This is heart-warming news from "the heart of it all" state. Public Policy Polling previews:

We'll start rolling out our Ohio poll results tomorrow but there's one finding on the poll that pretty much sums it up: by a 50-42 margin voters there say they'd rather have George W. Bush in the White House right now than Barack Obama.

I've been away for some time in foreign corners of the world, so allow me to rejoin the American political discourse by citing a historical observation which seems relevant to our current plight. Explaining the reason for the Czech Republic's economic slump in the mid-90's, then-President Vaclav Havel postulated that it was a "punishment for pride":

The government has embraced an arrogant ideology. They claim to know the key to prosperity. It's analogous to communism. They thought the same thing. The clever ones - themselves - would run everything. That's the analogy. The key to prosperity is to let things run themselves. We'll liberalize everything, let everyone look after himself, let business, not the state, run the economy. The state should have no views, no policies of its own. Just open it all up, step back, let it go and you'll see how well everything will work if we just leave things alone.

These were not prepared remarks. Havel was recorded while drinking scotch and chatting with political advisors. The translation from Czech may be a bit rough, but the relevancy to English-speakers warrants the rendition here. If he'd been born in America, Havel would have been a Republican - and might have succeeded Reagan as one of the great conservative leaders of our time.

Megan McArdle wonders whether Obamacare will ever get much more popular than it is now.  I'm not sure that is the right way to look at it.  The idea that Obamacare was going to become much more popular by November 2010 was always some combination of self-delusion and a cynical attempt to gull wavering congressional Democrats from marginal or right-leaning constituencies.  The more important issue is how Obamacare changes the structure of the health care market and how these structural changes will influence the politics of Obamacare in the next 2-6 years.  People don't have to learn to love Obamacare.  They only need to have their interests structured in such a way that repealing Obamacare seems like a change for the worse and (eventually) that single-payer health care is the most obvious solution to the problems produced by Obamacare.  The way different elements of Obamacare will play out will be uncertain.

   1.  Prices - If the experience of Massachusetts with insurance mandate/coverage mandate/government subsidy is anything to go by, Obamacare will lead to an even faster rise in insurance premiums.  This sounds like a major weakness for Obamacare, but, if conservatives are not careful and articulate, it could actually strengthen the political case for even more government-run health care.  For one thing, it won't be obvious to everybody that Obamacare is the reason for rising premiums.  The politics of rising premiums will be a jump ball.  Obama supporters and liberals generally will argue that the premium increases are the result of mean, fat cat, greedy insurance companies that will benefit from Republican attempts to liberalize the health insurance market.  The argument will be that the insurance companies are already bleeding you dry and that if the Republicans get their way, the insurance companies will charge you even more or even deny you coverage altogether.  They will say that it is better to go with the next iteration of Obamacare (or Bidencare or Pelosicare or whatever) and crack down on those mean insurance companies with some combination of price controls and expanding programs of government-provided health insurance.  Rising health care premiums will also create urgency for Obamacare's forthcoming premium subsidies to middle-class families.  Rising premiums will make people feel vulnerable and suspicious of any health care reform that seems to leave them on their own to pay for coverage that only barely seems affordable even with 'help" from their employers and the federal government.  Supporters of market-oriented health care reforms will have to offer policies that promise lower prices, but also policies that address what is reasonable about people's feelings of vulnerability.

2.  Guaranteed Issue - This provision will force insurance companies to offer policies to people with preexisting conditions (so far only for children but eventually everybody)a nd seemingly at about the same premium rate as everyone else.  This will tend to increase premiums on everybody, but as people with preexisting conditions are guaranteed coverage (it is complicated now, but if you develop a condition while insured, it becomes a disincentive from leaving your job and possibly losing coverage), they become a constituency against repeal. 

3.  Medicaid expansion - Obamacare is estimated to increase the population on Medicaid by as much as twenty million by 2014.  I'm not sure it will be that much, but even if it is half that, it is still a sizeable constituency against repeal of Obamacare.  And it isn't just the people on Medicaid.  People who aren't on Medicaid will worry about what happens to people who lose coverage.  It will seem awfully cruel to take people off Medicaid in an environment in which premiums are rising very fast. 

There are counters to all of these concerns.  Support for the guaranteed issue element of Obamacare can be reduced by coming out for well funded and well designed reinsurance pools that would reassure people with preexisting conditions. Medicaid offers an opportunity for some conservative jujitsu as conservative can offer a better deal for Medicaid recipients and allay the fears of middle-class Americans who worry about how market-driven health care will impact the poor.  Medicaid is a truly lousy program that needs to be reformed in a market-driven direction for the sake of the program's recipients.  I prefer something like adding a federal version of Mitch Daniels Health Indiana Plan as a choice for Medicaid recipients, but there are many ways to improve Medicaid and there is no one right answer.  But any answer given will have to be defended in detail. People don't have to like Obamacare in order to start feeling dependent on it.  As Obamacare is institutionalized, repeal of Obamacare and reform of health care policy will involve allaying people's concerns about what will happen to them (and what will happen to the poor and what will happen to them if they develop a condition) in an environment where prices seem to be rising too fast and Obamacare seems like their only life raft.      

