Congress Needs to Do Its Job

Daniel Larison is writing about one of his pet peeves:

Virginia Sen. Tim] Kaine’s point [on Congressional abdication and presidential overreach] is well-taken, and this is one more reason why the war against ISIS needs to be debated and voted on in spite of the president’s pretense that he doesn’t need Congressional approval. It is profoundly wrong to commit the U.S. to military action without having first considered the merits of the operation publicly and deliberately, but there is something even worse. It is even worse to commit the U.S. to a war that isn’t necessary for American security whether Congress has gone through the motions of a debate or not.... [Kaine is correct that Congress mustn’t be permitted to keep dodging its responsibilities on matters of war, and presidents mustn’t be allowed to wage wars without Congressional approval, but it’s even more important that members of Congress break the habit of signing off on the latest elective war. It is Congress’ habitual deference to bad presidential judgment on matters of war that is even more appalling than its refusal to debate and vote on the wars presidents choose to start. That can’t be fixed without first reviving Congress’ role in the process, but simply getting Congress to debate and vote on these wars is also woefully insufficient.

When I read Larison's complaint about a Congress that refuses to debate war, or that is excessively deferential to requests for the authorization to start or continue a war, I couldn't help but think of Ross Douthat's complaint that the constitution will be ruined if a Democratic president follows the lead of past Republican presidents and achieves by executive order what Congress has failed to accomplish through legislation. The sort of, "Wars, drones, security state, black hole prisons, torture, whatever.... immigration is serious argument that, to me, represents the worst form of missing the forest for the trees. Congress can pass legislation in response to an executive order, often long before the order takes effect. Congress can't unstart a war.

There is no hypocrisy in Larison's criticism of President Obama. Larison has consistently argued against the type of overreach he describes in Obama's actions. He is an established opponent of military adventurism and wars of choice. He's correct, in my opinion, that the nation would be well-served by Congress doing its job, by not turning a blind eye to unilateral military action by the President or granting its blessing after-the-fact. Larison is unimpressed with past Congressional debates over war authorization, and understandably so, but I'm not sure what the remedy would be short of electing different representatives.

My first reacton to Douthat's over-the-top rhetoric on how immigration reform could destroy our way of life (I exaggerate slightly) was that it was another example of Douthat writing about something that he doesn't understand. The blog posts that follow his editorials sometimes suggest to me that he encounters the basic facts and competing interpretations for the first time only after he publishes an editorial, with his making a strong, subsequent effort to reconcile the facts with his already-established opinion. In relation to unilateral war action, I found this complaint about the President's decision to go to Congress before waging war on Syria:

It would be a good thing for the country if the older constitutional norms regained some force – if we declared war in cases where we now issue so-called authorizations for the use of military force, and issued authorizations in situations where presidents of both parties claim the power to act with no congressional blessing whatsoever. But when a constitutional power atrophies, it’s extremely unlikely to be restored through the kind of last-minute, poorly-thought-out, and self-undermining approach that the White House has taken in this case.

You see, in Douthat's mind the President should have spent months reminding Congress that it has a role in debating the wisdom of involving a nation in a war, and should not have surprised them at the last minute by suggesting that they fulfill their constitutionally defined role. Douthat carries on at some length about legality and morality, bou don't have to spend much time reading between the lines to see what Douthat is actually thinking: He supported intervention in Syria, Congress voted against it, and it was thus wrong for the President to have gone to Congress.

Going to Congress is entirely optional, and it’s what presidents do when they’re pitching wars that they themselves don’t fully believe in, and need to rebuild credibility squandered by their own fumbling and failed alliance management. What future White House would look at that example and see a path worth following?

You see, where the Congress specifically addresses and issue and dictates how wars are to be declared, it is nothing short of weakness for a President to give anything more than lip service to those requirements. That's certainly not what Douthat would want a future president to do. You only destroy the constitution by acting in a legal manner, consistent with its terms, in the face of Congressional inaction, and in a context in which Congress is free to legislate on the issue, not by ignoring its explicit terms and launching wars that cannot be undone.

Douthat also complains,

Ah, you might say, but if Congress actually votes the Syria authorization down, then future presidents will feel constrained by the threat of a similar congressional veto whether they want to emulate Obama or not. Except that it’s actually more likely that future presidents will look at a congressional rejection in the case of Syria and see a case for going to Congress even less frequently than recent chief executives have done.

The problem with that conceit should be obvious: Congress does not have to wait for an invitation before it takes up the issue. Congress can look at a crisis in a nation like Syria and, on its own initiative, take up the question of whether military intervention is appropriate. It can pass resolutions urging the President to act. It can pass authorizations giving the President the power to Act. Or it can do the opposite, using its power of the purse to withhold funding for military action that it deems unwise. The question of whether or not Congress acts is not one that is controlled by the President -- it's controlled by Congress itself.

Douthat closes with the same sort of trademark silliness that he used in his immigration editorial,

It is just possible, I suppose, that if Congress votes “no” on this resolution and then the president unwisely goes ahead with strikes anyway and then the House impeaches the president for violating his oath of office... and then the whole thing spirals out into a wild constitutional crisis that leaves this administration permanently crippled, the end result of that crisis could conceivably reshape the White House/Congress balance of power on foreign policy, and leave future administrations more constrained.

Turning briefly to the Constitution, Article I, Section 8,

The Congress shall have Power... To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water;

Congress does not need to wait for a president to invite it to participate in a decision to start a war, or to sit on its hands until a president ignores its refusal to authorize war. It can initiate impeachment proceedings any time a president launches a war without its authorization. Congress has done its best to avoid having to take up its constitutional duties, from passing the War Powers Resolution, an ostensible check on presidential power that is effectively treated as a delegation of constitutional responsibility, to allowing the President to declare that pretty much any military action taken by the United States -- even an action explicitly targets a single country for invasion with the purpose of removing and replacing its leadership -- as a "police action".

Whatever temptation might exist to suggest that what we're looking at is a political debate, with Larison supporting a framework that limits international adventurism and Douthat embracing a President's right to unilaterally engage in that sort of adventurism in the role of "world policeman", the text of the Constitution plainly favors Larison. At the same time, it's difficult to avoid seeing Douthat's positions as being driven by anything other than politics. When it comes to war, he doesn't seem to care what the Constitution says, and if anything he is concerned that a president's respect for the Constitution would be too constraining. When it comes to the issuance of executive orders that are consistent with both the law and Constitution, at least when he opposes the outcome, taking action by executive order usurps the authority of Congress and threatens our system of government (never mind that, at all times, Congress remains free to act).

At the end of the debate, though, it boils down to the same fundamental issue: If Congress cannot or will not do its job, the President is likely to look for ways to act unilaterally. In my opinion it's worse in a context like war powers, where Congress has a clear, constitutionally defined role and, instead of fulfilling that role, effectively encourages the President to act unilaterally. Congressional deference to the President on matters that arguably should have required a formal declaration of war did not begin in the 20th Century -- it's a long-standing problem that became particularly glaring when Congress allowed presidents to launch the Korean and Vietnam wars as "police actions". Larison can complain that the President is operating under a pretense that he does not need Congressional approval for military action in Syria, but it's only a pretense if Congress is willing to act. If Congress won't call for a vote, and won't impose any consequence on unilateral action by a President, then (constitutionally or not) Congress has effectively delegated its war-making power to the President. Douthat can whinge that the President should not engage in perfectly lawful action to bypass Congressional gridlock, but again it's only an issue if Congress refuses to act.

Either way, nothing is going to change until Congress decides to start doing its job.

Democracy Will be Ruined if Obama Acts Like... Ronald Reagan

Poor Ross Douthat is in a tizzy over the possibility that President Obama may act through executive order, to address some of the immigration issues that the Republicans refuse to address through legislation. No, of course, Douthat makes no mention of the fact that the Senate passed an immigration reform bill that died in the Republican-controlled House. He instead sees the inevitable death of democracy in the President's following in the footsteps of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.

Douthat's first resort is to the slippery slope, the idea that if the President is willing to shield some groups from deportation in a manner consistent with his constitutional authority and existing law, he could exempt pretty much every person unlawfully in the U.S. from being subject to deportation. He fantasizes,

So the president could “temporarily” legalize 99.9 percent of illegal immigrants and direct the Border Patrol to hand out work visas to every subsequent border crosser, so long as a few thousand aliens were deported for felonies every year.

Even if we assume that to be the case, as Douthat's fantasy has no chance of actually becoming reality, it makes for a weak argument against the exercise of executive prerogative. If anything, though, Douthat's hyperbolic scare tactics reveal the weakness of the Republican position. Perhaps it is only in the face of such a fantasy scenario that House Republicans could be inspired to do their job and actually pass legislation.

Douthat makes an extraordinarily weak attempt to distinguish the President's proposal from past executive actions, revealing his essential ignorance of the facts.

In past cases, presidents used the powers he’s invoking to grant work permits to modest, clearly defined populations facing some obvious impediment (war, persecution, natural disaster) to returning home.

Obviously, the amnesty that Bush and Reagan granted to the wives and children of prior beneficiaries of legislative amnesty do not even slightly resemble what Douthat describes. Douthat also suggests that the number of potential beneficiaries somehow makes the Obama proposal different from what has come before. However, what the numbers truly reflect is the extent to which Congress has neglected this issue -- immigration reform was supposed to be a priority for George W. Bush, but he was never able to get a bill past his own party. As the previously linked article indicates,

"Bush Sr. went big at the time. He protected about 40 percent of the unauthorized population. Back then that was up to 1.5 million. Today that would be about 5 million."

