Curtis Bowman

Let the Borrowing Begin!

No one seems to have a very clear idea how the Bush administration and its supporters intend to reform Social Security, as this article by Richard W. Stevenson of The New York Times indicates. Borrowing large amounts of money figures into most plans, needless to say:

Proponents say the necessary amount of borrowing could vary widely, from hundreds of billions to trillions of dollars over a decade, depending on how much money people are permitted to contribute to the accounts and whether the changes to Social Security include benefit cuts and tax increases.

Borrowing by the government could be necessary to establish the personal accounts because of the way Social Security pays for benefits. Under the current system, the payroll tax levied on workers goes to benefits for people who are already retired. Personal accounts would be paid for out of the same pool of money; they would allow workers to divert a portion of their payroll taxes into accounts invested in mutual funds or other investments.

The money going into the accounts would therefore no longer be available to pay benefits to current retirees. The shortfall would have to be made up somehow to preserve benefits for people who are already retired during the transition from one system to the other, and by nearly all estimates there is no way to make it up without relying at least in part on government borrowing.

Mr. Bush and Republicans in Congress have paid little political price in the last four years for the swing from budget surpluses to deficits. But some polls show that Americans consider reducing the deficit to be a higher priority than many other goals, including cutting taxes, and embracing a new round of borrowing could pose political as well as economic risks.

A reasonable amount of borrowing now, the proponents say, would avert a much bigger financial obligation decades later. They say personal accounts would yield higher returns for individuals than the current system and could be a catalyst to broader changes that would bring the benefits promised by Social Security into line with what the system, which is also about to come under intense financial strain from the aging of the baby boom generation and the increase in life expectancies, can afford to pay.

Mr. Bush has vowed to push hard to remake Social Security. Republicans in Congress say the White House has signaled to them that Mr. Bush will put the issue at the top of his domestic agenda in the coming year.

But the White House has never answered fundamental questions about Mr. Bush's plan. In particular, it has not explained how it would deal with the financial quandary created by its call for personal accounts.

Too bad that federal budget surplus that Clinton bequeathed to Bush mysteriously disappeared not too long ago, huh?

More: Read this column by E. J. Dionne of The Washington Post to get a good early view of the approaching flim-flam.

Benny Morris on the Collapse of the Peace Process

I've decided to excerpt a long passage from Benny Morris' recent review of Dennis Ross's The Missing Peace. As I mentioned in an earlier post, Morris' review appeared in the print issue of The New Republic that is dated November 8, 2004. Unfortunately, the only way to find the review on-line is to download the entire issue in the PDF version that is available only to subscribers.

I wanted to post Morris' brief history of the Israeli/Palestinian talks that took place during the final months of the Clinton administration. As far as I know, you can't find Morris' views on the collapse of the Oslo peace process expressed at such length anywhere else on the web. Feel free to correct me if I'm mistaken.

What Morris has to say is consistent with views that he has expressed elsewhere to the effect that Arafat was never serious about making peace with Israel.

Here's the passage, which despite its length, is only a small portion of the entire review:

Tucked in here, deep in this whale of a book, is a fitting metaphor. In one of his lighter passages Ross describes the American team driving out from Washington, D.C. to Camp David on July 10, 2000, on the eve of the historic American-Israeli-Palestinian peace conference, and taking a wrong turn in Maryland's Catoctin Mountains, where there were "few signs and no streetlights." They were lost. Ross says that he joked about it in the van, "praying we are not going to be lost once we get there."

But that is precisely what happened. The Israeli team, led by Ehud Barak, proposed to the Palestinians, led by Arafat, a genuinely historic peace settlement that would have created a Palestinian state, and the Palestinians rejected it, and all hell was unleashed in the Holy Land. It is now four years later and Israel, the Palestinians, and the Americans remain lost in a maze of violence and despair defined by Islamic suicide bombers, retaliatory strikes, and hatred on all sides.

As the conference at Camp David unfolded, the Israelis continuously upped the ante. At first Barak offered the Palestinians a state encompassing 100 percent of the Gaza Strip and some 80 percent of the West Bank; the uprooting of most of the settlements; and in Jerusalem, sovereignty over outlying neighborhoods of East Jerusalem and functional autonomy in the core parts of the holy city. By the end of the conference fourteen days later, the Palestinians were offered a state on 100 percent of the Gaza Strip and 91 to 92 percent of the West Bank (including most of the Jordan Valley); compensation for the Palestinian refugees and aid in their partial repatriation to the Palestinian state; Palestinian sovereignty over half the Old City of Jerusalem and parts of East Jerusalem; and sovereignty over the surface area of the Temple Mount, including its two sacred mosques, the Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa.