Personal note - The Spiliakos familly is still  moving, so I won't be around much until after Labor Day. 

Schall asks whether the cell phone and cyberspace "reality" have diminished our imaginations, which used to be expanded by the reading of fiction.  We see the lack of fiction reading in our students and how it shrivels their souls.

"Racism, racism, fight, fight, fight/Workers of the world unite"--a Communist leafleteer provided some zest for the Glenn Beck rally and handed out fliers to bemused participants.  In my mere 20 minutes at the rally (I had a lunch engagement) I heard little from the stage and saw less, save the apparently middle to upper-middle class crowd, very thick just NE of the Lincoln Memorial.  I have no way of estimating its overall size, except to observe that where I was it was denser than, say, the Fourth of July crowd.  I did hear numerous complaints about the sound and the lack of a view, as many people left, but maybe the audience further back had better sound and perspective on the stage.

In case someone else hasn't made this obvious point, I note that the Lincoln Memorial unites the Beck crowd, the counter-rally, and the original civil rights March on Washington through its presentation of simple justice.  After all, it was Lincoln who defined slavery as "you work, I eat."  That was at the heart of his attacks on slavery in the 1850s, and it is the moral precept that condemns slavery, Jim Crow segregation, and compulsory redistribution of wealth today.  And it is the logical deduction from the proposition that all men are created equal.  The Communists and others who don't share American principles would have a different view of the matter. 

UPDATE:

On the methodology of counting crowds:  Consider this photo analysis.  That's fine as far as it goes, but this is like taking roll at the start of class and ignoring all the students who sneak out (and others who come in later).  As I came in, around 11 a.m., I saw innumerable folks leaving, some complaining they could not see or hear.  Others may have found the heat too hard to take.  Yet they should count as attendees, too.  Many more people were coming in than leaving.  So the count needs to take into consideration the total numbers who were there throughout the day--not just a static snapshot of the event.  Maybe some (overly clever) social scientist (a new-bred economist) has devised a methodology for doing this.  So my total count would exceed the static count at the crowd's greatest size by a considerable factor.

Instead of cataloging philosophers for rows of classroom note takers, he throws students into an ongoing argument: How should we live? He forces students not merely to study political philosophy but to engage in it."

So liberals have already started their attacks on Joe Miller (h/t to Andrew Sullivan.) If that is the best they can do, he should be fine in a Republican-leaning state in a Republican-leaning year - as long as it stays a two person race. 

It seems like Lisa Murkowski might be thinking of going the third party route.  It is tough to imagine a rationale for her campaign.  I guess she could cobble together some kind of pro-choice, pro-pork, pro-seniority platform.  It would clearly just be a Charlie Crist-like attempt by a hack politician to hold on to office for the sake of holding on to office.

Even though the polls are all over the place, I don't expect Crist to win in Florida.  Rubio's message is a little overwrought for me, but he is a well above average speaker, seems to have a clue on domestic policy, and will have plenty of money to get his message out.  With Crist's movements to the left on abortion and Obamacare, Rubio should be able to consolidate the right-of center vote.  It would take a major Rubio scandal and/or virtually unanimous tactical voting from usually Democratic voters for Crist to win.

It is interesting to compare Crist and (maybe) Murkowski with the Democrat-affiliated independents in the Senate.  Lieberman broke with his party over differences with his party's base on a high salience issue.  Bernie Sanders is an explicit social democrat and the Democrats (an internally complicated party) tend to furiously reject that label.  Their formal estrangement from the Democratic Party is based on stuff that matters.  What, other than ambition, estranges Crist or Murkowski from the Republicans?  Does anyone doubt that Crist would take back his support of the stimulus and the Obama hug if it could be guaranteed he would get the Republican nomination and a two man race against Kendrick Meek or that Crist would still be pro-life and pro-repeal of Obamacare if he was the Republican nominee?   

For just about everyone who has addressed the question, the controversy has to do with whether Muslims ought to build a Mosque in the blast-zone of Ground Zero.  Almost everyone agrees with President Obama that the owners of the property have a legal right to build it.  Even so, most people who heard Obama's remarks thought he was endorsing the Mosque, rather than making a trite comment about the legality of the matter.