The same article quotes a former Republican aide to then-Senator Alan Simpson that a difference at that time was that Congress indicated that it was going to pass legislation addressing the issue. That's really a distinction without a difference. Nothing is stopping Congress from passing immigration reform legislation, or a narrowly tailored bill directly addressing the issues on which Obama has proposed executive orders. Instead they talk about trying to tie anti-immigration provisions onto "must pass" legislation, potentially triggering a government shut-down. A mature Congress would debate and legislate. We don't have a mature Congress.

From there, it's back to the slippery slope. A President, Douthat argues, could "rewrite" vast areas of public policy through executive order. Again, Douthat ignores the fact that executive orders must be consistent with the law, and thus that Congress has an easy and obvious remedy to overreach -- namely, doing its job. Douthat adds one of his near-inevitable whinges about how Democrats are supposedly hypocritical,

No liberal has persuasively explained how, after spending the last Republican administration complaining about presidential “signing statements,” it makes sense for the left to begin applying Cheneyite theories of executive power on domestic policy debates.

Perhaps Douthat spent years complaining about executive overreach by Bush and Cheney; I can't say that I've followed him closely enough to know, and can say that I don't care enough about his past writings to try to find out. I could point out the obvious, that executive orders are not the same thing as signing statements. A signing statement declares, in effect, "I don't think that this law (or some provision of this law) is constitutional, so I won't be bound by it". Congress can't do much about a signing statement -- it has already legislated on the issue, so passing another bill saying "We really mean it" isn't going to have an impact.

As Douthat should know, an executive order must be consistent with federal law. With an executive order, Congress is free to express its will, and nothing is stopping Congress from passing an immigration law addressing these issues. A better analogy would be to the objections raised to the stack of executive orders that George W. Bush signed on his way out of the White House, but perhaps Douthat doesn't know that history -- or perhaps he doesn't want to allude to facts that betray how pathetic his argument truly is.

It's also interesting that Douthat floats from accusing "liberals" of being hypocrites to relying on a poll that documents that most Democrats oppose unilateral action.

According to the latest IBD/TIPP poll, 73% of the public say Obama should work with Congress on reforms. Just 22% say he should "sidestep Congress and act on his own using executive orders" — something the president has repeatedly pledged to do.

Among independents, 78% say Obama should work with Congress, with only 19% saying he should go it alone. Even among Democrats, only 39% say Obama should act unilaterally, while 54% say he should work with Congress.

Were Douthat more interested in facts and less interested in attacking "liberals" and the President, he might concede that the President's willingness to act by executive action flows from his own party's refusal to legislate on a wide range of important issues, including immigration. He could even call on his party to preempt the President or to make immigration reform a priority in January. Odds are it will take a year from the time any executive order is finalized to when agencies have new regulations and procedures in place to carry out the new policy -- Douthat should note that if the Republicans who will be in control of both chambers of Congress choose not to pass an immigration law during that year, they have nobody to blame but themselves. If they pass a clean bill and it is vetoed by the President, they will be in a strong position to complain -- but they have no apparent intention of being that responsible.

Douthat next resorts to the notion that the midterm election stands as some sort of informal referendum on the President's agenda, I guess signifying that he's supposed to abandon his agenda in favor of whatever the Republicans want. By now, Douthat should be aware that his depiction of a midterm election as a plebiscite is not, in fact, its role, nor is it how legislators treat the outcome of an election. What the election does do, however, is give the Republican Party control in both chambers of Congress, and tremendous latitude to pass an immigration reform bill of their own design come January 1 -- or, if the House Republicans choose to do so, even during the lame duck session.

Douthat follows up by describing his column as "shrill-but-accurae", which shows, I guess, that he can be half-right. After reiterating his position that the number of people who might benefit from the executive orders is larger that with similar prior actions, percentages apparently being beside the point, Douthat expresses the belief that President Obama hopes that his executive orders create "facts on the ground" that a future President won't easily be able to reverse. Wow, now that's the sort of brilliant insight that makes clear why he got his NYTimes gig. Next column, "I just looked in a mirror and realized that there's a nose on my face."

Douthat believes that the executive orders might not be reversed because a "moral obligation" could arise; it's not clear why Douthat believes that such a "moral obligation" would sway a Republican president or legislators. He argues that the "moral obligation" would result in "a form of political pressure", with its supposedly being harder for government "to retract a benefit than to grant it in the first place". Again, no explanation as to why he believes the Republicans -- their party being dedicated to rolling back Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and other aspects of the social safety net -- would not give it a college try. Oh, but then he gets to the real issue -- that we're talking about "a Republican establishment that’s fearful of doing anything to alienate Latinos in a presidential year".

A reasonable interpretation of that last point is that the rest is window dressing. Douthat knows that the problem is not so much an issue of executive overreach as it is an example of Republican Party dysfunction. The faction that wants to pass immigration reform can't get a bill past the party's anti-immigration factions, but if you have some form of immigration reform in place the party as a whole won't want to touch the issue for fear of alienating an important voter bloc.

[Recognition of Republican reluctance to alienate Latino voters] is, of course, part of the political calculation here … that claiming more presidential authority won’t just accomplish a basic liberal policy goal, but could also effectively widen the G.O.P.’s internal fissures on immigration, exploiting the divergence of interests between the congressional party and its would-be presidential nominees.)

It's not the President's fault that Douthat's party is dysfunctional on this issue. It's the fault of its elected representatives.

Douthat makes a rather incredible statement,

Then finally, even setting all of the foregoing aside, even allowing that this move could be theoretically reversed, pointing to the potential actions of the next president is still a very strange way to rebut complaints about executive overreach.

It's as if Douthat has never before heard of an executive order. Could he be so ignorant of the U.S. system that he's unaware of the thousands upon thousands of executive orders that have been signed by past administrations, or that there's absolutely nothing unique or special about how Congress or a future President would respond to Obama's proposed administrations as compared to any other executive order?

And this....

But that reality doesn’t really tell us much of anything about whether a particular moves claims too much power for the executive branch itself. Even in the fairly unlikely event that Chris Christie or Marco Rubio cancels an Obama amnesty, that is, the power itself will still have been claimed and exercised, the line rubbed out and crossed; the move will still exist as a precedent, a model, a case study in how a president can push the envelope when Congress doesn’t act as he deems fit.

Given his prior concessions, Douthat knows that's a specious argument. When you're talking about actions that literally track the footsteps of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, you're not talking about a new line being set. Perhaps Douthat means to indict Reagan and Bush for moving the line that Obama is treating as a fair limit? No, of course not. We're dealing with a standard Republican argument that boils down to, "Whatever may have happened under a past Republican president, it's different when a Democrat does it."

Douthat could have offered a reasoned explanation for why immigration reform is a bad idea, or why his political party is correct to oppose it. He could have offered a balanced argument -- yes, it follows precedent; yes, it follows Republican precedent; yes, it flows from Republican obstruction in Congress; but it's still a bad way to implement policy. He could have implored his party to finally pass an immigration reform bill and render the issue moot. But any of that would be far too surprising. Instead, predictably, Douthat makes what is at its heart an appeal to fear, built on the weak foundation of the slippery slope.

Me? As this whole issue could be preempted if Congress simply does its job, I call on Congress to do its job. If Congress can't do that much, even as Douthat bleats about executive overreach, presidents will be effectively forced to rely on executive orders to circumvent Congressional gridlock. That's bad for the country, but in most cases it will likely be worse for nothing to get done.

There Are Worse Things Than Divorce

Ross Douthat sounds like a guy who stopped by the cafeteria, only to discover that the chef may be changing some of his favorite dishes:

On the two modern occasions when a pontiff defined a doctrine of the faith, it was on a subject — the holiness of the Virgin Mary — that few devout Catholics consider controversial....

But something very different is happening under Pope Francis. In his public words and gestures, through the men he’s elevated and the debates he’s encouraged, this pope has repeatedly signaled a desire to rethink issues where Catholic teaching is in clear tension with Western social life — sex and marriage, divorce and homosexuality.

What has Douthat so concerned?

And in the synod on the family, which concluded a week ago in Rome, the prelates in charge of the proceedings — men handpicked by the pontiff — formally proposed such a rethinking, issuing a document that suggested both a general shift in the church’s attitude toward nonmarital relationships and a specific change, admitting the divorced-and-remarried to communion, that conflicts sharply with the church’s historic teaching on marriage’s indissolubility....

In the end, the document’s controversial passages were substantially walked back....

Over all, that conservative reply has the better of the argument. Not necessarily on every issue: The church’s attitude toward gay Catholics, for instance, has often been far more punitive and hostile than the pastoral approach to heterosexuals living in what the church considers sinful situations.... But going beyond such a welcome to a kind of celebration of the virtues of nonmarital relationships generally, as the synod document seemed to do, might open a divide between formal teaching and real-world practice that’s too wide to be sustained. And on communion for the remarried, the stakes are not debatable at all. The Catholic Church was willing to lose the kingdom of England, and by extension the entire English-speaking world, over the principle that when a first marriage is valid a second is adulterous, a position rooted in the specific words of Jesus of Nazareth. To change on that issue, no matter how it was couched, would not be development; it would be contradiction and reversal.

If we're going to invoke the horror of Henry VIII wanting an annulment from his first marriage such that he could marry Anne Boleyn, might it not make sense to ask if the Church's decision was the right one -- let alone a decision driven by theology as opposed to politics? Might it not also make sense to look at Henry VIII's subsequent history and hesitate -- to contemplate that just maybe it's better that annulments and divorce be more freely available than to have a husband decide that the best way out of a marriage is through decapitation? As Rudy Giuliani and Newt Gingrich can attest, it is much easier now to get a divorce and yet remain a Catholic in good standing, by virtue of annulment, than it was in Henry VIII's time -- but politics are still involved and it seems much easier for the wealthy, powerful and connected to get an annulment from the Church than for most others.

