Discriminations

The declining popularity of President Obama and his handling of both domestic and foreign affairs has for a while now fueled either hopeful or fearful memories of 1994, when the Republicans took over Congress. A better comparison might be to 1884, when the Democrats were largely done in by a devastating slogan that branded them as the party of “Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion.”

In A Cold-Blooded Foreign Policy
in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, Fouad Ajami writes:

With year one drawing to a close, the truth of the Obama presidency is laid bare: retrenchment abroad, and redistribution and the intrusive regulatory state at home. This is the genuine calling of Barack Obama, and of the “progressives” holding him to account.

Forget about Justice “Wise Latina” and an Attorney General who thinks Americans are cowards because they don’t agree with his race nostrums. Anyone objecting to my inclusion of “racialism” should send me examples — no, only one example would do — of a single race preference policy that the president has rescinded or even rhetorically opposed.

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Will The Democrats Reap “Wonderment And Happiness”? has been UPDATED.

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Way back in the latter middle part (or early late part) of the last century, when under the influence of the developing civil rights movement liberal impulses were just beginning to stir formerly somnolent Stanford, where I was then an undergraduate, an older, activist graduate student for the first time decided to run for student body president. His campaign slogan: “Elect A Man To Do A Boy’s Job!”

I was reminded of that campaign and that slogan by Shelby Steele’s typically excellent column in today’s Wall Street Journal, “Obama and Our Post-Modern Race Problem, whose implicit theme is that we’ve elected a boy (and a particularly callow one at that) to do a man’s (or woman’s) job. (If Steele were writing this blog post, in anticipation of the supercilious criticism sure to come from oh so emancipated Southerners like David Gergen, he would probably inject a perceptive riff here on the risks of describing a black man as a boy and why he was doing it anyway. Please associate me with what Steele would have said.)

I have discussed Steele before. Over a year and a half ago, in Man of Steele, I wrote that

[j]udged by the power of his analysis in several books that are almost breathtaking in their perception, Shelby Steele really is an intellectual Superman.

... Mr. Obama always knew that his greatest appeal was not as a leader but as a cultural symbol. He always wore the bargainer's mask — winning the loyalty and gratitude of whites by flattering them with his racial trust: I will presume that you are not a racist if you will not hold my race against me. Oprah Winfrey, Michael Jordan and yes, Tiger Woods have all been superb bargainers, eliciting almost reverential support among whites for all that they were not — not angry or militant, not political, not using their moral authority as blacks to exact a wage from white guilt.

First, in his bargain with whites, what Obama sought from them was not that his race not be held against him but rather that it should be regarded as a positive reason to support him. If his race weren’t such a dramatic positive, there would have been no cause for the tidal wave of of self-congratulation that engulfed the country because it elected its first black president.

Second, Steele’s main point in today’s column is that Obama is like the emperor whose new suit isn’t really there, or, in a different metaphor, that in many respects Obama himself is an empty suit.

America’s primary race problem today is our new “sophistication” around racial matters. Political correctness is a compendium of sophistications in which we join ourselves to obvious falsehoods (“diversity”) and refuse to see obvious realities (the irrelevance of diversity to minority development). I would argue further that Barack Obama’s election to the presidency of the United States was essentially an American sophistication, a national exercise in seeing what was not there and a refusal to see what was there — all to escape the stigma not of stupidity but of racism.

Barack Obama, elegant and professorially articulate, was an invitation to sophistication that America simply could not bring itself to turn down. If "hope and change" was an empty political slogan, it was also beautiful clothing that people could passionately describe without ever having seen.

Mr. Obama won the presidency by achieving a symbiotic bond with the American people: He would labor not to show himself, and Americans would labor not to see him....

that Mr. Obama is not just inexperienced; he is also hampered by a distinct inner emptiness — not an emptiness that comes from stupidity or a lack of ability but an emptiness that has been actually nurtured and developed as an adaptation to the political world.

.... [H]e has come forward in American politics by emptying himself of strong convictions, by rejecting principled stands as “ideological,” and by promising to deliver us from the “tired” culture-war debates of the past. He aspires to be “post-ideological,” “post-racial” and “post-partisan,” which is to say that he defines himself by a series of “nots” — thus implying that being nothing is better than being something. He tries to make a politics out of emptiness itself.

If anything, Obama is closer to the opposite of Steele’s portrait — the most ideological, most partisan, and most race-conscious president in our history. Steele is right that “hope and change” were this emperor’s new clothes, and that a gullible public led by a politically correct media and eager to congratulate itself for electing a black was incapable of admitting that this suit did not exist. But Steele’s own misperception — regarding Obama as an empty suit, with no convictions, no rigidly ideological agenda, as offering nothing but “a politics out of emptiness” — confuses the mask with underlying face just as dramatically.

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Many, perhaps most, leftists — from former President Carter down to lowly bloggers like Matthew Yglesias — obviously believe that opposition to Obama is fueled by racism.

So, following their analytical example, perhaps it’s time for me to conclude that anyone who disagrees with me must be anti-semitic. (Or maybe just a Yankee, since my Jewish friends tell me I’m more Southern than Jewish.) And it follows that if any foreigner rejects my wisdom, the explanation is that he or she must be anti-American.

Heck, they don’t even value my literature in college these days. As a panel at the Modern Language Association (“Does The English Department Have A Jewish Problem”) just heard,

English departments that would never allow themselves to be without experts in the literatures of many racial and ethnic groups in the United States don't think twice about failing to have a knowledge base in American Jewish literature.

the full scope of ethnic American literatures: African American, Asian American, Caribbean, Chicana/o, Latina/o, Native American.

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Compare Harry Reid’s prediction from the Senate floor before the final health care vote —

We’re going to hear an earful, but it’s going to be an earful of wonderment and happiness that people waited for for a long time

As Dodd spoke Thursday, a man walking by called out: “Talk while you can; you’re not going to get re-elected.”

About 100 people showed up Tuesday at the federal courthouse in Baton Rouge to protest U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu’s support of the Democratic health-care bill being debated in the U.S. Senate

I’m very disappointed.

It’s Christmas morning and I can’t find one single gift to Nevada from Sen. Harry Reid under the health-care “reform” tree.

Louisiana got a nice package. Florida and Connecticut, too. And Nebraska scored a really big present.

Just three days ago Uncle Harry said that if a senator didn’t get his state “something” in the health-care “reform” package, then that senator wasn’t doing his or her job.

And yesterday Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., upped the ante. He said that every state did “get something” in the measure.

OK. I’m excited. What’s Nevada’s gift? Uncle Harry, as everyone knows, is the Big Kahuna of the Senate. He “brings home the bacon,” his TV commercials claim. So if Nebraska got dispensation from Medicaid increases forever, one can only imagine the magnitude of Nevada’s present....

I’m sure many others across the country are also wondering what bribes “bacon” their senators brought home. Here’s one such question, whose author I can reliably report has received no reply:

As a Virginian, I wonder what my Senators, Jim Webb and Mark Warner, got. Does their silence about the bribes goodies for Virginia they secured mean they are embarrassed because they gave their votes away for free, meaning they liked the Reid bill so much they didn’t have to be bribed induced to vote for it? Or are they embarrassed to admit their votes were for sale? Or perhaps they are embarrassed for having sold too cheaply? I assume we’ll find out.

Well, at least wonderment. The voters of Nebraska wonder so much about the sale of Sen. Ben Nelson’s vote that Rasmussen finds him 30 points behind his potential 2012 challenger, Governor Dave Heineman. Nelson won his second term in 2006 with 64% of the vote.

Meanwhile, now that presumably they’ve made an effort to look at what’s in the health care bill, according to Politico

[t]he governors of the nation’s two largest Democratic states are leveling sharp criticism at the Senate health care bill, claiming that it would leave their already financially strapped states even deeper in the hole.

New York Democratic Gov. David Paterson and California GOP Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger are urging congressional leaders to rework the Medicaid financing in the Senate-passed bill, warning that under that version their states will be crushed by billions in new costs.

Many have questioned whether those who favor or oppose the health care plan in Congress really know what’s in it. A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey suggests that they have a decent understanding of the bill and that voter attitudes towards the legislation have hardened.

While several individual components of the plan are popular, reminding voters of what’s included in the plan has virtually no impact on support for the overall legislation. This suggests that there are not major surprises in the legislation that will cause people to change their opinion of it.

