Reason Magazine - Topics > Campaigns/Elections

Sports and Election 2008

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Sun, 11 May 2008 20:58:00 EDT

USA Today asked the three remaining major-party candidates how they feel about Title IX and about performance enhancing drugs.

Refreshingly, all three said neither steroids nor gender participation are any of the government's business, and that, being private entities, sports organizations should be free to set their own rules free of meddling from the federal government or grandstanding congressmen.

Just kidding. All three favor using the federal government to bend pro and amateur sports to their liking.

Attn: SoCal Reasonoids -- Three Events About John McCain

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Fri, 09 May 2008 20:41:00 EDT

I'll be talking about McCain: The Myth of a Maverick at three upcoming appearances, each open to the public:

* Saturday, May 10, 3 p.m. − At the Palos Verdes Library, at a meeting of Rancho Palos Verdes Democrats; 701 Silver Spur Rd., Rolling Hills Estates.

* Wednesday, May 14, 7 p.m. − At the Pasadena Public Library; 285 E Walnut St., Pasadena.

* Thursday, May 15, 7 p.m. − At L.A.'s beautiful downtown Central Library, in the Mark Taper auditorium, as part of Zocalo L.A.'s "Deconstructing McCain"; 630 W. 5th St.

Please come by and say hello!

The Center of Britain

mmoynihan@reason.com (Michael C. Moynihan) — Fri, 09 May 2008 15:00:00 EDT

To get a broad sense of what Britain once was, just what necessitated the rise of Margaret Thatcher, ignore the frequently referenced punk lyrics of the late 1970s, so full of manufactured rage at the ruling class (White riot! England’s dreaming! Guns before butter!). Instead, drop Yes, Minister, the classic early 1980’s television comedy of Whitehall perfidy and ministerial incompetence, into the Netflix queue. Or just find the episode “The Compassionate Society”—season two, episode one—in which the show’s protagonist, Minister Jim Hacker, attempts to halt a massive National Health Service (NHS) hospital project which bequeathed to London 500 full-time nurses and doctors but housed not a single patient. Arrayed in defense of the plan are the usual interests: the tub-thumping left-wing union leader (a send up of the militant socialist head of the mineworkers union, Arthur Scargill), Downing Street spinmeisters, and various members of Parliament shilling for self-interested constituents. An advisor defends the project, telling Hacker that one must “sort out the smooth running of the hospital. Having patients around would be no help at all.” It was, unsurprisingly, Prime Minister Thatcher’s favorite episode.

It isn’t hyperbolic to say that this was more or less the government the Iron Lady inherited—a bloated, free-spending state, full of make-work jobs jealously guarded by union toughs. It was a system that Thatcher would help delegitimize and then effectively destroy. The heavy lifting was done (thank you very much) by those heartless Tories, though by 1997 voters decided it was time to return government to the more compassionate hands of Labour.

And Tony Blair’s “New Labour” didn’t win the 1997 election so much as they pushed the Conservative Party to the edge of oblivion. The Tories retreated having lost a massive 178 seats, its biggest defeat in almost a century. For the Conservative Party leadership, it was an existential crisis.

Pop stars that, 10 years previous, excelled in writing songs about the forgotten British miner were now popping champagne corks at Number 10 Downing Street. These would be the years of “Cool Britannia”; Red Wedge was dead. But the honeymoon of pop and politics was mercifully—and predictably—short. Noel Gallagher, guitarist of the seminal 1990s Britpop band Oasis and early adherent of New Labour, soon grumbled that the prime minister was forgetting the working class and acting like an American president. This Tony talked god, was chummy with President Bush, and fancied himself a liberal internationalist. Indeed, the rebranding of Labour, according to Blair biographer Anthony Seldon, resulted in far more criticism from the traditional left than the Tory right. Blair would govern from the center.

Fast-forward to early 2008: Prime Minister Gordon Brown is wildly unpopular and local council elections resulted in Labour’s worst showing in 40 years. Barely a week after the catastrophic defeat, a YouGov poll put Conservative Party support at 49 percent and Labour at 23 percent, its lowest rating since polling records began in the 1930s. (Though it is tempting to blame an easy culprit like Iraq, Labour was 11 points ahead of the Tories just eight months ago, and this week’s Economist leader, which asks if “Gordon Brown is doomed,” doesn’t even reference the war.)

A certain amount of this Labour collapse is attributable to a palatable alternative: Conservative leader David Cameron, the Eton-and-Oxford party boss who professes a love of The Smiths and began a recent Times editorial with the cringe-inducing line “Radiohead are one of my favourite bands.”

But it’s not the pathetic hipster pose that has attracted so much positive attention from both voters and Fleet Street journos, but Cameron's bold (some say facile and opportunistic) attempt to rebrand conservatism in the style of New Labour: "I made changes to and with the Conservative Party over the last 18 months for a very clear purpose, to get us back into the centre ground, to get us into a position where people listen to what we were saying, where we are more in touch with Britain as it is today."

It’s getting crowded in the center of British politics.

Even after his stunning local election victory, Cameron continued to burnish his centrist credentials, writing this week in the lefty paper The Independent that "If you care about poverty, if you care about inequality, if you care about the environment—forget about the Labour Party…If you count yourself a progressive, a true progressive, only we can achieve real change."

Cameron didn’t always consider himself a “true progressive.” When running for Parliament in 2000, he repeatedly dealt the social conservative card, grumbling about legislation that was "anti-family" and warning that it would force the "teaching of homosexuality" into British schools. When he took over the party leadership, Cameron jettisoned the tradition talk and spoke of welcoming gays and lesbians into the party fold, admonishing the Tory old guard for not supporting domestic partnership arrangements. The perpetually peeved Thatcherite Norman Tebbit grumbled that he didn't think "Tory supporters have gone soft, but I think the Tory leadership believes the electors are too soft to take the hard decisions which the country is now facing."

Others argue that the dash to the center—the “modernization”—is vindicated by recent electoral success and recent polling data. "The modernisers were right,” Times columnist and former Tory policy wonk Daniel Finkelstein trumpeted after the election. “Their critics were wrong."

It’s hard to argue with success.

The days following the Conservative rout saw nearly every political columnist on the island considering the future of Gordon Brown. The Spectator wondered what Brown “could learn from Hillary Clinton.” In the 1990s, when Labour was emerging from its punishing wilderness period, it took on countless Clinton operatives as consultants to micromanage its Clintonian rightward drift. But perhaps it’s time for American politicos—i.e. Republicans—to tear a page from the British political playbook.

The political landscape in America is hardly analogous to that of England. Despite Blair’s public piousness, fealty unto God isn’t a prerequisite for a presumptive prime minister. Nor do issues like abortion, the death penalty, or stem-cell research dominate the political culture. British conservatism is in many important ways distinct from its American cousin. But as many American conservatives have noted—David Frum in his book Comeback and his National Review colleague Jonah Goldberg—America too is becoming more socially tolerant and, if the Republican Party is interested in a successful future, a Cameron-like shift to the center on issues such as gay marriage and the drug war is advisable.

As political scientist Morris Fiorina points out in his book Culture War? The Myth of a Polarized America, both residents of red and blue states are “basically centrists”; American's aren't "red" or "blue" but various shades of purple. As conservative commenter David Brooks pointed out in 2001, "Although there are some real differences between Red and Blue America, there is no fundamental conflict."

Pat Buchanan's declaration at the 1992 Republican convention that there was a "religious war" raging in America, a "war for the soul" of the country, seems preposterous in retrospect. With a strong majority of Americans supporting Roe v. Wade, a clear majority supporting civil unions for gay couples, and the very real possibility of the country electing an African-American president, it's time for the Republican Party to borrow from the Tories if they want to recapture the center ground.

Michael C. Moynihan is an associate editor of reason.

Mike Gravel Crosses Over

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Fri, 09 May 2008 13:39:00 EDT

No comment:

For the Love of Godwin...

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Fri, 09 May 2008 10:28:00 EDT

This is mean-spirited, unfair, and profane. I loved it.

[Via Andrew Sullivan.]

Friday Funnies

info@reason.com (Scott Stantis) — Fri, 09 May 2008 07:00:00 EDT

Why Does Aspirin (and Hillary Clinton Supporters) Work?

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Thu, 08 May 2008 12:19:00 EDT

Hillary Clinton is well on her way to becoming the most reviled politician in the country. Not because she's resisting establishmentarian calls to step aside and let Prince Obama stride toward coronation − hell, I'd keep competing too, if I was that close to the mechanical rabbit. No, it's more that she will leave no faux-populist-bullshit-hardhat-Scranton-antitrade-what's-an-economist-Pabst-in-my-lunchbucket-Obama=Jesse stone unturned in her (and her husband's) quest to debase each and every molecule in their bodies, and snuff out every last positive memory we might have had of the way the federal government managed its affairs in the 1990s (when we, meaning me, never really liked her to begin with, and never voted for her husband).

The latest from Hitlery:

"I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on," she said in an interview with USA TODAY. As evidence, Clinton cited an Associated Press article "that found how Sen. Obama's support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me."
"There's a pattern emerging here," she said.

Yes, there is. When mincing little twerps like Paul Begala posit this rancid crew of Beltway power-mongers as the too-legit-to-quit anti-"egghead" faction representing the vast non-latte-drinking values of Real America, it's almost enough to make a guy pine for the authenticity of John Edwards.

