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Is Immigration a Killer Issue for Congress?
Tweet Share on Facebook June 27, 2008 Comment (32)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.
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The Supreme Court Rules That the Second Amendment Means What It Says
Tweet Share on Facebook June 27, 2008 Comment (18)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.
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Why Vice Presidents Are Important to Governing
Tweet Share on Facebook June 27, 2008 Comment (13)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.
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Are Americans Too Racist to Vote for Barack Obama for President?
Tweet Share on Facebook June 24, 2008 Comment (67)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?
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Iraq and Energy Haven't Played Out in the Presidential Election the Way We Thought
Tweet Share on Facebook June 23, 2008 Comment (8)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.
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Why Did Obama Change Positions on Iraq?
Tweet Share on Facebook June 19, 2008 Comment (28)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.
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The Race Factor in the 2008 Presidential Election
Tweet Share on Facebook June 16, 2008 Comment (31)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.
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Tim Russert, 1950-2008: Gone Much Too Soon
Tweet Share on Facebook June 13, 2008 Comment (30)Horrible news: Tim Russert has died suddenly of a heart attack at NBC's Washington bureau. Others are paying proper tribute to him as the host since 1991 of Meet the Press, on which he conducted the toughest interviews of politicians and officeholders on any interview show since he took over the program. My memories of Tim go back to the early 1980s, when Tim was on Pat Moynihan's Senate staff. He and Moynihan had much in common: They were both from working-class backgrounds, they both had roots in Upstate New York—Tim, as everyone knows, grew up in Buffalo, while Pat got his graduate degree at Syracuse and had a summer house in Delaware County—they both were staunch Democrats who nevertheless respected Ronald Reagan, they were both (at least on one side of their families) very, very Irish.
Tim didn't have particularly impressive credentials—no Ivy League, no law review. But Moynihan grasped early on that Tim had a brilliant, instinctive understanding of politics. He showed it in the run-up to Moynihan's 1982 re-election race. Reagan had carried New York and Republicans had won a majority in the Senate in 1980. In New York, the Republicans had hopes that Westchester Congressman Bruce Caputo—Italian, suburban, Vietnam veteran—could beat the one-term Democrat. But Tim did some opposition research and found out that Caputo had not served in Vietnam. He held it back and then leaked it, forcing Caputo out of the race, when it was too late for the Republicans to find a strong substitute.
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The Economy Isn’t as Bad as We Think
Tweet Share on Facebook June 13, 2008 Comment (8)Things are a lot better in America than most Americans think. Or so argues Gregg Easterbrook in today's Wall Street Journal. I've written along similar lines myself. By any historic standards, the American economy is in pretty good shape and living standards are at an all-time high. So how to explain the sour mood? Over the last quarter-century, we've had low-inflation economic growth more than 90 percent of the time. That period covers the entire adult lifetime of the median-age voter. We've gotten so used to good times that we've forgotten what bad times are really like.
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The Key Counties to Victory for Obama and McCain
Tweet Share on Facebook June 13, 2008 Comment (2)Chris Stirewalt of the Examiner lists five counties that he says will decide the election. Each voted close to the national average (51 percent to 48 percent Bush) in 2004. My comments on each:
Jefferson County, Colo. Suburbs west of Denver. The inner Denver suburbs have been trending Democratic in recent years, and I expect Jefferson County will trend more that way this year. It voted 63 percent to 36 percent for Obama over Hillary Clinton in the caucus this year, but only 14,000 participated—far fewer than the 271,000 that voted in the 2004 general election. My impression is that this county, like many inner suburbs, is becoming more downscale; the big population growth of young affluent families is to the south, in Douglas County. One problem for Barack Obama is that he may not do well with an expanding Hispanic population.
