Pat Allen: The View from Right Field

Ted Stevens Isn't Guilty and He's Not a Senator

The reversal of former Senator Ted Stevens’ conviction and the decision by Attorney General Eric Holder to drop the charges against Mr. Stevens (see here) raise some interesting "what ifs" and a couple of "thank heavens". First, the "what ifs".

What if then-Senator Stevens had not been improperly convicted before the November election? As it was, he only lost by 3,724 votes. If he had not been convicted, or maybe even acquitted, would he have won re-election? Given the small margin by which he lost after being convicted, a good argument can be made that he would have won.

What if Republican Ted Stevens had been in the Senate for the past three months instead of Democrat Mark Begich? Instead of a 58-41 party split (we’re still waiting for Minnesota), we would have a 57-42 split. Would have made a difference on some of those bills that passed without a vote to spare? Even if the bills would still have passed, might some changes have had to be made in them to pick up another Republican vote?

And now for a couple of " thank heavens". What if, instead of Senator Stevens, the Bush Justice Department had gone after a Democratic Senator and convicted him or her through prosecutorial misconduct, thereby flipping a Democratic seat Republican. If the Minnesota seat finally goes to Franken, would that Republican senator be the difference between 59 Democrats and 60 Democrats in the Senate? Thank heavens it was a Republican seat, not a Democratic one.

What if there had been a Democratic President in office last year? What if it was a Democrat-led Justice Department that got a conviction of Senator Steven through prosecutorial misconduct? Would some people think it was part of a plan to get to do whatever was necessary to get to 60 seats in the Senate? Thank heavens it was a Republican-led Justice Department, not a Democratic one.

One final note. Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said this of the decision by Attorney General Holder to ask that the charges against Senator Stevens be dropped: "Ted Stevens is 85 years old. He's already been punished enough. I'm satisfied." Uh, Senator Reid, with his conviction reversed and the charges against him dropped, former Senator Stevens hasn’t been convicted of anything and has no charges against him. Why should he be punished at all? How much punishment is enough for somebody who hasn’t been found guility of anything? But, I guess, that is just Harry "this war is lost"/"we won’t seat anybody appointed by Rod Blagojevich" Reid.

Rove on Bush: He Was Right When It Mattered Most

In Thursday’s Wall Street Journal Karl Rove wrote an op-ed piece entitled "Bush Was Right When It Mattered Most". Some of Mr. Rove’s comments need a response or two.

"To start with, Mr. Bush was right about Iraq. The world is safer without Saddam Hussein in power."

President Bush was right about Iraq, but he was right about Iraq because he thought, as almost everybody else did at the time, both here and abroad, that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Given what had happened on September 11, neither the world nor the United States could take a chance on somebody like Saddam Hussein having WMD. Saddam was not involved in the 9/11 plots, but he was doing other things, like paying the families of Palestinian suicide bombers, starting a war with Iran, invading Kuwait, using WMD on his own people, etc. The risk of him having WMD could not be allowed to continue; it was too dangerous. Bush was right to go in for that reason. The fact WMD were not found does not mean the decision was wrong. There did not need to be another justification for the invasion once WMD were not found. The decision could only be based on the facts available at the time it was made. And it was right on that basis – period.*

"And the former president was right to change strategy and surge more U.S. troops."

President Bush was right about changing our strategy in Iraq and, therefore, needing to send more troops, but it took him too long to figure it out. The change in strategy should have happened six, nine, even twelve months earlier. And the failure to figure it out and do it earlier was a huge mistake. Without an incompetent foe like Al Qaeda in Iraq, that delay might have cost us the chance to win. Being right too late doesn’t count as being right.

"Mr. Bush cut income taxes for every American who pays taxes. He also cut taxes on capital, investment and savings."

President Bush was right to cut taxes, but he and the Republicans in Congress were wrong to play games with how the tax cuts were passed. Because of some silly Congressional budgeting rules, these tax cuts (or at least most of them) were structured so they would automatically expire in 2010. That means that unless the new Democratic Congress passes a law to continue them, they go away. That may have made it easier to pass the tax cuts in 2003, but it is not looking like a good idea now. Instead of playing budgetary games, President Bush and the Republicans in Congress should have locked the tax cuts into place when they were originally passed.

