Best of the Web Today - March 30, 2006
James Taranto is traveling today; Best of the Web Today returns tomorrow. In its place we offer a free sample of Political Diary, the editorial page's premium daily email newsletter on American politics (subscribe here).
In today's Political Diary:
o He Wishes He Didn't Know Jack
o Cunningham Seat Up for Grabs
o Bernie Siegan, RIP
o Port Diversion (Quote of the Day I)
o Youth vs. Youth (Quote of the Day II)
o Rumsfeld: Soft Power for Hard Cases
Boy Blunder
Ralph Reed, the former executive director of the Christian Coalition who is now running for lieutenant governor of Georgia, is being dogged by a fellow evangelical over his past ties to lobbyist Jack Abramoff.
Marvin Olasky, editor of the 140,000 circulation evangelical magazine World, says that Mr. Reed did not act properly in passing along $4.2 million from Mr. Abramoff to Christian leaders fighting new Indian casinos without telling them the money came from rival casino operators who were trying to block competition. Mr. Reed "has shamed the evangelical community by providing evidence for the generally untrue stereotype that evangelicals are easily manipulated and that evangelical leaders are using moral issues to line their own pockets," Mr. Olasky said in a posting on his magazine's Web site. Mr. Reed responds that he didn't know at the time the money came from rival casinos.
The Olasky criticism has prompted Mr. Reed to step up meetings with prominent evangelicals. He has been relaying the same message he has stated publicly: "If I had it to do over again, and knowing what I know about Jack Abramoff now, I wouldn't have become involved." His explanations have satisfied such evangelical leaders as Sadie Fields, chairwoman of the Georgia Christian Coalition. "It was important to us to hear him say, 'I shouldn't have done it,'" she says. "I'm very satisfied. Up until those two meetings, I was not satisfied."
A new poll by Insider Advantage/Majority Opinion Research shows Mr. Reed retaining a lead in the July 11 GOP primary. He has 24% of the vote, and state Senator Casey Cagle has 17%. A whopping 59% remain undecided, a potentially ominous signal for Mr. Reed, a former highly successful GOP party chair in the state who enjoys high name recognition in Georgia.
-- John Fund
'Netroots' Smell Victory in Special House Race
Randy "Duke" Cunningham's dramatic fall from grace opened up California's Republican-leaning 50th congressional district and a huge Republican field has scrambled for the chance to fill the relatively safe GOP seat. Democrats, on the other hand, are hoping President Bush's sagging poll numbers coupled with Cunningham's blatant corruption may be enough to give them an unexpected victory.
To win the April 11 special election outright, a candidate must receive "50% plus one" of the vote. Otherwise, the top vote-getters from each party square off in a June 6 runoff.
Francine Busby is the anointed Democrat in the race. The 55-year-old former Sunday school teacher and current trustee of the Cardiff School District Board won 37% of the vote against Cunningham in 2004 (John Kerry won 44% in the district). Ms. Busby faces a choice of whether to go all out and try to win the 50% in April versus husbanding her resources for the June runoff (she's a lock to be the leading Democrat). More and more, she appears to have decided to go for the outright win in two weeks.
Meanwhile, there are 14 Republicans in the race, but polls have consistently given only three candidates a legitimate shot at winning the pro-GOP vote: Brian Bilbray, Howard Kaloogian and Eric Roach. Mr. Bilbray is an ex-Congressman from the more Democratic 49th Congressional district who lost his job to Rep. Susan Davis in 2000 and is considered the establishment candidate. Mr. Kaloogian is a former state assemblyman (1994-2000) from within the district and is the leading movement conservative in the race. Mr. Roach, a Mormon, is a venture capitalist and political neophyte who appears to be making headway thanks to his ability to outspend his main rivals.
