Frank’s Case Book

This week  thousands of people in dozens of cities pulled together with disparate perspectives to protest on tax day, April 15. The protesters commandeered the metaphor of the 1773 Boston Tea Party, when nascent Americans protested the taxes on tea. What made the taxes then unacceptable was the fact that they were imposed by a far away power and Americans had no representation.

The present protests were more than about taxes they were also about increases in spending and a general angst that the events were spirally out of control. Clearly any imposed taxes are enacted by a legitimately elected authority. However this only mildly attentuates the notion that bailouts of financial companies and enormous increases in public spending represent powerful forces in government and the private sector taking advantage from the average person. In short, these parties represent a spasm of populism.

There are typically two kinds of populism, populism of the Left and populism of the Right. Populism on the Left believes that the average person is at the mercy of corporate interests.  Populism on the Right, asserts that the average person suffers under the predations of intrusive government. The recent Tea Party Protests are perhaps a confused amalgamation of both varieties of populism. Republicans are trying to jump in front of this  parade, but they are certainly not leading it. Democrats, who have recently embraced an anti-corporate populism, feel threatened by the movement because they represent the incumbent political party. The movement was instigated by economic uncertainty and it will likely wither or grow inverse relation to the short term perceived success of the economy.

The coverage of the Tea Party Protests, particularly by the cable news channels exposed more about those news networks than they did about protests. The reporters at Fox News were clearly sympathetic to the protesters. The individual protesters were generally portrayed favorably. The protesters returned the positive coverage by cheering Fox News personalities. This resembles the coverage of pro-choice rallies by the mainstream press. In this different  case, CNN and MSNBC were not nearly so sympathetic to Tea Party demonstrators. Reporters actively argued rather than interviewed protesters. Tea Party Protesters  accused reporters of selecting the most extreme protesters to paint the demonstrations in the worst possible light.

While one might forgive a reporter who temporarily looses her professional composure, how can one explain the comments by David Schuster of MSNBC. The protesters never called their protests ``tea bagging,” but rather “tea parties.” Nonetheless, some on the Left, obviously  familiar with the sexual implications of “tea bagging,” sought to simultaneously show their hipness in understanding the innuendo and ridicule the protesters. While such vulgarity might be expected from the more extreme blogs, David Schuster of MSNBC News in one single episode further lowered MSNBC standards (such as they are) when he he did a whole piece exploiting the sexual innuendo. The commentary sounded more like that of a smug 16-year old than the thoughts of a seasoned reporter. Now David Schuster may be personally delightful person to have dinner with and for all I know contribute large amounts of time and money to worthy causes, pets his dog when he arrives home, but may I suggest that this episode reveals more about David Schuster than it does about the Tea Party protesters.

As long ago as 1959, the sainted leader of modern Conservatism, William F. Buckley Jr. observed that Liberals in his time did not recognize Conservative thought as a competing intellectual perspective or philosophy. Rather, if they even thought at all about Conservatism, it was as a pathology that moderns were growing out of or that people needed to be cured of.

It is, therefore, of some amusement that a recent issue of Social Justice published “When Morality Opposes Justice: Conservatives Have Moral Intuitions that Liberals May Not Recognize,” by Jonathan Haidt and Jesse Graham, psychologists at the University of Virginia. The plucky thesis of their argument is that it may not be the case that all Conservatives are morally evil. Rather, some (probably a minority) may have a “moral intuitions” that are not entirely shared by Liberals. As a Conservative, perhaps I should offer some thanks for this small gracious concession.

It should be noted that this conclusion emerged from psychologists who, I suppose, are qualified to render a clinical conclusion that Conservatism is not necessarily aberrant behavior. Discussion and debate between Conservatives and Liberals should reside the Politics or Philosophy Departments of universities, but first Conservatives, I suppose, need to be professionally certified as eligible to participate in open discussion.

In fairness, some elements of the paper criticize the presumption of some liberals who assume that their positions can be the only moral ones. We are gently informed, for example, that some scholarly research indicates that “some portion of the conservative [1] opposition to affirmative action is truly based on concerns that affirmative action programs sometimes violate the principle of merit.” Gee, I would like to know when providing opportunities to people on the basis of the race or gender does not violate the principle of merit.

Haidt and Graham write as reasonable people. However, articles in scholarly journals are supposed to represent original ideas. The fact that such an article was necessary indicates just how insular and arrogant Liberals and particularly the Liberal intelligentsia in academia have become.

[1] A lower case “conservative” indicates a conservative temperament. The authors should have capitalized“Conservative” since it is a competing political philosophy or ideology. Their punctuation suggests that the authors, despite their openness, are still treating Conservatism as a mental condition rather than a set of consistent ideas..