The Palestinians rejected each deal in turn. They insisted on an Israeli endorsement of the right of return of the refugees from 1948 and their descendants — some four million people — to Israeli territory (Israel's population, without the territories, currently stands at five million Jews and more than one million Arabs); and on exclusive Palestinian sovereignty over the Temple Mount; and on Israeli withdrawal from the entirety of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. In the course of the intensive negotiations, some of the negotiators declared a Palestinian readiness to relinquish as much as 4 percent of the West Bank (if compensated with an equal amount of territory from Israel proper) and affirmed their "flexibility" on the implementation of the right of return, once the principle was conceded (alongside Israeli acceptance of sole "responsibility" for the creation of the refugee problem). But Arafat himself never explicitly confirmed these concessions, and he often made statements to the contrary.

During the following months, culminating in Clinton's "non-negotiable" proposals of December 23, 2000, the terms for the Palestinians were dramatically bettered — to include 94 percent to 96 percent of the West Bank, Palestinian sovereignty over all the Arab neighborhoods of East Jerusalem, and a small measure of repatriation of refugees to Israel proper, with massive international aid for the rehabilitation of the rest either in place or in the future Palestinian state. "Arafat had the best deal he could ever get," as Ross puts it. Or, as Clinton observes in his memoir, it was time for both parties "to put up or shut up." The "parameters" were immediately endorsed by Barak's Cabinet — and they were rejected, after the traditional footdragging, by the Palestinian leadership. Various Palestinian spokesmen were later to lie about this (Ross thoroughly exposes the lie) and claim that they had, "in principle," accepted the parameters. Arafat, according to Clinton, had made a "colossal mistake" and "an error of historic proportions."

Along the way Barak, too, made mistakes, and Ross highlights them. In his first year in office, Barak had allowed the continued expansion of the settlements; and signaled to the Palestinians that they were not his first priority by trying to make a deal first with Syria; and insisted on the summit taking place in mid-July, when the Palestinians asked for a delay until August or September (why such a delay would have rendered the Palestinians more amenable to compromise I have never fathomed); and delayed further Israeli withdrawals from parts of the West Bank, contrary to earlier Israeli commitments; and generally broadcast suspicion if not downright ill will toward Arafat (with whom he refused to meet one-on-one at Camp David). Barak was by no means a great diplomat. But his peace overture embodied real statesmanship and great courage — and his mistakes pale into insignificance by comparison with the Palestinians' rejection of the genuinely momentous deal offered in 2000.

This jibes with what I've read elsewhere, although, of course, I'm willing to consider other credible versions of the final breakdown of the Oslo accords. If you know of any that differ significantly from Morris', send me the links or the bibliographical information.

I've mentioned Benny Morris in two earlier posts — "Benny Morris on the Death of Yasser Arafat" and "The Disillusionment of Benny Morris."

Todd Purdum on Republican Hubris

Todd Purdum has a good piece in the The New York Times this weekend.

Purdum writes of the dangers posed by the current Republican dominance of D.C. — that is, the dangers posed to Republicans themselves:

From the rapacious capitalism of the Gilded Age to the cronyism of Teapot Dome, from the corruption of Tammany Hall to the cultural and fiscal excesses of the Great Society, American history is replete with examples of the price of one-party rule. At the moment, Democrats on Capitol Hill lack even the power to call a committee meeting, issue a subpoena or do anything much more active than complain.

But history also suggests a perilous twist on an adage as old as Athens: Whom the Gods would destroy they first give control of both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue. With responsibility for all of government comes accountability for all of government, and the picture is not always pretty.

"There are three pretty obvious patterns," said Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the House, who should know. "There are majorities which are motivated to do very large things, which resonate with the country - the Homestead Act, land-grant colleges, all of the Progressive reforms, the rise of the New Deal. The other possibility is that you get a majority that doesn't do much bad and doesn't do much good, like lots of state legislatures.

"And third, you can have majorities that get out of touch and either become corrupt or get arrogant and isolated, the way the Democrats after the 1992 election clearly didn't understand the country and threw away their majority."

It is far too early to say which pattern will prevail, and in his first four years Mr. Bush has shown an uncanny willingness to do what he says and a corresponding ability to prove doubters wrong. But the new Congress will not even convene until Jan. 4, and Mr. Bush has so far sketched in only the broadest terms his agenda of overhauling Social Security and the federal tax code. His biggest ideas are complicated, may not attract uniform Republican support and will probably need Democratic votes to pass.

