An end to evil
Web Exclusive 1/8/04
The National Interest
Today: An end to evil; New black candidate; Texas redistricting
By Michael Barone
An end to evil
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Anyone who has ever listened to Richard Perle speak in a panel discussion will remember the elegance of his framing of issues and the strength of his argumentation. And anyone who has listened to David Frum in such a setting will remember his cheerful demolition of opposing arguments and forthright statements of the facts. All those qualities are apparent in their new book, An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror. This is an eloquent and persuasive look ahead at the next imperatives in the war against Islamist terrorism and defense of George W. Bush’s military action in Iraq as integral to that struggle.
Perle is often portrayed as a Svengali, the head of a cabal who has vast influence in the Bush administration. He is indeed a member of, and used to be chairman of, the part-time Defense Policy Board, but from what I have been able to tell he has seldom been in communication with Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, or Paul Wolfowitz; they can read his opinion articles, panel testimony, and this book as easily as anyone else. Nor does it appear that Frum, a presidential speechwriter in 2001-02, has been summoned back by high-level officials for his advice. Indeed, An End to Evil reads like the work of outsiders. "The natural predilections of government," they write, is to take a weak line against terrorism. Those who resist a stronger line "are supported by the heavy weight of inertia, by every governmental instinct toward regularity and predictability and caution, by the bureaucracy’s profound aversion to innovation, controversy and confrontation. And let us not forget that, for all the bravery of our soldiers, our military is a bureaucracy, too."
They chide the State Department for undermining Ahmed Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress, the CIA for liberal bias in its analysis of old Soviet and new Arab threats and for its emphasis on recruiting often useless agents, the FBI for being "pitifully inadequate" in investigating terrorists, the military for being insufficiently flexible, agile, and cost-effective. Our bureaucracies are often more the problem than the solution. "Bureaucracies avoid risks, hate innovation, and seek to conceal their mistakes." These are not the words of men confident that they are setting the course for government.
Nor will all their suggestions be welcome to George W. Bush. Perle and Frum want CIA Director George Tenet to be fired and CIA special operations to be turned over to the Defense Department; Bush has shown no inclination whatever to do either. They want the FBI’s counterterrorist duties handed off to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), something that was deliberately not done in the 2002 DHS legislation. Nor does the administration seem likely to support the national identity card they advocate. Their recommendations that the military invest in productivity and machines does, however, seem to be in line with what Rumsfeld is trying to do.
Some of their recommendations will seem audacious to many readers. They call for a naval and air blockade of North Korea, a redeployment of U.S. troops away from the DMZ where they are at risk from a North Korean assaults, and the planning of pre-emptive strikes on North Korean nuclear installations. They call for clandestine aid to Iranian dissidents, like the clandestine aid to Polish dissidents which Perle, at the Reagan Pentagon, played some part in delivering. They want the administration to tell the Saudis to close down their Wahhabi missionary activities in the United States and to at least hint that we might be willing to recognize a breakaway state in the heavily Shiite eastern provinces where most of the Saudi oil is found. That last recommendation can scarcely fail to be noticed by Prince Bandar, who is Saudi ambassador to the United States, even if no one in the administration utters a word of it .
Perle and Frum give us no sense of when we might expect an end to the war on Islamist terrorism. Much like the Cold War, we must keep fighting the enemy – occasionally in pitched battles, often by other means – for a very long time, until it ceases to pose a threat. Some will say that this course and their recommendations are unrealistic, that America will in time tire of the struggle, and that the bureaucracies will have their way. Perle and Frum point to American success in Iraq and argue that the changes that success has already made in the Middle East–and they wrote before Libya’s abrupt surrender of weapons of mass destruction – have shown that resolve is the only reasonable option. Their critics can deploy time-tested verbal formulas ("stability in the Middle East") and counsels of caution. But Perle and Frum’s elegant deployment of cold logic makes a case that is, for me at least, convincing that we must continue the steely course George W. Bush has set in Afghanistan and Iraq.
