Reason Magazine - Topics > John Edwards

John Edwards: Rhetoric, Flatulence Not Enough; WSJ: Copyediting, Proofreading Not Enough

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 09:09:00 EDT

From the Cato Institute's David Boaz comes this hat tip about an anti-Barack Obama debate point made many moons ago by presidential sweepstakes loser John Edwards:

"Rhetoric is not enough. High flatulent language is not enough," says Edwards from a debate appearance.

Read that, from a Wall Street Journal blog, here.

Sadly, and like too many really great stories, this one is simply wrong. In the video clip the Journal embeds right there, Edwards plainly says "high falutin.'"

And that's your Thursday morning comedown.

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.

Legacies of Injustice

info@reason.com (Shikha Dalmia) — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 12:00:00 EST

College-bound high school students do not always lose their chastity before graduation, but they certainly lose their innocence. Nearly every senior who has gone through the admissions mill can recount stories of peers with outstanding academic records—class valedictorians with stellar SATs and perfect GPAs—who were passed over by top colleges while others with far more modest credentials got the nod. The New York Times reports that Harvard turned down 1,100 applicants with perfect 800s on the math SAT this year. Yale rejected several with perfect 2400s on the three-part SAT exam. Princeton said no to thousands with 4.0 GPAs.

To many frustrated parents, one word de-scribes the admissions process at America’s elite universities: arbitrary. But that’s not the word admissions officials use, as I discovered two summers ago when I toured a dozen or so East Coast campuses with my son, a high school junior at the time. Asked what kind of grades and scores made kids competitive for their schools, officials in university after university insisted, as if reading off the same memo, that the review process was “holistic,” “comprehensive,” or “individualized.” Grades, we were repeatedly told, “are only one among many factors we consider.”

Another such factor is race. Nearly every selective college, public and private, gives a sizable edge to underrepresented minorities. Before the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed the University of Michigan’s undergraduate admissions criteria in Gratz v. Bollinger (2003), the school relied on a complicated rating system that awarded points for several personal and academic factors, including skin color. Black and Hispanic candidates automatically got 20 points. A great essay counted for only one point; a perfect SAT score, a mere 12.

But as Justice Clarence Thomas observed in his dissent in a companion case, race is not the only factor that distorts college admission decisions. “The entire [college admission] process is poisoned by numerous exceptions to ‘merit,’ ” he noted.

The Wall Street Journal’s Daniel Golden exposes those other exceptions in his 2006 book The Price of Admission. Golden shows that elite schools routinely hand preferences to athletes; to the children of faculty, celebrities, and politicians; to “development cases” whose fabulously wealthy parents offer hefty donations up front; and, above all, to the offspring of alumni. Universities expect the parents of these “legacy” candidates to contribute to their coffers after their children are admitted.

Robert Birgeneau, chancellor of the University of California at Berkeley, told Golden that at one Ivy League school only 40 percent of the seats are open to candidates competing on pure educational merit. According to a 2005 study by the Princeton sociologists Tom Espenshade and Chang Y. Chung, in 1997 nearly two-thirds of all these non-race-based preferences at elite universities benefited whites, even though whites comprised less than half of all applicants that year.

We have a vigorous national movement to eradicate racial or minority preferences, at least in public universities. In 2006 Michigan became the third state in the country after California and Washington to approve a ballot measure imposing a constitutional ban on the use of race in admissions at state-run schools and in government hiring decisions. And this year the author of all those bans—Ward Connerly, a black California businessman—is stepping up his crusade. He has launched petition drives in Oklahoma, Missouri, Colorado, Nebraska, and Arizona to put similar measures before voters in November.

But there’s no comparable effort to get rid of legacy preferences. Even more troubling, many prominent opponents of racial preferences greet suggestions to get rid of legacies, the mother of all preferences, with a perfunctory nod—or a gaping yawn.

It shouldn’t be that way. Legacy preferences are the original sin of admissions, the policy that fundamentally compromises fair, merit-based standards. Universities can’t in good conscience tip the admission scales for the more privileged and then ask the less privileged to compete solely on merit. What’s more, eliminating race while keeping legacies will make the admissions process less fair, not more fair, because it will open up minority slots to competition by whites but not vice versa.

Legacy preferences are an especially terrible idea for tax-supported public universities, since they make it possible for rich, white, and less qualified kids to take seats that are at least in part supported by the tax dollars of poor, minority families. Private schools, of course, should be free to admit whomever they want, and it is therefore tempting to ignore their use of legacies. But there are few genuinely private schools in America anymore, thanks to the enormous amount of federal funding they accept. And setting public policy aside: Just as a matter of propriety, should there be room for legacies at institutions that market themselves as bastions of meritocracy? The use of legacies by the Harvards, Yales, and Princetons of the world dilutes the standards of excellence they pretend not merely to uphold, but to embody.

Who Cares About Legacies?
With only a few exceptions, both the right and the left have ignored legacy preferences. Sen. John Edwards (D-N.C.) has promised to do everything in his power to end legacy admissions if he becomes president. But for the most part liberals have picked up the anti-legacy mantle only in retaliation against efforts to eliminate racial preferences. Local activists forced Texas A&M and the University of Georgia to abandon legacy preferences, for example, after these universities stopped using race in admissions. Otherwise, liberals seem quite willing to tolerate legacies, presumably because they make it easier to advocate countervailing preferences for their favored groups.

Given that dynamic, you might expect the opponents of racial preferences to go on the offensive against legacy preferences. But if liberals have been opportunistic about legacies, conservatives have been paralyzed.

