The View from Right Field

Is 2008 a New Course or Just a Detour?

(The following is a broad brush and generalized treatment of a topic that deserves a long article or even a book, but I do not have the time or expertise to do either. In any case, I think there is at least a germ of truth in what I say, and I have wanted to write it for a while. So here it is.)

In March of 2007, I said that I thought the Republicans would lose in November of 2008. While John McCain is by far the best candidate the Republicans could have chosen to run for President this year, I still think the state of the economy, the fact that only once in the last 60 years has one party held the White House for more than eight years, and the tiredness of so many of the American people with George W. Bush will mean that Senator Obama will win in November – unless he loses it, either by what he says or what comes out about him that we do not know yet. And in any case, the Republicans are going to suffer losses in Congressional races.

So how does a conservative feel about this prospect? As I get older and learn more, it seems to me that there is a time and a flow to history and to politics that one cannot stop or reverse. The time after World War II was a time of government. In some places it was socialism. In others it was a matter of more government action and intervention in a free market economy.

The 1970s brought a world-wide stagnation that led, in the 1980s, to a shift to less government intervention and more free market solutions. From Keynes (perhaps a slightly misunderstood Keynes) in the 1960s, we went to Friedman in the 1980s. From regulation we went to deregulation. From government running things we went to privatization. From the high taxes of the 1950s and 1960s, we went to the Laffer curve and tax cuts in the 1980s.

Thatcher and Reagan led this shift in the UK and the US, but it was not just Tories and Republicans. Deregulation of things like the airlines and the trucking industry in the US actually began under Jimmy Carter. In France, Francois Mitterrand tried old style socialism and government intervention when he was elected in 1981, but it failed and he had to reverse course.

The deregulation and reform movements in places like Australia and New Zealand were lead by Labor (Australia)/Labour (New Zealand) parties. Among the most radical free market reforms were those in New Zealand, reforms that were implemented by a Labour government that followed a "conservative" National Party government that had given New Zealand one of the most controlled economies outside the Soviet Bloc.

In other words, there was a world-wide shift in politics and policies, which affected all countries and parties.

And now, are we seeing the beginning of a trend back the other way? Is the upcoming Democratic victory the sign of a new trend in the United States? Or is it just a short-term reaction to the Bush Presidency and the failures of recent Republican Congresses?

We cannot know at this point. And so we have to fight for our principles. If it is just a short-term thing, we need to fight to get through this period as quickly as possible. And if it is the start of a new trend, then we have to work to keep the flame of small government and free market economics alive for the time when the trend shifts yet again, and we have to work on the edges to limit the extremes of the shift.

Obama Sides With the Lefties

After months and years of controversy over the right of the President to order warrantless eavesdropping of U.S. citizens in certain limited situations, on Friday the House of Representatives passed a compromise bill updating the 1978 Foreign Security Surveillance Act. According to The Washington Post (here and here):

"[T]he bill makes clear that all intelligence surveillance is governed by FISA. The legislation mandates that the administration obtain a court-approved, individual warrant for any spying activity directed at a U.S. citizen – whether that citizen is on U.S. soil or abroad – and that the administration prove it has ‘probable cause’ to believe that the person is engaged in espionage. The procedures used for surveillance of non-U.S. citizens on foreign soil must be approved by the FISA court and reviewed annually."

Importantly, the bill provides immunity to telecommunications companies such as AT&T and Verizon for the help they gave the government after 9/11. According to the bill, the suits will be dismissed as long as the companies "can show the court ‘substantial evidence’ they received a written request from the attorney general or head of an intelligence agency stating the president had authorized the surveillance and determined it to be lawful". (The Wall Street Journal, June 20, 2008)

Democratic opposition to the bill (of the 129 votes against the bill, 128 were by Democrats; i.e., over half of the Democrats in the House voted against the bill) raised the question of what Senator Obama would do. Friday afternoon he announced that he would support the bill in the Senate – with one big exception: "It [the bill] does, however, grant retroactive immunity [to the telecoms], and I will work in the Senate to remove this provision so that we can seek full accountability for past offenses."

So, like the lefties I talked about here, the presumptive Democratic nominee wants to let people sue phone companies for doing what the President asked them to do at a time of national emergency. That is just wrong. If Senator Obama really thinks there were offenses committed back then for which people need to be held accountable, then instead of going after the phone companies, who were just doing what the President asked them to do, he ought to go after the person who asked them to do it

Also, if Senator Obama gets elected President, he better hope, if we have some problem in the future and he has to ask for help, that the people he asks won’t remember what he wanted to do to people who did what the government asked when his predecessor was President.

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Update [6/23/08 11:00 a.m.]: I probably overstated things with my headline on this post.  I really feel that Obama's continuing position against immunity for the telecoms is appalling for the reasons I have stated before.  And he is continuing to side with the lefties on this point.  However, it appears that many lefties are really upset with Obama for agreeing to support the rest of the bill.  For an example, see here. 