Certainly, there have been early signs of elephantine hubris, chief among them the House majority's willingness to rewrite its own ethics rules for the sole purpose of assuring that its majority leader, Representative Tom DeLay of Texas, would not have to step down should he be indicted as a result of any of the inquiries now swirling around him. Only a dominant party would dare do a thing like that. It was the Republicans themselves, after all, who instituted the rule that indicted members could not serve as leaders. They did so a decade ago after supplanting the long-ruling Democrats, whom they derided as ethically sloppy.

"It was a mistake, because it was a public statement that the party would change the rules to benefit one individual," Mr. Gingrich said of the DeLay decision. "That's a mistake, period. Are the rules subordinate to the interests of the powerful, or are the powerful subordinate to the interests of the rules? In a free society, the rules govern."

There's nothing like a little Republican hypocrisy to show you what the GOP really cares about, is there?

I've mentioned before that Kerry's loss means that from now on the Republicans own everything that the government does. They can't pin anything on the Democrats. It's up to the Democrats to make this work for them.

By the way, I should add for the benefit of those of you who live outside of the Lone Star State that The Texas Observer has been following the DeLay money scandal for over two years. If you follow my link to the front page of the magazine, you'll find links to several of their DeLay-related stories.

Noam Scheiber on Privatizing Social Security

A few days ago I posted an entry about Robert Reich's recent commentary on the privatizing of social security. Let's add some subtlety to Reich's rather blunt remarks, by way of a slightly more recent article by Noam Scheiber of The New Republic.

Scheiber's article is rather long — and I certainly recommend reading it in its entirety — but this is the part that looks at some of the current proposals:

The obvious sticking point in privatizing Social Security is how you finance the transition from the current system--in which today's workers fund the benefits of today's retirees--to a system in which workers save partly for their own retirement as well. The problem is that any dollar you divert to fund private accounts is one less dollar available to pay for what remains of the existing system. So the burden is on privatization advocates to explain where they will get the money to bridge the gap. 

Social Security wonks distinguish the various plans floating around Capitol Hill by the degree to which they acknowledge this financial hurdle. At one extreme are so-called free-lunch plans, like those sponsored by Representatives Paul Ryan of Wisconsin or Clay Shaw of Florida, or Senator John Sununu of New Hampshire. These create private accounts while guaranteeing that no one will receive fewer benefits than they do today. Proponents intend to finance this arrangement through huge borrowing (as much as $7 trillion over the next several decades) or vague budget cuts, or some combination of the two. At the other end of the spectrum are the tough-love plans proposed by representatives like Arizona Republican Jim Kolbe and (recently defeated) Texas Democrat Charlie Stenholm, who want to finance the transition with deep cuts in Social Security benefits and modifications to the payroll tax. In the middle are plans like those of GOP Senator Lindsey Graham, which rely on substantial benefit cuts but also some slightly dubious budget savings from measures like closing corporate tax loopholes. The different plans require infusions of anywhere from $750 billion to nearly $4 trillion to pay for the initial decade of the transition, during which time no benefits would be cut. 

As a general rule, the more honest the accounting (i.e., Kolbe-Stenholm), the more draconian the cuts to the current system. Which means that, given the political reality, the most honest proposals are the ones least likely to be enacted. Privatization advocates like to argue that, having now been through three consecutive elections in which candidates--not least of them the president--ran on privatization and won, Republicans have proved the "third-rail" status of Social Security to be a thing of the past and paved the way for more honest reform. But this proposition is dubious at best. The president has always been extremely vague about his Social Security plans and has never embraced the kinds of benefit cuts necessary to fund privatization, which are what make the idea so politically untouchable.

Well, since Scheiber isn't willing to be as blunt in writing about the Bush administration as I am — I'm an unaccountable blogger, after all, not a serious political commentator — I'll step up and say that we should expect the Bush administration, given its past record, to be as irresponsible as possible.

Scheiber says nearly, though not quite as much:

Ultimately, the effort to "reform" Social Security could end up looking a lot like last year's effort to "reform" Medicare. In that case, the White House had initially hoped to bestow a goodie on seniors (a prescription-drug benefit) while introducing more competition into the program, which could have produced big savings (and big cuts) in the coming decades. But the president only laid out vague principles. And, when the political pressure became intense, the GOP stuck with its prescription-drug benefit, kicked its competition proposals years into the future--thereby winning the support of the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP), the 800-pound gorilla of entitlement interest groups--and then monkeyed around with its numbers to make them appear to check out. Along the way, Republicans also managed to reward a key interest group--the pharmaceutical industry--by preventing the government from negotiating lower drug prices, which could have saved billions of dollars. 