On Tuesday, KGTV-TV in San Diego released a poll showing that none of the candidates breaks the 50%-plus-one threshold. Ms. Busby, the Democrat, comes closest, at 45%. She was followed by the three leading Republicans: Mr. Roach at 14%, Mr. Kaloogian at 12% and Mr. Bilbray at 10%. The poll was especially good news for Ms. Busby's attempt to wrap up the race in the first round. Barely a week ago, a Datamar poll had her at 36%, but the left-wing netroots community led by MoveOn.org and Web sites like DailyKos have made a big push to help her win. Survey USA's Jay Leve, who conducted the KGTV poll, points out that Ms. Busby is pulling 53% among women. If she can increase the women's turnout just a couple of percentage points from his projected 46%, he says Ms. Busby has a good chance to get over 50%.
Can one of the Republicans hope to expand his share of the vote enough to stop her? It's up in the air. Mr. Bilbray appears to have no momentum and in a special election with a very low turnout may be hard pressed to get the 15% he would probably need to keep his hopes alive. Mr. Kaloogian, with his grassroots conservative support and endorsements from James Dobson, Steve Forbes and Rep. Tom Tancredo, looks to have an edge in getting his voters to the polls. Mr. Roach is the wildcard in the race. While he looks good in the latest poll, it is uncertain whether his money advantage will translate into the votes he needs on Election Day.
The irony, of course, is that Messrs. Kaloogian, Roach and Bilbray would each be a heavy favorite to beat Ms. Busby in a June runoff. But Ms. Busby appears to have a shot at pulling off an upset on April 11. A surprise Democratic win in two weeks would be seen, correctly, as a major warning sign for Republicans and could be the first tangible indication the GOP might be in real trouble in November.
-- John McIntyre, managing editor of
He Was a Child of Madison
Three distinguished California associates of Ronald Reagan passed away within a day of each other this week. Each represented a distinct element of the Gipper's legacy. Lyn Nofziger, whom I wrote about Tuesday, was a press secretary and political adviser who helped shape and amplify the Reagan message. Caspar Weinberger, Reagan's former secretary of defense, helped him formulate the strategy that brought the Cold War to an end without firing a shot. Much will be written about both men. I would like to honor a lesser-known Reaganite: University of San Diego law professor Bernard Siegan, who died on Monday at age 82.
Bernie Siegan was a major figure in the movement to promote strong constitutional protection for economic liberty as well as civil rights. In a pathbreaking 1980 book, Mr. Siegan challenged the view set out by the New Deal Supreme Court in 1937 that property rights are somehow inferior to other rights and deserve lesser protection. Gail Heriot, a colleague at the University of San Diego, summarized Mr. Siegan's thinking this way: "What's yours is yours, what's mine is mine, and the government does not have unlimited power to take that property or to tell us what to do with it." Who could have given him such a crazy idea? It was James Madison, the father of the Constitution, who wrote: "Government is instituted to protect property of every sort... that alone is a just government, which impartially secures to every man, whatever is his own."
The son of Russian-Polish immigrants, Siegan spoke only Yiddish until he was five. A friend of both Reagan and then-Attorney General Edwin Meese, he was nominated to a seat on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals early in 1987. His nomination quickly became contentious. "He was Borked before Robert Bork was even nominated to the Supreme Court later that year," recalls Patrick McGuigan, who worked for the Free Congress Foundation at the time. "The left used his nomination as a proving ground for the tactics they later applied to Robert Bork."
Indeed, by the time Siegan's nomination failed on an eight-to-six party-line vote in the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1988, he had been accused of being a wild-eyed extremist despite his assurances that his role as an appeals court judge was "to uphold the views of the Supreme Court, not of Bernard Siegan." At the hearing at which he was rejected, he was roasted for daring to say that while the Supreme Court's landmark 1954 desegregation ruling, Brown v. Board of Education, was correctly decided, it was based on the wrong legal grounds. In words familiar from his blistering attack on Mr. Bork earlier that same year, Senator Ted Kennedy said that Mr. Siegan's views were "far, far outside the mainstream of legal thinking." Senator Arlen Specter, who voted for confirmation, warned his colleagues that their assault on Mr. Siegan would have "a chilling effect" on legal scholars if they worried that everything they wrote would later be attacked if they were nominated for judgeships.
