David Clarke does it his David Clarke does it his

Transcription

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May 4, 2015
$4.99
D AV I D F R E N C H : W I S C O N S I N ’ S S H A M E
KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON: HILLARY’S IMAGE CAMPAIGN
LOYOLA on
Iran
PONNURU on
RFRAs
THE
SHERIFF
AS REBEL
David Clarke does it his
way CHARLES C. W. COOKE
www.nationalreview.com
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BEHIND THE RED TAPE
Regulatory red tape is restricting our country’s ability to create jobs and grow the
economy. Americans deserve a regulatory system that balances the need for protection
without impeding innovation and productivity.
A series of reports produced by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce illustrates why we must improve our nation’s
rulemaking process to build a strong, safe and vibrant economy. We must create a more transparent system
that values public input and holds agencies accountable for the nature and quality of their data.
CHARTING FEDERAL
COSTS AND BENEFITS
TRUTH
IN REGULATING:
Restoring Transparency to EPA Rulemaking
Environment, Technology & Regulatory Affairs Division
Environment, Technology & Regulatory Affairs Division
Visit www.uschamber.com/etra to learn more.
www.uschamber.com/etra
No. 6 in a Series of Regulatory Reports
TOC--FINAL:QXP-1127940144.qxp 4/15/2015 2:10 PM Page 1
Contents
M AY 4 , 2 0 1 5
ON THE COVER
|
VOLUME LXVII, NO. 8
|
w w w. n a t i o n a l r e v i e w. c o m
Page 26
The Rebel Sheriff
Kevin D. Williamson on
Hillary Rodham Clinton
It’s not just the cowboy hat and the
p. 16
leather waistcoat that set him
apart. On the questions of gun
control, race, the nature of
BOOKS, ARTS
& MANNERS
policing, the record of his
city’s government, and even
41
his own Democratic party,
David A. Clarke Jr. is dramatically out of step with what
is expected. Charles C. W. Cooke
43
COVER: THOMAS REIS
45
by Kevin D. Williamson
by Ramesh Ponnuru
Public commitment to religious freedom is not as strong as it should be.
21 OBAMA’S IRAN CAPITULATION
50
by Mario Loyola
by Jay Nordlinger
adventures in moral equivalence.
51
WAY TO LIVE
Kathryn Jean Lopez reviews
And the Good News Is . . . :
Lessons and Advice from the
Bright Side, by Dana Perino.
FEATURES
26 THE REBEL SHERIFF
WHERE THE BUCK STOPPED
Craig Shirley reviews Ronald
Reagan: Decisions of Greatness,
by Martin and Annelise Anderson.
Never mind victory; the administration isn’t even seeking containment.
24 THE EVEN-STEVEN TEMPTATION
IN THE CRUCIBLE
Michael F. Bishop reviews
Washington’s Revolution:
The Making of America’s First
Leader, by Robert Middlekauff.
Sometimes, appearances are everything.
18 THE RFRA FUROR
GENRES WITHOUT BORDERS
Otto Penzler discusses the decline of
literary snobbery.
ARTICLES
16 HILLARY, HERSELF
BOLD FUSION
John Hood reviews
The Conservatarian Manifesto:
Libertarians, Conservatives, and
the Fight for the Right’s Future,
by Charles C. W. Cooke.
by Charles C. W. Cooke
How David a. Clarke Jr. became a political celebrity.
29 JOHN DOE’S TYRANNY
34 FEAR NOT THE ROBOT
by Danny Crichton
automation will continue to raise our quality of life.
36 DRYDOCK TIME
SECTIONS
by David French
wisconsin conservatives have been subjected to secretive, baseless investigations.
by Jerry Hendrix
aircraft carriers belong to the fleet of yesteryear.
2
4
39
40
45
52
Letters to the Editor
The Week
Athwart . . . . . . . . . . . James Lileks
The Long View . . . . . . Rob Long
Poetry . . . . . . . . . Jennifer Reeser
Happy Warrior . . . . . . . . Daniel Foster
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letters--FINAL:QXP-1127940387.qxp 4/15/2015 1:12 PM Page 2
Letters
MAY 4 ISSUE; PRINTED APRIL 16
EDITOR
Richard Lowry
Senior Editors
Richard Brookhiser / Jonah Goldberg / Jay Nordlinger
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Managing Editor Jason Lee Steorts
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Learning from Dorothy
Jay Nordlinger’s piece on Dorothy L. Sayers (“Sing It, Dorothy”) in the April 6
issue of NAtIoNAL RevIew spoke to my heart. More than a decade ago I read her
1947 essay “the Lost tools of Learning,” and was inspired and emboldened to
home-educate my children using the classical method that she advocated. they are
now in a public high school pursuing the modern-day quadrivium, but they are
benefitting from the solid foundation they received. the classical paradigm that we
followed has taught them to be independent and thoughtful learners who easily see
connections as well as fallacies. Dorothy L. Sayers is one of my heroines and I
thank NAtIoNAL RevIew and Jay Nordlinger for aiming the spotlight on her.
Susan Gibbs de San Martin
Ossining, New York
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Taxation without Ratiocination
In “the taxman endureth” (April 20), Patrick Brennan criticized Senator ted
Cruz for promising to abolish the IRS. Mr. Brennan’s criticism is correct as long
as we have any form of income tax, flat or not.
Fortunately, Senator Cruz is a co-sponsor of the Fair tax (H.R. 25, S. 155),
which actually abolishes federal income, payroll, business, gift, and estate
taxes and the IRS. the states will collect a national retail sales tax and the
Social Security Administration will issue a monthly rebate to all legal residents ($226 per adult, $79 per child, indexed to inflation) in order to un-tax
spending up to the federal poverty level. the rebate also makes this consumption tax “progressive.”
the Fair tax will expire in seven years if the 16th Amendment is not repealed.
this is to avoid having a national sales tax in addition to the taxes it replaces.
Mr. Cruz, et al., tear down this tax code.
Jim Stehr
Atlantic Beach, Fla.
PAtRICk BReNNAN ReSPoNDS: As I noted in my piece, Cruz has indeed at times
supported a state-administered sales tax, known as the Fair tax, that would
replace the federal income tax. Such a system would allow massively reducing
the involvement of the federal government in tax collection, in a way that a flat
income tax would not. But Senator Cruz’s campaign says he isn’t running on
the idea right now. Moving toward a consumption tax is appealing, but as I
wrote, the Fair tax has huge problems of its own. For one, systems work best
when incentives are aligned, as they rarely are in government. the Fair tax, in
order to get rid of the federal tax-collection bureaucracy, ignores this, and relies
on states’ doing a decent job of collecting tax revenue for the federal government, under a system that impinges on what’s traditionally a source of state
revenue (sales taxes). this is a big enough problem to make this elegantsounding Fair tax idea a bad one, in the view of many tax experts.
CHAIRMAN EMERITUS
Thomas L. Rhodes
FOUNDER
William F. Buckley Jr.
2
|
Letters may be submitted by e-mail to [email protected].
M AY 4, 2015
week:QXP-1127940387.qxp 4/15/2015 2:09 PM Page 4
The Week
n In the tense negotiations over a nuclear deal with Iran, Obama
swore he would make no concessions to America’s most dangerous enemy. Unfortunately for him, Congress held firm.
n Farmer’s son, hick politician, railroad lawyer; warlord, philosopher, saint. One hundred fifty years after his assassination, do
we think Abraham Lincoln our greatest president? His only competitor for that honor, George Washington, had the advantage of
not being murdered halfway through his lifework. We know,
from Lincoln’s speeches in 1865, the outlines of his post–Civil
War policy: malice toward none, charity for all, citizenship for
freedmen. An impossible balancing act? Lincoln was both a determined and a wily politician. His successor, Andrew Johnson,
was a man of shifting purpose (from hanging ex-rebels to flattering them) and ham hands. After four years of chaos, America got
eight years of Ulysses Grant, who did his best—then 80 years of
inequity. Still, the Union was saved from a losers’ veto, and 4 million men, women, and children were freed. In his Peoria speech
of October 1854, Lincoln said, “Our republican robe is soiled,
and trailed in the dust. . . . Let us turn and wash it white, in the
spirit if not the blood of Revolution.” It was washed of the stains
of slavery, then of rebellion. So long as democracy can find men
such as Lincoln in its hours of need, it will endure.
ROMAN GENN
n Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the Chechen terrorist who, with his brother
Tamerlan, attacked the Boston Marathon in 2013, was convicted
in federal court of his crimes. Let us review them. The radicalized
brothers planted homemade bombs at the marathon’s finish line
that killed Krystle Campbell, Lu Lingzi (a grad student), and
Martin Richard (age eight); hundreds were injured. After a few
days on the lam, the brothers killed Sean Collier, an MIT campus
cop, en route to New York, where they planned to plant more
bombs. Tamerlan died when the police closed in (he had been accidentally run over by his brother’s car); Dzhokhar was picked up
later. His conviction sets up a second trial, the penalty phase: life
imprisonment, or death? Clearly he deserves the latter. His motives were fanatical, his methods heartless, his victims random.
To feed and house such a wretch for the remainder of his natural
life makes the law-abiding his servants; letting him see the sun
rise leaves his victims unavenged.
n Senator Marco Rubio (R., Fla.) launched his presidential run
with a speech calling for leaving behind the past, for which read
Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush. And what better way to do that than
to elect a youngster like himself? The senator has some substance, though, to match the generational theme: He really has
pursued innovative policies to apply market principles to health
care, higher education, and many other issues. You can see these
initiatives as examples of the bold risk-taking that also led him to
tackle immigration in 2013. But the contrast is more instructive:
On that issue Rubio was not innovative, instead sticking with the
same flawed “comprehensive reform” that other politicians have
4
|
tried and failed to achieve. That policy differs from Rubio’s other
ideas, as well, in not promoting upward mobility. Senator Rubio
should keep that goal in mind as he tries to arrange some upward
mobility of his own.
n Senator Rand Paul (R., Ky.) was testy, for both good and ill, in
the days following his presidential-campaign announcement. He
rebuked a reporter for asking him why his foreign-policy views
have changed, calling it editorializing. If so, it was editorializing
based on fact, and a fair question. Better was his response when
interrogated about how far he would take his opposition to
abortion: He challenged reporters to ask Democratic National
Committee chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz whether
she favored letting seven-pound babies be aborted, and she responded by saying she supported a woman’s right to choose,
period. So few Republicans have had the wit to change the media
conversation on that issue. Paul famously has a lot of ideology as
well as a lot of personality, and its mixed quality was also on display. His kick-off mentioned criminal-justice reform, a worthy
cause. But he also said that he wants a future in which “any law
that disproportionately incarcerates people of color is repealed.” He did not mean laws against murder, his campaign
had to clarify. No libertarian presidential candidate has ever
been taken as seriously as Paul. To win, though, he will have to
suppress some of his libertarian reflexes.
n Governor Scott Walker (R., Wis.) continued his evolution on
immigration. He has renounced his support for a comprehensive “reform” including a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants. Now he is saying that the “immigration system . . . has
to protect American workers and make sure American wages
M AY 4, 2015
THE WEEK
are going up.” No immigration reform can make sure most
Americans’ wages go up, of course. But increased enforcement of the laws against illegal immigration, which Walker
has endorsed, would boost wages at the low end of the labor
market. So would reducing the number of low-skilled immigrants we admit legally each year. On that issue, Walker remains silent for now. But by talking about the connection
between immigration and wages at all, he is already ahead of
most of his rivals.
n Of all the charity foundations in all the towns in all the
world, Moroccan money—at least $1 million of it—found its
way into the Clintons’. After making headlines for accepting
foreign donations while Hillary Clinton was serving as
America’s chief diplomat, the Clinton Foundation has accepted
a sizable sum from a Moroccan-government-owned company
to host a high-profile conference there in May. It’s not the first
link between the Clintons and the North African nation. As
secretary of state, Hillary traveled to Morocco, then launched
a “strategic dialogue”—even though the State Department censured Morocco in 2011 for “arbitrary arrests and corruption in
all branches of government.” The very next year, Clinton
called Morocco “a leader and a model.” Perhaps she meant that
she admires the corruption.
REID: BLOOMBERG/CONTRIBUTOR; TRIBE: ULLSTEIN BILD/CONTRIBUTOR
n So outgoing senator Harry Reid
(D., Nev.), having lied in 2012 about
Mitt Romney’s not paying his taxes,
was asked by Dana Bash of CNN in
2015 whether he regretted his lie.
He said of course not: “Romney
didn’t win, did he?” Reid goes off
into the sunset, but his baseness took
on enough of the solidity of wit that
he may linger as floating matter in
the toilet bowl of political memory,
along with Jim Folsom (“You stupid
sonuva bitch, I don’t need you when
I’m right”), George Washington
Plunkitt (“honest graft”), and Joseph Fouché (“Worse than a crime,
it was a blunder”).
n An alliance of liberals and large corporations forced Indiana to
retreat from its defense of religious freedom. After enacting a law
substantially identical to the religious-freedom laws of many
other states and the federal government, the state’s Republicans
found themselves accused of rolling out an unwelcome mat to
gays. Supposedly the law would lead to widespread mistreatment
of them by business owners with religious exemptions from
antidiscrimination rules. Never mind that most of Indiana lacks
such rules, that market forces and public sentiment seem to be
reducing discrimination even in their absence, and that antidiscrimination laws have almost always trumped religiousfreedom laws in the courts. Indiana Republicans gave in to the
pressure, amending the religious-freedom law so that it cannot
even be invoked to limit antidiscrimination laws. Arkansas
Republicans stumbled into the same controversy, but got out of it
by enacting legislation that instructed the state’s courts to apply
the federal religious-freedom law to local issues. The bad news is
6
|
that the coalition against religious freedom is very powerful,
even in conservative states. The good news is that it appears also
to be easily fooled.
n The inheritance tax is an outdated measure—like several of our
dumbest taxes, it was introduced to pay for the Spanish–American
War—that is applied to only a handful of households in any given
year and produces almost no revenue, providing a fraction of
a percentage point of federal tax income. Republicans have
narrowed the scope of the “death tax” and now propose eliminating it root and branch. This initiative naturally has the
Obama administration and congressional Democrats in full
class-warfare mode. The tax inflicts much pain for little gain,
and it is a particularly heavy burden on certain kinds of enterprises, such as farms and small businesses, that may be valuable
on paper because of land holdings and the like, but generate
income insufficient to pay the inheritance tax and thus must be
sold. There is a question of justice here, too: If families save,
forgoing pleasures today in order to leave a legacy for their
children tomorrow, why should the federal government get in
the middle and demand a cut? Attach an offsetting spending
cut and put the death tax in its grave.
n Laurence Tribe, the famous left-wing professor of constitutional law, has joined with Peabody Energy, the
largest private coal company in the U.S., to challenge new
regulations that the Environmental Protection Agency
intends to impose on states. The Left has accused Tribe of
selling out. He maintains that the EPA plan for reducing
carbon dioxide emissions “violates principles of federalism” and amounts to an exercise of powers that Congress
never delegated to it. “The brute fact is that the Obama
administration failed to get climate legislation through
Congress,” he wrote in the Wall Street Journal in December. “Yet the EPA is acting as though it has the legislative
authority anyway to re-engineer the
nation’s electric generating system
and power grid. It does not.” We
don’t know whether his argument
will prevail in court. We do
know that what he identifies as a particular
unconstitutional
abuse of executive power
by the Obama administration fits a pattern.
n The academic Left likes to talk about the “fluidity” of human sexuality, but that flow is apparently permitted in only
one direction. There are people who are sexually attracted to
others of the same sex but who do not wish to live as homosexuals, and there are organizations that seek to help them to
live as they wish—which is under some circumstances a
crime in California, New Jersey, and the District of Columbia, a situation that President Obama and aide-de-camp Valerie Jarrett have endorsed. There is a good deal of quackery
M AY 4, 2015
THE WEEK
in “reparative therapy,” but there is also simple counseling
andsupport,whichcriticsconsider—thisisnotanexaggeration—tantamounttomurder,citingthecaseofJoshuaAlcorn
(he wished to be known as Leelah), a teenager who killed
himselfwhenhisparentsobjectedtohisdesiretoundergoa
sexchangeandwhosenthimtoaChristiancounselingservice.“Leelah’slaw”wouldcategoricallybantheseservices
forminors.Itishardtoescapethesuspicionthatthemotive
forthelawisnotjustsorrowatthewayconversiontherapy
sometimes ends in tragedy—which is true of any kind of
therapy—butoffenseattheideathatanyonewouldwantto
leave homosexuality or transgenderism behind, or help an-
othertodoso.Thatoffensemaybeunderstandable,butitis
notagoodenoughreasonforalaw.
n RerunsofM*A*S*H aregoingtobereallyconfusingin
thefuture.TheArmyisonthehookforlegaldamagesforinstructingamannottousetheladies’roomevenafterhehad
startedwearingskirtstoworkandchangedhisnameto“Tamara.”TamaraLusardiservedintheArmyforsevenyears
andnowworksatRedstoneArsenalinAlabama,andwishes
toliveasawoman.TheArmyattemptedtobeaccommodating—“management was supportive of her transition,” as
Stars and Stripes put it—and provided a gender-neutral
Age of Uncertainty II
I
8
|
and have “certain speculative characteristics.” A larger
spread indicates that market participants are charging
businesses more for buying their bonds instead of the “riskfree” bonds of the U.S. government.
The chart below plots these measures against the measure of policy uncertainty I discussed last time. As the chart
shows, stock valuations and debt spreads both respond
adversely to the increases in uncertainty that seem to come
with the election cycle. The effects are large and so vivid
that they are almost eerie.
So elections are times when politicians present wildly
different views of what policy might be, and when investors
dramatically increase their assessments of risk. The higher
risk premia that result then dampen economic activity. The
data continue to support the view that policy risk is a very
big deal indeed.
—KEVIN A. HASSETT
Policy Uncertainty and Asset Pricing
Through the Election Cycle:
January 1985−March 2015
30%
25%
Year-Over-Year Change
(Rolling Three-Month Average)
N my last column, I showed that policy uncertainty rises
as presidential and midterm elections approach and
cited research that documented a strong negative statistical link between economic-policy uncertainty and economic growth. I heard back from many NATIONAL REVIEW
readers who wondered whether the apparent relationship
between policy uncertainty and growth might be a simple
coincidence. How can it be, a critic might say, that elections
in this gridlocked world matter that much? The questions
motivated a deeper dive into the data, a dive that uncovered some pearls that are the subject of this month’s chart.
Economists deploy theory as a defense against statistical coincidence. One should reason through a specific
causal link before looking at the data, the thinking goes, and
then turn to the data and see whether the data are consistent with the theory. In the best of all worlds, the theory
motivates the investigator to look at something completely
different, and then the data reveal a new pattern that confirms the theory.
Policy uncertainty should, in theory, affect the economy
by increasing the risk that people perceive they face when
making economic decisions. If you were going to lend
money to a low-risk borrower—say, Bill Gates—then you
might charge him a low interest rate. If you were going to
lend money to a tremendously sketchy fellow—say, Jonah
Goldberg—then you might charge a higher interest rate. If
policy uncertainty has a big effect on the economy, it should
be visible as generally heightened risk premia. These, in
turn, would harm the economy because they would raise
the cost of investing in anything that requires financing, be
it a new machine, a house, or a new car.
The price-to-earnings ratio of the S&P 500 measures the
price a firm can charge an investor in exchange for the
claim on the firm’s earnings that a share of its stock represents. A relatively high P/E ratio serves as an indication that
the firm can raise capital at a relatively low cost: When the
P/E is higher, it means the market perceives the equity to be
less risky. The spread between the yield on Moody’s BAArated debt and the ten-year Treasury yield is an alternative
measure of the risk premium. It indicates how much market
participants demand in exchange for holding bonds that,
according to Moody’s, come with “moderate credit risk”
20%
15%
10%
5%
0%
−5%
−10%
−15%
−20%
−24
−20
−16
−12
−8
−4
0
4
8
12
16
20
Months away from a Presidential-Election Month
Economic-Policy
Uncertainty Index*
P/E Ratio of the S&P•500
Moody’s Corporate BAA
Debt−Ten-Year Treasury
Yield Spread
*SOURCE: "MEASURING ECONOMIC POLICY UNCERTAINTY," SCOTT A. BAKER ET AL.
M AY 4, 2015
A
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THE WEEK
restroom. Not good enough. Corporal Max Klinger awaits
his reparations.
n The Democratic party wants your guns again. A piece of legislation introduced in the House by Representative Rosa
DeLauro (D., Conn.) would provide a $2,000 tax break to any
American who would be happy to hand over his “assault
weapon” to the federal government. “There is no reason on
earth,” DeLauro claims, “that anyone needs a gun designed for
a battlefield.” And so she wants to buy yours. Putting aside the
obvious unseemliness of the state’s attempting to disarm the
people for whom it works, there are a host of practical objections
to this proposal. Most prominent among them is the question of
exactly what problem DeLauro is attempting to solve. A dramatic increase in the number of guns in private hands has coincided with a decline in the number of crimes committed with
firearms. Moreover, the type of weapon that this bill goes after
is used so rarely in crimes that the federal government doesn’t
even keep statistics on them. As for the structure of the law:
There would be nothing whatsoever to prevent savvy gun owners from trading in their existing firearms for far more than they
are worth, and then buying a new, more expensive model in
replacement. Rather than griping, advocates of the Second
Amendment should really be saying thanks.
SCOTT OLSON/STAFF
n Two years after Shaneen Allen was pulled over in Atlantic
County and arrested for the illegal possession of a firearm, New
Jersey governor Chris Christie has gotten around to granting
her a full pardon. Allen, who had not understood that her Pennsylvania concealed-carry permit was not valid in her neighboring state, was at first facing a felony conviction and up to twelve
years in prison—a punishment that would have taken her away
from her children and barred her from working again as a nurse.
Happily, a public outcry prompted the prosecutor to relent
before the case went to trial, and Allen was ushered instead into
a diversionary program designed to help nonviolent first-time
offenders avoid jail time. Her criminal record, however, had
remained, and could have caused problems farther down the
line. Christie’s pardon brings the sorry affair to a satisfying, and
final, close. Will he now take steps to ensure that, next time,
he’s not needed?
n A video taken by a passerby showed policeman Michael
Slager shooting Walter Scott, a fleeing man stopped for a broken taillight, eight times in the back until Scott fell, mortally
wounded. Slager said there was a scuffle, not filmed, in which
he tried to Taser Scott. But shooting an unarmed and nondangerous man who is running away is against any civilized
police procedure; so Slager has been fired and charged with
murder. He will get his day in court. Meanwhile we will get
weeks in the court of public opinion, where anti-cop activists
finally appear to have what they sought in the cases of Trayvon
Martin, Michael Brown, and Eric Garner—a white man in
authority wantonly killing a black man. Omnipresent cell
phones and a push for police dash cams will make it easier to
catch gross errors and instances of police criminality. But ubiquitous video narratives (often partial) will also inflame the
media and the public and derange the violent, such as Ismaaiyl
Brinsley, murderer of officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu.
Let justice be done, but may the heavens not fall.
10
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n Rahm Emanuel has
won reelection as mayor
of Chicago, defeating
Jesús “Chuy” Garcia, a
Cook County commissioner, in a runoff election on April 7. Outspent
ten to one, Garcia, with
the support of progressives, particularly teachers and other members of
public-employee unions,
still managed to win 44
percent of the vote, making it close, at least by
the standards of elections in which an incumbent mayor of Chicago is on the ballot. The runoff represented a split in the Democratic party:
Chicagoans, overwhelmingly Democratic, chose the moneyed, business-friendly “Godfather,” ruthless but competent, over the idealistic populist focused on inequality. New
Yorkers, also overwhelmingly Democratic, decided similarly in sending and returning Rudy Giuliani and then Michael
Bloomberg to Gracie Mansion over a span of two decades.
Democrats urging Elizabeth Warren to challenge Hillary
Clinton for the presidential nomination, take note. For
Republicans, too, Chicago has a message, if they’ll hear it:
In electoral politics, demonstrated executive ability counts
for a lot.
n New York governor Andrew Cuomo (D.) was left with a red
face in April after it was revealed that his billion-dollar “StartUp New York” program had created a grand total of 76 jobs. The
initiative was intended to help reverse the state’s dismal economic record by attracting private companies on the promise of
a ten-year holiday from taxation. In practice, however, it threw
good money after very little indeed. For each job created, StartUp New York cost taxpayers a stunning $13,157,894. This news
came as a blow to Cuomo, as an earlier report had suggested
that the state was creating jobs at the much less embarrassing
cost of half a million dollars apiece. Given the previous
behavior of stimulus apologists, the big question will now
undoubtedly be: “Yes, but how many jobs did it save?”
n In recent years, a few jurisdictions around the United States
have allowed legal resident aliens to vote in local elections.