This time around, the president is likely to be no more specific than necessary to get the ball rolling on the Hill. Once he places Social Security on the agenda, Congress can coalesce around a plan that establishes private accounts--this year's goodie for seniors--but with few or no benefit cuts and no way to pay for it over the long term. (AARP recently announced that it opposes privatization but left the door open to private accounts that are "added on" rather than "carved out" of the existing system, leading some to suspect the organization is open to a deal.) The sop to conservatives, suggests Norquist, would be a vague promise to impose benefit cuts through future legislation, similar to the backloading of the "pain" in the Medicare bill. Then, to make the numbers work out, the GOP will once again cook the books--this time exploiting a quirk in the way the Social Security actuaries evaluate the solvency of the trust fund. (The actuaries only consider whether the trust fund has enough money to pay benefits, not where the money comes from; the GOP can simply propose borrowing trillions of dollars from the rest of the federal budget and the actuaries will be forced to sign off.) And, of course, the GOP will take care to reward this year's choice interest group--the securities industry--on which it will likely rely to make the final lobbying push on the Hill. (According to a recent University of Chicago study, the securities industry could reap up to $10 billion a year in fees from administering private accounts.)

The reference to "Norquist" is to Grover Norquist, the director of Americans for Tax Reform.

Here's Scheiber's final paragraph:

The only real difference between last year's Medicare reform and the likely outcome of Bush's second-term Social Security reform is that the economic consequences of the latter could be far, far more severe. Bond markets and currency traders assume the government will eventually take the steps necessary to prevent Social Security from bankrupting the country. A plan that moves in the opposite direction by issuing trillions of dollars in new debt without any meaningful long-term cuts would shatter that assumption, driving down the value of the dollar, driving up interest rates, and potentially triggering a deep recession. Then again, what's a little economic crisis when your legacy is at stake?

Would anyone like to take bets on which option Bush will ultimately endorse?

I say, in the spirit of these Republican times, let the massive borrowing begin!

John Allen Paulos Does the Math

Mathematician John Allen Paulos argues in The Guardian that Bush's re-election victory says nothing of significance about the American electorate:

George Bush's election has generated far too many ill-founded conclusions about the US electorate. Despite Bush's assertions to the contrary, the voters certainly did not give him a mandate to further "traditional moral values" (or, indeed, to do anything else).

No deep theorem in arithmetic is needed to see that the 51% of the electorate who voted for him constitute a bare majority. The outcome looks even more questionable in the electoral college. Bush received approximately 130,000 more votes than John Kerry in Ohio, so if 65,000 Bush voters in the state had switched, we'd now be talking about president-elect Kerry.

Looking back over recent elections strengthens the view that no seismic realignment of the electorate has occurred. Of the last four presidential elections, the Democratic candidate has received a greater popular vote in three and a greater electoral vote in two.

Excuse my mathematician's obsession with coin flips, but consider this. There is a large bloc of people who will vote for the Republican candidate no matter what, and a similarly reliable Democratic bloc of roughly the same size. There is also a smaller group of voters who either do not have fixed opinions or are otherwise open to changing their vote.

To an extent, these latter people's votes (and thus elections themselves) are determined by chance (external events, campaign gaffes, etc).

So what conclusion would we draw about a coin that landed heads two or three times out of four flips (or about a sequence of two or three Democratic victories in the last four elections)? The answer, of course, is that we would draw no conclusions at all.

One reason we tend to draw far-reaching conclusions about elections is the charming superstition that significant events must be the consequence of significant events.

This psychological foible is illustrated by an experiment in which a group of subjects is told that a man parked his car on a hill. It then rolled into a fire hydrant. A second group is told that the car rolled into a pedestrian.

The members of the first group generally view the event as an accident; the members of the second generally hold the driver responsible. People are more likely to attribute an event to an agent than to chance if it has momentous or emotional implications. Likewise with elections.

Another argument against the claim that the electorate has undergone a drastic change derives from so-called statistical regression models. One of the most cited models of this type was constructed by Yale economist Ray Fair and is based on six factors.

The first is incumbency, which has been a distinct advantage historically. The second is party (Republicans have a slight historical edge), and the third is "party fatigue" (two or more terms out of power offers some benefit).

The remaining three factors concern the economy: GDP's per capita growth rate (higher is better for the incumbent), the number of quarters during the preceding four years in which the growth rate exceeded 3.2% (the more, the better), and the inflation rate (lower is better).