While the notion that the Church might find a way to accommodate the millions of Catholics who are separated from their faith by virtue of a divorce may deeply offend some Catholics -- a minority — sometimes a small minority — among self-identified Catholics in the West -- a faction that apparently includes Douthat, it's interesting to see how dismissive Douthat is of Catholics who feel every bit as strongly about homosexuality. Douthat appears to be very concerned that "conservative Catholics" believe something that he, himself, does not appear to believe -- the doctrine of Papal infallibility.

My guess is that many of the same people who, on the issue of divorce, Douthat praises as "the people who have done the most to keep the church vital in an age of institutional decline: who have given their energy and time and money in an era when the church is stained by scandal, who have struggled to raise families and live up to demanding teachings, who have joined the priesthood and religious life in an age when those vocations are not honored as they once were", are every bit as opposed to his progressive views on homosexuality. It would be interesting to hear them surveyed, in retrospect, as to whether the Church made the correct decision with Henry VIII.

The Call for Constant Parental Supervision

Ross Douthat tells us about the night he had to walk home from baseball practice,

When I was about 9 years old, I graduated to a Little League whose diamonds were a few miles from our house, in a neighborhood that got rougher after dark. After one practice finished early, I ended up as the last kid left with the coach, waiting in the gloaming while he grumbled, looked at his watch and finally left me — to wait or walk home, I’m not sure which.

I started walking. Halfway there, along a busy road, my father picked me up. He called my coach, as furious as you would expect a protective parent to be; the coach, who probably grew up having fistfights in that neighborhood, gave as good as he got; I finished the season in a different league.

Here are two things that didn’t happen. My (lawyer) father did not call the police and have the coach arrested for reckless endangerment of a minor. And nobody who saw me picking my way home alone thought to call the police on my parents, or to charge them with neglect for letting their child slip free of perfect safety for an hour.

Douthat should include the coach among those who didn't call the police on his parents. I'm tempted to be more than a bit uncharitable in my interpretation of what Douthat means by "rougher after dark", and I suspect he's dressing up a rather mundane story, but New Haven is a big place. Douthat should consider something more: What the police would have been likely to do if they were summoned. Odds are they would have tried to help young Ross find his way home. Also, as Douthat compares his own experience to those in the news of late, it seems worth noting that he doesn't accuse his furious father of overreacting.

I have a great deal of sympathy for the argument that our nation has become overprotective of children, but that's in no small part due to the fact that changes in our culture have led to a car culture, a culture in which you can drive down a street or even go to a park and find yourself quite alone. When I was a kid, I could walk from my home to the neighborhood park, and I would see other kids (and adults) on the sidewalk on the way there, and plenty of kids (and adults) at the park when I arrived. For much of the summer, one of my cities of residence would have staff at the park, organizing activities and supervising a splash pool. I don't think that human nature has changed, that fewer adults would help a kid in distress, but instead think that the problem is that fewer adults are around to provide that type of support to somebody else's unsupervised child. The biggest difference between a person driving by in a car, then and now, is that back then drivers didn't have cell phones.

Douthat lists a series of stories in which parents were arrested or had their children removed from their care after leaving them unsupervised, often for short periods of time, or even for matters outside of their control.

Some of these cases have been reported, but some are first-person accounts, and in some the conduct of neighbors and the police and social workers may be more defensible than the anecdote suggests.

But the pattern — a “criminalization of parenthood,” in the words of The Washington Post’s Radley Balko — still looks slightly nightmarish, and there are forces at work here that we should recognize, name and resist.

Douthat identifies what he believes to be the three primary causes of this pattern, upper class helicopter parenting producing a culture in which people expect children to be supervised at all times, media-driven anxiety from stories overstating dangers to children, and an erosion of community and social trust. I suspect that there is something to the first argument, as parents who have the privilege of always supervising their children, whether directly or through caregivers, can easily lose track of how difficult it is for other parents to accomplish a similar level of supervision. No doubt, the media's horror stories inflate public fears and make people wary of letting their children go out alone. An erosion of community and social trust, though? It fits with Douthat's preconceptions, but I don't see it. Instead I see a significant change in context, with our society shifting to indoor activities and its becoming alien to see an unsupervised child at play in a park. It's not particularly realistic to expect that a person, catching a glimpse of a child who may be lost, to park their car, approach the child and investigate before deciding what their next step should be, even if we assume the child won't be calling the police on her own cell phone due to "stranger danger" lessons.

Let's also not forget the angry parent. Just as Douthat's dad tore into his coach with a criticism that must have amounted to, "How dare you leave the child (who we forgot to pick up) alone to find his way home after practice?" How many passersby want to encounter the angry parent who, upon seeing them approach a child who seemed to be unattended, approaches with a belligerent, "How dare you!" How many store owners, finding children wandering unsupervised in their aisles, want to take the risk of having the children wait in their offices while they try to track down parents? Particularly with the exaggerated but accepted "stranger danger" threat, and with the disproportionate anger that can come from some parents even when it was their own negligence that necessitated stranger involvement, it's no small wonder that some people choose to notify the police.

The problem at that point, also, is less that the police were notified, and more that prosecutors are willing to authorize charges over parental mistakes that cause no harm, where a stern lecture might suffice. And in that context, once again, we have a significant media role -- "Protective services was called about this child on three separate occasions, but did nothing...." Nobody wants to be the subject of that sort of headline, so the reflex has switched from a friendly drop-off and perhaps a warning about providing proper supervision to the initiation of legal proceedings.

Moving back to the complexity, for a moment, sometimes at the root of these cases you will find either that the reason for court intervention is more complicated than a news media sound bite might suggest, or can find another case that suggests why the police or a prosecutor don't find an act to be as harmless as the media coverage suggests. Leaving a "4-year-old in a locked, windows-cracked car for five minutes on a 50 degree day" may not pose a danger that the child will die from exposure to heat, but cars are not safe playgrounds for children. You'll find plenty of stories about near-misses and injuries resulting from a child's shifting a parked car into neutral or releasing a hand brake and, although car cigarette lighters are now something of a rarity, of children injuring themselves with items left inside the car.

I'm also reminded of a time when one of my clients decided to bring his girlfriend's four-year-old child to court, on a date that he expected to be sentenced to jail. The judge drew the conclusion that the child was present as an insurance policy, inferring that the defendant thought he might not be sent to jail if that meant that somebody else would have to take care of the child. The judge sentenced the defendant to jail and was prepared to call protective services. I offered to try to find the child's mother and, after several hours and the leaving of countless messages, while ultimately delivering the child to his grandmother, was not particularly impressed that I had done the child any great favor by keeping protective services out of his situation. As my experience with that type of case has expanded, I would be surprised if the child had not already been the subject of a protective services investigation. I'll say this: He was a remarkably well-behaved child who handled the situation very well, and he deserved a better life than the one he has likely since experienced.

Douthat notes that work requirements for welfare recipients can result in contexts in which "a single mother [is] behind a fast-food counter while her kid is out of school". Douthat's childhood was apparently sufficiently sheltered that he is not aware that most single mothers are neither on welfare nor working fast food jobs, but that aside he raises a fair observation about the inherent tension within Republican views on the subject:

This last issue presents a distinctive challenge to conservatives like me, who believe such work requirements are essential. If we want women like Debra Harrell to take jobs instead of welfare, we have to also find a way to defend their liberty as parents, instead of expecting them to hover like helicopters and then literally arresting them if they don’t.

And the solution is.... to be continued? What an unfortunate moment for Douthat to have run out of space for his column.

If you want a culture in which children can play in public, walk to school, take urban public transportation and the like, without parental supervision and without raising any concerns or eyebrows, you need to focus less on nebulous notions of "community and social trust", and focus much more on getting a population of kids and parents back on the streets such that it's not unusual for a child (of appropriate age and maturity) to engage in public activities without supervision, and where there's a natural population of people on the streets and in the parks who will react to any danger the child might face. Scolding people for not putting their lives on hold to investigate a child's status before notifying the police is not an approach that is likely to solve anything. With the manner in which our society has evolved to one of indoor activities and empty public spaces, I'm not sure that any generation of kids in the foreseeable future is going to enjoy the sort of liberty I had as a child, to go to a park, walk to school, ride my bicycle around town, take public transportation and the like, without any thought of parental supervision.

I Don't Remember President Rumsfeld

In a column that reminds me of David Brooks' efforts to put a nominally independent spin on right-wing talking points, Ross Douthat criticizes President Obama's second term foreign policy record. All sixteen months of it. Douthat isn't going to cut Obama any slack:

His foreign policy looked modestly successful when he was running for re-election. Now it stinks of failure....

But the absence of an Iraq-scale fiasco is not identical to success, and history shouldn’t grade this president on a curve set by Donald Rumsfeld.

Why should this President be graded "on a curve set by Donald Rumsfeld", as opposed to on a curve set by George W. Bush? The buck stops at the White House, unless you're a Republican in which case it stops with the Secretary of Defense?