Now New York City’s council is seriously considering the
idea (the council has raised it before, but now the city has a
mayor who might be leftist enough to approve the law). As was
the case a century ago, when non-citizen voting was last in
vogue, advocates say that aliens pay taxes and use schools and
government services, and therefore deserve a vote. But citizenship is more than just a set of privileges and obligations. It’s
a state of mind—a knowledge of the country’s laws, values,
and customs, and an understanding that the long-term interests
of citizen and nation are aligned. Requiring immigrants to
demonstrate this knowledge and make a formal commitment to
the United States before they can influence the making of laws
and the spending of public money is not an act of repression
but one of simple common sense.
M AY 4, 2015
n Carly Fiorina, the former Hewlett-Packard CEO who is
preparing a run for the GOP presidential nomination, is blaming
environmentalists for her home state’s predicament: “Despite the
fact that California has suffered from droughts for millennia, liberal environmentalists have prevented the building of a single
new reservoir or a single new water-conveyance system over
decades during a period in which California’s population has
doubled.” She is of course correct, and while California probably
will not be a part of a winning Republican bloc in 2016, conservatives should make their case in all the liberal-dominated cities
and states, which have the most direct experience with defective
Democratic governance. And it might be worth pointing out that
California’s defective water arrangement—limit supply while
demand is growing, and cover up the mess with price-fixing—is
the ur-progressive model, being among other things the source of
California’s electricity crisis some years back and the underlying
economic model of medicine under Obamacare. Droughts are
bad enough; liberalism is an unnatural disaster.
n Kansas recently passed into law the “Unborn Child Protection
from Dismemberment Abortion Act.” “Dismemberment” is not
a term of propaganda. It is the word Supreme Court justice Anthony Kennedy used in Stenberg v. Carhart (2000) to describe
the abortion method by which an unborn child “dies just as a human adult or child would: It bleeds to death as it is torn limb
from limb.” Kansas’s law makes physicians who conduct an
abortion by this method subject to prosecution. Opposition to
death-by-dismemberment might seem like a subject ripe for
bipartisan agreement—but that firm pillar of the Democratic
establishment, Planned Parenthood, is considering challenging
the law in court. “Kansas is now not only the sole state with this
atrocious law; it also now has more restrictions on abortion than
any state in the U.S.,” it declared on Facebook. Good for Kansas;
and defenders of this procedure should perhaps think twice
before talking about atrocities.
n A nation-state only in name now, Somalia is the base of alShabaab, a franchise of al-Qaeda. Out on that arid African coast,
there is nothing for al-Shabaab to do in the way of spreading Islamism except set the Muslims and Christians in neighboring
Kenya against each other. In the past two years, al-Shabaab has
killed more than 200 Kenyans, raising sectarian tensions, and
also put an end to tourism by murdering or holding hostage English visitors. At five in the morning on April 2, a team of four alShabaab terrorists, duly wearing explosive belts, broke into the
dormitories of Garissa University, about 200 kilometers from the
Somali border and generally thought to be in a safe region. The
gunmen then held a selection of the students, releasing those who
were Muslims and shooting dead the Christians. By the time the
federal police arrived, 15 hours later, 147 corpses lay in pools of
blood here and there on the campus—more than twice as many
as al-Shabaab killed in the attack on the Westgate shopping mall
in 2013. “The operation has ended successfully,” the Kenyan
interior minister said, trying to keep his spirits up in the mayhem
of Garissa. “Four terrorists have been killed.”
n Nimrud dates from the 13th century before Jesus Christ; Dur
Sharrukin, the Assyrian capital, is said to have been founded in
the year 717 before Jesus Christ; Hatra, the Seleucid city with
temples and sculpture, is 2,000 years old. These wonderful sites
tell the story of mankind in the setting of Mesopotamia, nowadays Iraq—or rather, they used to. Islamic State is on the rampage
in Iraq. A video shows ISIS men with bulldozers, picks, and drills
eradicating this heritage in the same spirit that their colleagues
behead captives. A row of barrel bombs blew to pieces the walls
with inscriptions at Nimrud. Jonah’s Tomb, traditionally identified, and all the Christian churches of Mosul have been destroyed. According to one report from Mosul, there has been a
bonfire of precious manuscripts, and according to another report
the winged half-man, half-bull statues at Nineveh have been
smashed. Not mindless vandalism, this is ideology in action.
“God has honored us in the Islamic State to remove all of these
idols and statues,” exults a militant in the video. People and
places with other identities and associations are seen as contemptible, fit to be wiped out. The only history that counts is
theirs. What to them is civilization to everyone else is barbarism.
n Is there any anti-American despot Barack Obama dislikes? The
president took a break from smoothing Iran’s path to a nuclear
bomb by sharing a stage and shaking hands with Raúl Castro,
brother of Fidel, at the Summit of the Americas in Panama City.
“I’m not interested in having battles that frankly started before I
was born,” Obama said. No surprise there: History, for Obama,
has always been about his biography, so it therefore began with
his birth. His goal, of normalizing relations between the United
States and Cuba, is not quite imminent, but look for it before
January 2017. Meanwhile the hoary Communist dictatorship will
continue to beat, torture, imprison, and immiserate its people.
n Last December, a Maryland couple was investigated by Montgomery County officials for child neglect. The Meitivs’ crime
was to let their children, ages ten and six, play without supervision
in a park and then walk to their home a mile away in an upscale
suburb. Child Protective Services found the Meitivs neither
guilty nor innocent of violating any laws, but lodged a charge of
“unsubstantiated” neglect in their file. “We don’t know if we will
get caught in this Kafkaesque loop again,” Danielle Meitiv said
at the time. In April, they did. The children were picked up by
police a few blocks from their home on a Sunday evening and
detained for nearly six hours. The Meitivs were required to sign
a “safety plan” promising not to let the children out of their sight
until further notice. CPS officials, for their part, have promised
to “continue to work in the best interest of all children.”
n In Worcester, Mass., a high-school English teacher said that
her school’s staff and students were colorblind. This prompted an
all-staff e-mail from the principal, who was furious at the teacher:
“Personally, I’m embarrassed when she says our teachers and
students are colorblind. As if our students don’t know enough to
honor the beauty of their complexions.” The principal further
wrote, “Cultural Competency 101: ‘colorblindness’ suggests
racism.” It would be impossible to capture the trajectory of liberalism in one news item. It would be impossible to capture the
problems of America in one news item. But this one comes close.
n The University of Michigan planned to show American Sniper
at a social event. But some students complained that the movie
was “anti-Muslim” and would make Muslim students feel “unsafe.” So the university canceled the movie, substituting
Paddington. The new football coach, Jim Harbaugh, sent out a
11
THE WEEK
tweet that went around the world: “Michigan Football will watch
‘American Sniper’! Proud of Chris Kyle & Proud to be an
American & if that offends anybody then so be it!” (Chris Kyle
is the late Navy SEAL whose story is told in the movie.) The university, embarrassed, reversed course and screened the movie.
That was good. In Paddington, the little bear’s beloved uncle and
guardian is killed in an earthquake. Could the college kids have
handled it?
n Emmanuel College, a Catholic liberal-arts college in Boston,
recently joined in the denunciation of Gordon College, a nearby
nondenominational Christian school. The former will no longer
compete in athletic events against the latter, because of objections to a letter that Gordon College president D. Michael
Lindsay signed on to last summer. The letter was sent to President Obama in response to a proposed executive order banning sexual-orientation discrimination by federal contractors.
Lindsay and several other religious leaders requested that an
exemption for religious organizations be included in the order.
Gordon College affirms traditional Christian teaching on sexual
ethics, and has a policy that prohibits students and employees
from engaging in sex outside of marriage or with members of the
same sex. Emmanuel athletic director Pam Roecker said that she
and other administrators “just didn’t feel this aligned with the
mission of our college,” despite Emmanuel’s professed Catholic identity. Emmanuel’s school newspaper reported that the
decision “was an easy one and was met without resistance in the
athletic office.” Shameful decisions are often easy.
n The ignominious collapse of Rolling Stone’s shocking cover
story “A Rape on Campus” has led to a renewed focus on both its
author, Sabrina Rubin Erdely, and the magazine’s management.
A report, commissioned by Rolling Stone and conducted by the
dean of the Columbia Journalism School, highlights their many
editorial failures. “The magazine,” the report’s co-author, Steve
Coll, ruled, “set aside or rationalized as unnecessary essential
practices of reporting that, if pursued, would likely have led the
magazine’s editors to reconsider publishing.” Moreover, “the
editors made judgments about attribution, fact-checking and
verification that greatly increased their risks of error.” Putting it
less politely, we might say that, regardless of whether Erdely and
her team suspected that they were dealing with a fabrication,
their behavior was ultimately indistinguishable from that of the
feminist Left. In looking for a set of kulaks onto whom she could
pin society’s ills, Erdely effectively auditioned rape victims in
the hope of finding one that fit snugly into her narrative. When
writing her story, Erdely declined to do her due diligence lest
she upset her subject, discourage others from coming forward,
or come to be seen as doubting a purported victim. And, when she
was finally caught, she refused to apologize to those who had
actually suffered—namely, the falsely accused—preferring
instead to note that while her story may have been false, she
hoped nobody would draw any broader conclusions from that.
The most pronounced objection to the staging of show trials is
that they desensitize the public to the distinction between the
individual and the collective. Had it not been dismantled, Rolling
Stone’s story would have played the same role.
n Ezra Klein and Vox suffered two embarrassments. His rival in
the world of condescendingly backhanded “explanatory” journa12
|
lism, Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight, accused him of chartjacking—“stealing people’s charts without proper attribution,” pillaging work from Silver’s site and others—and Klein was
obliged to admit that Vox had failed to live up to its own standards. Such sloppiness was the order of the day—a few hours
later, what appears to be a combination of inept typing and an
unfortunate autocorrect had Klein tweeting, “Marco Rubio
tostada on taxes, Medicare, marijuana.” It may not be a verb, but
some people do tostada, especially when they marijuana. We
look forward to Klein’s reports as Governor Bobby Jindal
attempts to curry favor among primary voters—and God help
him if Ben Carson gets into the race.
n Günter Grass was a public intellectual who influenced how his
fellow Germans were to think about themselves in the aftermath
of Hitler, and how his fellow Europeans were to think about Germans. The Tin Drum, his first novel, portrayed Nazism as a sort
of bewitchment rather than the rational choice of the millions of
Germans who voted for Hitler. This apologia proved popular and
won him the Nobel Prize in 1999. Continuously controversial, he
denounced former Nazis, accused the West of warmongering,
toyed with Communist countries, and opposed German unification. Towards the end of his life, he confessed that he had kept
hidden his youthful enrollment in the Waffen S.S. and wrote that
Israel is a danger to world peace. The dispenser of morality was
no different from those he had been moralizing about, and
many Germans saw this as hypocrisy. Bewitchment had come
full circle. He has died at age 87. R.I.P.
IRAN
Deal or No Deal
E thought we had a bad deal with Iran. Now it turns out
we might not really have a deal at all.
In the interim agreement supposedly reached at the
beginning of April, the Iranians got the negotiators from the U.S.
and other major powers to give in on nearly every substantive
point. Iran will get to keep thousands of centrifuges, multiple
nuclear sites, the right to develop new, more advanced enrichment equipment—even permission to continue nuclear research
at a highly reinforced underground facility that was kept secret
from international inspectors for years. The West’s only victory
was a promise of a new, tough inspections regime, even though
there is already a long record of Iran’s developing nuclear facilities in secret. In theory, the deal pushes the time it would take Iran
to acquire a nuclear weapon to a year, but widely respected armscontrol experts have said that, given the difficulty of performing
good inspections and of building consensus around violations,
this is not enough.
But even those judgments come from an outline of concepts
published by the Western negotiators. Iran has been telling a very
different story: The government says, for instance, that it plans to
operate—not just research—advanced centrifuges, and, most
worryingly, that it expects immediate and complete sanctions
relief once a final deal is reached. The U.S. has maintained that
relief will be phased in.
Such points of disagreement suggest that a final deal, with explicit, public details rather than contested, private promises, may
never be reached. (It is scheduled to be done by the end of June.)
In the meantime, damage is already being done. Russia recently
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THE WEEK
announced, for instance, that it will sell an almost impregnable air-defense system to Iran, a sale the U.S. had long successfully blocked.
The White House believes that an agreement that brings Iran
into the world community will be a big step toward solving many
of the region’s problems, such as the rise of ISIS. This is, of
course, fantastical. The enemy of our enemy and all, but legitimizing and strengthening a totalitarian, terrorist regime that happens to appear to be loosely on the same side of one battle isn’t
much of a long-term strategy. Even in Iraq, Iranian-backed Shiite
militias aren’t really the answer to Sunni radicals. This Iranian
regime is never going to be a true partner, and President Obama
seems to think not just that it could be, but that we should give it
just about every concession possible to make it happen.
But there is hope that his plans can still be blocked. First, it is
no sure thing that the remaining gaps between our negotiators
and the Iranians can be bridged, although President Obama’s
flexibility has been impressive. More important, members of
both parties in Congress remain skeptical of the outlined deal,
and the recent confusion over what the deal meant has only
strengthened the case that the White House cannot be trusted with
reaching a final deal on its own.
The Senate Foreign Relations Committee has unanimously
passed a bill sponsored by Senator Bob Corker (R., Tenn.) that
would give Congress a period in which to approve or disapprove of a final deal. Congressional disapproval would prevent
the lifting of sanctions; the bill would also require the White
House to certify every 90 days thence that Iran is complying
with the deal, in order to keep sanctions lifted.
This is a weak bill—the president retains plenty of flexibility,
and rejecting a deal will require two thirds of both houses. A
measure along the lines of the Kirk-Menendez legislation,
which has not found as many Democratic votes as Corker’s,
would help the situation, by reinstating sanctions if the final
negotiations drag on. But the Corker bill may be the most feasible way Congress has to place some restrictions on the president. It should certainly not wait on this bill until after a final
deal is reached, as some Democrats want.
If passing the Corker bill interrupts or derails negotiations,
that might be the best outcome. The evidence is mounting that
Iran is not interested in a respectable deal. But Congress must do
its best to demonstrate that, because a respectable deal does not
appear to be a priority for President Obama either.
2016
Hillary’s In
HE suspense is over. Hillary Clinton is running for president. But no one is inevitable. Although Republicans
will spend the next several months running against one
another, making the case for themselves should encompass
making the case against Clinton and for conservative principles
and policies that will appeal not only to Iowa, New Hampshire,
and South Carolina Republicans next spring, but to most
Americans come November 2016.
Although Hillary Clinton has mostly avoided statements of
substance, she obviously sees America’s economic sluggishness
much as the current president does: as a consequence of income
inequality, a stingy minimum wage, the decline of labor unions,
and, in general, America’s turn to the right in the Reagan era.
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All indications are that Clinton plans to repackage her husband’s economic policies, peddling the notion that they turned
the economy around in the 1990s and can do so again—dubious
contentions both. The recession that Bill Clinton ran against in
1992 was already over when he took office, and his most
extravagantly liberal initiatives were defeated early in his presidency by a Republican Congress that brought needed restraint
on taxes, regulation, and spending. In any case, the economy is
greatly changed from that of the 1990s, and we aren’t going to
boost stagnating middle-class incomes by promoting labor
unions or rationing carbon.
In addition to running against a recycled agenda, Clinton’s
opponents should articulate an economic agenda broader and
deeper than cuts to marginal tax rates and vague calls for deregulation. That agenda should include market-based health-care
policies to replace Obamacare; reforms to break up the highereducation cartel that has saddled millions of Americans with
crushing debt; tax relief for middle-class parents; and policies
that would capitalize on America’s rich energy resources.
Clinton’s tenure as America’s chief diplomat, meanwhile, will
help her little. Clinton led a State Department best known now for
the misbegotten “reset” with Russia, for administering special
favors to administration donors, for ignoring requests for increased security at the American consulate in Libya, and for an
illicit e-mail arrangement for Clinton and her closest aides. She
was complicit in President Obama’s failed foreign policy from the
beginning, and there is little to suggest that she rejects its erroneous premises. What we can expect from a Clinton administration is a continuation of Obama’s policies, with even worse ethics.
The current Republican field should set out a strong, responsible alternative to the Democratic strategy of preemptive capitulation. Reasserting the vitality of NATO, arming our allies in
Kurdistan and Ukraine, redoubling sanctions against the Iranian
regime, reaching out to alienated allies (such as Israel)—there is
much the United States can do, in both the short and the long
term, to secure America and American interests abroad.
Hillary Clinton has been hovering about the heights of
American political power for nearly three decades, yet she has
almost no substantive accomplishments to show for it, and her
best plans for the next eight years are likely to be the repurposed
policies of Democratic administrations past. She’s beatable, and
the substantive work to prepare the ground for her defeat should
begin now.
M AY 4, 2015
Hillary, Herself
Sometimes, appearances are everything
BY KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON
vERY Mystery Machine must
have its velma.
You’ll remember velma
Dinkley, the grim-faced young
fogey of the Scooby-Doo gang: turtleneck and knee socks, orange; pleated
skirt and pumps, red; spectacle lenses a
very groovy shade of aqua; hair in a
severe, LPGA-ready bob. She was the
thick and bookish counterpoint to the
comely Daphne Blake. But the id moves
in mysterious ways, and velma has
enjoyed a strange post-1970s career as a
minor object of erotic fixation, being
portrayed on film by the knockout Linda
Cardellini and, in a dramatic illustration
of Rule 34, by the pornographic actress
Bobbi Starr.
Perhaps that is what sometime sex
symbol Hillary Rodham Clinton had in
mind when she nicknamed her campaign
van “Scooby”—a mystery machine,
indeed; as of this writing, nobody has
documented her presence in it—noting
its resemblance to the famously psychedelic Saturday-morning ride of
Mystery Incorporated. Mrs. Clinton—
the Grand Glorified Imperial Herself—
is very much a creature of the 1970s,
E
16
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and Scooby-Doo may very well feel
fresh in her mind.
De gustibus non disputandum est and
all that. Nobody is more mindful of the
role that her bodily appearance plays in
her public persona than Herself, who
has compared her own evolving coiffure
to a Mighty Morphin Power Ranger. (Of
course she’s pals with Haim Saban, the
billionaire owner of that entertainment
franchise and many others.) You’ll
remember that in 2006, just before
Herself’s first, failed presidential
campaign, the artist Daniel Edwards
un veiled a statue of the former first
lady, The Presidential Bust of Hillary
Rodham Clinton: The First Woman
President of the United States, the
generous proportions of which provoked at least 11,487 “bust” puns among
the nation’s least ambitious headline
writers. The resin casting was displayed
at the Museum of Sex in New York. “Her
cleavage is on display, prominently portraying sexual power which some people still consider too threatening,” the
artist said. Mr. Edwards—whose other
notable work of the time was a life-size
statue of an enormously pregnant
Britney Spears on her hands and knees
giving birth on a bearskin rug—said
that he was provoked to sex up the
junior senator from New York by a
comment from Sharon Stone, who proclaimed the Solon of Chappaqua too
residually sexy to be elected president
and said that those ambitions would
have to wait until she was “past her sexuality.” Herself was at the time not yet
60; if she is elected, she will turn 70 her
first year in office.
Sharon Stone, the Clintons, ScoobyDoo, the man-feminists of the New York
art scene, the just-one-name-like-Stingor-Cher thing: That Hillary Show has a
distinctly retro feel to it already. We
have seen this movie before: Last Vegas,
The Bucket List, About Schmidt, John
Podesta and Paul Begala starring in
Grumpy Old Men. Once more unto the
breach. The Lion in Winter, with all the
domestic friction and succession drama
but no lion.
Herself, who speaks in clichés and
who gives some indication that she
thinks in them, too, says that she is in
the van—“Road trip!” she tweeted—
because she is “hitting the road to earn
your vote.” The Clintons—not too long
ago “dead broke,” as Herself put it—
have earned well more than $100 million since the president left office, the
Washington Post reports, with his
speech income alone amounting to
some $105 million. That’s armored-car
money, and an armored car is of course
what Herself is riding around in, as she
did during her first Senate campaign.
There is something ineffably Clintonesque in that: She declined the use of the
customary limousine because she wanted
to appear to share the lives and troubles
of the ordinary people, so she rides
around in a customized armored van,
having spent a great deal of money—
starting prices for such vehicles are
comparable to those of Lamborghinis—
to avoid the appearance that she has a
great deal of money.
Appearances apparently do matter.
That van is the cosmetic surgery of
populism, the tummy tuck of a 1 percenter auditioning for a role somewhere
between Evita and Auntie Mame. But
the Clintons have always had a strange
knack for getting people to admire them
for their phoniness, not in spite of it.
Their admirers—and there are many of
them—are like those odd ducks who
M AY 4, 2015
ROMAN GENN
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prefer breast implants to the genuine
articles, the more obviously artificial
the better.
That’s the strange thing about the
career of Herself: Because she is a feminist, or at least a woman who plays one
on television, to bring up the subject of
her appearance is taken as prima facie
chauvinism, boorish boobishness of the
sort that illustrates exactly why we need
a woman as president. (Maybe. But this
woman?) At the same time, appearance
is 83 percent of every presidential campaign, and 97 percent—at least—of a
Hillary Rodham Clinton campaign. In
some cases, the appeal is literally skin
deep: When Team Herself unveiled its
campaign icon—an uppercase “H” with
a vector pointing to the right—the daft
young actress Lena Dunham remarked
that she wanted to get a “tramp stamp”
tattoo of the logo.
Much of life comes down to good
design. How good the H is going to be
at that remains unclear: On launch day,
the “JOBs” section of her website was a
highly symbolic link to nowhere. Jobs?
“NOT FOuND.” Yeah . . . tell America
about it. But she will have first-rate
help, gobs of money, and plenty of
celebrity flesh to throw at the slavering
gibbering maw of the electorate. Herself knows that appearances matter:
None of her political career makes a
hell of a lot of sense if you think about
it for three minutes.
she’s a feminist who has served as
very little other than an extension of her
traditionally patriarchic, manipulative
hound dog of a husband, elected to the
senate as a tribute to him, like some sad
little Ma Ferguson of the New York suburbs. Her record in office has run from
mediocrity in the senate to catastrophe
as secretary of state.
But she has some feelings she’d like
to share, some adventures in High
Herselfery.
The Clinton campaign’s launch
video opens with a young mother
describing an all-too-familiar predicament: she is moving to a new neighborhood because her child is about to
start school and the local public schools
are terrible. That’s some powerful
stuff—powerful stuff that conservative
school reformers watched with gob smacked disbelief: You know who has
a solution to the specific problem of poor
families’ being trapped by their ZIP
18
|
codes in craptastical public schools?
Literally every Republican positioning
himself to run against Mrs. Clinton in
2016. You know who opposes that
solution? Herself, who as a senate candidate and a presidential candidate not
only ran against school choice but went
so far as to link it to Islamic terrorism
and white supremacy.
But she has a van!
The video goes on to show a gay couple excitedly talking about their pending wedding, never mentioning that
literally every single presidential administration Herself has served has
opposed gay marriage, as indeed did
Herself as a presidential candidate. Her
husband signed a law prohibiting HIVpositive people from even entering the
united states on tourist visas, treating
some gay people as if they were plague
rats, but so what? she has a van!
she is positioning herself to run as
an economic populist, an Elizabeth
Warren–style scold of the wicked 1
percent. she will be doing this while
her husband sports wristwatches that
cost more than the typical American’s
house and after having plotted the
launch of her second campaign from
the multi-million-dollar beachfront
estate of the late Oscar de la Renta in
the Dominican Republic.
Van!
Of course appearances matter. Or at
least Hillary Rodham Clinton had better hope that they do: If not upon such
superficialities as her possession of a
uterus, upon what will she base her
campaign for president? upon the
remarkable foreign-policy successes
she achieved as secretary of state, during which time the united states not
only ceded Iraq and Afghanistan to brutality and chaos but stood by practically
mute for the emergence of the Islamic
state? upon senator Herself’s scanty
record as a lawmaker? Her husband won
on charm, charisma, and a psychopathic
gift for instrumentalizing human beings
without hesitation or regret. One out of
three is not going to do it.
The politician’s proposal is never
really “Vote for me—I’m just like you!”
It’s “Vote for me—I’m the version of
you that you really want to be!” Maybe
there are people who see that when they
look at Herself. (Again: De gustibus and
all that.) Every political machine is a
mystery machine.
The RFRA
Furor
Public commitment to religious freedom
is not as strong as it should be
BY RAMESH PONNURU
better illustrates
the sheer irrationality of
the national furor over the
religious-freedom law passed
by Indiana than the absence of a national
furor over the religious-freedom law
passed by Arkansas the following week.
Indiana passed a religious-freedom
law that critics said amounted to free
rein for discrimination against gays.
under pressure from liberals, the media,
and businesses, the Republican legislature amended the law to quiet the critics.
The Republican governor, Mike Pence,
signed the amendment.
Arkansas got some of the same negative attention when its Republican
legislature passed a religious-freedom
bill that was also decried as anti-gay.
Its Republican governor, Asa Hutchinson, refused to sign the bill until it
was changed.
supporters of both the Indiana law
and the Arkansas bill said that they were
merely creating state equivalents of the
Religious Freedom Restoration Act that
had been enacted at the federal level, to
bipartisan acclaim, in 1993. That law
said that the federal government could
impose a substantial burden on the exercise of religion only in furtherance of a
compelling interest, and only by the
least burdensome means possible.