The year 1949 marked a time when the hubris in the competency government was near its peak, especially after the successful conclusion one of the largest and most successful government enterprises of all, World War II. At that time the Federal Communications Commission issued the Fairness Doctrine, trusting in the government’s ability to arbitrate fairness. The doctrine required broadcasters to provide all sides of a controversial issues in a manner that the FCC considered fair. The fundamental rationale for the doctrine was that the broadcast spectrum is a limited public resource and should be used for the public good. As a practical matter, with the club of the Fairness Doctrine over their heads and their licenses at risk, most broadcasters simply  avoided political controversy. The risks were too great.

In 1969 Red Lion Broadcasting v. FCC case, the Supreme Court upheld the Fairness Doctrine based on the limited number of stations, but hinted that if the doctrine were used to suppress speech, the doctrine could be re-evaluated. By 1984, FCC v. League of Women Voters, the Court concluded that the scarcity  argument was loosing its saliency. In this environment, the FCC backed off a the Fairness Doctrine altogether in 1987.

The period since has experienced an explosion in public affairs related broadcasting. For a variety of reasons, Conservatives have been particularly successful on talk radio, while one could easily make the case that broadcast television news is provided from a liberal perspective. Indeed, many political operatives view talk radio as the major source of contemporary Conservative thought.

Any arguments about scarcity have long ago been overwhelmed by modern technology. Not only has there been significant growth in the number of radio stations, but radio information is beamed from satellite increasing available bandwidth. In an age, when one can receive “netcasts” over the cell phone networks on smart phones or assemble one’s own webpage, their is virtually no limit on the space available for political discourse.

The First Amendment is  unequivocal. “Congress shall make no law …  abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press…” It is very likely that the imposition of the Fairness Doctrine with the current state of technology would loose a constitutional challenge.

What is interesting is  the liberal (they would like to say “progressive”) community’s instinctive reaction to wield political power by suppressing inconvenient free speech. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has said that she personally favors the revival of the Fairness Doctrine.  She has blocked votes that would prohibit the FCC from imposing the Fairness Doctrine. So much for the free speech movement of San Francisco. It is hard to reconcile the First Amendment with the ethos of using the government to ration speech. Such an effort would be rightly rejected in the case of newspapers, where scarcity is a graver than in the broadcast media.

To his credit President Barack Obama, through his press secretary Michael Ortiz, has said the he “does not support reimposing the Fairness Doctrine on broadcasters.” Unfortunately, the reasoning provided is not reassuring. Ortiz explained that the Fairness Doctrine debate it distracts from among other things like support for public broadcasting and increasing minority ownership media outlets. It does not seem that opposition to the Fairness Doctrine arises from principle, but from tactical calculation. For now, perhaps the pressure to re-instate the Fairness Doctrine will ease. It would have been more heartening if Obama said he would actively oppose the re-institution of the Fairness Doctrine. The good news is that time is one the side of free speech. As communications technology improves and becomes even more ubiquitous, the Fairness Doctrine becomes not only less justifiable, but far more difficult to implement.

In 1989, Senator John Tower was President George H. B. Bush’s first choice for Secretary of Defense. President’s almost invariably get their choices for cabinet positions confirmed by the Senate. According to King and Riddlesperber [1] in the post-War era from 1945 to 1988, opposition to the nomination of cabinet officials was dominantly based on policy differences, but still are very rare.  On paper,  it looked like Tower had the necessary qualifications including Chairmanship of the Senate Armed Services Committee. Moreover, Senators are generally loathe to embarrass their own.

However, Senators perhaps knew Tower too well. Although, he served competently in the Senate he was reputed to have a drinking and womanizing problem. Part of the ultimate rejection of Tower was a little political payback to Bush winning the previous election, but Tower would have survived the nomination process had there not been very real and serious  issues with Tower’s character.

In retrospect, the Senate did President Bush an important and historic favor. Ultimately, Dick Cheney was approved overwhelmingly by the Senate for Secretary of Defense. Whatever present reservations there are about Cheney’s recent performance as vice president, there remains consensus that he was a key element of the successful effort to remove Saddam Hussein from Kuwait in the first  Gulf War.

The Senate, particularly, the Republicans, as the opposition party now have an obligation to exercise due diligence and put up a substantial fight against at two of the remaining  nominations of President Barack Obama. The opposition should not be based upon political or policy differences but on the simple question of character.

Eric Holder, Jr. the nominee for Attorney General, should be opposed based on the role he played in the Mark Rich pardon and the pardons of the Puerto Rican terrorists — pardons that were clearly made for political expediency under President Clinton. As Deputy Attorney General, he had a obligation as a presidential legal adviser to stand up to President Clinton’s ill-advised pardons. The president would have probably still issued the pardons, but at least he would have been ignoring the proper legal advice.  There may come a time when a  sensitive legal issue comes before President Obama. He deserves an Attorney General whose legal advice is  not hostage to cynical political calculations.