Thirty-nine percent (39%) of voters nationwide support the plan, and 58% are opposed. That’s consistent with our weekly tracking of the issue which has found support between 38% and 41% every week from just before Thanksgiving to the end of 2009.

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The Berkeley High School Governance Council is considering, with “virtually unanimous” agreement, an ingenious (or perhaps ungenius) proposal to close its “dismal racial achievement gap, where white students are doing far better than the state average while black and Latino students are doing worse.” (HatTip to a reader from Berkeley.)

The solution is both obvious and simple: “eliminate science labs and the five science teachers who teach them to free up more resources to help struggling students.”

Paul Gibson, an alternate parent representative on the School Governance Council, said that information presented at council meetings suggests that the science labs were largely classes for white students. He said the decision to consider cutting the labs in order to redirect resources to underperforming students was virtually unanimous.

Well, war is hell, and one can easily understand why the Berkeley High School Governance Council would conclude that depriving a few minority students of science labs and advanced placement courses is a small price to pay for the advantage of depriving a larger number of whites and Asians (who presumably are not a minority) of those classes.

But wait. Why stop with high school science? The last times I looked (here and here), blacks made up only 4% of the entering class at that other large school in Berkeley, the University of California. If it were closed, think how many resources the state could “free up ... to help struggling students” at community colleges, city colleges, and the less white (or Asian) state colleges and universities.

UPDATE

See Linda Seebach’s in-depth discussion of Berkeley’s educational “equity” wrecking ball, here.

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Compare this recent University of North Carolina Daily Tar Heel editorial —

Admissions decisions should be based solely on the merits of one’s application. Although the female-to-male ratio at universities across the country is rising, administrators at UNC shouldn’t begin giving preferential treatment to male applicants....

Regardless of how wide the gender gap becomes, it is wrong to deny admission to an applicant based solely on gender....

All six public colleges and universities in North Carolina that we studied--NC State and UNC at Asheville, Chapel Hill, Charlotte, Greensboro, and Wilmington--show a substantial qualifications gap between black and white applicants who have been accepted for future enrollment....

The odds of admission at five of the six schools studied indicate a strong degree of preference in admissions given to blacks over whites. These odds ratios range from 177.1 at NC State to 3.4 at Chapel Hill....

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Compare

Pelosi, Reid to Hold Closed-Door Meetings to Decide Final Bill...

• November 2007: “We are going to have a big table, and everybody is going to be invited, labor, employers, doctors, nurses, hospital administrators, patient advocate groups. The drug and insurance companies, they’ll all get a seat at the table. ... And we will work on this process publicly. It’ll be on C-SPAN. It will be streaming over the Net.” (Town hall meeting with Google employees, Mountain View, CA, 11/14/07)

• January 2008: “That’s what I will do in bringing all parties together, not negotiating behind closed doors, but bringing all parties together, and broadcasting those negotiations on C-SPAN so that the American people can see what the choices are.” (Democratic presidential debate, 1/31/08)

• March 2008: “But here’s the difference: I’m going to do it all on C-SPAN so that the American people will know what’s going on.” (Town hall meeting, Lancaster, PA, 3/31/08)

• August 2008: “When I come together around this health care system, I’m going to do it all in the open. I’m going to do it on C-SPAN.” (Town hall meeting, Albuquerque, NM, 8/18/08)

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Mickey Kaus has been following the Obamacare debate much more closely, and deeply, than I, and although I disagree with his bottom line — he’s for it — he has cogently skewered most of the deficit/debt/cost curve bending defenses of it. See, for example, his recent post arguing that the CBO lives in an “alternate universe.”

“Is any CBO analysis that doesn’t include the doctors’ fix really worth paying much attention to?” he asks, and answers no. “It’s an analysis of a fantasy world.”

He concludes:

The prediction that Democratic health care bill will not reduce the deficit over the long run is about as safe a year-end prediction as you could make. Even with all the budget gimmickry, it wouldn't help cut the budget much....

P.S.: I’m not saying that the reform (which I favor for non-deficit reasons) won’t help set the stage for at least some cost-restraint in the future. As Hendrik Hertzberg and E.J. Dionne argue, it should be easier to take future action to control medical costs after everyone’s covered — then we’ll all be in the soup together, and it will be harder for distinct demographic groups (e.g. seniors on Medicare) to argue that they are being singled out for sacrifice unfairly or unnecessarily. But the administration’s claim is that the bill as written will by itself cut costs so much that it will reduce the deficit--something that seems plausible only in the artificial alternate universe of the CBO.

True, a number of groups, organizations (think the private insurance industry), and individuals will be injured by this legislation, but I don’t see how that makes it harder for old people to argue that cutting $500 billion from Medicare singles them out for especially harsh treatment.

Empirical test: let’s see if their complaints diminish and if their complaint about the severe injury to them is diluted by the injuries to others.

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[NOTE: This post has been Updated]

Ordinarily I’d say that commitment to principle, or its absence, is bi-partisan, that Republicans are neither more virtuous nor more concerned with the public interest than Democrats (or, obviously, vice versa), but a glaringly obvious yet under-remarked aspect of Harry Reid’s recent “Cash for Cloture” auction for health care votes calls that assumption into question: all of the bribes financial inducements were taken by Democrats.

First there was the “Louisiana Purchase,” $100 million in extra Medicaid money for the Bayou State, requested by Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.).

Then came the “Cornhusker Kickback,” another $100 million in extra Medicaid money, this time for Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.).

This was followed by word that Sen. Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.) had written into the legislation $100 million meant for a medical center in his state. This one was quickly dubbed the “U Con.”

Earlier, when GOP staff member mistakenly thought the medical center was destined for Indiana rather than Connecticut, they named it the “Bayh Off” for Sen. Evan Bayh (D-Ind.).

For Democratic leaders, this created an appearance problem

Indeed, the proliferation of deals has outpaced the ability of Capitol Hill cynics to name them.

Gator Aid: Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) inserted a grandfather clause that would allow Floridians to preserve their pricey Medicare Advantage program.

Handout Montana: Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) secured Medicare coverage for anybody exposed to asbestos -- as long as they worked in a mine in Libby, Mont.

Iowa Pork and Omaha Prime Cuts: Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) won more Medicare money for low-volume hospitals of the sort commonly found in Iowa, while Nebraska’s Nelson won a “carve out” provision that would reduce fees for Mutual of Omaha and other Nebraska insurers.

Meanwhile, Sens. Byron Dorgan and Kent Conrad, both North Dakota Democrats, would enjoy a provision bringing higher Medicare payments to hospitals and doctors in “frontier counties” of states such as -- let’s see here -- North Dakota!

Hawaii, with two Democratic senators, would get richer payments to hospitals that treat many uninsured people. Michigan, home of two other Democrats, would earn higher Medicare payments and some reduced fees for Blue Cross/Blue Shield. Vermont’s Sen. Bernie Sanders (I) held out for larger Medicaid payments for his state (neighboring Massachusetts would get some, too).

said Tuesday that three other senators have told him they want to bargain for the same kind of special treatment.

“Three senators came up to me just now on the (Senate) floor, and said, ‘Now we understand what you did. We’ll be seeking this funding too’,” Nelson said.

According to Harry Reid, every Senator who was worth his or her salt got something.

“I don’t know if there is a senator that doesn’t have something in this bill that was important to them,” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) reasoned when asked at a news conference Monday about the cash-for-cloture accusation. “And if they don’t have something in it important to them, then it doesn’t speak well of them.”

But, to return to my initial questions, why did no Republican succumb to the temptations that surely were offered? It can’t be simple political self-interest, since Snowe, Collins, and perhaps some other Republicans would have benefitted politically by a show of bi-partisanship.

I hesitate even to suggest it, but could it be that devotion to principle is not randomly distributed between the parties after all?

UPDATE

Iowa Senator Tom Harkin calls the bribes “catering to self-interest” of wavering Democratic Senators no big deal.

Harkin dismissed deals dubbed vote-buying by GOP senators as “small stuff” that distracted Americans from the primary focus of the overhaul bill.

“We have to keep our eyes on what we’re trying to do here. We’re trying to cross a demarcation line,” Harkin told “Early Show” co-anchor Maggie Rodriguez. “On one side is health care as a privilege, on the other side is health care as a right. With these votes, with the vote that we’ll take before Christmas, we will cross that line finally and say that health care is a right of all Americans.”

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Medicaid Mandate: Funded ... Then Un-Funded has been Updated, three times.