In this context it is interesting to consider the question of "strategic default"--defaulting on one's mortgage not because one cannot pay it, but rather because it is no longer an economically sound position.  Megan McArdle takes the classic view on the question, saying it is, morally wrong and financially stupid.  The first half of that comment is relevant here.  McArdle believes that a moral man pays his debts.  Failure to pay one's debts when one has the means to do so is a form of fraud, or perhaps theft.  Many Americans, however, don't see it that way.  They simply think that the law allows it, and, therefore, they are perfectly entitled to do it.

I suspect that in both of these cases we are seeing nature at work.  It is natural, and I would say inevitable, for people to conflate what is right with what is legal.  Everyone allows that there is daylight between what is right and what the law allows or requires.  On the other hand, to hold that the legal and the moral are completely separable is to wish for that which cannot happen among men.  The law is by nature a moral teacher.  It cannot be otherwise so long as we remain human.

says Dick Armey, and he is right.  But I don't think he spells out why it takes so much political courage.  Alot of conservatives are thinking of 2010 in terms of 1994, so it might make sense to compare the Ryan Roadmap to the Contract With America.  The Contract was a collection of poll-tested rightish proposals that the House Democratic leadership was not willing to support due to some combination of opposition from Democratic political elites (welfare reform), the arrogance of power (ending congressional exemptions to federal regulations) or principle (the tax limitation and budget balancing amendment.)

What the Contract lacked was any provision that seemed to threaten the economic interests of any constituency that Republicans were courting.  About the only group that was being directly asked to give anything up were the trial lawyers (families on welfare are a complicated case.).  The Ryan Roadmap is a totally different kind of document.  It isn't designed to put together a set of popular policy ideas as a campaign document.  It is designed to try to answer the hard questions about how to get the long-term deficit to sustainable levels without crushing the economy.  That means asking for sacrifices from alot more groups than the trial lawyers.  Running on the Roadmap is nothing like running on the Contract.  It is more like running on the 1995 Medicare cuts, plus some major Social Security cuts, plus a middle-class tax increase.  Oh, and it might cost you your employer-provided health care coverage.  Running on that does take courage, but it might also be the wrong political answer in the short and medium term.

It might also be something less than the ideal policy answer.  I think that the Ryan Roadmap is best thought of not as the economic policy agenda for the center-right, but as framework for thinking about a broad range of policy problems.  Individual Republicans might want to structure the tax burden differently.  They might want to transition to a more market-oriented health care system differently.  Those might be better ideas and debate between different approaches should be encouraged rather than demanding featly to one plan as a sign of seriousness (something which Ryan himself has never demanded.)

But I'm prone to some of the same vices as Armey and I do recognize that Republicans need something more than just not-Obama.  Actually I don't think that (Republicans could probably make big gains just based on the huge flop that "recovery summer" has turned into), but I would like to see the Republicans advance arguments in favor of a set of policies that have a chance of winning majority support and are achievable in the medium term.  This would structure the forthcoming debates with Obama in a way that would force Obama to either compromise or hurt his chances for reelection.  The Ryan Plan doesn't put that choice to Obama.  It makes it easier for him to dig in and paint the Republicans as the party that will cut benefits for Granny, take away your health insurance(and your children's) and raise your taxes for the privilege. 

The best such Republican agenda I have seen was the one put together by Ramesh Ponnuru.  I would also throw in some version of Medicaid reform that introduces some kind of Swiss-style voucher option into the program. 

Two distinguished scholars explore its original meaning. First, poitical scientist Edward Erler: 

Most revealing, however, was Senator Howard's contention that "every person born within the limits of the United States, and subject to their jurisdiction, is by virtue of natural law and national law a citizen of the United States." Almost everyone certainly would have understood "natural law" to refer to the social compact basis of citizenship, the basis for citizenship adumbrated in the Declaration of Independence.

The argument of the Declaration grounded citizenship in consent. The natural law argument of the Declaration was a repudiation of the notion of birthright citizenship that had been the basis of British citizenship (i.e., being a British "subject") ever since it was first articulated in Calvin's Case in 1608.

Next, law professor John Eastman:

Such a claim of birthright citizenship traces its roots not to the republicanism of the American Founding, grounded as it was in the consent of the governed, but to the feudalism of medieval England, grounded in the notion that a subject owed perpetual allegiance and fealty to his sover­eign.[33] 

So is "Born in the U.S.A." an anti-American song?  No, as long as we agree through democratic republican principles.  "All men are created equal" means that Americans are free to determine their destiny through proper means--not through the aristocratic principles that underlie birthright citizenship.  In the current debate over illegal immigration, the true egalitarians here, the believers in the Declaration of Independence, are not the "birthers."  This nation long ago stopped recognizing "squatter rights." 

UPDATE:  See at least this earlier post on the 14th amendment, with Richard Adams' comments.