"Mr. Bush was right to match tax cuts with spending restraint. … Bill Clinton's last budget increased domestic nonsecurity discretionary spending by 16%. Mr. Bush cut that to 6.2% growth in his first budget, 5.5% in his second, 4.3% in his third, 2.2% in his fourth, and then below inflation, on average, since. That isn't the sum total of the fiscal record, of course -- but it's a key part of it."

I don’t know what Mr. Rove means by "domestic nonsecurity discretionary spending," but this doesn’t reflect the reality of what happened during President Bush’s first six years in office. Once again, it was not all President Bush. Republicans in Congress were complicit, too. But the spending excesses of those six years are hurting Republican credibility now when we try to warn of overspending by the Obama administration. Why should people listen to complaints about wasteful spending from the party that originally brought you the Bridge to Nowhere?

"He was right to have modernized Medicare with prescription drug benefits provided through competition, not delivered by government. The program is costing 40% less than projected because market forces dominate and people -- not government -- are making the decisions."

While the competition part was good, it was wrong to pass the biggest expansion of the welfare state since the Johnson Administration before addressing the funding problems of Medicare and Social Security. Also, let’s see how many of those competition provisions survive the new Administration and the new Congress.

"Mr. Bush was right to pass No Child Left Behind (NCLB), requiring states to set up tough accountability systems that measure every child's progress at school."

No, President Bush was not right to get the federal government so deeply involved in elementary and secondary education. Education is a state and local responsibility. President Bush was President of the United States, not president of the school board. The president’s responsibilities are huge. He has enough to do without taking on other jobs, too. For example, President Bush needed to get Iraq right, not worry about fourth grade social studies scores.

President Bush did get some things right, but not as many as Mr. Rove claims. Also, too much of what President Bush did has cost the Republican Party its credibility and some of its principles. How can you support fiscal responsibility and pass that many earmarks? How can you claim to believe in federalism and pass NCLB? How can you worry about the size of government and pass the senior drug program? People may have thought that doing these things would help Republicans stay in office. They didn’t. And in any case, if that is what you have to do to stay in office, why would you care?

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* The question of whether we should have gone into Iraq in 2003 if we had known that Saddam Hussein did not have WMD is another question, and it is beyond the scope of this post. I hope to get to that question someday.

President-Elect Obama to Take the Train to Washington

Reports are that President-Elect Obama will take a train to Washington for his inauguration. This is apparently another of his efforts to invoke the memory of Abraham Lincoln, though President-Elect Obama will just take the train from Philadelphia instead of all the way from Springfield.

Two comments on this plan, one serious and the other not so. First, the not-so-serious comment: So, President-Elect Obama wants to take the train to Washington for his inauguration, just like Abraham Lincoln. Does that mean Obama is going to get off the train in Baltimore and sneak into Washington in the middle of the night, dressed up like an old woman?

Second, the serious comment. President-Elect Obama has said Abraham Lincoln is one of his heroes. There can be no objection to that. There may not be a better role model for a public official than Abraham Lincoln. But I wonder if President-Elect Obama is talking about Abraham Lincoln too much. I wonder if he isn’t pushing the comparison with Lincoln too far. Comparisons with people like Abraham Lincoln should come from others, not from one’s self.

I would urge President-Elect Obama to de-emphasize the Lincoln comparisons. If someday he deserves the comparisons, they will come. If he doesn’t, he will look the poorer for having tried to make them himself.

Why Do We Even Need a Replacement for Barack Obama?

I have an idea. Instead of all dealing with all of the problems of trying to appoint somebody to replace President-elect Obama as senator from Illinois, why don’t we just leave the seat vacant? I mean it’s not like Obama did anything in the Senate during the last two years. He hardly showed up at all, and we got along fine. Why don’t we just wait until 2010? It might be a lot easier.

Oops, I Was Wrong On That One – And Electing the President By Popular Vote

Back on November 6, I made this comment about the election:

"According to CNN, as of this morning, approximately 120,558,000 votes had been cast for either Obama or McCain. In 2004 Bush and Kerry got slightly over 121,068,000 votes between them. While there are more votes to be counted, and the final vote total in 2008 will probably be more than the 2004 total, it looks like the percentage of the total eligible voters who actually voted will be down.(See Update below.)
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Update (11/06/08 8:35 a.m.): Stories in the media have indicated that the turnout was the highest in generations.  Maybe the count is going more slowly than I would have thought.  We will see."