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A city councilman and some organizations in New York City “are pushing for legislation that they believe will expand diversity in the Fire Department’s employment pool.”

The legislation would allow any candidate applying to become a New York City firefighter who has a high school diploma or GED from a city high school or testing center to receive an additional eight-point credit on the firefighter exam.

DCAS already offers point credits for a number of other special circumstances. Veterans receive five points and disabled veterans get 10. New York City residents receive an additional five points. Parents of a NYC police officer or firefighter killed in the line of duty receive 10 points as do the siblings of police officers or firefighters who died on Sept. 11. But all are either allowed by the state constitution or state law unlike the new proposed credit.

According to City Councilman Leroy Comrie,

Minorities account for less than 11 percent of city firefighters — making it the least diverse Fire Department of any major U.S. city and less than 40 percent of eligible FDNY applicants are African American....

“This bill is a legitimate, practical and common sense solution to addressing diversity issues in the FDNY,” he said during a press conference with other officials at City Hall on Tuesday.

I wonder if any colleges have given “diversity” bonus points to applicants who are not themselves “diverse” but come from “diverse” schools. (Of course, to do that they would have to believe in actual diversity, not “diversity” as universally practiced.)

And on the other side:

Adjoa Gzifa, the chairwoman of Community Board 12 says she is leery of laws that mandate diversity and believes the proposed credit will have legal consequences.

“If you take the test and you pass, you pass,” she said. It shouldn’t matter where you live or what your ethnic background is. They are just going to end up spending taxpayer money fighting lawsuits.”
....
City Councilman Eric Ulrich (R- Ozone Park) also opposes the bill. “I see it as affirmative action rearing its head in the hiring process of the FDNY,” he said. “I don’t think it’s fair. If they want it to be all inclusive why don’t they have it apply to graduates of city Catholic schools and Yeshivas as well.”

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“The bad news is that Senator Ben Nelson is not up for reelection until 2012,” Roger Kimball laments.

I hope that Ben enjoys his final two years in the Senate.

OK, that’s not quite right. Since it was Ben Nelson of Nebraska that finally got Harry Reid his desperately needed 60th vote for socialized medicine, I hope 1) that the next two year are unpleasant for Sen. Nelson and 2) that he loses in 2012 by a landslide.

67% of Nebraskans oppose the current health care reform, yet you voted against us.

We gave you the chance to work for us, now we’ll find someone else.

But it was worth it, and now Nebraska Republicans have my number as well.

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Surreal Words: Reid “An Abortion-Rights Opponent” And Burris a Believer In “Mere Fundamentals” has been Updated.

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[NOTE: This post has been Updated twice three times]

One of the many objections to the Democrats’ health reform is that it would impose a large unfunded mandate on the states by adding substantial numbers of individuals to Medicaid. For example, three days ago the Speaker of the Virginia House of Delegates and the Chairman of its Appropriations Committee wrote a letter to the state’s two senators noting that the Senate bill “would dramatically boost state Medicaid expenses by expanding the number of people eligible.”

In the deal that was just struck, however, the feds agreed to pay for all of Nebraska’s new enrollees forever. In addition,

The federal government will also pick up the tab for all new Medicaid enrollees in the other 49 states through 2017.

Perhaps it would be cheaper for Virginia to provide incentives for all those individuals newly qualified for Medicaid to move to Nebraska.

UPDATE 1

Thanks to Robert Costa for quoting the above on the excellent National Review Online blog, Doctor! Doctor!

UPDATE 2

Now Senator Nelson has joined those who regard their proclaimed pro-life principles as “mere fundamentals,” since the language on abortion that he accepted (after being bought with additional Medicaid funds for Nebraska) is far worse than the Casey compromise he regarded as inadequate just a day ago. The Hill reports that “Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Oka.) said it is ‘absolutely fictitious’ that there is an anti-abortion provision in the Senate Democrats’ reworked healthcare reform bill.”

UPDATE 3

Sen. Nelson tried to explain his position today by pointing to the unfunded mandate of Medicaid expansion.

Gov. Dave Heineman “contacted me and he said this is another unfunded federal mandate and it’s going to stress the state budget, and I agreed with him,” the Nebraska Democrat said. “I said to the leader and others that this is something that has to be fixed. I didn’t participate in the way it was fixed.”

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I have written several times about the attempts of some Democratic politicians, usually but not always liberal Catholics, to force the square peg of their “personal” opposition to abortion into the round and bottomless hole of their public opposition to measures that would restrict it. Read those posts and you will see that I do not find these attempts successful, and often find them fatuously unsuccessful. In Life Begins .... Life Ends, for example, I argued with my characteristic understatement that

I believe that trumpeting both “personal” opposition but active political support is an unsuccessful, pusillanimous, straddling cop-out, reminiscent as I argued in my earlier posts of Stephen A. Douglas’s “personal” opposition to slavery while working as hard as he could politically to enable its expansion.

Reid an “abortion rights opponent”? That would appear to be news to the National Right to Life Committee, whose scorecard reveals that in the most recent Congress Sen. Reid supported right to life positions 0% of the time. On ten “key votes” going back several years (click the “Votes” tab ) he voted against the position favored by the NRLC on 8 out of 10 votes.

Nevertheless, Reid regards himself as “an abortion-rights opponent.” Just ask him, or apparently The Hill reporter Jeffrey Young.

Sometimes the surreal language of our politics can take a humorous turn, and there are few politicians on the current scene than Sen. Roland Burris of Illinois, who is temporarily warming the seat vacated by Barack Obama (who himself wasn’t in it long enough to get it warm. Even when he was there he wasn’t, instead being off somewhere writing the second of what will no doubt be his multi-volume autobiography). Burris once “vowed that he will not vote for a health care bill that does not include a government-run insurance plan, or public option,” but that vow, like most Burris vows, was temporary, and he as since seen fit to “calibrate his language.”

“I am committed to voting for a bill that achieves the goals of a public option: competition, cost savings and accountability,” he said. “I will not be able to vote for lesser legislation that ignores those fundamentals.”

He added: “My colleagues may have forged a compromise bill that can achieve the 60 votes that will be needed for it to pass. But until this bill addresses cost, competition and accountability in a meaningful way, it will not win mine.”

With a dramatic flourish, Mr. Burris said: “As Mohandas Gandhi once famously said, ‘All compromise is based on give and take, but there can be no give and take on fundamentals. Any compromise on mere fundamentals is a surrender.’”

UPDATE: Another Articulate Democrat

No one can doubt Sen. Nelson’s ability to deliver the goods for Nebraska, but his mediocre (more on mediocrity in a moment) rhetorical skills suggest that he is just the sort of leader his famous Nebraska senatorial predecessor (1954 – 1976), Roman Hruska had in mind when he offered his infamous defense of President Nixon’s abortive appointment of Harold Carswell to the Supreme Court. As reported in his New York Times obit:

Liberal Democrats had mounted a strong campaign against Judge Carswell, a member of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in Florida, contending that he was too ‘‘mediocre’’ to deserve a seat on the nation’s highest court.

When Senator Hruska addressed the Senate in March 1970, speaking on Judge Carswell’s behalf, he asked why mediocrity should be a disqualification for high office.

‘‘Even if he were mediocre,’’ Mr. Hruska declared, ‘‘there are a lot of mediocre judges and people and lawyers. They are entitled to a little representation, aren’t they, and a little chance? We can’t have all Brandeises, Frankfurters and Cardozos.’’

Roman Hruska would feel well represented.

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For a generation or more many conservatives have hoped (and even believed) that one of the most beneficial effects of tax cuts (and for many, their main purpose) is to reduce or at least restrain the size of government.

“Starving the beast” is a fiscal-political strategy of some American conservatives to use budget deficits via tax cuts to force future reductions in the size of government....

Prior to being elected as the President, then-candidate Ronald Reagan foreshadowed the strategy during the 1980 US Presidential debates, saying “John Anderson tells us that first we’ve got to reduce spending before we can reduce taxes. Well, if you’ve got a kid that’s extravagant, you can lecture him all you want to about his extravagance. Or you can cut his allowance and achieve the same end much quicker.”

In almost every respect, Obama is the Anti-Reagan. And one of the most important of those respect is what might be called his Force-Feed The Beast strategy to increase the size and scope of the federal government. The theory, at least as strongly implied by the policies being proposed, is that if expensive program is piled on top of expensive program (“stimulus,” cap and trade, health “reform,” wealth transfers to the third world to curb global warming, etc., etc.), Congress will eventually have to increase taxes to pay for them.