Over in one of the threads, political scientist Carl Scott referenced the shrinking of the mainstream media.  He is certainly right when you look at the long-term ratings trends of the CBS Evening News or the prime time line up of the old big three networks.  But I don't take much solace from that decline.  My sense is that the decline of the mainsteam media and the resulting audience fragmentation is going to make it harder for conservatives messages to reach certain segments of the population.

The old MSM sure wasn't fair.  I remember being in seventh grade and reading a Time magazine story about abortion.  I didn't know what abortion was.  At the end of the really long story I still didn't know what abortion was, but I knew that people who were against abortion were bad.  It wasn't like the story outright told you to dislike them but the message got across. 

But even though the coverage wasn't fair, the vast size of the MSM's audience, its commercial orientation and certain journalistic conventions that predominately liberal journalist felt they had to follow gave conservatives the space to get their message out.  If you had the money to but ads, you could be pretty sure that most people would hear your thirty second (or thirty minute) message.  The interviews for conservative figures might have been more hostile than the ones for liberal figures, but at least people got to see you and the hostility was usually limited to subtle cues (an exception being Bryant Gumbel, who usually didn't bother to disguise his detestation of center-right figures.)  Even an overtly hostile interview could play to a center-right figure's advantage as George H.W. Bush and Dan Rather could tell you.  Certain conventions where journalists were discouraged from openly taking sides and were obligated to describe center-right arguments, and provide coverage and interviews for center-right figures usually put boundaries on a press corps with liberal defaults.  That these conventions allowed conservative messages to reach the public has been bitterly noted by  liberal media critics who wanted the media to more overtly side with liberal partisans.  Even when the MSM clearly took sides (as in the 1964 presidential campaign), if you had the money, you could buy a thirty minute ad that could make a huge impression on people who never thought of themselves as conservatives 

The decline of the MSM, rise of the right-leaning media and the fragmentation of audience into small pockets that consume formally "nonpolitical" media has made it much easier to mobilize right-leaning Americans even as it has made it much harder for conservative messages to reach that majority of Americans that don't consume right-leaning media.  Reaching that majority is now tougher because it means fighting for space in hundreds of outlets that aren't overtly political.  These media often have a celebrity, lifestyle or ethnic/racial focus.  The defaults of those who produce the media are probably liberal, and those producers can, by their occasional interventions into political issues, shape the political orientation of their media consumers.  The most obvious example was the US Weekly "Babies, Lies and Scandal" cover story on Sarah Palin.  This helped shape the perceptions of people who don't follow much "news."  While reading my wife's Parenting magazine (don't judge me!) I was struck by an explanation of Obamacare that read like a paid advertisement.  It didn't seem "political."  It was just telling busy middle- class women (and me apparently) how a new law was going to change the lives of their families.   

Twenty years ago you could count on at least reaching those people by ads during popular programs.  Today it is much tougher not only because of audience fragmentation, but because it is easier to skip ads.  Getting conservative messages into the forums that people are consuming will require different techniques than the ones that conservatives developed to deal with their relative weakness in the old MSM.  It doesn't matter so much now that the economy is so bad, the turnout model for the November elections favors Republicans and the right-leaning media is able to help mobilize tens of millions of voters.  But reaching those tens of millions who aren't being reached now is a major long-term problem with no obvious solution.

1. Marvin Olasky says that Jim Wallis and Sojourners receive money from George Soros.
2. Jim Wallis says that Sojourners does not receive money from George Soros and that Marvin Olasky lies for a living.
3. Sojourners and Jim Wallis subsequently say that they do receive money from George Soros, though not much, though they don't say how not much.
4. Jim Wallis does not apologize for saying something that was untrue - the three grants from Soros were "so small that I hadn't remembered them" - and doesn't retract or apologize for the assertion that Olasky lies for a living.
5. The only blame Wallis is willing to assign for his own categorical statements that turned out to be categorically wrong is that it was all Olasky's fault, since Wallis merely replied in the spirit of the accusation against Sojourners.

I got to watch some of Obama's town hall thing today (you could probably find it on YouTube or something) and it reminded me why he is such a canny opponent.  Watching and listening to him is a strange and frustrating experience.  I get frustrated by his persistent intellectual dishonesty, but can't help but be impressed at his skill.

Obama was utterly deceptive about how the introduction of private accounts into Social Security would work.  He seemed to indicate that private accounts would involve older workers shifting all the money that would otherwise have gone to their Social Security benefits to the market.  He had some vague easy answers ("tweaks") about how Social Security could be saved and threw in a reference to a commission to give himself some third party validation.