However, the left was jubilant over the Siegan defeat. Nan Aron of the Alliance for Justice, exulted: "The vote shows that the Bork debate and vote was not an anomaly -- that the Senate means business with scrutinizing not only Supreme Court nominees but lower court nominees as well." It's no exaggeration to say the events of 1988 brought us directly to the current impasse over lower-court Bush appointees, many of whom have been waiting for a Judiciary Committee vote for years.
Bernie Siegan didn't let his defeat impede his work. He continued to teach and also to advise government officials and private groups drafting new constitutions in post-Cold War Eastern Europe and elsewhere. Evidence of his handiwork can be found in the remarkable respect some post-Soviet countries are showing for foreign investment and property rights. Those protections have helped boost the economic growth of those countries far above that of some nations in "Old Europe." In this country, his ideas have also had an impact. In 1991, the Institute for Justice, a libertarian public interest law firm, was founded in Washington in large part to pursue the ideas in Mr. Siegan's books. Public opinion on economic liberty has clearly shifted. Witness the uproar that followed the Supreme Court's infamous Kelo decision granting local governments sweeping rights to seize private land so it could be turned over to private developers.
"Siegan effectively questioned the conventional wisdom of the day that Congress and the states had broad powers to restrict the use of property rights," notes Richard Epstein, a leading expert on economic liberty at the University of Chicago. Mr. Siegan will be missed, but his ideas will continue to have important consequences.
-- John Fund
Quote of the Day I
"While Congress was engaged in the hysterical debate over foreign ownership of U.S. ports, something much more dangerous was taking place in America's vulnerable ports of entry. As disclosed yesterday at a congressional hearing, federal investigators were able to smuggle enough radioactive material into the United States last year to make two dirty bombs.... The Government Accountability Office is the investigative arm of Congress. In a test in December, undercover GAO teams managed to sneak small amounts of cesium-137 across U.S. border crossing points in Washington State and Texas. Radiation alarms went off, but security inspectors were fooled by phony documents and allowed the material through" -- editorial in yesterday's Miami Herald.
Quote of the Day II
The sight of millions of Frenchmen, predominantly young, demonstrating in deep sympathy and solidarity with themselves, is one that will cause amusement and satisfaction on the English side of the Channel. Everyone enjoys the troubles of his neighbours... Whether they know it or not, the people on the streets in France were demonstrating to keep the [predominantly Muslim] youth of the banlieues -- who recently so amused the world for an entire fortnight with their arsonist antics -- exactly where they are, namely hopeless, unemployed and feeling betrayed. For unless the French labor market is liberalized, they will never find employment and therefore integration into French society. You have only to speak to a few small businessmen or artisans in France -- the petits bourgeois so vehemently despised by the snobbish intellectuals -- to find out why this should be so. The French labor regulations make employment of untried persons completely uneconomic for them" -- Times of London columnist Theodore Dalrymple.
Mister Softie
Donald Rumsfeld has always been known for speaking in blunt terms. This week, the Defense Secretary lived up to his reputation when he told the Army War College that the U.S. deserves a "D" or "D-plus" for its efforts in communicating in the "battle of ideas" that is part of the war on terrorism.
He added: "We have not found the formula as a country" to counter the message of the extremists in the Muslim world. "The strategy must do a great deal more to reduce the lure of the extremist ideology by standing with those moderate Muslims advocating peaceful change, freedom and tolerance."
"The enemy we face may be the most brutal in our history. They currently lack only the means -- not the desire -- to kill, murder millions of innocent people with weapons vastly more powerful than boarding passes and box cutters," Mr. Rumsfeld told the assembled military officers, referring to the terrorists who struck on 9/11.
Maybe it's time to dust off some of the folks who made Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty such a success in combating the ideology of Communism during the Cold War. They could form a "Team B" to reevaluate and suggest experiments in how to conduct U.S. public diplomacy. |
