Morning Fog

Should North Dakotans Be Represented In The Senate?

It was only a week ago that I commented about our skewed system of political representation, in which a state like North Dakota, which has only a fraction of one percent of the country's population, nevertheless can become the tail that wags the dog in the U.S. Senate.

In several previous posts, I have also criticized the continuing failure of Congress (and of the American people as a whole) to permit citizens of the District of Columbia a voting representative in the U.S. House of Representatives, or any representation at all in the Senate.  Opponents of DC voting rights have usually suggested that the District is just too small to have Senators. 

But if North Dakota, with 672,000 people, has two Senators; and Wyoming, whose population is 563,000, also has two, I think we have to ask why, in the 21st century, the District, with 601,000, should not be a state or should not have two Senators to represent its population.  

Other objections opponents have raised include that the District's special status, as defined in the Constitution, precludes such representation.  Of course, it's recognized that some special arrangements - mostly involving local government and the jurisdiction over federal facilities in the District -- would need to be made for the nation's capital.  However, the Constitution can be amended, and given the fundamental question of unequal representation here, all our states ought to be lined up to set about doing so.  That they are not reflects shame on the political leaders of every state in the union, and on the people of the U.S. who allow them to drag their feet on this simple question of justice. 

The real objection of politicos, of course, is political.  The District of Columbia typically votes heavily Democratic.  Sometimes they suggest a new House seat for the District should be counterbalanced by creating a new seat in some Republican stronghold, but that's poppycock.   DC is already balanced... by tiny North Dakota and Wyoming, among others.  This is not, should not be, a political question.  It's an issue of basic fairness.  How can we preach democracy to the benighted lands of the Middle East, when at home we disenfranchise 600,000 citizens?

What Republican political candidate will pledge to push through an amendment for statehood for the District of Columbia?  Now that might actually shift quite a few of those DC votes onto the Republican side of the ledger.

A side note:  I don't mean to pick on poor North Dakota, by the way, especially when they're currently suffering the terrible effects of our latest weather disaster.  Have you donated to North Dakota flood disaster assistance yet?  Relief is just a click away, at www.american.redcross.org. 

For The Roberts Court, Money Talks

The Roberts Supreme Court this week struck another blow for the Bill of Rights - the Corporate Bill of Rights.  (Don't hunt for these in your copy of the Constitution -- they're not there, even though conservative jurists and politicians pretend they are.)   Building on earlier decisions in which the court has sought to further the preposterous notion that corporations have all the rights of individuals, a majority of five (guess who!), declared unconstitutional an Arizona law that sought to equalize the effects of big money on elections.  

In this case, and in the infamous earlier one (Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission) in which the same Supremes gave corporations the right to spend in support of political candidates pretty much without restraint, I think we're seeing a real distortion of what "free speech" entails.   If Exxon-Mobil and Microsoft and their ilk do have First Amendment rights (which is very disputable), then free speech would mean their running their own ads for a political candidate, e.g.:  "GE supports Joe Smith for President."  

But it offends my rationality to suggest, as the court does, that unlimited amounts of money may be spent secretly (or with only after-the-fact revelation) to support someone else's free speech.  If I give money to a candidate whose views I like, it never occurs to me that's "free speech."  Free speech engages if I decide to stand on a soapbox to extol the virtues of my candidate, or write a letter to the editor of my newspaper about him.  If we think about it, don't we really believe that free speech means free public speech? 

So let the big spenders stand up and be counted in the light of day, let the politicians who accept their donations be prepared to be judged by the company they keep, and let the voters decide what that corporate support really means.   

Health Care, Dogma, And Drivel

Dogmatic drivel continues as the order of the day in ongoing arguments about health care, as it does regarding spending cuts without tax increases. 

On the health care side, one recent example is "Why can't we fix Medicare," by Geoff Colvin.  Mr. Colvin is a wordslinger-for-hire, currently in the hire of Fortune magazine, so it's not surprising he can't see any ill in turning our freedom to choose over to a handful of friendly corporations.   He begins by distorting Medicare into a "brute force" mechanism in which the poor downtrodden people get no choice, though it's probably really the fact that big insurance companies have to work under certain restrictions that bugs him.  Although this system is the lowest-cost health care provider in the country, he proclaims that it doesn't work.  Against this brute force, he posits another system, one in which gentle corporate interests offer a huge range of choices, and all the consumer need do is to pick one that meets his needs.  We're "not dummies," so all we need is free choice in the market and everybody can relax as costs plummet. 