In part, that’s because they’re genuinely divided on the issue. Ward Connerly, like Justice Thomas, regards legacies as a fundamental violation of a fair, merit-based standard. He prodded the University of California, where he is a regent, to abandon them in 2000, four years after California voters banned racial preferences. But Terry Pell, who heads the Center for Individual Rights (CIR), the outfit that engineered the lawsuit against the University of Michigan’s race-based admissions, has never fought against legacies. Neither has Stephan Thernstrom, who has co-authored several books attacking racial preferences. “Legacy is a far more complicated issue than race,” insists Thernstrom, who once served on Harvard’s admissions committee.

Conservatives in Pell and Thernstrom’s camp argue that racial discrimination is in a class apart, given this country’s history of slavery and segregation. What’s more, they say, legacy preferences are just not as big a problem as racial preferences, quantitatively speaking. Further, they produce huge benefits for universities that racial preferences don’t. Above all, to the extent that legacies are practiced by private rather than public universities, there are no easy or desirable legal cures that aren’t worse than the disease.

The last argument is their most powerful one, but it is hardly grounds for ignoring the issue. There are ways to address the issue of private universities’ legacy preferences—and racial preferences—that don’t involve lawsuits or government action. But the other arguments for why legacies aren’t a public policy problem are simply disingenuous and suffer from the same ideological blind spots that afflict defenders of racial preferences.

A Small Problem?
Legacy preferences, like racial preferences, are repugnant because they reward not individual virtue or accomplishment, but an accident of birth that has no relevance for a college education. Moreover, just because they aren’t linked with an egregious history of racial abuse does not justify turning a blind eye to them. India has a far uglier record of discrimination by caste than race. Yet no one would argue that it ought therefore to concentrate only on eradicating caste discrimination and treat race as a non-issue.

It is true that the use of legacies is mainly limited to undergraduate programs in the more selective public and private schools. Racial preferences, on the other hand, pervade every aspect of every school—from undergraduate and graduate admissions to faculty hiring and promotion. Moreover, according to a 2007 paper by Princeton’s Douglas S. Massey and Margarita Mooney of data from 28 elite universities, while 77 percent of minorities had standardized test scores below the institutional average, about 48 percent of legacies did. In rare exceptions, such as Middlebury College, legacies actually scored higher than the institutional average.

How far below average do those legacies and minorities score? It’s impossible to get up-to-date, nationwide data on the subject, given the universities’ secrecy, but the late psychologist Richard Herrnstein and the social scientist Charles Murray reported one telling piece of information in their 1994 book The Bell Curve. In 1990, the average student admitted to Harvard scored 697 on the verbal SAT and 718 on the math section. By comparison, legacies scored 674 on verbal and 695 on math—a 47 point difference. Combined minority scores hover at about 100 to 150 points below the institutional average.

What’s more, even when universities lower admission standards for legacies, they don’t lower them as much as they do for minorities. As mentioned before, the Michigan point system used to award 20 bonus points to under-represented minorities—the equivalent of boosting a 3.0 GPA to a 4.0. By contrast, it handed only four points to children of alumni.

But such statistics don’t tell the full story. Given how intense the competition is for the nation’s most selective schools, even seemingly small differences in scores translate into significantly higher rates of acceptance for legacies over “unhooked” candidates—admissions lingo for those who don’t qualify for any preferences.

According to the October 1996 Brown Alumni Magazine, 40 percent of legacy applicants were accepted to Brown University, as opposed to 19 percent of the total applicants. The Office of Civil Rights similarly found in 1990 that children of alumni were twice as likely to be accepted at Harvard over more qualified students who did not get legacy or athletic or any other preferences. And a study by the Center for Equal Opportunity, a Virginia-based think tank, found that at the University of Virginia, after controlling for test scores, grades, and other academic credentials, a legacy candidate had 4.3 times higher odds of admission than non-legacy applicants in 1999.

Universities claim that legacy status is never a major or decisive factor in their admission decisions. It’s only used, they say, as a tie-breaker among otherwise comparable candidates. That’s what they claimed about racial preferences too, and that turned out to be false. Indeed, it is hard to really know how much weight universities award to legacies given their stubborn refusal to reveal their admissions data or even talk about their admission policies. (University of Michigan officials, for instance, declined repeated requests to discuss this issue.) But why do legacies deserve any edge, big or small?

Racial preferences, at least originally, were meant to remedy discrimination—both historic and current—against blacks. What is the justification for favoring the offspring of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton alumni? Unlike many inner-city kids, they grow up in families with a strong pro-education ethos. They have access to the finest public or private high schools in the country. Their parents can spring for tutors, standardized test preparation courses, and even consultants to help them write essays and complete their college applications. “These are kids who grow up with every privilege,” notes Connerly. “They don’t deserve any additional advantage.”

Moreover, though the policy of using legacy as a “tie-breaker” among equivalent candidates sounds innocuous, it has perverse consequences for one group in particular: Asian Americans. Asians don’t benefit from racial preferences because they are not considered underrepresented minorities. And they don’t benefit from legacy preferences because they tend to be the children of first-generation immigrants. Espenshade, the Princeton researcher, found that while legacy and athletic preferences offset the effects of racial preferences on whites, they compound them for Asian Americans.

According to Espenshade’s regression analysis of data from a dozen selective colleges, on a 1600-point SAT scale, being black and Hispanic adds up to an advantage of 230 and 185 extra SAT points respectively. The preference for legacies translates into an edge of 160 points. By contrast, being Asian American represents a 50 SAT-point disadvantage.

The CIR’s Pell, however, argues that the legacy problem is “self-correcting.” Racial preferences have become so ideologically embedded that universities will never abandon them unless forced to by courts or voters, Pell maintains. But as the ethnic mix of the broader population changes so does the composition of the student body. A generation later, then, so will the composition of the beneficiaries of legacy preferences.