Well, I was wrong – because the counting was going more slowly than I thought. As of this morning, CNN shows 125,016,000 votes for President. That number of votes is 3.3% higher than 2004, and the total could wind up being about 4% more than 2004 by the time they are done counting. That is a sizable increase, though it is just a little bit more than the increase in the overall population of the United States from 2004 to 2008. The population of the U.S. as of July 1, 2004, was estimated to be 294,655,000. As of October 22, 2008, it was estimated to be 305,468,000. Lowering the 2008 estimate to 304,500,000 so you have comparable numbers (i.e., July 1 to July 1) shows a 3.7% increase in population from 2004 to 2008. Obviously, these numbers are not eligible voters, but I think the increase would be about the same. So, there was a small increase in the percentage of voters participating, but not a big one. What probably happened was that Obama wound up increasing the percentage of people voting in certain categories (for example, maybe Blacks and young people), while unhappiness with the Republican candidates and/or unhappiness with the Bush Administration and the Republicans in Congress from 2001 through 2006, decreased participation among other groups.

One more comment: The slowness of the counting of the last 3% or 4% of the popular vote perhaps provides another reason why electing the President by a straight popular vote is not be a good idea. Think about he possibility of a really close contest in the popular vote – and then consider additional votes coming in over days and weeks after election day. It would be Florida 2000 (or the gubernatorial election in Washington state in 2004) writ large. They couldn’t recount the votes in just Florida on a timely basis in 2000. How could we recount all of the votes in the whole country? And what about ballot security and standards for counting the votes? Appalling as it is to say, those things don’t matter if the election isn’t close. If it’s 60-40 (or even 53-46), it doesn’t matter. When it’s Florida in 2000, it does matter. If it was that close nationally, every vote everywhere would matter. In the governor’s race in Washington state in 2004, the election authorities in Seattle were discovering additional uncounted ballots days and weeks after the election. That was a big problem, but it was just one state. A close popular vote, and a President elected by popular vote, would make that a national problem – and could de-legitimatize the election in a way that would make Florida 2000 look like the proverbial Sunday School picnic.

Electing the President by popular vote. I don’t think I want to go there.

Random Comments on Tuesday's Election

1. According to CNN, as of this morning, approximately 120,558,000 votes had been cast for either Obama or McCain. In 2004 Bush and Kerry got slightly over 121,068,000 votes between them. While there are more votes to be counted, and the final vote total in 2008 will probably be more than the 2004 total, it looks like the percentage of the total eligible voters who actually voted will be down. (See Update below.)

2. Republicans who complain that John McCain should have done this or shouldn’t have done that (mostly not pick Sarah Palin) or that Mitt Romney (or somebody else) could have done better are just kidding themselves. Only once since FDR has a party held the White House for more than eight years, and this was not going to be the second time. What with Katrina, Iraq (before General Petraeus), a disastrous record by Republicans in Congress and an economy that was not doing good even before the panic in late September, it was incredible that Senator McCain was virtually tied with Barack Obama before the panic. With the panic, no Republican could win. Period. Stop talking about it.

3. While the electoral vote feels like a landslide, the difference in the popular vote, 53% to 46%, was not all that big, especially in light of point # 1 above. It’s not going to take that much of a shift for Republicans to win back the presidency.

4. Congress is an entirely different story. The losses on Capitol Hill, especially when added to the results in 2006, are going to take a while, a long while, to recover from. Once representatives are elected, they are tough to kick out. Incumbency is very powerful, and the Democrats have picked up a bunch of new representatives in the last two elections who will be able to start building up their own incumbencies.

5. There was a lot of talk on election night about this being the most Democratic Congress since Bill Clinton’s in ’93 or Jimmy Carter’s in ’77 or maybe even Lyndon Johnson’s in ’65. I think this one could beat all of them. The ‘65 and ’77 Congresses had a lot of southern Democrats, who tended to be moderate or even conservative. Even ’93 had more moderate Democrats than the upcoming ’09 Congress. The leaders, the committee heads, and the vast majority of the members are real liberals. This could be the most liberal Congress (especially the House) since the New Deal.