Otherwise courts would give people
with religious objections to obeying a
law exemptions from it.
There have always been some people
who think that, as a matter of principle,
everyone should have to follow all
laws, with no exemptions based on religion. But the law has long allowed for
such exemptions. For most of the three
decades prior to the Religious Freedom
Restoration Act, the supreme Court had
held such exemptions to be required by
the First Amendment. Before the courts
got involved, legislators had codified
exemptions piecemeal.
N
OTHINg
M AY 4, 2015
This tradition remains sufficiently
strong that few of the partisans in the
battles over the Indiana law and the
Arkansas bill attacked exemptions in
principle. Instead, the critics mostly
said that the state legislation went
beyond the federal law in two troubling
ways. It gave religious rights to businesses, not just to persons; and it
applied to litigation in which the government was not a party. Even Fox
News ran a graphic highlighting these
supposed differences.
They were imaginary. The federal
Dictionary Act defines “persons” to
include corporations except when otherwise specified, and the Religious
Freedom Restoration Act does not say
otherwise. Legislative debates in the
1990s showed both liberal and conservative legislators to understand the law
to apply to businesses. In last year’s
Hobby Lobby decision, the Supreme
Court held the law to apply to businesses, or at least closely held businesses, and only two of the liberal
justices dissented. Most circuit courts
have also ruled that the federal law applies
to private litigation. The Obama–Holder
Justice Department reads the law that
way, too.
If the law is to allow religious exemptions, it makes sense to allow it in these
contexts. The principle is identical. A
kosher deli should be able to ask in
court for a religious exemption to a
food-preparation regulation that conflicts with its owner’s or owners’ faith.
The reasonable questions to ask in such
a situation are: Is this regulation necessary to advance an important governmental purpose, and is it the least
burdensome way to do it? Whether the
people asking for the exemption are
seeking to make a profit should be irrelevant to the inquiry.
And because the point of the law is to
guard against government infringements
of religious liberty, it should not matter
whether the government is actually a
party to litigation that involves its infringement. Everyone understands this
point when it comes to other freedoms.
Imagine that a government authorized
private lawsuits against newspapers for
publishing content critical of the ruling
party. We would not say that the government was respecting the freedom of the
press, and we would not say this even if
the government itself refrained from
20
|
prosecuting any critics. Nor would it
matter if the affected media outlets were
for-profit corporations.
Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, wrote
an op-ed claiming that the Indiana law
created a license to discriminate. No
religious-freedom law has been read
that way. There are almost no cases in
which anyone has even asked a court to
grant him a general right not to hire
black people, or serve gay people, for
religious reasons. There have been
cases in which more specific exemptions from nondiscrimination laws
were sought. A photographer in New
Mexico, for example, did not wish to
provide services for a same-sex wedding because of religious convictions.
Even such narrowly drawn claims,
which have generally been made by
people who said that they would happily provide services in contexts
other than weddings, have tended to
lose in court.
The combined pressure of people
who did not want wedding photographers to be able to bring such a claim
to court, and people who thought the
law went much farther than it actually
did, was too much for Indiana Re publicans. In the guise of “clarifying”
their religious-freedom law, they
amended it so that it could not be used
to win exemptions from nondiscrimination laws.
Legislating under pressure, much of it
misinformed, created some anomalies.
Indiana does not prohibit discrimination
on the basis of sexual orientation,
although some Indiana communities do.
In those places, a florist with a religious
objection to same-sex marriage will
probably have to swallow that objection.
Everywhere else in the state, a company
has the legal right not to serve gays at all,
whether or not its owners have any religious motives.
Arkansas had a better outcome. Its
revised version of the bill, which
Governor Hutchinson signed, omitted
any reference to businesses or private
litigation. Instead it included a provision
telling the courts to interpret the law in a
way “consistent with the Religious
Freedom Restoration Act of 1993,” that
is, the federal law. That should mean
that it is interpreted to protect businesses from private litigation.
It was an ingenious solution. It disarmed the critics’ main weapon: the
claim that conservatives in Indiana
and Arkansas were going dangerously
beyond the federal law. But the new
Arkansas law seems to accomplish
exactly what the critics said they op posed. If it’s a kind of legislative hate
crime to let businesses invoke religious rights in private litigation, the
law should have been a new provocation rather than, as it seems to have
been, an end to the national shoutfest.
That denouement suggests that the
controversy had very little to do with
the actual substance of any legisla tive proposals.
Both states ended with greater statutory protections for religious liberty
than they had previously had on the
books. Indiana weakened its law but
did not repeal it, and the weakening
amendment will not affect many possible cases. (It would be irrelevant to a
case involving the ceremonial use of
peyote, for example.)
It is possible, then, to put an optimistic conservative gloss on the
debate. It is also worth noting that
Republicans were more supportive of
religious-liberty legislation during it
than they were during a flare-up over
very similar legislation in Arizona in
early 2014. A Republican governor
vetoed that legislation after both of the
state’s Republican senators and the
2012 Republican presidential nominee, Mitt Romney, denounced it. This
time the Republican presidential hopefuls uniformly defended the law, if at
varying speeds.
Yet the debate was also a setback for
religious liberty. It is often said that
rights should not be put up for a vote.
Governments will protect rights, however, only if those who wield governmental power are committed to them. It
depends, in our system, on votes by
legislators, by judges, and ultimately
by citizens.
Polling on these religious-liberty
controversies is murky. The failures of
religious-liberty claimants in cases
involving same-sex marriage, coupled
with the absence of any effective
protest against those failures, is a sign
that the public commitment to religious freedom is not as strong as it
should be. And the confused debate
over religious-freedom legislation is a
sign that the strength of that commitment is headed further downward.
M AY 4, 2015
Obama’s Iran
Capitulation
Never mind victory; the administration
isn’t even seeking containment
BY MARIO LOYOLA
the 1970s, Americans
hotly debated whether we should
approach the Soviet Union in the
spirit of “détente” or confront it
and, if possible, roll it back, but virtually
everyone agreed that the Soviet Union
must at a minimum be contained. except
on the far left, nobody seriously suggested
scaling back U.S. power or accommodating Soviet demands on major fronts.
Yet that is precisely the policy President
Barack Obama has embraced toward Iran,
in the teeth of opposition from U.S. allies,
Congress, and public opinion. the result
is a Middle east that grows more unstable
and dangerous by the day.
what makes this particularly tragic is
that, early in Obama’s first term, we had
Iran on the ropes. After three decades of
war, isolation, and sanctions, the Iranian
regime was as hostile to the west as ever,
yet by 2009 the Islamic revolution of
Ayatollah Khomeini, which was supposed
to be a worldwide millenarian revolution
like Communism, had been successful
nowhere outside Iran except lebanon.
After Iran’s secret uranium-enrichment
plant at Fordow was discovered in 2009,
Congress passed crippling sanctions, sailing past a veto threat with a 99–0 vote in the
Senate. together with those imposed by the
european Union, they cut Iran off from the
world financial system. As a result, Iran’s
currency soon lost half its value, bringing
rampant inflation inside Iran, and major
customers such as India and China faced
large difficulties paying for Iran’s oil deliveries once payments couldn’t be cleared
through financial centers such as New York
or london. A fiscal crisis loomed, threatening the government’s ability to keep subsidizing necessities such as food and gasoline.
the critical thing at that point was to
maintain and strengthen a strategy of containment that was already mostly in place.
Just as george Kennan had predicted it
would, containment brought about the fall
of the Soviet Union when outside pressure
aggravated the regime’s intrinsic lack of
D
URINg
legitimacy. Similarly, with support for dissidents, increased sanctions, and a powerful military presence in both Iraq and
Afghanistan, the U.S. could have brought
Iran to its knees.
In a 2007 paper for the center-left
Brookings Institution, the late Peter Rodman, a former assistant secretary of defense
and a former senior editor of NAtIONAl
RevIew, advocated just such a policy.
He called for supporting the Iranian prodemocracy movement, increasing sanctions pressure, and stabilizing Iraq as an
American ally. In every particular, Obama
has done the opposite, dismantling essentially every element of containment. worse,
Obama is actively helping Iran to fill the
vacuum created by America’s retrenchment in the Middle east.
Almost from the start of his presidency,
Obama made clear his willingness to
accommodate Iran in order to get a
nuclear deal. As Senator Jon Kyl said at
the time, Obama’s approach resembled
that of a man who walks into a car dealership and announces that he’s not leaving
888-402-6575
21
until he buys a car. Sensing their opportunity, the mullahs soon made it clear that
they weren’t interested in negotiating
anything except the terms of an American
surrender on the nuclear front. They must
have been stunned to discover that not
only did Obama fully intend to oblige, but
he was also thoroughly committed to helping Iran become a “successful regional
power,” as Obama himself put it. The
president was offering to accommodate
Iran on every front.
Naturally, Iran hardened its positions in
response and became dramatically more
assertive, pouncing on opportunities to
expand Iranian power throughout the
region. Iranian military might has suddenly
unfurled itself across the Middle East in
two directions: north across Iraq, Syria,
and Lebanon, and south to Yemen, encircling the entire Sunni Arab heartland.
America’s Arab allies are visibly rattled
by the sudden Iranian expansion, and even
more by America’s apparent acquiescence
and outright assistance. Several members
of the anti-ISIS coalition have protested
America’s de facto coordination with
Iranian-backed militias in Iraq, which is
cornering them into helping Shiite extremists murder their fellow Sunnis north and
west of Baghdad. Far to the south, Saudi
Arabia hardly bothered to consult the U.S.
before launching a campaign of major air
strikes in Yemen.
Obama clearly sees ISIS quite differently
from the way he sees the government of
Iran. He shouldn’t. Iran has killed as many
Americans in Iraq as ISIS’s al-Qaeda precursors did. More fundamentally, the
Islamic revolution of Iran is merely the
Shiite equivalent of the Sunni revolution
that produced the Muslim Brotherhood, alQaeda, and ISIS. In fact, it is the same revolution, the goal of which is to establish a
worldwide caliphate under the principle
of velayat-e faqih, the unification of religious and political authority. Yet when
asked why Iran must be stopped from
gaining a nuclear weapon, Obama’s consistent answer is that it would start a dangerous regional arms race. In other words,
he’s worried about nuclear weapons falling
into the hands of our Sunni allies, but
doesn’t seemed troubled by the prospect
of Iran itself getting nuclear weapons.
People who believe that conflicts are
best resolved through concessions and cordial dialogue typically say they want to
strengthen the moderates within the opposing regime. But as Rodman pointed out,
22
|
moderates are risk-averse and apt to argue
that hardline policies carry unacceptable
risks. “We can strengthen their arguments
by actually posing such risks,” he noted.
Obama’s approach, on the other hand, has
only disheartened the moderates in Iran. He
failed to say a word in support of the “green
movement” after the fraudulent 2009 elections and is now doing virtually everything
possible to extend the life and prestige of
the Islamic revolution. It’s hard to imagine
what circumstances could be more demoralizing for the pro-democracy movement.
The nuclear talks, meanwhile, have been
a fiasco of historic proportions. At the end
of March, the U.S. and its partners reportedly reached an agreement with Iran that
limits growth in the various elements of its
nuclear-weapons program and subjects
the facilities to enhanced inspections. Since
our diplomats apparently don’t bother with
negotiating actual agreements that can be
written down anymore, we don’t really
know what has been agreed, and the Iranian
and U.S. explanations diverge on key
points, including the timing of sanctions
relief and the scope of inspections. What’s
clear is that the U.S. has given in to Iran on
all the essentials: Iran will get to keep its
nuclear-weapons program while sanctions
are lifted, without having to answer the
International Atomic Energy Agency’s
many outstanding questions about the possible military dimensions of its program.
And while the White House claims that the
sanctions will “snap back” into place if Iran
fails to comply with its obligations, the deal
doesn’t attach automatic consequences to
Iranian noncompliance.
Secretary of State John Kerry recently
testified to Congress that we have to
accept a large-scale enrichment program
in Iran because the Bush administration
failed to stop it. He has a point. But saying
that Iran refuses to give up its enrichment
capability and therefore we must accept it
is not a statement of fact, but rather a bargaining position. Besides, however intransigent Iran might be, sanctions still had a
crucial role to play, in making clear to Iran
(and any potential imitators) that it was
headed down a blind alley and would
never know prosperity or normal international relations unless it dismantled the
program or fundamentally transformed
itself. The sanctions were a pillar of containment, the best hope for transforming
Iran into a peaceful democracy.
The central pillar of any containment
strategy is of course a system of regional
alliances such as we have in NATO.
America’s Arab allies remain steadfast on
the surface despite their mounting criticism of Obama. The problem is that
Obama’s withdrawal from Iraq, and his
subsequent accommodation of Iranian
hegemony over that country, undermines
the entire alliance. It’s as if John F.
Kennedy had abruptly pulled out of West
Germany and invited the Soviets to occupy
it in our stead. Saddam Hussein shielded
the Sunni Arabs from Iranian hegemony,
but that was not a long-term solution
because he was a hegemon in his own
right. Having removed Saddam, the U.S.
needed to remain a stabilizing, dominant
force in Iraq for years to come. Holding
that central position in the Middle East
would have allowed us to deal with almost
any situation, in the process rendering our
Arab allies unassailable and effectively
containing Iran. What Rodman said in
2007 remains true today: “There is no way
for the United States to be strong against
Iran if we are weak in Iraq.”
Instead Obama precipitately withdrew
all U.S. forces in 2011, and has since in
effect turned Iraq over to the Iranians. The
ubiquitous General Qassem Suleimani,
commander of the Iranian Quds Force, is
present all along the ISIS front, along with
heavy Iranian weapons. The U.S. has
assembled a coalition of air forces that
are now operating as de facto Iranian
proxies, softening up ISIS targets so that
the Iranian-backed militias can take over,
as seen in the recent operation to retake
Tikrit, Saddam’s hometown. U.S. air
power allowed Iranian-backed militias
and the increasingly Iranian-dominated
Iraqi army to occupy the city and exact
revenge on suspected ISIS supporters,
many of whom are just innocent Sunnis.
Our Arab allies warn that any operation
against Mosul must guarantee the safety
of Sunnis, but it cannot, because Obama
refuses to involve U.S. combat troops.
The Obama administration’s decision to
end the containment of Iran, let it keep a
nuclear-weapons program, and help it expand its hegemony throughout the region,
all while providing billions of dollars in
sanctions relief, is a strategic debacle bordering on material support for terrorism.
The Islamic revolution wasn’t going to
stay in what Rodman called its “exuberant
phase” forever. Containment was bringing
Iran to its knees. Now Obama has given
the murderous revolution of Ayatollah
Khomeini a whole new lease on life.
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The EvenSteven
Temptation
Adventures in moral equivalence
B Y J AY N O R D L I N G E R
HEN I was growing up, the
worst thing you could be
was a racist. (And racism
was often defined with
grotesque, malicious looseness.) The
second-worst thing you could be, probably, was a jingoist. An “ethnocentrist.” A
flag-waver. Even simple patriotism was
suspect, a sign of naivety and boobishness.
You were not to think yourself anything special as an American. You were
not to be too big for your britches.
Everything had to be equal, balanced,
even-steven. The Soviet Union tossed
poets into prisons? Yeah, well what
about the Hollywood Ten?
At the time, there was a best-selling
book called “I’m OK—You’re OK.” It
was by Thomas A. Harris, M.D. One of
the original self-help books, it sold
more than 15 million copies. Its title
expresses the principle I’m talking
about: “I’m okay, you’re okay,” or,
maybe more accurately, “I’m not okay,
you’re not okay.”
If I raised concerns about what the
Chinese Communists were doing to the
Tibetans, it would fall to you to say,
“Well, what did we do to the Indians?”
That wouldn’t help the Tibetans at all.
But it would obey “even-steven.” If I
said it wasn’t nice to shoot people as
they scaled the Berlin Wall, you would
say, “It wasn’t nice to lynch blacks in
the South, was it?”
“GUlAG,” said one guy. “Japanese
internment,” said another (meaning the
internment of Japanese Americans).
“Nazi war machine,” said one guy.
“Dresden,” said another (referring to
the American and British bombing of
that city). “Imperial Japan.” “Hiro shima and Nagasaki!” Etc.
We were afraid of committing the
sin of national pride, a pride that might
suggest a sense of national superiority.
No one wanted to come off as an
W
24
|
Archie Bunker. (He was the main
character, bigoted though somewhat
lovable, in All in the Family, the popular sitcom.) We kind of policed ourselves. If you criticized something
relating to a foreign land, you had to
criticize something relating to home in
the next breath.
The Communist East and the democratic West? They both had their strengths
and weaknesses. We Westerners were
keen on “political rights,” such as freedom of speech and freedom of assembly.
In the East, they were keen on “social
rights,” especially the rights to food,
shelter, and health care. (It was a lie, but
it was widely taught and believed.)
Interestingly, the even-steven principle
applied only if you were talking about
governments hostile to the United States.
You could criticize apartheid South
Africa, or Pinochet’s Chile, or Marcos’s
Philippines, without a complementary
criticism of America or the West. No one
said, “Who are we to knock Pretoria?
Reagan just reduced food stamps.” But
when it came to hostiles, equivalence was
the name of the game.
I must say, I smiled a bit when I read
about President Obama at the National
Prayer Breakfast in February. He said
we were not to “get on our high horse”
about violent jihad. “Remember that
during the Crusades and the Inqui sition, people committed terrible deeds
in the name of Christ. In our home
country, slavery and Jim Crow all too
often were justified in the name of
Christ.” That is a clear example of
even-steven at work.
In 1978, the Soviet Union was putting
dissidents through show trials. Our ambassador to the United Nations, Andrew
Young, gave an interview to a French
newspaper, saying, “In our prisons, too,
there are hundreds, perhaps thousands,
of people whom I would describe as
political prisoners.” He was obeying
even-steven. He was not on his high
horse. He probably thought he was being
polite as well.
At a press conference, President Carter said, “I know that Andy regrets having made that statement, which was
embarrassing to me.” He kept him on in
his job (for a while).
Some years later, I was in college
and starting to read NATIONAl REvIEW
and other subversive literature. In a
social-theory class, we were studying
Marx, and I dared approach the professor after class: What should we think
of the terrible human-rights violations
by Marxist governments all over the
world? He was irked at me and said
that Marx should not be held responsible
for what others might do in his name.
“Should we blame Thomas Jefferson for
the sins of Richard Nixon?” (Say what
you will about Nixon, but he didn’t
own slaves.)
Back to the Obama administration—
which in 2010 participated in a “humanrights dialogue” with the Chinese
government. Afterward, our representative, Assistant Secretary of State Michael
H. Posner, held a press conference at
Foggy Bottom. A reporter asked, “Did
the recently passed Arizona immigration
law come up? And, if so, did they bring it
up or did you bring it up?” This law was
an attempt to curb illegal immigration,
and a mild one at that—but some portrayed it as onerous.
Our man said, “We brought it up early
and often. It was mentioned in the first
session, and as a troubling trend in our
society and an indication that we have
to deal with issues of discrimination or
potential discrimination, and that these
are issues very much being debated in
our own society.”
The reporter had a follow-up question: “Did they,” meaning the Chinese
officials, “discuss anything about their
concerns about Chinese visiting in Arizona?” Posner said no.
Bear in mind that China is a one-party
dictatorship with a gulag (laogai). Bear
in mind that this is a government that
imprisons a Nobel peace laureate (liu
Xiaobo), among thousands of other
democrats and dissidents. Bear in mind
that this is a government all too credibly accused of organ harvesting (the
murder of human beings, such as Falun
Gong practitioners, for the extraction
of organs).
What must liu and other political prisoners think—what must Falun Gong
practitioners and other hunted people
think—that we Americans would talk this
way? That we would wonder whether
Chinese are afraid to visit Arizona? Do
they think we are mad?
In 2011 and 2012, our vice president,
Joe Biden, spent time with Xi Jinping,
who was then his counterpart in China.
Now Xi is boss of the Communist party
(and therefore of the country). Recently,
M AY 4, 2015
AP PHOTO/LOS ANGELES TIMES, JAY L. CLENDENIN, POOL
Xi Jinping, then the Chinese vice president, with the U.S. vice president, Joe Biden, in 2012
Biden told Evan Osnos of The New
Yorker that Xi had asked him why the
United States put “so much emphasis on
human rights.” (I haven’t noticed this in
the last six years, but be that as it may.)
Biden told Xi, “No president of the
United States could represent the
United States were he not committed to
human rights. If you don’t understand
this, you can’t deal with us. President
Barack Obama would not be able to
stay in power if he did not speak of it.
So look at it as a political imperative. It
doesn’t make us better or worse.”
No? I doubt that Joe Biden learned
the even-steven principle when he was
growing up in the 1940s and ’50s in
Pennsyl vania and Delaware. But he
learned it later.
Move with me now to the concert
hall—to Avery Fisher Hall at New York’s
Lincoln Center, in the last week of
March. A new piece was being premiered by the New York Philharmonic.
It was Scheherazade.2, by John Adams.
A markedly different man from our
second president, this John Adams is
probably America’s most famous and
important (classical) composer. Before
the downbeat, Adams talked to the audience about how his piece came about. He
said he wanted to respond, musically, to
brutality toward women. He had been
reading about such brutality in Egypt,
Afghanistan, Iran, and elsewhere.
But we were not to be too big for our
britches. We were not to get on our
high horse. Because we have brutality
toward women right here at home,
Adams said. You can “find it on Rush
Limbaugh.”
At this, the audience responded with
robust and sustained applause. I thought
it was like the “Two Minutes Hate”
found in Orwell’s 1984. My guess is,
Adams did not want to be seen as picking on the “Other”—the Taliban, the
Muslim Brotherhood, the theocrats in
Iran. So did he pick on himself, or his
friends? No, no, they never do. He decided to defame Rush Limbaugh. And
he must have known that the audience
would delight in this defamation.
Let me say a couple of kind words
for even-steven (believe it or not). The
impulse behind it may be admirable.
It’s good to avoid judgmentalism. It’s
good to be self-aware, self-critical—
on guard against hypocrisy. It’s good
to consider the beams in our own eyes
while, or before, considering the motes
in others’ eyes. It is also good to keep
history in mind.
When despairing of barbarism in the
Arab world, I sometimes think, “You
know, two seconds ago, Germans and
their allies, on European soil, were carrying out a holocaust.”
Furthermore, a mindless patriotism is
unattractive. But then, so is a mindless
national self-flagellation. Bernard Lewis,
the great Middle East historian, recently
observed that Americans once said, “My
country, right or wrong.” Now we’re apt
to say, “My country, wrong.”
The even-steven principle—or moral
equivalence or not getting on your high
horse—can be taken to absurd extremes.
It can be logically and morally perverse.
It does no one any good to pretend that
America has political prisoners or that
Arizona is a police state. And what I
heard in Avery Fisher Hall the other
week was one of the most disgusting
things I have ever heard in my life. (I’m
not talking about the music, which was
pretty good.)
25
The Rebel Sheriff
How David A. Clarke Jr. became a political celebrity
B Y C H A R L E S C . W. C O O K E
N January 2013, a 32-second radio advertisement was
broadcast in Milwaukee, and—quite by accident—a
political star was born. Hoping to encourage local residents to play a part in their own protection, the commercial’s progenitor went firmly on the record in favor of the
private ownership of firearms: “With officers laid off and
furloughed, simply calling 911 and waiting is no longer your
best option.” Rather, listeners were invited to “consider taking
a certified safety course in handling a firearm.” “You have a
duty to protect yourself and your family,” the commercial
intoned. “Can I count on you?”
The speaker was Milwaukee County sheriff David A. Clarke Jr.,
and the reaction was immediate. Within days of the ad’s release,
Roy Felber, president of the Milwaukee Deputy Sheriffs’
Association, complained bitterly that the idea didn’t “sound too
smart.” “People have the right to defend themselves,” he griped,
“but they don’t have the right to take the law into their own
hands.” Tom Barrett, the mayor of Milwaukee, seconded Felber’s
critique. “Sheriff David Clarke,” Barrett lamented, “is auditioning
for the next Dirty Harry movie.” Predictably, these sentiments
were echoed by gun-control groups across the country. A year la-
THE WASHINGTON POST/CONTRIBUTOR
I
26
|
ter, when Clarke ran for reelection, Michael Bloomberg’s
PAC contributed $150,000 to his opponent’s campaign.
Initially, Clarke was shocked at the contretemps. “I didn’t
see this as a national question when I spoke out,” he tells me,
as we sit down in his Milwaukee office. “The ad was meant in
response to some local crime issues. I couldn’t have dreamed
of being catapulted into the national spotlight.” Indeed, at first
he resisted the pull. “When it started to grow, I tried to corral it
and push it away,” he recalls. “This is my hometown. I’m just
trying to make a difference here.”
Before long, however, the requests for interviews and
appearances became so numerous that they were all but impossible to refuse. At first, it was mostly radio. Then a few curious
television stations began to inquire. And, finally, the National
Rifle Association got in touch. “Someone in my position is
unique,” Clarke tells me. “I’m in law enforcement, I’m black,
and I was speaking from a rare position.” Now he is in demand.
