David Boaz

Today I saw a John Edwards bumper sticker — the first one I can really recall — on a beautiful Audi convertible parked in a luxury development in a wealthy suburb of Washington, D.C. Just an idle question: Do you think it’s more likely that this John Edwards supporter is part of Edwards’s much touted constituency of mill workers and “regular, hard-working Americans” or of Edwards’s real constituency of trial lawyers and lobbyists?

Sen. John McCain issued a ringing endorsement of the Supreme Court’s Heller decision:

Today’s ruling recognizes that gun ownership is a fundamental right – sacred, just as the right to free speech and assembly.

You can’t get much stronger than that. Except . . .  wait . . . what was it McCain said about our sacred right to free speech? Oh, right, two years ago on the Don Imus show he said, “I would rather have a clean government than one where quote First Amendment rights are being respected, that has become corrupt.” So when McCain says that our Second Amendment rights are just as fundamental and sacred as our First Amendment rights, maybe he’s pulling a bait-and-switch. Because he’s thoroughly indifferent to the First Amendment.

In his statement on the Heller decision McCain went on to say, “This ruling does not mark the end of our struggle against those who seek to limit the rights of law-abiding citizens. We must always remain vigilant in defense of our freedoms.”

So true.

In the interview touted below by Jim Harper, the faux-neocon character played by Stephen Colbert asks constitutional scholar Neal Katyal, “Where does the Constitution get off telling the government what it can and cannot do?”

He’s ostensibly speaking for the four conservative justices who dissented in the Boumediene v. Bush case. But today he could be channeling the four liberal justices who dissented in the D.C. v. Heller case. Justice John Paul Stevens wrote that he couldn’t imagine that the Constitution would “limit the tools available to elected officials wishing to regulate civilian uses of weapons.”

It is sadly hard to find justices who don’t, in some cases, sound like “Stephen Colbert”:

“Where does the Constitution get off telling the government what it can and cannot do?”

For a discussion of how the Constitution does in fact establish a government of delegated, enumerated, and thus limited powers, go here.

Over at RedState, they’re excited about a video narrated by Sen. Fred Thompson — remember him? — for the President’s Dinner of the National Republican Senatorial Committee and the National Republican Congressional Committee. It’s a fine video, full of stirring music and appeals to freedom and smaller government by Thompson, John McCain, and the President — Ronald Reagan, that is. In 5 minutes and 28 seconds, there was no room for a clip, a photo, or a mention of the current President, what’s his name, Bush.

Republicans are no dummies. If they haven’t had a president they’re proud to be associated with in the past 20 years, they’ll reach back 27 years ago to the first inaugural address of a president they can still sell.

I’ve just posted a piece at the Guardian on Sen. James Webb’s Scots-Irish ethnic populism. But he’s got his good side, too. A Virginia newspaper reports today:

Virginia Sen. Jim Webb began building a public case Thursday to change the nation’s drug laws to stress treatment over incarceration for nonviolent offenders.

The freshman Democrat held a hearing of the Joint Economic Committee to solicit testimony from prosecutors and scholars who argued that the decades-long emphasis on incarceration has been costly and ineffective.

David Boaz: The potential vice-presidential candidate supports liberal economic policies because of his Scots-Irish heritage

The potential vice-presidential candidate supports liberal economic policies because of his Scots-Irish heritage

Richard Just at the New Republic magazine is not impressed with Virginia senator Jim Webb as a running mate for Barack Obama. Webb is fundamentally illiberal, he writes, a misogynist and an ethnic nationalist and “something of an apologist for the Confederacy.” So why do lots of liberals like Webb, Just asks. “In the years since he left the Republican party, Webb has found his way to certain policy stands that liberals correctly find attractive. He was right about Iraq, and, on economics, he is right to criticise the disparity between rich and poor.” Just can’t figure out how a fundamentally illiberal Scots-Irish nationalist can arrive at all those good liberal tax-hiking, big-spending, trade-restricting positions that “liberals” like.

But in fact Webb’s liberal positions on economic issues stem directly from his self-image as an oppressed working-class white man. When I read his book Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America, I was struck by how it burned with a passionate hatred of the English in both England and America, who in Webb’s view had been keeping his people down for hundreds of years. Throughout the book he complains about “the Wasp hierarchy” and the “Cavalier aristocracy” from which the hard-working Scots-Irish have been systematically excluded. Just notes that too: “Perhaps the most unappealing thing about Webb’s worldview is that it seems to be built largely on resentment. In his book Born Fighting, you can practically feel the resentment coming off the page.”

Webb complains that affirmative action “focused only on the disadvantages that had accrued to blacks,” while “the white cultures whose ancestors had gained the least benefit from the elitist social structure” were “grouped together with the veneer that had formed the aristocracy.” Webb points out that in a landmark 1974 study from the National Opinion Research Centre, family incomes among different white ethnic groups varied far more than the black-white differential. White Protestants other than Episcopalians were at the bottom of the income rankings. White Baptists had an educational level at the same level as black Americans and far below that of Jews. A later NORC study, he went on to write, showed that as late as 2000 white Baptists and “Irish Protestants” had less educational attainment than the national average.