6. There was also a lot of talk on election night about whether the Democrats would get filibuster-proof 60 seats in the Senate or whether the Republicans would retain at least 41 senators. The reporters made it seem like a big deal once it began to look like the Republicans would keep at least 41 senators. (Actually, because Georgia is apparently going to have a run-off, it is unclear whether the Republicans really do have 41 seats yet.) In any case, this is a phony issue. It will not be hard for the Democrats, especially with President Obama’s help, to pick off a couple of Republicans if necessary to beat a filibuster. Gordon Smith of Oregon would be a possibility if he wins or the Republican senators out of Maine. And there are others, too. It will be tough for Mitch McConnell to hold the Republicans together, unless Harry Reid and the Democratic leadership in the Senate are really arrogant and stupid (which is a possibility).

6. Given the size of the liberal Democratic majorities in Congress, conservatives and Republicans may have to look to Barack Obama to stop the more extreme liberal ideas of Congress. (Not a re-assuring thought.)

8. President-elect Obama’s victory speech Tuesday night was muted and moderate, which the media loved. But then the media loves talk; it’s what they do themselves, after all. The question is whether his actions will follow his talk. We don’t know. Thus far Barack Obama’s career has been almost all talk. Now it is going to involve doings things, too.

9. The area, at least domestically, where I think Barack Obama will be the most liberal will be judicial appointments. This is an area where he can go liberal and not have it be obvious to the general public. For conservatives, this is a real concern.

10. Potentially, the most concerning aspect of the Obama election is this: When I was in Young Republicans in college, they told us that if we could get somebody to join the YR’s, pay the membership dues, and do a little work, they would likely be Republicans for life. If that theory is still true, a lot of life-long Democrats may have been created in this election.

11. A local prediction: Barack Obama has promised that he would not fire Patrick Fitzgerald, the U.S. Attorney for Northern Illinois, who has been relentless in his corruption investigations, bringing charges against Illinois politicians of both parties. As John Kass of the Chicago Tribune has said, though, Obama never promised not to promote Fitzgerald out of Chicago. Local Democrats do not care about Governor Rod Blagojevich (who seems to be a target of Fitzgerald’s investigations), but they are going to want Fitzgerald gone before he gets to Richie (i.e., Mayor Richard M. Daley). In order to get Fitzgerald to leave, it is going to have to be a big promotion. I figure Obama would not want Fitzgerald in his Justice Department. He could be a real pain there. So, how about a judgeship? Would a U.S. District Court judgeship be enough or would it take a Court of Appeals seat? I’m betting on the latter.

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Update (11/06/08 8:35 a.m.): Stories in the media have indicated the turnout was the highest in generations.  Maybe the count is going more slowly than I would have thought.  We will see.

Who Do You NOT Want To Be President

And so, this election, like so many of them, finally turns to the questiojn of who do you not want to be elected.

While you can’t elect the Vice President and President separately (at least not since 1800), let’s look at the presidential and vice presidential candidates separately just to make things manageable. And let’s do the vice presidential candidates first.

Joe Biden. Sarah Palin. Joe Biden has been in the Senate since Ron Santo played third base for the Chicago Cubs. Joe Biden has a lot of experience in Washington. So what? As I have said before, Senator Biden may have been in the Senate for a long time, but he keeps getting the answers wrong. Governor Palin may not have a lot of foreign policy experience, but I’ll take a good solid Republican, even one without a lot of foreign policy experience, over somebody who can’t get the answers right even when he has been there for 30+ years.

Also, Sarah Palin has actually stood up against the leaders of her own party in Alaska to fight corruption. That’s experience we need in Washington, and it’s not experience that anybody on the Democratic side has.

Barack Obama. John McCain. John McCain has taken lots of positions I disagree with. His knowledge of and experience in the economic area is less than one would prefer. But he gets a lot of things right, too. He got Iraq right. He gets government spending right. He knows that foreign policy and defense is a lot more than thinking we can work it all out if we just sit down and talk to other countries.