Douthat's principal conceit is that, "balked by domestic opposition, turn to the world stage to secure their legacy". By "usually", he apparently means "recently", as his examples are Jimmy Carter ("the Camp David accords"), George W. Bush ("his AIDS-in-Africa initiative"), Bill Clinton ("chasing Middle Eastern peace") and Richard Nixon (opening doors to China) and... one-term President George H.W. Bush with something that's not really a foreign policy initiative as it is a matter of watching events unfold ("closing out the cold war"), although I suspect Douthat means to attribute that to Reagan. To the extent that you want to credit Reagan's foreign policy with helping to end the cold war, it's difficult to see how his second term policy was materially different from his first term policy. I can't help but notice, also, that Douthat makes no mention of the Clinton Administration's success facilitating the peace process in Northern Ireland, instead implying that Clinton is among those presidents who has no clear victory. He also makes no mention of Ronald Reagan's decision to intervene in Lebanon, or his rapid withdrawal after the barracks bombing, or of George W. Bush's inabilty to prevent Russia's invasion of Georgia, and its subsequent actions in South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

One big problem with Douthat's conceit is that he looks only at what he sees as the "big accomplishment", even if it relative terms it's a small one or a failure, while ignoring the lists of horribles that can be found in the choices of pretty much every president on his implied list. There's no reason to believe that, a decade or so from now, a pundit as generous as Douthat is toward Republican presidents won't be able to find a second term accomplishment by President Obama that's at least as impressive as Bush's AIDS initiative. Further, why is it a good thing that presidents, frustrated by their inability to achieve their domestic agenda, shift their focus to the international scene? If it's possible to attend to both the domestic and the international, go for it. But if it's not, or if focus on domestic issues is "too hard", a President should nonetheless buckle down and do his primary job before trying to build a legacy on foreign policy issues.

In listing what he describes as Obama's foreign policy failures, it's no surprise that Douthat wants to limit our consideration of G.W.'s fingerprints. Even granting that Douthat recites, "His predecessor’s invasion of Iraq still looms as the largest American blunder of the post-Vietnam era", and concedes that "many current problems can be traced back to errors made in 2003", to put it mildly that's a remarkable understatement.

• Libya - Douthat implies that the so-called Benghazi scandal is a Republican confabulation, but complains, "The consuming Republican focus on Benghazi has tended to obscure the fact that post-Qaddafi Libya is generally a disaster area". That's not an unfair assessment, but the question becomes, "What should we do about it". The chaos is not considered a sufficient threat to U.S. or European foreign policy interests that any western nation is interested in intervening. Is Douthat arguing that Obama should have left Qaddafi in power, better to keep the humanitarian disaster we know than to risk one we don't know? He does not seem to be arguing that the U.S. should send enough troops to occupy and pacify the region, for however many years that would take. What's left? Also, how does Obama's Libya record and its fallout compare to that of Ronald Reagan, who unsuccessfully tried to kill Qaddafi, or George W. Bush, who along with Tony Blair spent years promoting Qaddafi as a poster child for the success of the "War on Terror"?

• Syria - Douthat complains, again not without justification, that the Obama Administration has not kept its implied promise to use military force to remove Assad from power, upon it being established with reasonable certainty that he used chemical weapons. Except Douthat is not endorsing the prevarication that the world does not take the U.S. seriously any more because we didn't invade Syria, and goes on to state, "I’m glad we don’t have 50,000 troops occupying Syria" -- as if we could occupy Syria with only 50,000 troops. The military estimated a short-term need for 75,000 troops just to secure Libya's weapon stockpiles.

• The Holy Land - Douthat complains that John Kerry's Israel/Palestine peace initiative has failed. I'm not sure that many people other than John Kerry expected the initiative to be a success. Douthat himself deems the failure "predictable" and... it was. George W. Bush had a number of peace initiatives directed at the Middle East that were far more ambitious than anything President Obama has endorsed. His father attempted a more coercive approach to advancing a peace accord. Clinton spent years hosting superficial peace talks before his last-minute effort to achieve agreement on the big issues helped contribute to a complete collapse of the peace process. But the fundamental problem is with the leaders of that region, and the last leader who seemed courageous enough to press for a bona fide peace deal was assassinated in 1995.

• Iraq - Douthat complains that "the caldron is boiling and Iranian influence is growing", as if this is a new thing. Who would have thought, after all, that replacing a largely secular Sunni regime with a much more religious Shiite regime would lead Iraq to become friendlier with Iran... except for anybody who knows anything about the Middle East? The failure Douthat attributes to Obama? a suggestion that the "White House’s indecision undercut negotiations that might have left a small but stabilizing U.S. force in place." That's not actually what the article linked by Douthat states. The author indicates that U.S. officials did not receive guidance from the Obama Administration about how many troops they wanted to leave behind, but that's attributed to ambivalence, not indecision. The article also suggests that the Obama Administration was not in fact ambivalent, but that "The American attitude was: Let’s get out of here as quickly as possible". Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki, on the other hand, who was negotiating over troop levels, is explicitly described as indecisive. Douthat admits, "I sympathized with the decision to slip free of Iraq entirely", and he attempts no argument that the Middle East would be better off had the U.S. maintained a troop presence in Iraq.

• Afghanistan - Douthat complains that "", never mind that he's speaking of a first term decision by the President, or that if he's followed the Iraq and Afghanistan wars at all he should know that there are enormous differences between the two nations and the nature and purpose of the respective "surges". Douthat seems to have little understanding of Afghanistan, complaining, "even with an American presence the Taliban are barely being held at bay". Let's imagine that the U.S. took a few holds barred approach to occupation and modernization of Afghanistan, as the Russians did during their years of occupation. Did that make the Taliban go away? And if we're bringing first term decisions into the discussion, here's a doozy. For that matter, was Ronald Reagan's effort to get the Soviet Union out of Afghanistan a foreign policy success, in that the USSR withdrew, or should we look at what subsequently happened in both Afghanistan and Pakistan and contemplate whether it was one of the biggest foreign policy blunders of all time?

• Russia - Douthat complains that "the 'reset' with Russia — has ended in the shambles of the Ukraine crisis, as if there was something that the U.S. could reasonably have done to prevent Russia from invading Crimea. This is the same Putin who, as previously mentioned, invaded Georgia under G.W.'s watch. Expressing a willingness to start afresh with Putin is not something that can be achieved unilaterally.

• Iran - Although Douthat suggests that the Obama Administration could still achieve a "paradigm-altering achievement" with Iran, he simultaneously complains that those efforts could "unsettle[] America’s existing alliances in the region to very little gain". So it's the same situation G.W. Bush failed to resolve, but with the added caveat that any promising effort, and perhaps even a breakthrough agreement, could simultaneously be a failure. Perhaps that's not such a bad perspective on significant foreign policy issues, as blowback from even well-intentioned efforts can be harsh, but it seems like an absurd standard to impose on the President, particularly in light of Douthat's failure to acknowledge that the presidents whose second term accomplishments he finds to be most impressive all made foreign policy decisions that resulted in severe, negative consequences for the country.

Douthat goes on to qualify the Obama Administration's successful operation that resulted in the killing of Osama bin Laden by asserting that the success of the mission "has to be qualified by Islamist terrorism’s resurgence". It's the sort of footnoting he's not willing to do for any other President, some of who can be credited with foreign policy failures that had much more profound and direct negative consequences for U.S. foreign policy interests. More than that, does Douthat believe that it's the killing of bin Laden that resulted in the "Islamist terrorism's resurgence"? That the Obama Administration shouldn't have pursued that mission? And, wait a minute, the blog post linked to support Douthat's allegation of the claimed "resurgence" doesn't even support his position, instead pointing out how difficult it is to hunt for terrorists and has resulted in U.S. security difficulties for government personnel in Yemen, that the U.S. issues regional security alerts when there is an "uptick in the fight against Al Qaeda in Yemen", and questioning the value of drone attacks.

From my reading, all Douthat's equivocation does is reaffirm that his goal is not to analyze Obama's foreign policy records, but to put a slightly centrist spin right-wing talking points. To be a "reasonable voice" by alluding to G.W. Bush's disastrous Iraq policy and distancing himself from the most ludicrous right-wing allegations directed at the President, and then to explain why none of that distance matters while hoping that his readers don't recognize his overt partisanship. If any lesson can be drawn from Douthat's analysis, it's that six years from now, no matter what larger consensus is drawn from the Obama Administration's foreign policy record, we can anticipate that some number of partisan pundits will offer tear-downs of the foreign policy records of the incumbent President and, if the President is a Republican, that they're apt to try to pick even the smallest of cherries from President Obama's record to try to paper over his acknowledged failures. Meanwhile, I would rather a second term President keep his eye on the domestic situation as even a small but significant foreign policy success does not overcome the rank incompetence of an administration that ignores or inflates an economic bubble that, upon bursting, almost takes down the world's economy.

Sure, Let's Break the Tie Between Health Insurance and Employment

Ross Douthat complains that the PPACA does not break the bond between employment and health insurance,

The policy consensus... is that the status quo is actually the problem, and that it deserves to be threatened, undermined and replaced as expeditiously as possible. Wonks of the left and right disagree on what that replacement should look like. But they’re united in regarding employer-provided coverage as an unsustainable relic: a burden on businesses, a source of perverse incentives for the health care market and an obstacle to more efficient, affordable and universal coverage.

Douthat then provides an inaccurate history of McCain's proposal to replace employer tax incentives with an individual tax credit. Douthat pretends that there was something brave in McCain's proposal, and that it played a role in his loss of the 2008 election, but presents no evidence in support of either suggestion. The problems with McCain's proposal did not lie in its severing the tie between insurance and employment, but in his reliance upon dogma - the notion among factions of the Republican Party that the biggest problem we have with health insurance is that people have too much of it - and the fact that he would have thrown working Americans into the individual health insurance market, with some sort of government-run insurance program to pick up the unprofitable applicants, those with pre-existing medical conditions. The problem wasn't that McCain wanted to shift out of the employer-provided insurance model, it was that he wanted to radically redefine the entire health insurance market to the significant detriment of individual workers.