I sincerely hope Hillary takes it all the way to the convention, even if that means I won't be able to watch cable TV for a few months. Few prospects would delight me more than seeing the Clintons stand up on a national stage in front of the political party they've long dominated and then get showered with richly deserved boos.

I'm wondering where in the world Alan Keyes could be, I been looking for him even clear through Tennessee

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Thu, 08 May 2008 08:00:00 EDT

For heaven's sake, stop encouraging him:

The Constitution Party may not want Alan Keyes but some people do. Keyes scored his best Republican primary performance of the campaign last night, winning 3 percent of the vote in North Carolina (although he still trailed John McCain, Mike Huckabee, Ron Paul, and "no preference"). Keyes continues to run as an independent. And the state party chairman of the American Independent Party, Keyes's largest bloc of support at the CP national convention, told Ballot Access News that he would still like to nominate Keyes for president.

New at Reason

Wed, 07 May 2008 12:00:00 EDT

From the June 2008 issue, Associate Editor David Weigel reveals the big political payoff that organized labor expects from the Democrats this fall.

Read all about it here.

Union Rules

dweigel@reason.com (David Weigel) — Wed, 07 May 2008 12:00:00 EDT

If you ever want a window into the needs and desires of the labor movement, you should listen to Stewart Acuff. And if you get within 50 yards of Acuff, you’ll be listening: The snow-bearded activist, now the AFL-CIO’s director of organizing, projects his voice like an opera singer. He grips the podium, white-knuckled. He clasps his hands, then pulls them apart with a snap. When I saw him at the Take Back America conference in Washington in March, his reedy voice grew rougher and louder as his speech went on.

“My brothers and sisters,” he said, “if we go into 2008 with an even larger mobilization of workers behind this legislation, with even more commitment to win the election in 2008, and put this on the agenda in 2009, I’m here to tell you today that we will pass this legislation, in the House, overwhelmingly! We will pass it in the Senate! We will defeat a Republican filibuster! And we will have a president who signs the Employee Free Choice Act! And we can get back to the business of restoring the American dream for millions and millions of workers!”

What’s the Employee Free Choice Act? If you aren’t a lobbyist in Washington, a union worker, or an employer nervously trying to prevent your staff from organizing, you might not have followed the twisty history of the latest attempt to increase private-sector unionization. “Card check,” as it is usually known, would allow employees at a company to bypass secret-ballot elections and declare their intent to unionize by simply signing cards. If adopted, it could portend the most revolutionary change to labor law since the 1940s.

The battle over card check is part of a much larger story of Campaign ’08: the coming-out party of Democratic interest groups. For the first time since 1992, Democrats are eyeing complete control of the executive and legislative branches, with all of the spoils of appointment and legislative scheduling that would entail. Unions want to grow their numbers. Green industries want tax incentives. Trial lawyers want a ceasefire in the war on torts.

If these groups could actually form a line in January, the unions would be at the front. Card check was the brainchild of organizers who had watched their numbers tumble as manufacturing jobs moved out of the rust belt and successive conservative administrations made it tougher to organize. President Bill Clinton, signer of NAFTA, did little to stop the skid from labor’s point of view. The organizers have learned their lessons, pushing members of the House and Senate—including the junior senators from New York and Illinois—to commit in writing to card check.

“When we started working on this legislation five years ago,” Acuff said at Take Back America, “people in Washington said it would never be taken seriously, never pass the laugh test.” Bills were introduced in 2003, 2005, and 2007. The first two times, they never reached the floor, with Republicans arguing that labor organizers usually win unionization elections anyway and that 90 percent of those results are approved by the federal government’s National Labor Relations Board within two months. In 2007, with the Democrats in charge of the legislature, the same bill passed the House easily and won 51 votes in the Senate, but that wasn’t enough to proceed to an up-or-down vote. All along, the effort has faced a veto threat from President Bush.

Things are different now. Democrats believe that as many as nine Republican-held Senate seats are vulnerable in 2008. The AFL-CIO, Change to Win, and allied unions plan to spend $360 million on the 2008 election. That’s around $200 million more than the unions spent in the Kerry-Bush race. As Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton slug it out for the nomination, the AFL-CIO is running a $53 million campaign attacking John McCain—portraying him as a right-wing ideologue who co-sponsored the Secret Ballot Protection Act, the GOP’s attempt at making kryptonite against card check.

All that union money comes with a promise: What’s good for unions will be good for the Democrats. Greg Tarpinian, a Change to Win organizer who spoke at the Take Back America panel, pointed out that union membership was one of the strongest determinants for a voter choosing a Democratic ballot. “If union membership was 10 percent in Ohio in 2004,” he argued, “John Kerry would be president.”

If card check passes, Tarpinian has only one worry: the ability of the National Labor Relations Board to “keep up with the demand” for brand new unions. Those new brothers and sisters of the labor movement will start paying dues; said dues will find their way to new Democratic campaigns like salmon finding their way upstream.

Republicans and business lobbyists are watching all of this with a sense of resigned horror. They know Democrats will have the votes, and they believe that the end of secret ballot elections will be not just bad for business, but bad for democracy. They also see card check as the tip of a spear. One Republican staffer worried to me about collective bargaining rights for public employees. “Do we really want fire-fighters to start striking?” he asked.

The unions stand to be the biggest beneficiaries of an all-Democratic Washington. Affordable housing advocates, meanwhile, want the 2007 Federal Housing Finance Reform Act, which created a $3 billion fund bankrolled with tax revenue and the profits of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, to be spent on more housing units instead of held up by concerns over budget deficits. Trial lawyers have paid their dues: The American Association for Justice spent $6.3 million to elect Democrats in 2006 through its political action committee, the most of any single PAC. For the first half of this decade, the plaintiffs industry fought a rearguard action against the tort reform movement, which Republicans have been using to limit the size of settlements. Trial lawyers lost a big battle when the Senate passed class action lawsuit reform in 2005, but they haven’t given much ground since then. When the Democrats come back, plaintiffs expect to go back on offense.

The Consumer Product Safety Reform Act, passed this year, is a model of what to expect in a Democratic future. The law doubled funding for the eponymous safety commission to $155 million by 2015, set no caps on damages, and empowered state attorneys general to make federal cases if they have “reason to believe that the interests of the residents of that State have been, or are being, threatened or adversely affected by a violation” of consumer safety. It passed the Democratic-controlled Senate by 79-13, aided by the scare over tainted toys from China.

But unions outmatch every other member of the Democratic coalition in demands and expectations. Now is their time. One organizer told me that a Democratic comeback would mean that the party had “no more excuses” for not giving them what they wanted. At Take Back America, Acuff said the party should gift-wrap anything wavering Republicans want if it will get the bill to a floor vote. “If we have to build a bridge somewhere to get it passed, then build the damn bridge!” he said. “If we have to rename a highway after somebody, rename the highway!”

Another activist, relaxing after a day of sessions and meetings, regaled me with stories of how businesses bust unions, how the National Labor Relations Board punctures budding movements, and how essential it was to change the system. He repeated my question back to me. “If we get a Democratic president, are we going to pass card check?” He leaned back and grabbed a Miller Lite from one of his brothers coming back from the bar. “If the sun comes up in the morning, we’re passing card check.”

David Weigel is an associate editor of Reason.

Here Come Da McCain Judges!

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Wed, 07 May 2008 08:32:00 EDT

GOP Prez Candidate Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) vows to appoint good conservative judges if elected:

John McCain made a play to the GOP's right wing yesterday, vowing to appoint conservative judges like Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. and Justice Samuel Alito and blasting Democratic rivals Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton for voting against them.

In a speech his campaign billed as a major address on the judiciary, McCain delivered a harsh critique of "judicial activists" who over step their Constitutional bounds. He also lambasted Democrats for blocking GOP nominees to the bench by turning the confirmation process into a "gauntlet of abuse."

More here.

Never forget: John Roberts played Peppermint Patty in his high school production of You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown, which should have disqualified him from something.

reason's Damon Root on why some libertarian activism on the high court can be a good thing:

A principled form of libertarian judicial activism—that is, one that consistently upholds individual rights while strictly limiting state power—is essential to the fight for a free society....The real legal challenge facing libertarians isn't judicial activism; it is defending individual rights from the liberals and conservatives who seek to take our liberties away.

A Narrative of the Life of Barack Obama

info@reason.com (Damon W. Root) — Mon, 05 May 2008 17:18:00 EDT

So far, Democratic frontrunner Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) has been compared to Abraham Lincoln, Robert F. Kennedy, and Ronald Reagan. Is he the second coming of abolitionist Frederick Douglass as well? In the spring issue of The American Scholar, Nick Bromell makes the interesting, if ultimately unconvincing case that Obama is the only Democrat still adhering to the faith- and feelings-based liberalism espoused by Douglass:

If Douglass were alive today, he would be dismayed by the reluctance of most liberals and progressives to connect programs with values, values with beliefs, beliefs with feelings. He would insist on their knowing what kind of temperament underlies and what spirit animates their politics. He would ask why they find particular values enduring and sacred—a question that would set them on a path leading back to how they feel about the world and themselves and other people, back to a recovery of words that breathe life and passion into an otherwise static list of clichés.

Aren't Americans today impatient for liberals to rediscover what they stand for? Aren't they eager for a liberalism that speaks out of its deepest wellsprings, a liberalism that speaks reason from the heart?

Of course, Frederick Douglass was a classical liberal, a lifelong champion of natural rights, including the rights to life, liberty, and property. Too bad Obama seems so uninterested in following Douglass' lead on that third one.