Further Update (7/26/08 5:05 p.m.):  The headline on this post got it wrong.  See here. 

You Can't Fool Mother Nature and You Can't Beat the Big Muddy

There was an interesting point in last Friday’s Chicago Tribune about the flooding and water levels along the Mississippi River:

"After days of flooding, the Mississippi showed significant signs of losing steam Thursday. That's because in recent days the river hit record levels as it fanned out for miles around when it overran levees.

For urban areas in and around Quincy, the breached levees [upstream] were a blessing. Most of the land submerged along the river is farmland."

In other words, the fact some levees upstream broke, and some of the water was able to spread out over, i.e., flood, land around the river banks, means that the river will not be as high or as dangerous when it gets downstream.

Which means that the levees everybody builds to keep the water from flooding, raise the water levels, which mean the levees have to be built higher which pushes the water levels higher which mean the levees have to be higher and so on and so on.

I think there may be a lesson here.

The Sound of a Country Dying

What is the sound of a country dying? I ask because a country is dying in southern Africa. The country is Zimbabwe. In the midst of inflation of a million percent a year, an HIV/AIDS epidemic, a decline in life expectancy into the 30s and more, Zimbabwe had an election on March 29. Robert Mugabe, its dictator, could not stop the opposition from winning a majority of the seats in the parliament. He was, however, able to make sure, when the results for President were finally announced on May 2, over a month after the election, that his chief opponent, Morgan Tsvangirai, did not get a majority of the vote. That means there has to be a run-off. Zimbabwe law requires that a run-off be held within 21 days after the results are released, but apparently that was not enough time for the Mugabe forces to get their "campaigning" done, so the election was set for June 27.

And the campaigning has started. Of course, for Mugabe’s party, campaigning means detaining the opposition candidate when he returned to the country. It means arresting the number two leader of the opposition and threatening to charge him with treason, a capital offense. Campaigning means ordering all non-governmental humanitarian groups to suspend their operations, forcing them to stop providing food to people who may starve without it. Only the government will distribute food, and I think we can guess who they will give it to.

And what has the world done in response to this man-made disaster? It has done pretty much the same thing it has been doing for years as Mugabe ruined what was once a fairly prosperous country with hope for the future. As Mugabe has turned Zimbabwe into an economic basket case and a terrible dictatorship, the world has done what it does best: Not much.

The European Union adopted a resolution prohibiting Mugabe from traveling to any EU member country. But when the United Nations held a big conference on the world food crisis in Rome earlier this year, Italy let Mugabe attend. Italy wouldn’t stop Mugabe from coming, apparently because they didn’t want to insult the United Nations. And the United Nations wouldn’t stop Mugabe from attending because it has no standards.

The United Nations would, I suppose, use the same excuse that they did for failing to take action that might have prevented the genocide in Rwanda in 1994: We can’t interfere; we would harm our reputation for even-handedness and neutrality; we have to maintain our influence for the future.

The unfortunate truth is that, for most countries, there is not much they can do now. There have been attempts to try to isolate Mr. Mugabe, but like the EU ban which did not stop Mugabe from going to the UN conference in Rome, they have not accomplished much, mostly because some counties deliberately ignore them and others just don’t care enough to inconvenience themselves even a little.

Some say that there are other despots in Africa, so why single out Mugabe? (Well, you have to start somewhere.) Others say that if we don’t do business with Mugabe, the Chinese or others will. (We’re talking Zimbabwe here, not the entire African continent. Are your principles really for sale that cheap?)

There is, however, one country which might be able to do something, even now. Unfortunately, it doesn’t appear to want to. When Nelson Mandela emerged from 27 years of imprisonment and then became President of South Africa four years later, he gave South Africa a physical voice in Africa and a moral voice in the world. But Nelson Mandela is old, and his successors do not have his stature – or seem to want it.

If South Africa said something, if it took a stand against the horror of what is going on in Zimbabwe, it is probable Mugabe would give up or could be beaten in the June 27 election. But South Africa has abandoned the cloak of Mandela‘s authority and is doing nothing. And so, on June 27, Robert Mugabe will almost certainly be re-elected President of Zimbabwe, and Zimbabwe will continue to die.

What is the sound of a country dying? It is the sound of indifference, the sound of a world unwilling to sacrifice for principle, the sound of a world that cannot be bothered with caring.

Guantánamo Bay: A Decision for the Courts?

Let me make three comments on the Supreme Court decision last week in Boumediene v. Bush, in which the Supreme Court held that foreigners held in the detention camp at the Guantánamo Bay naval base had the right, under the U.S. Constitution, to file writs of habeas corpus challenging their confinement.