Douthat argues that having insurance exchanges and subsidies constitutes a "center-left alternative to the existing system", never mind that right-wing advocacy groups like the Heritage Foundation had a long history of pushing for exchanges, and that nobody has proposed that a system of exchanges can function without subsidies. Douthat has a point, that much of the rest of the program is designed to perpetuate the status quo, and he's also correct that demagoguery from both political parties makes it difficult to disturb that status quo, but he's implicitly arguing that the exchanges are a superior alternative to employer-provided health insurance. So why no criticism of the Republican factions that are working overtime to impede the implementation of the exchanges, in the hope of crippling individual access to health insurance through the exchanges?

Douthat fails to discuss the Republican Party's lockstep opposition to the PPACA, and how that factored into the eventual legislation. What would be better than an "individual mandate", and a continuation of traditional subsidies to employers that offer health insurance? A tax. Leaving aside for the moment John Roberts' ultimate conclusion that the individual mandate is a tax, why couldn't we fund the PPACA through a tax, again? Many aspects of the bill could have been improved had the Republican Party, or even a handful of Republican Senators, decided that it was better to pass a good reform bill than to try to take down the President. That strategy seemed to be working in 2010, so they doubled down. How many times have House Republicans brought absurd "repeal" votes to the floor, demonstrating their fondness for grandstanding and demagoguery? How many times have they offered to sit down with the Democrats to iron out the bugs in the PPACA and make it a better, more functional bill? Would that be roughly 37:0?

How's this for an idea? Phase out the present subsidies to businesses in favor of subsidies to individuals, but with the subsidy credited toward the cost of any employer-sponsored health coverage, while replacing the individual mandate with a modest payroll tax that is also credited to health insurance purchases, whether through an employer or through the exchanges? If your employer doesn't provide insurance you can take the entire subsidy with you when you purchase through an exchange. If you choose not to obtain health insurance, you don't get anything back - or the government could enroll you in a bare bones catastrophic insurance plan so that should you require medical care following an unexpected accident or illness your care providers can get paid.

Perhaps Douthat should also ponder this: if the tie between health insurance and employment is the huge evil he perceives, it can be wiped away in a heartbeat by implementing a single payer system, or through a system of exchanges in which the consumer picks an approved, privately administered health insurance plan while the government pays the premium.

If Republicans Obstruct Voting Rights, They Can't Pin the Consequence on Roberts

Ross Douthat purports,

If you believe Chief Justice John Roberts Jr.’s more overheated liberal critics, last week’s Supreme Court decision invalidating a portion of the Voting Rights Act is designed to make sure African-American turnout never hits these highs again. The ruling will allow a number of (mostly Southern) states to change voting laws without the Justice Department’s pre-approval, which has liberals predicting a wave of Republican-led efforts to “suppress” minority votes — through voter ID laws, restrictions on early voting and other measures.

These predictions probably overstate the ruling’s direct impact on state election rules, which can still be challenged under other provisions of the Voting Rights Act and other state and federal laws. But it is possible that the decision will boost the existing Republican enthusiasm for voter ID laws, and hasten the ongoing, multistate push for their adoption.

I think there's an inherent tension between suggesting in one paragraph that an argument is a ridiculous slippery slope theory advanced by "overheated liberal critics", then in the next to say that the predictions of those "overheated liberal critics... probably overstate" the impact of the ruling. At first blush it would seem either that a characterization of the critics as "overheated liberal[s]" is unfair or that the risk of vote suppression is dramatically overstated by the suggestion that it "probably" won't occur - is it truly a coin toss? Perhaps Douthat means to suggest that although only "overheated liberal[s]" are concerned, a much larger population of liberals and conservatives underestimate the possibility that they're correct? I suspect it's poor editing.

The "gift" Douthat perceives is that Republicans will continue their effort to disenfranchise African American voters:

A 2 percent dip is still enough to influence a close election. But voter ID laws don’t take effect in a vacuum: as they’re debated, passed and contested in court, they shape voter preferences and influence voter enthusiasm in ways that might well outstrip their direct influence on turnout. They inspire registration drives and education efforts; they help activists fund-raise and organize; they raise the specter of past injustices; they reinforce a narrative that their architects are indifferent or hostile to minorities.

This, I suspect, is part of the story of why African-American turnout didn’t fall off as expected between 2008 and 2012. By trying to restrict the franchise on the margins, Republican state legislators handed Democrats a powerful tool for mobilization and persuasion, and motivated voters who might otherwise have lost some of their enthusiasm after the euphoria of “Yes We Can” gave way to the reality of a stagnant, high-unemployment economy.

Oddly, despite having noted that tjhe "effects [of voter ID laws] are relatively limited" and that the resulting "reduction [in voting] crosses racial lines, rather than affecting African-Americans exclusively", Douthat seems unconcerned by those efforts on voters. His concern seems to be only that his party of preference may suffer for its actions. Douthat shares some numbers:

As Sean Trende of RealClearPolitics has pointed out, for all the talk about how important Hispanics are to the conservative future, the Republican Party could substantially close the gap with Democrats in presidential elections if its post-Obama share of the African-American vote merely climbed back above 10 percent — a feat achieved by Bob Dole and both Bushes. If that share climbed higher still, the Democratic majority would be in danger of collapse.

Such a turn of events wouldn’t just be good news for Republicans. It would be good news for black Americans, as it would mean that both parties were competing for their votes.

First, an implicit admission that Republican "voter ID" initiatives and similar measures were pursued in order to suppress the African American vote, and now an implicit admission that the Republican Party is not attempting to compete with the Democratic Party for Republican votes? But there must be something more to transitioning from the present state of affairs to a context in which "both parties [a]re competing for [African American] votes" than the Republican Party's merely retreating from efforts to suppress African American voter turnout. Douthat does not explain what that might be.

As Jon Stewart put it, if the Republican Party wants to win more African American votes, "You can’t just yadda yadda yadda the last 60 Republican years". Other than "Let's back off voter suppression efforts," what does Douthat suggest? Meanwhile, rather than suggesting that an outcome the Democratic Party opposed, and which Republican partisans have been seeking for decades, is a gift to the Democrats, perhaps Douthat should ponder the fact that if he's correct it will still be the Republican Party that cuts off its nose to spite its face. The gift in that imagined future is not from Roberts to the Democratic Party, it would be from the Republicans.

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If You Want to Reduce Suicide, Focus on the Economy

Ross Douthat is concerned that "loneliness" may be behind an increase in the suicide rate among middle aged men... a classic case of missing the forest for the trees. You would think this part would clue Douthat in:

This trend is striking without necessarily being surprising. As the University of Virginia sociologist Brad Wilcox pointed out recently, there’s a strong link between suicide and weakened social ties: people — and especially men — become more likely to kill themselves “when they get disconnected from society’s core institutions (e.g., marriage, religion) or when their economic prospects take a dive (e.g., unemployment).” That’s exactly what we’ve seen happen lately among the middle-aged male population, whose suicide rates have climbed the fastest: a retreat from family obligations, from civic and religious participation, and from full-time paying work.

But you can see he's already on the wrong track by the end of the paragraph. That is, the problem is not about a retreat from family, community and work. It's about the carpet being pulled out from under you.

You would think it was a state secret that the group at highest risk of suicide was middle class men (particularly white men), and that risk of suicide is strongly associated with three stressors: job loss, loss of family and poor health. Contrary to Douthat's assumption, there's not a higher suicide risk if you're single versus married - but divorce is a risk factor.

In our culture, our identity is wrapped up in the work we do. One of the first questions you're likely to be asked when you meet somebody is "Where do you work" or "What kind of work do you do". The factors also tend to go hand-in-hand. Poor health can lead to the loss of employment, financial stress resulting from loss of employment (or from poor health) can lead to divorce. When somebody's self image is built around job and family and he feels that he's irretrievably lost his economic future and his family, that's a huge psychological blow.

Douthat builds his argument in part on a fiction, that we're dealing with "structural unemployment". I've taken some issue with those who argue that there's nothing structural about our unemployment situation, but the type of thing they're talking about (the ability to return to full employment) and the type of thing I'm talking about (the ability of somebody who has lost employment to get back onto a similar income and career path) are two different things. If Douthat believes that there's something new about the problems men have if they're displaced from the workplace during or after their late forties, he hasn't been paying attention. Not even to the content of the newspaper for which he writes:

Unemployment is almost always a traumatic event, especially for older workers. A paper by the economists Daniel Sullivan and Till von Wachter estimates a 50 to 100 percent increase in death rates for older male workers in the years immediately following a job loss, if they previously had been consistently employed. This higher mortality rate implies that a male worker displaced in midcareer can expect to live about one and a half years less than a worker who keeps his job.

There are various reasons for this rise in mortality. One is suicide. A recent study found that a 10 percent increase in the unemployment rate (say from 8 to 8.8 percent) would increase the suicide rate for males by 1.47 percent. This is not a small effect. Assuming a link of that scale, the increase in unemployment would lead to an additional 128 suicides per month in the United States. The picture for the long-term unemployed is especially disturbing. The duration of unemployment is the dominant force in the relationship between joblessness and the risk of suicide.

Joblessness is also associated with some serious illnesses, although the causal links are poorly understood.