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New black candidate
Someone once asked me if I knew any black Republicans. "Sure," I said. "I know all the black Republicans." An exaggeration, of course, but the fact is that black Republicans in public office are scarce. With the retirement of Rep. J. C. Watts of Oklahoma in 2002, there are now no black Republicans in Congress. So it is interesting news that three black Republicans are running serious races for seats in Congress – all, as it happens, in the South. Godfather’s Pizza chain founder Herman Cain is running for the Senate in Georgia. Winston-Salem Councilman Vernon Robinson is running for the open seat in the Fifth District of North Carolina. Former Gingrich aide Dylan Glenn is running in the Eighth District of Georgia. But none has the support of the local Republican establishment or of the Bush White House.
That’s understandable, given the ordinary rules of politics. The Georgia Senate seat, being vacated by Democrat Zell Miller, is almost certain to go to the Republicans; George W. Bush carried the state 55 to 43 percent in 2000. The North Carolina Fifth and Georgia Eighth are safe Republican seats: 66 and 69 percent for Bush in 2000. Naturally there are contests for the Republican nominations in these races. Cain, Robinson, and Glenn have primary opponents with well-known names, much local political support, and, in some cases, personal fortunes they are ready to spend. None is probably the favorite right now to win. Yet each would make an interesting member of Congress, and it would surely benefit the national party if one or more were elected.
Herman Cain is running in the state where he grew up, but not where he made his fortune; he ran Godfather’s Pizza out of Omaha. Cain made his way up in corporate America. He went to work for Pillsbury in 1977, first at corporate headquarters, than at the company’s Burger King and Godfather’s Pizza divisions. In 1988 he and other executives bought Godfather’s from Pillsbury. In the 1990s, Cain became a leader in the National Restaurant Association, appearing in ads criticizing the Clinton healthcare plan. He is a motivational speaker who focuses on economic issues. So far, he has raised far less money than the two congressmen running for the seat, Johnny Isakson and Mac Collins, but he may dip into personal resources. Also running is Al Bartells, a black businessman who received 12 percent of the vote in the 2002 primary for lieutenant governor. The primary is July 20, with a runoff August 10 if no candidate gets 50 percent of the vote.
Vernon Robinson is a former Air Force officer who got elected to the Winston-Salem Council from a heavily Democratic district and consistently opposed higher taxes and spending; he led a fight against taxpayer funding for a stadium. He is sharply confrontational and happy to link himself with Jesse Helms. He favors school choice and charter schools, Second Amendment rights-he defended Boy Scouts against the local United Way when it threatened to cut off funding-and opposes racial quotas and preferences. With support from Jack Kemp, Alan Keyes, and Bob Barr, he has raised $1.1 million from 24,000 donors in all 50 states, including $120,000 on the Internet. Robinson has tough competition, from Ed Broyhill, son of former congressman and Sen. James Broyhill, state Sen. Virginia Foxx, and several others, all capable of self-financing their campaigns–and several others. But he has a track record in public office, high visibility in Winston-Salem, the district’s population center, and has won impressive support from movement conservatives. The primary is May 4, with a runoff June 1 if no candidate gets 40 percent of the vote, unless delayed by redistricting litigation.
Dylan Glenn, a Republican staffer in Washington in the 1990s, returned to his native Georgia and ran for Congress in the Third District in 1998 and lost the primary. In 2000 he won the primary but lost 53 to 47 percent to incumbent Democrat Sanford Bishop. After the 2002 election he became Deputy Chief of Staff to Gov. Sonny Perdue. He resigned in September to run in the Eighth District when incumbent Mac Collins ran for the Senate. (Both the old Third and new Eighth districts include part of his hometown of Columbus.) Glenn is not so much of a firebrand as Robinson and does not have Cain’s financial resources, but he seems to have good political instincts. He also has tough competition, from House Minority Leader Lynn Westmoreland (endorsed by Sen. Saxby Chambliss) and state Sen. Mike Crotts.