(Via Arts & Letters Daily)

The Coming Recession

Mon, 05 May 2008 12:05:00 EDT

As this issue of reason goes to press, the dollar is at a record low against the euro, oil is more than $100 a barrel, consumer prices are up 4 percent from a year ago, and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke is cutting interest rates so often that the guys at the office have taken to calling him Edward Scissorhands. The subprime mortgage fallout has yet to finish wreaking its havoc, Bear Stearns is holding on by the skin of its teeth, and the government’s bucket may not be big enough for all the bailouts under way. Gloomy faces dominate CNBC and the Fox Business Channel, muttering long-forgotten terms like inflation and recession.

President George W. Bush, by contrast, is relatively cheery, conceding that we are in “challenging times” but arguing that “our financial institutions are strong” and the capital markets “functioning efficiently and effectively.” “In the long run,” Bush said in a March 17 White House address, “our economy is going to be fine.” And some statistics back up the sunny view: Unemployment is still at a low 5.1 percent, and productivity remains high.

Presidential hopefuls are offering a variety of explanations and possible solutions for what 42 percent of voters say is the most important issue to them, according to a recent CNN poll. At a March 20 rally, Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) suggested the problem was a combination of “special interests” and war: “At a time when we’re on the brink of recession, when neighborhoods have ‘For Sale’ signs outside every home, and working families are struggling to keep up with rising costs, ordinary Americans are paying a price for this war.” Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) took a different tack: The “economic crisis is, at its core, a housing crisis,” she said in a major Philadelphia address on March 24, but she cited other factors as well, including Bush’s “brain dead energy policy.” Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) won the Republican nomination without really talking much about the economy.

How will we know when it’s fair to speak the dreaded r-word? In general, a recession is defined as a decline in a country’s gross domestic product for two or more successive quarters. In the United States, an official pronouncement is required from the professional doom diagnosticians on the business-cycle dating committee of the National Bureau of Economic Research, who often take other aspects of an ailing economy into account. GDP growth slowed dramatically at the end of 2007 and is projected to be zero in the second quarter of 2008, so we look to be well on our way.

As oil prices continued to climb and housing prices continued to slide, Reason assembled a panel of economists and other market watchers to help make sense of the headlines, point some fingers, figure out how we got where we are, and offer advice about how to get out with our wallets intact.

Blame the Fed
Gerald P. O’Driscoll Jr.
The U.S. economy is in the midst of an old-style credit crunch brought on by a combination of bad policies and incredibly lax underwriting standards at financial institutions. The biggest policy failure was the decision by Alan Greenspan’s Federal Reserve to hold interest rates too low for too long. That led to a tsunami of credit that inundated the economy with cheap money. Mortgage lenders in particular were flush with funds and searched for deals wherever they could be found. Heretofore unqualified borrowers suddenly “qualified” as underwriting standards relaxed and then disappeared.

Egged on by statements from Chairman Greenspan, market participants came to believe the era of low interest rates would last indefinitely. But the era did come to an end as the Fed was forced to begin raising interest rates. Faced with the prospect of paying higher rates on their mortgages in the future, borrowers began defaulting. First home prices stopped rising, and then home prices began dropping—precipitously in some overheated housing markets. Now we are approximately six months into a new cycle of lower interest rates, but with no end in sight to the crunch.

At least two other factors stoked the crisis. First, many exotic financial products were issued whose value was tied in one way or another to home prices and the value of the securities into which home mortgages were bundled, such as collateralized mortgage obligations. The pricing of these financial products was the product of complex economic models, not the outcome of market transactions. As the value of the underlying homes and mortgages declined, pricing of the financial exotica became nearly impossible. As we learned in the collapse of Long Term Capital Management, these pricing models fail precisely when their accuracy is most important—in times of financial turbulence. The inability to price the financial products has exacerbated losses among the firms holding them.

There is a wonderful parallel here to the collapse of the Soviet Union. As the great Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises argued almost 100 years ago, central planning inevitably fails because there are no market prices to allocate resources. Market prices can only be the outcome of actual market transactions among buyers and sellers. Planners used mathematical formulas to value resources, especially capital. Now Wall Street wizards have imported Soviet thinking to allocate financial capital. Is it any wonder that it failed?

The second factor contributing to the housing market collapse was the federal government’s commitment to “affordable housing.” Lenders, especially Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, were pressured into promoting housing to low-income groups that could not qualify for normal loans. That policy is predicated on the belief that there is an underserved group of people who, but for economic discrimination or some other market failure, would be homeowners. That social goal and the credit-driven desire for more deals merged into mortgages made without adequate collateral.

We learned two lessons from the drive to make home ownership available to the heretofore underserved. First, many of these were not homeowners because they could not afford a home. Only under the temporary “hothouse” conditions in mortgage markets did they seem to qualify. Second, people who have no equity in their homes cannot meaningfully be said to be owners. When times turn tough, they will walk away. They were effectively renters, not homeowners.

The crisis will end when housing markets hit bottom and the prices of mortgage securities stabilize. Banks also need to unwind their positions in exotic financial derivatives.

The Fed needs to understand it is facing a capital crisis, not a liquidity crisis. The very low interest rates on safe assets show there is ample liquidity in financial markets. The Fed should not supply capital. That is the job of markets, and they are doing it.

Gerald P. O’Driscoll Jr., formerly a vice president and economic adviser at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute.

No Hoofing to Hooverville
Megan McArdle
Just one thing puzzles me about the race to the White House: Why would anyone want to get there? I know that being crowned prettiest girl at the prom is the great lasting rejoinder to everyone who made fun of you in middle school, but given the economic condition of the country, the next four years seem like a rotten time to reign.

Ignore the econopundits making comparisons to the 1930s. While the parallels are striking, we are missing the key ingredient in the onset of the Great Depression: tight Fed policy that caused the money supply to shrink by 25 percent. You can put away that bindle and push the apple cart back in the garage.

But if we’re not exactly hoofing it to Hooverville, we nonetheless face one hell of a rough patch. Record high oil prices, surpassing even the momentous spikes of the 1970s, have brought with them another piece of ’70s memorabilia: stagflation. Federal Reserve bankers are faced with an extremely unpalatable choice. They can tighten up the money supply to combat inflation, at the cost of making the probable recession even deeper. Or they can hang loose and watch inflation march upward while the economy does God knows what. With the credit markets broken, the Fed may end up losing its hard-won credibility as an inflation fighter while producing only marginal benefits to growth.

The president has no control over any of this, but that won’t stop people from blaming him anyway. He will also almost certainly have to come up with some regulatory scheme for increasing transparency and accountability in the vast new financial markets that have been created by the securitization of loans during the last 30 years. It will be a tough order to give investors better information without strangling valuable financial innovation.

But by far his biggest quandary will be the budget. Obama (who I assume will be the Democratic nominee) wants a big new health care entitlement; John McCain wants even more tax cuts. Both will be frustrated by adverse budget math. The economic slowdown is going to cut into tax revenues, and most economists agree that a recession is not a good time to raise taxes—nay, not even on “the rich.” Meanwhile, the baby boomers are about to start retiring, turning Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid into the sucking chest wound of the federal budget. Assurances that the trust fund won’t run out until 2042 notwithstanding, the president will have to start coping with Medicare deficits as soon as next year, and a falling Social Security surplus soon thereafter. All this will be compounded by the slowdown in GDP growth made inevitable by declining labor force participation and service-intensive elder care.

Any future president should be panicking. That doesn’t mean the rest of us should. At the end of the day, America has the most flexible and resilient economy in the world. We’ll pull through somehow, although a lot of us won’t be very happy in the process. But least happy of all will be the president—the bum we get to throw out when things don’t go our way.

Megan McArdle blogs about economics at The Atlantic.

First, Do No (More) Harm
Ron Paul
This nation is facing an economic crisis the likes of which have not been seen in several generations. It is crucial that we take to heart the lesson that should have been learned after the Great Depression, which is that the central bank should do nothing.

I have been writing and speaking for years about the dangers of the Federal Reserve, but the importance of the actions of the Fed in laying the groundwork for the downturn in the business cycle pales in comparison to the damage done by actions the Fed takes once the downturn arrives. At the first sign of crisis, even with growing inflation, the Fed began to further inflate, lowering interest rates, stepping up open market operations, and injecting liquidity. World markets, already jittery, see these steps as affirmations of their worst fears and react accordingly by selling assets denominated in smoke-and-mirrors fiat currency and fleeing to the solid value of gold, oil, and commodities.

Every action the Fed takes sends a signal that the U.S. dollar will continue to be inflated and therefore debased, which is why the correct action is no action at all. Lower interest rates and liquidity injections are viewed with alarm by foreign markets, while higher interest rates and money tightening are anathema to many domestic investors. The Fed is between a rock and a hard place, and its insistence on inflating the money supply to manage the brittle economy will likely be our undoing.

Until we realize that the Federal Reserve system itself is flawed, and until we recognize that no one economic maestro or committee of economic experts can set prices and plan the economy, this nation will continue to flounder about in an economic malaise. Ending that may take a much more serious downturn than anything we’ve seen yet. It is beyond doubt that our economy is in recession, and the only rational response is for the government to allow malinvested resources to liquidate so that we can return to a stable economy.