He was even better...er worse on Medicare.  He repeated the amazing stupendous lie about how Obamacare extended the life of Medicare when Obamacare actually took hundreds of billions of dollars out of Medicare to pay for a new entitlement.  He was smart to use expert third party validation (from the Medicare actuaries who are required to credit the cuts as extending the life of Medicare because of arcane budget rules) so as to show how post partisan and nonideological he is.  If you didn't know about the CBO's commentary on this practice (and most people don't), Obama sounded like the most reasonable guy in the world and not a refugee from Enron's accounting department.

It doesn't really work to describe what Obama does.  You have to see and hear it.  There is something about his calmness, verbal fluidity, seeming empiricism, and easy confidence that adds up to what people think of as "moderate" in the flattering sense of the word.  He can talk for four minutes and it would take ten to explain what was wrong with what that nice smart man was saying.  It allows him to seem much less partisan and ideological than he really is.  It didn't matter so much today.  It is August and the economy is lousy.  The marginal voter isn't caring what he is saying or how he is saying it.  But we saw a preview of some of the most important domestic policy arguments that will dominate the next several years.  So the challenge is to explain both what was wrong with what Obama was saying and why your preferred policies will work better.  You have ten minutes and the message has to be pitched to the median American.  And you are following Obama.

He should not be underestimated.

might be the founding of National Affairs, and Reihan Salam's The Agenda blog (there is some overlap between those who write for the two platforms.)  They don't get much mass media attention (even from the more popular venues of the right-leaning media), but the conservative domestic policy ideas that will get picked up by the sharpest conservative candidates in the years to come are being hashed out in those places.

Also, National Review On Dead Tree has been smoking in its willingness to publish dissenting or reformist articles in a way that doesn't needlessly antagonize established conservative media figures or politicians.  There is still the problem of popularizing policy prescriptions, but we can begin to see the outlines of a set of rightish policies appropriate for the moment and that is a huge improvement over two years ago.  Now if only someone could get National Affairs subscriptions for the Arizona Republican senatorial candidates. 

• "Muslims know the idea behind the Ground Zero mosque is meant to be a deliberate provocation to thumb our noses at the infidel. The proposal has been made in bad faith..."
• "Do they not understand that building a mosque at Ground Zero is equivalent to permitting a Serbian Orthodox church near the killing fields of Srebrenica where 8,000 Muslim men and boys were slaughtered?"
• "[A] mosque is an exclusive place of worship for Muslims and not an inviting community centre. Most Americans are wary of mosques due to the hard core rhetoric that is used in pulpits. And rightly so. As Muslims we are dismayed that our co-religionists have such little consideration for their fellow citizens and wish to rub salt in their wounds and pretend they are applying a balm to sooth the pain."

• "As for those teary-eyed, bleeding-heart liberals such as New York mayor Michael Bloomberg and much of the media, who are blind to the Islamist agenda in North America, we understand their goodwill. Unfortunately for us, their stand is based on ignorance and guilt, and they will never in their lives have to face the tyranny of Islamism that targets, kills and maims Muslims worldwide, and is using liberalism itself to destroy liberal secular democratic societies from within."

  Read the entire article, from the Ottawa Citizen.
  

Mr. Sargent: You keep drawing lines in the sand. First, you disparaged mosque opponents who made a distinction between recognizing the right to place Cordoba House on Park Place and endorsing the wisdom of their doing so. When President Obama availed himself of the same distinction, you dropped that argument.

Now you make a new distinction. It is fine, you say magnanimously, "for Republicans to argue the case against the center on the merits," since "the same First Amendment that protects the right of the group to build the center also protects the right of conservatives to make a case against it." However, "it's another thing entirely if Republicans adopt criticism of Obama's speech as part of a concerted electoral strategy."

How is the latter entirely different from the former? Opposing Cordoba House is legitimate but opposing it in a politically coordinated, systematic fashion is illegitimate? The same First Amendment that protects the freedoms of religion and speech also protects the freedom of association. If Republicans have your permission to say that the mosque location is a bad idea, why can't they say so to anyone, including campaign consultants, in any manner, including speeches and campaign ads? And if it's something one Republican can say, why can't scores or hundreds of Republicans say the same?

Megan McArdle argues that Obama won't see a Reaganesque turnaround in the economy or his political fortunes.  That is probably true but that doesn't mean Republicans have a clear path to winning in 2012.  2012 won't be some Democratic version of 1984.  The economy almost certainly won't be growing as fast as it was in 193-1984.  Obama hasn't shown Reagan's ability to lop off large chunks of voters from the other party's coalition.  Obama's strengths were his ability to win large margins (and get large turnouts) among voters from Democratic-leaning groups and make gains among upper income and higher educated whites who were not reliable voters for either coalition.  That is a good place to start from, but not the stuff of 49 state sweeps.