More academically,

Suicide rates among both men and women aged 35–64 years increased substantially from 1999 and 2010. This finding is consistent with a previous study that showed a notable increase in the overall suicide rate among middle-aged adults relative to a small increase in suicide rates among younger persons and a small decline in older persons during a similar period. The increases were geographically widespread and occurred in states with high, as well as average and low suicide rates. By race/ethnicity, the increases were highest and statistically significant only among whites and American Indian/Alaska Natives, widening the racial/ethnic gap in suicide rates....

Possible contributing factors for the rise in suicide rates among middle-aged adults include the recent economic downturn (historically, suicide rates tend to correlate with business cycles, with higher rates observed during times of economic hardship); a cohort effect, based on evidence that the "baby boomer" generation had unusually high suicide rates during their adolescent years; and a rise in intentional overdoses associated with the increase in availability of prescription opioids.

In a loosey-goosey sort of sense, one court argue that Douthat has a point. That if people who were suicidal could break out of their mindset, reconnect with their communities, and find peace and joy in their lives, they would no longer be suicidal. But that would be to assume that depression and suicide are the results of a rational thought process rather than cognitive distortion, and that somebody who is suicidally depressed is well-positioned to make significant life changes. Sometimes in response to a suicide you hear, "I don't understand, he seemed so happy that day" - the result of a confusion of the immense relief that can come from the decision to commit suicide with an emergence from depression. When severely depressed individuals receive treatment, you have to be very careful during their early recovery because in some cases the only thing holding them back from suicide is lacking the cognitive energy to carry out their plan. This cartoon series, I think, does a pretty good job of illustrating depression - but that freedom depicted at the end can be (and in the author's case, was) dangerous.

Douthat shares a non-suicidal author's account of how he reconnected with his small hometown due to his sister's terminal illness, and extrapolates,

Too often, and probably increasingly, not enough Americans will have what the Lemings had — a place that knew them intimately, a community to lean on, a strong network in a time of trial.

And absent such blessings, it’s all too understandable that some people enduring suffering and loneliness would end up looking not for help or support, but for a way to end it all.

It seems that Douthat is looking for a simple solution to the issue of suicide that ties into his conceit that a simple, small town lifestyle is somehow superior to... the way he lives his own life. As if anybody can find peace, contentment and community simply by moving to small town, rural America. As if small town, rural America would be unchanged if we all moved there. As if that's even possible. As if you can't find community in a city. As if suicide rates weren't higher in the less urbanized parts of the nation.

If you care about reducing suicide, you should be calling for government policies to help restore full employment. You should be advocating programs to help people deal with job loss and regain decent employment. You should be concerned about the quality and availability of mental health care. Pretending that all will be well if people return to the type of community seen in states with above-average suicide rates? Probably not helpful.

The Problems of Heterosexual Marriage Can't Be Attributed to Things That Haven't Happened

Before going out of town, I apparently opened a browser window to Ross Douthat's latest editorial on gay marriage, one in which he reverts to his traditional form of not coming to a clear conclusion. Instead, he implies that gay marriage is somehow causing problems for heterosexual marriages:

“Proponents of gay marriage can only get what they want,” [David] Frum wrote, “by weakening Americans’ attachment to the traditional family even more than it has already been weakened,” and speeding the “process of social dissolution” that the 1960s and 1970s began....

Yet for an argument that has persuaded so few, the conservative view has actually had decent predictive power. As the cause of gay marriage has pressed forward, the social link between marriage and childbearing has indeed weakened faster than before. As the public’s shift on the issue has accelerated, so has marriage’s overall decline.

Since Frum warned that gay marriage could advance only at traditional wedlock’s expense, the marriage rate has been falling faster, the out-of-wedlock birthrate has been rising faster, and the substitution of cohabitation for marriage has markedly increased. Underlying these trends is a steady shift in values: Americans are less likely to see children as important to marriage and less likely to see marriage as important to childbearing (the generation gap on gay marriage shows up on unwed parenting as well) than even in the very recent past.

Correlations do not, of course, establish causation.

No, they don't. But more to the point, there's no meaningful correlation. If there were, Douthat could point to the more market collapse of heterosexual marriage in states and nations that have legalized gay marriage, or in cities with larger numbers of gay couples.¹ He could point to opinion polls showing that states or regions with the highest opposition to gay marriage have the strongest heterosexual marriages. As it stands, he may as well be saying, "I'm not saying that the deterioration of heterosexual marriage is caused by the Earth orbiting around the sun, but you can't deny the correlation."

If you were to look through history, to look at cultures and communities that were troubled by high rates of birth outside of marriage, unstable relationships and the like, you might learn something. Such as, when the people of those communities are given a path into a stable middle class lifestyle, they start to behave in a way Douthat would deem acceptable. Not the way he behaved before his personal rejection of the hook-up culture of his college, but the way he has ostensibly behaved since his revelation. And when you pull the economic carpet out from under a community, the same issues predictably arise. That's a correlation you can believe in. Douthat gives it a nod:

The economy is obviously playing a leading role in the retreat from marriage — the shocks of recession, the stagnation of wages, the bleak prospects of blue-collar men. Culturally, what matters most is the emergence of what the National Marriage Project calls a “capstone” understanding of marriage, which treats wedlock less as a foundation for adulthood and more as a celebration of adult achievement — and which seems to work out far better for our disciplined upper class than for society as a whole.

Our "disciplined upper class", as compared to the undisciplined, perhaps unwashed masses? It's almost as if Douthat wants to slip into the caricature of the manor born, sniffing at the shiftless behaviors of those of lesser birth. As if it's discipline that allows him to live a life of relative leisure, while that shameless hussy of a scullery maid was caught kissing a footman during her half-day off from her 16-hour work shifts, and thus had to be dismissed without a reference. You cannot claim to be disciplined in the face of a recession, and loss of career and income potential, unless you actually feel the effect - and sorry, Ross, "The Princess and the Pea" is a fable, and no matter how sensitive you believe yourself to be, having a pea under your 100 mattresses is not the same thing as sleeping on the floor.

Douthat huffs,

For 10 years, America’s only major public debate about marriage and family has featured one side — judges and journalists, celebrities and now finally politicians — pressing the case that modern marriage has nothing to do with the way human beings reproduce themselves, that the procreative understanding of the institution was founded entirely on prejudice, and that the shift away from a male-female marital ideal is analogous to the end of segregation.

Certainly, that was a decade with not one voice speaking against gay marriage. There was no concerted, multi-million dollar campaign to defeat gay marriage in California. Maggie Gallagher wasn't, in effect, a paid spokesperson for "traditional marriage". Ross Douthat and his anti-gay marriage peers found themselves strangely unable to speak on the subject. Opponents of gay marriage didn't push ballot initiatives across the nation not only to prevent gay marriage, but also to weaken civil union laws and block gay employees from receiving benefits for their partners. And then there's the real world. Look, I'm sorry Ross found himself losing in the marketplace of ideas... no, scratch that, I'm not at all sorry... but there was a contest of ideals. Douthat prefers to pretend that gay marriage supporters were not opposed, but the fact is that his faction fought a bloody fight and despite its best effort is now on the verge of total defeat. Why? Because the anti-gay marriage arguments they present, as exemplified by the columns about which I am writing, were feeble, and the fall-back position of "tradition!" was not found to be compelling. What do we see now? Douthat attempting to rewrite history and caricature the positions of gay marriage advocates. That's the best he can do.

As I recall it, it was not advocates of gay marriage who brought procreation into the discussion. It was culture scolds like Douthat. If you take away procreation from his effort to wall off marriage as a heterosexual institution, what's left of Douthat's already weak argument? I think it's fair to say, also, that some of those bringing procreation into the mix wanted to evoke a visceral reaction against gay marriage - "We can't let them raise children." If Douthat resents that there was push-back against that type of argument that left its proponents looking foolish, even if by stating the painfully obvious truth that nothing about somebody else's gay marriage affects my ability to procreate and raise children within my own marriage (or Douthat's)... oh well.

Douthat continues,

Now that this argument seems on its way to victory, is it really plausible that it has changed how Americans view gay relationships while leaving all other ideas about matrimony untouched?...

A more honest, less triumphalist case for gay marriage would be willing to concede that, yes, there might be some social costs to redefining marriage. It would simply argue that those costs are too diffuse and hard to quantify to outweigh the immediate benefits of recognizing gay couples’ love and commitment.

No, actually that would not be an honest argument. It might reasonably be deemed "Throwing a bone to Ross Douthat", but beyond that it's a position without substance. There might be some social costs to redefining marriage, and there are social costs to not redefining marriage. The former, the costs upon which Douthat would have us place all of our attention, are theoretical. The latter are real, and are substantiated. This is the art of distraction - hand waving. There is no need to perform a weight of theoretical, unarticulated, unsubstantiated "costs" associated with allowing gay marriage and the costs of maintaining the status quo, as one side of the equation is a null set.

Douthat whines,

Such honesty would make social liberals more magnanimous in what looks increasingly like victory, and less likely to hound and harass religious institutions that still want to elevate and defend the older marital ideal.

Honesty? The honesty of "admitting" that, as the future is uncertain, some unanticipated development could somehow detrimentally affect gay marriage? One might say, "There's no harm in throwing somebody like Douthat a bone, in ceding to him that as the future is uncertain something negative could result from gay marriage." Except that Douthat's whinging about "honesty" is itself dishonest - he still can't identify any actual harm that is likely to result from gay marriage. Is this demand for a concession anything more than his asking us to feed his smugness, give him the self-satisfaction of saying, "See? Even supporters of gay marriage admit that bad things can happen."