“I’ll go where anybody wants to hear me. I don’t tailor my
message to one specific group.”
At local conservative events, at the Conservative Political
Action Conference, and at pro–Second Amendment meetings,
M AY 4, 2015
the man is welcomed like a rock star. His face is a regular feature on the front covers of firearms-enthusiast and lawenforcement magazines. He is a fixture on Fox News and talk
radio. On the face of it, Clarke was just joking when he told the
70,000 attendees of this year’s NRA convention that he “isn’t
running for anything . . . yet.” But all gags contain a modicum
of truth, and, with his pregnant pause, Clarke was acknowledging just how popular he had become. “I’m a cop at heart—
it’s in my blood,” he insists when I ask about his future. But he
won’t rule anything out.
It’s not just the cowboy hat and the leather waistcoat that set
him apart. On the questions of gun control, race, the nature of
policing, the record of his city’s government, and even his own
Democratic party (more on which later), Clarke is dramatically
out of step with his colleagues and with what is typically
expected from African-American males.
ask for help when we’re trying to solve a crime. That’s after the
crime has happened. How about before?”
Which is to say that Clarke’s transformation has been more
than merely pragmatic. “As the NRA and other groups started to
want to use me as a symbol of the Second Amendment—a black
voice—I started reading up,” he recalls. “I became fascinated.
What really struck me was the black tradition of arms. . . . I
thought, Wow. This isn’t the black history I grew up reading
about.” Among the many thinkers to whom Clarke attributes
his present philosophy are Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells,
and—a particular favorite—Thomas Sowell. “Once blacks
were able to arm themselves to protect against kidnapping and
lynching,” he explains, “things really began to change in terms
of black freedom.”
This unorthodox outlook has gone a long way toward informing Clarke’s difficult relationship with the Democratic
Understandable as his electoral affiliation may be in
practice, there is no doubt that Milwaukee County sheriff
David A. Clarke Jr. is an odd fit for the party of the
American Left.
His views have changed over time. Back in 2003, when
the governor was considering a bill that would have loosened restrictions on the private carrying of firearms, Clarke
penned a worried letter urging him to veto it. “There are better ways to fight crime than to flood the streets of Milwaukee
with dangerous weapons,” Clarke proposed. In an urban area
such as Milwaukee, he added, an increase in the civilian use
of firearms would jeopardize the “safety of my deputies and
the citizens they represent.”
By 2007, Clarke had done a 180. “The police are no
longer able to guarantee the personal safety of citizens,” he
told local talk-radio host Charlie Sykes. In consequence, the
state government should reconsider its “opposition to
allowing law-abiding people the means with which to protect themselves.”
Clarke is happy to explain this shift. “Once,” he tells me,
“this was a thriving city. It was industry-based, had a lot of
manufacturing, was very safe.” And now? “People are at the
mercy of the criminal element here. I’m in these neighborhoods and I talk to these folks. They’re living in terrorized
neighborhoods. That bothers me. I grew up here.”
“There was a time in this country,” Clarke adds, “when a lot
of personal protection was done by the individual. As time
went on and these urban centers developed, the government
took on a bigger role. We were okay with that. But they
weren’t doing it here. People were waiting an inordinate
amount of time to get a squad to respond. So I said, let’s define
a role for the citizenry.”
T
HAT role, Clarke insists, is consonant with the American
ideal of self-government. “You have a duty to protect
you and your family,” he charges. “I don’t mean go
chasing down bank robbers and all that stuff. But we can’t just
party, under whose banner he has now been winning for almost
a decade and a half. “I run as a Democrat because it’s a partisan election,” he explains. “And originally, I decided to run as
a Democrat because that’s what the family history was. But I
didn’t want to join the party.” His parents were “Jack Kennedy
and Harry Truman Democrats” and fans of Martin Luther King
Jr., but they didn’t talk about politics much. “As a child,” he
recalls, “I was taught to value education, hard work, perseverance, and taking responsibility for your decisions in life. Now,
it seems like those are conservative ideas. But they’re not.”
“Growing up a career cop,” Clarke explains, “I was always
taught, ‘Stay out of politics.’ I didn’t have any particular allegiance to any particular party.” Still, understandable as his
electoral affiliation may be in practice, there is no doubt that
Clarke is an odd fit for the party of the American Left. “I
believe in limited government,” he affirms. “I know what the
welfare state has done to the black family.”
He continues: “I believe in military superiority. I get that
from my dad: He did combat jumps in Korea under fire. I
believe that the Constitution protects individuals and not
groups. I believe in safe streets here at home. And I believe in
states’ rights. For a label for me, ‘conservative’ is more appropriate than ‘Republican.’”
Clarke’s electoral coalition is a combination of poorer
blacks and suburban white conservatives: “I clean up in the
suburban areas. I always lost a lot of those communities, but I
won them handily this time.” And what of those black voters,
who typically do not vote in great numbers for conservative
candidates? “I win because I get those folks,” Clarke smiles. “I
get ’em. I understand them. They feel connected.”
’Twas not ever thus. Clarke recalls that when he started out,
he would explain that one can blame “the white man” and
“slavery” only so much before recognizing that “some of this
is self-inflicted.” That didn’t work, so Clarke took a different
27
tack: “I started to connect with them emotionally rather than
logically. I started talking about things that affected them. And
it started to change. With me they think, ‘We’re not real crazy
about some of the things he says, but he’s ours.’”
Some of the things that Clarke says are, indeed, highly controversial. Black Americans, he proposes, “have been separated from their history,” and are therefore “easily exploited”
by politicians. In consequence, he argues, the Democratic
party has cultivated a large bloc of voters who are “susceptible to bullsh**.”
“If we were reconnected with our history,” he predicts,
“you’d see some erosion away from this abject servility to the
Democratic party.” And younger blacks need to recognize that,
while they do have real problems, things in America are better
than they once were. “My dad was an Airborne Ranger,”
Clarke reiterates. “When he fought in Korea, the Army was
[partly] segregated. He witnessed injustice. Young blacks have
no idea what they’re talking about.”
I
T’S
“problematic,” Clarke contends, that in many parts of
America the population is mostly black and the police
force and local governments are mostly white: “I don’t
want quotas, but that’s a problem.” And yet if blacks want to
change that, they don’t need to riot, “they need to vote.” At the
height of the tensions in Ferguson, Mo., Clarke took to Fox
News and told Al Sharpton to “shut up.” Sharpton, Clarke submitted, was a “charlatan” who “ought to go back into the gutter.” Eric Holder, he added, had offered up a “poor display”
and should “apologize” to law enforcement. Barack Obama,
meanwhile, had fueled “racial animosity between people.”
“When the president talks,” Clarke tells me, “everybody listens. When Eric Holder holds a press conference, everybody
listens. They have to be more careful. Obama should have said
to the rioters, ‘You need to find a more socially acceptable way
of dealing with your anger.’”
“I’m not going to defend the Ferguson P.D.,” he adds. “But
I will defend the profession.” In Clarke’s telling, “there was no
institutional racism” in Ferguson, though there may have been
some bad actors: “Eric Holder went on a witch hunt. . . . Holder
went down loaded for bear when Ferguson first happened.”
The DOJ’s report, Clarke charges, was “poorly written and
poorly put together”—the product of an attorney general who
dislikes the police and wishes to cast them in a poor light: “The
DOJ manipulates the numbers.”
Also unsupported, Clarke charges, is the contention that
there are too many Americans in prison. (Wisconsin has the
highest incarceration rate for black males in the country.)
“That’s a myth,” Clarke tells me. “Drug reformers are misleading the public.” Clarke sees a role for decriminalization of
the possession of certain drugs, but he is not open to wholesale
legalization. “For my community,” he tells me, “drugs are a
problem. Guy’s got a little weed on him—a few rocks on him
for his own personal use—he doesn’t need to go to prison. The
guy with the intent to deliver—yes, he needs to go to prison.
I’m not there in terms of legalizing anything.”
Clarke casts the drug war as a means by which African
Americans are liberated from violence in their communities. (I
nationalreview.com/nrdsubscribe
28
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M AY 4, 2015
disagree.) “The only reason we went on that lock-’em-up drive
in the first place,” he suggests, “was black mayors who went to
Congress and pleaded for help. Because of the violence, they
pleaded with Congress for tougher laws on crack cocaine.
Black mayors did that. yet we’re made to believe it was white
congressmen who wanted to throw these black guys in jail.”
Clarke’s views on drugs—and, indeed, on almost everything—are at odds with those of the city’s leadership. “Right
now,” he explains, “my relationship with the city is acrimonious. We have a county executive who is very anti-police. he
has a disdain for the police.” For Tom Barrett, the longtime
mayor of the city, Clarke has only criticism. “Barrett’s been
there for eleven years—almost as long as I have. Milwaukee
has been a disaster under this guy. We have obscenely high
black unemployment.”
Pushing the brim of his hat up slightly, Clarke picks up a
piece of paper from his desk. “Let me read you something,” he
says, with a pained expression. “This is from this year’s stateof-the-city address”:
Milwaukee in 2015 is a city where opportunity is growing,
investments are increasing, and residents are tackling new endeavors. Milwaukee is strong, and this is a year to build on our
strengths.
“Does it look like that to you?” Clarke asks me.
I confess that I am an outsider, and that I do not know. he
motions toward his truck. “Let’s go take a look.”
I strap on a bulletproof vest, and we head into the Central
City—or, in less polite parlance, into “the ghetto.” At 3 o’clock
in the afternoon, the streets are mostly deserted, save for a few
shiftless people who look up from the sidewalk only to gauge
the interest of the marked police car that is following our truck.
In an hour and a half, I do not see a single white face.
Almost half of the homes in the Central City have been
boarded up completely. Others have been stripped of their tiles,
their doorknobs, and their sheet metal. Once-pristine backyards have become vast dumpsters, into which the locals have
deposited trash, broken furniture, busted tires, ripped mattresses,
and, in some cases, worn-out cars. It is impossible to travel
more than three blocks in any direction without seeing a
makeshift memorial to the murdered, wrapped inexpertly
around a tree trunk.
Occasionally, we see a pristine house whose owners are
holding out against the decay. how long they will last is anybody’s guess. In 1960, Milwaukee had 741,000 residents. Today, it has just 600,000.
“Milwaukee has the fourth-highest homicide rate per
100,000 people in the United States,” Clarke tells me. In fact,
“20 kids under 16 were murdered here last year.” I presume
that this means that they were caught in the crossfire. “No,”
Clarke tells me. “They were the targets. These people are
trapped.”
A couple of miles away, in the Northpoint neighborhood on
the edge of Lake Michigan, children fly kites and laugh happily
by the water. At the top of the hill, perfectly groomed Victorian
houses stand proudly. An American flag flies in the distance.
“There was a shooting down here,” Sheriff Clarke tells me.
“People were coming in from nearby and causing problems. So
we beefed up the police presence and fixed it.
“They called me a racist.”
John Doe’s
Tyranny
Wisconsin conservatives have been subjected
to secretive, baseless investigations
BY DAVID FRENCH
came with a battering ram.”
Cindy Archer, one of the lead architects of
Wisconsin’s Act 10—also called the “Wis consin Budget Repair Bill,” it limited publicemployee benefits and altered collective-bargaining
rules for public-employee unions—was jolted awake by
yelling, loud pounding at the door, and her dogs’ frantic
barking. The entire house—the windows and walls—
was shaking.
She looked outside to see up to a dozen police, yelling to
open the door. They were carrying a battering ram.
She wasn’t dressed, but she started to run toward the door,
her body in full view of the police. Some yelled at her to grab
some clothes, others yelled for her to open the door.
“I was so afraid,” she says. “I did not know what to do.”
She grabbed some clothes, opened the door, and dressed
right in front of the police. The dogs were still frantic.
“I begged and begged, ‘Please don’t shoot my dogs, please
don’t shoot my dogs, just don’t shoot my dogs.’ I couldn’t
get them to stop barking, and I couldn’t get them outside
quick enough. I saw a gun and barking dogs. I was scared
and knew this was a bad mix.”
She got the dogs safely out of the house, just as multiple
armed agents rushed inside. Some even barged into the bathroom, where her partner was in the shower. The officer or
agent in charge demanded that Cindy sit on the couch, but
she wanted to get up and get a cup of coffee.
“I told him this was my house and I could do what I wanted.”
Wrong thing to say. “This made the agent in charge furious.
he towered over me with his finger in my face and yelled
like a drill sergeant that I either do it his way or he would
handcuff me.”
They wouldn’t let her speak to a lawyer. She looked outside and saw a person who appeared to be a reporter.
Someone had tipped him off.
The neighbors started to come outside, curious at the commotion, and all the while the police searched her house,
making a mess, and—according to Cindy—leaving her
“dead mother’s belongings strewn across the basement floor
in a most disrespectful way.”
Then they left, carrying with them only a cell phone and
a laptop.
‘T
hey
Mr. French is an attorney, a writer, and a veteran of the Iraq War.
29
‘I
T’S
a matter of life or death.”
That was the first thought of “Anne” (not her real
name). Someone was pounding at her front door. It
was early in the morning—very early—and it was the kind of
heavy pounding that meant someone was either fleeing
from—or bringing—trouble.
“It was so hard. I’d never heard anything like it. I thought
someone was dying outside.”
She ran to the door, opened it, and then chaos. “People came
pouring in. For a second I thought it was a home invasion. It
was terrifying. They were yelling and running, into every
room in the house. one of the men was in my face, yelling at
me over and over and over.”
It was indeed a home invasion, but the people who were
pouring in were Wisconsin law-enforcement officers. Armed,
uniformed police swarmed into the house. Plainclothes investigators cornered her and her newly awakened family. Soon,
state officials were seizing the family’s personal property,
including each person’s computer and smartphone, filled with
the most intimate family information.
Why were the police at Anne’s home? She had no answers.
The police were treating them the way they’d seen police treat
drug dealers on television.
In fact, TV or movies were their only points of reference,
because they weren’t criminals. They were law-abiding. They
didn’t buy or sell drugs. They weren’t violent. They weren’t a
danger to anyone. Yet there were cops—surrounding their
house on the outside, swarming the house on the inside. They
even taunted the family as if they were mere “perps.”
As if the home invasion, the appropriation of private property, and the verbal abuse weren’t enough, next came ominous
warnings.
Don’t call your lawyer.
Don’t tell anyone about this raid. Not even your mother,
your father, or your closest friends.
The entire neighborhood could see the police around their
house, but they had to remain silent. This was not the “right to
remain silent” as uttered by every cop on every legal drama on
television—the right against self-incrimination. They couldn’t
mount a public defense if they wanted—or even offer an
explanation to family and friends.
Yet no one in this family was a “perp.” Instead, like Cindy,
they were American citizens guilty of nothing more than exercising their First Amendment rights to support Act 10 and
other conservative causes in Wisconsin. Sitting there shocked
and terrified, this citizen—who is still too intimidated to
speak on the record—kept thinking, “Is this America?”
‘T
followed me to my kids’ rooms.”
For the family of “rachel” (not her real name),
the ordeal began before dawn—with the same
loud, insistent knocking. Still in her pajamas, rachel
answered the door and saw uniformed police, poised to enter
her home.
When rachel asked to wake her children herself, the officer
insisted on walking into their rooms. The kids woke to an
armed officer, standing near their beds.
The entire family was herded into one room, and there they
watched as the police carried off their personal possessions,
30
HEY
|
including items that had nothing to do with the subject of the
search warrant—even her daughter’s computer.
And, yes, there were the warnings. Don’t call your lawyer.
Don’t talk to anyone about this. Don’t tell your friends. The
kids watched—alarmed—as the school bus drove by, with the
students inside watching the spectacle of uniformed police
surrounding the house, carrying out the family’s belongings.
Yet they were told they couldn’t tell anyone at school.
They, too, had to remain silent.
The mom watched as her entire life was laid open before the
police. Her professional files, her personal files, everything.
She knew this was all politics. She knew a rogue prosecutor
was targeting her for her political beliefs.
And she realized, “Every aspect of my life is in their hands.
And they hate me.”
Fortunately for her family, the police didn’t taunt her or her
children. Some of them seemed embarrassed by what they
were doing. At the end of the ordeal, one officer looked at the
family, still confined to one room, and said, “Some days, I
hate my job.”
F
or dozens of conservatives, the years since Scott
Walker’s first election as governor of Wisconsin transformed the state—known for pro-football championships, good cheese, and a population with a reputation for
being unfailingly polite—into a place where conservatives
have faced early-morning raids, multi-year secretive criminal
investigations, slanderous and selective leaks to sympathetic
media, and intrusive electronic snooping.
Yes, Wisconsin, the cradle of the progressive movement
and home of the “Wisconsin idea”—the marriage of state
governments and state universities to govern through technocratic reform—was giving birth to a new progressive idea,
the use of law enforcement as a political instrument, as a
weapon to attempt to undo election results, shame opponents,
and ruin lives.
Most Americans have never heard of these raids, or of the
lengthy criminal investigations of Wisconsin conservatives.
For good reason. Bound by comprehensive secrecy orders,
conservatives were left to suffer in silence as leaks ruined
their reputations, as neighbors, looking through windows and
dismayed at the massive police presence, the lights shining
down on targets’ homes, wondered, no doubt, What on earth
did that family do?
This was the on-the-ground reality of the so-called John
Doe investigations, expansive and secret criminal proceedings that directly targeted Wisconsin residents because of
their relationship to Scott Walker, their support for Act 10, and
their advocacy of conservative reform.
Largely hidden from the public eye, this traumatic process,
however, is now heading toward a legal climax, with two key
rulings expected in the late spring or early summer. The first
ruling, from the Wisconsin supreme court, could halt the
investigations for good, in part by declaring that the “misconduct” being investigated isn’t misconduct at all but the simple
exercise of First Amendment rights.
The second ruling, from the United States Supreme Court,
could grant review on a federal lawsuit brought by Wisconsin
political activist Eric o’Keefe and the Wisconsin Club for
M AY 4, 2015
ROMAN GENN
Growth, the first conservatives
to challenge the investigations
head-on. If the Court grants review, it could not only halt the
investigations but also begin the
process of holding accountable
those public officials who have
so abused their powers.
But no matter the outcome of
these court hearings, the damage
has been done. In the words of
Mr. O’Keefe, “The process is
the punishment.”
It all began innocently enough.
In 2009, officials from the office
of the Milwaukee County executive contacted the office of the
Milwaukee district attorney,
headed by John Chisholm, to
investigate the disappearance of
$11,242.24 from the Milwaukee
chapter of the Order of the
Purple Heart. The matter was
routine, with witnesses willing
and able to testify against the
principal suspect, a man named
Kevin Kavanaugh.
What followed, however, was
anything but routine. Chisholm
failed to act promptly on the report, and when he did act, he
refused to conduct a conventional criminal investigation but
instead petitioned, in May 2010, to open a “John Doe” investigation, a proceeding under Wisconsin law that permits
Wisconsin officials to conduct extensive investigations while
keeping the target’s identity secret (hence the designation
“John Doe”).
John Doe investigations alter typical criminal procedure in
two important ways: First, they remove grand juries from the
investigative process, replacing the ordinary citizens of a
grand jury with a supervising judge. Second, they can include
strict secrecy requirements not just on the prosecution but
also on the targets of the investigation. In practice, this means
that, while the prosecution cannot make public comments
about the investigation, it can take public actions indicating
criminal suspicion (such as raiding businesses and homes in
full view of the community) while preventing the targets of
the raids from defending against or even discussing the prosecution’s claims.
Why would Chisholm seek such broad powers to investigate a year-old embezzlement claim with a known suspect?
Because the Milwaukee County executive, Scott Walker, had
by that time become the leading Republican candidate for
governor. District Attorney Chisholm was a Democrat, a very
partisan Democrat.
Almost immediately after opening the John Doe investigation, Chisholm used his expansive powers to embarrass
Walker, raiding his county-executive offices within a
week. As Mr. O’Keefe and the Wisconsin Club for Growth
explained in court filings, the investigation then dramatically expanded:
Over the next few months, [Chisholm’s] investigation of allthings-Walker expanded to include everything from alleged
campaign-finance violations to sexual misconduct to alleged
public contracting bid-rigging to alleged misuse of county time
and property. Between May 5, 2010, and May 3, 2012, the
Milwaukee Defendants filed at least eighteen petitions to formally “[e]nlarge” the scope of the John Doe investigation, and
each was granted. . . . That amounts to a new formal inquiry
every five and a half weeks, on average, for two years.
This expansion coincided with one of the more remarkable
state-level political controversies in modern American history
—the protest (and passage) of Act 10, followed by the
attempted recall of a number of Wisconsin legislators and,
ultimately, Governor Walker.
Political observers will no doubt remember the events in
Madison—the state capitol overrun by chanting protesters,
Democratic lawmakers fleeing the state to prevent votes on
the legislation, and tens of millions of dollars of outside
money flowing into the state as Wisconsin became, fundamentally, a proxy fight pitting the union-led Left against the
Tea Party–led economic Right.
At the same time that the public protests were raging, so
were private—but important—protests in the Chisholm home
and workplace. As a former prosecutor told journalist Stuart
Taylor, Chisholm’s wife was a teachers’-union shop steward
who was distraught over Act 10’s union reforms. He said
Chisholm “felt it was his personal duty” to stop them.
Meanwhile, according to this whistleblower, the district
attorney’s offices were festooned with the “blue fist” poster of
the labor-union movement, indicating that Chisholm’s
employees were very much invested in the political fight.
31
I
the end, the John Doe proceeding failed in its ultimate
aims. It secured convictions for embezzlement (related to
the original 2009 complaint), a conviction for sexual misconduct, and a few convictions for minor campaign violations,
but Governor Walker was untouched, his reforms were implemented, and he survived his recall election.
But with another election looming—this time Walker’s campaign for reelection—Chisholm wasn’t finished. He launched
yet another John Doe investigation, “supervised” by Judge
Barbara Kluka. Kluka proved to be capable of superhuman efficiency—approving “every petition, subpoena, and search warrant in the case” in a total of one day’s work.
If the first series of John Doe investigations was “everything
Walker,” the second series was “everything conservative,” as
Chisholm had launched an investigation of not only Walker
(again) but the Wisconsin Club for Growth and dozens of other
conservative organizations, this time fishing for evidence of
allegedly illegal “coordination” between conservative groups
and the Walker campaign.
In the second John Doe, Chisholm had no real evidence of
wrongdoing. Yes, conservative groups were active in issue advocacy, but issue advocacy was protected by the First Amendment
and did not violate relevant campaign laws. Nonetheless,
Chisholm convinced prosecutors in four other counties to launch
their own John Does, with Judge Kluka overseeing all of them.
Empowered by a rubber-stamp judge, partisan investigators
ran amok. They subpoenaed and obtained (without the conservative targets’ knowledge) massive amounts of electronic data,
including virtually all the targets’ personal e-mails and other
electronic messages from outside e-mail vendors and communications companies.
The investigations exploded into the open with a coordinated series of raids on October 3, 2013. These were home invasions, including those described above. Chisholm’s office
refused to comment on the raid tactics (or any other aspect of
the John Doe investigations), but witness accounts regarding
the two John Doe investigations are remarkably similar:
early-morning intrusions, police rushing through the house,
and stern commands to remain silent and tell no one about
what had occurred.
At the same time, the Wisconsin Club for Growth and other
conservative organizations received broad subpoenas requiring
them to turn over virtually all business records, including “donor
information, correspondence with their associates, and all financial information.” The subpoenas also contained dire warnings
about disclosure of their existence, threatening contempt of
court if the targets spoke publicly.
For select conservative families across five counties, this was
the terrifying moment—the moment they felt at the mercy of a
truly malevolent state.
N
S
both on and off the record, targets reflected on
how many layers of Wisconsin government failed their
fundamental constitutional duties—the prosecutors who
launched the rogue investigations, the judge who gave the
abuse judicial sanction, investigators who chose to taunt and
intimidate during the raids, and those police who ultimately
approved and executed aggressive search tactics on lawabiding, peaceful citizens.
32
pEAKING
|
For some of the families, the trauma of the raids, combined
with the stress and anxiety of lengthy criminal investigations,
has led to serious emotional repercussions. “Devastating” is how
Anne describes the impact on her family. “Life-changing,” she
says. “All in terrible ways.”
O’Keefe, who has been in contact with multiple targeted families, says, “Every family I know of that endured a home raid has
been shaken to its core, and the fate of marriages and families
still hangs in the balance in some cases.”
Anne also describes a new fear of the police: “I used to support the police, to believe they were here to protect us. Now,
when I see an officer, I’ll cross the street. I’m afraid of them. I
know what they’re capable of.”
Cindy says, “I lock my doors and I close my shades. I don’t
answer the door unless I am expecting someone. My heart races
when I see a police car sitting in front of my house or following
me in the car. The raid was so public. I’ve been harassed. My
house has been vandalized. [She did not identify suspects.] I no
longer feel safe, and I don’t think I ever will.”