But the problem with legacies is not that they never adjust to shifting demographics. It is that they slow the process of adjustment. Legacy policies protect groups that are already in, at the expense of those that are trying to break in.

Practical Benefits?
Conservatives pride themselves on being sensible realists, not starry-eyed utopians eager to stamp out every form of social injustice regardless of consequences. This tendency partially explains their squishiness on the legacy issue. On the one hand, they don’t dispute that legacy admissions border on institutionalized nepotism—rewarding children for the accomplishments of their parents and relatives. On the other hand, enforcing a strict merit-based standard seems a tad fanatical given all the practical benefits of legacy policies for universities.

One purported benefit is that legacies are an important source of funding for universities. Not only do more legacies donate to universities, they donate in greater amounts. For instance, according to the Cavalier Daily, the University of Virginia’s student newspaper, 65 percent of legacy parents contributed to the university’s 2006 capital campaign, compared with 41 percent of non-legacy parents. Moreover, legacy parents on average coughed up $34,759 each whereas non-legacy parents gave only $4,070.

All in all, legacies alone account for over 30 percent of the private donations to most elite colleges. “If mild preferences to legacy students allow universities to maximize their income, is that so objectionable?” asks Thernstrom.

Without such donations, universities claim, they could not invest in high-quality faculty and facilities and remain competitive. Even more important from the standpoint of social justice, universities say they couldn’t maintain need-blind admission policies. These policies allow colleges to admit students purely on academic grounds—and then offer financial aid to anyone unable to afford the roughly $50,000 per year it costs in tuition and living expenses to attend a top-notch university these days. Without legacy contributions, such aid would supposedly become more difficult, and elite campuses would truly become playgrounds of the rich.

But Thernstrom and Pell don’t buy arguments from social utility when it comes to racial preferences. Like other conservatives, they insist that universities that want to help inner-city minorities need to find race-neutral ways that don’t selectively dilute academic standards for some groups. Nor do they believe that the educational benefits of a diverse student body are real or big enough to justify giving minorities a leg up.

Yet they uncritically accept the business and social case for legacy preferences. And it is far from clear that universities lack “legacy-neutral” tools to—as Thernstrom puts it—“maximize their profits.” They could conceivably rake in more money by auctioning off a certain number of freshmen seats every year to the highest bidders. But elite universities would never entertain a scheme like that, because it could cost them their “elite” reputations. It would expose precisely how much they are diluting their admission standards for how many and for how much. This kind of information would erode their aura of selectivity—the very thing that makes them attractive to legacies and everyone else.

Connerly, after spending years on the University of California board, is not convinced that alumni will stop contributing to their alma maters if their kids don’t get preferential treatment. Indeed, as Golden noted in The Price of Admission, Caltech is able to tap alumni money without offering any edge to their children. For instance, Caltech in 2001 obtained a $600 million pledge—the largest gift in the history of higher education at the time—from Gordon Moore, cofounder of Intel, neither of whose two sons attends the university. Caltech’s commitment to high standards and excellence is a core part of its sales pitch to raise money from alumni and non-alumni alike.

Golden offers other examples, albeit isolated ones, of schools that have built sizable endowments through business strategies that don’t rely on legacy preferences. Cooper Union, a highly prestigious and selective art school in New York that offers a free education to everyone admitted, for decades lived off income generated through its investments in real estate. Berea College, a small college in Kentucky exclusively targeted toward low-income kids, has accumulated a startlingly large endowment by making its progressive credentials a selling point to potential donors: It is the South’s first inter-racial, co-educational college and was founded by an abolitionist minister. Its mission is to educate and uplift impoverished Appalachian families.

Legacy money doesn’t seem to boost the presence of low-income kids on elite campuses by subsidizing their educations, either. The schools that get the most legacy money—Harvard, Yale, and Princeton—are among the worst when it comes to the economic diversity of their students. In his 2005 book The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale and Princeton, Berkeley sociologist Jerome Karabel reported that among the top 40 schools, Princeton and Harvard are ranked at 38th and 39th, respectively, when it comes to such diversity, and Yale 25th.

For a contrast, look at Caltech. It is the nation’s most meritocratic private university that eschews all preferences, and it is among the 10 most economically diverse schools. Nor is it hard to understand why. Admissions are a zero-sum game with many candidates vying for a finite number of seats. The crucial determinant of economic diversity on campus therefore becomes not how much largesse legacies expend on poor kids but how many seats they take away from them.

If elite colleges were serious about offering equitable access to genuinely talented students, they could find business models that don’t involve legacy preferences. If they have not done so, it is because the government won’t—and market forces can’t—hold them accountable.

Is There Any Rationale for Legacies at Public Schools?
The core mission of taxpayer-funded public universities is not to conduct research, promote economic growth, or correct broader social problems. It is to expand higher education opportunities. That, at any rate, is what the general public believes: Respondents in a 2003 survey conducted by The Chronicle of Higher Education overwhelmingly picked “offering a general education to undergraduates” as the top priority among 21 different roles that public universities could play.

Taxpayers perceive different public universities as fulfilling this educational mission in different ways. They regard land-grant universities as catering to rural kids, urban universities to commuters who can’t live on campus, community colleges to students not served by traditional four-year colleges.

There is something problematic, even oxymoronic, about the very idea of “elite” public universities whose doors are by definition shut to the vast majority of taxpayers who fund them. If they must exist, they should exist to serve academically gifted kids. Thus the only defensible admission policy for these universities is one that allows all gifted kids an equal shot at admission.