First, many of the media reports focused on the decision being a defeat for President Bush so much that it was easy to miss the fact that what was at issue here was not an executive order issued by Bush but two laws passed by Congress, the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 and the Military Commissions Act of 2006. It wasn’t just some order of President Bush that the Court was invalidating; it was a law passed by Congress.

Second, the question of how we should deal with the people being held at Guantánamo is not an easy one to answer. It was, for example, pretty simple to know what to do with enemy soldiers during World War II. You captured them, and you held them until the war was over. For some soldiers in Europe, captured in 1940, that meant being held five years. But there was an end to that war. Some people have called our fight with Islamic totalitarianism "the long war." Who knows how long it will last. And how will we know when it is over? Is it fair to detain people indefinitely? While it might seem easy to answer no to that question, what about the person released from Guantánamo who apparently became a suicide bomber in Iraq? Where was the fairness for the people he killed?

Another question is how do we know all of these people are really terrorists or enemy combatants? It was easy to tell who the enemy soldiers were during World War II. Everybody wore uniforms, and the uniforms were different. The chances of mistaken identity were not very high. But is that true at Guantánamo? It would be one thing if we knew all of the detainees really were terrorists. But given the way some of them were taken into custody, there could be cases of mistaken identity. Some of them really could be farmers who just got caught by mistake.

In a war without end and in a fight where it is hard to tell who the enemy really is, should these people be treated like POWs or just regular criminals? How long can we detain them? Are they terrorists or innocent farmers rounded up by mistake? As I said, these are tough questions. The answers are not black and white. There will be shades of gray. There will need to be some delicate balancing of different interests. Which brings me to my third point.

Is a U.S. federal district court the best place to decide who these people are and what we should do with them? Are the kinds of questions I mentioned above best answered by the kind of adversarial system that our courts use, in which two lawyers each try to win for their client, sometimes regardless of what the underlying truth is? In many situations, this system does result in the truth being discovered. But is that going to happen here? Do federal district courts have the knowledge and the skills to decide who should be detained and who should be released? For that matter, do we want the question of whether somebody is a dangerous terrorist to be decided by who has the best lawyer?

Change He Won't Believe In

"Change We Can Believe In" is Barack Obama’s campaign slogan – and change what his campaign is all about. But there is one change Barack Obama does not seem to believe in – the change that is happening in Iraq.

Senator Obama has made a big deal of being against the war in Iraq since 2002. (It is too bad Senator Obama did not have the same foresight with respect to Tony Rezko.) The fact is, however, things have changed in Iraq since 2002. They have changed since January of 2006 when Senator Obama last visited Iraq. They have changed since January of 2007 when Senator Obama said that the surge, and the change in strategy that went with it, wouldn’t work. In fact, about the only thing that has not changed with respect to Iraq is Senator Obama’s position.

I don’t know if Senator Obama’s refusal to change is because he doesn’t believe things have changed in Iraq or because he doesn’t know enough to understand things have changed in Iraq or because he doesn’t care enough to figure out things have changed in Iraq. And even if I knew, I am not sure it would matter.

Obama On Increasing Capital Gains Taxes

Now that Barack Obama is, as they say, the "presumptive" Democratic nominee for President, it’s a good time to starting looking, or looking again, at some of his policies and proposals. First, let’s look at his view on capital gains taxes. Senator Obama wants to increase them.

To justify his support for an increase in capital gain taxes, Barack Obama cites Warren Obama as saying it is okay to do so. (The Wall Street Journal, April 5, 2008) I understand why Senator Obama might listen to Mr. Buffett. Mr. Buffett is a renowned investor. He has proven he knows how to invest and how to make money. He is better at it than almost anybody else. It would make sense to listen to him on investing. Tax policy, on the other hand, may be a different matter.

Mr. Buffet is famous, not only for his investments, but also for being a rich person (a very, very, very rich person) who thinks his taxes should be higher. Mr. Buffett is opposed to repealing the estate tax. Senator Obama quotes Mr. Buffett as saying that raising the capital gains tax from 15% to 20% or 25% will not distort economic decision making.

However, as I said, I am not sure Mr. Buffett is the right person to listen to on tax policy. At least part of the reason that Mr. Buffett is better at investing than just about anybody else is, in addition to being really smart, he thinks differently than most people.

It seems to me that what motivates Mr. Buffett, what affects his thinking and his decision-making, may be different than what affects the decisions of most Americans (especially Americans who aren’t worth billions of dollars). Maybe a death tax doesn’t bother Mr. Buffett (though if that is true, I wonder why he contributed so much of his money to Bill Gates’s foundation instead of waiting and having his estate pay tax on it). Similarly, maybe increasing the capital gains tax from 15% to 25% wouldn’t affect what Mr. Buffett does.

But such an increase will affect what most investors do – and that will affect the stock market and the economy with it. 25% versus 15% may not be a big deal to Mr. Buffett, but it is a big deal to a lot of people.