Glenn and Robinson are both running in districts with low percentages of blacks, and, in any case, they know they cannot count on many blacks voting in the Republican primary, just as Cain knows that not many blacks are likely to vote in the Georgia Senate primary. But it is not true that Southern whites are unwilling to vote for blacks. Andrew Young ousted a Republican incumbent in a white-majority Atlanta district as long ago as 1972. Roger Crowder, a black Mississippi State University agriculture specialist, lost the 2003 Republican runoff for agriculture commissioner by just hundreds of votes: a lot of whites clearly voted for him, and Gov.Haley Barbour argues that the vote split on regional, not racial lines.
Cain, Robinson, and Glenn may be long shots according to traditional handicappers, but they are serious candidates–and examples of a trend toward a wider variety of black politicians. The 2002 Democratic primaries resulted in the ouster of two left-leaning incumbents with well educated, more moderate Democrats–Denise Majette in the Georgia Fourth and Artur Davis in the Alabama Seventh. Now we see conservative black Republicans making strong runs in the South. An encouraging trend, whatever the results.
Texas redistricting
A three-judge federal court has just approved the very partisan Republican redistricting plan passed this fall by the Texas legislature and signed by Gov. Rick Perry. Unless the Supreme Court steps in and issues a stay – an unlikely event, I think – it will go into effect immediately, with a filing deadline just days away. This means that Democrats’ chances of regaining a majority in the House have moved from very slight to indiscernibly above zero.
This is great news for the Republicans and dreadful news for the Democrats. For 2002 the district lines in Texas were set by another court, and followed pretty closely the 1990s very partisan Democratic redistricting plan, while awarding the Republicans the two seats Texas picked up in reapportionment after the 2000 census. As a result, in November 2002 Republicans won a majority of votes cast for the House in Texas, but Democrats ended up with a 17-15 majority of the delegation. It is now 16-16 since Fourth District Democrat Ralph Hall, the oldest member of the House, switched parties last week; Hall has usually voted with Republicans anyway and in 2002 promised that he would vote to organize the House with the Republicans if his vote turned out to make the difference.
The new plan, pushed by House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, but modified to meet the demands of Republican Texas legislators, could easily produce a 22-10 Republican majority in the Texas delegation – a seven-seat gain over 2002. Shrewdly, the plan maintains the current number of heavily black and Latino districts. Black Congresswomen Sheila Jackson Lee and Eddie Bernice Williams and Latino Congressmen Ruben Hinojosa, Silvestre Reyes, Charlie Gonzalez, Solomon Ortiz, and Ciro Rodriguez appear to have safe seats, and so do Houston area Congressman Gene Green and Chris Bell, who are white and represent heavily Latino and black districts. But white Anglo Texas Democrats are an endangered species. In east Texas Jim Turner, Max Sandlin, and Nick Lampson were all given districts with much unfamiliar territory that vote heavily Republican. So were central Texans Chet Edwards (George W. Bush’s congressman) and Charles Stenholm. Austin liberal Lloyd Doggett seems likely to run in a new district that extends from Austin’s heavily Latino east side all the way to the Mexican border; it’s safely Democratic, but also heavily Latino, and he could face serious Latino primary opposition now or in the future. In the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex, Martin Frost, ranking Democrat on the Rules Committee who lost to Nancy Pelosi in the race for minority whip in 2001, faces cruel choices. The Republican redistricters lopped off heavily black areas of Fort Worth from his district and substituted heavily Republican suburban precincts. But Frost is a fighter and a shrewd politician, and has said he is not sure which district he will run in. An argument can be made that this redistricting is institutionally bad for the House. Frost, Stenholm, and Doggett are veteran House members with great legislative skills, and the intellectual level of the House will not be improved by their departure. The other endangered white Anglo Democrats are also intelligent and useful members. But they are not innocents either. Frost was the author of the 1990s redistricting plan which kept so many Democrats in the Texas delegation for so many years, and the others were its grateful beneficiaries.
Now a lot of changes that might have occurred over a period of years under a neutral redistricting plan seem likely to happen all at once. I don’t take pleasure in seeing the involuntary departure from the House of competent members of either party. But nowhere does the Constitution say that serving in the House is supposed to be a pleasant lifetime career. |