While the Fed should take a hands-off approach, Congress should aggressively cut taxes and spending and repeal regulations that stifle economic growth, such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. This country has enormous economic potential, an industrious work force, and an enviable history of innovation and entrepreneurship. If the government would learn from its past mistakes and abstain from further interference, we could get back on a solid footing and grow to our full potential.

My fear is that the Fed will continue with its policy of inflation and Congress will be pressured to continue to stimulate the economy with government spending, probably extending to even more outright taxpayer-funded bailouts of financial institutions, subprime mortgages, and government-sponsored enterprises that are “too big to fail.” These debt-funded efforts reward the recklessness of some institutions at the expense of the productive sectors of our economy. Until the federal government acts to extricate itself from intervention in the markets, economic activity will be hindered and true recovery will not take place.

Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) is a nine-term congressman and a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination.

The Vicious Ethanol Cycle
Robert Bryce
I see three big dangers to the global economy: the ongoing fallout from the mortgage mess, rising energy prices, and rising food prices. That last item is the most maddening, because surging food prices are largely the result of the ethanol scam.

As U.S. ethanol distilleries vacuum up ever increasing quantities of corn, and corn takes up an ever larger percentage of arable land, prices for all types of food are skyrocketing. During the last two years, corn prices have more than doubled and soybean prices have nearly tripled. In 2007 food prices in the U.S. increased by nearly 5 percent. Bill Lapp, of the Omaha-based research firm Advanced Economic Solutions, told The Boston Globe in March that he expects food prices to increase at an annual rate of 7.5 percent for the next five years.

Because of mandates requiring gasoline producers to mix ethanol with their fuel, 20 percent of the U.S. corn crop in 2006—about 2.1 billion bushels—was diverted into ethanol production. By 2009, according to the National Corn Growers Association, about one-third of the expected crop—some 4 billion bushels—will be used to make motor fuel. And those projections were made in April 2007, eight months before Congress passed the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007, which requires the consumption of 36 billion gallons of ethanol by 2020, a fivefold increase over current levels.

The far-reaching economic impact of ethanol mandates is already being felt. In early 2007, tens of thousands of people marched in the streets of Mexico City to protest the rising cost of tortillas, an increase that Mexico’s secretary of economy, Eduardo Sojo, blamed on American corn ethanol production. In March of this year, Pilgrim’s Pride, the world’s largest poultry processor, shuttered a plant in Siler City, North Carolina, and fired 1,100 workers. Company CEO Clint Rivers laid the blame squarely on the ethanol mandates, predicting that “there is much more to come” in the way of food price increases. “We’re spending our tax dollars to raise the price of our food to subsidize the ethanol industry,” he said.

Congressional meddling in the energy market has created what Lester Brown, the president of the Earth Policy Institute, calls an “epic competition” between “the world’s supermarkets and its service stations.” Therein lies the perversity of ethanol mandates: As the global economy heads for rougher times, food prices are soaring. And those prices will increase anxiety among consumers, who will further reduce their discretionary spending. Congress has created a negative feedback loop that will reverberate for years to come.

Robert Bryce is the managing editor of Energy Tribune. His latest book is Gusher of Lies: The Dangerous Delusions of “Energy Independence” (PublicAffairs).

War Is the Health of the Civilian State
Robert Higgs
Adam Smith famously observed that there is “a great deal of ruin in a nation”—that is, nations can take a lot of abuse. Let’s hope he was right, because the George W. Bush administration has taken a great many actions during the past seven years that contribute to economic ruin.

Much of the White House’s faulty economic policy can be traced to its wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, especially the latter because it has been larger, costlier, and more diverting. I use the word diverting deliberately to emphasize that the government’s military adventures in southwest Asia have served to draw the public’s attention away from economic measures that otherwise would have attracted more notice and hence more resistance.

One reason war is always associated with especially rapid growth in the size, scope, and power of the state is that it focuses people’s attention on what is seen as the most urgent matter, so they simply don’t notice what the government is doing in other areas. Another reason is that during wartime many people increase their broad support for the government and are less inclined to challenge its actions even when those actions have little or nothing to do with the war.

Hardly anyone was surprised that real military spending (measured in accordance with the government’s own narrow definition) increased by almost 60 percent between 2000 and 2007, compared to real GDP growth of 18 percent during that time. Note, however, that the government’s real nondefense outlays increased concurrently by more than 24 percent—an increase one-third greater than that of GDP. When people let down their guard in “supporting the troops,” they permit the government to make greater headway in its ceaseless quest to enlarge spending in a wide range of areas, many of them strictly civilian in nature.

The administration has partially concealed the burden of its spending binge by resorting to deficit finance. Federal debt held by the public increased by 49 percent between the end of fiscal 2000 and the end of fiscal 2007—a 24 percent increase after adjusting for inflation. To facilitate this surge in public borrowing, the Federal Reserve engineered a 40 percent increase in the monetary base, easing credit conditions in the commercial banking sector. The real estate bubble (now bursting) and the substantial depreciation of the dollar’s international exchange value are but two of the consequences of these reckless, war-spawned fiscal and monetary policies.

In view of the plunging stock market, my guess is that the current recession—in which many of the easy-credit-induced malinvestments of the past seven years are being liquidated by means of write-offs, loan defaults, bankruptcies, and other asset forfeitures—has much further to run. If you like the present worsening economic situation, write the president and your congressional representatives a letter and thank them for their war and their related economic spoliation.

Robert Higgs, a senior fellow in political economy at the Independent Institute, is author of Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government (Oxford University Press) and many other books.

Stagflation or Depression?
Robert E. Wright
The current U.S. economic outlook is as bleak as it was in 1974 or even 1930. Will the economy wither? Or will it just wilt a little before blossoming in a bath of Fed-supplied liquidity? Nobody knows for sure, but I fear the former. Here’s why:

Our educational system does a poor job of teaching people how to think independently. It always has, but until recently that wasn’t a big problem. Today’s globalized economy, however, demands ever larger numbers of engineers, doctors, scientists, and sundry creative types. We probably won’t create enough independent thinkers until we have school choice at the primary, secondary, and tertiary levels.

Thankfully, entrepreneurs abound. They’ve pulled us out of the economic fire in the past and could do so again. But they are more hamstrung than ever with high, uncertain, and often capricious taxes and regulations that do not appear to be going away anytime soon.

Something stinks in our financial system. Six different mortgage securitization schemes blew up between the Civil War and World War II for exactly the same reason that subprime mortgages tanked last year: very poorly designed incentives for mortgage originators. Why don’t financiers and their regulators pay more attention to America’s rich financial heritage? Their modeling is more sophisticated than ever, but their economic reasoning is not.

The national debt is so high ($9.4 trillion, or almost $31,000 per person) that the government must largely rely on monetary stimulus rather than more salubrious fiscal measures, such as permanently cutting taxes. Too much easing by the Fed could lead to 1970s-like inflation and further financial havoc.

Urged on in part by the example set by their profligate leaders, Americans wallow in a huge pile of private debt as well. A high level of individual leverage has become a permanent fixture of the nation’s landscape. Americans owe so much that to keep growing, financial institutions have to push the margin of safety by making loans on ever thinner collateral and ever weaker covenants. If the economy slows significantly, many more poor-quality loans will hit the proverbial fan. The ensuing mess will stink and take a long time to clean up.

Even if the Federal Reserve manages to save the economy this time, these problems may continue to fester, breeding the next economic catastrophe. Perhaps, though, even greater levels of incompetence in other countries will break our fall.

Robert E. Wright is the author of One Nation Under Debt: Hamilton, Jefferson and the History of What We Owe (McGraw-Hill) and a curator for the Museum of American Finance. He teaches business, economic, and financial history at New York University’s Stern School of Business.

The Only Thing to Fear Is Fear-Driven Government ‘Control’
Donald J. Boudreaux
New York Times columnist Gail Collins was underwhelmed by the president’s folksy course-things-ain’t-great-now-but-we-Americans-with-our-rebate-checks-and-incessant-complaining-about-congressional-earmarks-are-gonna-be-just-fine address to the Economic Club of New York on March 14. She complained that “in times of crisis you would like to at least believe your leader has the capacity to pretend he’s in control.”

This is the attitude that scares me. I worry not a whit that the subprime crisis or falling share prices will cause long-term economic woe. As unnerving as the current downturn might be today, people in competitive markets always find ways of regaining their economic footing tomorrow. Investors recalibrate their expectations and entrepreneurs redirect their energies to take better advantage of the changing economic landscape. Workers’ pay and consumers’ standard of living, after blipping briefly downward, resume their upward trend.

“Nonsense!” a chorus yells. “What about the Great Depression? Or the 1970s?” The experiences of these decades are indeed relevant. They are, however, precisely why the clamor for putting someone “in control” of this crisis is so frightening.

Contrary to the conventional wisdom, whose strength of empirical support rivals that for the flat-earth hypothesis (“It seems so obvious!”), the massive move toward centralized control of the economy during the administrations of both Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt did not “rescue” Americans from economic hardship. All that FDR’s soaring rhetoric and army of officials manning newly created alphabet-soup agencies managed to do was to prolong an economic downturn into America’s deepest and longest depression—one that showed no reliable signs of ending until after Roosevelt met his maker. As the economic historian Robert Higgs documents in his 2006 book Depression, War, and Cold War, investors were terrified by the very real risk during the 1930s that government would extend its control over the economy even beyond what it achieved with its New Deal programs.

