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Bill Kristol says it is not just about the economy.
… focusing a campaign only on the economy is risky. The economy is unpredictable, and may end up doing well enough in 2012 that it doesn’t automatically help the Republicans—even if the nominee is someone who can boast of his success in the private sector and knowledge of how business works. …
… Over the last couple of weeks, we’ve seen how Obama-care threatens freedom of religion (see Jonathan V. Last’s piece in this issue). We’ve been reminded of Eric Holder’s pathetic and ideological mismanagement of the Department of Justice (see Mark Hemingway’s editorial). We’ve seen several instances of this president’s weakness in foreign policy (see Elliott Abrams’s editorial). We’ve had reminders from the Congressional Budget Office of the looming entitlement and budget disaster and of the Obama administration’s gross irresponsibility on that front.
So there’s plenty besides the economy for the GOP to call attention to, to shout about, to use to illustrate the short and long-term dangers of Obama administration policies. A successful Republican presidential candidate will have to be about far more than the economy, narrowly understood, in order to win the election and to lay the groundwork for successful governance. Ronald Reagan famously asked at the end of the 1980 campaign whether we were better off than we had been four years before. But he had spent his whole campaign laying the predicate for that question by explaining why the Carter administration’s foreign and domestic policies had failed, not just economically but socially, and not just at home but in the world. He was also able to explain why liberal policies would continue us on a downward path. Reagan never left any doubt that the fundamental problem wasn’t just a few quarters of subpar economic performance. The problem was the arrogant destructiveness and wrongheaded fecklessness of modern liberalism. It still is.
Mark Steyn says Komen didn’t have it coming.
As Sen. Obama said during the 2008 campaign, words matter. Modern “liberalism” is strikingly illiberal; the high priests of “tolerance” are increasingly intolerant of even the mildest dissent; and those who profess to “celebrate diversity” coerce ever more ruthlessly a narrow homogeneity. Thus, the Obama administration’s insistence that Catholic institutions must be compelled to provide free contraception, sterilization and abortifacients. This has less to do with any utilitarian benefit a condomless janitor at a Catholic school might derive from Obamacare, and more to do with the liberal muscle of Big Tolerance enforcing one-size-fits-all diversity.
The bigger the Big Government, the smaller everything else: In Sweden, expressing a moral objection to homosexuality is illegal, even on religious grounds, even in church, and a pastor minded to cite the more robust verses of Leviticus would risk four years in jail. In Canada, the courts rule that Catholic schools must allow gay students to take their same-sex dates to the prom. The secular state’s Bureau of Compliance is merciless to apostates to a degree even your fire-breathing imams might marvel at.
Consider the current travails of the Susan G. Komen Foundation. This is the group responsible for introducing the pink “awareness-raising” ribbon for breast cancer – as emblematic a symbol of America’s descent into postmodernism as anything. It has spawned a thousand other colored “awareness-raising” ribbons: my current favorite is the periwinkle ribbon for acid reflux. We have had phenomenal breakthroughs in hues of awareness-raising ribbons, and for this the Susan G. Komen Foundation deserves due credit.
Until the other day, Komen were also generous patrons of Planned Parenthood, the “women’s health” organization. The Foundation then decided it preferred to focus on organizations that are “providing the lifesaving mammogram.” Planned Parenthood does not provide mammograms, despite its president, Cecile Richards, testifying to the contrary before Congress last year. Rather, Planned Parenthood provides abortions; it’s the biggest abortion provider in the United States. For the breast cancer bigwigs to wish to target their grants more relevantly is surely understandable.
But not if you’re a liberal enforcer. Sen. Barbara Boxer, with characteristic understatement, compared the Komen Foundation’s Nancy Brinker to Joe McCarthy: …
Jennifer Rubin has Komen comments too.
… You might agree or not but the presumptuousness of liberal members of Congress who believe it is within their purview to bully private charities suggests that the left really does not understand the important distinction between public policy and private, voluntary civil institutions. (See my colleague Greg Sargent’s piece on the letter that two dozen members sent to the Komen Foundation.) …
… Pardon me, but this is nuts. Planned Parenthood can raise its own money (which it did in spades in the wake of the flap). Those who want to give to a breast cancer charity can donate with the peace of mind that their money will be used to fight breast cancer. (Donors did so generously as a result of the controversy.) Now Planned Parenthood’s bosses have every right under current law to do what they do and raise money to fund their organization. But shame on them for intimidating other groups that might contemplate the same move as the Susan G. Komen Foundation made.
And to members of Congress, let me say: Butt out. Don’t you have enough to handle not doing your own jobs without hectoring charities to do your bidding?
Ross Douthat wonders why the media is so blind about abortion.
IN the most recent Gallup poll on abortion, as many Americans described themselves as pro-life as called themselves pro-choice. A combined 58 percent of Americans stated that abortion should either be “illegal in all circumstances” or “legal in only a few circumstances.” These results do not vary appreciably by gender: in the first Gallup poll to show a slight pro-life majority, conducted in May 2009, half of American women described themselves as pro-life.
But if you’ve followed the media frenzy surrounding the Susan G. Komen for the Cure foundation’s decision — which it backpedaled from, with an apology, after a wave of frankly brutal coverage — to discontinue about $700,000 in funding for Planned Parenthood, you would think all these millions of anti-abortion Americans simply do not exist.
From the nightly news shows to print and online media, the coverage’s tone alternated between wonder and outrage — wonder that anyone could possibly find Planned Parenthood even remotely controversial and outrage that the Komen foundation had “politicized” the cause of women’s health.
Steven Malanga writes in the Journal about the court that has broken New Jersey.
When he decided against running for president last fall, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie said he had lots more to do to fix his “broken” state. Certainly true on spending and taxes, where Mr. Christie has made significant progress. But there’s another issue he’s only begun to take on: the New Jersey Supreme Court.
Last month Mr. Christie nominated two new members to the court, easily one of the most activist in the nation. His appointments could reshape the seven-member panel, which over the past half-century has transformed the Garden State, seizing control of school funding and hijacking the zoning powers of towns and cities, among other moves.
“I don’t think the supreme court has any business being involved in setting the budget of the state government,” the governor complained last year. Yet it is, extensively.
New Jersey’s supreme court is the product of the state’s 1947 constitution, which jettisoned the unwieldy 16-member Court of Errors and Appeals. The new court established in its place was shaped by Arthur Vanderbilt, a former dean of New York University’s law school who served as the court’s first chief justice. Vanderbilt is best remembered for persuading President Dwight Eisenhower to appoint to the U.S. Supreme Court William Brennan, who then led that court’s liberal activist wing for more than three decades.
The New Jersey court was power-hungry from its inception, but its ambition began bearing serous fruit, especially regarding education policy, in the 1970s. …
Politico has the story of Dick Armey dispensing with Newt.
Former House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-Texas), head of FreedomWorks, said Sunday presidential candidate Newt Gingrich won’t have another comeback.
“I don’t think Newt will be able to replicate that magic moment,” Armey said, adding he believes Gingrich’s peak in South Carolina was a momentary surge and he has “played that string out.”
“I feel bad for him. I think he’s digressed; taking a second-rate campaign into a first-rate vendetta,” Armey said of Gingrich’s attacks on GOP front-runner Mitt Romney.