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David Shribman in the Post-Gazette with a healthy reminder about how much time is still left in the 2008 race.
You can almost hear the Democrats singing: There’s no way even we can lose the 2008 election. There’s upheaval in Iraq, uncertainty in the financial markets, unease in the country. President Bush’s disapproval ratings are at Richard Nixon levels. Many loyal party members think the GOP has veered off course. This is not an easy time to be a Republican.
But here’s a word of caution to the Democrats and a word of perspective for the Republicans: Presidential elections are almost always easier to analyze in retrospect than in advance, and what appears to be clear 14 months before the voters go to the polls can often turn out to be muddied once the voting starts.
Though any sober politician would rather be in the Democrats’ position today than in the Republicans’, a Democratic victory next November is no sure bet, and a new Democratic era, powered by public revulsion of the errors of George W. Bush, is an even less certain development. …
Rob Bluey finds the government program the left hates.
The Office of Labor Management Standards, the federal government’s union watchdog agency, has recouped more than $100 million for American workers since 2001. But the increased oversight on unions hasn’t gone over well with liberals in Congress, who are trying to slash the agency’s budget for next year.
Last month, pro-labor Democrats in the House successfully fought back a Republican-led challenge to restore $2 million to the agency’s budget. The Senate will take up the bill when Congress returns from its August recess.
The liberals’ revolt against the Department of Labor agency comes on the heels of an increased crackdown on union misbehavior and greater scrutiny of union finances. Following the 2000 elections, the Office of Labor Management Standards reversed nearly a decade of lax enforcement under the Clinton Administration. …
David Brooks had book review duty this weekend. He has some fun with a new example of the Dems are thinkers genre.
… The core problem with Westen’s book is that he doesn’t really make use of what we know about emotion. He builds on the work of Antonio Damasio, without applying Damasio’s conception of how emotion emerges from and contributes to reason.
In this more sophisticated view, emotions are produced by learning. As we go through life, we learn what cause leads to what effect. When, later on, we face similar situations, the emotions highlight possible outcomes, drawing us toward some actions and steering us away from others.
In other words, emotions partner with rationality. It’s not necessary to dumb things down to appeal to emotions. It’s not necessary to understand some secret language that will key certain neuro-emotional firings. The best way to win votes — and this will be a shocker — is to offer people an accurate view of the world and a set of policies that seem likely to produce good results.
This is how you make voters happy.
Cliff May Corner posts to a good Ralph Peters column.
… Whatever may have been the situation is 2003, today Iraq is the main front in the war against Islamist terror and fanaticism. Our enemies have made it so.
Of the two simultaneous missions under way – maturing a responsible government and advancing our own strategic interests – the latter is far more important. In fact, it’s vital. And on that track, we’re making stunning progress. …
… Al Qaeda is on the verge of a humiliating, devastating strategic defeat – rejected by their fellow Sunni Muslims. …
… With the sixth anniversary of 9/11 approaching, how dare we throw away so great a potential victory over those who attacked our country?
Forget the anti-war nonsense you hear. The truth is that our troops want to continue this struggle. I know. I’m here. And I’m listening to what they have to say. They’re confident as never before that we’re on the right path. …
Mona Charen, also in the Corner, posts for the umpteenth time – we did not go to war in Iraq solely because of WMD’s.
This morning on C-SPAN 2, I heard a nice young historian spout the conventional wisdom about President Bush and the Iraq War. This particular interpretation is now totally uncontroversial – but it is false.
Elizabeth Borgwardt of Washington University told an audience that George W. Bush had urged the war in Iraq in order to end the threat of weapons of mass destruction and only later used democracy promotion as a post-hoc justification for the conflict. …
The Captain has fun posting on “Winning the Jimmy Carter Sweepstakes.”
The Barack Obama campaign won an endorsement that sounds more like a kiss of death to anyone who survived the Jimmy Carter era. Zbigniew Brzezinski, the man who oversaw the disastrous foreign policy of the Carter administration, picked Obama to be the next Carter:
Zbigniew Brzezinski, one of the most influential foreign-policy experts in the Democratic Party, threw his support behind Barack Obama’s presidential candidacy, saying the Illinois senator has a better global grasp than his chief rival, Hillary Clinton. …
… How much did Zbig have to do with our feckless foreign policy regarding the Soviets? He was more of a hawk than Cyrus Vance, but then again, almost everyone was more of a hawk than Vance, except Jimmy Carter. He never bothered to resign in the face of disaster after disaster, and he was the man who created the mujaheddin counterstrategy in Afghanistan, and Zbig drafted Saudi Arabia and Pakistan to support them.
Maybe Barack Obama can get Carter’s economic adviser, Charles Schultze, to endorse him as well. That way he can campaign clearly on a return to Carter’s policies.
A more serious note with a post on agreements in Iraq.
It looks like the Iraqi political leadership remained on the job during their August recess. Representatives of all main sects in Iraq announced agreement on the most contentious issues, including a deal to initiate revenue sharing on oil production that concerned the American Congress most (via Power Line): …
Important news like that should be on page one, right?
Let’s say we’re at war, and we’re waiting for some specific action to take place to show us that our efforts are succeeding. Add in that the war itself would be rather controversial and that our political class is split as to whether we will ever see that specific action take place. Imagine that Congress and the White House have scheduled a showdown in the next couple of weeks to determine how much longer we will wait for that development.
Now imagine that the specific action for which we’ve waited actually occurs. Where would you think that story appear in Washington’s biggest newspaper? The front page, one might assume. Would you believe … page 9?
Iraq’s top five political leaders announced an agreement Sunday night to release thousands of prisoners being held without charge and to reform the law that has kept thousands of members of Saddam Hussein’s political party out of government jobs.
The agreement was publicized after several days of meetings between Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, a Shiite; President Jalal Talabani, a Kurd; Vice President Tariq al-Hashimi, a Sunni; Vice President Adel Abdul Mahdi, a Shiite; and Massoud Barzani, president of the semiautonomous Kurdish region. …
John Fund reports on the increase of government licensing of business. He, and the Institute for Justice claim this is a method to increase cost of entry in many occupations.
Americans pride ourselves on being a country that encourages people to work and stand on their own two feet. But over the past few decades there has been a hidden surge in regulations, licensing and monopolies that discourage people from starting the kinds of small businesses that are often the first step toward self-reliance.
In the 1950s, only about 4.5% of jobs required a license to work. Today, that proportion is more than 20%. Many of the jobs that require a government stamp of approval don’t involve health or safety. Depending on the state, you need a license to be a hair braider, florist, auctioneer, interior designer or even fortune-teller. Many licensing regulations exist only because business interests lobby for them in order to reduce competition. They then often set up oversight boards that protect incumbents in the industry while excluding newcomers.
Reason Foundation analyst Adam Summers has written a new study of occupational licensing (available here) that catalogues some of the absurd requirements to get occupational licenses. Does a hair braider really need hundreds of hours of instruction in all aspects of cosmetology, hardly any of which he will ever use? Is it essential to the well-being of young children that directors of day-care centers possess master’s degrees? What’s the point of refusing to license a car service unless it has at least 10 cars?
Misc. Corner Posts. The second is a two-language pun.