On the basis of these six factors, Fair's model has generated quite accurate vote percentages in presidential elections dating back to 1916. (It should be noted, however, that a degree of after-the-fact torturing of the data to reveal meaningless correlations can make a model appear more impressive than it is. Predicting the past isn't too difficult).

In 2004, Fair's regression model (and several others) predicted that the election wouldn't even be close, that the incumbent Bush would win somewhere around 58 per cent of the vote.

If we give more credence to Fair's model than it perhaps deserves, the fact that Bush won only 51% of the vote can be interpreted optimistically, at least by Kerry supporters.

Fully 7% of the electorate - 8 million voters - resisted the compulsions of incumbency and the economy to vote for Kerry. Moderately impressive, if true.

In any case, my meta-conclusion is that there are no very compelling conclusions to be drawn about the electorate. Bush received more votes than Kerry. Period. I don't think this simple fact means the country supports the Bush agenda.

This isn't to argue, of course, that Bush's re-election won't be significant for the country.

Acknowledgment: Thanks to SciTech Daily Review for leading me to Paulos' article.

Robert Reich on Privatizing Social Security

Robert Reich tells us why privatizing social security is a really dumb idea:

Start with the irrefutable fact that Social Security is a pay-as-you-go system. The payroll taxes of today's workers go to today's retirees. And when today's workers retire, they'll be supported by the next generation's payments into Social Security. In other words, Social Security is a compact between generations, based on trust. I pay into Social Security to support my parent's generation in their retirement because I trust that my children's generation will pay into Social Security to support my generation in our retirement.

If their Social Security payments are diverted into their own private accounts, their money won't be there for my generation's retirement. The compact will be broken.

It's theoretically possible for the federal government to bail out my generation by drawing on general tax revenues. But that won't happen because there won't be any spare revenues. The federal budget deficit, already over $400 billion this year, is projected to be more than $5 trillion over the next ten years.

To make matters worse, my generation of boomers, born between 1946 and 1964, is huge. It's so big, in fact, that our payments into Social Security have been more than enough to pay the retirements of my parents' generation. But instead of investing the surplus, the federal government has been using the extra funds to pay for the war in Iraq and everything else the government's doing. Remember the Social Security lock box? Well, boomers, I hate to break it to you this way, but the lock box has been raided. This means we're doubly dependent on the next generation's Social Security payments. If those payments are diverted into private accounts, 76 million boomers are in deep doodoo.

Quite apart from it breaking the intergenerational compact and being unaffordable to boot, privatizing Social Security would expose retirees to huge risks. Anyone who wants to put away some extra savings -- over and above your Social Security payments -- into a private investment account can do so right now. The whole point of Social Security is to spread the risk, so you don't end up with no retirement savings if you've made bad investments, or if you've been caught in the down-draft of a bad economy. Anyone ever hear of a bear market? That's why it's called Social "Security." Duh.

On all grounds, a terrible idea -- which is no guarantee it won't become law.

As the saying goes, if it ain't social, then it ain't security.

Of course, the idea of privatizing social security is a stupid one — when it's judged, that is, from the point of view of social responsiblity, concern for the common good, and intergenerational justice. You know, when it's judged from the Democratic point of view.

But plenty of Republicans would be happy to kill Social Security, especially if doing so cuts the tax burden even more for the already well-to-do. They know, however, that they can't kill the program outright. Instead, they extol the benefits of privatization, all the while knowing full well what it means for the future of the program. It's just another instance of the dishonesty of contemporary conservative governance.

One of the great accomplishments of post-World War II America has been the great reduction in poverty among the elderly. Republicans seem content to undo that legacy.

More: A slightly later post — "Noam Scheiber on Privatizing Social Security" — takes another look at this issue, and with more details.

Theodore Dalrymple on the Murder of Theo Van Gogh

Here's how Theodore Dalrymple attempts to explain the murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh:

But why kill Theo Van Gogh, of all the people who have expressed hostility to radical Islam? Perhaps it was mere chance, but more likely it resulted from his work's exposure of a very raw nerve of Muslim identity in Western Europe: the abuse of women. This abuse is now essential for people of Muslim descent for maintaining any sense of separate cultural identity in the homogenizing solution of modern mass society.

In fact, Islam is as vulnerable in Europe to the forces of secularization as Christianity has proved to be. The majority of Muslims in Europe, particularly the young, have a weak and tenuous connection to their ancestral religion. Their level and intensity of belief is low; pop music interests them more. Far from being fanatics, they are lukewarm believers at best. Were it not for the abuse of women, Islam would go the way of the Church of England.