There is no informed and intellectually  honest person who believes the nominee for Treasury Secretary, Timothy Geithner,  did not deliberately cheat on his income taxes. He is just too smart and informed about his tax obligations to have committed an inadvertent over sight. There is no doubt as to Geither’s credentials or that he would try to implement Obama’s policies with competence. However, he lacks the character to be granted the fiducial  responsibility of Treasury Secretary. Just as yourself if you would hire a brilliant financial analyst to handle your finances if you knew that he cheated on his own taxes. We are told that  Geithner is so brilliant that we have to overlook his character. Is that the moral message the Obama wishes to endorse?

The Democrats, perhaps not for the most altruistic motives, helped President Bush (41) by forcing the selection of Dick Cheney over John Tower for Secretary of Defense. It is time that Republicans paid that back favor to President Obama. He would be best served by an Attorney General with character to tell the President what he make not want to hear and a Treasury Secretary worthy of the trust placed in that position.

[1] King, J. D. and J. Riddlesperger, chapter in From Cold War to New World Order, 2002.

It is always amusing to run across a story that tells us as much about the people commenting on a story as about the immediate subject of the story. The recent Wall Street Journal column by former Bush presidential adviser Karl Rove represents just such a story. In the column, Rove reveals that President George W. Bush is not just voracious reader, but a competitive industrial-strength reader, averaging over a book a week. Apparently, Rove and Bush competed on who could read the most books in a year. Rove was the victor, but Bush was able to find time to read:

“… biographies of Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Carnegie, Mark Twain, Babe Ruth, King Leopold, William Jennings Bryan, Huey Long, LBJ, Genghis Khan. ” Other nonfiction included “Andrew Roberts’s A History of the English Speaking Peoples Since 1900, James L. Swanson’s Manhunt, and Nathaniel Philbrick’s Mayflower.” Bush’s reading tastes also extended to “eight Travis McGee novels by John D. MacDonald, Mr. Bush tackled Michael Crichton’s Next, Vince Flynn’s Executive Power, Stephen Hunter’s Point of Impact, and Albert Camus’s The Stranger, among others.”

What is most interesting is how people reacted. Of course, some simply did not believe the column because it ran so counter to the image of Bush in the media and painted by his political enemies. How could such a dolt or disinterested frat boy be so attracted to books? The best way to deal with inconvenient evidence is to ignore it or dismiss it.  Interesting, no one questions whether Rove, also a very busy person, read the number of books he reports reading. But, of course, Rove is an evil genius.

For Bush supporters, the story does provide some evidence of the intellectual capacity of the President. However, their opinion of the President would not have changed if he had read only  a few books while President. A president is a very busy and might be expected to primarily read work-related material. He would have to rely on the well of intellectual capital acquired before reaching office.

For those who dislike Bush — at least the ones who believe Roves’s reports — are compelled to spin the news negatively. On the basis of this evidence, you don’t here anyone saying, “Perhaps I was wrong in my estimation of Bush’s intelligence.” One approach is to criticize Bush for reading too much and not spending enough time actually implementing  policy. Another is to criticize his reading list as not sufficiently introspective or is in some other way inadequate. Yet another is to assert that Bush feigned being a good-old-boy to hide his trues intentions.

The truth is that the Left and the press has always found it rhetorically convenient to paint Bush as an idiot. The problem is that for the most part, Bush politically defeated his opponents, winning the presidency twice. To reconcile this success with the caricature, Bush had to have clever evil henchmen who did his thinking for him. The usual candidates where political adviser Karl Rove or  Vice-President Dick Cheney.

If the same story came out about Barack Obama, with the same list and volume, we would all be amazed at his commitment to pursuit of intellectual enrichment. It would be additional evidence that he is a thinking man.

Anyone who followed Bush carefully with an open mind should have realized how profoundly he is affected by books. Natan Sharansky, was a former Soviet dissident who managed to emigrate to Israel and rose the position of Deputy Prime Minister of Israel. Sharansky advocated a compelling thesis articulated in his book The Case for Democracy. The argument is that many of the world’s political problems were a consequence of the lack of true democracy, freedom, and the rule of law. The lack of these was the source of political disruption that leads to war and terrorism. Democracies do not fight one another.

Hence, one goal of American foreign policy should be to encourage democratic ideals. These arguments are part of the underpinning of Bush’s policies in Iraq and Afghanistan. One working definition of an intellectual is a person who takes ideas seriously. By this definition, Bush is an intellectual who put into practice ideas he acquired through reading, study, and reflection.

