Entries for July 2008

ANCHORAGE—Sen. Ted Stevens of Alaska has been indicted for making false statements about receiving gifts, primarily from prominent Alaska business executive Bill Allen, the former chairman of Veco, a now defunct oil and construction company, in a major renovation of his home in the ski resort town of Girdwood 40 miles south of Anchorage, and for favorable trades of automobiles. The indictment also alleged that Veco sought favorable treatment from Stevens and that his office did things on behalf of the company. It is almost exactly a year to the day that federal investigators conducted a search of the Girdwood home. This is not the first indictment that has roiled Alaska politics. Several state legislators have been indicted and some convicted of bribery charges; in May 2007, Allen and a Veco subordinate pleaded guilty to paying $400,000 in bribes to state officials.

As it happens, I am in Alaska to deliver a speech. I was able to speak with a few Alaska insiders on Monday, and none seemed to expect an indictment of Stevens or of Congressman-at-Large Don Young, who has also been under investigation—especially so soon before the August 26 primary. Alaska pollster Ivan Moore, who has worked for Democrats and in past years for Republicans, said that most locals believe Stevens did not knowingly take gifts, and Stevens has long maintained that he paid Veco all it billed for the renovations. But he noted that Stevens's and Young's legal predicaments have been a "cumulative embarrassment" for the state. Former Democratic state legislative leader Ethan Berkowitz, who is running for the U.S. House seat, pointed out that he had spoken out on the floor of the legislature against Veco. But all he had to say about Stevens is that he had "a lot of respect for what he's done" over the years. Lt. Gov. Sean Parnell, who is challenging Don Young in the primary, noted that Young has spent more than $1 million of campaign funds on lawyers. On Stevens's primary race against a little-known opponent, Parnell said only, "Most expect the senator to prevail." I stopped by Young's campaign headquarters, but it was shut tight as a drum, and aside from a few fliers on the reception desk, it seemed to have been undisturbed by campaign activity for some time. Young, like Stevens, is in Washington for the last week of session before the August recess.

This is my Creators Syndicate column for this week. I hit pretty hard on the environmental restriction groups, who like to portray themselves as pure representatives of the public interest. But, in fact, the people who run these organizations, just like the people who lobby for oil companies, have an economic motive: They want to keep their jobs. Presumably they aren't paid as well as the oil lobbyists, in some cases not nearly so well, but they're far from starving. They live in comfortable houses or condominiums in one of the nation's most expensive housing markets, they have (or many of them do) children bound for college, they (I'm presuming) eat out in nonfast food restaurants more than once a month. The environmental restriction movement has done a lot of good for this country. It helped build support for clean air and clean water legislation that, with perhaps the exceptions of some provisions, has been brilliantly successful public policy.

An affluent democracy acts wisely when it devotes resources to maintaining an ever cleaner environment. But some policies that the environmental restriction groups have pushed for operate irrationally. The Endangered Species Act is a gift for litigators who seek to stop economic activity; the current project is to have the polar bear declared endangered, and then have the Ninth Circuit prohibit any economic activity that produces carbon emissions on the grounds that it will melt the ice floes and endanger the current far-from-endangered polar bear. Lawyer/radio talk show host/blogger Hugh Hewitt has done a definitive job of setting out the environmental restrictionist strategy—and has suggested how to stop it. But there wasn't any room in my column for this.

The assumption among most observers seems to be that Barack Obama will get a bounce in the polls from his trip to Afghanistan and Iraq, the Middle East, and western Europe. But it's not apparent in the polls that have come in to date. Gallup tracking shows him with a 46 percent-to-42 percent lead, about what he's had since clinching the Democratic nomination June 3. Rasmussen tracking shows him ahead by just 47 percent to 45 percent and the day before had the race at a 46 percent-to-46 percent tie. The Detroit News poll shows Obama leading in Michigan by only 43 percent to 41 percent, and there is some good news for John McCain in the recent Rasmussen poll in Ohio showing McCain ahead 46 percent to 40 percent. This last is a contrast with another poll in Ohio, showing Obama ahead 48 percent to 40 percent, conducted by the North Carolina Democratic firm PPP, whose record this cycle seems to me to have been erratic.