Instead of listening to a few rich people who think like he does, Senator Obama needs to listen to regular people trying to make a little money to retire on or to send their kids to college. He needs to hear what they think about an increase in capital gains taxes and what they are going to do if he does raise those taxes.

If he does, he will find that increasing the capital gains tax, while it might seem like an easy way to raise taxes on the rich, will hurt the economy – and a lot of ordinary people.

Reestablishing the Republican Party

In Friday’s "Political Diary," published at WSJ.com (subscription required), John Fund wrote about what he saw as the failure of class warfare politics by the Labour Party in recent elections in England. Before quoting further from Mr. Fund, let me note that the Labour Party in England has been having many of the same problems Republicans have had in the United States: they’ve been in power for a long time, and now they are losing elections. Mr. Fund writes:

"[I]t's axiomatic in European politics that most people favor redistributionist policies and that class warfare works as a vote-getting campaign theme. But now there's recent evidence -- at least in Britain -- that such appeals are also falling flat on the other side of the pond.

The first scent of change came in early May with the news that London, a Labour Party stronghold, had elected as its new mayor Boris Johnson, a Conservative journalist who was attacked by Labour for having a flighty personality and for attending Eton and Oxford, the ultimate schools for ‘toffs.’

[C]lass warfare took it on the chin again in a by-election in Crewe, another Labour stronghold. Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown is said to have personally approved a class warfare attack on Edward Timpson, the Conservative candidate in Crewe.

Indeed, when Mr. Timpson showed up for a campaign swing in Crewe accompanied by Conservative leader David Cameron, the pair were ambushed by two Labour activists in top hats and tails calling themselves the ‘Tarporley toffs.’ More was to come. Leaflets featured a doctored picture making Mr. Timpson, a member of a wealthy shoe making family, appear to be wearing a ‘Lord Snooty’ top hat. …

But the campaign quickly went bust. Many voters told reporters they found the approach ‘pathetic.’ Labour Party leaders began distancing themselves from the class warfare strategy even before the election results were in, declaring it a ‘stunt’ that wasn't meant to be central to the campaign. …

When the results of the by-election came in last week, they were shocking. Conservatives gained 17 points from their 2005 showing in the seat, winning 50% of the vote over all other parties. Labour slipped back to a humiliating 32%.

Two elections do not quite make a trend. But even in Britain, where popular culture and politics have long marinated in class consciousness, the tactics of class warfare aren't working. America's Democrats may be in for a rude surprise this fall if they attempt a similar approach. …"

I think a comparison can be made between what seems to be happening in England and what is happening in the United States, but I think Mr. Hunt gets the comparison wrong. It seems to me that what the voters were finding "pathetic" in England was not the class warfare argument but the kind of desperate tactics the Labour Party was using. Instead of standing on principles, Labour seemed to be trying to win on scare tactics and political name-calling.

Which is just what the Republicans have been doing over here in races to fill vacancies in Congress. Instead of nominating good candidates and having a good Republican brand to promote, the Republicans have resorted to shrill attacks, calling their opponents liberals and trying to link them to Nancy Pelosi or Rev. Jeremiah Wright or whoever else is the enemy du jour in Republican attack ads.

But these attacks are not working. The voters know their local Democratic candidates, and these ads don’t fit what the voters know about them. Like in England, these attack ads are seen as "pathetic". And they are.

The problem is, of course, there isn’t much positive to say about the Republican Party in Congress. In 1994 Republicans took over Congress because they had a program of real ideas that appealed to voters. But after the Republicans got in, too many of them seemed to abandon the limited government principles that got them elected in the first place.

Instead of limited government, we got the K Street Project. Instead of restraining government spending, we got winning by earmarks. That may be a way to stay in office, but it is not a Republican way – and in the long run it doesn’t work for Republicans. One of my favorite senators, Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, hit the nail on the head in an article in The Wall Street Journal last Tuesday. (See here.*)

Republicans are not going to win by holding up Nancy Pelosi masks and trying to claim their opponents are "San Francisco Democrats". Republicans can’t scare the voters into voting for them; they have to stand for something.

What they need to stand for are traditional Republican principles: limited government; low taxes; controlling government spending; strong national defense; federalism; and letting people make their own choices. Too many Republicans in Washington have not been doing that, and they have done a lot of damage to the Republican Party in the process.

It is going to take a while to reestablish voters’ trust in the Republican Party. It’s not going to be easy. It isn’t going to happen overnight. But it can be done. And it should be done. Because it is the right thing to do.

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* One complaint about Senator Coburn’s article: I wish he would not have mentioned Scriptures and Jesus in the way did. I have no problem with those being the bedrock of one’s political philosophy. I just wouldn’t say it this way. I’m not trying to hide anything. I just think saying it this way could be off-putting to some people, and I don’t think it is necessary.