This is precisely what legacy and other preferences don’t allow. They reduce the fate of applicants to the discretion of admissions bureaucrats, eliminating clear-cut standards applied equally to all. Preferences replace the rule of law with the rule of men.

There are no good legal tools to mount court challenges against legacies in either public or private universities. The Constitution requires public entities to award everyone “equal protection under the law.” But when a student tried to use this guarantee to mount a legal challenge against legacy preferences, she failed: In Rosenstock v. Governors of University of North Carolina (1976), an out-of-state applicant who was denied admission to the University of North Carolina argued that preferential treatment for in-state residents and children of alumni violated her right to equal protection. The court ruled that the state had no compelling interest in barring discrimination on the basis of alumni status, even at a public university.

But if the courts can’t or won’t ban legacy preferences, state voters certainly can. The simplest way to do so would be to append them to Connerly’s ballot initiatives banning “race, gender, color, ethnicity, and national origin” preferences. Even the CIR’s Pell acknowledges that it would be entirely appropriate for state voters to ban legacy preferences at public universities.

Connerly considered doing just that when drafting Proposition 2, the ballot amendment that banned racial preferences in Michigan in 2006. But he ultimately dropped the idea, he says, because constitutional amendments ought to be reserved for things that are “sacred for now and forever.” He wasn’t sure that alumni preferences were in that category.

But a further reason, some people close to Connerly admit, was that including legacies risked alienating whites in addition to blacks, making it harder to pass the initiatives. Strategically, it made more sense to deal with the two issues separately, reserving the ballot amendment process for race while looking for other ways to address legacies. Yet beyond Connerly’s own personal crusade against what he calls “fat cat preferences” at the University of California, there has been almost no action on a national level against legacies.

If voter bans against legacies won’t work, another way to force public universities to adhere to a stricter version of merit might be by requiring them to post—and adhere to—straightforward admission criteria like universities elsewhere in the world do.

For instance, Oxford, one of Britain’s most prestigious universities, states unambiguously on its website precisely what scores and grades applicants need in order to gain admission. U.S. kids, it notes, need a combined SAT score of 2100 or a composite ACT score of 32 to 36—comparable to what kids from England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland need. In order to remain true to its mission of creating an intellectually rigorous academic environment, Oxford, at least on paper, maintains the same admission standards for British students as for applicants from elsewhere. By contrast, it is accepted practice for elite American public universities to lower the bar for in-state students. To the extent that the tax contributions of the parents of these students fund the universities, they certainly deserve a break over out-of-state students. But that break ought to only involve lower tuition fees, not lower standards.

Openly publishing admissions criteria ensures transparency in the admissions process and serves as a sort of guarantee to prospective students that those who score below these minimum requirements won’t be admitted ahead of those who do.

Connerly could use the contacts and machinery he has built in various states in the course of pursuing his anti–racial preferences amendments to push admission reform laws requiring public universities to set open and objective admissions standards. Universities will no doubt wail about the loss of academic freedom. But the rule of settled and transparent laws is no loss to freedom. It would only hem in the discretionary power of bureaucrats who wield it in an arbitrary way to offer access for their own self-serving purposes.

What About Market Forces?
There is a strong civil libertarian argument against applying such laws to private universities. Such schools ought to be allowed to admit whomever they want for whatever reason they want, as part of their right of voluntary association. Some schools might exercise this right for pernicious ends. But just as tolerating odious speech is essential for the sake of protecting broader freedoms, so, arguably, is tolerating odious forms of voluntary association.

This thinking has restrained conservatives from challenging racial preferences at private schools, even though they have powerful legal tools to do so. For instance, Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act bars racial discrimination by any school that receives federal funds—a category that includes practically every private university given the ubiquity of federal research grants, scholarship aid, student loan guarantees, and countless other forms of direct and indirect financial assistance. Yet Michael Greve, former executive director of CIR, told the ABA Journal some years ago that his organization had no plans to go after private universities for racial preferences—a policy that his successor, Terry Pell, also adheres to. If Harvard, Stanford, and Yale want to discriminate for any reason, Greve said, that’s their business.

It is conceivable that laws requiring public universities to set open and objective admission standards might help trigger industry-wide change, including at private schools. But why hasn’t the higher education industry reformed its own admission practices? The market appeal of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton rests on the impression that getting through their door puts you in a league of intellectual superstars. If these schools dilute their standards—if they turn away incandescent intellects in favor of the merely bright with good family connections—how are they still able to maintain their luster? In a functioning marketplace, you would expect more Caltechs to emerge: Elite schools that market their uncompromising adherence to standards of excellence to snag students interested in being part of a true meritocracy. In the process, they would force Harvard and others to either reform their admission practices or relinquish their niche.

So far, instead of elite schools losing their niche, smart kids are losing their shot at an elite education. “Higher education is the only industry that is rewarded for turning away customers,” observes Richard Vedder, an economist at Ohio University.

There are both demand and supply reasons for this peculiar state of affairs. The demand for colleges with established reputations is artificially inflated, notes Vedder, because of the absence of any meaningful metrics of educational quality, leaving students with nothing but the prestige factor to go by. Meanwhile, instead of accommodating this demand by expanding their supply, colleges have every incentive to ignore it: Their ranking in the annual U.S. News and World Report college ratings depends in large part on their “selectivity”—on what percentage of applicants they reject.

U.S. News’ near-exclusive focus on inputs rather than outcomes when ranking universities perverts the admissions process in an even more direct way. One of the factors in its ranking is the extent of alumni giving, which is supposed to indicate alumni satisfaction with the education they received. Though this sounds reasonable, in practice it hands universities one more incentive to dole out more legacy preferences to shake down its alumni—and avoid a search for less compromising fundraising alternatives.