The abuse of women has often, if not always, appealed to men, because it gives them a sense of power, however humiliated they may feel in other spheres of their life. And the oppression of women by Muslim men in Western Europe gives those men at the same time a sexual partner, a domestic servant, and a gratifying sense of power, while allowing them also to live an otherwise westernized life. For the men, it is convenient; interestingly, but perhaps not surprisingly, almost the only openly hostile expressions toward Islam from British-born Muslims that I hear come from young women, some of whom loathe it passionately because they blame it for their servitude.

Religious sanction for the oppression of women (whether theologically justified or not) is hence the main attraction of Islam to young men in an increasingly secular world. This explains why a divide often opens between brothers and sisters in the same European Muslim family; the sisters want liberty, but the brothers enforce the old rules. They have to, or the whole gratifying system breaks down.

This, I suspect, is the source of the rage against Theo Van Gogh.

Dalrymple has written in this vein before — see an article from a few months ago entitled "When Islam Breaks Down."

I can't confirm or deny any of what Dalrymple says. He often draws on his experiences as a doctor when he writes his essays. Consequently, his readers simply have to take his word on a lot of things.

Just Say No to Hillary Clinton in 2008

Michelle Cottle, who still has the best sense of humor at The New Republic, explains why Hillary '08 is a terrible idea.

Cottle starts with a little Kerry bashing and then quickly warms up to her anti-Hillary theme:

Ordinarily I'm not the kind of gal to kick a guy when he's down--at least not unless I'm pretty sure he's so far down he ain't getting back up. But I make an exception in Kerry's case because, while Democrats are busy reflecting, they need to carefully consider the costs of disregarding a candidate's basic likeability. (Not to be confused with his IQ or experience or fundraising clout or height.) Dems can rework their policies and narrative and meta-message all they want, but if they don't learn to pick a contender with a common touch and a broad appeal--meaning someone who can relate to the masses outside the Delta Shuttle corridor--they are going to wind up wandering in the wilderness far longer than Moses.

Most importantly, the party would do well to come to grips with this electoral reality now, before it finds itself staring down the barrel of an even grander presidential disaster. I speak, of course, of Hillary '08.

Since Election Day, I have suffered through multiple discussions with giddy conservatives all but drooling over a Hillary run. They--like most liberals I know--all assume Senator Clinton is the horse to beat in 2008. But unlike discussions with liberals, my Hillary chats with conservatives typically begin with a variation on, Have your people gone completely insane? I'd like to take offense, but I can't, because nominating Hillary would be insanity. It's not that she's a bad gal. And she's surprised most of the Beltway crowd by turning out to be a relatively moderate, low-key, collegial, workhorse senator. Factoring in her high name recognition, her mythic status with the base, her ability to energize female voters, and, of course, her easy access to the greatest natural politician of our time, it's easy to see Hillary's appeal. Looked at rationally, she'd make a crackerjack presidential candidate.

But the American public is not rational about anyone with the last name Clinton. If you thought the Republican base was energized this year, just give them the chance to vote against that uppity Clinton girl. The GOP possibilities for fund-raising, not to mention creative attack ads, are mind-boggling.

At minimum, Hillary starts with some 40 percent of the country dead-set against her. Granted, an equal number would start out in her corner. But it's hard to see how she unloads all of her baggage in order to reach enough mushy-middle voters to win. The political class may now think of Hillary as a moderate legislator. But the bulk of the electorate, all those folks who won't tune into the race until after Labor Day '08, will be voting on Hillary the icon. Think headbands and cookie-baking. Think Vince Foster and the Rose law firm billing records and the health care debacle. Washington understands that Hillary has grown, but it will be much tougher to convince Middle America. (And let's face it: Her status as a senator from the ultra-uppity, Yankee state of New York is unlikely to help.)

Bush was unquestionably a polarizing figure this election. But it bears recalling that he initially came to power not by energizing his base, but by projecting an aggressively non-polarizing image that drew swing voters to his corner. (He also got a little help from stupid Floridians and the U.S. Supreme Court, but it's considered bad form to mention all that now.)

If Dems have any hope of performing better in 2008, they need to rally around a candidate who won't freak out the GOP base, even as he or she reassures wary swing voters that Democrats aren't the godless, convictionless, condescending, out-of-touch cultural aliens that Karl Rove claims. It's still too early for anyone to know who that candidate is yet. But I damn sure know who it ain't.

If Cottle hasn't persuaded you yet, here's what I would add:

Just picture what will happen to the GOP once it's faced with the possibility of having Bill Clinton as the First Husband.