2012 also won't be 1996.  This recession was worse that the early 90s recession and the unemployment rate  won't be in the 5s when Obama is running for reelection.  Obama also won't go as far to the center as Clinton.  I don't know what the current equivalent of Welfare Reform would be, but I don't see Obama signing a major piece of rightish policy change. 

The problem is that Obama doesn't have to win a reelection landslide in order shift the country to the left in an enduring way.  Obama's administration is in a consolidationist phase.  He has already passed a law that puts the country on the glide path to government-run medicine.  Obamacare will raise premiums while making middle-class Americans more dependent on government subsidies, guaranteed issue and community rating just to make health care coverage affordable.  The likely result of the problems Obamacare creates is a more government-run system that transitions to government price controls and the replacement of the health insurers with a single-payer system.  He only has to hang on and let the dynamics play out.  If even one of the five non-liberal (or rather nonconsistently liberal) Supreme Court Justices retire we can expect a transformational liberal majority on the Supreme Court.

If the labor market of 2012 is the same one we have now, Obama's skills won't matter and the Republicans would have a tough time losing the election.  But there is another potential scenario where Obama's chances are uncertain, but much better.  Imagine the economy is growing slowly.  The unemployment rate is in the 7s but falling very, very slowly.  Obama and his media allies have been assailing the congressional Republicans as Medicare and Social Security cutters - shades of 1995.  It doesn't help that this is a plausible interpretation of the Ryan Roadmap.  Even if congressional Republicans don't sign up for the Roadmap, it is hard to see how a Republican majority in the House can seriously cut into the deficit without cutting entitlements or defense or raising taxes.  It is probably possible but who trusts John Boehner to either come up with the right plan or find an effective way to defend it?  The ensuing arguments could do the GOP enormous damage.  Obama will be able to plausibly argue that his spending program averted a depression and put the country back on the road to recovery.  It doesn't have to be true.  It only has top seem true to some wavering voters.   As Peter Lawler says, when the answer isn't obvious, spin matters alot.  No amount of spin ("recovery summer") is going to help when the unemployment rate is 9.5%.  A slightly better labor market puts the economic discussion back in the spin zone and I'm not ready to bet against Obama in a spin contest.  This isn't even getting into Obama's demonstrated skill at crafting an enormously well funded GOTV and media operation in a year when the turnout model will be more favorable to Democrats.

None of this means that Republicans are doomed under this scenario.  They would need a good candidate, a good media message and a good GOTV operation.  Basically the opposite of the McCain campaign.  They will also need some answers on economic growth and getting the deficit under control that offer tangible benefits to the middle and aspiring working-classes without terrifying them (as most talk of entitlement cuts and market-oriented health care reform have a tendency to do.)  This will be incredibly complicated (as Paul Ryan will be the first to tell you), and the stakes are huge.  If Obama wins reelection and retains enough Democrats in congress to uphold his vetoes, Obama will be on the way to being a far more significant (from the liberal perspective) President than Clinton, even if he wins reelection by a much smaller margin.  

If the builders of the proposed Mosque near Ground Zero have pure intentions, why did they originally want to call is Cordoba House.

Update: a commentator points us to an article in Tablet on the history of Medieval Cordoba.  Apparently the myth of Medieval Muslim Spain being a haven of toleration is an invention of 19th Century Germans.  Why am I not surprised.

Ross Douthat points out that religion needs the aid of reason--America, with its insistence on natural rights and a civil religion based on it, is the case in point.  Conservatives should adopt this argument and not sound like low-grade liberals in pleading for "compassion" for the survivors and victims of 9/11.  They don't need compassion; they demand justice, and justice as the rule of law in turn requires the rule of reason.  Douthat:

The steady pressure to conform to American norms, exerted through fair means and foul [my note:  see Republican platform of 1856], eventually persuaded the Mormons to abandon polygamy, smoothing their assimilation into the American mainstream. Nativist concerns about Catholicism's illiberal tendencies [my note:  contrast Washington's letters to Catholics with those to the Jews] inspired American Catholics to prod their church toward a recognition of the virtues of democracy, making it possible for generations of immigrants to feel unambiguously Catholic and American.

Douthat also reminds us that the proposed Islamic Center's imam does not inspire confidence in his amenability to reason.  The problem of reason or natural law and Islam is elaborated on by Robert Reilly, whose work is essential on this issue.

By Ann Althouse:

Obama has made his brilliant career out of saying the most crashingly banal things to people who hear what they want to hear.