If market forces seem unable to hold elite universities accountable, it is because prospective students don’t have good information about their educational outcomes to truly gauge whether these colleges are worth six figures. “Competition succeeds only to the extent that customers…can define success in some legitimate way in order to establish a standard and reward those who best achieve it,” Derek Bok, Harvard’s president from 1971 to 1991, has noted. “In education, at least at the university level, this ability is lacking.”

So what did Bok—whose wife, the philosopher Sissela Bok, has written an entire book decrying institutional secrecy—do to make more information available to “customers” as Harvard president? Nothing. In fact, he tenaciously resisted repeated calls to reveal Harvard’s admissions and other data.

Bok’s reaction is typical. In 2003, Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) tried to pass a mandate requiring both public and private universities to reveal their admissions data and show how many legacies they were admitting. Political pressure from universities killed the plan. Earlier this year, they opposed the recommendations of a commission convened by Education Secretary Margaret Spelling. The commission wanted all universities to report, among other things, their graduation and retention data.

Vedder, an ardent free-market advocate who served on that commission, is sympathetic to concerns about extending the government’s reach into private universities. But he also argues that these universities are only nominally private, given the enormous amount of federal research subsidies and student aid they receive. “If we are going to drop planeloads of money to these universities,” he asks, “why is it unreasonable to require them to report some basic information?”

Can Meritocracy Prevail?
Universities resist not just outside efforts to force more transparency, but also efforts from within the industry itself. Over the last decade, two serious efforts have emerged in the higher education marketplace to measure “outcomes”—the quality of education that colleges provide. In 2000, the Pew Charitable Trust and Indiana University launched the annual National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE), which polls students about their college experience and, based on this feedback, ranks each college against its peers. Meanwhile, the Council for Aid to Education has developed the Collegiate Learning Assessment survey (CAL). While the NSSE measures only subjective student opinions about their college experience, the CAL actually offers extensive exit exams to students to measure what they have actually learned.

Making information about student satisfaction and learning available to consumers might revolutionize the way they make decisions about colleges. But elite colleges, having little incentive to have their reputation questioned by actual data, have refused to participate in either survey.

America’s fundamental promise is that individuals ought to control their destiny through hard work and talent, not arbitrary accidents of birth. Legacy preferences are no less damaging to this promise than racial preferences. Those who oppose race as a factor in admissions but ignore legacies open themselves to accusations of inconsistency and hypocrisy. But, worse, to the extent that they succeed in dismantling race while leaving legacies intact, they risk putting in place a less—not more—fair admissions system.

As their battle against racial preferences heats up this year, they need to open another front against legacy preferences. The U.S. Constitution and courts do not offer ready weapons for the new battle. But that hardly justifies laying down arms without a fight.

There are plenty of ways at the state level to stop the use of legacies at public universities, from constitutional bans to state mandates requiring more transparent admission policies. Government can’t ban private universities from using preferences, legacy or racial or any other, without running afoul of the Constitution. But that doesn’t mean that moral suasion can’t be used to prod them toward fairer admissions policies. Public outrage recently forced Harvard to give up its early decision program. The program, which overwhelmingly benefited the rich and connected, effectively lowered the bar for students who applied early and promised to accept its admission offer.

Most of all, we need policies to strengthen market accountability. We need to end the cartel-like character of the higher education industry, where private universities can keep consumers in the dark about their admission practices and educational product and still charge exorbitant prices without worrying that a competitor will emerge to challenge their market dominance with a cheaper and better product. An honest and straightforward recognition of the dangers of legacy preferences will go a long way toward bringing about such reforms.

Shikha Dalmia is a senior analyst at the Reason Foundation.

Edwards to Drop Out...

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 09:17:00 EST

...today in New Orleans, CNN reports. Even with two Americas, he couldn't find even half a country's worth of support.

Jeff Taylor parsed Edwards' "two Americas" idea back in 2006. Steve Chapman followed him around in July.

Rocketship Rudy Sets His Sights on Mars!

kleinp@spectator.org (Philip Klein) — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 17:00:00 EST

Tampa, Florida--"I hate pandering... have all my life," Rudy Giuliani once told Newsmax. "It's one of the worst characteristics that politicians have--pandering to people...There's a dishonesty in that that really offends me."

That was in 2006. This year, the former mayor of New York City is trying to win an election. With his national lead eroded and his presidential candidacy on the brink, Giuliani has staked everything on winning today's Florida primary. In the process, he has developed a strange new appreciation of the space program and the perils of the homeowner's insurance market.

"We're going to get to Mars before anyone else gets there," Giuliani boasted at a rally on Monday by the Orlando Sanford International Airport. "And we're going to reestablish our space program and eliminate that gap, so we can get our people up to the space station ourselves. That's something I learned about here in Florida, and I am committed to doing it."

Beyond supporting an industry that is an important part of the state's economy, Giuliani's main gambit to win votes and influence people in the Sunshine State has been getting behind something called the National Catastrophic Fund. Under this proposal, the federal government would help in the event of a major natural disaster, which would spread risk and thus allow insurers to offer more affordable homeowner's polices to residents of hurricane-prone Florida.

"The idea is to be there with a backstop that will allow a private market to work so that people who have risk will pay more but at least they'll have insurance that [isn't] excessive," Giuliani explained last week.

Contrary to Giuliani's assertion, the private market in Florida is functioning quite efficiently, because it is sending homeowners the signal that it'll cost them if they choose to live in an area in which there is a high risk of a hurricane. To artificially lower insurance rates would only encourage more people to move to the state, meaning more costly storms in the future. Giuliani's response to critics is that the federal government ends up stepping in anyway, so being proactive is actually the more fiscally conservative thing to do.