You know what I wouldn't mind seeing? I wouldn't mind seeing Douthat demonstrate some honesty for once. I would like to see him admit that he has been unable to provide any evidence or support for the notion that gay marraige causes any harm to the institution of marriage. I would like to see him admit that gay marriage could strengthen the institution of marriage, as the option of marriage becomes available to a greater number of committed couples. I would like to see him admit that gay marriage could benefit the children of gay couples who are presently legally barred from marrying. I would like to see him admit that his opposition to gay marriage, whether it is rationalized based upon his religious beliefs, "tradition", or the sort of gut reaction that he had to "chunky Reese Witherspoon", is at heart bigotry. He should relax - the churches that offered a religious defense of slavery, the subjugation of women, Jim Crow, and anti-miscegenation laws are still with us, and many have evolved to the point that it's easy to forget where they once stood. Instead he grouses that when you call bigotry what it is, it makes bigots look bad.²

Douthat continues,

But whether people think they’re on the side of God or of History, magnanimity has rarely been a feature of the culture war.

As Douthat believes himself to be on the side of God, to be supported by history, and to be a champion of the correct side in the culture wars he fights, I guess that's his way of saying, "Don't expect any magnanimity or honesty from me."
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1. It's fair to point out that the social trends Douthat laments are more visible in states in which there is broad opposition to gay marriage, and are less visible in states that allow legal gay marriage.

2. Douthat argues that the position that marriage has a strong connection to procreation and the rearing of children has historic truth, and that in the past that as recently as the early 1970's nobody found that argument to be "transparently silly". But here's the thing: You can accept that history of marriage, not dismiss it a silly, and still find it to be wholly irrelevant to the question before us. You can observe that we do not require straight couples to be fertile or to agree to have children before we allow them to marry, and that the institution of marriage has not been weakened by those non-procreative partnerships. You can also point out that the 1971 Minnesota case he mentions came a mere four years after the U.S. Supreme Court finally struck down anti-miscegenation laws, which had previously been upheld by state courts who treated the mixing of the races as a very serious matter.

You can observe that, shocking as it may be to Douthat, gay parents are capable of parenting children and many gay parents are presently raising children. Is Douthat prepared to go into the puerile, "But kids need a biological mommy and a biological daddy" argument to distinguish the children of gay couples from those of heterosexual couples who adopt, who use an egg donor, sperm donor or surrogate due to fertility issues, who raise stepchildren, who take in the child of a troubled family member?

Douthat again whnes that it's "almost impossible for liberals to show magnanimity in victory, and accept the continued existence of people and institutions that still take the older view of what marriage is and means." When Douthat demonstrates the honesty I previously invited from him, when he demonstrates an iota of humility about his stance, we can talk about "magnanimity". As it stands, I don't feel any greater need to give Douthat a shoulder to cry on than to give similar comfort to the alumni of Oral Roberts University when it finally abandoned its prohibition of interracial dating. I don't need to "rewrite the past" to make Douthat look bad - he's doing fine, all by himself.

Rand Paul for... Unsuccessful Presidential Candidate!

Ross Douthat wants to turn Rand Paul into a mountain, but qualifies his statements to such a degree that it's clear he views the man as a molehill. One he would prefer to become an influence within the Republican Party, but a molehill nonetheless.

Officially, Paul’s filibuster was devoted to a specific question of executive power — whether there are any limits on the president’s authority to declare American citizens enemy combatants and deal out death to them. But anyone who listened (and listened, and listened) to his remarks, and put them in the context of his recent speeches and votes and bridge-building, recognized that he was after something bigger: a reorientation of conservative foreign policy thinking away from hair-trigger hawkishness and absolute deference to executive power.

Or they might see Rand as engaging in cynical grandstanding over an issue that, yes, he probably believes in - but in a manner that he knew would not amount to a hill of beans. He knew that his party was, in essence, using him to create headlines - ideally some negative press for the President, but also cover for their actual filibuster of the nomination of Caitlin Halligan to the D.C. Circuit Court. As for listening to Rand Paul, did anybody actually do that? If they did, among other things, they would have heard him criticize President Obama over his skepticism of Lochner v. New York, a century-old case that held limits on the length of an employee's workday or week to be unconstitutional. Yes, a handful of libertarian scholars have made it their pet case, but it has largely been regarded as a bad decision (Robert Bork called it an "abomination) by legal scholars across the political spectrum. To put it another way... I refer you to Charles Pierce's 5 minute rule ("This rule states that, for five minutes, both the son and the father, Crazy Uncle Liberty (!), make perfect sense on many issues. At the 5:00:01 mark, however, the trolley inevitably departs the tracks.") Even if we assume that Paul sincerely wants to move the Republican Party in the direction of opposing military adventurism, hawkishness and deference to executive power - a deference they insisted be shown to G.W. Bush but are happy to permit Paul to question when the other party's guy is in charge - Douthat admits that his party is not at all inclined to follow:

And he’s exploited partisan incentives to bring his fellow Republicans around to his ideas, deliberately picking battles — from the Libya intervention to drone warfare — where a more restrained foreign policy vision doubles as a critique of the Obama White House. Those incentives, rather than an intellectual sea change on the right, explain why his filibuster enjoyed so much Republican support. (Most of the senators who gave him an assist were just looking for a chance to score points against a Democratic White House.)

Might? A gratuitous qualification. Once Rand was done with his song and dance, Brennan was promptly confirmed. But Douthat hopes more will come of Rand's display:

But if Paul hasn’t won the party over to his ideas, he’s clearly widened the space for intra-Republican debate. And if he runs for president in 2016, that debate will become more interesting than it’s been for many, many years.

Why, it would be like the race would have been in 2008 or 2012, had Ron Paul chosen to run. Oh... right. It might be fun to see Paul questioned about his more bizarre political positions, and his somewhat bizarre sense of history (e.g., that the Lochner decision was a strike against Jim Crow... perhaps even Douthat had stopped listening by that part of the filibuster), but I don't expect Rand to have any more influence on his party than Ron. He's an ambitious man, and he clearly wants to advance within the party, but while Douthat may believe it to be impressive that Rand's "two big interviews after his filibuster were with Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh", to me that choice screams that the man understands that he's far from ready for primetime.

There’s a lesson here for his fellow Republican politicians — though that lesson is not, I repeat not, that they should all remake themselves as Paul-style libertarians.

Does Douthat truly believe that any Republicans are about to make that mistake? (Should I interject that, although Douthat appears to be unaware of it, Rand Paul does not view himself as a libertarian?)

Rather, the lesson of Paul’s ascent is that being a policy entrepreneur carries rewards as well as risks — and that if you know how to speak the language of the party’s base, it’s possible to be a different kind of Republican without forfeiting your conservative bona fides.

Nobody questions Pat Buchanan's "conservative bona fides", and he can still give speeches on a variety of subjects that are in the right language to fire up the Republican Party's base, but... that's not a formula for winning elections. Douthat's hanging his hopes on the wrong guy.

Highly Informed, Highly Engaged Voters Won't Be Fooled by Douthat

It's reasonable to infer that when a partisan Republican columnist laments that he has "sympathy for the undecided", his column is going to attempt to explain why undecided voters should break in favor of his candidate of choice. Alas, Ross Douthat has not polished his skill at making this form of argument to the extent of his colleague, David Brooks, but he gives it his best shot.

Douthat's first tactic, flatter his audience. People make fun of undecided voters, Douthat laments, but you, his undecided reader are part of a "rarer species" than the undecideds who are subject to ridicule - you are "the highly informed, highly engaged, yet still conflicted voter."

Whatever partisans on both sides may insist, there are good reasons that a high-information voter with views somewhere near the American median might still regard this November’s decision as a harder-than-average call.

Rarer than rarer than rare, you're not only a highly informed undecided voter, you're one whose views coincide with the latest opinion polls. I guess Douthat credits you with enough intelligence to recognize that Romney's latest positions are poll-driven, and that you cannot trust that he has departed from the similarly poll-driven positions he took in his past campaigns because the only thing you can trust about the man's political positions is that he'll say what he thinks it takes to get himself elected. No, who am I kidding, Douthat's not crediting you with that much intelligence - if he were, he would write a different column.

So what, to Douthat, is "one of the biggest issues the campaigns are arguing about", the only one he writes about so presumably the one he believes will most influence the vanishingly small group of highly informed independent voters whose views align with the latest opinion polls? The standard Beltway obsession, "the question of how to bring our spending in line with our revenues". Douthat presents a statement he knows to be false, but who cares about facts when you can fall back on platitudes?

Conservatives think we tax too much and liberals think we spend too little, but the present combination of relatively low middle-class taxes and relatively generous entitlement spending is one that most Americans would happily maintain in perpetuity.

Let's see... on the one hand, we have a party that is promising a small tax increase on the wealthiest Americans, and the hope that through economic growth and spending cuts we can sustain the present system. On the other hand we have a party that is promising a $4-$5 trillion tax cut to be paid for by spending cuts and the closing of tax loopholes, but refuses to get more specific about how that will be achieved than "We'll defund PBS", and is simultaneously proposing a $2 trillion increase in the military budget. As for spending less? The only specifics, turning Medicare into a voucher program, are pushed off a decade into the future - everything stays the same for now.

It is perhaps not an unfair simplification of those different visions of our future budget as "Conservatives think we tax too much and liberals think we should balance the budget before we talk about tax cuts," but it is absurd to pretend that Romney's budget-busting military spending and refusal to commit to even a single meaningful spending cut constitutes anything but thinking we spend too little. And if you look at the history of Douthat's party, going back to Reagan, the whine going into the election has been "liberals tax and spend too much" and the policy coming after the election has been to go on budget-exploding spending sprees - the problem is with taxation that brings the budget closer to balance, not with the spending.