The 1970s weren’t as bad as the 1930s. Most important, there was no serious talk during the ’70s of nationalizing industries or socializing investment decisions. International trade was expanding rather than being suffocated by a disco-era Smoot-Hawley tariff. Still, wage and price controls were in vogue (and in effect), Congress and Richard Nixon were keen on command-and-control regulations, and Fed chairmen Arthur Burns’ and G. William Miller’s control over the money supply was injuriously inflationary. Shot through with so many interventions giving government more “control,” the economy slipped into an infamous malaise.

My only fear, therefore, is fear itself—fear that deludes people into believing that giving government greater control is the key to earthly salvation. As I write these words, the Fed’s aggressive moves to bail out Bear Stearns and prevent other necessary market corrections—along with increasing public support for protectionism, anti-immigrant nativism, and environmental hysteria—send shivers down my spine. The threat of a long-term crisis is only as real as is the likelihood that government will try to exert more control.

Donald J. Boudreaux is a professor of economics at George Mason University.

Oliver Diaz, Jr.

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Sun, 04 May 2008 08:50:00 EDT

In Mississippi, state supreme court justices are elected, not appointed. They serve eight-year terms, but can serve multiple terms if they're reelected. Yesterday Associate Justice Oliver Diaz, Jr. announced his plans to run for reelection.

Diaz may face a tough campaign, due in part to the fact that he's one of the more liberal justices on the court. He's also the only justice on the court who seems to give a damn about the sham that is Mississippi's criminal justice system. Diaz was instrumental in building a coalition to throw out Dr. Steven Hayne's absurd two-hands-on-the-gun testimony in the Tyler Edmonds case. My sources in Mississippi tell me the court initially was planning to uphold Hayne's testimony and Edmonds' conviction. Diaz not only succeeded in turning that around for a 8-1 vote for a new trial, he wrote a blistering concurring opinion stating that Dr. Hayne should never testify in Mississippi's courts again (disclosure: he cited my reason article on the Cory Maye case in that opinion). Unfortunately, Diaz wasn't able to convince a majority of his colleagues of his opinion of Dr. Hayne, and so Hayne continues to do the bulk of the state's autopsies.

The other reason Diaz may face an uphill battle for reelection is because several years ago, he was indicted by the Bush Justice Department on public corruption charges. Diaz, a former Republican now backed by Democrats, maintained his innocence throughout the ordeal, refused to plea or resign his seat on the court, and was eventually acquitted on all charges. The Bush Justice Department then indicted him again. And he was acquitted again. His case is now being investigated by Congress to see if it was one of a series of overtly political and questionably meritorious prosecutions of Democratic public officials led by Bush-appointed U.S. attorneys (other prosecutions under investigation include those against former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman and Pennsylvania medical examiner Cyril Wecht).

One other thing: The federal charges against Diaz stemmed from his relationship with Paul Minor, a plaintiff's attorney in Mississippi who got rich off the tobacco settlement. As Harper's Scott Horton points out, the case against Diaz, Minor, and others was part of a GOP backlash in Mississippi against the rise and enormous influence of trial lawyers in that state. But interestingly, while Diaz is often painted as a friend of the plaintiff's bar, it's worth noting that Dr. Hayne is also a favorite of trial lawyers in Mississippi. Part of Hayne's success stems from the fact that he has managed to win over both the state's prosecutors and the state's trial lawyers (and the county coroners, who often go out of their way to please both). Talk to any medical malpractice defense attorney in Mississippi, for example, and they'll rant about Hayne's absurd testimony in various tort cases for a good ten minutes (I'll have more on this next week).

Diaz's blistering opinion singling out Hayne in the Edmonds case, then, was actually a blow to the state's trial lawyers—the very group for whom the feds and the state's GOP accuse of Diaz of being a shill. His continued presence on the court is important to keep the pressure on the state to do something about Hayne.

It would be unfortunate if South Mississippi's voters were to take Diaz off the bench due to what looks like an overtly political federal prosecution. Right now, at least on criminal justice issues, he's the only justice on the Mississippi Supreme Court who seems to even realize Mississippi has a problem.

Hillary Rising

info@reason.com (Jeff Taylor) — Fri, 02 May 2008 12:00:00 EDT

One month ago Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) faced an uphill climb in North Carolina. A few days from Tuesday's primary, Clinton has clearly closed in on Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) and there are now whispers of a Clinton win among her state-wide supporters.

The Clinton campaign continues to set the bar low, intending to spin even a close loss to Obama as proof that superdelegates cannot trust the party's nomination to such a weak candidate. However, keep in mind how Clinton managed to make up ground in a state where some polls had her trailing by as much as 20 points. The Clinton campaign has largely lucked into its recent momentum.

Clinton must first thank the state's Republican Party. It's decision to put the most strident anti-Obama ad, one with a heavy dose of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, into the mix two weeks ahead of the primary has rebounded to Clinton's advantage. The ad was ostensibly directed at the two Democratic contenders for the governor's race, both of whom have endorsed Obama.

But a TV ad featuring Rev. Wright damning America from the pulpit presented rural white voters with an uncomfortable image of Obama while at the same time freeing Clinton from having to do that job herself. It was win-win for the Clinton team.

Incidentally, state conservatives will not soon forget John McCain's sanctimonious heartburn over the NC GOP ad. They did not like the Republican nominee much on the issues before the flap, and now they find him pandering—and soft to boot.

Better still for Clinton, Rev. Wright decided to drop by the National Press Club this week to reamplify his previous remarks. This kept the story fresh for another few days and led Obama—prodded along, rumor has it, by spot polling in NC showing the Wright issue sapping his support among well-educated white voters—to finally denounce his former pastor.

Still, the potential for huge numbers of newly registered voters to turn out for Obama next week has clearly troubled the Clinton camp. They were not likely to be turned off by the 24/7 focus on Wright. They were on a mission to vote. But the Clinton network had an answer for that.

The Institute for Southern Studies (ISS), a left-liberal outfit in Durham with a hair-trigger on all voting rights issues, claims that the answer was good ol' voter suppression courtesy of a group with connections to the Clinton campaign. A Beltway non-profit with the tongue-twisting name of Women's Voices Women Vote has made robo-calls around the state—as it did ahead of other primaries—telling potential voters that the "packet" they must sign to be eligible to vote will soon arrive in the mail.

But no such "packet" exists, and the deadline for registration has long since passed. As such, ISS finds this calling effort "misleading"—and with good reason. Turns out one of the group's executives is a frequent contributor to the Clinton campaign, amid other interesting connections:

Women's Voices Executive Director Joe Goode worked for Bill Clinton's election campaign in 1992 as a pollster; the group's website says he was intimately involved in "development and implementation of all polling and focus groups done for the presidential primary and general election campaigns" for Clinton.

Women's Voices board member John Podesta, former Chief of Staff for President Bill Clinton, donated $2,300 to Hillary Clinton on April 19, 2007, according to OpenSecrets.org.

What is a Clinton campaign without a little funny business? The size of the turnout among black voters remains the great unknown for Tuesday; anything which dampens that turnout will be to Clinton's advantage.

One above-board factor the campaign can claim credit for is turning Bill Clinton loose to do his Bubba routine among small towns of displaced blue-collar workers. The former president remains popular with the NASCAR crowd and he never fails to skewer the Bush administration, noting, for example, that he left office with a federal budget surplus.

Much less important—indeed, bordering on the insignificant, despite the spin given it by consultants with the ear of gullible reporters—is Clinton's endorsement by North Carolina Governor Mike Easley. On paper Easley is a four-time statewide winner, including two wins as attorney general before his current run as governor.

But Easley's lame-duck year has been marked by political scandal in Raleigh, with one Democratic ally after another under investigation, and the former Speaker of the House now serving time in the federal pen. Add in the fact that governor's office is institutionally weak and that Easley has no campaign for another office in the field, and Hillary gets very little bump out on the campaign trail from this backing.

However, there is no denying that whatever the cause, Clinton is on the upswing while Obama seems to be treading water and is focusing on the insider game of locking down superdelegates. Weekend events and news coverage will be crucial for both candidates. As improbable as it seemed 30 days ago, Clinton has a shot to deny Obama a big victory. This would send the Democrats a loud-and-clear message: Pick me, I can win this thing.

Jeff Taylor writes from North Carolina.

Fiscal Discipline: Use Only in Case of Surplus

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Thu, 01 May 2008 19:33:00 EDT

Some surprisingly straight campaign talk from The Associated Press:

Republican John McCain is making promises that would cost billions of taxpayer dollars, yet he is vague about how he would pay for them. [...]
McCain has pledged to balance the federal budget, although he has backed off an earlier promise to do so in his first term and now says he would do it within eight years. [...]
[He] proposed a new mortgage refinancing program for struggling homeowners that could cost the government $3 billion to $10 billion. He proposed to suspend federal gas taxes for the summer months at a cost of $8 billion to $10 billion.
And McCain has several proposals whose costs are unknown, such as his pledge to give all veterans a plastic card to get medical treatment anywhere they choose, a new student loan program and tax write-offs for companies that provide Internet service to rural areas.
How would he pay for it? New user fees could pay for the gas-tax holiday, McCain adviser Doug Holtz-Eakin said. [...]
[F]or all the numbers he has provided, McCain has been reluctant to say exactly which programs he would cut.

Whole thing, with plenty more details, here. I might also add that trillion-dollar wars tend to be expensive, as do plans to boost the standing military by 150,000 troops, etc.

