May 30, 2012

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Peter Wehner makes a point about the administration’s claim Romney has no idea how to be president.

… For Obama and Biden to lecture Romney on the qualifications for being president is like John Edwards and Bill Clinton lecturing us on the importance of fidelity in marriage. Their case is undermined by their record, their actions, and their failures.

I cannot imagine a greater in-kind gift to the Romney campaign than for the president and the vice president to run on their stewardship. But that is what they’ve decided to do, at least this week.

Andrew Malcolm says Wisconsin is very important.

… June 5 is the election in Wisconsin, the unions’ attempt to recall Republican Gov. Scott Walker using Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett. Yeah, Yeah, yeah, you say. That’s a re-run of the 2010 election. And you’re right. It is. And the same result is likely, according to late polls.

But this time much more is at stake. This time Wisconsin’s election has become a symbol of the national struggle between Republicans and Democrats, between fiscal restraint and spending as usual, between President Obama’s vision of uncontrolled spending to transform America into something else and the opposite.

The stakes are huge. Because either way the winning side will interpret Cheeseland’s verdict as emblematic of the national mood, with a national election coming just 154 days later.

Obama didn’t deliver what he promised the unions during this term. So, his operatives at the Democratic National Committee are quietly sending in money and help to oust Walker, a fiscal hawk whose budget cuts, collective bargaining reforms and radical ideas such as teachers paying some of their pension are already benefiting local governments and school boards.

But Obama doesn’t want a high profile there in case the Dems lose there again. The Real Good Talker is already suffering from E.D., Election Dysfunction as a significant number of voters have opted for nobodies or “Uncommitted” against him in Democratic primaries, even though he’s essentially unchallenged. …

The analogies with the Civil War are overdone, but Bill Kristol’s piece on significance of Wisconsin and the GOP’s deep bench is good to read.

… Campaigns tend to focus on making the case for their uniquely qualified candidate. But the case for Romney as president is immeasurably strengthened if it’s not just about Mitt Romney. His case is reinforced by the successes of governors like Mitch Daniels and Bobby Jindal and Chris Christie and Bob McDonnell and Scott Walker and Susana Martinez. These governors have had real successes dealing with the fiscal and financial challenges their states have faced. And this during the same period in which President Obama (and to some degree President Bush before him) failed to grapple with comparable problems at the national level—and at the same time that Democratic governors and legislators in states like Illinois and California have conspicuously failed.

If Team Romney can become Team Romney-Walker-Daniels-Christie-et al., Romney’s campaign will take on a sharper focus. His chances of prevailing this fall will increase. It’s true that he might win anyway in a long and difficult slog. But a Walker victory in Wisconsin on the first Tuesday in June could provide a defining moment for the Romney campaign—and for the forces of responsible Republican reform against reactionary Democratic opposition.

It’s up to the Romney campaign to seize that moment and spend the months after June 5 explaining that a Republican president is needed to complete at the national level the “work so gloriously prosecuted so far” by Republican governors.

 

Michael Barone says life in the liberal cocoon dulls the senses.

… cocooning has an asymmetrical effect on liberals and conservatives. Even in a cocoon, conservatives cannot avoid liberal mainstream media, liberal Hollywood entertainment and, these days, the liberal Obama administration.

They’re made uncomfortably aware of the arguments of those on the other side. Which gives them an advantage in fashioning their own responses.

Liberals can protect themselves better against assaults from outside their cocoon. They can stay out of megachurches and make sure their remote controls never click on Fox News. They can stay off the AM radio dial so they will never hear Rush Limbaugh.

The problem is that this leaves them unprepared to make the best case for their side in public debate. They are too often not aware of holes in arguments that sound plausible when bandied between confreres entirely disposed to agree.

We have seen how this works on some issues this year.

Take the arguments developed by professor Randy Barnett of Georgetown Law that Obamacare’s mandate to buy health insurance is unconstitutional. Some liberal scholars like Jack Balkin of Yale have addressed them with counterarguments of their own.

But liberal politicians and Eric Holder’s Justice Department remained clueless about them. Then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, asked whether Obamacare was unconstitutional, could only gasp, “Are you serious? Are you serious?” …

 

A good example of leftist cocooning is the disparate reactions to a couple of hit pieces posing as books. Byron York tells about the fawning treatment made over a hatchet job on Bush and compares that to the left liberal press practically ignoring a new book on Obama. Here’s how the NY Times got the word of the Bush book out on the sly.