As for Barack Obama, it is hard to know what he believes. Is he a very liberal Democrat or is he a moderate Democrat who has just emphasized liberal positions when he has run in liberal constituencies? He has never really done anything, so we don’t have that to go on. When it’s just talk, it’s hard to tell. If he had taken a position against his constituents or his party (because he thought it was the right thing to do), we might have an idea as to what he really believes. But he hasn’t; so we don’t know. It’s pretty much a guess as to what he would do. Except. Except two things.

First, Senator Obama did explain his philosophy on taxes and redistribution in his conversation with "Joe the Plumber". It wasn’t a planned, scripted event, so it probably does represent what Senator Obama believes. We all favor some redistribution. That’s obvious. When people are in need, you have to help them. But Senator Obama said a lot more than that. It sounds like he is going to take money from people he thinks have too much of it and give it to others who don’t have as much. He says we’re all better off when government does that.

Second, appointment of judges. In July of last year, Senator Obama explained what he would look for in the judges he would appoint:

"[W]e need somebody who's got the heart, the empathy, to recognize what it's like to be a young teenage mom. The empathy to understand what it's like to be poor, or African-American, or gay, or disabled, or old. And that's the criteria by which I'm going to be selecting my judges."

No. That’s not right. Judges are supposed to decide cases on the facts and the law, not on who is the more sympathetic person. It’s not empathy; it’s law.

Empathy is what legislators do. But maybe that is what Senator Obama wants the courts to do. Maybe he sees the courts as an extra set of legislators that can be used when the first set doesn’t do what he wants. Maybe it is all about the ends and not about the means. Well, if that is what be believes, and in this case I think it is, then I do not want Barack Obama to be President.

Tax Credits and Social Security

Note this comment by Ruth Marcus in response to John McCain’s complaint about Barack Obama’s plan to give yet additional tax credits to people who do not pay income taxes:

"When McCain inveighs against Obama's plan to give tax credits to ‘those who pay none,’ he ignores the fact that the 40 percent who do not owe income tax still have 7.65 percent taken out in payroll taxes."

Interesting. Eight years ago this 7.65% was considered a "contribution" to Social Security, and Al Gore was going to take each worker’s contribution and put in a Social Security lock box to protect it for his or her future. Now it’s just another tax, the payment of which we can shift from one group to another; the former being deemed to not have enough money and the latter being deemed to be obligated by fairness to pay more of their money in taxes.

This would seem to push us further along the path of Social Security being less of a national retirement program supported by everybody’s contributions and more of a welfare program paid for by taxes on the well-to-do.

Sarah Palin Is

Baseball is a game of history, and fans love to compare players of one era to those of another. For example, Robin Roberts and Ferguson Jenkins, Bob Feller and Nolan Ryan, Babe Ruth and Barry Bonds (except that Babe Ruth could pitch, too, and fans actually liked the Babe).

In any case, I was reading an article on Sarah Palin by Joseph Epstein in The Weekly Standard. Here are a couple of excerpts:

"The liberal women I know--and most of the women I seem to know are liberal--loathe Sarah Palin. They don't merely dislike her, the way one tends to dislike politicians whose views are not one's own, they actively detest her."

"But rage in their reaction to Governor Palin is emphatically what I do sense on the part of liberal women--that and delight in any attempt to humiliate her.

As I read the article, I realized who Governor Palin is. She’s Clarence Thomas. Just as Justice Thomas has been written out of the black race by many liberal black leaders because of his opinions, Sarah Palin has been told that "[h]er greatest hypocrisy is her pretense that she is a woman" by a person who is allegedly a leading feminist at the University of Chicago.

It looks like I may have found another reason to like Sarah Palin.

"Joe the Plumber" – Piñata of the Democratic Party

A little over a week ago Joe the Plumber confronted Barack Obama on his tax plan. The story quickly gained traction, but pro-Obama forces were right there, too. Joe didn’t have a plumber’s license, he owed back taxes, his first name wasn’t really Joe, and lots more.

In fact, the Democrats’ treatment of Joe the Plumber reminded me of what the Clintons used to do to all those women back in the ‘90s who falsely claimed they had had sex with Bill Clinton – you know, like Gennifer Flowers and Monica Lewinsky.