A Peek in the Mirror

Ross Douthat is a conservative columnist at the New York Times (given David Brooks’ frequent forays into non-ideological common sense, it would not be inaccurate to say he is THE conservative columnist there). This morning’s column displayed an interesting combination of obtuseness and dawning recognition of political reality.

Douthat joins other conservatives who simply cannot fathom why Romney isn’t walking away with this election. He goes through several possible reasons–identifying “villains” like the “liberal education establishment” that has shifted the culture to the left–before settling on the likely culprit. And that culprit is…George W. Bush! He’s the one who destroyed the party’s brand!

Now, Bush clearly deserves a good deal of blame for the electorate’s distrust of GOP competence. But nowhere does Douthat suggest that the ham-handed Romney campaign with its wooden candidate might have something to do with the current status of the race. And only at the very end of his column does he grudgingly admit that the party doesn’t seem to have learned anything from the disaster in Iraq and the rape of the middle class by the bankers and other Masters of the Universe.

Conventional political wisdom tells us that “it’s the economy, stupid!” So Douthat and other conservative pundits are mystified by the increasing likelihood of a second Obama term.  What seems to have escaped them is yet another timeworn political adage: “you can’t beat something with nothing.”

You can’t beat a sitting President with a deeply flawed candidate whose only persuasive argument is that he isn’t Obama. And you can’t beat a party that reflects the ideas and aspirations of a diverse and ever-changing electorate with a party composed mainly of rigidly ideological old white guys.

As the GOP keeps reminding Obama, you can’t blame George W. Bush for everything.

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Getting It Backward

In a recent article about the experiences of gay Supreme Court clerks, I came across the following paragraphs:

Justice Antonin Scalia, joined by Rehnquist and Justice Clarence Thomas, has authored some of the most caustic dissents against gay legal rights. In his dissent in Lawrence v Texas, Scalia said the majority had “signed on to the so-called homosexual agenda … directed at eliminating the moral opprobrium that has traditionally attached to homosexual conduct.”

Asked last month in an interview about his dissents in past gay-rights cases, voiced from the bench as well as in his written opinions, Scalia said he was merely reading the Constitution, which he says does not cover a right to same-sex relations: “Where does it come from?” he said. “This is a trendy view of the current society elite. It’s not right to impose it on everybody else. It’s a democratic question. If you want to permit homosexual sodomy, then pass a law.”

This betrays a profound misreading of the Constitution and our most basic approach to the role of government–a misreading that Scalia himself would scorn in a different context.

One of the very few things the Tea Party folks get right is their insistence that rights precede government. Their formulation is that rights are “god-given”–I won’t go that far, but I agree with the Founders that humans have rights simply by virtue of being human, that we are born with “inalienable” rights. The Bill of Rights is a list of actions that government is forbidden to take—actions that would violate those antecedent rights.

The language in the Ninth and Tenth Amendments–amendments that Scalia the “textualist” rarely mentions–is pretty explicit on the point, providing that failure to “enumerate” a right in the preceding Amendments is not to be taken as evidence that the right was not protected. That language was included in order to calm the fears of folks like Alexander Hamilton, who argued that the government of delegated powers that the Founders had created had been given no power to infringe fundamental liberties, and worried that a written Bill of Rights would inevitably omit some important ones.

The Constitution doesn’t explicitly protect a right to have children, or a right to travel, or any number of other rights the Court has had no difficulty recognizing as protected. We would rightly consider it absurd if a Justice of the Supreme Court said something like “If you want to allow people to have children, pass a law.” A majority of the Court–unlike Scalia–understands that we don’t comb through the Constitution to find out whether government, in its infinite wisdom, has conferred a particular right on We the People.We look to the Constitution to see whether government has been given the right to interfere with a particular liberty.

And I don’t find anywhere in the Constitutional history or text where government is given the power to decide who has human rights.

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Those Tantalizing Tax Returns

As everyone on the planet knows by now, Mitt Romney is not going to release more than one year of his tax returns.

And as every parent on the planet knows, there is nothing–nothing!–that will intensify children’s interest in something like being told they can’t see or do it. And come to think of it, adults have a similar tendency to fixate on what is seemingly out of reach.

In the last few days, we’ve had two examples of this phenomenon: hackers who claim they have obtained copies from PriceWaterhouseCooper have threatened to release the returns if they aren’t paid a ransom; and Larry Flynt (yes, he of Hustler ‘fame’) has offered a million dollars to anyone who will deliver the returns to him.