Although its advocates have been reluctant to admit what they’re doing, their Force-Feed The Beast strategy has not gone completely unnoticed. Thus Kimberly Strassel writes in the Wall Street Journal today. Given the low and still-plummeting popularity of health care reform, she asks, “why the stubborn insistence” on passing it?

Think big. The liberal wing of the party — the Barney Franks, the David Obeys — are focused beyond November 2010, to the long-term political prize. They want a health-care program that inevitably leads to a value-added tax and a permanent welfare state. Big government then becomes fact, and another Ronald Reagan becomes impossible. See Continental Europe.

.... They are more than happy to sacrifice a few Blue Dogs, a Blanche Lincoln, a Michael Bennet, if they can expand government so that in the long run it benefits the party of government.

What’s extraordinary is that more Democrats have not wised up to the fact that they are being used as pawns in this larger liberal game.

These Democrats are not dumb, at least not in the sense of being unaware that they are probably sacrificing themselves for the benefit of their party.

Alas, I suspect their sacrifice will be in vain. Even if health reform passes, even if the debt and deficit continue to spiral upward, future Congresses, especially if filled with Republicans who owe their seats to the unpopularity of all the Democratic debt- and deficit-fueling spending, will be as unwilling to raise taxes as past Congresses were to cut spending after Reagan’s tax cuts.

The Beast, in short, is strong. He survives both starving and force-feeding.

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Maybe there is a Santa Claus after all.

The White House

Office of the Press Secretary

For Immediate Release December 17, 2009

President Obama Announces More Key Administration Posts, 12/17/09

WASHINGTON – Today, President Barack Obama announced his intent to nominate the following individuals to the Board of Directors of the Legal Services Corporation:

• Sharon L. Browne, Member, Board of Directors of the Legal Services Corporation

• Charles Norman Wiltse Keckler, Member, Board of Directors of the Legal Services Corporation

• Victor B. Maddox, Member, Board of Directors of the Legal Services Corporation
  

President Obama announced today his intent to nominate the following individuals:

Sharon L. Browne, Nominee for Member, Board of Directors of the Legal Services Corporation
Sharon L. Browne is a principal attorney in Pacific Legal Foundation’s Individual Rights Practice group and a member of the Foundation’s senior management. Ms. Browne is a trial and appellate lawyer and joined Pacific Legal Foundation as a staff attorney immediately following law school in 1985. From 1991-1995, she was a senior trial attorney with the public issues law firm of Zumbrun, Best, & Findley where she specialized in land use and education law. She returned to Pacific Legal Foundation in 1995. Ms. Browne has also served as an adjunct professor of law at McGeorge School of Law from 1995-2000. Ms. Browne’s articles have been published in the University of Miami Law Review (2009) and the Pepperdine Law Review (1994). Since 2007, Ms. Browne has served on the California Advisory Committee to the United States Commission on Civil Rights and is on the Executive Committee for the Federalist Society’s Civil Rights Practice Group. Ms. Browne received her B.A. in 1970 from the University of California, Davis and her J.D. in 1985 from the University of the Pacific McGeorge School of Law....

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President Obama is fond of blaming the unpopularity of his health care reform on Republican “scare tactics” (at least when he’s not asserting that failure to do his bidding will lead to national bankruptcy), and now a special election in Kentucky has revealed just how low Republican candidates are prepared to stoop.

As reported with shock and awe by CNN’s Gloria Borger:

Consider the results of a recent “open seat” special election for the state senate in a Democratic district in rural eastern Kentucky: Republican Jimmy Higdon beat the Democrat Jodie Haydon by tying him to, of all things, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats.

“Congress is out of control,” one effective ad intoned, “and [Haydon] will bring Nancy Pelosi’s one-party control of government to Frankfurt.”

Republican Higdon won by 12 points.

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The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights has sent a letter to a bunch of Senators pointing out and protesting a series of “racially discriminatory provisions” in the Senate Health Care bill. (HatTip to Roger Clegg)

It’s an excellent letter, definitely worth reading.

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In an excellent essay Roger Clegg discusses the question of discrimination in tenure decisions, here. He notes that in the absence of “direct evidence of discriminatory intent ... , such as racist or sexist comments,” plaintiffs in such cases have a hard roe row to hoe (my trite metaphor, not his).

The track record of such claims is mixed at best, although the scorekeeping is complicated by the fact that many such cases are settled out of court. Race and sex discrimination surely exist, although these days the only institutionalized discrimination of either sort in academia is of the politically correct variety — that is, against whites and “overrepresented” minorities (especially Asians) and men.

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The Wall Street Journal reports this morning:

The latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News brings bad news for Democrats when it comes to passing a health care bill.

For the first time in our polling, more Americans said they’d rather stick with the status quo on health care than pass the Democrats’ bill.

More than four out of ten, 44%, of respondents said it is better to not pass the plan and to keep the current system versus 41% who said it is better to enact the proposed health care overhaul.

Do you think it would be better to pass Obama’s health-care plan and make its changes to the health-care system or to not pass this plan and keep the current health care system?

Do you think it would be better to pass Obama’s health-care plan and make its changes to the health-care system or to not pass this plan and start from scratch to create a new plan for reform?

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... lack “diversity.” A research team from the University of Michigan

analyzed 47 embryonic stem cell lines and found that most were derived from donors of northern and western European ancestry. None of the lines were from people of recent African ancestry, from Pacific Islanders, or from populations indigenous to the Americas, the researchers said.

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Inside Higher Ed assures us today that “Gender Matters.”

Does having a woman in the top job (or the No. 2 slot) make a difference?

When it comes to faculty hiring, the answer appears to be Yes. And having a critical mass of women on boards of trustees also makes a difference. These are the results of a study released Tuesday by the Cornell Higher Education Research Institute....

Among the findings:

• Institutions with female presidents, female provosts (or academic vice presidents), and more women on boards of trustees saw larger increases in the share of female faculty members than did other institutions.....
  

Pretty soon some organization will probably do a study finding that institutions with black presidents, provosts or academic vice presidents, and more blacks on their board of trustees hire more blacks. And institution with more non-Hispanic white male presidents, provosts ..., etc., hire more white males, a finding that is routinely denounced as confirming pervasive discrimination and ignoring the principle of non-discriminatory equal opportunity.

Isn’t higher education and its research apparatus wonderful?

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President Obama frequently blames the unpopularity of his health care reform on the “scare tactics” of his meany critics. For example (but it is only one of many), ABC News posted a transcript of an interview on Nightline, noting that one point that “The president blows it [reform unpopularity] off and blames his critics and their ‘scare tactics.’”

Today, the president who is always so critical of “scare tactics” told Charlie Gibson of ABC News that if his health care reform is not passed “the federal government “will go bankrupt.”

And that’s not the worst of it.

The president laid out a dire scenario of what will happen if his health care reform effort fails.

“If we don't pass it, here's the guarantee….your premiums will go up, your employers are going to load up more costs on you,” he said. “Potentially they're going to drop your coverage, because they just can't afford an increase of 25 percent, 30 percent in terms of the costs of providing health care to employees each and every year....

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Democrats claim to love the public option because the competition it would provide would keep the otherwise dishonest insurance companies honest. As President Obama said in Green Bay last June, “if the private insurance companies have to compete with a public option, it will keep them honest and help keep prices down.” And as Moveon.org, an organization known far and wide for its love of unfettered competition, asserted in a video supporting the public option, “competition is as American as apple pie.”

It’s no wonder, then, that Democrats are such avid supporter of modest school voucher programs, since the competition they provide helps to keep the massive public school near-monopoly more honest.

Oh, wait. I was dreaming and just woke up. What I should have said is that it would be no wonder if Democrats, because of their professed love of competition with powerful entrenched interests, supported modest school voucher programs. They don’t, of course.

Neal Boortz nails them. He points out that critics of voucher usually rationalize their position by arguing that they take money away from the public schools, but that is not the case in the District of Columbia.

They can't use this argument here because the DC voucher system is funded by the federal government. The actual result is that the DC schools have even more money per student after the voucher students bail.

Well ... it didn't seem to matter that the teacher's unions had no real argument against the DC voucher program. We all know what the true argument was. The teacher's union is scared to death that the private schools are going to make them look bad. Competition is poison to teacher's unions. So the voucher system had to be killed.