Rachel talks about the effect on her children. “I tried to create
a home where the kids always feel safe. Now they know they’re
not. They know men with guns can come in their house, and
there’s nothing we can do.” Every knock on the door brings
anxiety. Every call to the house is screened. In the back of her
mind is a single, unsettling thought:
These people will never stop.
Victims of trauma—and every person I spoke with described
the armed raids as traumatic—often need to talk, to share their
experiences and seek solace in the company of a loving family
and supportive friends. The investigators denied them that privilege, and it compounded their pain and fear.
The investigation not only damaged families, it also shut
down their free speech. In many cases, the investigations halted
conservative groups in their tracks. O’Keefe and the Wisconsin
Club for Growth described the effect in court filings:
O’Keefe’s associates began cancelling meetings with him and
declining to take his calls, reasonably fearful that merely
associating with him could make them targets of the investigation. O’Keefe was forced to abandon fundraising for the
Club because he could no longer guarantee to donors that
their identities would remain confidential, could not (due to
the Secrecy Order) explain to potential donors the nature of
the investigation, could not assuage donors’ fears that they
might become targets themselves, and could not assure
donors that their money would go to fund advocacy rather
than legal expenses. The Club was also paralyzed. Its officials
could not associate with its key supporters, and its funds were
depleted. It could not engage in issue advocacy for fear of
criminal sanction.
These raids and subpoenas were often based not on traditional
notions of probable cause but on mere suspicion, untethered to
the law or evidence, and potentially violating the Fourth
Amendment’s prohibition against “unreasonable searches and
seizures.” The very existence of First Amendment–protected
expression was deemed to be evidence of illegality. The prosecution simply assumed that the conservatives were incapable of
operating within the bounds of the law.
Even worse, many of the investigators’ legal theories, even if
proven by the evidence, would not have supported criminal
M AY 4, 2015
prosecutions. In other words, they were investigating “crimes”
that weren’t crimes at all.
If the prosecutors had applied the same legal standards to the
Democrats in their own offices, they would have been forced to
turn the raids on themselves. If the prosecutors and investigators
had been raided, how many of their computers and smartphones
would have contained incriminating information indicating use
of government resources for partisan purposes?
With the investigations now bursting out into the open, some
conservatives began to fight back. O’Keefe and the Wisconsin
Club for Growth moved to quash the John Doe subpoenas aimed
at them. In a surprise move, Judge Kluka, who had presided over
the Doe investigations for more than a year, recused herself from
the case. (A political journal, the Wisconsin Reporter, attempted
to speak to Judge Kluka about her recusal, but she refused to
offer comment.)
A
so, almost five years after their secret beginning, the
John Doe proceedings are nearly dead—on “life support,” according to one Wisconsin pundit—but incalculable damage has been done, to families, to activist organizations,
to the First Amendment, and to the rule of law itself.
In international law, the Western world has become familiar
with a concept called “lawfare,” a process whereby rogue
regimes or organizations abuse legal doctrines and processes to
accomplish through sheer harassment and attrition what can’t
be accomplished through legitimate diplomatic means. The
Palestinian Authority and its defenders have become adept at
lawfare, putting Israel under increasing pressure before the
U.n. and other international bodies.
The John Doe investigations are a form of domestic lawfare,
and our constitutional system is ill equipped to handle it.
Federal courts rarely intervene in state judicial proceedings,
nD
The John Doe investigations are a form of domestic
lawfare, and our constitutional system is ill equipped to
handle it.
The new judge in the case, Gregory Peterson, promptly sided
with O’Keefe and blocked multiple subpoenas, holding (in a
sealed opinion obtained by the Wall Street Journal, which has
done invaluable work covering the John Doe investigations) that
they “do not show probable cause that the moving parties committed any violations of the campaign finance laws.” The judge
noted that “the State is not claiming that any of the independent
organizations expressly advocated” Walker’s election.
O’Keefe and the Wisconsin Club for Growth followed up
Judge Peterson’s ruling by filing a federal lawsuit against
Chisholm and a number of additional defendants, alleging
multiple constitutional violations, including a claim that the
investigation constituted unlawful retaliation against the plaintiffs for the exercise of their First Amendment rights. United
States District Court judge Rudolph Randa promptly granted
the plaintiffs’ motion for a preliminary injunction, declaring
that “the Defendants must cease all activities related to the
investigation, return all property seized in the investigation
from any individual or organization, and permanently destroy
all copies of information and other materials obtained through
the investigation.”
From that point forward, the case proceeded on parallel state
and federal tracks. At the federal level, the Seventh Circuit
Court of Appeals reversed Judge Randa’s order. Declining to
consider the case on the merits, the appeals court found the lawsuit barred by the federal Anti-Injunction Act, which prohibits
federal courts from issuing injunctions against some state-court
proceedings. O’Keefe and the Wisconsin Club for Growth have
petitioned the Supreme Court for a writ of certiorari and expect
a ruling in a matter of weeks.
At the same time, the John Doe prosecutors took their case
to the Wisconsin Court of Appeals to attempt to restart the
Doe proceedings. The case was ultimately consolidated
before the state supreme court, with a ruling also expected in
a matter of weeks.
state officials rarely lose their array of official immunities for
the consequences of their misconduct, and violations of First
Amendment freedoms rarely result in meaningful monetary
damages for the victims.
As Scott Walker runs for president, the national media will
finally join the Wall Street Journal in covering John Doe. Given
the mainstream media’s typical bias and bad faith, they are likely
to bring a fresh round of pain to the targets of the investigation;
the cloud of suspicion will descend once again; even potential
favorable court rulings by either the state supreme court or the
U.S. Supreme Court will be blamed on “conservative justices”
taking care of their own.
Conservatives have looked at Wisconsin as a success story,
where Walker took everything the Left threw at him and
emerged victorious in three general elections. He broke the
power of the teachers’ unions and absorbed millions upon millions of dollars of negative ads. The Left kept chanting, “This is
what democracy looks like,” and in Wisconsin, democracy
looked like Scott Walker winning again and again.
Yet in a deeper way, Wisconsin is anything but a success.
There were casualties left on the battlefield—innocent citizens
victimized by a lawless government mob, public officials who
brought the full power of their office down onto the innocent.
Governors come and go. Statutes are passed and repealed.
Laws and elections are important, to be sure, but the rule of law
is more important still. And in Wisconsin, the rule of law hangs
in the balance—along with the liberty of citizens.
As I finished an interview with one victim still living in fear,
still shattered by the experience of nearly losing everything
simply because she supported the wrong candidate at the wrong
time, I asked whether she had any final thoughts. “Just one,”
she replied. “I’m hoping for accountability, that someone will
be held responsible so that they’ll never do this again.” She
paused for a moment and then, with voice trembling, said: “no
one should ever endure what my family endured.”
33
Fear Not
The Robot
Automation will continue to
raise our quality of life
BY DANNY CRICHTON
few years, we experience a wave of concern
over the rise of robots and its effect on jobs. automation, we hear, will rid the economy of human labor,
replacing the inefficient flesh-and-blood employee
with amazingly powerful computers. Yet the robot takeover has
so far not occurred—human workers seem to be surviving and
even thriving alongside all the machines.
another one of these surges of concern is upon us, fueled by
books such as Tyler Cowen’s Average Is Over and Martin
Ford’s Rise of the Robots, as well as a spate of articles arguing
that this time, the computer revolution really is different. and
when we wade through the headlines, this time actually does
look different.
Google’s autonomous car has already traveled nearly a million miles on California and nevada roads. Elon Musk, the
founder of the electric-car company Tesla Motors, recently
predicted that autonomous cars could enter the market as soon
as this year, potentially wiping out the taxi and trucking industries in one fell swoop.
Robots are getting better not only at understanding road conditions but also at “reading” their human operators. IBM’s computer system Watson, which famously defeated its human
opponents in the television game show Jeopardy, has continued
to rapidly improve and is now answering complex queries about
such subjects as medicine. apple’s siri voice interface for the
iPhone has also improved. silicon valley seems close to building
a starship Enterprise–like voice-based computer, threatening
hundreds of thousands of jobs in customer-support call centers.
added to the usual worries about computers’ replacing
workers is a new concern: Who will own these robots? Will a
small stratum of people (capitalists, of course) control them
and extract exorbitant rents from the rest of us? If you thought
inequality was a problem before, the critics warn, wait until
you see what happens next.
Technological change always brings out these negative
voices, because we don’t have answers for many important
questions. We don’t know where new jobs are going to come
from or even whether there will be work to do at all in 50
years. Yet in light of the history of technological innovation,
such fears are unfounded.
Far from exclusively benefiting elites, automation has
allowed people of modest means to buy products that were
E
vERY
Mr. Crichton is a doctoral student at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of
Government, where he researches labor economics.
34
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once luxury items available only to the most deep-pocketed
consumers. Robotics have caused tremendous social change
and will probably continue to do so, but their long-term
effect may well be to decrease inequality rather than
increase it. Indeed, robotics and automation have perhaps
done more to improve quality of life than has any other economic force in history. We need to keep this in mind as we
assess the massive, world-changing potential of the next
round of technical innovations.
T
to Star Wars, many of us have images of robots
as humanoid figures walking around the desert, but the
reality is that robots are often built into the products we
use every day. Consider the keurig coffeemaker. We place a
special cup in the machine, hit a button, and the built-in computer handles the rest, leaving us a steaming hot cup of coffee,
with minimal human involvement in the brewing process. The
device has become a mainstay in office break rooms, and
keurig has sold millions of units around the world. Yet baristas
haven’t disappeared from the work force. Despite the popularity
of automated coffee machines, starbucks continues to increase
its earnings and expand to new locations, with about 1,500 new
stores opening just last year.
We often think of robotics as a zero-sum economic game
in which humans and machines are locked in a tug-of-war.
The keurig coffeemaker shows that the zero-sum calculus
can be flat wrong. similarly, accountants did not disappear
after the arrival of Excel and QuickBooks; in fact, accounting majors have been some of the most in-demand college
graduates in recent years.
home appliances are particularly good examples of how
automation increases convenience, since they are among the
most common robots we use daily. Cooking is simplified by
microwaves that have all kinds of automation built in, such as
buttons that heat our food to the perfect temperature. Cleaning
our homes takes less and less effort as well, with devices such as
iRobot’s Roomba, which can automatically sweep the floors.
Perhaps no robots have had a greater effect on quality of life
than the washing machine and the dishwasher. In the mid 20th
century, when women no longer had to do laundry or wash
dishes by hand, they suddenly had considerably more time for
themselves. The devices saved hundreds of millions of hours
of household labor per year. some scholars argue that the laundry
machine did more to increase female participation in the economy than any other change in the last century.
While many of these conveniences began as luxury goods,
history shows us that automation tends to permeate the economy
quickly. Yesterday’s computers cost millions of dollars and
took up whole floors of office buildings, and printers cost tens
of thousands of dollars. Today, we can carry a supercomputer
in our pocket and purchase a desktop printer for less than a
hundred dollars.
Those who fear that robotics will increase inequality overlook the great consumer demand for these products, and the
supply-and-demand interplay and competition that force prices
ever downward. Based on its autonomous-driving technology,
Google could become a monopoly that owns all cars, but it’s
more likely that all car manufacturers will incorporate this
technology into their models.
hanks
M AY 4, 2015
There is little reason to think that this trend of democratization will stop, and it may even be accelerating. Soon 3-D printers will allow us to “print” millions of different objects, from
mugs to the coasters they sit on. Such printers cost thousands
of dollars today, but their prices have fallen dramatically over
the past few years, and they will probably be in wide use by the
end of the decade. Further, 3-D printers will probably increase
the pace of innovation across many fields, as they make it
cheaper to quickly make product prototypes and sell early
models, allowing more inventors to get in the game and make
their work available to the public.
When technology allows consumers to produce averagequality goods at home, companies must offer higher-quality
products to compete. The greeting-card industry, for instance,
faced extinction with the advent of desktop printing, but it
started producing specialized designs that home printers cannot (yet) match. The market expanded to encompass a greater
range of consumer tastes.
To be fair, patents and other intellectual-property protections
ensure that the inventors of technologies are well rewarded for
their efforts. hewlett-Packard has made millions off its printer
ink, much as Keurig and Whirlpool have made millions off
their products. But economies of scale are no more likely to
drive out competition tomorrow than they are today.
B
also at risk. The rules of the market affect everyone. Investors
have poured millions of dollars, for instance, into computer
startups targeting the legal industry, because lawyers read
boilerplate contracts at hours billable well into the triple digits.
Creative destruction is as old as history, but the pace today
is accelerating, with millions of workers potentially affected
by automation in a matter of years instead of decades.
Professions created just a few decades ago are now being
eliminated, and entire job categories can rise and fall within a
single generation.
There are no simple solutions. Increased efficiency rewards
all of us with lower prices for higher-quality goods and services, but certain groups of workers could suffer deep losses.
It’s possible that education itself will become more automated, which would allow more workers to take classes and
improve their skills to compete in the marketplace. Englishteaching robots already exist in Japan and South Korea, and
more subjects may soon be offered by such automated programs. Workers must constantly improve their productivity to
increase their value. This is fundamentally good for the economy,
because it means that the average hourly value of a human
worker is increasing over time.
We are all going to have to improve our skills to be competitive in this economy, but this transition shouldn’t distract us
from the economic bounty that awaits on the other side of the
revolution in robotics.
uT we shouldn’t tout the benefits to the individual con-
sumer of all these conveniences without taking a wider
look at automation and its overall effect on the economy.
Greater efficiency through robots allows us to produce more in
less time, but these changes can force some workers to change
their occupations.
The most important factor in improving quality of life is productivity growth. Productivity is simply the quantity of goods
and services we can produce given limited resources, particularly our time.
If we want to improve our standard of living, there are only
two options available. One way is to increase our work hours
and thus the amount that we produce. But human productivity
rarely grows linearly in proportion to hours worked, nor do we
necessarily want to spend more time at work. The other option
is to increase productivity per hour. We do this when we
expand access to education and job training, increasing the
productivity of individual workers. We do this also by enhancing human industry through the use of tools, which includes
automation and robotics. When we use a microwave to produce
a meal in five minutes rather than an hour, we have increased
our food-preparation productivity more than tenfold. Multiply
such improvements across all devices throughout the economy,
and the massive efficiency gains we’ve made in the last hundred years look unsurprising.
Automation in the economy doesn’t strike randomly; it takes
hold when market forces determine that physical capital (a
robot) is cheaper than human capital (a worker). America’s
entire manufacturing sector used to be heavily dependent on
human labor, but today’s highly efficient factories produce
more goods than ever before while employing far fewer people, because of robotics.
It’s not only a line worker in a factory or a burger flipper who
might be replaced by a robot. Many white-collar workers are
W
the issue of employment garners the most
attention from commentators, robotics’ socially
transformative effects deserve our scrutiny as well.
Perhaps no technology has more potential to improve our
quality of life than the autonomous car. We will be able to
relax during our commutes, reducing our stress and improving our health. Autonomous cars could almost instantaneously
deliver a greater number of goods and services, such as
meals, household supplies, and home-maintenance services,
giving us more leisure time. Perhaps most significant, many
fewer accidents would be caused by drunk driving or distraction while driving.
If autonomous cars become popular, we could greatly reduce
the land space devoted to roads and parking. City governments
could dedicate vast tracts of land to a variety of new uses, such
as parks or housing.
Finally, and perhaps most futuristically, we will have to
adapt to having more robots in nearly all aspects of our daily
life. Siri and Watson are just the first steps toward fully personalized digital assistants, and future generations of these
sorts of products will lead to all kinds of new social interactions and situations, affecting human relationships in ways we
can’t yet predict.
There is no question that our economy will undergo vast
changes in the next few years. Critics are right to warn that
many jobs will be made redundant, and that automation might
increase inequality, at least in the short term. But we’ve survived—and thrived—through waves of automation for centuries, and the productivity gains show that we should be
championing these improvements, not hoping they stop soon.
The best has been, and always will be, just around the corner.
let R2-D2 show the way.
hIlE
35
Drydock
Time
Aircraft carriers belong to
the fleet of yesteryear
BY JERRY HENDRIX
bATTLE of the hawks is raging on Capitol Hill.
Defense hawks say the nation’s security will be
endangered if the caps imposed under the 2011
budget Control Act aren’t lifted, allowing for more
defense spending. Fiscal hawks assert with equal vehemence
that the nation’s long-term economic health—the foundation
for all government activities, including defense—will be permanently harmed if burgeoning deficits and debts are not
addressed. Defense hawks argue for a massive investment to
maintain the United States’ position as the world’s strongest
power. Fiscal hawks argue for innovative improvements in
efficiency to sustain U.S. leadership.
This argument as it regards the U.S. Navy is taking place
with special vigor. The budget will have serious consequences
for the size of the fleet and its ability to maintain combat
readiness, which in turn will have consequences for U.S.
strategy. If the Navy wants to address its budget crisis, its
falling ship count, its atrophying strategic position, and the
problem of its now-marginal combat effectiveness—and
reassert its traditional dominance of the seas—it should
embrace technological innovation and increase its efficiency.
In short: It needs to stop building aircraft carriers.
This might seem like a radical change. After all, the aircraft
carrier has been the dominant naval platform and the center of
the Navy’s force structure for the past 70 years—an era
marked by unprecedented peace on the oceans. In the past
generation, aircraft have flown thousands of sorties from the
decks of American carriers in support of the nation’s wars.
For the first 54 days of the current round of airstrikes against
ISIS in Iraq, the USS George H. W. Bush was the sole source
of air power. but the economic, technological, and strategic
developments of recent years indicate that the day of the carrier is over and, in fact, might have already passed a generation ago—a fact that has been obscured by the preponderance
of U.S. power on the seas.
The carrier has been operating in low-threat, permissive
environments almost continuously since World War II. At no
time since 1946 has a carrier had to fend off attacks by enemy
aircraft, surface ships, or submarines. No carrier has had to
establish a sanctuary for operations and then defend it. More
often than not, carriers have recently found themselves oper-
A
Mr. Hendrix, a retired Navy captain, is a senior fellow at the Center for a
New American Security and the director of its Defense Strategies and
Assessments Program.
36
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ating unmolested closer to enemy shores than previous Cold
War–era doctrine permitted, secure in the knowledge that the
chance of an attack ranged between unlikely and impossible.
Such confidence in the dominance of the carrier encouraged naval architects to put more capabilities into their
design, going from the 30,000-ton Essex-class carrier in 1942
to the 94,000-ton Nimitz-class carrier in 1975. Crew size of
a typical carrier went from 3,000 to 5,200 over the same period,
a 73 percent increase. Costs similarly burgeoned, from $1.1
billion for the Essex to $5 billion for the Nimitz (all in adjusted
2014 dollars), owing to the increased technical complexity
and sheer physical growth of the platforms in order to host
the larger aircraft that operated at longer ranges during the
Cold War. The lessons of World War II, in which several
large fleet carriers were lost or badly damaged, convinced
Navy leaders to pursue a goal of a 100,000-ton carrier that
could support a 100,000-pound aircraft capable of carrying
larger bomb payloads, including nuclear weapons, 2,000
miles or more to hit strategic targets, making the platform
larger, more expensive, and manned with more of the Navy’s
most valuable assets, its people. Today’s new class of carrier,
the Ford, which will be placed into commission next year,
displaces 100,000 tons of water, and has a crew of 4,800 and
a price of $14 billion. The great cost of the Cold War–era
“super-carriers” has resulted in a reduction of the carrier
force, from over 30 fleet carriers in World War II to just ten
carriers today. While the carrier of today is more capable,
each of the ten can be in only one place at a time, limiting the
Navy’s range of effectiveness.
This points to the first reason the U.S. should stop building
carriers: They are too valuable to lose. At $14 billion apiece,
one of them can cost the equivalent of nearly an entire year’s
shipbuilding budget. (Carriers are in fact funded and built
over a five-year period.) And the cost of losing a carrier
would not be only monetary. Each carrier holds the population of a small town. Americans are willing to risk their lives
for important reasons, but they have also become increasingly
averse to casualties. Losing a platform with nearly 5,000
American souls onboard would not just raise an outcry, but
would undermine public faith in elected officials—and the
officials know it. It would take an existential threat to the
homeland to convince leaders to introduce carriers into a
high-threat environment.
Yet any hesitance to do so would create a cascading failure. Carriers are the central cogs in the U.S. war-fighting
machine. They don’t just launch planes for air strikes: They
also provide airborne command and control, host the staffs
of strike-group and fleet-commanding admirals, and provide
underway refueling and resupply of other ships in their
strike group. In addition, they house much of the fleet’s ordnance in their cavernous magazines. If they were removed
from the arena as a result of a political decision not to risk
their damage or loss, current plans to defend U.S. interests
would collapse.
For this reason, the modern carrier violates a core principle
of war: Never introduce an element that you cannot afford to
lose. There can be no indispensable person or platform in
war, for as soon as that element is identified, the enemy will
risk everything to destroy it, and in that moment a war can be
lost. The carrier has done well in the benign environments of
M AY 4, 2015
WWW.DISENO-ART.COM/NEWS_CONTENT/2014/10/DISSECTING-THE-USS-GERALD-R-FORD-CVN-78-AIRCRAFT-CARRIER/
The USS Gerald R. Ford, price: $14 billion
recent decades, but in the face of current rising threats, in
which U.S. credibility is on the line, there are serious questions about its continued worth.
In 1996, China found itself embroiled in a controversy with
a government in Taiwan that was intent on declaring its formal independence. To send a message, China conducted a
series of tests that involved firing missiles into the waters
around Taiwan and built up forces to conduct an amphibious
exercise in the Taiwan Strait. In response, President Bill
Clinton sent two aircraft-carrier strike groups to the strait.
China, chastened, embarrassed, and well aware of the United
States’ recent demonstration of its ability to project power at
will into Iraq and the former Yugoslavia from seaborne air
bases, set about developing a series of capabilities that could
credibly threaten American aircraft carriers and push them
back beyond the combat range of their aircraft. In the years
that followed, China developed long-range aircraft equipped
with anti-ship cruise missiles, submarines, surface ships with
long-range missiles, and land-based ballistic missiles capable
of knocking a carrier out of action. Today, any carrier operating within 1,000 miles of the Chinese coast knows that it can
be targeted at any moment. And the problem looks even more
serious when we consider that China has often exported military technologies to other nations willing to pay for them.
The United States, the center of technological innovation,
thus finds itself in the position of being out-innovated. To
counter emerging “anti-access/area denial” (A2AD) technologies that include ballistic and cruise missiles that can reach
ships over a thousand miles from shore, the U.S. Navy has
invested billions of dollars in anti-A2AD capabilities—such as
electronic-spectrum jamming, directed-energy weapons, electromagnetic rail guns, and ballistic-missile defenses—in a vain
attempt to defend the carrier. An objective outside observer can
easily identify who is imposing costs on whom in this competition. The same outside observer would also discern where the
difficulty with the carrier design lies.
T
he efficacy of the carrier lies not in the ship but in the
capabilities of its planes. Today, most of those planes are
F/A-18 hornets—a superb aircraft that has undergone
many improvements in its lifetime but remains limited by its
original light-attack-mission requirements.
In the past 14 years of combat operations, in which Navy aircraft have flown tens of thousands of sorties, we have learned a
number of things. First, nearly 80 percent of a hornet’s 9,000flight-hour lifetime is spent maintaining the flight qualifications
of its pilots.
Second, if we factor in the life-cycle costs of the aircraft—including the cost of buying it, maintaining it, fueling it,
and training its pilots—and then divide that cost by the number
of bombs dropped in combat, we arrive at an average cost per
bomb of nearly $8 million. This is seven times the cost of a
Tomahawk precision-strike cruise missile.
Third, the current average combat range of a carrier lightattack plane is only 500 miles. This means that, even steaming at
30 knots, the carrier would spend 15 hours under an A2AD threat
in order to carry its planes close enough to hit land targets. The
Navy has consistently opposed investing in the type of unmanned
long-range combat strike platforms that could renew its relevance, and today’s carrier planes do not have sufficient in-flight
refueling capacity to significantly extend the range of the attack
aircraft. Proposals to use large “big-wing” U.S. Air Force tankers
to extend the refueling capacity beyond what carriers can provide
ignore the fact that these aircraft will not be able to operate within the A2AD threat bubble unescorted by single-seat fighters,
whose pilots cannot remain physically effective throughout the
long 14-hour missions.
Recently, in apparent recognition of these strategic challenges,
Navy leaders and their supporters in industry and think tanks
have begun to advance the argument that, when dealing with
A2AD-capable powers, it is not necessary to project power
ashore: Rather, the Navy and its carriers should conduct a campaign to control the sea, slowly destroying their opponent’s navy
37
and interdicting its trade over time to eventually degrade its capabilities and roll back its defenses. This approach is very much in
line with what the U.S. Navy did in World War II, but it ignores
the overarching strategy the U.S. pursued in that war.