What a crock!  We may not be dummies, but our ability to choose a health insurance plan wisely would depend heavily on full disclosure by the insurance companies.  Think what the chances of that would be!  Further, our ability to profit from such choice would depend heavily on being able to predict, years in advance, what health problems we might be facing as we age.  Our ability to cover our health insurance costs would deteriorate over time, as the little stipends Colvin and others want to substitute for Medicare would inexorably decrease in value over time, inversely as our need for health care would be increasing with age.  

And finally:  The idea that private companies will offer a myriad of choices, one of which will be just right for you, is as much a fairy tale as Goldilocks finding that just-right bowl of porridge. Initially, the availability of a wide variety of choices would probably be confusing, requiring us to spend days of sifting through the fine print of different plans, trying to compare them.  In the longer run, it would lead to "simplification," as a few companies grew big and swallowed up those that sought to offer lower cost or innovative alternatives (T-Mobile for lunch, anyone?). 

Actually, I think a less ideologically biased writer, Steven Pearlstein, is onto something when he notes that:

"Unless you’re trained as a lawyer or a Talmudic scholar, it’s hard to see a practical, moral or constitutional distinction between Obamacare (requiring every American to buy health insurance from a regulated exchange or face a tax) and Ryancare (requiring every American to pay a Medicare payroll tax so they can buy health insurance from a regulated exchange at age 65). Both involve an individual mandate. Both involve an exercise of coercive power by government not enumerated in the Constitution. Both envision federal regulation of the marketplace. And both involve a transfer of subsidies from the rich to the poor." 

In short, the Democratic and Republican parties' approaches really aren't so different, if we can only get past the needless and largely meaningless posturing of which both our commentators and our politicians seem so fond.  The argument is more about who gets political credit for resolving a longstanding problem.  The health care bill passed last year already offers plenty of free choice and is based on ideas once supported by Republicans (like the individual mandate).  

One thing is certain:  The unfettered free market will NOT deliver adequate or equitable or affordable health care.  Government has an essential role to play. 

Wheat And Chaff

It's just human nature to stress what's important to you personally, over matters that are much more momentous for most of us.  There's even a Saturday column in the Washington Post, called "Free For All," especially designed for people with such complaints.  Maybe it's good of the Post (and self-serving, certainly) to provide a forum for these single-focus readers, but the column is also a reliable source of chuckles, too.

In one recent letter, a reader complained that the Queen of Denmark had visited the U.S. and didn't get nearly the high-profile media treatment that British royals get when they come.  Nothing against Denmark, an old ally, a stable democracy, and so on ... and I confess I think all the fawning attention lavished in this country on Her Brittannic Majesty and her extended family is both ridiculous and incomprehensible.  But c'mon, let's put these two nations on the scale.   U.K./Denmark ... UK/Denmark... gee, how could newspaper editors possibly figure out which is more newsworthy?

Beyond the letter columns, a slightly larger constituency has been able to make "news," in the shadow of the First Lady's travel to Africa, with its complaints that President Obama, as our first African-American President, hasn't devoted enough attention to Africa.  The complainers fail to realize that if our first Af-Am President were to jump on a personal hobby-horse by making Africa the centerpiece of our foreign policy, or by focusing at home on programs aimed specifically at African-American citizens, he would pretty well scotch the chances of any other African-American's getting elected for another two hundred years or so. 

All Presidents have to be the President of us all.  And, as a former "foreign policy expert," I would add my view that sub-Saharan Africa suffered heavily from the end of the Cold War in terms of the attention it gets from the U.S., Europe, and even Russia; we should be devoting more energy to the problems and future of this huge expanse of territory and human potential.  That said, however, if we get out our scale again, put Africa on one side, and Afghanistan/Iraq/Libya/China/Europe on the other, we might conclude that an Africa visit by Michelle Obama and her daughters is far more than might be expected.