… The New York Times also found a way to pass on the accusation without passing on the accusation; the paper published several articles about the controversy over the book, even if it did not directly quote the book itself. Times readers certainly got the idea.

The party ended when the Dallas Morning News reported Hatfield was “a felon on parole, convicted in Dallas of hiring a hit man for a failed attempt to kill his employer with a car bomb in 1987.” The publisher of “Fortunate Son,” St. Martin’s Press, quickly withdrew the book.

But nobody could withdraw the story. For a while, the tale that Bush had been arrested for cocaine possession, even though it was told by an unknown author who was also a felon who apparently made the whole thing up — that tale was the talk of the 2000 presidential race. (Hatfield committed suicide in 2001.)

Fast-forward to today. Klein’s book reports that in the spring of 2008, in the middle of the presidential campaign and in the heat of the controversy over Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s incendiary sermons, a very close friend of Barack Obama’s offered Wright a payoff if Wright would remain silent until after the November election.

The source of the story is Jeremiah Wright himself. Wright told it, in his own words, in a nearly three-hour recorded interview with Klein. (The author gave the audio of the entire interview to me, as well as to other reporters who asked.)

Unlike the media storm over “Fortunate Son,” the Wright revelation has attracted very little comment in the press. The Associated Press and most of those outlets that talked about Bush and cocaine? They’ve had little or nothing to say about Jeremiah Wright and alleged payoffs. …

 

Robert Samuelson says it’s time to stop pretending that everyone should have a college education.

The college-for-all crusade has outlived its usefulness. Time to ditch it. Like the crusade to make all Americans homeowners, it’s now doing more harm than good. It looms as the largest mistake in educational policy since World War II, even though higher education’s expansion also ranks as one of America’s great postwar triumphs.

Consider. In 1940, fewer than 5 percent of Americans had a college degree. Going to college was “a privilege reserved for the brightest or the most affluent” high-school graduates, wrote Diane Ravitch in her history of U.S. education, “The Troubled Crusade.” No more. At last count, roughly 40 percent of Americans had some sort of college degree: about 30 percent a bachelor’s degree from a four-year institution; the rest associate degrees from community colleges.

Starting with the GI Bill in 1944, governments at all levels promoted college. From 1947 to 1980, enrollments jumped from 2.3 million to 12.1 million. In the 1940s, private colleges and universities accounted for about half. By the 1980s, state schools — offering heavily subsidized tuitions — represented nearly four-fifths. Aside from a democratic impulse, the surge reflected “the shift in the occupational structure to professional, technical, clerical and managerial work,” noted Ravitch. The economy demanded higher skills; college led to better-paying jobs.

College became the ticket to the middle class, the be-all-and-end-all of K-12 education. If you didn’t go to college, you’d failed. Improving “access” — having more students go to college — drove public policy.

We overdid it. The obsessive faith in college has backfired.

For starters, we’ve dumbed down college. …

 

Mark Perry has the proof college has been dumbed down.

In 1960, the average undergraduate grade awarded in the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Minnesota was 2.27 on a four-point scale.  In other words, the average letter grade at the University of Minnesota in the early 1960s was about a C+, and that was consistent with average grades at other colleges and universities in that era.  In fact, that average grade of C+ (2.30-2.35 on a 4-point scale) had been pretty stable at America’s colleges going all the way back to the 1920s (see chart above from GradeInflation.com, a website maintained by Stuart Rojstaczer, a retired Duke University professor who has tirelessly crusaded for several decades against “grade inflation” at U.S. universities).

By 2006, the average GPA at public universities in the U.S. had risen to 3.01 and at private universities to 3.30.  That means that the average GPA at public universities in 2006 was equivalent to a letter grade of B, and at private universities a B+, and it’s likely that grades and GPAs have continued to inflate over the last six years. …

 

Which brings to mind a two year old post from the blog The View From Alexandria. The post is about Reynold’s Law. The bien pensants who run our governments have ruined home ownership and college education.

… The government decides to try to increase the middle class by subsidizing things that middle class people have: If middle-class people go to college and own homes, then surely if more people go to college and own homes, we’ll have more middle-class people. But homeownership and college aren’t causes of middle-class status, they’re markers for possessing the kinds of traits — self-discipline, the ability to defer gratification, etc. — that let you enter, and stay, in the middle class. Subsidizing the markers doesn’t produce the traits; if anything, it undermines them. …

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