You’d think they’d get together….Maybe they still will.

These new efforts come on the heels of what may be the biggest political gambling operation outside Intrade–a robust market in rumors about what could possibly be so damaging in those returns. It is intriguing. Romney’s intransigence about his tax returns adds one more element to the shady public persona he has projected. (A Facebook friend recently asked “Is anyone else waiting for Romney to offer a great deal to put you into a 2012 Malibu?”) What can he be hiding that would hurt him more than the secrecy does?

It isn’t only the refusal to release his taxes. As the Presidential campaign goes on, it becomes more and more apparent that Romney’s entire strategy was to make the election a referendum on the incumbent. That wasn’t a bad idea; with the economy still sluggish, and many people still very uncomfortable with Mr. Obama’s perceived “otherness,” making the choice all about the President made some sense. (When you add in Mr. Romney’s own wooden demeanor and general lack of warmth and likability, it makes even more sense.)

Making the election about Obama does not relieve the Republicans of the duty to run an actual candidate. But that’s what they’ve done. Even the media–obsessed with the “horse race” and generally oblivious to policy–has complained about the absolute absence of specifics to back up the vague platitudes coming from the Romney-Ryan ticket. The message has been “fire Obama and we’ll do better,” but there has been no explanation of how–no description of the steps Romney would propose to take, or how his administration would differ from either Barack Obama’s or George W. Bush’s.  We are left with “trust me.”

If you are going to center your campaign on a message that essentially says: “Voters, you need to fire the incumbent and replace him with a more trustworthy person who is a better manager,” then at an absolute minimum you at least need to demonstrate that you are that trustworthy, competent person. You can’t also ask us to take your own character and capacity on trust. But that is exactly what Romney is doing by refusing to release his tax returns.

He is asking voters to fire Obama and hire an empty suit.

Whatever is in those tax returns must really be damaging.

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Our Deteriorating Public Services

I’m officially pissed.

The rant I’m about to embark upon was triggered by the City’s recycling contractor, Republic, which–for the third straight time–picked up everyone’s recycling except ours. We’ve had plenty of reasons to be less than enamored of the recycling program, which charges extra for the service (thus incentivizing environmentally irresponsible behavior). My biggest gripe has been the refusal of Republic to come down the alley, as our regular garbage pick-up does. Since we live in the city–the “hood”–that means we have to schlep our container down one alley, then another, in order to get it to the street. Not only is this inconvenient for elderly folks (and we’re pretty elderly!), it means that the street looks cluttered and trashy for two or three days, while cans are taken out and then returned to garages.

It isn’t just recycling. Regular trash pickup has gotten hit-or-miss of late. Crime in our neighborhood has increased to a worrisome degree–initially, the increase was mostly petty thefts, or cars being broken into, but more recently, people have been mugged and homes invaded while the occupants were still there. Scary stuff that we haven’t previously experienced.

When apartments being built a couple of blocks from our house caught fire a couple of months ago, it took IFD what seemed like a long time to arrive. That may have been an incorrect impression, but several people in the neighborhood reported a discomfiting wait between their 911 calls and the first truck. In those minutes, the blaze became a huge conflagration (we could feel the heat on our front porch, which is a good two and a half blocks away, and the flames could be seen for miles).

Not far from where that fire raged is a city park that–despite repeated promises–continues to shows signs of neglect. It has a very nice pool, but the hours of operation have been sharply cut back since it first opened.

It’s hard to remember that during the Hudnut Administration, streets in the Mile Square were swept every day. Now, from the looks of it, they aren’t being swept at all.

Part of the problem is management. Construction and especially street repairs drag on for weeks more than necessary (and let’s not even talk about the Cultural Trail segments that kept parts of Mass Avenue and Virginia Avenue closed for months on end while little or no work got done). Accountability for garbage collection is a management issue. But the major culprit is lack of money. So we have too few police, too few lifeguards, too few managers generally.

It’s bad enough that we’ve starved local government; it’s worse that we’ve actually built that starvation diet into our state constitution. Indiana taxpayers have spoken, and what they’ve said is that they don’t care enough about the quality of public services to pay for those services.

Unfortunately, we get what we pay for.

One of the unintended consequences of a city with inadequate public services and a deteriorating quality of life is that the people who can, leave.  And they take their tax dollars with them, triggering a cycle of further decline.

We aren’t there yet, but the signs are ominous.

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