We suffer some tunnel vision in our national politics, too.  Our Senate is organized in a way that provides one or two Senators from states representing a minuscule proportion of our population to exert inordinate influence on political outcomes, bringing us 1950s rural solutions to 2011's urban problems.  Today's latest utterance from Senator Kent Conrad of North Dakota brings this fact once again to our attention.  Conrad is probably correct, as far as he goes -- whacking a couple of trillion in spending won't fundamentally alter our deficit problem -- but as far as I know, he hasn't offered any ideas that could achieve what he seeks. 

Only by getting spending on both military and civilian entitlements under control can we reassert that kind of control over our budget.  This involves changing people's expectations, and even if Conrad persuades each of his wheat-producing state's 672,591 people (far less than 1% of the nation's population) of the necessity for that, we'll need a lot more.  Can he really get the attention of legislators of more populous states, or is he just the chaff that will be blown away as winds (hot air?) sweep across the plains from New York, California, and Illinois? 

Political Nostalgia, The Maryland Strain

There's been a bit of a ruckus lately over certain activities of former Maryland Governor Ehrlich's political staff during the last gubernatorial elections.  Two Ehrlich staffers stand indicted by a grand jury for having engineered robocalls that tried to persuade Ehrlich's opponent's voters to stay home from the polls by claiming he was so far ahead he didn't need their votes.  (Incidentally Ehrlich was the incumbent at the time, but lost his bid for reelection.) 

The Washington Post editorial on the subject pretty well summarizes the details, and offers an opinion I think is also about right.  To suggest that such deceit is protected free speech is in itself chicanery.  

Crooked or deceitful practices are well enshrined in the pantheon of American politics, in some places more than others.  A century and a half ago was the pinnacle of the power of Tammany Hall, the famous New York political machine; my city of birth, Kansas City Missouri, remembers the notorious Pendergast; Illinois has produced a bumper crop of politicians doing perp walks, even though some (Adlai Stevenson, Barack Obama) managed to be elected without succumbing to graft and corruption. 

Maryland is rising fast in this competition, it seems, with recent stories about funny business in some local county offices, as well as the aforementioned allegations about the Ehrlich campaign.  For me, though, this became a bit of a nostalgia trip, as I immediately thought another Maryland politico, Spiro T. Agnew, who was both Governor of Maryland and later, Vice President of the U.S.under Richard Nixon, before having to resign from the latter office as a result of bribery charges.

Meanwhile, the deceit of which Ehrlich's staffers are accused reminds me of a little joke a guy in my office once tried to play on election day:  Everybody got a note saying that because of anticipated heavy turnout at the polls, voting had been split over two days - all the Republicans should vote on Tuesday, and all the Democrats should go vote on Wednesday.  I don't recall that anyone was fooled.

Gates, The U.S., and Europe Revisited

A bit of followup on my previous post ("Gates's Frank Talk on NATO Allies"), which made the point that Europe has consistently spent about two to three percent less of its GDP on defense than the U.S.  That's spending of 2% by the Europeans versus about 5% by the U.S.  It's a huge difference, and one that explains a lot about lagging U.S. performance in a variety of domestic indicators of progress.   It's also one that our political leaders and pundits alike have tended to ignore.

Exhibit A is the Washington Post's editorial on Gates's rant, "Bob Gates's Sermon To Europe."  The Post took Gates to task for failing to acknowledge that the U.S. is also cutting back on defense expenditures, just as the Europeans are, in the current economic downturn.  Even if that is true (and the pittance in cuts that has been proposed so far raises serious doubts that it is), the Post seems to have missed the point that the imbalance has prevailed for decades, and it cumulative effects are far-reaching.

Exhibit B: Richard Haass's op-ed piece suggesting that Europe doesn't really matter any more.  He makes a persuasive case (not that he's the first to do so) but along the way, he makes the claim that NATO's marginalization cannot be attributed to "what Europeans collectively are spending on defense ($300 billion a year)."  Sorry, I'd suggest that it is at least partly that -- but again, it's the percentage, not the absolute amount, that requires our attention. 