At every campaign stop "America's Mayor" has been touting the fact that he is the only Republican in the race that supports the National Catastrophic Fund, and he took out a television ad educating voters on his position. During last Thursday's debate, when Giuliani had the opportunity to ask a question to one of his rivals, the former prosecutor grilled former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney on his lack of enthusiasm for the giveaway.

Yet Giuliani has received very little in return for taking such a strong stand on the fund and the desperate need for a publicly funded Mars expedition. His poll numbers have continued to dwindle in the state, and Florida's GOP Gov. Charlie Crist, a leading proponent of the idea, ended up endorsing Sen. John McCain, who said no to the fund.

To be sure, not all economic pandering is created equal. While Giuliani doesn't have much to show for his efforts, Mitt Romney's latest incarnation as a born-again John Edwards has paid enormous dividends.

After defeats in Iowa and New Hampshire, where he had spent tens of millions of dollars, Romney's chances of capturing the Republican nomination seemed slim. But in Michigan, he won by promising to save the auto industry and fight for every job, and he has continued to echo populist themes in Florida. At campaign stops here, Romney talks about the "economic squeeze" and "help[ing] middle class families make ends meet."

After spending most of last year running away from his Massachusetts health care plan, Romney now fully embraces it, defending the various mandates that are part of the program. He has been promising that as president, he'll work to get every American insured.

Not only is Romney pushing the idea of universal health care, but according to a report in the Politico, his campaign has attempted to woo senior citizen voters in Florida with robo calls attacking the frontrunner McCain for voting against "the AARP-backed Medicare prescription drug program."

That multi-trillion-dollar entitlement program has served as a monument to President Bush's betrayal of limited government principles, and the AARP has been the biggest obstacle to achieving entitlement reform because of its use of scare tactics directed at its elderly members. The idea that Romney, who is trying to portray himself as an economic conservative, would employ similar scare tactics to assail a rival for opposing the boondoggle is staggering. Yet many conservatives have concluded that Romney is their last hope of stopping McCain, whom they dislike on immigration, campaign-finance reform, and other issues. So they are giving the former Massachusetts governor a free pass on his dash to the left on economic issues.

In the primaries so far, McCain himself has avoided the type of economic pandering that his rivals have engaged in, and it has been greeted with mixed results. He had a better-than-expected showing in Iowa despite his opposition to ethanol subsidies. And his refusal to endorse the idea of a catastrophic fund didn't cost him the endorsement of Gov. Crist. In the span of a few weeks, he improbably went from also-ran to the head of the GOP pack, both in Florida and nationally.

Which isn't to say he hasn't paid a price in the campaign.

"We went to Michigan, and we told them the truth," McCain recounted at a Tampa rally Monday night, referring to his acknowledgement that auto industry jobs leaving Detroit weren't coming back. He then joked, "They didn't like it much."

Philip Klein is a reporter for The American Spectator.

Discuss this story at reason's Hit & Run blog.

Some Positive Thoughts About Negative Campaigning

schapman@tribune.com (Steve Chapman) — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 12:03:00 EST

Negative campaigning has a bad reputation, routinely being disparaged as juvenile taunting that serves only to degrade public discourse. A New York Times headline the other day noted "Bickering and Negative Ads in Countdown to Caucuses," as though these were the moral equivalent of an old married couple grousing about that mess in the kitchen.

Even devoted practitioners feel the duty to deplore negative campaigning. After commissioning an ad accusing Mitt Romney of grievous departures from conservative wisdom, Mike Huckabee was so remorseful that he refused to run it—though he managed to disseminate his charges in a news conference where he sorrowfully screened the spot for the news media. Explaining his newfound magnanimity, Huckabee asserted, "It's never too late to do the right thing."

But what was so terrible about the ad? It merely said that as governor of Massachusetts, Romney raised taxes, left a budget deficit, provided abortion coverage in his universal health care program, and failed to carry out a single execution—all of which appear to be grounded in fact, and any of which a few voters would find interesting.

The spot thus passes the only two tests voters should apply to any campaign attack: Is it true, and is it important? Accusing Romney of having devil's horns would be unacceptable because, though significant, it's not true. Accusing him of owning too many sweaters, though true, would be over the line because it doesn't matter.

It would be nice if politicians were all saintly figures who invariably do the right thing. Since they are not—and since Americans often disagree on what constitutes the right thing—negative campaigning serves the helpful function of illuminating facts that a) people are likely to care about and b) the targets would prefer we didn't know. In fact, if it weren't for attacks on the air and on the stump, our campaigns might have all the nutritional content of a Coke Zero.

What would we glean about the current candidates from watching only their own positive ads and presentations? That Hillary Clinton has unmatched experience in government and is a good listener to boot. That John Edwards is tireless in fighting for You. That Mitt Romney loves his highly photogenic family. That John McCain is a common-sense conservative.

That Mike Huckabee is unabashedly in favor of Christmas. That Rudy Giuliani will kill terrorists with his bare hands. That Barack Obama's serene wisdom would make Gandhi look like Bill O'Reilly.

Compare those blinding revelations with what we know about the same candidates from unflattering portrayals offered by their opponents and other uncharitable souls: Clinton's experience is greatly exaggerated. As a state senator, Obama's Zen-like approach to divisive legislation often led him to vote neither "yes" nor "no" but "present."

Giuliani has a history of support for gun control and abortion rights. Huckabee has changed his position on illegal immigration. Edwards has changed his position on the Iraq war. Romney has changed his position on everything.