It is perhaps noteworthy to point out that this is almost precisely the opposite of John McCain's tax/budget philosophy of 2000, when he was a big (and convincing!) budget hawk and debt-payer-downer. Here he is in his 2002 memoir Worth the Fighting For, talking about his differences with George W. Bush on that score:

He and I disagreed on tax policy. My position invited greater hostility from conservatives in the party and in the press than my support for campaign finance ever had. Republican primaries had long featured a bidding war to see which candidate could promise the biggest tax cut. I chose to offer the smallest, targeted to middle- and lower-income families, so that we could use most of the budget surplus to pay off the national debt, build our defenses, and begin to pay the transition costs of reforming Social Security and Medicare for the sake of future American generations.
Lest anyone think my positions were brave, if self-defeating, honesty obliges me to note that every poll my campaign conducted (and we took as many as we could afford) found greater support for paying down the debt than cutting taxes for upper-bracket incomes, among Republican voters as well as Democrats and independents. [...] You will have to trust me that I held and expressed these views before I had survey research proving their popularity.

Readers of this website might also find of interest the selection immediately preceding the passage above:

I welcomed a greater, if still limited, role for government in national problems, anathema to the "leave us alone" libertarian philosophy that dominated Republican debates in the 1990s. So did George W. Bush, I must add, who challenged libertarian orthodoxy with his appeal for a "compassionate conservatism." He based much of his more activist government philosophy in an expanded role for the federal government in education policy and in his support for contributions that small, faith-based organizations could make to the solution of social problems. I gave more attention to national service and to a bigger role for government as a restraining force on selfish interests that undermined national unity. But his positions did him much credit, as well they should have, and they do him much credit now as he uses his presidency to advance them.

Joe Trippi's Gut-Check Failure

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Thu, 01 May 2008 16:39:00 EDT

From the current issue of Politics (formerly Campaigns & Elections and outlet for two damn fine cover stories by reasoners [about Mike Huckabee and the coming libertarian era]), Joe Trippi turns on the waterworks thinking about his experience with presidential washout John Edwards:

For the first time in thirty years of political work, I didn't go with my gut.
I didn't tell him what I should have told him: That I had this feeling that if he stayed in the race he would win 300 or so delegates by Super Tuesday and have maybe a one-in-five chance of forcing a brokered convention. That there was a path ahead that would be extremely painful, but could very well put him and his causes at the top of the Democratic agenda. And that in politics anything can happen-even the possibility that in an open convention with multiple ballots an embattled and exhausted party would turn to him as their nominee. I should have closed my eyes to the pain I saw around me on the campaign bus, including my own. I should have told him emphatically that he should stay in. My regret that I did not do so-that I let John Edwards down—grows with every day that the fight between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama continues....
My mistake was not seeing more clearly then what is so obvious to me now: He could have kept his agenda in the forefront by staying in the race and forcing Obama and Clinton to focus on those issues because he, John Edwards, would hold the key to the convention deadlock. And maybe, just maybe, a brokered convention would have stunned the political world and led to an Edwards nomination.

Whole thing, worth reading for many reasons (including real insight into campaign guys' heads), here.

Me, I'm glad John Edwards is out of the race—he's the Mountain Dew of phoney-baloney pols (to the extreme!) and while a brokered convention would be a good deal of fun (whether it'll ever happen is a very different question), Edwards' dumb Big Gummint ideas were cutting edge back when LBJ was taking craps in front of his cabinet members. Do we really need another moneybagged populist egging Obama and Clinton to go Ralph Nader on an already-flagging economy?

reason on Joe Trippi here.

Obama and Wright...

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Thu, 01 May 2008 09:52:00 EDT

Atlanta-based columnist Ron Hart on Barack Obama and Jeremiah Wright:

I am no stranger to what is said in a black church, which, since revealed by the Rev. Wright, can shock and amaze most whites. It is the same feeling of disbelief that blacks and whites grappled with when O.J. Simpson was acquitted in his trial in Los Angeles.

The Rev. Wright is simply ripping the scab off race relations, yet to be reckoned with by political leaders. Politicians pander to race for their own benefit, but they don't intend on getting past it because it is an effective tool. Without race and class envy, the Democrats really have no campaign tools.

The media continue their fascination with Obama, but this new religious stumble toward Obama's coronation clearly troubles them. Politicians bring religion into politics at their own peril. Yet somehow the media will spin it for Obama, and probably tie it to their belief that Obama was born in a manger.

Whole thing here.

John McCain's Plan to Keep Employer-Provided Health Insurance While Moving Away From It

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 18:11:00 EDT

Severing the government-supported, market-distorting connection between health insurance and employment would promote choice, allowing people to select the medical plans that best suit their circumstances, and security, addressing one of the main anxieties about health care by making coverage portable. This is one of the few areas where the Bush administration was on the right track, and I'm glad to see John McCain picking up the idea. But I wish his talk were a little straighter on this subject. Here is how he describes the current system, in which most Americans with health insurance get it through their employers, and the change he'd make:

Under current law, the federal government gives a tax benefit when employers provide health-insurance coverage to American workers and their families. This benefit doesn't cover the total cost of the health plan, and in reality each worker and family absorbs the rest of the cost in lower wages and diminished benefits. But it provides essential support for insurance coverage. Many workers are perfectly content with this arrangement, and under my reform plan they would be able to keep that coverage. Their employer-provided health plans would be largely untouched and unchanged.
But for every American who wanted it, another option would be available: Every year, they would receive a tax credit directly, with the same cash value of the credits for employees in big companies, in a small business, or self-employed. You simply choose the insurance provider that suits you best. By mail or online, you would then inform the government of your selection. And the money to help pay for your health care would be sent straight to that insurance provider. The health plan you chose would be as good as any that an employer could choose for you. It would be yours and your family's health-care plan, and yours to keep.
The value of that credit—$2,500 for individuals, $5,000 for families—would also be enhanced by the greater competition this reform would help create among insurance companies. Millions of Americans would be making their own health-care choices again. Insurance companies could no longer take your business for granted, offering narrow plans with escalating costs. It would help change the whole dynamic of the current system, putting individuals and families back in charge, and forcing companies to respond with better service at lower cost.

Although you might not guess it from McCain's gloss, the "tax benefit" in question goes to employees, not employers. Companies can deduct money spent on employee compensation as a business expense whether it takes the form of wages or health benefits. But since the government does not treat employer-provided health insurance as taxable income, there's an artificial incentive for employees to prefer compensation in that form, rather than the cash equivalent. If both kinds of compensation were treated the same, most employees presumably would prefer the money; employers would respond by ditching health benefits and offering higher wages instead. Equal tax treatment could be accomplished either by taxing the health benefits as income or, as McCain seems to be proposing, making the money an employee independently spends on health insurance tax-free as well.

Although the policy change has to do with taxes paid by employees, The New York Times has McCain "eliminating the tax breaks that currently encourage employers to provide health insurance for their workers," which makes it sound as if employers are the ones getting the breaks. And the McCain campaign seems to be downplaying the impact that equalizing the tax treatment of health benefits and wages would have on the prevalence of employer-provided medical coverage. According to the Times, McCain's domestic policy adviser "said he believed that many employers would still offer health insurance to try to attract the best workers." McCain himself says "employer-provided health plans would be largely untouched and unchanged" for the "many workers" who "are perfectly content" with the status quo. Maybe this is just his way of reassuring people that changes in the compensation mix would be driven by employee preferences. But the main economic rationale for eliminating the health-benefit tax preference is to make employer-provided medical coverage the exception rather than the rule; otherwise we would still have a system in which medical coverage is both artificially expensive, since patients have little opportunity or incentive to economize, and insecure, since losing a job often means losing health insurance.

Unionizing the Village in Order to Democrat it

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 12:53:00 EDT

The Washington Post's resident Labor toady, Harold Meyerson, is refreshingly direct today about our coming union/Democrat world:

[H]ow, Democrats wonder, can they secure the white working-class vote?
Well, they could start by re-unionizing it.
[bunch of numbers showing unionized whites voting Democrat, unlike their non-unionized co-racialists]
What do unions do that has such an impact? Chiefly, they remind their members what's at stake.

That's the ticket! Meyerson goes on to let slip what a Democratic-run Washington would do within the first 100 minutes of a Hillbarry Clinbama presidency:

Today, the party is united behind the Employee Free Choice Act, which, by enabling workers to join unions again without fear of being fired, would also greatly help Democratic prospects at the polls.

What is the Employee Free Choice Act, a.k.a. "card check"? Get ready to read all about it in the June issue of reason, care of David Weigel! In other words, subscribe today, for less than 20 bones a year.

Who's Going to Get Your Wasted Vote?

dweigel@reason.com (David Weigel) — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 15:00:00 EDT

The polls have closed in the East and John McCain is winning the presidency. Florida goes red. Ohio goes red. Iowa flips to Barack Obama, but McCain needs only to lock up 16 electoral votes for victory.

And then things start going pear-shaped. McCain is down by 10,000 votes in New Hampshire with only 5,000 left to be counted—the Libertarians scored 15,000—and the networks call it for Obama. Those sparse Republican New Mexico counties start rolling in, and McCain is falling short of those Bush 2004 margins as the Libertarians rack up 2 percent, 3 percent, 5 percent vote totals. Obama wins the state. It's the same story in Nevada, and McCain can't quite make up the Obama margin out of Las Vegas. The pattern becomes clear as the sun comes up on Wednesday: Just enough Republicans have ditched their party to hand the election over to the Democrats.

