in the last five administrations have been important officers of government. (Yes, including Dan Quayle; see Bob Woodward and David Broder's book). How the vice presidency has been transformed is an interesting story that takes us from the Founding Fathers to recent history.

The Framers of the Constitution created the vice presidency to solve the problem of succession. They expected that electors meeting in state capitals would vote for two candidates from different states, with the No. 2 vote-getter becoming vice president. It worked well twice. Then the unexpected emergence of political parties produced bizarre results. In 1796, John Adams was elected president and his opponent, Thomas Jefferson, vice president. In 1800, the electors produced a tie between Jefferson and his ticket-mate, Aaron Burr, broken only by an opposition Federalist in the House of Representatives. The Twelfth Amendment promptly passed, providing that electors cast separate votes for president and VP. Parties would nominate one man for each office.

That's a question that's going to be raised a lot between now and November, not least by Barack Obama, as he did at this Jacksonville fundraiser. "They're going to try to make you afraid of me. He's young and inexperienced and he's got a funny name. And did I mention he's black?"

Then there's the lead story in last Sunday's Washington Post, headlined "3 in 10 Americans Admit to Race Bias." The Web version of the article does not include a link to the questionnaire and responses, so I can't judge what "admit to race bias" means. But the writers also separated respondents according to a "racial sensitivity index." As you might expect, voters with a high sensitivity index tended to vote for Obama, those with a low sensitivity index for John McCain. How do they judge racial sensitivity?

My Creators Syndicate column illustrates how a couple of key issues—Iraq and energy—seem to be working differently in the presidential election from what just about everyone expected a few weeks or months ago. The success of the surge strategy in Iraq and the sudden appearance of $4 gas have undermined narratives that seemed to be working strongly for Barack Obama and the Democrats.

There does seem to have been a big shift of public opinion on oil drilling offshore and in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. This seems to be one case where opinion doesn't move proportionately in line with an external development (gasoline prices) but moves discontinuously, with a sharp shift once a psychologically critical point is reached ($4). Newt Gingrich has now gotten more than 1 million signatures on his online "drill now" petition. And pollster John Zogby reports, in a press release.

It has been documented in National Review Online by Peter Wehner that Barack Obama, far from always taking the same position on the war in Iraq, has in fact taken different positions at different times—don't go in, stay in, get out, roughly in order.

Now comes Belmont Club blogger Richard Fernandez with a Pajamas Media blog post suggesting, though not quite charging, that Obama's changes in position were prompted by concern for his longtime patron and friend Tony Rezko, who sought a contract to build a $150 million power plant in Iraqi Kurdistan with some help from a couple of Chicago-based Iraqi-Americans.

It's a story that is, I think, worth the attention of investigative journalists. At the same time, one can imagine other reasons for Obama to change from opposing a timetable to leave Iraq in June 2006 and support of such a timetable in November 2006, besides the rejection of the contract proposal in between. Like the 2006 election results, after which it became pretty clear that a Democratic presidential candidate, particularly one with the asset (for the primary season at least) of having opposed the Iraq war in 2002, would have a much better chance of winning the party's nomination if he came out for a timetable for withdrawal. That might not have seemed such a mandatory position to take five months earlier. That's not a noble motive for Obama's switch, but it's less stomach-crunching than the one Fernandez suggests.

Noemie Emery does me the honor of quoting me at length—and improving on my work—in the current Weekly Standard. Like me, she dissents from the view that Barack Obama is being rejected because of his race. Rather, some voters don't like the particular kind of person he is.

Skeptical? Try this thought experiment. How large is the class of American voters who (a) would not have voted for Colin Powell in 1996 (you'd have to look back on fall 1995 polls to get an idea of this) and (b) would not vote for Barack Obama this year? I would submit it is not very large. Virtually all Republicans and Republican-leaning independents were ready to vote for Powell as a Republican against Bill Clinton. Virtually all Democrats and a very large majority of Democratic-leaning independents are ready to vote for Obama this year.