The Navy conducted a prolonged sea-control campaign to
destroy the Japanese navy, and thereby create space and support
for its Marine and Army brethren to capture islands. Navy construction battalions then built on those islands the airfields necessary to host the Army Air Forces’ long-range bombers, which
bombed the next island to be captured, and then the next, until the
bombers were within range of the Japanese home islands. At that
point a conventional bombing campaign was planned to weaken
Japanese industry, degrade living conditions, and destroy military power in advance of an all-out invasion. Only the dropping
of the atomic bombs halted this inexorable drive. The point of the
entire World War II Pacific campaign was not to gain sea control
infantry was overcome by the chariot, the chariot was overcome
by spears and arrows, spears and arrows were overcome by gunpowder and artillery, and so on. The United States has sat atop the
pinnacle of power alone for nearly three decades. It reached its
heights through investments in carriers, tanks, fighters, and
bombers. Today’s Navy looks remarkably like it has for the past
70 years, just smaller and more expensive. It is an evolutionary
force, not a revolutionary force, and it’s an easy target for rising
powers that seek to overtake it.
The nation’s sovereign citizens deserve better. They deserve an
innovative solution to the United States’ strategic problems.
Rather than attempting to find a war to fit the fleet it has, the Navy
should build a fleet to win the war it’s likely to fight. Rather than
dedicate such new technologies as directed energy, electromagnetic rail guns, and hypersonic propulsion systems to propping
up and defending a legacy platform, it should free these systems
Rather than attempting to find a war to fit the fleet it has, the
Navy should build a fleet to win the war it’s likely to fight.
and attrite Japanese naval forces, but rather to bring U.S. forces
within range of the Japanese capital in order to project power and
bring the war to an end.
Today, it appears, in an attempt to find a continued justification
of the aircraft carrier in war plans designed to deal with A2AD
capabilities, the Navy proposes to set aside the capacity for this
sort of power projection and its promise of a shorter and less
expensive war, and accept in its place a strategy based on a
drawn-out, expensive, and disruptive campaign of sea control
and economic blockade. This is a mistake. The Navy should
instead invest in upgrading the aircraft in the carrier’s air wing
with unmanned combat strike vehicles to increase their range, or
abandon the carrier as the centerpiece of naval warfare and buy
numerous additional guided-missile submarines, which can operate with impunity within the A2AD bubble and can each carry
150 long-range precision-strike cruise missiles. Instead the Navy
has chosen the strategically untenable position of resigning itself
to longer wars.
Some emphasize that the carrier serves other roles, such as providing overawing peacetime presence, diplomatic influence, and
unmatched humanitarian assistance and disaster response, and
they are correct. The carrier performs superbly in all these roles,
but the nation’s citizens don’t pay $14 billion for a ship to hand
out water, food, and blankets. They pay that much money, the
cost of 350 new public schools, to ensure that the Navy they
maintain can fight and win, decisively, the nation’s wars. The carrier, with its present air wing, can no longer do that.
I
many ways, the United States is repeating the historical
pattern of former great powers. Great powers typically rise
and rule on the back of a key technological breakthrough or
combination of breakthroughs. Once established, they tend to
invest in the status quo, continuing to refine their technological
edge. The philosophy comes down to the old adage “If it isn’t
broke, don’t fix it.” Such an approach, however, provides a fixed
target for other rising powers to focus on. In this manner the
38
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to find a place in a revolutionary new fleet that is marked by
lower costs and ruthless efficiency. This fleet should be constructed with a focus on swift, decisive victory through power
projection into the enemy’s decision centers in order to bring
about rapid change in that enemy’s policies.
Resources recouped from ceasing construction of a $14 billion carrier could be redirected to the construction of seven
missile-laden destroyers, or seven submarines, or 28 frigates,
or 100 joint high-speed vessels, or any combination thereof. It
is true that the size of the Navy has shrunk, with the result that
areas of critical national interest are no longer patrolled regularly; but it is also true that the size of the Navy has shrunk
because of decisions that the Navy itself has made. The size of
the Navy’s shipbuilding budget has remained nearly constant,
at $16 billion per year when adjusted for inflation, but when
the Navy elects to purchase more-expensive ships within a
stable budget, it is electing to buy fewer ships. That the ships
it chooses to purchase have become less combat-effective
over time only exacerbates the problem and raises serious
questions about judgment; and expecting Congress to correct
acquisition misjudgments through increased deficit spending
is irresponsible. The simple fact is that there is enough money
to purchase surface and sub-surface ships in sufficient numbers to complicate any A2AD strategy, thereby regaining the
strategic initiative and imposing costs on those who would
make themselves our enemies.
We dare not risk being the classic great power, satisfied with
the strategic status quo and oblivious to rising competitors. The
Japanese, with the destruction of the battleship fleet at Pearl
Harbor, left the U.S. no alternative but to invest in the carrier. We
dare not risk suffering such a lesson of imposed change again.
Carriers had their day, but that day ended perhaps a generation
ago, and we have been too busy to notice. Congressional leaders,
torn between the desire to cut the defense budget and the need to
strengthen the military, will find that it is possible to achieve both
objectives if they simply let go of old paradigms. It’s time to
move on and lead again.
M AY 4, 2015
lileks--READY:QXP-1127940387.qxp 4/14/2015 10:23 PM Page 39
Athwart
BY JAMES LILEKS
Rand’s Riposte
H
ILLARy is running for president, a turn of events
so shocking you could knock me over with a
feather or a dossier of her Senate accomplishments. expect the press to revive the “war on
women” plot by asking a male GoP rival whether he feels
he’s thwarting progress by opposing the first female prez.
If the candidate has any fortitude, he’ll say, “Really, this
nonsense again? Conservatives don’t have a problem with
women. We have a problem with leftists who won’t be happy
until wizened nuns are required by law to perform abortions,
that’s what.” So you hope. you fear he’ll say: “Well, the good
thing about a female commander-in-chief, we’d only have to
pay her 77 cents on the dollar.” If he said that before the
debate he might as well refer to her as Madam President for
the rest of the campaign.
The trouble-with-women meme reappeared in April
when Rand Paul was insufficiently respectful to a reporter.
He shushed her. She was talking and he shushed her. When
Rand Paul tells a female reporter to shush, people hear different things.
1. Liberals think he’s saying “y ou SHuT youR
WHoRe MouTH .”
2. Conservatives think he’s finally doing what candidates
need to do, which is treat the media like glossy-coated
jackals who lap up whatever half-digested opinions the
New York Times barfed up that morn. After all, this is how
the interviews usually go:
“Thank you for appearing on the show today. There’s been
some controversy over statements you’ve made in the last 35
years, and some say you’ve flip-flopped on some key issues,
like Iran, abortion, butter as a preferable spread to margarine,
Chinese trade, the latter Darren on Bewitched vs. the former,
and, perhaps most troublesome as far as women voters are
concerned, your opposition to a bill that would have reduced
federal penalties for increasing state penalties on local penalties with regard to the Healthy Baby Act of 1975, leading
many to wonder why you have chosen this time to oppose
healthy, cute, smiling babies whose open faces and wide
innocent smiles are almost a universal sign of hope.”
Most GoP candidates respond with the hideous grin of a car
salesman given 50,000 volts of electricity through a catheter,
then say, “Well, the issue isn’t healthy children, Susan; we’re
all for those, and I have three lovely ones myself. The issue is
what kind of future we leave them, and that’s why I’m about
to use words like ‘deficit’ and ‘opportunity,’ because they
focus-tested well with six Iowa farmers who showed up at the
diner wearing hats covered with campaign buttons.”
Annnnd he’s dead. Because people heard “flip-flop,”
which is bad; it implies someone doesn’t have any principles. (Note: Adherence to principles over the course of a
long career is regarded as “ideological inflexibility,” unless
the issue is abortion rights, taxation, the environment, pubMr. Lileks blogs at www.lileks.com.
lic schools, or corporate regulation, in which case one is a
“tireless champion.”) People heard “troublesome” and
“oppose” in close proximity, which is sad because politics
are so negative these days, with all the opposing. And what’s
this about vetoing Healthy Babies? The monster!
The Rand Paul approach derails the 40-car freight train
and shoots the engineer in the cab for good measure. It’s like
the Gingrich Method for dealing with loaded questions:
refuse to accept the premise and eviscerate the reporter with
acidic wit. Watching Newt work with a hostile press was like
watching a porcupine do jumping jacks in a room full of balloons. And that’s why he’s president! People eat that stuff up.
Well, no. People who regard the D.C. media as inbred
overclass mouthpieces devoted to the rule of smothering
statists might cheer, but people who like those nice goodlooking young folk on TV think the candidate is just being
rude. And he didn’t answer the question about voting
against Healthy Babies.
Let’s say the candidate does answer the last point in the
litany. It usually goes like this:
“Well, Susan, that’s a long list, but I’ll take the last one. I
voted for the Baby Wellness Initiative, which was a House
version of the Healthy Babies Act, which as you know
replaced the Infant Mortality Abatement Directive of 1974
due to sunset in fiscal year 2016. What I voted against was
an amended bill that included money for drones that performed abortions in rural areas, which didn’t seem to have
anything to do with wellness—”
“But many have pointed out the lack of access to reproductive health care in the Heartland.”
“AND MANy HAVe PoINTeD ouT THe LACk of NoSe HAIRS
IN GeoRGe WASHINGToN oN MouNT RuSHMoRe, So WHAT—
sorry. It was a procedural vote, and—”
“Well, we’re out of time, but we thank you for coming
by today.”
“My pleasure.”
Rand Paul did something different: He told the interviewer to go ask Debbie Wasserman Schultz if she supports
aborting a seven-pound fetus, and then they’d talk. Bravo.
More please. you want to talk about gay rights? Ask
Hillary if a grandma florist should be jailed because she
didn’t make a bouquet for a transgender-polygamist commitment ceremony. you want to talk about women’s reproductive health? Ask Hillary if she thinks the abortion rate in
African-American communities is too high, too low, or
just Goldilocks right. you want to talk about money in politics? Ask Hillary if taking money from the koch brothers is
worse than taking it from robed Saudi creeps who beat
women for leaving the house without a hall pass.
Can’t miss! except you know what the media’s takeaway
would be, don’t you?
“Candidate’s questions revive the debate about
whether using Clinton’s first name is condescending—or
just sexist.”
39
longview--READY:QXP-1127940387.qxp 4/14/2015 10:22 PM Page 40
The Long View
NATIONAL
SECURITY AGENCY
RADIO-FREQUENCY
MONITORING
LOCATION: DUNBAR, OHIO
FREQUENCY: 287.90 GHz
BEGIN EXTRACT
[Static.]
MALE VOICE: “Can you hear me, Mrs.
Clinton? Nod and wave if you can
hear me?”
FEMALE VOICE: “What’s she doing?”
SECOND FEMALE VOICE: “Is she waving? We don’t have a visual yet. Get
her into visual range.”
MALE VOICE: “Mrs. Clinton, can you
hear me? Wave if you can.”
FEMALE VOICE: “Got it. She’s waving.”
MALE VOICE : “Okay, Mrs. Clinton,
we have a visual on you now.”
SECOND FEMALE VOICE: “We can see
the earpiece. Tell her to reinstall the
earpiece.”
MALE VOICE : “Mrs. Clinton, we’re
picking up some of the earpiece just
around the outer ear. If you can, just
casually push the earpiece back
deeply into the ear. Just casually
like you’re brushing back your
hair—”
FEMALE VOICE: “What is she doing?
Tell her to stop that!”
MALE VOICE : “Okay, Mrs. Clinton,
let’s just leave it there. I was thinking maybe a more casual gesture.
You don’t need to use the Sharpie.
Just . . . okay, just keep walking
towards the Olive Garden. Just walk
casually. Okay, Mrs. Clinton, see,
right there—when a person notices
you and says hello it’s really okay to
stop and greet them. So, yeah, just
stop there and turn slightly to your
left. No, the other left. Notice the
40
|
family. Make sure your eyes spend a
moment or two directed to each of
them and—”
This is . . . stop her!”
MALE VOICE: “Mrs. Clinton, no! No!
Stop! Do not smell the baby. The
baby is a real thing, Mrs. Clinton.
It’s a living thing. It means you no
harm. Remember the rehearsals.
Okay? Smile at the baby. Smile. No,
that’s not a smile, Mrs. Clinton.
That’s why the baby is crying.”
FEMALE VOICE: “Send in the Rescue
Team!”
SECOND FEMALE VOICE: “No! Wait.
Wait. Let this play out. Remind her
about the smile training we did.”
MALE VOICE: “Mrs. Clinton, you’re
doing great. Just relax. These are
just regular people out for a nice
dinner, they like you, the baby is not
a threat, everything is good. Okay?
Now, relax your lips again so they
cover your incisors. Good. Okay,
now let’s move into a smile. Begin
the smile. That’s when you try to
move the corners of your mouth
back towards the ears, okay?”
FEMALE VOICE: “We need to shut this
down now.”
SECOND FEMALE VOICE: “She’s going
to get it. Just give her a second.”
MALE VOICE : “No! Mrs. Clinton!
Stop! I meant move the corners of
your mouth to your ears, not the
baby’s. Give the baby back to the
parents. Now! Okay, now laugh
like we rehearsed—wonderful!—
look the parents in the eye, tell
them you’ve enjoyed listening to
them. Do NOT smell the baby
again. Now turn to face the Olive
Garden. Walk towards the Olive
Garden. Don’t jog, Mrs. Clinton.
This is a fun walk, okay? This is
just Grammy Clinton out for a fun
walk. It’s okay for your knees to
bend, Mrs. Clinton. That’s the way
normal people walk. Yes, yes,
doing great. Okay now, inside the
Olive Garden.”
FEMALE VOICE: “What is she doing
with her mouth?”
SECOND FEMALE VOICE: “She’s doing
it again. Stop her.”
BY ROB LONG
MALE VOICE: “It’s okay, Mrs. Clinton.
That person is greeting you. They’re
safe. You’re safe. Do not continue
spitting at her. Just smile and go into
your greeting protocol. Ask about
her and her life. Work the checklist,
Mrs. Clinton. Job, family, hopes,
fears. We’ll upload the responses
into the eyeball monitor. Just relax.
You’re safe. This is safe. The Olive
Garden is good.”
FEMALE VOICE: “Why is she eating
the menu?”
MALE VOICE: “The menu is not food,
Mrs. Clinton. People don’t eat the
menu! Take the menu out of your
mouth! Those are pictures of food,
Mrs. Clinton. Pictures of food are
not food. Okay, put the menu down.
Go into your laughter protocol.
Very nice.”
SECOND FEMALE VOICE : “Make a
note that some of the fast-casual
restaurant programming needs to be
recoded. This is going to come back
again and again in Iowa and New
Hampshire.”
MALE VOICE : “You’re doing very
well, Mrs. Clinton. But try not to
move your lips when other people
are talking to you. Just nod and follow the listening protocol.”
FEMALE VOICE: “Okay, this is working now.”
SECOND FEMALE VOICE: “She’s really connecting to those voters. Are
we getting this on tape?”
FEMALE VOICE: “We’re going to use
all of this! Really great!”
MALE VOICE : “You’re doing great,
Mrs. Clinton! Just wonderful. Okay,
now when you’re ready you can
wrap up your remarks. Whenever
you’re ready, just slowly stop talking and look at everyone around you
using your smiling tools. Okay?
Nice. Nice.”
Why is her hand out?”
MALE VOICE : “No, Mrs. Clinton!
Hand down! These people do not
have to pay you when you speak to
them! No! Hand down!”
SECOND FEMALE VOICE: “Okay, let’s
wrap this up and hit the road.”
END EXTRACT
M AY 4, 2015
books:QXP-1127940387.qxp 4/14/2015 4:30 PM Page 41
Books, Arts & Manners
Bold
Fusion
JOHN HOOD
The Conservatarian Manifesto: Libertarians,
Conservatives, and the Fight for the Right’s Future,
by Charles C. W. Cooke (Crown Forum,
256 pp., $25)
B
y the second page of the intro-
duction, I knew I would like
this book. American conservatism is “marked by its unorthodoxy and its radicalism,” observes
the British-born NATIONAl REvIEW writer
Charles Cooke. Rather than seeking to
conserve “international norms” or “the
tribal precepts that have animated most
of human history,” he continues, the conservative movement in this country is
animated by “eccentric ideas” such as
free markets, property rights, the separation of powers, and freedom of conscience. Personal liberty is “a rare
privilege” enjoyed by only a tiny percentage of all the human beings who have
ever lived. “If conservatism in America
has one goal, it is to preserve that opportunity,” Cooke explains.
As I read these words, I was reminded
of a wonderful little book first published
in 1947 entitled “The Mainspring of
Human Progress.” Its author, Henry
Grady “Buck” Weaver, was a half-blind
statistician from Georgia who worked for
General Motors. He’d never written anyMr. Hood is the president of the John William Pope
Foundation, a North Carolina–based grantmaker that
supports conservative and libertarian institutions and
scholarship.
thing before except articles on psychological research. But he had a way with
words—and a passion for defending
human freedom. “For 60 known centuries, this planet that we call Earth has
been inhabited by human beings not
much different from ourselves,” reads the
book’s first sentence. “Their desire to live
has been just as strong as ours. They have
had at least as much physical strength as
the average person of today, and among
them have been men and women of great
intelligence. But down through the ages,
most human beings have gone hungry,
in goods and ideas, and the final defeat of
totalitarianism (at least in its secularFascist and Communist forms). The
American Right seeks to explicate, protect, and build on these gains. For this we
need make no apologies or concessions.
We recognize that modern liberalism is
illiberal and that modern progressives are
actually backward-looking control freaks
hostile to dynamism and progress. In my
experience, young conservatives and libertarians are, as Cooke puts it, “passionate
and ambitious,” quite proud to defend
“the most successful, virtuous, and radi-
The best defenses of both traditionalist
conservatism and libertarianism are
grounded in reality, not in abstractions
or idealism.
and many have always starved.” The
reason this reality changed, Weaver goes
on to argue, was the birth of the freeenterprise economy, in turn made possible by the birth of limited government.
To describe modern conservatism as
the celebration and preservation of
progress may set certain thinkers’ teeth
on edge. But it’s the right choice, as a
matter of principle and as a tool of persuasion. The best defenses of both traditionalist conservatism and libertarianism
are grounded in reality, not in abstractions or idealism. One need not share any
particular theology to recognize that man
is an imperfect creature prone to mistaken,
self-destructive, and hurtful choices. And
one need not be an Objectivist or an
anarcho-capitalist to conclude that governments, being full of such imperfect
creatures wielding the power of coercive
violence, are unlikely to do better at
achieving “the Good” than individuals
acting on their own or through voluntary
associations.
When the Founders enshrined the principles of liberty and limited government
in the Declaration of Independence and
the Constitution, that was a great leap forward in human affairs. So were subsequent events such as the abolition of
slavery, the invention of the private corporation, the birth of worldwide free trade
cal political philosophy in the history of
the world.” They think the left is lame.
They’re right.
The Conservatarian Manifesto is full
of brilliant insights and powerful arguments. Cooke uses the failures of gun
control and the drug war to illustrate the
proper limits of state power, without lapsing into dogma or ignoring the inherent
tradeoffs of opting for personal freedom.
There is a crucial difference, he points
out, between saying “Society would be
better off if the drugs vanished overnight”
and saying “Society is better off when the
government tries to make drugs vanish.”
He also discusses at some length something I noticed several years ago: Today’s
generation of young conservatives is
more accepting of gay rights and less
accepting of abortion than my generation
was in the 1980s. Although left-wing analysts see these developments as confusing
and contradictory, they are in fact entirely
understandable and consistent applications of principle—and suggest to Cooke
that conservatives “should spend their
time on more fruitful endeavors” than
fighting a rearguard action against what
are really inevitable changes in marriage
laws and customs.
But Cooke also properly warns against
the irrational exuberance of certain libertarian activists who claim that if the
41
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Republican party would simply drop its
opposition to drug legalization and samesex marriage, it would suddenly command the allegiance of large swathes of
young voters. Unfortunately, most of
today’s voters in the 18-to-29 group
have quaffed large amounts of welfarestate propaganda served up by their
teachers, professors, and celebrity icons.
a nasty hangover awaits them, of course,
but in the meantime their votes won’t be
so easy to get.
Unlike the notorious tract published by
Karl Marx and Friedrich engels in 1848,
The Conservatarian Manifesto is informed by sound principle and devoted to
a noble goal, but it does resemble that earlier work in several ways: it is concise. it
is quotable. and it makes no attempt to
describe in a comprehensive fashion
Cooke’s entire political philosophy, or to
work out all the details of how that philosophy might be turned into a practical
system of governance.
This is an observation, not a criticism.
actually, let me restate that: it is an invitation. The term “conservatarian” may be
new. But the conservatarian project isn’t.
it has a rich history, and ought to have an
equally rich future as the interplay—however messy and boisterous it might be—
between the politics of liberty and the
politics of virtue. Buck weaver, for
example, was a devout family man and
Southern Baptist, and his only book (he
died in 1949) was later republished by
the libertarian Foundation for economic
education. The Mainspring of Human
Progress was a huge success, providing
hundreds of thousands of readers with a
powerful argument for free markets and
individual liberty. i think that, if he were
alive today, weaver might well associate himself with Cooke’s conservatarianism. Many of his contemporaries—the
authors, scholars, journalists, and activists
of the post-war Right—might do the
same. Those who founded such institutions as the Mont Pelerin Society (1947),
NaTioNal Review (1955), and the
Philadelphia Society (1964) brought substantial philosophical, political, and
rhetorical differences to their respective
projects. Some described themselves as
libertarians or classical liberals, others as
conservatives or traditionalists. They debated in public and bickered in private.
Some formed lasting friendships and
found their views converging over time.
others broke away from the discussion,
citing personal slights, irreconcilable differences on particular issues, or a wider
rejection of the possibility of consensus.
Modern-day conservatarians would be
well advised to revisit this intellectual
history and reread the works of its protagonists, starting with the father of
“fusionism” himself, Frank Meyer. The
longtime literary editor of NaTioNal
Review, Meyer argued, in such essays as
“in Defense of Freedom: a Conservative
Credo,” for integrating liberty and
virtue as mutually reinforcing principles.
another advocate of such integration
(although not of the term “fusionism”)
was my longtime friend Stan evans. He
just passed away, but you can still hear his
version of the argument in all its splendor (as well as Stan’s trademark chuckle,
if you listen closely enough) in his foreword to Principles and Heresies, Kevin
Smant’s excellent biography of Frank
Meyer, or in Stan’s own 1994 book, The
Theme Is Freedom. (For would-be conservatarians seeking a model for a vigorous, freedom-promoting foreign policy
that avoids both isolationism and impetuosity, i’d recommend Henry Nau’s 2013
book Conservative Internationalism.)
while we’re on the subject of labels,
i’ll go ahead and register my objection to
“conservatarian.” it’s clumsy. So was the
earlier term “liberaltarian” (although the
latter’s defects extended far beyond
inelegance, in that what it described was
little more than a marketing fad, not a
realistic possibility for political realignment). with Hayek, i mourn the stealing
of the proper term “liberal” by the avaricious left, but am enough of a realist to
concede that the pilferage is permanent.
Given that Cooke devotes a great deal of
his book to the case for decentralizing
government power to states and localities—which, he argues, would produce
better outcomes while harmonizing the
libertarian and traditionalist strands of the
movement—i suppose the term “federalist” could fit the bill. But it, too, was
swiped long ago by those who actually
favored its opposite, centralization.
whatever we choose to call the renewal of libertarian conservatism, Charles
Cooke has advanced its cause immeasurably. Here’s hoping that his manifesto will prompt the publication of
other volumes, by Cooke and like-minded
thinkers, that broaden and deepen the
philosophy while applying it to the challenges of the 21st century.
M AY 4, 2015
Genres
Without
Borders
OTTO PENZLER
E
vErything changed in 1922.
Until then, novelists were
novelists. End of story. So to
speak.
Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, and
Emily Brontë wrote beautiful, moving
narratives that examined the relationships
between men and women so powerfully
that they continue to resonate to the present day. reviewers of their time did not
identify them as romance writers.
On the mystery front, Charles Dickens,
the most beloved and popular author of
his age, created the first fictional police
detective in literature when he invented
inspector Bucket in Bleak House
(1852–53). Later, hoping to outdo his
friend Wilkie Collins, who had had great
success with such mystery novels as
The Woman in White (1860) and The
Moonstone (1868), Dickens planned what
he thought would be the greatest detective
novel ever written, The Mystery of Edwin
Drood (1870). ironically, he died with
barely a third of the book produced, frustrating readers and scholars ever since
with a mystery that would remain unsolved forever. One would be hardpressed to find obituaries of Dickens in
which he is identified as a mystery writer.
no matter what the subject of a fictional
work may have been, it was reviewed on
its merits and its creator praised or derided
for the quality of the production, no biased
decision already having been reached
about its worthiness because of the centrality of a specific genre. (When discussing
genre fiction, i will limit observations to
mystery fiction because that is what i
know about. i have not recently read
romance novels, science fiction, or westerns, but a similar sensibility applies.)