When former Rep. Bob Barr (R-Ga.) announced he was exploring a run for the Libertarian Party's presidential nomination, Republicans who'd sent "thank you" cards to Ralph Nader experienced their first flashes of this nightmare. "Sure, it will hurt," said South Carolina Republican Party Chairman Katon Dawson. "We'll just have to see how much." Republicans haven't forgotten how John McCain won his nomination over a splintered and pathetic field, and how the talk radio right's failure to settle on an anti-McCain gave them a candidate who more than a quarter of the base still refuses to vote for.

Of course, the LP hasn't ever actually swung a presidential election, and right-wing worries that they would in 2004 proved to be overheated. "I'm an LP person," says Libertarian Party chairman Bill Redpath. "Election night is my least favorite night of the year." Yet even Redpath thinks the ground has shifted since 2004. "I don't see how libertarians could vote for John McCain, and I see lot of conservatives who simply won't."

Throughout 2007, the LP watched Ron Paul vaccuum up libertarian money and siphon energy from the low-key field. Gambling guru Wayne Allyn Root, a former Republican, entered the race claiming that he had name recognition no candidate could beat. At the time, he was right. Physics professor George Phillies, a frequent local candidate in Massachusetts and national organizer for the 2004 Michael Badnarik campaign, claimed that he had more electoral experience than anyone else in the race. That was right, too. Party leaders, nervous about the strength of their field, offered the nomination to Ron Paul if he wanted it, a divisive decision lambasted by the candidates in the ring and by the more radical elements of the party. But when Paul spoke at the Free State Project's Liberty Forum, days before the New Hampshire primary, he drew a crowd that dwarfed the turnout for an LP candidates' debate.

As Paul's surprising bid for the GOP nomination winds down, it's clear that it was a boon for the LP after all. Paul's fundraising and gadfly debate performances got national pundits talking about the libertarian vote. "I'm amazed at how often I hear that word in the mainstream media now," says 2004 LP nominee Michael Badnarik. "Four years ago it was a curse word." Paul indirectly drew three high-profile candidates into the race. Bob Barr, an LP leader since 2006, introduced Paul at the Conservative Political Action Conference with a rousing speech that ramped up the movement to draft him. Mary Ruwart, a left-libertarian author as renowned in LP circles as she is obscure outside of them, re-engaged in electoral politics to support Paul, then jumped into the race as Paul withdrew. Mike Gravel, the biggest-name convert to the party since, well, Barr, made the leap in part because Paul was so successful at raising money.

The result of all this manuevering is a wild, unpredictable, and possibly disastrous battle for the LP nod. Every faction of the party is represented in the race, and the 702 delegates and 146 alternates slated to go to the national nominating convention over Memorial Day weekend are up for grabs. They will vote until one candidate scores an absolute majority. Here is a current, rough ranking of the highly fluid race, based on conversations with multiple delegates and campaigns.

1. Bob Barr. Age: 59. Experience: U.S. Attorney 1986-1990, U.S. Congressman from Georgia 1995-2003, author of The Meaning of Is.

The drive-by media view of the LP race—that Barr is all but certain to win—isn't quite wrong. If the delegates convened today, Bob Barr would win most of their votes. But he would not win a majority. While Barr’s entry into the race was greeted with a rush of support, his allies count on a bit less than 30 percent support on the first ballot.

A first-ballot victory isn't much of a prize in the LP. In 2004, Aaron Russo won the first round of balloting, only to watch third-place finisher Gary Nolan endorse Michael Badnarik for the win. Russo, like Barr, faced an intractable bloc of delegates who considered him heretical. The comparison doesn't go far, however, as Barr has spent two years in party leadership and carefully apologized for the stances that offend Libertarians most, like his pro-drug war votes and his initial support of the PATRIOT Act.

It's good enough for a lot of Libertarians, who are desparate for a candidate who can capture some of the Ron Paul mojo and avoid the fringey appearence of the Badnarik campaign. "We need to get back to basics," said Alabama delegate Dr. Jimmy Blake, "rather than discussing mineral rights on Mars and all of that crap." Washington, D.C. delegate Rob Kampia—better known as the head of the Marijuana Policy Project—is planning on voting for Barr, a sign of how much he's been forgiven. The question is how willing Barr's opponents are to accept him, and whether the party risks a fight along the lines of the razor-thin Ron Paul–Russell Means race 20 years ago. "If you nominated a Barr," said a rival candidate, "you’d lose the entire, very large, neo-pagan and non-traditional religious people. You'd lose the entire gay and lesbian groups. It would be a very big problem."

2. Mary Ruwart. Age: 59. Experience: Candidate for multiple local offices, author of Healing Our World in an Age of Aggression and other books.

Like Barr, Ruwart was pushed into the race by Libertarians who were unsatisfied by their choices. Like Barr, she didn’t need to be pushed very hard. Twenty-four years ago, Ruwart, then a scientific researcher and first-time LP delegate, threw her hat into the presidential nomination race and came in third. From there she mounted a series of unsuccessful (but often credible) bids for local offices, supplemented by reams and reams of freelance writing about nonaggression, philosophy, and left-libertarian ideas.

Ruwart's supporters see her as a singular spokesman for Libertarians, a likeable and eloquent activist who'll stay faithful to the party's message. Ruwart's opponents see her as a fringe candidate who'll do nothing to attract wayward conservatives. ”I don’t see us getting anywhere if Ruwart is the nominee,” said delegate Stewart Flood. [ed--This quote was originally misattributed to Aaron Starr.] “She’d be completely ignored by the media, or if she wasn’t ignored their view would be, ‘Boy, she’s got some strange ideas on things.’”

Proving this "strangeness" to delegates has proven tricky. Ruwart's oeuvre has been parsed for controversial statements, and a doozy from Short Answers to the Tough Questions made it sound as if the candidate favored the legalization of child pornography. It shook the campaign, and Ruwart responded, days later, with a tough statement denouncing "divisiveness" in the party. The pro-Ruwart and anti-Ruwart forces saw exactly what they wanted to see. "Mary is family," said a consultant for a rival campaign. "This isn't the Democrats or the Republicans, who'll pile on each other. If you're expecting a reaction against her from this, you're mistaken."

3. Wayne Allyn Root. Age: 47. Experience: sports handicapper, former sports talk show host, author of five books, including Millionaire Republican and The Joy of Failure!

Back in the long-ago, snow-swept days of February, Root was building a winning coalition with two groups of voters: right-leaning Libertarians and delegates who wanted a media-savvy nominee. They were willing to forgive Root’s heresies, such as his big-dollar donations to Republican candidates (and Joe Lieberman) and a shifting position on the Iraq War. Barr's entry into the race has changed that and bled some support from Root, with some of his supporters jumping ship entirely and some suggesting he'd merely make a good running mate. "He'd be a better candidate in four years if he got some seasoning under Bob Barr," one delegate said.

Root, a savvy and quick-witted speaker, hasn't adjusted too well to the new entries. One of his tongue-in-cheek slogans ("the WAR you can vote for") has occasionally cut against him, as he struggles to convince delegates that he's not an interventionist Republican in disguise. Some left-libertarians accuse him of playing dirty, calling on Mary Ruwart to leave the race after the "child sex" snippet of Short Answers spread through the blogosphere. Not all of them buy the argument that he'd be the most media-savvy candidate they could nominate, or that they'd even want him speaking for them. "The GOP launched a full court press to make sure Michael Badnarik was never on TV," rival candidate George Phillies said. "If you booked him, you wouldn’t get access to the good Repubican guests. This direct access to the mainstream media that Root and Barr talk about will crash to a halt if either one gets the nomination."

4. Mike Gravel. Age: 77. Experience: Alaska state representative 1963-1967, U.S. Senator from Alaska 1969-1981, author of Citizen Power.

Libertarians are largely happy, if somewhat skeptical, about a Democratic also-ran's embrace of their party. "Other than the fact that he's drinking the liberal Kool Aid on health care, he sounds like a libertarian," said delegate Stewart Flood. [ed--This quote was originally misattributed to Aaron Starr.] Two delegates called him blunt, and only one of them meant it as a compliment.

None of this, nor Gravel's late entry in the race, have prevented him from gaining steam. He's won delegates over by talking to them one on one, pumping his omnipresent National Initiative, and arguing for his own brand of left-libertarianism that focuses on human rights first and governing principles second. "I am not a Constitutionalist," Gravel said last week. "I'm a classical liberal."

When he entered the race, Gravel seemed unlikely to win enough delegate support to even enter the candidate debates at the Denver convention. That's changed: There's chatter that Gravel will win a berth even if he doesn't get 30 tokens, due to the media attention he'd draw. ”He’d make a great vice presidential nominee," one delegate said, for that reason. Unfortunately for that kind of delegate, Gravel has refused to consider the VP slot.

5. George Phillies. Age: 60. Experience: physics professor, 2004 Badnarik campaign organizer, editor of the newsetters Let Freedom Ring! and Libertarian Strategy Gazette, author of the e-book Stand Up for Liberty!

Before Barr and Gravel entered the race, George Phillies claimed he had the most electoral experience in the field. He's still saying that. "I have a working campaign organization," he says. "I'm in close contact with Libertarians all over the country. I'm the only candidate who's worked in a national Libertarian campaign on a Libertarian campaign budget. I have $100,000 in the bank, ready to go." But Phillies' support has remained low and steady while the newer candidates have hogged the spotlight. Nebbishy and nasal-voiced, trekking from event to event in his three-piece suit and prescription specs, Phillies has made himself credible. "He's improved a whole lot since I met him in 2004," said one delegate. ”I’d like to see him run for party chairman.”