I have to admit that I relish the prospect of thousands of right-wingers suffering from strokes and apoplexy, but it's not a very good electoral strategy to throw so much red meat in front of one's opponents. Let's find a better candidate for 2008.

Here's my motto: Just say no to Hillary '08.

Update - July 14, 2005: Amy Sullivan has written a thoughtful article expressing reasonable doubts about Hillary Clinton's ability to win in 2008.

Not Enough Fathers in the Fatherland

Here's an excerpt from an interesting article about Germany's dwindling population:

Germany's falling birthrate, like that in much of Western Europe, is entering its second generation. This means not only that mothers continue to have one or at most two children - too few to reproduce the population - but also that the number of potential mothers has dwindled.

[. . .]

Germany, like several of its neighbors, is running out of the people it needs to sustain its advanced social systems and public infrastructure.

"There will be 10 million fewer young people in my lifetime," observed Frank Schirrmacher, an editor at the daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, who has written a best-selling book about population trends in Germany. "Our whole infrastructure is designed for a bigger population."

Mr. Schirrmacher and other commentators conjure up a sort of reverse Malthusian nightmare: Germany as a land of predominantly geriatric towns and cities set in a deserted, creeping countryside.

Niall Ferguson has written about this issue from time to time, though not just with reference to Germany. These two links — here and here — will take you to two of his articles that touch on the theme of Europe's declining population and its importance for the future.

Some Thoughts on the Election and the Future of the Democratic Party

Because I left town on November 4, I wasn't able to blog my thoughts about the outcome of the election. I thought that I should write down a few things before more time passed. Part of my thinking in this post was influenced by Alexander Barnes Dryer's recent article for The New Republic on the competing explanations for Kerry's loss. If you haven't read Dryer's article yet, then I recommend it to your attention.

As I've mentioned before, I'm a yellow-dog Democrat who has long had little use for the Democratic party. The persistent inability of Democratic presidential candidates to win elections, even though opinion polls routinely show that a majority of voters favors Democrats over Republicans on domestic issues, is truly maddening. If the Democrats could package their concerns properly, and if they could develop a serious attitude on issues involving national security, they would be unbeatable for years to come.

I was never enthusiastic about John Kerry as a presidential candidate, even though in many respects he is an admirable man. Given his wealth and social background, there was never any need for him to lead a serious life. Instead, he volunteered to fight in Vietnam, served heroically, and then returned home and became involved in the anti-war protests. These are all remarkable achievements. He went to law school, worked as a lawyer, and then went into politics. Once again, real achievements. President Bush's life pales in comparison to Senator Kerry's.

Unfortunately, however, Bush was a more effective candidate than Kerry, and Bush & Co. ran a more effective campaign than Kerry & Co. Unlike Bush, who is much admired by his supporters, Kerry doesn't connect well with people, and he never articulated a clear message that succinctly summarized what he wanted to do in office. Only in the last few weeks of the campaign, especially after his speech on Iraq at NYU, did he manage to shift the focus of his campaign onto Bush's failures in office. For some reason — I'll never fathom this — Kerry and his people decided not to use the Boston convention as a venue to attack Bush and his record of overt failure.

The Democratic convention was a disaster, although it didn't appear to be one at the time. If we've learned one thing about the media in the past four years, it's that they can be easily manipulated. (When I speak of the media in what follows, I'm thinking primarily of television and radio outlets that aren't overtly partisan. There are plenty of magazines and newspapers that offer serious political criticism, but their audience is small compared to that for television and radio. Some magazines and newspapers are overtly partisan, whereas others lean left or right. Consequently, they're often dismissed as biased — a favorite Republican rhetorical device — and this charge simply increases the noise and confusion surrounding a campaign.) Republicans have mastered media manipulation, as the Swift Boats saga proves. The media will repeat the basest lies — doing so in the name of objectivity — if they're shouted loudly and long enough.

Op-eds and investigative reporting follow up the initial stenography that favors the liars, and so the lies are eventually exposed for the lies they are, but by then the damage has been done. Doubt has been sown in voters' minds, and so it may be too late for a candidate to recover.

A presidential candidate should never pass up an opportunity to criticize his opponent's record. Bush wasn't about to admit to any mistakes whatsoever, even though he has blundered his way from one mistake to the next throughout his term in office. The media hesitate to make harsh judgments, and thus often end up reporting spin and distortion, rather than simply stating the facts that make up a record of failure.

The media are even more reluctant to call a sitting president a liar unless the evidence — as in the case of President Clinton and Monica Lewinsky — is overwhelmingly against him. Bush proved again and again that he was perfectly willing to lie about his record. Naturally, he did the same thing about Kerry's.