You can argue that trying to cover government spending through tax revenues is a horrible thing, and certain Republicans love to defy math, logic and history by purporting that tax cuts can be presumed to "pay for themselves" by producing economic growth... never mind how G.W.'s tax cuts were followed by sluggish growth - much less impressive than growth under Clinton - propelled in significant part by a housing bubble, and culminating in economic catastrophe. (Yes, Clinton's economic boom was driven in part by a different bubble, the Internet bubble, but at least he didn't squander the tax revenues.) A highly informed undecided might say, "I'm undecided because I want to vote for a guy who prioritizes long-term fiscal responsibility, someone whose budget priorities are first to balance the budget and only then to discuss what we might do with an assumed future surplus," but they're not going to fall for Douthat's oversimplification.

If we are to actually assume that Douthat's undecided voter is in fact highly informed, that voter knows this: Democrats are more likely to balance the budget when economic times are good, but are less likely to call for cuts in social spending when the economy is faltering or in recession. Republicans are going to call for tax cuts, inuring principally to the benefit of the wealthy, no matter what the economic conditions are, when in power are likely to adopt the Dick Cheney philosophy of "deficits don't matter", would prefer to cut and privatize Social Security and Medicare, but have balked at serious reform because they don't want to alienate the important voting bloc of seniors who receive, or are about to start receiving, those benefits.

The highly informed undecided voter is aware that Romeny is trying to "split the baby" by promising that nothing will change for anybody over 55, but that the promise likely translates into "nothing getting done" because ten years from now somebody else will be in the White House, that President will be as terrified as Romney at standing up to seniors, and that any budget proposal that doesn't go into effect for a decade whil have no impact on the budget, debt or deficit during the next eight to ten years.

At this point, Douthat's highly informed, undecided voter is no doubt wondering, "Why do I bother reading this guy's columns," as they understand that on the issue Douthat deems of highest importance, Romney offers nothing but snake oil and Douthat's nonetheless attempting to argue that it could in fact be a cure-all.

Back to "Beltway wisdom":

Unfortunately, the status quo can’t actually continue: the combination of the baby boomers’ retirement and rising health care costs means something has to give.

Social Security is a big expenditure, certainly, but as Douthat knows, it is not in imminent fiscal peril and can be rendered solvent for many decades to come through some relatively minor adjustments. Granted, the wealthy balk at increasing the FICA cap, and both older Americans and the political left oppose raising the retirement age or cutting benefits, but it has been done before and can be done again. Douthat knows that the only President to present a serious proposal on this issue, to make the same type of adjustments that were put into effect under Ronald Reagan is President Obama. And, one must assume, so does his highly informed yet undecided voter.

Medicare is a more pressing issue, not so much because of its present size but because of its projected growth.

The White House is arguing that we can limit health care spending largely by bureaucratic fiat, by empowering experts to change the way doctors and hospitals spend and treat and charge. But we’ve tried variations on centralized cost control for years — “Medicare Whac-A-Mole,” Reason magazine’s Peter Suderman has called it — without reaping anything like the promised benefits.

Douthat's highly informed voter can see through Douthat's charade. This voter knows that there is nothing unique in the government's effort to try to steer patients toward the most cost-effective care and to reduce waste - that private insurers do that as well, sometimes with a very heavy hand.

The highly informed voter is probably also thinking, "The best Douthat can come up with to back up his rhetoric is a columnist for Reason magazine? Isn't that a bit like inbreeding - one columnist who knows little to nothing about the subject matter attempting to support his political case by referring to another guy who who knows little to nothing about the subject matter but has a similar political philosophy?" They might click through to the article and see that it opens,

House Republicans, you may have heard, are trying to “end Medicare as we know it.” And well they should—Medicare as we know it is the nation’s biggest fiscal disaster.

And recognize that it's not going to attempt balance. They might wonder, "Does Douthat think that marrying Megan McCardle gave Sunderman a bachelor's degree level understanding of economics by proxy?" Or, "Why is Douthat citing as an expert a guy who is part of a political debate about Medicare, but is not part of the actual discussion amongst experts on Medicare reform - the year-old column of a non-expert is the best Douthat can come up with?" They might pause for a moment and wonder, "Has Douthat ever challenged Romney's pretense that a couple of off-the-cuff blog posts constitute 'studies' that prove his mystery budget can work?" and again wonder, "Why am I still reading this guy?"

Seriously, resorting to Sunderman is fine if you oppose Medicare, don't believe that the nation should provide comprehensive health insurance to the elderly as a matter of policy, and don't mind a somewhat inconsistent narrative explaining how the program is an affront to libertarianism. But if you're the highly informed centrist that Douthat proposes, one who wants to continue Medicare as a meaningful program, you're apt to find Sunderman's article to be long but ultimately unconvincing. You already know cost control is difficult and that past efforts have resulted in uneven benefits, and Douthat presupposes that you nonetheless want to keep trying to find solutions that will allow Medicare to continue more or less in its present, highly popular form.

Douthat, as usual, goes from there to worse:

The Republicans are arguing for a more competition-driven approach, which would allow private insurers to compete for Medicare dollars, and hopefully bid down the cost of coverage. There are studies and pilot programs that suggest this kind of structural change might lower costs.

The highly informed voter sees right through Douthat's word salad: "The Republicans want to turn Medicare into a voucher program, have the benefit shrink in value over time relative to medical inflation, and put much more responsibility for health care costs onto seniors while simultaneously providing a massive transfer of wealth to participating private insurance companies." They also can see for themselves that Douthat's pretense that "studies and pilot programs" support the viability of vouchers is false - they know that Medicare came into existence because private insurers did not want to insure the elderly at an affordable price, and know that Medicare Advantage participants needed a subsidy in order to compete with Medicare - and are probably thinking, "Douthat at least linked to a libertarian screed to support his last argument - why no link for these purported 'studies and pilot programs'?"

Douthat continues,

But there isn’t a large-scale example that conservatives can point to as the template for the United States to follow.

At least, nothing that has worked. If you look for "large-scale examples" of approaches to health insurance that reduce cost and control inflation while preserving choice of doctor, quality of care and quality of outcome, you can look around the world and find many - all of which would be decried by the Republican Party and people like Sunderman as "socialized medicine". You will find that those programs were implemented largely as a response to the faltering or failure of market-based alternatives. You will find that "single payer" is not prerequisite to success, and that it is possible to rely upon private insurance companies to provide coverage under a national health insurance program.

What you will find when you look for "a large-scale [or small-scale] example" is that the most market-based country in the world, the United States, has not only repeatedly failed to demonstrate the superiority of "a more competition-driven approach", its approach has made health care exceptionally costly without an associated improvement in outcomes. If you want to take it on faith that one more experiment will disprove decades of failure, there's nothing wrong with adhering to your philosophical principles, but if you are a highly informed voter attempting to perpetuate Medicare while realizing significant cost savings you know up front that voucher proposals are just another round of snake oil.

On to the hollow man:

That same skeptic’s eye would also tell our hypothetical undecided that neither side is being entirely honest about the costs of its approach. The Democrats are pretending that taxing the rich can pay for almost everything. The Republicans are pretending that neither today’s taxpayers nor today’s seniors need bear any of the burden. The high-information swing voters are basically left to decide which dishonesty is worse, and which unacknowledged cuts or tax hikes they’d rather risk having to bear.

The fact is, "The Democrats" are not claiming that a modest tax increase on the rich will balance the budget, certainly not that it will "pay for almost everything". Douthat probably knows that his claim is untrue - after all, he can read - and no doubt any highly informed voter who has not yet given up on his column knows the claim to be untrue.

But what of the criticism of the Republican Party? It's a point that even Douthat found it hard to gloss over, the aforementioned fact that the Romney/Ryan Republican approach is, "We'll kick the can down the road a decade, at which time Medicare will be a voucher program." Douthat apparently would like to see Medicare immediately tranformed into a voucher program - his criticism is not of its substance but of its timing. I'll give him the benefit of the doubt, that his mention of the fact that the Republicans have promised to spare "today's seniors" of any pain is an actual criticism, not a reminder to seniors who might be reading his column that they don't have to worry about voting for Romney.

But Douthat's highly informed voter, seeing the hollow man on one side of the scale - a position no Democrat has actually taken - weighed against the postponement of any action on the other side of the scale, might be wondering, "Why did Douthat present that hollow man argument in the first place, rather than presenting a simple, honest criticism of his own party. He knows I'm an informed and intelligent person - does he seriously think I'm going to fall for that?" I jest - I expect that by now the "high-information swing voters" to whom Douthat is supposedly speaking have long given up on the column.

Douthat next picks up his fiddle and starts singing about Rome:

If you want to think well of swing voters, and imagine them as wise Athenians rather than a Colosseum-going mob, you could see the improving odds for what once seemed like an unlikely 2012 outcome — a Romney victory in which Democrats hold the Senate — as a nod to the necessity for bipartisanship, and an attempt to make a significant change in Washington while also forcing both parties back to the negotiating table.

The highly informed swing voter, though, knows that the Republican problems with their Senate races emerge in no small part from the radicalism of some of their Senate candidates, and how their dream boys (like Scott Brown) haven't held up as well as they anticipated when running against competent, well-funded opponents. They know it has nothing to do with a fantasy that "bipartisanship" will magically start working just because one party controls the White House and the other controls the Senate.

Douthat's back to his historic practice, pretending to be a wise man, perched upon a fence, but unwilling to come down clearly on one side or the other. His highly informed voter long ago figured out the side upon which Douthat falls - why is he afraid of admitting it?