The tactic of painting a political adversary as not just wrong, but stupid, was applied to President Ronald Reagan. Lyndon Johnson’s Secretary of defense Clark Clifford once referred to Ronald Reagan as an “amiable dunce.” Ironically, Clifford died just  ahead of an indictment in a scandal surrounding Bank of Credit and Commerce International. He whined that in his defense,  “I have a choice of either seeming stupid or venal.” Claiming stupidity (not even amiable stupidity) was Clifford’s best defense.  By contrast, after Reagan left office, a compendium of his writings revealed a thoughtful and eloquent person.

Similarly, former President George H. W. Bush (41 to friends) was ridiculed for his mangled verbal expressions while in office. However, it turns out that Bush was an inveterate letter writer. The collection of these letters also reveals a delightful and intelligent writer, not consistent with his public persona.

No one can legitimately deny that 2008 was an interesting year.

Any presidential election year is bound to draw disproportionate attention, but this year particularly so. The US electorate elected its first African-American as president, Senator Barack Obama. Most importantly, the electoral race did not center on the question race. With the exception of a couple of ill chosen remarks about looking like the faces on currency [1], Obama avoided playing the “race card.” No one of any stature suggest that race disqualified Obama as president. There was no so-called “Bradley effect” where Americans would publicly say they would vote for a black candidate, but in the privacy of the voting booth allow a latent racism or fear prevent them from casting a vote for a black person. Americans were nearly as unprejudiced in the private deliberations as in their public statements. Americans clearly deserve more credit than they deserve. It is hard to imagine any other country that would elect a racial minority of that country as its chief executive.

Early in the year, Shelby Steele, was not enthusiastic about chances for a black president. In his view, any black had to be non-threatening to the white majority and not appear to be a candidate whose primary message was race. On the other hand such a candidate would not seem as an authentic black to fellow African-Americans. As it turns out, once it became clear that Obama had a realistic opportunity to win the presidential election, the prospect of a black American president excited African-Americans. There was no litmus test of authenticity.

This was embarrassing year for journalism. The enthusiasm for Obama was  so great that many lost even the appearance of objectivity.  The first victim of this bias was Senator Hillary Clinton who was regularly portrayed negatively by MSNBC. Hillary even began to appreciate Fox News. Actually, the Democratic primary was an amusing battle between the politics of gender and the politics of race with both candidates anxious to claim the mantel of representing a victim class without the weakness of appearing to be victim.

After the election there were media mea cuplas. The ombudsman of the Washington Post wrote:

“The Post provided a lot of good campaign coverage, but readers have been consistently critical of the lack of probing issues coverage and what they saw as a tilt toward Democrat Barack Obama. My surveys, which ended on Election Day, show that they are right on both counts.”

There were similar self-analysis from other organizations. The real question is why such retrospection and assessments were not forthcoming when they could have improved coverage during the campaign. The behavior of the main-stream-media is not healthy for democracy.

The biggest news of the year may have been news that fell off the front pages: the Iraq War. Largely because of the troop surge and the associated strategy, the War in Iraq is succeeding. Perhaps  the most important measure for Americans, the increased security in Iraq has resulted in dramatic reductions in American lost of life. This month thus far 14 Americans had died and only seven from hostile actions. Of course, any loss is devastating for the soldier’s family, but no one can deny that Iraq is largely now a settled issue — mostly as a consequence of the effectiveness of the American military.

Unfortunately, the victory will be a silent one as American troops are allowed to slowly return home as Iraqis become more and more responsible for their own security. In part because the media does not want to grant President Bush the credit for an important success Americans and troops will not enjoy the satisfaction of victory — just compensation for their sacrifice.

Finally, this is the year that the economy fell into a dramatic recession which has dramatically reduced stock values and real estate prices. Certainly, the business cycle has not been repealed and we can always expect episodic recessions. This particular recession was initiated under a complex interaction between public and private mistakes. The housing market was oversold largely under the encouragement of government to extend loans to people who could not afford them — the “sub-prime” crisis. The increase in oil prices helped trigger some of the defaults.

This crisis was then magnified by credit default swaps where  companies in a non-transparent fashion had traded risk. This radical increase in liability brought down many investment houses. As a consequence, the federal government had to intervene with massive bailouts (with dubious salutary effect) to rescue irresponsible behavior by large Wall Street investment house. We can hope that 2009 with mark the beginning of the recovery.

[1] Barack Obama: “‘Well, you know, he’s got a funny name and he doesn’t look like all the presidents on the dollar bills and the five dollar bills and, and they’re going to send out nasty emails.”