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The Balance in the Senate
Tweet Share on Facebook November 29, 2006 Comment (21)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.
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Bookshelf
Tweet Share on Facebook November 28, 2006 Comment (23)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:
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Medicare Part D
Tweet Share on Facebook November 27, 2006 Comment (122)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.
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Does Gates's History Mean Continuity or Change in Iraq?
Tweet Share on Facebook November 24, 2006 Comment (180)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.
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Latin American Politics: Leftism Repudiated
Tweet Share on Facebook November 22, 2006 Comment (34)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.
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The Draft
Tweet Share on Facebook November 21, 2006 Comment (208)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.
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The Pentagon's New Plan
Tweet Share on Facebook November 20, 2006 Comment (16)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."
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The Abortion Issue: No Longer Salient?
Tweet Share on Facebook November 17, 2006 Comment (14)South Dakota's voters rejected a ban on abortions passed by the Republican legislature and signed by Republican Gov. Mike Rounds. The margin was 56 to 44 percent. The results in smaller counties were mixed; voters in Minnehaha County (Sioux Falls) voted 57 percent against the ban, while voters in Pennington County (Rapid City), ordinarily more Republican but perhaps also more libertarian, voted 61 percent against. Those two counties provided almost half the popular vote margin against the ban (17,530 of 37,270).
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Health Savings Accounts Expansion
Tweet Share on Facebook November 16, 2006 CommentThe lame-duck legislature in Ohio is considering a bill by state Sen. Lou Blessing, a Cincinnati Republican, to require that all public employees be given an option of at least three health savings accounts. My sources tell me that it has an excellent chance of passing and being signed by outgoing Gov. Bob Taft. I have written about health savings accounts on numerous occasions. HSAs were authorized in the 2003 Medicare prescription drug law to work in tandem with health insurance policies with high deductibles; the employee gets money in a health savings account and can retain money not spent. The argument is that HSAs encourage policyholders to weigh the cost of routine healthcare and at the same time protect them from catastrophic expenses. After all, your auto insurance doesn't pay you for oil changes but does pay if your car is totaled. Why should a health insurance policy pay for routine, predictable medical expenses but not cover the full cost of catastrophic care?
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Why Is Nancy Pelosi Backing John Murtha?
Tweet Share on Facebook November 15, 2006 CommentWhy is Speaker-to-be Nancy Pelosi backing the ethically challenged John Murtha for House majority leader? For background on Murtha's ethics record, see these tough columns by the Washington Post's Ruth Marcus, the Wall Street Journal's John Fund, and Ralph Kinney Bennett in Tech Central Station Daily. For background on Pelosi's longstanding alliance with Murtha, see my blog post from November 2005. My understanding is that Pelosi's closeness to Murtha goes back to her early years in the House. She won a special election to fill the vacancy caused by the death of Sala Burton, the widow of Phil Burton, who held the seat until his death in 1983. One of Phil Burton's legacies was a provision that when the military base at San Francisco's Presidio was closed, it would become part of the national park system. But this required hefty funding. From my Almanac of American Politics 1998:
