I'm here today to endorse the best pro-life candidate to beat Hillary Clinton, a man that I think is best prepared to be Commander-in-Chief during these difficult times and during this War on Terrorism, and I might say as well the person that had the right strategy a couple of years ago for how we would stablize Iraq...If you want a guy to change Washington, John McCain's the guy to do it. He has been in Washington, but he is not of Washington. He will appoint strict constructionist judges to the Supreme Court. ...[F]or a breadth of causes, the Court is the key issue! And here is a pro-life leader who will appoint strict constructionist judges...He's the full package.

Read Fred Barnes, "McCain's Last Stand: He Still Has A Chance," (The Weekly Standard, December 24, 2007). He quotes Phil Gramm saying, "Deep in their hearts, Republican primary voters know John McCain is the only great man running for president." There is certainly the stuff of greatness in him. Primary voters are sniffing for tragic flaws, perhaps including whatever led him to sponsor the McCain-Feingold assault on first ammendment freedoms and to oppose re-authorizing the Bush tax cuts.

Here is the endorsement from the Des Moines Register.

Here is Robert Novak's sober account of McCain's own surge and chances for the nomination ("GOP's Last Man Standing").

 

At times I rebuke myself that I am so grumpy.

For example, when I nearly trip over someone's wheeled luggage as I maneuver through the crowds at New York's Penn Station. These one-car luggage trains roll through the concourse with their dark loads discreetly trailing down at ankle level, unobserved until you nearly fall over them. "David," I say, "his bag is heavy. He's entitled to his luggage, isn't he?"

But my conscience is clear and I'm back to grumpy on this. Seth Stevenson in today's New York Times has written an essay that brings the consideration of this issue out from under people's breath into public discussion, and zeroes in on the central moral issues ("Hell on Wheels"). And it's also funny.

I consider it especially unmanly for a healthy gent to be dragging what is clearly hand luggage behind him on wheels. I want to say, "Don't be a girl. Carry that thing!" Luggage manufacturers first started putting wheels on their bags for little old ladies who were travelling without their little old men. They tend to outlive their husbands and travel to see grandchildren. Wheels help. Then, as women began travelling alone as result of the more public lives they were leading, they began using these wheeled suitcases as well, and even rolling hand luggage. Then the men said, "Why not me?" On goes the creeping effeminization of the modern man.

But then I had to lug a carry on sized bag to a conference. I have a ten minute walk from my house to the commuter train station. I hadn't gone but two blocks before I extended that handle and started rolling it. I felt like an old woman and the proper object of all virile contempt. But what was I to do?

Stevenson answers the question. Because these bags are made to be pulled on wheels, even "load-bearing wheels," they are also made to be overstuffed and thus unportable--by weight as well as proportion--except by a larger than average stevedore.

Whether you are a man or a woman or simply not sure, and whatever your age, we all need wiser luggage and a thoughtful eye to the people stumbling behind us.

Here I am, going on about Mike Huckabee again. Well, the Iowa caucuses are just over the Christmas horizon and this guy is almost as threatening to out national well-being as Barak Obama is or as Jimmy Carter was.

Would the party of Ronald Reagan actually nominate a man who, prior to announcing his candidacy for the nomination, appears never to have given a thought to foreign affairs at all? And this while our soldiers are in the field against a lethal enemy.

At this point he does not even have a foreign policy adviser. If he does, it is a well kept secret.

He recently published an essay in Foreign Affairs to clear up this rumor that he thinks the world is flat and that it does not extend beyond North America. (Is he aware of Canada? He has made mention of Mexico, and of course he wants to close Gitmo so the Europeans will like us, but can he find Europe on a map?) Matthew Continetti at the Weekly Standard provides links to various assessments of that essay. It's embarrassing.

One of those responses comes from Stephen Hayes ("The Perils of Huckaplomacy") who also provides quotes from the affable but inept former Arkansas governor in response to questions from CNN's Wolf Blitzer at a candidates' debate on June 5. He was asked directly about the al-Maliki government and about Darfur. His answers are frightening only because so many people are taking this guy seriously as a presidential candidate.

I think there's some real doubt about that, Wolf. But I want to remind all of us on this stage and the people in the audience that there's a reason that this is such a struggle. And I think we miss it over here in the West. Today's the birthday of Ronald Reagan. We all would believe that Ronald Reagan is the one who ended the Cold War, and Ronald Reagan is the one who helped bring about the collapse of the Soviet Union. But there's a group of people who don't believe that, and that's the Taliban. They believe they brought about the demise of the Soviet Union because of the way they fought in Afghanistan. And what I want to just mention is that it is not the size of the dog in the fight, it is the size of the fight in the dog.

What? Nothing there about the government in Iraq and what to do about it. And is he comparing himself to the Taliban in their fight as the mujaheddin against the Soviets?

On Darfur, he immediately redirected the conversation toward what appears to be a proposed War on Poverty:

I think we have some role to play in it, but I guess what disturbs me even more, we have not even addressed the genocide that's going on and the infanticide in our own country with the slaughter of millions of unborn children. And we also have extraordinary poverty in this country. Yes, we ought to be involved. But you know something? There are a lot of people in America that don't think the only poverty is in Darfur--understand, there's poverty in the Delta. There are people who don't have running water, people that don't have access to medical care and don't have a decent school to go to and you don't have to go halfway around the world to find it. We've got it right here in this country.

Was one Johnson era not enough? Huckabee's foreign policy seems to be: get elected, then hope the subject doesn't come up.

Kyle-Ann Shiver at American Thinker gives the best summary of how sensible people should view Mike Huckabee as a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination.

We are up to our necks in a war for our own survival, and I will not put my vote in the hands of a man who learned his methods for foreign policy in vacation Bible school. We need a fierce, street-fighting Commander in Chief without a single gullible bone in his body.

John McCain is looking better all the time.

As the Iowa caucuses move closer and Mike Huckabee rises in the polls, discussion intensifies over his Fair Tax proposal. Here is some of it.

In today's New York Sun, Amity Schlaes calls it a Scare Tax. She shows how the 23% rate is actually 30% on each purchase, whether a DVD or a house. With that sort of surcharge, she foresees a black market developing. Though the idea includes canning the IRS, we can expect some other form of tax police to enforce the Fair Tax. Go to, "Scare Tax, Not Fair Tax," December 17, 2007.

Rich Lowry is also critical. In "Huck's Draft Tax Plan: A Silly Political Ploy" (NRO December 4, 2007), like Amity Schlaes he does not think that the sixteenth amendment will be repealed. The tax plan is premised on that. Otherwise, instead of a national sales tax replacing the income tax, it would be simply added on top of it. Lowry cites the congressional Joint Committee on Taxation estimating the tax being as high as 57%. He responded to Ken Hoagland of FairTax.org with this.

FYI, the sixteenth amendment to the constitution (ratified 1913) reads like this: "The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration."

Bruce Bartlett, in "Dianetics, The Tax Plan" (The New Republic, December 13, 2007) focuses on the connection between the Fair Tax backers and the Church of Scientology, a religion invented by science fiction writer, L. Ron Hubbard. He also has an assessment in the Wall Street Journal, "Fair Tax, Flawed Tax" (August 26, 2007), with only a passing reference to Scientology.

The editors at the National Review also give it the thumbs down. "Republicans cannot win a national election without the tax issue. If they ran on the national sales tax, Republicans would be taking one of their natural strengths and making it into a liability." ("Fair Tax, Foul Politics," NRO August 16, 2007)

David Tuerck of the Beacon Hill Instititute and of the Suffolk University economics department backs the Fair Tax , but I found his brief defense in the New York Sun ("On Taxes, Huckabee Leads") to be without much substance. (You get one chance, buddy.)

• Under pressure from then governor Huckabee, the Arkansas parole board released rapist Wayne Dumond from prison on condition that he leave the state. Shortly thereafter he raped and killed a Missouri woman. Read about it here (Arkansas Times) and here (National Review). Dumond's vigilante castration just after his arrest in 1985 as well as his Christian profession of faith appears to have influenced the governor's heart.

• As governor of Arkansas, he supported extending state taxpayer-funded college scholarships and in-state college tuition rates to the children of illegal aliens, i.e. students graduating from Arkansas high schools who are in the country illegally. His rationale for this is that we should not "penalize the children for the crime of the parents." But there is only so much money available for state college education, and every dollar that goes to an illegal alien, regardless of how well he or she performed in high school, is a dollar that is denied to a legal resident. That compassion is idiosyncratic, not intelligent, and thus not godly for Christian leader.

How easily people are taken in by populist appeals that are used to justify government regulation of political speech. It is common to find the following line of argument in an undergraduate research paper. The Public Interest Research Group (PIRG) reports:

Ninety-four percent of the candidates who raised the most hard money won their 2002 general elections. In primary elections, the candidate who raised the most money won 90 percent of the time.

These figures show an almost perfect correlation between money spent and electoral success. PIRG continues to blow the trumpet for drowsy patriots:

The primary problem with money in politics is that large hard money contributions—which only a small fraction of the public can afford to make—unduly influence who is able to run for office and who wins elections in the United States. Without personal wealth, or the ability to raise large sums of money from wealthy contributors, many aspiring candidates are locked out of the process. Those voters who wish to support views that are rejected by wealthy donors are left without an outlet.

They provide 2002 figures from Federal Elections Commission (FEC) campaign finance data:

U.S. elections are predominantly funded by a small number of large contributors. Just 0.22 percent of the U.S. voting age population contributed at least $200 to a 2002 congressional candidate; this narrow donor pool was responsible for 76 percent of all individual candidate contributions. Only 0.09 percent of the population made contributions of at least $1,000 and accounted for 55.5 percent of individual contributions to 2002 congressional candidates.

It is worth noting that 2002 was an off-year election, i.e. there was no presidential contest to draw people to the polls, so turnout might have been at most 40% of registered voters. Notice also that PIRG provides percentages NOT of registered voters, but of voting age population. That presumably includes people who have not registered to vote, non-citizens, convicted criminals, the insane etc. I suspect also that all those clicking Internet small donors have shifted the figures considerably since 2002, but PIRG is characteristically silent on that. Nonetheless, those ancient 2002 figures aren't all that shocking. Given how hard it is to get people actually to vote, it should not surprise us that the percentage of people who contribute money to a political campaign is a relatively small segment of voters.

But it does not follow that elected officials therefore kowtow to that 1%. To get or keep power, they must still solicit the votes of 50% of the voters plus one. To be re-elected, they must please that same majority. If giving lots of money meant that you could control the outcome of an election, George Soros would have bought the 2004 election for Democrat John Kerry. But thankfully substance, i.e. what candidates say with their money, still matters in American politics.

More evidence that political office is sold to the highest bidder. According to OpenSecrets.org, Hillary Clinton has raised over $90 million for her campaign, and spent half of it already. 88% of that has been from individual contributors, or $80 million. Once again, the leading candidate is the one with the most money. Is she in the lead because she is the most promising candidate, or because she has the wealthiest backers?

First, according to the same source, Barak Obama, though he has raised $10 million less Sen. Clinton has, has spent 4 million dollars more, but he is nonetheless 10-20 points down in the polls. But that aside, it seems to escape many people who encounter these arguments that perhaps greater fund raising ability is related to greater popular support in the first place. Can Senator Clinton's front runner status be reduced simply to her bigger bank account, or might there be other factors? If Mike Gravel (he's a candidate) had $90 million, would he be polling far out in first place? No! He would still be trailing because substantively he is not a good candidate. No matter how well and how often he were to get his face and message out before the public eye, the American people would find him unattractive for reasons entirely unrelated to his "war chest" and what he can buy with it. In other words, there is a reason that Hillary Clinton attracts money!

What about campaign spending limits? Buckley v. Valeo (1976) settled that question, overturning a law which attempted to set such limits, but people still find the notion attractive. In the interest of democracy and of removing the unfair advantage that wealth and wealthy backers gives to some candidates over other, let's level the playing field by setting a cap on how much any candidate can spend in campaigning. We could even adjust it for inflation and for the size of a given electorate. But what if I want to run for the U.S. Senate and I only have $1000 in my savings account? Why should others have an advantage over me just because they have more money? Democracy is about speech and equality, not about money. This is a democracy, not a plutocracy! So the spending cap should be $1000. But what about my neighbor who has only $100 and wants to run? You see the absurdity. If I were a credible candidate, people with whom I had credibility would be thrusting me forward with donations. Hence, the dynamic relationship between the support of the people and the financial means to address them for their support.

Of course, the equal right to speak, guaranteed by the First Amendment to the Constitution, does not guarantee an equal right to the means of speech. Our republic is not only one of equality, but one of freedom. Indeed, the equality is understood in terms of freedom. "All men are created equal." We are equal in our humanity, in our essence. "And we are endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights." These are liberties, i.e. various aspects of the security in which to exercise our various (unequal) faculties, as well as to reap and enjoy the fruit of that exercise. Thus, though Rupert Murdoch has greater means to speak that I do, he does not have a greater right to speak. Government control of those means would be tyranny. To limit wealthy political candidates such as Mitt Romney, Michael Bloomberg, Steve Forbes or Ross Perot as to how much they could spend in addressing the nation would leave them politically "tongue-tied." But that freedom of the tongue, and by implication any means it can muster in its support, is precisely what the first amendment protects.