None other than Illinois Senator Dick Durbin. Remember that $1.1 trillion dollar spending program passed over the weekend? Durban had a very quiet little amendment hiding in that bill. The amendment killed all funding for the DC voucher program. Durbin's Christmas gift for teacher's unions.

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Overweening arrogance.

Given the heavy and increasing opposition to Obamacare, Byron York asks in the Washington Examiner, “why are Democrats dead-set on hurting themselves?”

“Because,” he asks “a Democratic strategist” who for understandable reasons wants to remain anonymous,

they think they know what’s best for the public,” the strategist said. “They think the facts are being distorted and the public’s being told a story that is not entirely true, and that they are in Congress to be leaders. And they are going to make the decision because Goddammit, it’s good for the public.

Based upon a great deal of data, many scientists have come up with a theory that human activity is wrecking the climate of the planet and that if the wise, good people are not allowed to compel the stupid, evil people to change their ways drastically, terrible things will happen.

This all-knowing, morally self-congratulatory, superciliously sneering attitude of superiority is now so endemic on the left that it has even begun to attack, and thus offend, some of its natural allies. Thus, with fury supported by chapter and verse evidence, this is how Feminist Law Professors summarizes (HatTip InstaPundit) a “contempt-laden” recent New York Times piece: “From the NYT: You Dumb Women are Opposing the New Mammogram Recommendations Because You Don’t Understand Science or Math.

The left is increasingly embattled and defensive, but circling the wagons and then shooting everyone inside the circle has not historically proved to be a winning tactic.

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Great question, if I do say so myself.

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Today in the Washington Post David Broder waxes (or perhaps wanes) eloquent about the insight into the mind of Obama that can be gleaned by paying close, careful attention to the words of Obama.

One of the things that sets Barack Obama apart from most politicians is how much can be learned from listening to his speeches....

... They have no equal in providing insights into the way his mind works and the context that guides his decisions.

The striking thing is the consistency with which he places concrete actions into the broadest historical or philosophical setting, and how much he is influenced in his decision-making by the reach of his intellectual exercise.

This first struck me during the crisis in the primaries when the racially provocative views of his longtime pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, came to public attention. In his Philadelphia address, Obama took the first steps to separate himself from Wright, but he also somehow managed in the pressure of a hard-fought campaign to compose what is likely to be seen as the most significant essay on race delivered by any public figure since the days of Lyndon Johnson and Martin Luther King Jr.

No Red America or Blue America, just America, from the aspiring future candidate but who is now a president who is presiding over the most race-conscious administration in history (“wise Latina” “nation of cowards” afraid to discuss race, Van Jones, etc.). Can anyone, can even Broder, summarize the deep content of the Wright-induced Philadelphia speech? I can’t, but I vividly recall Obama’s unbelievable denials that he ever heard Wright’s rants in church. And what about the incessantly repeated need to bend the cost curve as the justification for massive health care reform? Or transparency in government when all major decisions about health care have been made behind the closed door of the Democratic caucus, except the ones in the closed mind of Harry Reid?

Senate Majority Whip Richard Durbin admitted Friday that he is “in the dark” about the national health care bill currently under construction by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. In an exchange on the Senate floor, Republican Sen. John McCain asked Durbin, “Should we not at least be informed as to what the proposal is that the Senate Majority Leader is going to propose to the entire Senate?” Durbin’s answer: “I would say to the senator from Arizona that I am in the dark almost as much as he is, and I am in the leadership.”

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The New York Times reported today that the Democrats “hit a rough patch Friday in their push for sweeping health care legislation” when “a top Medicare official” declared that their proposal would raise, not lower, health care costs.

The Medicare official ... said that total national health spending would increase slightly as a result of the Senate bill, put together by the majority leader, Harry Reid, Democrat of Nevada. President Obama has repeatedly said that one of his top goals is to slow the growth of health costs.

Richard S. Foster, the chief actuary of the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, said Friday that under Mr. Reid’s bill national health spending from 2010 to 2019 would total $35.5 trillion. That is $234 billion, or 0.7 percent, more than the amount projected under current law, he added.

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Last night Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D, RI) asserted on the Senate floor that opposition to the Democrats’ health care reform “is about creating a political defeat for the president of the United States,” that it has “nothing to do with health care, entirely about creating a defeat for this new president....”

Also yesterday, reports Real Clear Politics, a new CNN poll found “61% opposed to the health care plan currently working its way through the Senate. Only 36% approve of the legislation.”

I wonder: does Sen Whitehouse believe that the opposition of 61% of “adult Americans” to the Democrats’ plan is based entirely on a desire to embarrass the president, that it has “nothing to do with health care”?

Hmm. So, we have one party opposing and the other party supporting something that 61% of adults oppose. Since politicians opposing something that most people oppose hardly requires a hidden, conspiratorial explanation, isn’t it more likely that it is the supporting party’s support that “has nothing to do with health care” but is based instead on a desire to prevent a defeat for their party and president?

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In a generally interesting article pointing out that Obama’s popularity has declined among all groups except nonwhites, Ron Brownstein writes:

[Obama’s] familiar strength is his standing among racial minorities. In the 2008 race, Obama won four-fifths of nonwhite voters. Nearly three-fourths of nonwhites still approve of his performance, the latest Gallup weekly polling average shows. That will boost Democrats next year in the growing number of House districts with large minority populations. And those very diverse districts could help Democrats limit any midterm losses....

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Students, and others, have been protesting loudly about California budget cuts in education. One of the more far-reaching protests was at San Francisco State, as Inside Higher Ed reports:

The protests have been described as largely being about the major program cuts and tuition increases at the California State University System, but a list of demands on the protesters Web site also called for the end to wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan and Gaza; a shift in university control from administrators to students, faculty members and staff; the shutdown of prisons; and the establishment of a single payer health-care system.

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I have mentioned my daughter, Jessie, more than a few times, and those of you who have been visiting here for a while will recall (and others will learn now) that she skipped high school, graduated from Bryn Mawr at 17, and is now early in her sixth year of graduate work in applied physics at Caltech.

I mention all this, again, because yesterday, with her successful dissertation defense (her committee was not only enthusiastic about her work, but effusive), she became Caltech’s newest applied physics PhD! And in a double whammy, she learned just before her defense that her latest article submission had been accepted by Nature Photonics, a major journal in her field and her second article there within several months (this was the first). And a few days earlier she learned that one of her articles published recently in Applied Physics Letters was selected in the current (December 2009) issue of Nature Photonics as one of 7 or 8 noteworthy recent articles.

All in all, a very successful few days.

Apparently it is a tradition at Caltech — and other places as well, though I was unaware of it — to post notices around campus of scheduled dissertation defenses because parts of them are open to other students and faculty to observe. In any event some of Jessie’s friends, who remain anonymous, created and distributed this rather dramatic poster. The pictures of and references to “rings” refer to the “double-disk” gizmo [non-scientific term] Jessie and her postdoc colleague, Qiang Lin, have developed to some acclaim, and the “spider” and “spiderweb” references refer to its design, which resembles a spiderweb. (In real life the gizmo is quite small, about two microns in diameter).

I better watch myself, or pretty soon I’ll begin to sound like a proud father.

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CNN, December 9:

Math scores show improvement at schools in large U.S. cities

Washington (CNN) -- Public school students in major metropolitan areas are showing improvement on test scores in mathematics compared with scores from previous years, according to a report released Tuesday by the Department of Education.

Math Gains Stall in Big Cities

Most urban school districts failed to make significant progress in math achievement in the past two years, and had scores below the national average, according to a federal study.

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From the BBC’s Switzerland and the gun (HatTip to InstaPundit):

Guns are deeply rooted within Swiss culture — but the gun crime rate is so low that statistics are not even kept....

But despite the wide ownership and availability of guns, violent crime is extremely rare....

Guns are deeply rooted within Swiss culture — and at least in part as a result the gun crime rate is so low that statistics are not even kept....

Because of the wide ownership and availability of guns, violent crime is extremely rare....

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Is liberal opposition to the successful Stupak amendment in the House, and its equivalent being offered by Sen. Nelson in the Senate, blatantly hypocritical, or am I missing something? (Or, I suppose, both....)

Here is a summary of current anti-abortion law (the Hyde Amendment), the original House health reform bill, the current Senate Finance Committee health reform bill, and House bill as passed with the Stupak amendment.