Writers understood that a crime novel,
like any other work of fiction, needed to be
an entertainment but also a reflection of
Mr. Penzler is the owner of The Mysterious Bookshop
in New York City, the founder of The Mysterious
Press, and the editor of more than 70 anthologies.
society and a documentation of it, told in
an original, colorful, thoughtful manner.
then came 1922. Boni & Liveright
published The Waste Land, by t. S. Eliot,
and the Paris bookshop Shakespeare &
Co. published Ulysses, by James Joyce.
Although they are critically admired,
almost revered, the rewards of these literary milestones are not immediately evident to the average reader. O frabjous day
for literary critics! they suddenly had a
role. they could interpret what an author
had produced, explain what it meant,
then dig even deeper to expound on the
subtle, hidden messages that could be
gleaned only with intense concentration
and laborious study.
to the new arbiters of literary taste,
readers would no longer walk into a bookstore, select something from the shelves,
and immerse themselves in the happy
experience of being transported by a wonderful story, filled with irresistible characters who had beautiful (or horrid) things
to say and said them in ways nobody else
had ever said them. readers of Dickens
hadn’t needed guidance to understand
what his writings were about, nor did
those who read Shakespeare, Chaucer,
homer, or anyone named Dumas. not all
readers may have been fully aware of
every nuance of every relationship in a
novel, or of the books’ connections to
events of their era, but they had a splendid
time and perhaps saw greater depths to the
work upon contemplation, or after a second or third reading.
For ensuing decades, popular fiction
was largely ignored by “serious” critics
and academics. With the elevated perspective brought to bear on virtually
impenetrable works (if i may mention
Finnegans Wake), literary critics flourished. they filled magazines, books, and
academia with their collective wisdom,
selecting the authors and titles deserving
of their attention and bestowing on them
a status often directly correlated to their
obscurity and arcane characteristics.
thus, Gravity’s Rainbow, Foucault’s
Pendulum, and Don DeLillo’s Underworld received long, glowing reviews in
the nation’s leading newspapers and
magazines, and found themselves on the
required-reading lists of comparativeliterature courses at the better (or more
pretentious) universities. that they are
tedious and incomprehensible to most
readers ideally suited those who mined
their pages for the nuggets of genius they
were eager to ferret out and explain to
the proles.
the divide between literary fiction and
popular fiction, begun in earnest in the
magical 1922, widened year after year
until such publications as The New York
Review of Books and most literary journals
ignored the books that people actually
read but devoted thousands of pages,
millions of words, to expounding on the
genius of, for example, a plot patterned
after a large sheet of graph paper (as
Gravity’s Rainbow was).
in recent years, however, there has been
a little ripple of change hopefully battering its tiny wavelets against the ramparts
of snobbism. Quietly sneaking up on the
guardians of esoterica, some authors of
crime fiction began to be noticed for the
originality of their prose and the profundity of their observations.
Detective fiction was invented by Edgar
Allan Poe (who, in a single short story,
“the Murders in the rue Morgue,” created most of the tropes of the genre) and
Dickens, but it was not identified as something separate from an author’s body of
work; it was merely one more part of his
oeuvre. it was not until Arthur Conan
Doyle created Sherlock holmes in 1887
that the detective story achieved an independent popularity. “After holmes, the
deluge,” as the bibliophile vincent Starrett
famously wrote, as authors and publishers
raced to emulate and cash in on the staggering success of the great Detective.
For the next six or seven decades, detective stories—that is, books conceived of
and published as genre fiction—were
mainly (though not exclusively) puzzle
stories. in a typical and familiar construction, a person is murdered in a confined area (a city, a village, a ship). A
detective arrives at the scene, investigates, makes observations and deductions, and points his unerring finger at
the guilty party. readers, unable to recognize the same clues that the detective
unearthed, or to understand them sufficiently to unravel their secrets, had the
puzzle satisfyingly solved for them by
the hero. Order is restored.
the genre reached its zenith in what
has been described as detective fiction’s
golden age, the years between the world
wars. Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers,
Ellery Queen, and the other masters of the
era began selling in massive quantities at
precisely the same moment that they were
being ostracized from the literary main43
stream by the publishers who profited
from them and by the critics who felt justified in ignoring them.
Mostly, critics were right to do so. The
vast majority of mystery novels and stories were formulaic, produced in an endless stream for an insatiable reading
public. Puzzles, without literary merit,
were the norm. Of course, the same criticism of being utterly pedestrian and predictable could easily have been leveled at
mainstream fiction, both then and now.
However, exceptions should have been
made to the dismissal of detective fiction
in the 1920s. Certainly Dashiell Hammett
with a genre that had defined itself as pure
entertainment, nothing more, ever since
Holmes strode onto the scene. In addition
to the elements required of all good fiction, the detective story had demands of
composition that are as strict as those of a
sonnet or sonata. Even with those firm
boundaries, Hammett and Chandler, and a
few others, produced work of enduring
literature that was largely ignored by
major critics and academics. The genre
had a reputation for stick-figure characters, stilted dialogue, and predictable
plots; and no reputable university dared
consider assigning students a book by
soon followed by entire courses devoted
to the subject. By the 1990s, more than
300 universities offered courses in mystery fiction.
In much of the 20th century, a minuscule number of mystery writers were
regarded as significant novelists. After
Macdonald’s breakthrough, many were
welcomed into the hall of letters. Robert
B. Parker was one. A disciple of Macdonald (as Macdonald had been of
Chandler), Parker wrote his doctoral dissertation on Hammett and Chandler. He
involved Spenser, his primary protagonist, in cases that raised significant polit-
Once the door was opened, the guardians of the
literary pantheon welcomed more and more authors
clamoring for admittance.
was a major literary figure of his time, a
genre writer whose work in all likelihood
influenced Ernest Hemingway, as an
American prose style developed its own
sound, its own muscle, separating itself
from Henry Jamesian wordiness.
For evidence of the lasting significance
of Hammett, I draw your attention to the
Pulitzer Prize, which, at one time, was
regarded as the ne plus ultra of literary
achievement. Neither Hammett’s superb
Red Harvest nor The Maltese Falcon
won it, and I’d wager Alfred Knopf, his
publisher, failed to nominate them.
Winners in the years proximate to
Hammett’s publications included The Able
McLaughlins, by Margaret Wilson, Early
Autumn, by Louis Bromfield, Scarlet
Sister Mary, by Julia Peterkin, Laughing
Boy, by Oliver La Farge, Years of Grace,
by Margaret Ayer Barnes, The Store, by
T. S. Stribling, Lamb in His Bosom, by
Caroline Miller, and Now in November,
by Josephine Winslow Johnson.
Show of hands. How many have read
these books, the epitome of success in
the 1920s and 1930s? Right.
Yet Hammett’s novels, produced while
the prize-winners were being published,
have never been out of print, and remain
as fresh and captivating today as they
were more than 80 years ago. Raymond
Chandler came along right on Hammett’s
heels with Philip Marlowe and his memorable poetic style. All remain in print and
read to the present day.
They, and occasional other mystery
writers, were tainted by their association
44
|
what it regarded as back-of-the-bus hacks.
However, just as 1922 drove a wedge
between allegedly serious literature and
genre fiction, the chasm that had widened
between them over the years began to be
breached in a landmark year of the opposite kind. The erosion of the distinction
began in 1969, when a few journalists
embarked on a crusade to bring deserved
attention to an elegant novelist whose
form happened to be the detective novel.
The author was Ross Macdonald (the
pseudonym of Kenneth Millar) and the
campaign was spearheaded by John
Leonard, the editor of the New York
Times Book Review, who commissioned
a front-page review of Macdonald’s The
Goodbye Look, by William Goldman,
and added a lengthy interview with
Macdonald to the same issue. Two years
later, Leonard continued his support by
requesting a review from an ardent fan of
Macdonald’s Lew Archer series, placing
Eudora Welty’s paean on the front page.
(This year, Macdonald’s novels are joining those of Hammett, Chandler, and
Elmore Leonard in the canonical Library
of America series.)
This acceptance broke the dam for a
new deluge. Recognition that a mere
mystery writer could also be a serious
novelist encouraged newspapers and
magazines to devote review attention to
them, resulting in dramatically increased
exposure and commensurate sales. The
popularity of large numbers of crime writers persuaded universities to add occasional mystery novels to literature classes,
ical and philosophical subjects within
the strictures of the detective novel.
Elmore Leonard forged his dialogue
brilliantly, and Stephen King described
him as the great 20th-century American
writer—an appraisal supported by London’s Guardian and numerous other publications and readers.
Once the door was opened, the
guardians of the literary pantheon welcomed more and more authors clamoring
for admittance. Mystery writers in recent
years have attempted, successfully, to
focus on character and prose style rather
than simply relying on plot to define their
books. Richard Price, Thomas H. Cook,
Kate Atkinson, Dennis Lehane, P. D.
James, George Pelecanos, and Daniel
Woodrell, to name a few, have succeeded
in moving the crime novel farther into the
mainstream of literary fiction.
From the other end of the spectrum, socalled literary writers have often turned to
mystery and crime fiction. John Banville,
Joyce Carol Oates, Robert Olen Butler,
Thomas Pynchon, and Michael Chabon,
among many others, have centralized
murder and other crimes to drive their
novels and stories. The lines are blurring
between the more ambitious authors in
the mystery genre and those who have
been defined as authors of literary fiction.
What a modern, sophisticated method
of judging a novel: on its merits, not on
a pre-evaluated definition. To the critics and academics at the vanguard of
this movement, I say: Welcome to the
19th century.
M AY 4, 2015
In the
Crucible
M I C H A E L F. B I S H O P
Washington’s Revolution: The Making of America’s
First Leader, by Robert Middlekauff
(Knopf, 384 pp., $30)
F
rom 1754 to 1763, Britain and
France were locked in a bitter,
bloody struggle for control of
North America. The conflict,
which spread across the globe, could be
considered the first world war.
And George Washington started it.
He was 21 and a lieutenant colonel
of militia, ordered by the royal governor of Virginia to travel to the ohio
Country and divine French intentions.
His little force, supplemented by members of the Iroquois tribe, encountered
a small French expedition that had
been dispatched to take his measure.
The result was a massacre. Wash ington’s men, and the accompanying
Indians, driven more by fear and bloodlust than by any orders of his, killed
and scalped dozens of Frenchmen. The
young colonial officer wrote later of
the episode: “I heard bullets whistle
and believe me there was something
charming in the sound.”
It is with this rather inauspicious
event that robert middlekauff, a professor emeritus at the University of
California, Berkeley, and author of The
Glorious Cause—perhaps the finest
single-volume history of the American
revolution—begins his excellent new
Mr. Bishop has held several posts on Capitol Hill
and in the White House and is the former executive
director of the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial
Commission.
study of Washington’s leadership. He
expertly traces the arc of Washington’s
career, from his days as a colonial officer driven by vaulting ambition to
make his mark and his fortune to his
triumphant leadership at the head of
the Continental Army. And he sensitively explores the process by which
the “provincial” Washington became,
over the eight years of the revo lutionary War, “an established citizen
of the world.”
It has become customary—even
trite—for biographers of Washington to
declare their discovery of flesh and
blood beneath the marble that has
encrusted his legend. (The marble was
not long in forming; middlekauff
observes that by the end of the revolution, Washington was to his countless
admirers “a creature apart, a man set
above all others, a unique being—not a
god, but at the least a chosen instrument of Providence.”) Therefore it is
somewhat refreshing that middle kauff takes Washington’s humanity as
a given, and devotes himself more to
political development than to psychological exploration. His book is neither a vast, cradle-to-grave biography
like ron Chernow’s, nor a brief character study like richard Brookhiser’s.
rather, it is a deeply researched and
enlightening look at three transfor mative decades in the life of an indispensable American.
The Father of His Country was the
son of a planter; he started life at the
margins of the aristocracy. No log cabin
for him. But as middlekauff puts it, “If
he was not quite an outsider, he was far
from the center of the elite.” The army
seemed to him the surest path to distinction, and he threw himself into a
military career. His fondest ambition
was a commission in the regular army;
the future scourge of the redcoats wished
nothing more than to don the scarlet
himself. Fortunately for America, it
was not to be: Washington never won
his commission, and could not abide
the condescension with which British
officers treated him. Stung by the
high-handedness of the regular army,
Washington resigned from the militia.
He embarked on the career that was
his birthright, taking his place among
the planter class of the Tidewater. He
inherited the estate of his elder halfbrother, Lawrence, and immediately
set about acquiring more land, some of
it adjacent to his Potomac river property and some far away in the West.
marriage to the dowdy but rich
martha Custis secured his fortune; the
commander-in-chief of the Continental
Army was perhaps the wealthiest man
on the continent, secure in his status
but aggrieved by the financial depredations of the mother country. His
commitment to the revolutionary cause
was all the more impressive because
FOR MARIA SHARAPOVA
Harder, harder, harder—slam the ball
Down through the claws of those opposing hands.
The prince and duchess, present in the stands,
Will soon invite you into Anmer Hall.
They recognize—the winner takes it all.
Theirs is a court where one no more commands
The people, nor may conquer foreign lands
And nothing comes of muscle, nerve, and gall.
But yours!—yours is a kingdom, fingers curled
Around a scepter posing as a racquet,
The clay a rich, red carpet at your heel.
And you are our catharsis in a world
Which slips us in a fitted sideline jacket
To meet restraint, regardless how we feel.
—JENNIFER REESER
45
Alaska 2015 cruise April ad:Panama cruise.qxd 4/14/2015 3:15 PM Page 2
T H E N AT I O N A L R E V I E W 2 0 1 5
Alaska Cruise
S ai li ng Ju l y 18 -2 5 a b oa rd Ho ll an d Ame ri ca ’s l u xuri o us
MS
W es te rd a m wi t h
DANIEL HANNAN, KATIE PAVLICH, MICHELE BACHMANN, PAT CADDELL,
JONAH GOLDBERG, JAMES O’KEEFE, JOHN SUNUNU, NAOMI SCHAEFER RILEY,
YUVAL LEVIN, ANDREW KLAVAN, PETE HEGSETH, STEPHEN MOORE, KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON,
JAMES LILEKS, KEVIN HASSETT, DANIEL J. MAHONEY, REIHAN SALAM, JAY NORDLINGER,
JIM GERAGHTY, JILLIAN MELCHIOR, JOHN HILLEN, KATHRYN LOPEZ, CHARLES C.W. COOKE,
ELIANA JOHNSON, JOHN J. MILLER, JOHN FUND, RAMESH PONNURU, KATHERINE CONNELL,
ROB LONG, PATRICK BRENNAN, JOEL GEHRKE, ROMAN GENN, KAT TIMPF, and more to come!
Enjoy the summer lights for
7 nights on the Westerdam!
ake part in one of the most exciting seafaring adventures
you will ever experience: the National Review 2015
Alaska Summer Cruise. Featuring an incredible cast of
conservative speakers—and affordable accommodations—this
special trip will take place July 18-25, 2015. Set for the absolutely ideal time to visit Alaska and enjoy its unique, breathtaking
beauty, the phenomenal journey—which would make for an
excellent family vacation or reunion—will sail round-trip from
Seattle aboard Holland America Line’s beautiful mS Westerdam,
visiting Juneau, Ketchikan, Sitka, Glacier Bay, and Victoria, B.C.
This is a unique opportunity to meet preeminent conservative celebrities and to discuss the day’s most important issues:
we’re happy to announce that Daniel Hannan, the popular
“Euroskeptic” British mEP—along with NR writers Rob Long
and John Fund, cartoonist Roman Genn, and videographer
James O’Keefe—will be joining a great line-up, including former New Hampshire governor and “Bush 41” chief of staff
John Sununu, ace economists Stephen Moore and Kevin
Hassett, former congresswoman Michele Bachmann, pollster
Pat Caddell, National Affairs editor Yuval Levin,
Townhall.com editor Katie Pavlich, top social commentators
Naomi Schaefer Riley, James Lileks, and Andrew Klavan,
military/security experts Pete Hegseth and John Hillen, leading conservative academic Daniel Mahoney, and from NR’s
editorial All Stars Jonah Goldberg, Jay Nordlinger, Ramesh
Ponnuru, Kevin Williamson, Eliana Johnson, Jim Geraghty,
Kathryn Lopez, Charles Cooke, John Miller, Patrick
Brennan, Jillian Melchior, Joel Gehrke, and Kat Timpf.
Over 400 readers—make certain you’re among them!—are
expected to take this wonderful trip, which is why we urge you to
act now to reserve your stateroom. Alaska cruises are mega-popular because of the region’s raw beauty. For mother Nature at her
finest, you can’t beat the stunning waterways hugging the 49th
State, or the glaciers and other wonders that adorn it from the
Artic to the Gulf. And as an unrivaled family summer vacation
destination, how can you compete with an Alaska voyage? You
can’t. So don’t beat them, join them (with your family)!—on the
National Review 2015 Alaska Summer Cruise.
There’s a cabin to meet everyone’s budget: Prices start at just
$2,299 per person, and “Single” staterooms begin at an affordable
$3,399 (the same prices we offered on our last trip here in 2007!).
If you’ve wanted to go on an NR cruise, but haven’t, consider
this: the “typical” NR cruise “alumnus” has been on an average of
four of our seafaring trips! They keep coming back again and
again for an obvious reason: an NR cruise is sure to be a great
time. It’s time you discovered this for yourself.
An NR cruise is your unique chance to meet and intimately
discuss politics and policy with some of the true giants of conservative and political affairs. Our exciting seminars—we’ve scheduled eight panel sessions (each preceded by a great one-on-one
interview of a special guest speaker)—provide a scintillating take
on current events. Then there are the exclusive “extras,” such as
our three cocktail receptions (convivial affairs featuring great food
and libations), two late-night “Night Owls,” one post-dinner
poolside “smoker” (with world-class
O N E C O O O O L W E E K O F S U M M E R F U N A N D C O N S E RVAT I V E R E V E L RY !
H. Upmann cigars and complimentary cognac!), plus intimate dining
DAY/DATE
PORT
ARRIVE
DEPART
SPECIAL EVENT
with speakers and editors on two
nights.
SAT/July 18
Seattle
4:00Pm
evening cocktail reception
Then there’s the Westerdam: Its
accommodations (elegant stateSUN/July 19
AT SEA
morning/afternoon seminars
“Night Owl” session
rooms and glamorous public spaces)
are luxurious, and matched by the
T
mON/July 20
Juneau, AK
1:00Pm
10:00Pm
morning seminar
TUE/July 21
Glacier Bay
SCENIC CRUISING
morning/afternoon seminars
WED/July 22
Sitka, AK
7:00Am
3:00Pm
afternoon seminar
late-night poolside smoker
THUR/July 23
Ketchikan, AK
7:00Am
1:00Pm
afternoon seminar
“Night Owl” session
FRI/July 24
Victoria, B.C.
6:00Pm
midnight
morning seminar
SAT/July 25
Seattle
7:00Am
G
Alaska 2015 cruise April ad:Panama cruise.qxd 4/14/2015 3:16 PM Page 3
indulgent staff, superior cuisine, and topnotch entertainment and excursions.
And then there is the spectacular itinerary, starting with beautiful Seattle, and followed over the next week with these top destinations:
GLACIER BAY National Park protects a unique
ecosystem of plants and animals living in concert with a changing glacial landscape. You’ll be awed: monumental chunks of ice
split off glaciers, crashing into the sea, roaring like thunder, water
shooting hundreds of feet into the air. Glacier Bay has more actively
calving tidewater glaciers than anyplace else in the world.
JUNEAU is the place to let your imagination run wild. Explore the
lush Tongass National Forest. Visit the rustic shops in town. Or get out
and kayak, dogsled, raft, whale watch, flightsee or fish. There’s no end
to the adventure because we’re in port long enough to truly take
advantage of the long daylight hours.
A GREAT FAMILY VACATION AWAITS!
Superior service, gourmet cuisine, elegant accommodations, and
great entertainment await you on the beautiful Westerdam. Prices
are per-person, based on double occupancy, and include port
fees, taxes, gratuities, all meals, entertainment, and admittance to
and participation in all National Review functions. Per-person
rates for third/fourth person in cabin (by age and category):
Categories J & C
Category VC
Categories SS & SA
17-younger: $ 736
17-younger: $1301
17-younger: $1354
18-up: $1451
18-up: $1501
18-up: $1554
DELUXE SUITE Magnificent luxury quarters (from 506 sq.
ft.) features use of exclusive Neptune Lounge and
personal concierge, complimentary laundry/drycleaning service, large private verandah, kingsize bed (convertible to 2 twins), whirlpool
bath/shower, dressing room, large sitting
area, DVD, mini-bar, refrigerator, safe,
and much more.
SITKA The onion domes of St. Michael’s Cathedral are your first clue
that Sitka was once a Russian settlement. Today, be greeted by Tlingit
native people and astonishing marine life.
DOUBLE OCCUPANCY RATE:
SINGLE OCCUPANCY RATE:
KETCHIKAN clings to the shores of Tongass Narrows and drapes the
mountains with a cheerful air. The main attractions include Creek
Street, the Tongass Historical Museum, and Totem Bight State Park
(and a floatplane flightseeing trip to Misty Fjords National Monument
is a transforming adventure not to be missed).
SUPERIOR SUITE Grand stateroom (from 273
sq. ft.) features private verandah, queen-size
bed (convertible to 2 twins), whirlpool
bath/shower, large sitting area, TV/DVD,
mini-bar, refrigerator, floor-to-ceiling windows, safe, and much more.
VICTORIA, B.C. A touch of England awaits in this beautiful port:
afternoon tea, double-decker buses, and the famed Butchart Gardens
(a brilliant tapestry of color spread across 50 blooming acres).
Use the application on the following page to sign up for what
will be seven of the most fun-filled days you’ll ever experience. Or
you can reserve your stateroom at www.nrcruise.com (or call
The Cruise Authority at 800-707-1634). Remember, there’s a
cabin to fit your taste and budget, but don’t tarry: all cabins are
available on a first-come, first-served basis, and supply is limited.
Join us this July on the Westerdam, in the company of Daniel
Hannan, John Sununu, Stephen Moore, Kevin Hassett, Michele
Bachmann, Pat Caddell, Yuval Levin, Katie Pavlich, Naomi
Schaefer Riley, James Lileks, Andrew Klavan, Pete Hegseth,
James O’Keefe, John Hillen, Daniel Mahoney, Jonah Goldberg,
John Fund, Rob Long, Roman Genn, Jay Nordlinger, Ramesh
Ponnuru, Kevin Williamson, Eliana Johnson, Jim Geraghty,
Kathryn Jean Lopez, Charles Cooke, John J. Miller, Patrick
Brennan, Jillian Melchior, Joel Gehrke, Reihan Salam,
Katherine Connell, and Kat Timpf on the National Review 2015
Alaska Summer Cruise.
GET YOUR CABIN! CALL 800-707-1634
NOW OR VISIT WWW.NRCRUISE.COM
Category SA
$ 5,499 P/P
$ 9,799
Category SS
$ 4,399 P/P
$ 7,499
DELUXE OUTSIDE Spacious cabin (from 213 sq.
ft.) features private verandah, queen-size bed
(convertible to 2 twins), bath/shower, sitting
area, mini-bar, TV/DVD, refrigerator,
and floor-to-ceiling windows.
Category VC
$ 3,799 P/P
$ 5,999
LARGE OCEAN VIEW Comfortable quarters (from
174 sq. ft.) features queen-size bed (convertible to 2
twins), bathtub/shower, sitting area, TV/DVD, large
ocean-view windows.
Category C
$ 2,999 P/P
$ 4,299
LARGE INSIDE Cozy but ample cabin quarters
(from 151 sq. ft.) features queen-size bed
(convertible to 2 twins), shower,
sitting area, TV/DVD.
Category J
$ 2,299 P/P
$ 3,399
FIND APPLICATION ON NEXT PAGE _
Alaska 2015_appl:carribian 2p+application_jack.qxd 3/18/2015 10:35 AM Page 1
National Review 2015 Alaska Summer Cruise Application
Mail to: National Review Cruise, The Cruise Authority, 1760 Powers Ferry Rd., Marietta, GA 30067 or Fax to 770-953-1228
Please fill out application completely and mail with deposit check or fax with credit-card information. One application per cabin.
If you want more than one cabin, make copies of this application. For questions call The Cruise Authority at 800-707-1634.
Personal
MAILING AND CONTACT INFORMATION (FOR INTERNAL USE ONLY)
Mailing address
GUEST #1: Name as listed on Passport (LAST, FIRST, MIDDLE)
Date of Birth
Passport Number
Citizenship
Expiration Date
Are you a past Holland America cruiser?
City / State / Zip
o Yes o No
Email Address
Date of Birth
GUEST #2: Name as listed on Passport (LAST, FIRST, MIDDLE)
Daytime Phone
Passport Number
CREDENTIALS
Citizenship
Expiration Date
Are you a past Holland America cruiser?
Cell phone
o Yes o No
PASSPORT INFORMATION This cruise requires a valid passport. Passports should expire
after 1/16/16. Failure to provide this form of documentation will result in denied boarding of
the Westerdam. For more information visit www.travel.state.gov.