That's the problem, though. It's easy to see Phillies in an organizing role, and considerably less easy to picture him holding the standard. "He doesn’t project 'candidate,'" said delegate Stewart Flood. "He projects 'college professor.'" For all of that, he might be the least offensive candidate to the largest number of delegates. No one is better set up to profit from a melee on the floor.

6. Steve Kubby. Age: 61. Experience: co-drafter of California's Proposition 215, which legalized medical marijuana in 1996, candidate for governor of California in 1998, author of The Politics of Consciousness and Why Marijuana Should Be Legal.

Kubby offers Libertarians much the same deal that Eugene Debs offered the vintage Socialists: real movement cred, battle scars from his fights with the state, and a crippling inability to campaign. Shortly after the 1998 gubernatorial election, Kubby’s home was raided and his bountiful marijuana garden was seized. A legal battle ensued that took him to Canada (for five years), to prison, and finally back to the West Coast, where his movement is limited. A candidate who nearly won the party’s vice presidential nomination in 2000 has been almost invisible on the trail, appearing at conventions via amateurish into-the-camera videos. "He’s not as clear-headed as he could be," one delegate said regretfully. Kubby has a good reason for that: adrenal cancer, the condition that turned him into a medical marijuana activist in the first place.

Kubby has tried to turn all of this to his advantage, with a little success. "I've gone to jail for freedom," he brags in one of his campaign videos. "I've gone to Canada for freedom. I've nearly died for freedom!" After Ruwart, he might be the best-liked candidate in the field, but concerns about his campaigning skills and his myopic focus on marijuana are keeping him out of the top tier. His second-place performance in his home state's (non-binding, low-turnout) presidential primary convinced some delegates that he's lost the notoreity that he had eight years ago.

7. Christine Smith. Age: 41. Experience: author of A Mountain in the Wind: An Exploration of the Spirituality of John Denver.

”I’m the leading candidate by all the ways that we can measure it,” Christine Smith claimed in a March radio interview. If that was ever true, it stopped being true when Mary Ruwart entered the race. But Smith is the most pugnacious representative of the libertarian left still in the running. "I believe the LP still has great potential in a nation whose people are disillusioned and disgusted with politics as usual," Smith writes in one of her campaign statements. "But that potential is destroyed if our party's 'leadership' continues to be weakened by people with major non-libertarian stances, ulterior motives, agendas and actions."

What's not clear is why Christine Smith is the candidate who can "save" the LP. "She hasn't been in the party that long," said Starchild, a California delegate. "I'd like to see her campaign for a lower office first." Other delegates are less forgiving, pointing out that for all her of her rhetoric about the LP, she offered to bolt the party if Ron Paul got the GOP nod and needed a running mate.

Smith's assertiveness cuts both ways. Several delegates told me they've been won over by her tough speeches, debate performances, or radio hits, or that a female nominee would be good for the party. But unless Mary Ruwart left the race, there aren't enough of these delegates to nominate Smith.

8. Michael Jingozian. Age: 46. Experience: founder of AngelVision Technologies.

A self-proclaimed "new age libertarian" whose 5-year plan assumes that he'll lose this election and win in 2012, Jingozian has funded a full-time staff and a busy travel schedule mostly through personal loans. He's become a presence in the race, but not one that the majority of likely delegates take seriously. ”I clearly got the impression he’s not lucid very often," one delegate said. "He didn’t seem...with it.”

One reason he turns off some delegates: Even though he's been a party member for years, Jingozian emphasizes the rottenness of the two-party system over the strengths of libertarianism. He's spoken at Green Party events to build cross-ideological support for his "Reset America" plan. He's waffled on policy questions in an attempt to seem more mainstream, telling one radio interviewer that the U.S. can't leave Iraq right away and a withdrawal would take six to nine months, sentiments utterly at odds with most LP voters.

9. The others. There is absolutely zero chance that John Finan, Barry Hess, Dave Hollist, Daniel Imperato, Alden Link, or Robert Milnes will get the Libertarian Party’s nomination. They are occasionally entertaining, and they are harmless. Imperato, in particular, has run a campaign worthy of Max Headroom, bidding (with no success) for the Constitution and Green Party nominations, claiming to run a multi-billion-dollar international organization, to speak seven languages, and to be descended from Emperor Nero. (If that actually was true, why would anyone admit it?) “He is the most ridiculous candidate I have ever seen,” says Starchild.

David Weigel is an associate editor of reason.

Now Playing at Reason.tv: Bob Barr on Why He Wants To Be President

Tue, 29 Apr 2008 07:00:00 EDT

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The Paranoid Style Is American Politics

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 16:30:00 EDT

On Tuesday the lesbian assassin of Vince Foster won Pennsylvania's presidential primary. In the larger contest for the Democratic nomination, though, she still lags behind a jihadist sleeper agent who is simultaneously a secret Muslim, a secret Communist, and a secret Republican. Whoever wins their race will go on to face a brainwashed puppet of the Viet Cong, and whoever wins that race will then get on with the modern president's central task: serving the interests of Mexico. It must be true, I read it in my email.

There's a persistant political myth that paranoia is only a feature of the fringe, something common among alienated radicals and reactionaries but rare in the great American center. In fact, paranoia has been ubiquitous across the political spectrum. You can find it in nearly every faction and movement at every point in American history, not least among those establishment figures who think they're immune to conspiracy theories. (The most lurid and destructive tales of Waco were not told by militiamen after the raid was over. They were told by the media and the government while the siege was underway.)

In The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, the historian Bernard Bailyn showed that the worldview of the patriots who would soon revolt against England included a strong belief, in the words of one colonist, that "a deep-laid and desperate plan of imperial despotism has been laid, and partly executed, for the extinction of all civil liberty." At the same time, Bailyn notes, British administrators "were as convinced as were the leaders of the Revolutionary movement that they were themselves the victims of conspriatorial designs." Colonial governors such as Thomas Hutchinson—a man John Adams accused of "junto conspiracy"—believed, in Bailyn's words, that "the root of all the trouble in the colonies was the maneuvering of a secret, power-hungry cabal that professed loyalty to England while assiduously working to destroy the bonds of authority."

After independence was won, the victorious patriots quickly found plots in their own ranks. If you didn't think the Jeffersonians were Jacobin pawns of the Illuminati, you probably fretted that the Federalists were conspiring to establish a monarchy. Nor did the hunt for subversive cabals end with the death of the revolutionary generation. The historian David Brion Davis has pointed out that the lead-up to the Civil War can be viewed as a clash between two conspiracy theories, one featuring a fearsome network of abolitionists and the other a hungry Slave Power.

And no, these passions haven't limited themselves to periods as violent as the war for American independence and the war between the states. It's telling that the 1990s, a time of relative peace and prosperity, were also a golden age of both frankly fictional and purportedly true tales of conspiracy. There are many reasons for this, including the not-unsubstantial fact that even at its most peaceful, America is still riven with conflicts. But there is also the possibility that peace breeds nightmares just as surely as strife does. The anthropologist David Graeber has argued that "it's the most peaceful societies which are also the most haunted, in their imaginative constructions of the cosmos, by constant specters of perennial war." The Piaroa Indians of Venezuala, for example, "are famous for their peaceableness," but "they inhabit a cosmos of endless invisible war, in which wizards are engaged in fending off the attacks of insane, predatory gods and all deaths are caused by spiritual murder and have to be avenged by the magical massacre of whole (distant, unknown) communities." Many bloggers with comfortable lives spend their spare time in a similar subterranean world.

Why all the paranoia? In part, of course, it's because there really are conspiracies out there. Power does attract the power-hungry. No, Hillary Clinton did not murder Ron Brown—but her explanations for her good fortune trading cattle futures do not bear close scrutiny. John McCain is not a deep-cover Manchurian Candidate, but he was a charter member of the Keating Five. Barack Obama is not a closet Islamist, but there are legitimate questions about his ties to the corrupt developer Tony Rezko. If politics is the art of compromise, then politicians will inevitably be compromised.

It also is often in a movement's interest to paint the opposition in the darkest possible colors, even when the stakes are small and even when the allegations involved are not completely true or relevant. More importantly, it is natural for the members of a movement to find such suspicions believable and to conjure up such theories themselves. It's always easy to think the worst about people outside your group, especially if they're already consciously working against your goals. This tendency becomes even stronger when a hierarchy is involved. The lower orders are inevitably suspicious of the elite, and the elite are always worried about the proles.

So it shouldn't be a surprise that one poll showed 15 percent of voters believing that Barack Obama is a Muslim. It shouldn't be a surprise that the stories anti-McCain conservatives used to whisper, that perhaps he collaborated with his captors in Vietnam, are now surfacing on the left as well. If Hillary Clinton somehow manages to take the Democratic nomination—an outcome that would probably require a conspiracy itself—you shouldn't be surprised when all the stories you heard about her in the '90s come roaring back, be they plausible or nuts.

Above all, you shouldn't be surprised when you hear these tales not just from that creepy-looking fellow manning the LaRouche booth near the bus stop but from ordinary, middle-class relatives and neighbors with ordinary, middle-class views. Welcome to America. Paranoia is a part of the political process.