This summary appears on a liberal site by a critic of all restrictions on abortion, but let us assume that it is entirely accurate. Its summary states as fact what all critics of the Stupak Amendment denounce with horror and outrage:

No taxpayer money could be used to pay for abortion services or for insurance plans that include abortion services beyond those allowed by Hyde, even if those services are paid for entirely with private money.

Sponsored by Reps. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.) and Joseph Pitts (R-Pa.), this amendment will:

• Prevent low- and moderate-income women receiving subsidies to help cover costs from using their own money to purchase private insurance that covers abortion.

• Prevent women with coverage purchased through the new health insurance exchanges, administered by private insurance companies, from using 100 percent of their own money to purchase private insurance that covers abortion.... [Emphasis in original]
  

[i]nsurers could only sell plans that include abortion to customers who can pay 100 percent of their premiums without government assistance.

That institution, of course, is Bob Jones University, and I have discussed the successful effort to prevent it from keeping its “own money” because its ideas and one of its policies, though not illegal, were held to violate “public policy” in several places, especially here, here, and here, where I noted that Bob Jones

lost its tax exemption, to liberal joy and acclaim, because the Supremes held that not only its First Amendment right to academic freedom but also its First Amendment right to the free expression of its religion was trumped by the IRS’s interpretation of the claims of “public policy.”

Or, depending on how you view liberals and hypocrisy, maybe you wouldn’t.

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This post and this post were UPDATED today.

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In a three-party race, the Democrats come in first, with 36% of the vote!

But the other two candidates are “the Tea Party candidate,” with 23%, and the Republican, with 18%.

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[NOTE: This post has been UPDATED]

Five days ago the New York Times published a front page article on the job hunt travails of black college graduates, an article I criticized here. Now, here they go again: today’s ‘Whitening’ the Résumé adds little or nothing to what was published last week.

Well, there was this: Michael Luo, the New York Times reporter, finds it “startling” that black job seekers, fearing discrimination, often attempt to disguise their race.

That seemed startling somehow, maybe because of the popular perception that affirmative action still confers significant advantages to black job candidates, a perception that is not borne out in studies. Moreover, statistics show even college-educated blacks suffering disproportionately in this jobless environment compared with whites, as that [earlier] article reported.

On what may be a related point, last week the National Science Foundation published an initial report from its Survey of Earned Doctorates, and the demographic data there may well have some bearing on job prospects, and not just of those with doctorates. A breakdown of that demographic data can be found here.

30,791 doctorates in all fields were awarded to U.S. citizens or permanent residents in 2008, and 2030 of them went to blacks. But of those black doctorates, 758, or over 37%, were in education. 241, or a little under 12%, were in physical sciences or engineering. By contrast, 24% of all the doctorates earned by whites and Asians were in physical sciences or engineering.

If we assume that the demographic distribution of undergraduate majors is not significantly different from the distribution of doctorates, it is certainly possible that black college graduates have a “disproportionately” harder time finding jobs because they “disproportionately” earned degrees that carry less weight in the job market.

UPDATE [7 December]

Keeping in mind that I don’t do numbers very well and am certainly not an education researcher, let’s play with these numbers a bit.

First, more numbers: According to this U.S. Census Bureau, 2005 American Community Survey Public Use Microdata Sample File, in 2005 there were 25,346,474 whites and 2,312,003 blacks 25 years old or older with bachelors degrees.

Now, if we make the reasonable (I think) assumption mentioned above — that the distribution of those degrees would at least roughly resemble the distribution of doctorates, that would mean that in 2005 there were 6,083,154 whites but only 227,440 blacks in the United States with degrees in engineering or some physical science. Thus for every 100 science or engineering job seekers, over 96% of them would be white. (This analysis would have been more accurate if I had included Asians, but doing so would have put an additional strain on my arithmetic and would have put blacks at an additional disadvantage since a higher percentage of Asians have science and engineering degrees than whites.)

Even if we assume that grades and other measures of educational qualification (such as nature of institution attended) were randomly distributed between the two racial groups, there is no reason to assume that employers who found the most qualified applicants from among the 96% rather than the 4% were guilty of racial discrimination, either conscious or unconscious.

I realize of course that not all job applicants are in science or engineering fields, but I mean this little exercise to be suggestive, not dispositive, of the prevalence of racial discrimination in the job market.

While I’m at it, here’s another bit of evidence suggesting that fears of rampant discrimination may be considerably exaggerated:

A white woman with a bachelor's degree typically earned nearly $37,800 in 2003, compared with $41,100 for a college-educated black woman and nearly $43,700 for a college-educated Asian woman, according to data being released today by the Census Bureau. Hispanic women took home slightly less, at $37,600 a year.

Now listen (if you like the sound of fingernails on blackboards) to Rep. Maxine Waters:

We don’t like to talk about it, but there’s still discrimination in our society. Black college graduates can’t get professional jobs as easily as whites. We have blacks disguising their voices on the telephone or trying to hide their blackness in responding to job announcements. It’s real.

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Over five years ago Joseph Califano, former just about everything, modestly explained in the pages of the Washington Post “How I Squared Church and State,” by which he meant how he had resolved the long-standing problem of how liberal politicians should deal with conservative church doctrine. The solution, he explained at some length, was actually quite simple: simply follow the examples he had set in dealing with the bishops over abortion, birth control, sterilization, fetal research, etc., as a top domestic advisor to President Johnson and as President Carter’s Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare.

We must be a nation of obdurate bishops and secular backsliders, however, for apparently Califano’s instructions have not been followed. Or at least that’s what I conclude since the Washington Post brought him back yesterday for a reprise of his old arguments. All the old examples are trotted out, in almost identical form.

For example, from 2004 article on meeting with bishops over their objections to President Johnson insisting on family planning a condition for foreign aid:

It was my first political negotiation with the Catholic hierarchy. I met several times with their Washington representative, the Rev. Francis Hurley. I reminded Father Hurley that LBJ was doing God’s work -- trying to eliminate poverty, helping the elderly, promoting equal rights for minorities. “The bishops,” I argued, “should not attack and wound a president who, on balance, is advancing so many of their causes.” We crafted an uneasy truce: If the president used the term “population problem” (which also allowed for solutions such as increasing available food) rather than “birth control” or “population control,” the bishops would stay silent. Johnson kept his part of the bargain. So did the bishops.

At meetings with Father Francis Hurley, the bishops’ top Washington staffer, and Detroit Archbishop John Dearden, leader of the American bishops, I assured them that we were offering an option to the poor, not coercing acceptance. We ultimately agreed that if the president phrased his policy in terms of “population control” (which allowed for more food and the church-approved rhythm method of family planning as well as contraception), the bishops would cool their rhetoric. LBJ kept his word, and when he later signed a U.N. declaration supporting population control, the bishops were silent.

About two months earlier I had posted some critical comments about Mario Cuomo, widely regarded as something like the secular Catholic sage of the Democratic party. Cuomo had recently published a Bush-bashing gloss on Lincoln, and I took that occasion to note at some length that his famous speech at Notre Dame, “Religious Belief and Public Morality: A Catholic Governor’s Perspective,” was, ironically, almost identical in rhetoric and underlying values to the views on slavery expressed by Lincoln's famous antagonist, Stephen A. Douglas. As I wrote then:

Essentially, Cuomo argued at Notre Dame that he agreed with and accepted his Church’s teaching that abortion is wrong, but that in a pluralistic democracy he did not believe he had the right to force his belief on others. He said this, of course, at much greater length, but that’s the essence of what he said.
....
Cuomo’s position, in short, is eerily similar to Stephen A. Douglas’s notion of “popular sovereignty.” As historian Robert W. Johannsen has written,

Slavery, [Douglas] believed, must be treated impartially as a question of public policy, although he privately thought it was wrong and hoped it would be eliminated some day.

Before getting on with it, however, let me say a few words about what I’m not going to say. This post is not about abortion and will not discuss what position politicians should take on it. Nor, since I am no longer a Democrat, will I attempt to tell that party what its position should be or whether it should continue to exclude pro-life Democrats from positions of influence, as it did when it refused the late Pa. governor Bob Casey speaking roles in the 1992 and 1996 nominating conventions. And since I am not now nor have I ever been a Catholic, I would not dream of pontificating (if you’ll pardon the expression) about the communion question or other matters of church policy or discipline. Finally, although I shall be critical of Mr. Califano’s article and argument, I want to emphasize that I challenge neither the sincerity of his beliefs nor his right to weigh the demands of his church and his public obligations as he sees fit.