Any of these particular discoveries may strike you as good, bad or irrelevant. But the only reason they get attention is that they furnish some voters with information that will influence their vote.

I don't want to be entirely positive about negativity. Political attacks can also be nasty, unfair or even outrageously false. When a top Clinton campaign official wondered if Obama might have been a drug dealer in his youth, the suggestion was all three. But rather than damaging Obama, the claim backfired, forcing the aide to resign.

That episode goes to show something else good about even the most indefensible attacks: They often tell more about the attacker than the attackee. The smear of Obama reminded some people of Clinton's pattern of ruthlessness toward her enemies—a pattern at odds with the image of quiet strength and personal warmth she has worked so hard to cultivate.

When Huckabee asked whether Mormons (such as Romney) really believe that Satan is the brother of Jesus, he did voters a similar service. Mormons say this is a mischaracterization, and I'm not qualified to address questions of theology. But true or false, it's about as relevant to a candidate's fitness for office as whether he believes in purgatory. And by raising it, Huckabee made himself sound like he should be running for pastor, not president.

Thomas Jefferson once said that he would prefer newspapers without a government to a government without newspapers. Given a choice between politics with no negative campaigning and politics with only negative campaigning, I suspect he would prefer the latter.

COPYRIGHT 2008 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

Iowa Caucus Prediction Thread (and Liveblogging)

dweigel@reason.com (David Weigel) — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 19:00:00 EST

I've got a bunch of friends in Iowa reporting out the race, and the storylines I've heard from them all are:

- Hillary Clinton has the smartest people in the Democratic primary working for her, and if it wasn't for them she'd already be out of this.
- Ron Paul's organization is tight and energetic, and they're turning out all their caucusgoers.
- Fred Thompson's campaign events have been small and sluggish.
- Barack Obama headed off an Edwards surge as some of the second-tier candidates told their supporters to back him as their second choices. (In the Democratic race, if your candidate doesn't get 15 percent of the room you caucus for someone else.)
- Democratic excitement is palpable. Republican excitement is non-existent.

Based on that, my incredibly safe predictions:

Democrats (final votes, including second choices)

Barack Obama 32
John Edwards 30
Hillary Clinton 27
Joe Biden 5
Bill Richardson 4
The others 2

Republicans

Mitt Romney 31
Mike Huckabee 29
Ron Paul 13
John McCain 11
Fred Thompson 9
Rudy Giuliani 5
The others 4

Of course, no one is watching all the candidates. It's all about the storylines for Obama, Clinton, Romney, Huckabee, and McCain. The only way Paul breaks into the headlines is if he beats the allegedly surging McCain and Thompson, although a McCain loss would be brushed off and a Thompson loss portrayed as the end of his campaign. (Reporters seem to be craving a McCain win in New Hampshire, for the amazing comeback story as much as anything.)

Post your predictions or gossip in the comments. I'll be at Murphy's Taproom in Manchester watching the caucues with a very optimistic Paul crowd, and will be liveblogging from there.

UPDATE: Liveblogging, commence!

8:30: Nestled in at the bar and talking to Paulites who are restlessly catching CNN harp on the Democratic race. They liked an "entrance poll" that showed Hillary up: "She's the easiest to beat."

8:32: This must be the only Republican party that's tuned in to CNN and not Fox News. I'm listening more to the exit poll questions than the miniscule precinct results. Huge female turnout sounds good for Clinton while the fact that voters prioritized "change" over "experience" sounds good for Obama... and the low percentage of independent voters sounds bad for Obama. I'm not hearing as much about the GOP...

8:38: A lot of derision here at the way CNN is leaving a big white pie piece in the chart where the Ron Paul, Rudy Giuliani, and Duncan Hunter vote should be.

8:48: More data, finally, and Paul's at 10 percent: A lot of relieved cheers at this party. But CNN is still showing that blank piece. As to the Democrats, Kos reports that the early counties are rural John Edwards counties, which bodes really poorly for him -- he's in a dead heat as the Clinton and Obama counties start to come in.

8:50: From the party: "We can come in eleventy-millionth place as long as we beat Giuliani!" They're screaming and clapping whenever a county result shows Paul clobbering Rudy.

8:56: CNN projects a Huckabee victory. There are some quiet boos and yells of "Huuuckster!"

9:04: There's gloating about Romney's defeat ("All those millions! His poor kids!") and a few cheers when Obama pulls ahead of Hillary and Edwards. I ask a "hard-right Republican" named Pete why he cheered. "I just want the crime family out of there," he says, referring to the Clintons. "Obama's a hard lefty but as long as we don't have the Clintons running we can have a battle of ideas. We can talk about the Constitution."

9:20: If the Democratic results keep up - Clinton literally tied with Edwards but only margin-of-error tied with Obama - it doesn't exactly look like a three way tie. It looks like a clear Obama win.

9:27: And NBC News calls for Obama. This is better for him than it is for Huckabee - Hillary and Edwards are so bunched up he can declare his victory before they can claim second place.

9:36: I'm uncomfortable predicting too much when the GOP race for third is so close, but I think McCain has little to worry about even if he slips behind Ron Paul. Romney is utterly humiliated: I'm going to have to check out one of his New Hampshire events to see how many advance men it takes to prop up his corpse. This is the expectation game. It doesn't matter that Romney doubled McCain's vote, it mattered that McCain was able to strut onstage and make fun of his effort to "buy the election."

9:39: People who won't be vice president: Tom Vilsack, the former governor of Iowa whose mighty operation was enough to win the Democratic frontrunner third place. Also Ted Strickland, the governor of Ohio who trashed the Iowa caucuses to a reporter merely days ago. People who might be: Bill Richardson and Joe Biden, for handing their votes to Obama. (So did Kucinich but his nomination as VP is less likely, let's say.)