And the whole tone of Webb’s discussion is not “Maybe we should have done less fighting and drinking and more reading.” Rather, it’s: “The English have kept us down.” His complaint about affirmative action is not that blacks (and other racial minorities) get it. It’s that his people don’t.

In a Wall Street Journal column just after his election to the Senate, Webb applied his identity-based politics to current political issues. He complained about “our society’s steady drift toward a class-based system,” in which the rich make millions while workers face “stagnant wages and disappearing jobs” in an era of globalisation. In his campaign he called for ensuring that “free trade becomes fair trade.”

Jim Webb supports Richard Just’s economic policies because he is a burning mass of ethnic resentment. Maybe liberals should worry about that.

Executives from Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley met with Democratic staff members of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee last week to make the case that trading in energy contracts is not the reason that oil prices are rising. Judging by Jeff Birnbaum’s report in the Washington Post, it’s not easy to teach Democrats about economics:

But the executives were met with skepticism and occasional hostility. “Spare us your lecture about supply and demand,” one of the Democratic aides said, abruptly cutting off one of the executives.

Another aide “warned the executives that no matter what arguments they muster, it would be hard to prevent Congress from acting.” So much for fact-finding and economic sanity in an election year.

The federal voucher program that enables nearly 2,000 children in the District of Columbia to attend private schools is facing opposition in the Democratic Congress and may be discontinued. Some people just can’t stand to think that kids might get educated outside the grasp of the government. 

The most honest, decent, and thoughtful Democratic president of modern times, Jed Bartlet, was surprised to find himself supporting vouchers on an episode of NBC’s “The West Wing.” Bartlet’s staff summoned the mayor of Washington, D.C., to the White House to plot strategy for his veto of a Republican-backed bill to provide vouchers for a few students in D.C. schools–and was stunned to discover that the mayor and the D.C. school board president both supported the program, as indeed Mayor Anthony Williams and School Board President Peggy Cooper Cafritz did in real life. Why? the president asked the mayor. “After six years of us promising to make schools better next year,” the mayor replied, “we’re ready to give vouchers a try….We spend over $13,000 per student–that’s more than anywhere else in the country-and we don’t have a lot to show for it.” (As Andrew Coulson wrote recently in the Washington Post, the real cost is actually much higher than that.)

Then the president summons his young personal aide to testify to the merits of D.C. public schools and gets another surprise:

Faced with the evidence, President Bartlet decided to do the right thing. Will Congress?

I pulled the September 24, 2007, copy of the New Republic out from a stack on my coffee table last night and happened on a fascinating column about the upcoming primaries. John Judis laid out in convincing detail just why the primary race was likely to go all the way to June and maybe even to the convention. He did acknowledge that people had made such predictions before:

Of course, dire prognostications of brokered conventions are made nearly every election…. But the structure of the election has changed this year. The old schedule of primaries and caucuses was designed to winnow the field. Invariably, only two candidates were left standing by March, one of whom would eventually capture enough delegates through the remaining contests to win the nomination. By contrast, the 2008 schedule concentrates more than half of the primary and caucus votes in the first month, which ends February 5. If there is no clear frontrunner by then, the race will probably continue on into June and perhaps even up until the convention.

And that’s why, he said, the delegates just might find themselves choosing the nominee at their convention in Minneapolis.

Yes, Minneapolis. Not Denver. The Republican convention. Because, Judis said, it was likely that Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney, and Fred Thompson would divide the states on a regional basis and no one would get a majority of the delegates. “So there is a very good chance that, by June, none of the Republican candidates will have secured the nomination.”

And then what would happen? Well, “the struggle for the nomination would probably move to the GOP convention’s rules committee,” which would have to decide, among other things, whether to disqualify delegates from Florida and other states that held their primaries too early.

TNR readers might have been worrying, Could this happen to our party? Not to worry, said Judis:

Democrats seem far less likely to face this sort of challenge next year. Indeed, Hillary Clinton appears to be putting her competition behind her, and none of her challengers has a built-in regional advantage that will ensure a respectable block of delegates….In fact, the compressed primary schedule could make a stalemate less rather than more likely for Democrats….While Republicans become ever more fractious as the general election approaches, Democrats will have already spent months coalescing around a new leader.

In this I think Judis was doubly, or triply, wrong. Not only did he get the primary process completely wrong in each party, I think he was wrong to predict that a drawn-out nominating process would be bad for the party. It seems clear today that Barack Obama has greatly benefited from the long battle with Hillary Clinton: he held the nation’s attention longer, he became a sharper debater, he raised unprecedented sums of money, he built an organization in every state, he faced a lot of the revelations and charges that would otherwise have come up closer to the election.

So . . . what are the pundits predicting about the fall election?