I put more weight on the Rasmussen poll, and I also think there is something to this interesting post from blogger Sean Oxendine saying it is going to be difficult for Obama to carry Ohio. Oxendine is arguing that Obama's weak primary showing in southern and southeastern Ohio will make it hard for him to carry the counties that enabled Democrats Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton to carry the state narrowly in 1976 and 1992. That thought occurred to me on the night of the March 4 Ohio primary, when I noticed that Obama lost Scioto County (Portsmouth, on the Ohio River) by an 81 percent-to-16 percent margin. Carter carried Scioto County 57 percent to 41 percent in 1976, and Clinton carried it 44 percent to 35 percent in 1992.

Here are Polidata's estimates of which states will gain and lose House seats and electoral votes based on extrapolations from the 2007 Census Bureau population estimates. Here's a list of which states are projected to gain or lose seats, for Bush 2004 and Kerry 2004 states.

We had greater differences between the age groups in the Democratic presidential primaries than any I can recall seeing, and we are seeing significant differences between age groups in general election polls. The ABC/Washington Post poll has Obama ahead among the under-30s by a whopping 66 percent to 30 percent, while McCain leads among over-65s (technically, I should say "65 and overs," but "over-65s" is more succinct) by 45 percent to 40 percent. Quinnipiac has Obama leading among under-35s by 63 percent to 31 percent, while McCain edged Obama 45 percent to 44 percent among over-55s. The CBS/New York Times poll showed Obama leading among under-30s by 48 percent to 36 percent, while McCain led among over-65s by 42 percent to 40 percent. In general, Obama's current lead in recent polls is due entirely to his lead—by as much as 2-1—among young voters.

But will they vote? The ABC/Washington Post (see page 2) poll shows young voters significantly less likely to say they would vote than they were in March. The Obama campaign is sending in organizers to register and turn out young voters—a good use of its copious resources, I think.

For a searing analysis of Barack Obama's current position on Iraq, you can't do better than this editorial from the Washington Post. The final sentences sum it up:

Indeed: The message that the Democrat sends is that he is ultimately indifferent to the war's outcome—that Iraq "distracts us from every threat we face" and thus must be speedily evacuated regardless of the consequences. That's an irrational and ahistorical way to view a country at the strategic center of the Middle East, with some of the world's largest oil reserves. Whether or not the war was a mistake, Iraq's future is a vital U.S. security interest. If he is elected president, Mr. Obama sooner or later will have to tailor his Iraq strategy to that reality.

"Ahistorical" is a good word, for Obama seems surprisingly lacking in his knowledge of history for a man educated at Columbia University and Harvard Law School. At one point in the campaign, he cited Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman as presidents who met with enemy leaders. In my reading, I have missed the descriptions of the Roosevelt-Hitler summit and the dialogue between Truman and the leaders of imperial Japan. Perhaps Obama had in mind the pictures of Roosevelt sitting next to Josef Stalin at Tehran and Yalta or of Truman sitting next to him at Potsdam. But the Soviet Union was our ally at the time of those meetings. Is it possible that Obama doesn't know this?

Two former U.S. News colleagues have books coming out, and they both look terrific. Linda Robinson, whose previous book was on our military's Special Forces, has now written what I suspect will be the definitive book on Gen. David Petraeus and the successful surge strategy in Iraq: Tell Me How This Ends: General David Petraeus and the Search for a Way Out of Iraq. And David Whitman, always a scholar as well as a reporter, has written Sweating the Small Stuff: Inner-City Schools and the New Paternalism, a description of some of the great charter schools that are doing a terrific job of educating kids from the most disadvantaged neighborhoods, including the KIPP Academy in the Bronx and the SEED School in Washington, D.C. Official publication dates for both books are still ahead: September for Linda's and August 15 for David's. But get your hands on copies as soon as you can if you have any interest in these subjects.