I would like to argue, however, that whatever one’s positions on the above matters, and despite his assurances of having solved the vexing question of church-state relations (or, where solution proved impossible, soothed them with the salve of wise and widely acclaimed compromise), Mr. Califano’s article does not succeed in rescuing his fellow Catholic pols from the occasionally conflicting demands of their faith, party, and personal ambition.

“When God and Caesar claim controlling jurisdiction over public policy in America,” Califano begins, “public servants who are Catholic can get caught between a religious rock and a public policy hard place.” He then proceeds to describe a series of issues that he dealt with, as domestic adviser to LBJ and secretary of HEW under Carter, where he “repeatedly confronted the tension between my religious beliefs and public policy — and the bishops repeatedly confronted me.”

The moral theology of the Catholic Church was an invaluable compass for me, but balancing my Catholic convictions with my obligations as a public servant was a wrenching intellectual, spiritual and emotional experience.

The simple fact is that in every single tug of war between what he proclaims to be his religious beliefs and public policy, public policy always won. He may have balanced his “Catholic convictions” against his obligations as a public servant, and that balancing may well have been “wrenching,” but once the balancing was done those convictions never interfered with his actions. In short, it is not possible to distinguish his actions at all from what they would have been, in each instance, had he not been a Catholic at all.

Some examples:

Birth Control
The “Catholic hierarchy” strenuously objected to LBJ’s “aggressive posture on birth control,” and Califano was sent to pacify the bishops. “The bishops,” he argued, “should not attack and wound a president who, on balance, is advancing so many of their causes.”

Medicaid Funding of Abortions
Califano favored limiting public funding to cases where the life of the mother would be endangered, but Congress passed a broader law that also permitted funding in cases of rape or incest.

At that point, my choice was to enforce the law or, as some suggested, to resign. I was not about to retire to some Walden Pond or Vatican Hill. So I issued regulations giving women 60 days to report cases of rape or incest, recognizing that in those days most women did not report such horrendous incidents unless they thought they were pregnant. The Catholic hierarchy erupted. So did President Carter. Both wanted a much shorter period, the bishops because they thought it would curb abortions; Carter because he thought it would reduce the opportunity for fraud. I held firm, believing that I had fairly reflected congressional intent. The Congress agreed with me.

The bishops wanted a complete ban; they considered morally unacceptable any experimentation or action that threatened the sanctity of life, including sterilization. Again I honored my obligation to follow the law. I issued regulations banning funds for the sterilization of anyone under 21 (on the ground that no minor could give informed consent to an irreversible procedure that goes to the essence of the life process) and of inmates of correctional facilities, mental hospitals or other rehabilitative facilities.

Califano’s attempts to justify these and similar choices take several familiar forms. The starkest is some combination of pure personal ambition and the no doubt sincere belief that the public should not be denied the singular benefits of his remaining in office: “I was not about to retire to some Walden Pond or Vatican Hill.”

Another justification is a convenient reading of Catholic tradition:

...having experienced the complications and compromises -- the need to choose the lesser of two evils and the importance of having Catholics in public life -- I believe that public figures who are Catholic are entitled to consult their own conscience to determine whether they are entitled to receive Communion. The Catholic tradition of leaving that decision to the individual Catholic and God applies to Catholics who have divorced, sinned or eaten food five minutes before Mass. It should apply to public officials.

Califano quotes and relies on the Jesuit theologian Gustave Weigel, who argued in an influential 1960 lecture that “the Roman Catholic Church would not attempt to interfere in the political activities of a Catholic president, nor would a Catholic president be bound by Catholic morality in deciding public issues.” This is no doubt a workable compromise for a church that does not want to banish itself to the political sidelines, but it does leave the question, a question re-inforced by Califano’s own vigorous use of the provided leeway, of why Califano thinks “having Catholics is public life” is so important, since they don’t have to behave like Catholics. Why is it important to have Catholics in public life if, once there, they’re no different from anybody else?

Like Cuomo before him, Califano tries hard to demonstrate that he’s holding on to his “Catholic convictions.”

I would prefer it if Kerry (and the 48 Catholic members of Congress who warned, in a letter to Washington Cardinal Theodore E. McCarrick, that U.S. bishops risk reviving anti-Catholic bigotry if they deny Communion to politicians who support abortion rights) expressed opposition to federal funding of abortion and voted to ban partial-birth abortion.

Again, I’m not saying he shouldn’t have done that. This is America, after all, and it is hard to deny sovereignty here to individual conscience. Nor am I saying that he should have been denied communion. It is for Califano to decide how much weight to give to church doctrine and his own convictions, and it is for the Catholic church to decide how, or whether, to enforce its own doctrines with discipline against individual members.

I suppose what I’m saying is that Cuomo’s and Califano’s convictions aren’t what they think they are. As I either said or implied in my earlier post on Cuomo, the arguments they offer to justify their acquiescence to abortion, sterilization, etc. were also employed to justify acquiescence to slavery. I suspect the simple fact is that neither of them think abortion is as bad as slavery. If they did, they wouldn’t have been so willing to go along with it.

One last point. The felt necessity of many Catholic liberals to make their peace, at least publicly, with abortion in some respects is just another example of what can be described as a flight from principle that has affected (some would say infected) modern liberalism. The sway of relativism in modern thought, including but certainly not limited to the post-modern excrescence that has captured more than a few outposts in academia, has tried to teach all of us that what we used to think of as our principles are really nothing more than personal preferences. Interpretation is more and more; text is less and less. “Without regard” to race, creed, or color now means “with regard” if one likes the regarders and their purpose.

Cuomo and Califano are modern Democratic liberals. It’s increasingly hard to see what their Catholicism adds to the mix, other than a little public angst.

UPDATE [7 December]

A meticulously careful reader, Linda Seebach (once an editor, always an editor), called my attention to the fact that in 2004 Califano recalled that the bishops were defused when he and President Johnson shrewdly realized that if they “used the term ‘population problem’ (which also allowed for solutions such as increasing available food) rather than ‘birth control’ or ‘population control,’ the bishops would stay silent.”

In last Saturday’s retelling of the same anecdote, however, Califano’s shrewd solution was “that if the president phrased his policy in terms of ‘population control’ (which allowed for more food and the church-approved rhythm method of family planning as well as contraception), the bishops would cool their rhetoric.”

“Population problem” or “population control,” who cares? What matters is not the actual fact but Califano’s shrewd brilliance. Just ask him.

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Randolph Bell, formerly special envoy in the Bureau of European Affairs at the State Department and now a columnist for the Richmond Times Dispatch, has an interesting column today discussing the differences between religious diversity in Europe and the United States. “Europeans,” he writes, “have a different view than do we of religious diversity and of the role of religion in the 21st century.”

Because the U.S. First Amendment establishes separation of church and state and free exercise of religion, there has prevailed in this country for more than two centuries a free market in religion — one which is often as assertive and competitive as is our free market in matters economic. That free market is as much anathema to many European elites as is the free market in fast food. To be sure, I recently visited a McDonald’s in the heart of Bordeaux wine country and found it mobbed — and Pentacostalism is experiencing a rapid growth in many European countries — but you are unlikely to get elected to the European Parliament by advocating fast food and hot religion.

The fact that freedom of belief and conscience is a matter of constitutional law has had the effect of widening and strengthening those freedoms here. The fact that European freedoms are more often culturally anchored lends a surprising degree of arbitrariness to them. Most Germans expect themselves to be either Evangelical Lutheran or Roman Catholic, and cultural bureaucracies have proceeded cautiously in permitting evangelical denominations — let alone Scientologists — to organize. Statist and Roman-law traditions mitigate against that kind of free-market religious diversity. In cultures wherein the first names one may give one’s children must be drawn from an officially approved list, it is simply unseemly that there should be “cults” out and about in the land. Freedom of thought and belief are therefore less often advanced by the courts in Europe than they are in the United States.

derives not so much from the text of the Constitution as from something deeper in the very structure of our society. That something is the overriding fact of religious pluralism, a pluralism that in the absence of official neutrality [that is, the separation of church and state] would lead to constant strife and conflict.