Presumably in response to John Eastman's fine work on the history of the "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" clause of the 14th Amendment, in his latest column, Michael Gerson says that those who oppose "birthright citizenship" are "Advocates for bloodline citizenship."  Does Gerson think so little of those who disagree with him on this issue?  There are a few nativists out there, but I don't think they are representative.  I am fairly certain that the vast majority understand that it is Gerson, not those who oppose birthright citizenship, who want to make birth the key characteristic in determining who is a citizen of the U.S.  Most people I know who think birthright citizenship is a mistake belive the U.S. ought to allow a good number of immigrans to come to the U.S. and become citizens.  The key disagreement between Gerson and someone like myself is that he does not think that we the people should be able to choose who may join us as citizens.

Getting to the evidence, he writes:

Civil War America did not lack for unpopular immigrants. The 1860 Census found that 13.2 percent of the U.S. population was foreign-born. The figure today is 12.3 percent. During the debate over the 14th Amendment, Sen. Edgar Cowan of Pennsylvania complained that birthright citizenship would include Gypsies, "who pay no taxes; who never perform military service; who do nothing, in fact, which becomes the citizen." Others objected that the children of Chinese laborers would be covered. Supporters of the 14th Amendment conceded both cases -- and defended them. Said Sen. John Conness of California: "We are entirely ready to accept the provision proposed in this constitutional amendment, that the children born here of Mongolian parents shall be declared by the Constitution of the United States to be entitled to civil rights and to equal protection before the law with others."

He does not quote some of the other parts of Conness's speech:  "The Chinese are regarded also not with favor as an addition to the population in a social point of view . . . they are not regarded as pleasant neighbors; their habits are not of a character that make them at all an inviting class to have near you, and the people so generally regard them."  And, he noted, Chinese workers tend to return to China.  "They do not bring their females to our country but in very limited numbers."  (Scanning over the debates quickly, I did not see anyone say they agreed with Conness.  The debate turned to other questions. But I read quickly, and may very well have missed the discussion).

In the sentence after the paragraph quoted above, Gerson notes, "The Radical Republicans who wrote the 14th Amendment were, in fact, quite radical."  Conness had been a Douglas Democrat and then a Union Republican.  To what degree he then became a radical, I don't know. He did vote to impeach President Johnson. 

It seems to me that Senator Trumbull's comment that "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" means "subject to the complete jurisdiction thereof" and "not owing allegiance to anybody else" is a better reading of the text.  Even so, Gerson does have at least one Senator on his side. (To be fair, Trumbull's comment was in the context of a discussion of Indians. Indian nations were not truly independent. They were captive nations.  But if an Indian mother gave birth one U.S. soil, rather than Indian lands, and her child was not a U.S. citizen, it would seem to imply that a person born in the U.S. to parents who had not become U.S. citizens, and who were from truly independent nations, would not be citizens).

Ulimately, it does not seem to me to be a coincidence that Justice Harlan dissented in both Plessy and in Wong Kim Ark (the birthright citizenship case).  The underlying principle, that an accident of birth is not to have ultimate importance in American law, is consistent.  After all, the principles of 1776 suggest that race is an arbitrary category in law.  Similarly, they suggest that the republic is a compact.  The parties to that compact have the right to decide who joins, and under what conditions.  Enshrining those principles more clearly in American law was, after all, the purpose of the 14th Amendment.  Trumbull and Harlan understood that.

Note: I updated this from the original post.

P.S. I recommend the opinion, both majority and dissenting in U.S. v Wong Kim Ark.  Very illuminating.

Even Unions are anti-Union:

Callaghan said he personally told Mulgrew on June 9 about his intention to try to organize nonunionized workers at UFT headquarters.

"I told him I want to have the same rights that teachers have," said Callaghan, 63, of Staten Island. "He told me he didn't want that, that he wanted to be able to fire whoever he wanted to."

The UFT has long strenuously resisted city efforts to make it easier for school administrators to fire teachers.

"This is the exact antithesis of what they preach, and Michael Mulgrew is the biggest hypocrite out there," Callaghan fumed.

Callaghan said he's planning to file a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board against the UFT for illegally blocking his unionizing effort, and he added he would slap the union with an age-discrimination lawsuit.

Harry Reid is a despicable jerk and his retirement from the Senate can't come quickly enough.  But I'm not sure that the Republican/conservative response to Reid's "I don't know how anyone of Hispanic heritage could be a Republican" comment has been as effective as it might be.  The main Republican/conservative reaction seems to be spluttering outrage and looking around for right-leaning Latinos who will say that gosh no, it is totally okay for Hispanics to be Republican.  This approach might work okay with white swing voters who don't like racialist politics.  It isn't clear to me why politically unaligned Latinos should care that Reid's comment hurt conservative feelings or care that some activist that 99.9% of Americans never heard of thinks the GOP is A OK for Latinos.  Reid's comment was in the context of an argument.  He was arguing that all Latinos had certain overriding common interests that were represented by the Democrats and opposed by the Republicans.  We can expect to see this argument from the Democrats in future campaigns (though perhaps not made with such brazen malice) and this argument (and it is a terrible argument) will have to be answered. It will have to be answered with an explanation as to why it is wrong in its presumptions that all Latinos have the same voting interests, but just as importantly, it will have to be answered by showing how Republicans offer (most) Latinos a better deal on both principle and policy.  Reid's comment is a preview of Democratic attempts to make voting for Democrats an integral part of Latino political identity so that non-Democratic Latinos become utterly marginal.  Just calling moral fouls when Democrats use this tactic won't be good enough.