Remember that Kerry started to turn things around in the debates. Why? Because the media had no choice but to report what he was saying and to present Bush's inability to counter the charges that Kerry made against him. The facts won out, however briefly. As a result, Kerry's campaign benefitted.

But this assault on Bush's record should have begun at the convention. It was foolish of Kerry & Co. not to attack Bush as Kerry was later attacked at the Republican convention. The fault lies with Kerry and his advisers, but ultimately, really, with Kerry, since the candidate is supposed to run the show.

The choice of John Edwards as Kerry's running mate seems to have been a poor one. Edwards has a lot of strengths, but he didn't really make much of an impression in the race. He certainly didn't help the ticket to carry his home state of North Carolina. Also, don't forget that Gore didn't carry Tennessee in 2000.

Consequently, I think that Democrats, at least for the near future, should simply give up on the South — except for Florida, of course, which is still in play. Perhaps Dick Gephardt would have been a better choice for the VP slot on the ticket. He would have had more appeal in the Midwest than Edwards.

There has been a lot of talk about the role of values in the campaign. I can't say to what extent Bush benefitted from the anti-gay marriage vote, but he certainly didn't lose votes overall because of it. And since conservative Christians will mostly be in the Republican camp for a long time, Democrats shouldn't go out of their way to appeal to them. They can't be won over anytime soon.

Instead, Democrats should couch their issues in moral terms that appeal to the majority of Americans regardless of their religious affiliation. Blue-collar and white-collar workers don't believe in the free market — they aren't think tank libertarians — they believe in the work ethic. That is, they believe that hard work should be rewarded, that they should be able to raise their families in a decent level of comfort and security. And many of them know that their lives are increasingly filled with risk, what with rising health insurance premiums and sky-high college tuition, among other sources of insecurity.

Democrats should relentlessly point out the ways in which Republican policies expose ordinary Americans to risk and uncertainty of a debilitating sort. Dryer makes a good suggestion that I can only second:

Why being against gay marriage and abortion reflects good values but being for health care and progressive taxation does not remains a mystery to most Democrats. Here's an idea for Democrats: Start framing your issues in moral terms and people will start seeing them as moral issues. [My emphasis - CB.] Ask Bill Clinton for help if you need it.

Democrats shouldn't simply complain about Republican deficits as instances of fiscal irresponsiblity. Instead, they need to expose the deficits for what they are: namely, deferred tax hikes or huge spending cuts in domestic programs. The important issues must be framed — to borrow Dryer's word — in moral terms. Otherwise, they sound like the technocratic, wonky matters that bore most people.

Finally, as regards security, terrorism, and foreign policy, well, this aspect of the Kerry campaign was more or less hopeless. Yes, he said that he would do better than Bush, lead more competently, and the like. And he probably would have. But such rhetoric doesn't much move people.

Here's what I would have said if I had been running, and I would have said it again and again and again:

As commander-in-chief, I pledge to defend the country against any and all enemies who attempt to kill Americans wherever they may be. I pledge to kill anyone who draws down on American soldiers. I pledge to kill anyone who kills American citizens.

In my administration the new rule of the international order will be as follows: Anyone who kills Americans is dead meat. The only justice they will receive will be delivered by American soldiers, and that justice will be a bullet through the forehead, and that bullet will be stamped "Made in America."

Memo to Democrats: No one ever lost votes by vowing to kill people who kill Americans.

And if Jacques Chirac said that he didn't like my bellicose language, well, I'd say in response that that's what I call killing two frogs with one stone.

Memo to Democrats: No one ever lost votes by insulting a French politician.

And I'd refuse to speak politely about the U.N., the Third World tyrant's best friend.

Memo to Democrats: No one ever lost votes by expressing contempt for the U.N.

As to the matter of Kerry's loss, naturally, I'm not happy about it. But I never thought that he would have been able to accomplish much, seeing that we knew that the Republicans would retain control of Congress.

But here's the good news. Now that Bush has been re-elected, the Republicans are the undisputed owners of Bush's failures. They own the Iraq issue; they own the deficits issue; they own the entitlements issue; they own the rising health care costs issue; and so on. They can't possibly pin them on the Democrats.

Democrats, if they're smart, can land a serious blow against conservatism in 2008. Conservatism, we should say again and again, stands for fiscal irresponsibility, growing inequality and insecurity, foreign policy failure, lack of government accountability, tax cuts for the rich, and futile culture war that divides the country in a time of war.

The campaign for 2008 has already begun. Democrats just need a good candidate.

But if they pick Hillary Clinton, then I'll just up and resign from the party.