Exhibit C: George Will calls NATO a "Potemkin alliance," and at least broaches the cost issue, but he skirts around it in the usual conservative-mantra terms:  Those foolish Europeans want to "finance their welfare states," unlike us he-man Americans, who know that things like health and education should always take a back seat to spending on our military.  This line of thought perpetuates our rationalizing our overspending on defense as "necessary," when in reality what's needed is a zero-based approach to what our defense really should be in the twenty-first century.

Incidentally, I can agree with Haass's and Will's mutual theme that NATO is obsolete, having by and large achieved its purpose; yet I also predict we'll stick with it as long as we can, because it provides us and Europe a common purpose.  Absent collective defense and security interests, we and Europe go our separate ways, and in most other respects (the most important one being economic interests and trade) we are competitors, not allies. 

Republicans Debate Not

I was fully intending to watch the Republican Party candidates and notional candidates talk on Monday night, but I just forgot to tune them in.   It turns out that this may have been a case of extreme accidental prescience.  It was, by all accounts, a very forgettable event.

The would-be Republican challengers to Obama all chose, apparently, to paper over the differences among them and to focus instead on attacking the President's record.  Just as we all voted in 2008 for "anybody but Bush," the Republicans would now like us to vote for "anybody but Obama."  Fair enough.  That's a predictable political campaign platform, no matter which of them (if any) ends up as the real candidate.  It's almost as if they all banded together to orchestrate this approach (and probably, they did).

So, if I had watched this production, I would have been disappointed.  Anyone who did tune in should have been disappointed too.  The only reason for anyone to watch it, I would think, would be to have a look at the field and begin to sort out the differences between them, and that didn't occur.  This was more like broadcasting the Republican Party convention, or maybe some national but dull GOP planning session - purely partisan and purely predictable. 

Which leaves me thinking that someone else ought to be disappointed too:  the sponsors of the event, reportedly "CNN, the New Hampshire Union Leader, and WMUR-TV."  Whatever these media may have invested in putting on this "debate," they got taken to the cleaners and didn't get what they paid for.  Could any Republican in the state possibly have been helped in making his/her primary voting decision by this lovefest?

 

Gates's Frank Talk On NATO Allies

In being brutally frank regarding our NATO allies' wimpiness in participating in commonly agreed defense projects, outgoing Defense Secretary Gates has called attention to a couple of problems in the U.S.-Europe relationship.  Both relate to the very imbalanced see-saw between the U.S., on the one end, and our NATO allies on the other.  One problem has to do with participation in, and funding of, defense efforts but the other, not much addressed in recent reportage of Gates's speech, has to do with an imbalance in how the two ends of the see-saw define the tasks the Alliance undertakes (or should undertake). 

Gates noted that our allies have generally been cutting their defense budgets, leaving the U.S. to pick up more costs, and that their forces have been less involved in recent NATO efforts, while attaching conditions to their involvement when they are engaged.  He almost makes it sound like a new problem, but it isn't.  

In fact, serious differences between what allied countries including Canada spend on defense, and what the U.S. spends, have existed for decades.   It's true that the U.S. GDP, even in these economically slow times, is greater than the NATO allies'.  So shouldn't we spend more?  That makes sense, but a more prudent and fair measure of expenditures would contrast defense expenditures of NATO members as a percentage of GDP.  Conveniently, NATO itself provides this information in an annual report, "Defense Expenditures of NATO Countries, 1990-2010."    (You'll need to scroll down to Table 3 in this report.)  To cut to the chase, you'll see that in 2009 (the last year for which complete figures are available) the U.S. spent fully 5.0% of GDP on defense, while our most engaged allies (France, Germany, the U.K) spent respectively 2.1, 1.4, and 2.7%.  Other allied countries, with a couple of anomalies, have consistently spent well less than 2%.  Previous years, going back two decades, on average show the same pattern.

The other side of the coin is that the U.S. has generally been content to outspend its allies in this manner because it enabled us to steer the ship.  Despite some occasional turbulence with prickly allies, Washington has been able to call the shots more often than not; to guide NATO decisions and policies in the directions the U.S. wanted; to retain command (or a very senior voice in command) of military forces in operations.  