Cabins, Air Travel, & Other Information
Your legal first and last name are required for travel documentation. If you have an informal
name you would like reflected on your name badge, please indicate it here:
__________________________________ _______________________________________
Guest #1
Guest #2
IV. AIR / TRANSFER PACKAGES
All rates are per person, double occupancy, and include all port charges and taxes, all
gratuities, meals, entertainment, and National Review activities. Failure to appear for
embarkation for any reason constitutes a cancellation subject to full penalties. Personal
items not included. PLEASE CHECK ALL APPLICAbLE bOXES!
o
o
We will provide our own roundtrip air and transfers to and from Seattle
(arriving there on 7/18/15 by 12:00PM and departing after 11:00AM on 7/25/15).
We would like The Cruise Authority to customize roundtrip air (fees apply) from
o
o
I. CAbIN CATEGORY (see list and prices on prev ious page)
_____________________________________________
First cabin category choice:___________
Arrival date: _____________________________________________________________
Bedding: Beds made up as
BOOKING SINGLE?
o
o
Second cabin category choice:__________
o
Twin
King/Queen
Every Night
o
3-4 times
o
2 times
o
Once
III. PRE- AND POST-CRUISE TOUR PACKAGES
o
First Class Air
Departure date: __________________________________________________________
Please try to match me with a roommate. (My age: ______)
II. DINING w/ FRIENDS/FAMILY: I wish to dine with _____________________________
o
Coach
Preferred carrier: _________________________________________________________
V. MEDICAL / DIETARY / SPECIAL REQUESTS
Please enter in the box below any medical, dietary, or special needs or requests we should
know about any of the members of your party:
Please send me information on pre-/post-cruise packages in Seattle (for 2 or 3 nights)
and in Vancouver, B.C. (for 2 or 3 nights).
Payment, Cancellation, & Insurance
o The card’s billing address is indicated above. o The card’s billing address is:
Deposit of $600 per person is due with this application. If paid by credit card, the balance will be charged to the same card on 4/17/15 unless otherwise directed. If application is received after 4/17/15, the full amount of the cruise will be charged.
________________________________________________________________________
o My deposit of $600 per person is included. (Make checks to “National Review Cruise”)
o Charge my deposit to: AmEx o Visa o MasterCard o Discover o
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oooo
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Name of Cardholder (please print)
CANCELLATION PENALTY SCHEDULE: Cancellations must be received in writing by date
indicated. Fax / email is sufficient notification. Guests must confirm receipt by The Cruise
Authority. PRIOR to Feb. 17, 2015 cancellation penalty is $100 per person; Feb. 17 to April 17,
2015, penalty is $600 per person, AFTER April 17, 2015, penalty is 100% of cruise/package.
CANCELLATION / MEDICAL INSURANCE is available and recommended for this cruise (and
package). Costs are Age 0–49: 7% of total price; 50–59: 8% of total price; 60–69: 9.5% of total
price; 70-79: 12.5% of total price; 80-plus: 22.5% of total price. The exact amount will appear on
your cruise statement. Purchase will be immediate upon your acceptance and is non-refundable.
o YES I/we wish to purchase the Trip Cancellation & Medical Insurance coverage. Additions
to the cruise package will increase my insurance premium.
o NO I/we are declining to purchase the Trip Cancellation & Medical Insurance coverage and
understand that I/we will be subject to applicable cancellation penalties.
Important!
RESPONSIbILITY: The Holland America Line (HAL) cruise advertised herein (the “Cruise”), which features guest
speakers promoted for the National Review Cruise (the “Speakers”), is being promoted by H2O Ltd. d/b/a The Cruise
Authority (TCA) and National Review magazine (NR). You understand and agree that if you elect to use TCA to serve as your agent in connection with the provision of any Services, you will look solely to HAL or the applicable service provider in the event of any loss to person or property, and you expressly release TCA from any liability for injury, damage, loss, accident, delay or irregularity to you or your property that may result from any act or omission by
any company, contractor or employee thereof providing services in connection with the Cruise (including any shore excursions), including but not limited to transportation, lodging, food and beverage, entertainment, sightseeing, luggage handling and tour guiding. For purposes of the preceding sentence, the term “Services” shall include, but not be limited to, the following: (i) the issuance of tickets, vouchers and coupons, (ii) arrangements for transportation to
and from the point of debarkment , and (iii) hotel accommodations prior to debarkation. = Furthermore, TCA shall not be responsible for any of the following: (i) delays or costs incurred resulting from weather, road connections, breakdowns, acts of war (declared or undeclared), acts of terrorism, strikes, riots, acts of God, authority of law or other circumstances beyond its control, (ii) cancellation of the Cruise or postponement of the departure time, (iii) price increases or surcharges imposed by HAL and/or service providers, (iv) breach of contract or any intentional or careless actions or omissions on the part of HAL and/or service providers, (v) social or labor unrest, (vi) mechanical or construction difficulties, (vii) diseases, (viii) local laws, (ix) climate conditions, (x) abnormal conditions or developments or any other actions, omissions or conditions outside of TCA’s control (xi) the accessibility, appearance, actions or
decisions of those individuals promoted as Speakers for the Cruise. Should a Speaker promoted for the Cruise be unable to attend, every effort will be made to secure a speaker of similar stature and standing. = TCA does not guarantee suppliers rates, booking or reservations. In the event you become entitled to a refund of monies paid, TCA will not be liable in excess of amounts actually paid. TCA reserves the right to prohibit any person from booking the
Cruise for any reason whatsover. = HAL reserves the right to impose a fuel supplement of up to $10 USD per guest, per day if the price of West Texas Intermediate crude oil exceeds $65 USD per barrel. = On behalf of those guests
listed in this application, I authorize TCA to use image(s) (video or photo) for purposes of promoting future NR cruise events. = You acknowledge that by embarking upon the Cruise, you have voluntarily assumed all risks, and you
have been advised to obtain appropriate insurance coverage against them. Retention of tickets, reservations, or package after issuance shall constitute a consent to the above and an agreement on the part of each individual in whose
name a reservation has been made for the Cruise, or a ticket issued with respect to the Cruise. = This Agreement shall be governed by the laws of the State of Georgia, excluding its conflicts of laws principles. Each party hereto
agrees that all claims relating to this Agreement will be heard exclusively by a state or federal court in Fulton County, Georgia. Accordingly, each party hereby consents to the exclusive jurisdiction of any state or federal court located in Fulton County, Georgia over any proceeding related to this Agreement, irrevocably waives any objection to the venue of any such court, and irrevocably waives any claim that any such proceeding in such a court has been
brought in an inconvenient forum. No provisions of this Agreement will be interpreted in favor of, or against, any of the parties hereto by reason of the extent to which any such party or its counsel participated in the drafting thereof
or by reason of the extent to which any such provision is inconsistent with any prior draft hereof or thereof. ACKNOWLEDGEMENT: I understand and accept the terms and conditions of booking this cruise package and acknowledge responsibility for myself
and those sharing my accommodations (signed)
_________________________________________________
SIGNATURE OF GUEST #1
______________________________
DATE
he had more to lose than most of his
compatriots. And though he was no
Napoleon on the battlefield, he was the
most impressive leader in the colonies.
The British must have regretted never
having given him that commission.
Through “his will and his judgment”—which Middlekauff considers
his chief qualities—Washington shaped
the ragtag rebel soldiers into a formidable fighting force. This took time and
trial and error; when he first took up
his command in 1775, Washington was
shocked by the troops he encountered.
Mostly New Englanders, they appeared
to him “nasty, dirty, and disobedient.”
But before long, Washington would
come to admire his men for their loyalty
and grit.
Middlekauff makes no extravagant
claims for Washington’s tactical abilities, but argues rightly that his “strategic sense proved to be of a very high
order.” He knew instinctively that the
success of the revolutionary cause
depended more on the maintenance of
the Continental Army than on the
occupation of territory. And it was
clear to him that the projection of force
on land and sea so far from home
stretched British resources to the utmost. As Middlekauff points out, the
British had no more experience dealing with a rebellion than Washington
had leading an army.
At the heart of the book is an engaging narrative of the Revolutionary War
as seen from Washington’s saddle and
writing desk. From the early triumph
at Boston, which the British evacuated
after bombardment by rebel guns on
Dorchester Heights, we follow the
general and his army through several
perilous engagements, and even more
strategic retreats. Washington’s ignominious defeat in New York and headlong flight through New Jersey are
vividly portrayed, as are his brilliant
winter victories at Trenton and Princeton. The latter were vital to the sustenance of national morale, not to
mention the confidence of the army;
their significance was as much political
as military. A war fought in the name
of the people cannot succeed without
their continued support.
Despite the harrowing winter at
Valley Forge, the betrayal of Benedict
Arnold, and countless other disasters,
Washington and his men persevered
until their dramatic march south in
1781. Their French allies had been
more consistently reliable on land than
at sea, but it was a French naval force
that blocked the retreat of General
Cornwallis at Yorktown as Washington’s guns relentlessly pounded the
British redoubts. It must have been
excruciating for Cornwallis to surrender to a force he thought little better
than a rabble, but surrender he did. As
his men streamed toward Washing ton’s lines, a band struck up “The
World Turned Upside Down.” Two
more years would pass before the
Treaty of Paris was signed and the war
was officially concluded, but York town marked the end of the fighting
phase of the conflict. Thereafter, Washington’s war was more about bureaucracy than battles.
The figure that emerges from these
pages is quietly superhuman—not in
terms of military prowess, but rather in
his endless patience. Having pledged
his life, his fortune, and his sacred
honor to the cause, he spent eight years
wrangling with stubborn, jealous politicians in Philadelphia and in the
states. Modern readers prone to lamentations about political dysfunction may
be surprised to discover that today’s
Congress is a model of efficiency
compared with the one with which
Washington constantly and fruitlessly
pleaded for funds and supplies to pay
and feed his long-suffering troops. He
revealed to a colleague his fear that
the nascent United States was like “a
many headed Monster, a hetero geneous mass that never can or will
steer to the same point.”
This searing political crucible made
the Virginian an American; he would
later lend his vast authority and prestige to the Federalist project of binding
the loose coalition of states into a
stronger and more centralized Union. In
Middlekauff’s admiring words, Washington “possessed a grand imagination,
a vision of his new country. That vision, often a daring instrument, set him
apart and made him the great leader of
the Revolution.”
We follow the hero, by now the most
famous man in the world, back to
Mount Vernon and his brief retirement
from the public stage. He exulted in
being under “my own Vine and my own
Fig Tree.” Innumerable tributes from
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admirers arrived by post, and countless
gifts were delivered. Among the latter
were “a gold medal studded with diamonds” from the French sailors who
helped ensure victory at Yorktown; a
“fine fat turtle”; and, from an Irish merchant seemingly determined to demolish his country’s culinary reputation,
“Cork Mess Beef” and “a firkin of Ox
tongues with roots.” His countrymen
revered him; Middlekauff observes
that, “had Washington attended all the
dinners in his honor, drunk the toasts
to his fame, and danced at all the
balls” devoted to him, “he would have
either died from gluttony or collapsed
from exhaustion.”
Fortunately for posterity, he did neither. A few years later, Washington
presided over the convention in Philadelphia that would create a new national charter and a presidential office
tailored to his regal form. Middle kauff’s book is a thorough, persuasive
explanation of why Americans, from
the era of the Revolution to the early
republic, gloried in having Washington
as their leader.
49
Where the
Buck
Stopped
CRAIG SHIRLEY
Ronald Reagan: Decisions of Greatness, by
Martin and Annelise Anderson (Hoover,
209 pp., $24.95)
Y
from now, presidential
historians will still be saying a
silent “Thank you” to Marty
and Annelise Anderson and
Kiron skinner for editing Reagan in His
Own Hand, Reagan: A Life in Letters, and
Reagan’s Path to Victory. As a Reagan
biographer, I have often quietly thanked
these invaluable individuals. Now I wish
to do so loudly and emphatically. Those
three tomes will always be essential resources on the thinking and writing of
Ronald Reagan. Two are massive books
of his letters to thousands of people, and
the third is a compilation of his hundreds
of radio addresses over the years; all of it
is material he wrote personally.
Reagan sometimes used help in writing his twice-a-week column, but he
never allowed anybody else to draft his
radio addresses. How important were his
radio addresses? In 1977, CBs and Walter Cronkite offered Reagan a regular
television commentary that would pay
the Gipper hundreds of thousands. He
turned it down, and his aides Mike Deaver
and Peter Hannaford, flabbergasted,
asked him why. (Deaver and Hannaford
famously handled all of Reagan’s media
eARs
Mr. Shirley, the chairman of Shirley & Banister
Public Affairs, is the author of two best-selling books
about Ronald Reagan, Rendezvous with Destiny
and Reagan’s Revolution. His third book on
Reagan, Last Act, comes out in October.
50
|
appearances and speeches in the critical
time from early 1975 until 1976, and
again from 1977 to 1979.) He replied that
people might get tired of seeing him on
TV but they would not get tired of listening to him on the radio. Reagan may have
been wrong in assessing people’s tolerance of his image, but it was still a courageous and impressive decision.
Marty and Annelise Anderson pored
over thousands of classified documents
stored at the Reagan Library to produce
yet another very fine book, Reagan’s
Secret War (2009), which broke new
ground in the understanding of President
Reagan and the Cold War. They spent sev-
co-written by Annelise) Ronald Reagan:
Decisions of Greatness. It’s a brisk
overview of Reagan’s presidency, with
special emphasis on major decisions
he faced.
The volume contains a long interview
Anderson conducted with Reagan shortly
after he left office. Marty asked him
about a new book by CBs’s Bob
schieffer titled “The Acting President,”
whose contention, Anderson noted, was
that Reagan’s presidency “had nothing
to do with ideology or principles, that
you had no plan.” Reagan replied, “How
the hell could they say this?” Reagan’s
critics were always portraying him as
The world of Reagan scholarship is
substantially different—and better—
today owing in large measure to the
work of Marty and Annelise Anderson.
eral decades turning out superior scholarship, year after year.
Marty and Annelise were always very
important to Ronald Reagan. They simply kept their voices down and did their
work for him for many years, including
in the White House. starting in the early
1970s, Marty was a permanent part of
the California mafia around the Gipper
that included ed Meese, Lyn Nofziger,
Deaver, Hannaford, stu spencer, and
honorary Californians Dick Allen and
Dick Wirthlin. Time is now slowly
claiming these men, including Marty,
who passed away in January; Nofziger,
in 2006; Deaver, in 2007; and Wirthlin,
in 2011.
Marty had degrees from Dartmouth
and MIT and other schools. He taught at
Columbia. He wrote countless books
and papers and gave countless lectures.
He served on countless boards, and not
just ceremonial ones but serious commissions that had genuine responsibilities on such matters as national defense,
economic policy, and higher education.
He probably was a legitimate genius.
But he also had a distinctively dry and
down-to-earth wit.
He was part of the Reagan inner circle because he was smart and conservative, but also because he was a problem
solver. He gave balance and heft to the
Reagan campaigns. And he has left us
one last gift: the marvelous book (also
disengaged and unaware; Marty and
Annelise demonstrate the opposite
throughout this book.
It’s a small volume, but, like everything that came from the Andersons, it’s
important. The interview with Reagan
alone is worth the price of admission.
He’s out of the presidency, but he is lively,
engaged, detail-oriented—everything
his opponents said he wasn’t. And he
wasn’t modest either, telling Marty how
many people had already come up to
him—“knowledgeable people, business
people”: “I can almost say in advance
what they’re going to say. . . . They start
thanking me for these eight years and
what has been accomplished. And then
some of them will tell me about where
they were eight years ago and where they
are now.”
Reagan was feisty in this interview; he
seemed to be letting his hair down. He
heavily criticized the schieffer book,
took a swipe at his old budget director
David stockman’s recently published
book, and called Tip O’Neill “grumpy.”
In the chapter titled “The Reagan
Legacy,” the Andersons write that “the
world is substantially different today than
it was during the Cold War.” And the
world of Reagan scholarship is substantially different—and better—today owing
in large measure to the work of Marty and
Annelise Anderson.
R.I.P. Martin Anderson.
M AY 4, 2015
Way
To Live
K AT H RY N J E A N L O P E Z
And the Good News Is . . . : Lessons and Advice
from the Bright Side, by Dana Perino
(Twelve, 256 pp., $26)
‘S
and gentleness
go hand in hand.” that’s
one of the lessons Dana
Perino learned from her
grandfather early on, living the ranching life in Wyoming. her new book is a
mix of memoir, snapshots from history,
and thanksgiving. She’s a woman with a
generous heart for mentoring, and she
explains what moved her to write the
book: “I believe that anyone who has
achieved some success is obligated to
help others do the same.”
the former White house press secretary offers a fair bit of “pent-up
advice,” including seemingly lost
habits of etiquette, such as “When in
doubt, send a thank-you note.” Perino
doubles down on common sense and
human decency throughout the book.
the best advice she ever got from
President george W. Bush, she says,
was about forgiveness. When former
White house press secretary Scott
McClellan wrote a bitter memoir of his
time in the administration, Bush told
her, “I’d like you to try to forgive
him.” She relates what Bush said when
she protested: “no buts. I don’t want
you to live bitterly like he is. nobody
will remember this book three weeks
from now. And we can’t let a book like
this take us away from the important
work we have to do here on behalf of
the American people.”
trength
there is freedom in forgiveness, she
writes. And it was a “blessing to have
the President of the United States be the
one to remind me.”
Writing about off-camera moments
with the president, she includes heartbreaking scenes with men wounded in
war. In some cases, families were overjoyed that the president would make
the time for them; in others, they were
furious. “One mom and dad of a dying
soldier from the Caribbean were devastated,” she writes about a Bush visit
to Walter reed, and the mother was
“beside herself with grief.” She yelled
“confuse civility with timidity or passivity.” She’s not anti-insults; she just
wishes we were more clever about them,
crediting the late Ann richards for wit
rather than “schoolyard name-calling.”
hers is a plea for more confident, clarifying debate that doesn’t insist on
winning but seeks to persuade and
challenges everyone to make a best case
with respect. We should seek common
ground, she advises, rather than reduce
politics to a bloody war zone.
She also offers some advice specifically to fellow conservatives: “If we
believe that the conservative approach
Dana Perino shares the joys and
practical benefits of actual
human encounter.
at President Bush, “wanting to know
why it was her child and not his who
lay in the hospital bed.” the president,
she writes, “was not in a hurry to
leave—he tried offering comfort but
then just stood and took it, like he
expected and needed to hear the anguish,
to try to soak up some of her suffering
if he could.”
Perspective is a large part of this book.
So is humor, of a sort that will be especially, but far from exclusively, appreciated by fans of the Fox news show The
Five, of which she is a co-host.
Perino also makes a plea for civility.
“Without some basic manners, we’re
doomed,” she writes. “there’s no hope
of reaching agreement if we can’t even
talk to each other.” the seemingly utter
breakdown in civility is actually her one
big bit of bad news. her concern flows
from the heart of the book: gratitude.
“For a country so blessed,” Perino
writes, “America sure can argue a lot.
We’ve gone from being the confident
leader of the free world to bickering
about every living thing under the sun.”
Civility is her rallying cry here. “the
scathing language used by many of our
elected leaders, candidate hopefuls, and
political pundits is beneath them. When
did public service turn into a bad episode of Real Housewives?”
In this book, as in her work on The
Five, Perino makes clear that she doesn’t
to governing is superior, then we ought
to act like it.”
And the Good News Is . . . is an antidote to despair about politics. It’s a proposal for—and witness to—something
better, from someone who has learned
along the way and in her gratitude
wants to share and help others. It’s a
plea for something better. Whether she’s
discussing the presidential-primary
trail, twitter, or marriage, she shares the
joys and practical benefits of actual
human encounter: prioritizing, humility,
and encouragement.
Overwhelmed
by
the
overconnectedness online? go old-school,
she suggests: “Choose five people a
month who you want to stay connected
to (family or friends, colleagues or former bosses) and then send them a personal, handwritten note.” For her, it’s “a
holdover tradition from my parents,
who made us write letters every week to
our grandparents and godparents.”
there’s more of that from the
granddaughter of an Italian grandmother who made it to the U.S. in late
1901 with very little english and
relied on the kindness of strangers to
get her from ellis Island to her sister’s
boarding house in Illinois. the Perino
story is a thank-you note to family,
faith, and country, with good stories
and thoughts worth passing on along
the way.
51
backpage--READY:QXP-1127940387.qxp 4/15/2015 1:12 PM Page 52
Happy Warrior
BY DANIEL FOSTER
Who Is for Hillary
elOW , for posterity, a partial list of the
things that happened in the first 24 hours
of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential
campaign:
• Clinton’s announcement, the circumstances of
which she had nearly seven years to plan, came three
hours late, in the form of a two-minute, 18-second
YouTube video in which Mrs. Clinton does not appear
until the 1:33 mark.
• The accompanying press release, the content of
which she had nearly seven years to write, included the
bracing acknowledgment that Mrs. Clinton has “fought
children and families all her career.” Sic erat, as they
say, scriptum.
• The campaign brandished its basic mastery of colors
and shapes by revealing this . . . well, this—
—as a
its logo, which, insofar as lots of things are red or blue
or angular, called any number of associations to mind. I
joked darkly that there would be those who saw a nosetouch to Truther conspiracy theory in the image (wait
for it, I’ll pause), only to find out that, of course, the
boggiest corners of social media were full of just such
speculations.
• The campaign unveiled its working slogan—“It’s
your time”—which, even if it didn’t evoke the over-50
dating site OurTime.com, just doesn’t have quite the
same ring as “Hillary ’16: What Difference, at This
Point, Can We Make?”
• Clinton embarked from New York, in a vehicle
dubbed the “Scooby van,” for a roadshow with voters.
NBC’s Charles Todd remarked on Twitter: “So hard in
this new media age to do anything that looks spontaneous to political world. This Hillary road trip idea has
done just that.”
• Moments later, RNC strategist Sean Spicer replied,
pointing out that in launching her 2000 Senate campaign, the Clinton team toured New York State in a
vehicle dubbed the “Scooby van.” like, zoinks.
• Clinton and said van were spotted at a Chipotle
Grill outside Toledo, Ohio. None less than ABC News
obtained the security tape of a sunglassed madam secretary Being Approachable, and appended to the
footage the shoe-leather fact that Clinton ordered “a
chicken bowl with guacamole, a chicken salad, and
fruit juice.”
And just think: As I write there are a mere 574 days
to go until election Day.
The only thing we can say for sure about these proceedings is that Hillary’s will be a content-free campaign. There will be some bits about income inequality
and the “middle class,” to be sure, and she will assure
B
Mr. Foster is a political consultant and a former news editor of NATIONAL
REVIEW ONLINE.
52
|
recent graduates of the unis she charges three-hundred
large per benediction that their student loans are albatrosses around their necks. But it will all be so much
fury and sound.
At its core it will be the world’s safest run, a kind
of “don’t make any sudden moves” show that makes
G. H. W. Bush ’92 look positively Bull Moose. Bill
Clinton’s chief political innovation was to stand on
the leftmost edge of the Overton window and then
start walking rightward, one step at a time, until his
approval rating went over 50. I expect his better half to
follow that playbook.
There are those who think that Clinton’s nomination-cum-assumption is a subsidy to the GOP field—
that the primary cage match will get the eventual victor
rowdy and ruddy and, as it were, ready for Hillary. But
I’m sure that that is a wash. Because while Clinton is
refining her messaging algorithm to the thousandth
decimal place, Republicans will be lanced and barbed
and run into exhaustion like so many Andalusian bulls,
by a media of picadores using gotcha questions in primary debates to bleed them gentle for the slaughter—
for the matadora.
This isn’t to say that Hillary doesn’t have her own
weaknesses. She’s probably a crook, and people don’t
like her once they remember what she’s like, and
she’s quite literally as old as the electronic transistor. But . . .
I suspect it will come down to the woman question.
Hillary is running as the First Woman because it’s the
blueprint. Because the incumbent won twice by mobilizing “First _____” voter coalitions.
But it’s no sure bet those Obama voters will be there
again. Obama significantly outperformed every Democratic nominee of the last 30 years among 18–29-yearolds and minorities, and even the One slipped in both
these categories between 2008 and 2012.
If Clinton is to be, then, she will be because she did
with women—especially unwed women—what
Obama did with Millennials and minorities. In 2012,
there was no bigger predictor of how a woman voted
than whether she had a ring on it. Romney won married women handily but lost the unwed—who constituted nearly a quarter of the electorate—by nearly two
to one.
If Hillary can dial in the right combination of policies
and signaling and good old-fashioned false consciousness to run up the score with these gals, then I’ll bet no
profusion of vowels in the GOP nominee’s name will
be enough to make the demographics work.
Which means our republic is in the hands of all the
single ladies.
As a GOP sympathizer who has spent his adult life trying to please this very group, I have my concerns.
M AY 4, 2015
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Brewed with the most
advanced digital technology.
Companies like Schlafly Beer rely on Siemens hardware
and software to reinvent manufacturing.
A new era of manufacturing has dawned, one where
manufacturers in every industry are relying on a highly
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before. And they’re turning to Siemens to get it done.
In St. Louis, Schlafly Beer doubled production without
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siemens.com/schlafly

David Clarke does it his David Clarke does it his

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