Entries for May 2009

By Peter Roff, Thomas Jefferson Street blog

It should be clear to everyone by now that neither the Chrysler Corporation nor General Motors are going quietly into bankruptcy. The actions of the Obama Administration represent what, in my lifetime, is certainly an unprecedented level of government interference in private business.

The intersecting of government and business is almost always a highly controversial matter. And it is no different here. The White House has taken a number of well-deserved blows for, in effect, firing the CEO of Chrysler and for insisting on a number of additional changes to the corporate structure as a condition of support for the company's survival. It is one thing when private investors insist on changes as a condition of support; it is altogether another when the government makes the same demands.

By Peter Roff, Thomas Jefferson Street blog

Keeping active duty U.S. personnel involved in the political process, retired Gunnery Sergeant Jessie Jane Duff told me, is not so much a matter of making sure they vote as it is making sure their votes count.

"A lot of military voters are told they have to get their ballots in 30 days ahead on an election if they are stationed overseas," the 20-year Marine Corps veteran said, "but the mail service that picks up and delivers those ballots is often delinquent. So their ballots often arrive late and, as a result, they're not counted."

By Peter Roff, Thomas Jefferson Street blog

British Tory leader David Cameron has issued a call for reform that is likely to carry him into No. 10 Downing Street as soon as Prime Minister Gordon Brown calls the next general election.

In "Fixing Broken Politics," a speech he delivered Tuesday at the Open University in Milton Keynes, Cameron proposed transformational changes to the business of government that should appeal broadly to Britons from all walks of life. It is, for someone who has the reputation of being a "toff" (British slang for a "well-dressed" or "upper-class person" and not at all a compliment) a remarkably populist manifesto.

Cameron's plan for remaking British politics includes several items U.S. conservatives would do well to consider as they debate the future of their own movement. They should, in fact, appropriate some of them—decentralization, transparency, electoral reform—into their own effort to wrest political power from the Obama Democrats.

By Peter Roff, Thomas Jefferson Street blog

Being rendered by the electorate in 2008, for all intents and purposes, temporarily irrelevant, Republicans are engaged in something that resembles, in its intensity, a shooting war for control of what remains of the brand and its political apparatus.

Many of the party's leaders and pretenders to leadership are busily fighting over what amounts to being the absolute rule of the smallest hill in the biggest part of the land. Rather than seek ways to broaden the party's appeal—in campaign school we were taught that winning was about addition and multiplication, not subtraction and division—they are seeking at all times and in all ways to sharpen the knife's edge in an effort to hone the most conservative—and therefore most exclusive—platform possible.

This is a foolish strategy.

By Peter Roff, Thomas Jefferson Street blog

California voters Tuesday put the truth to the lie that the tax rebellion has come to an end. Almost two-thirds of the electorate (65.4 percent) cast ballots against Proposition 1A, a measure which would have increased taxes in the cash-strapped "Golden State" by $16 billion.

By Peter Roff, Thomas Jefferson Street blog

In a stunning example that where you stand, in Washington, depends on where you sit, Senate Democrats handed Barack Obama the first major defeat of his presidency by refusing to fund his effort to close the U.S. detention facility for suspected terrorists at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Sen. Dick Durbin, the Senate's No. 2 Democrat said the plan to close "Gitmo" is not dead but that funding will not be forthcoming until Obama devises an "acceptable plan to handle the closure and transfer the detainees," the Associated Press reported Tuesday. Durbin's announcement means that Senate Democrats are now in line with their colleagues in the House of Representatives on what became a signature issue, linked to an important Obama promise, during the 2008 presidential campaign.

To put this in perspective, it's as though the Republicans on Capitol Hill decided-while the majority party in Congress-to withhold funding for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan until President Bush could show them a plan for winning the war.

By Peter Roff, Thomas Jefferson Street blog

There are a number of dimensions to the controversy over Notre Dame's granting of an honorary degree to President Obama as well as to the speech he gave there at Sunday's graduation ceremony. As someone who is not Catholic—but who does have Catholic roots in my family tree—I had not intended to add my thoughts to the commentary so ably provided on both sides of the issues by so many others.

Having read the speech, after being urged to do so by my Thomas Jefferson Street colleague Mary Kate Cary in her Monday post, it occurs to me however there is much about its message that should give all people of faith reason to pause.