This is the part that may now be under greatest stress.  Since the Cold War ended, the common bonds that originally brought this collection of allies together in NATO has faded away - not perhaps for the new members from the former Soviet sphere of influence, who  look to their freshly minted membership in NATO to protect them from an overweening Russia, but certainly for many of the members of longer standing.   Europe does not share our perception of the threat posed by terrorists in faraway Afghanistan, and sees less justification for military operations so far from home.  Within the Alliance, only the U.S. maintains a firm global outlook (the U.K. and France shared it once but seem to be fading), or the ability to project military force halfway around the globe.  For the rest, to be "Candide," it's back to Voltaire:  "Il faut cultiver nôtre jardin."

Ultimately, U.S. foreign policy has long been based on the assumption that the interests, traditions, and outlook that we share with Europe are one of the pillars of our foreign and defense policy.  Is that linkage falling apart, or is it just under stress?  That's something Presidents will need to decide, but I suspect we'll stick with what we know for quite a while to come, and seek to preserve our ties and cooperation with Europe.

Meantime, the cost issue is not insignificant.  I've always thought it's the unmentioned and unmentionable root of what I see as a key U.S. domestic problem, what I call the "Third World Superpower."  We are loath in the U.S. to acknowledge what statistics make clear:  by many measures, in education, health, infant mortality, crime, poverty, infrastructure, and hunger to name a few, we now lag behind many of the European countries.   What could that extra three percent of GDP, the difference between what our Allies generally spend and what we generally spend, do for us if it were redirected toward some of our pressing domestic needs? 

Our current level of "defense" spending impoverishes us.  Many don't think so (yet); others would deny that there's a link; some would argue that we can still have guns and butter.  I think it's inevitable, long term if not short, that we will need to face this music, define our international interests more precisely, reemphasize inexpensive diplomacy over expensive military hardware, and scale back our ambitions to fit. 

Bring On Those Primaries

Once again the supposed Republican front runner, Mitt Romney, is in the news, this time "under fire" from conservatives regarding his unacceptable (to them) view that the world's climate is getting warmer and that human activity on the planet just might have something to do with it. 

Romney, who developed something of a reputation for flip-flopping in his last Presidential election campaign, in this case at least is sticking to his guns (no doubt gaining him credit with Second Amendment misinterpreters!).   The conventional wisdom is that he will have to correct that "flip-flop" image, appeal to middle-of-the-road independent voters, and still hold onto the GOP's most conservative political base, all at the same time.  A difficult prescription.

But is it correct?   I'd say Romney and other Republicans who might naturally tend to lean toward moderation should just do so, and see where it takes them.  Wouldn't the base, and the professional pols who are working so hard cater to their concept of it, be surprised if the successful primary candidates turned out to be those who were more pragmatic, more prepared to take the middle ground?   It might force a bit of recalculation by the "pros," and pull the party back from going off the deep end to cater to tea party-ers. 

I have expressed my misgivings about Romney, but that doesn't alter the fact that his track record and current approach might appeal to a lot of people - people like serious, life-long Republicans who have been edged out by the greater activism and louder voices of extremists.  If such people were given an incentive to head to the polls on primary day, the result might produce a real horse race in November 2012. 

 

Revisiting Romney

Having just bestowed on the world my opinion about Mitt Romney's announcement for President, I could not help but notice - and applaud - the points made in "Romney's Flawed View of Freedom" in today's press. 

The writer, E.J. Dionne, is as bad a knee-jerk progressive as Charles Krauthammer is a knee-jerk regressive, so only people with one-track minds can consistently enjoy either of these columnists. 

Nevertheless, Dionne, in addition to noting the irony of Romney's needing to hide and/or disown his major political achievement from the base Republicans, also points up Romney's pompous, politically-motivated conflation of "freedom" with "government-free."  The idea that the more a government spends, the less free we are, is doublespeak worthy of George Orwell.   Romney and his political cohort should look back at our founding, where they will discover that free men established a government precisely because they sought to "secure to ourselves and our posterity the blessings of liberty."  Sound familiar? 

I've long maintained that GOP might stand for "Geezers Obstructing Progress;" but another possible interpretation is "George Orwell Prevails."