That doesn't mean conservatives shouldn't be outraged or express outrage.  Marco Rubio had the best reaction so far.  The outrage at Reid's comment should be expressed within an answer about why Latinos (and people of every other racial and ethnic group) should vote Republican.  The substance of the answer makes contempt for Reid's presumption more meaningful.  Rubio hit all the right themes of free enterprise, sacrifice, family, work and intergenerational upward mobility but he was still only halfway there.  The problem is that these themes become easily tuned out sloganeering if they are not combined with specific policies that can plausibly offer tangible outcomes.

A better answer to Reid would be that Latino (and non-Latino) voters should vote Republican because of tax policies that will decrease unemployment and make it easier for working parents to raise their children.  A better answer would include arguing for health care reforms that will improve the quality and security of care while increasing take home pay. A better answer would include arguing that Republicans won't use limited and hard earned tax payer dollars to fund abortions.  And then it would make sense to conclude that the reason Harry Reid doesn't know why any Latinos would vote Republican is because he is an arrogant and prejudiced Washington hack who thinks he is entitled to people's votes based on their surname.  It also wouldn't hurt to put this message in Spanish language ads. 

This is much bigger than a Nevada Senate race.  I want Reid gone, but I'm not sure Nevada Republicans have a Senate candidate that can articulate and defend a relevant agenda in English, never mind Spanish language media.  Angle might win anyway based on the horrible condition of the Nevada labor market, but that won't stop Democrats from trying to consolidate the Latino vote based on racialist arguments.  This is a good moment for Republicans to work out their counterarguments (and policies) so as to block the Democrats from slowly gaining overwhelming margins among a large fraction of the voting population.

So I'm back from the family road trip and used YouTube to watch Mitch Daniels' performance on FOX News Sunday.  Some thoughts as they came to me,

1.  The optics were pretty bad. I couldn't tell if he was standing very awkwardly or slouching into a very uncomfortable chair.

2.  His "trickle down government" line on government stimulus was pretty good.  I know it isn't original to Daniels but the line has more credibility coming from a governor who managed to keep the state budget under control while preserving key government services and doing so without major tax increases, than if it had come from some congressional blowhard.

3.  The idea of a congressionally granted presidential impoundment power might have some merit.  Chris Christie seems to have used it to some good effect in New Jersey. My only question is, if Congress is unwilling to vote for budget savings, why would they be willing to grant the President the power to make cuts Congress doesn't want?  Is it realistic to hope for a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate for such granting the President such a power?  I'm not sure, but I think it is a worthwhile campaign issue.

4.  Daniels takes on the entitlement issues honestly, but he will need to up his game in the explanations department.  His answers will have to be more detail-oriented and be in plainer language.  Those two imperatives are in tension, but not irreconcilable. On the details front, how will increasing retirement ages impact people who work physically demanding jobs and how will means-testing be designed in such a way that it doesn't destroy incentives to save and invest for people in their forties and fifties?  On the plain language front, what fraction of the public understood what Daniels was talking about when he mentioned "changing the indexation formula?"  Entitlement issues cut really close to people since they involve question about when people can retire, how much they will be able to afford in retirement, and how they will get health care in their old age.  It is scary enough to talk about cuts in entitlements, but when the explanations are incomprehensible, it gets even scarier. In fairness to Daniels, the format didn't really allow for much detailed talk, but if he runs for President, being able to say alot about the entitlement issue in short bursts that are comprehensible to the layman will be a key to winning elections and then getting reforms through Congress.

5.  Daniels is still lost on the social issues and he put on an especially obtuse performance.  The social issues won't be primary on a day-to-day basis, but there won't be a truce for the sake of Mitch Daniels or anybody else.  To pick just one example, there won't be a truce as long as federal judges try to impose their preferred social policies.  This means that a President Daniels will have to make appointments that either advance, check or (we can hope) roll back these judicial aggressions.  And where did Daniels ever get the idea that not talking about popular positions on social issues will make it easier to pass Social Security cuts?  Obama might be a good example here.  It isn't like appointing two liberals to the Supreme Court has gotten in the way of taking a big step towards government-run health care.  Would Obama have made more progress in advancing his social democratic and corporatist economic agenda if he had appointed Robert P. George to the Supreme Court?