“If the very structure of American society requires a principle of neutrality that in turn requires a separation of church and state,” I argued,

should it not also compel a separation of race and state? After all, as the eminent Berkeley historian David Hollinger has written, in our time "ethno-racial affiliations have come to play a role similar to that played by religious affiliations at the time of the founding of the republic and throughout most of American history." (Post-Ethnic America, Basic Books, 1995, p. 123). Surely racial and ethnic preferences are at least as “divisive” today as debates over school vouchers, which seem to have bothered a few litigants and the courts much more than the society as a whole.

Perhaps Justice Breyer and his like-minded brethren, on and off the Court, can be called on to explain why they fear “the risk” of “potential” divisiveness in what they see as religious preferences but not the clear and present divisiveness of racial and ethnic preferences. Or, in the alternative, they could explain why a principle that they believe justifies racial preferences does not also justify religious preference, for certainly they recognize that religion provides as good or better basis for “diversity” as race. Would they look on religious preferences in admissions and hiring with the same favor they bestow on racial and ethnic preferences? What is it precisely that would make a preference for Arabs acceptable but for Muslims unacceptable? Are not evangelical Christians “underrepresented” among the students and on the faculties of our elite, selective universities? Why must the Michigan law school have a “critical mass” of blacks and Hispanics but not of Missouri Synod Lutherans? Why was the old quota system that restricted the number of Jews in the Ivy League (presumably) wrong, but the de facto quota system that restricted the number of Asians admitted to Berkeley and UCLA under the reign of preferences not wrong?

In short, perhaps it is time to insist on a separation of race and state, to insist in the ethnic and racial sphere, as well as the religious, that government must be neutral, that it protect all of its constituent groups but prefer none — not because the First Amendment compels neutrality in this sphere, but because of the same social reality that led to the First Amendment in the first place.

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In what could easily pass as a rather unfunny attempt at comedy, the Obama White House, after demanding and getting $800 billion ten months ago to stimulate the economy, has now, with unemployment passing 10% and rising, decided to convene a “summit” of business leaders and others to try to figure out how to create jobs.

ABC News reports this morning:

“The president’s really looking forward to having a wide cross section of people from small, medium and lagre businesses,” senior White House adviser Valerie Jarrett told “Good Morning America’s” Robin Roberts today. “All coming together and working with him and his economic team to see if we can come up with some new, fresh ideas to help jumpstart the economy.”
....
“We inherited an economic meltdown 10 months ago when he took office. He moved boldly to get us back on track with a variety of measures. We still have an unemployment rate that is far too high,” Jarrett said. “He thinks today is a great opportunity to bring in new fresh ideas.”

Well, no. In a thin-skinned huff, the representatives of the largest job creators weren’t invited.

... President Obama is hosting a “jobs summit” at the White House Thursday that will be packed with business leaders and economists supportive of White House policies but lacks a diversity of opinion, several analysts say.

Missing from a partial list of attendees released by the White House are the self-proclaimed voices of business — the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Federation of Independent Business - both of which have been critical of Mr. Obama’s proposed health care overhaul.

Several attendees are labor leaders whose political action committees contributed impressive amounts to Obama's war chest, including one group that gave nearly $29.5 million.

Anna Burger of Change to Win, who is invited to attend the forum, is secretary treasurer of Service Employees International Union Committee on Political Education, or SEIU COPE, a political action committee that gave $29,442,016 to Obama between February 2008 and September 2009. Burger gave Obama $750 in personal contributions.

American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten will also be at the summit. The AFT, along with the AFL-CIO Committee on Political Education, gave Obama $1,997,375 in October 2008. And the United Food & Commercial Workers International Union, which donated $673,309 to Obama from February to October 2008, will also be represented at the forum.

Continuing in its unfunny comedic vein, on a day when the Secretary of State and assorted generals, admirals, and others were on Capitol Hill testifying about important matters of state, defense, the war against terrorism Muslim-made disasters or whatever terrorism is called these days, the New York Times reported (playing the straight man to the president’s stand up comedy) that President Obama claimed executive privilege and refused to allow his social secretary — his social secretary! — to testify about procedures (or lack of them) for admitting various and sundry unauthorized people to the White House.

The White House on Wednesday invoked the separation of powers to keep Desiree Rogers, President Obama’s social secretary, from testifying on Capitol Hill about how a couple of aspiring reality television show celebrities crashed a state dinner for the prime minister of India last week.

ADDENDUM

I inadvertently left out another major uninvitee:

Administration officials have excluded major trade associations from the summit, including the National Association of Manufacturers....

Maybe there’s no need; it’s already a joke.

ADDENDUM II

According to White House records, SEIU president Andy Stern has visited the White House more than any other individual. If the SEIU has any “new, fresh ideas to help jumpstart the economy” that it withheld from the president all those times, he should be barred from future visits.

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An interesting measure of where we are now — or at least where the Democratic Party is now — is seeing this link on Drudge, Howard Dean Declares Debate Between Capitalism and Socialism to Be Over..., and realizing that you have to go to the source to discover which side Dean thinks won the debate.

I won’t give away the answer.

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The New York Times has a front page article today, “In Job Hunt, College Degree Can’t Close Racial Gap,” about the continuing discrimination faced by black college and business school graduates. In place of evidence, however, there is innuendo, implication, perception, etc. Oh well, what do you expect? This is the New York Times writing about race, after all.

The article begins:

Johnny R. Williams, 30, would appear to be an unlikely person to have to fret about the impact of race on his job search, with companies like JPMorgan Chase and an M.B.A. from the University of Chicago on his résumé.

But after graduating from business school last year and not having much success garnering interviews, he decided to retool his résumé, scrubbing it of any details that might tip off his skin color. His membership, for instance, in the African-American business students association? Deleted.

“If they’re going to X me,” Mr. Williams said, “I’d like to at least get in the door first.”

Next:

Similarly, Barry Jabbar Sykes, 37, who has a degree in mathematics from Morehouse College, a historically black college in Atlanta, now uses Barry J. Sykes in his continuing search for an information technology position, even though he has gone by Jabbar his whole life.

“Barry sounds like I could be from Ireland,” he said.

Interestingly, even a famous name-changing Barry (though in the other direction) comes in for some knocks.

Many interviewed, however, wrestled with “pulling the race card,” groping between their cynicism and desire to avoid the stigma that blacks are too quick to claim victimhood. After all, many had gone to good schools and had accomplished résumés. Some had grown up in well-to-do settings, with parents who had raised them never to doubt how high they could climb. Moreover, there is President Obama, perhaps the ultimate embodiment of that belief.

Certainly, they conceded, there are times when their race can be beneficial, particularly with companies that have diversity programs. But many said they sensed that such opportunities had been cut back over the years and even more during the downturn. Others speculated there was now more of a tendency to deem diversity unnecessary after Mr. Obama’s triumph.

In fact, whether Mr. Obama’s election has been good or bad for their job prospects is hotly debated. Several interviewed went so far as to say that they believed there was only so much progress that many in the country could take, and that there was now a backlash against blacks.

“There is resentment toward his presidency among some because of his race,” said Edward Verner, a Morehouse alumnus from New Jersey who was laid off as a regional sales manager and has been able to find only part-time work. “This has affected well-educated, African-American job seekers.”

Looking closely at the comments of these disappointed job seekers suggests something revealing about the nature of their (and the New York Times’) desires and expectations. Consider, for example:

Whether or not each case actually involved bias, the possibility has furnished an additional agonizing layer of second-guessing for many as their job searches have dragged on.

“It does weigh on you in the search because you’re wondering, how much is race playing a factor in whether I’m even getting a first call, or whether I’m even getting an in-person interview once they hear my voice and they know I’m probably African-American?” said Terelle Hairston, 25, a graduate of Yale University who has been looking for work since the summer while also trying to get a marketing consulting start-up off the ground. “You even worry that the hiring manager may not be as interested in diversity as the H.R. manager or upper management.”

Certainly, [many of those interviewed] conceded, there are times when their race can be beneficial, particularly with companies that have diversity programs. But many said they sensed that such opportunities had been cut back over the years and even more during the downturn. Others speculated there was now more of a tendency to deem diversity unnecessary after Mr. Obama’s triumph.

“Diversity,” by discarding the principle prohibiting preferential treatment based on race, has done away with the ability of those who see themselves as victims of diversity’s absence to make principled complaints. Thus the article observes, in a strained effort to hold on to discrimination as the culprit:

Discrimination in many cases may not even be intentional, some job seekers pointed out, but simply a matter of people gravitating toward similar people, casting about for the right “cultural fit,” a buzzword often heard in corporate circles.

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