9:46: Huge catcalls for Giuliani when he arrives on CNN (his reward for losing to Ron Paul?): A voice behind me blares "Fuck you, fucker!" And there's some grumbling about how Wolf Blitzer referred to Paul's 7,800 votes as "seven thousand" and Giuliani's 2,700 as "almost three thousand."

9:55: The Paul party is sort of starting to disperse. A key hope of the volunteers is dying tonight: The hope that there were thousands of voters who the polls were missing but would turn out for Paul. He's only winning as many votes as the polls suggested he would. So he's set to keep scoring high single digits or low double digits unless something incredible happens - maybe Newt Gingrich enters the race, quits, and endorses Paul on the way out.

9:58: Just as I typed that I joined a conversation on Paul's percentage, already in progress. "I was hoping for 15, 17 percent" said a Pittsburgh volunteer named Bill. Frank, a campaign worker who came here with Operation Live Free or Die, is more optimistic: "That much of the Republican vote, that's Perot territory." Dun-dun-dun-dunnnnn.

10:04: I'm by no means the first person to say this, but here's the key difference between the parties tonight. Half of Democrats look at this picture and feel neutral; half of them look at it and feel elated. Half of Republicans look at his picture and feel worried; one-quarter feel enraged; one-quarter are happy, but it's that bitter, Kurt Russell dropping the truck on the bad guy in Breakdown kind of happy. If they weren't Christians they'd be flipping the bird.

10:24: No surprise, John Edwards tried to steal some Obama thunder by proclaiming "a victory over the status quo." He cheers up the crowd by telling stories of poor people who have it worse then them.

10:30: Laughs, jeers and catcalls when Hillary Clinton zooms onto the screen to concede. One Paulite grabs a Hillary sign and jumps up and down in front of the TV: "Hillary! Hillary! She's the easiest to beat!" The room picks it up. "Ron Paul can beat her!" "Ron Paul can beat anybody!" There's a whole lot of joy (and some pointing) at the sad Bill Clinton next to Hillary... when's the last time he had to stand on a concession stage?

10:33: Did Clinton promise to leave no child behind?

10:41: Like Stephen Spruiell reported today, the lefty netroots have made a long, curious march away from Barack Obama to John Edwards. There was plenty of enthusiasm for Obama in late 2006 and early 2007, it tempered over the course of the year, and in the last weeks Paul Krugman has led a pile-on of Obama for (among other things) not covering everyone in his health care plan, attacking trial lawyers, and arguing that Gore and Kerry had been too divisive. But since Edwards has narrowly moved past Hillary in Iowa I don't think there'll be a rush back to Obama. Edwards won his biggest-ever margin in the Daily Kos straw poll yesterday.

The Friday Political Thread: Free State of Mind Edition

dweigel@reason.com (David Weigel) — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 16:56:00 EST

There actually isn't a full-blown political thread this week, as I'm taking a short breather. From January 2nd to January 9th I'll be in New Hampshire covering the Republican primary—for the most part, covering Ron Paul and the state's rugged population of libertarians. That means I'll be watching the Iowa caucus, from afar, with members of the Free State Project and a TV tuned to C-Span. It also means I'll be filing reports from Paul campaign HQ, from the trail, and eventually from Paul's election night party. If you're in one of the lesser 49 states or, God forbid, some other coutry, stay tuned to the blog. If you're actually in New Hampshire, get in touch at dweigel at reason.com.

The week in brief...

- Benazir Bhutto was assassinated, scrambling both US foreign policy in Pakistan and the positions of the presidential candidates.

- John McCain basked in poll numbers that reflected a "surge" reporters had been predicting for nigh on four months. Mitt Romney looked frazzled trying to blunt his momentum.

- Barack Obama slapped John Edwards for benefitting from a 527 ad; Edwards counterpunched and then folded like a dixie cup, asking the 527 to stop.

- Hillary Clinton stopped her fall and now stands tied or ahead of the field in the first three primaries.

- The president vetoed a $696 billion defense bill because it exposed the Iraqi government to lawsuits.

Below the fold...

- John Tabin parties with the "best hair champions" of the Dems and GOP.

- Justin Raimondo takes on the anti-Ron Paul smear merchants.

- Mark Sunwall says Ron Paul is the only internationalist in the race.

- Jonathan Cohn asks whether John Edwards, in the throes of a populist campaign, had lost his ability to appeal to the middle class.

No music video this week, either, but there's a full-blown music post coming up later.

The Grand Old Party Is Up for Grabs

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 12:18:00 EST

Here's a quick snapshot of the race for the Republican presidential nomination. The closest the party has had to a frontrunner is a big-city mayor from a deep-blue state; he's a pro-choice adulterer who used to shack up with some gay guys. His chief rival is a tax-hiking governor who says our "responsibility to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions" is a "moral issue" and who denounces pro-market conservatives for their "greed." (He also thinks the world was created in less than a week, but in this party that isn't a disadvantage.) Another major candidate is trying to convince the voters that he's under fire for his Mormon beliefs, when the real reason no one trusts him is the pervasive suspicion that he has no beliefs at all. And the best man in the bunch is widely derided as a nut—not because of his frequently radical policy prescriptions, but because he opposes the most unpopular policy identified with the modern Republican Party.

And here's the weirdest thing of all: No one knows who's going to win. A party that prefers to coronate its standard-bearers at least a year before the primaries is about to head into the Iowa caucuses without a clear-cut frontrunner. The race is open, and it's open at a time when the party knows it has been doing something terribly wrong but can't agree on what mistakes it has been making. It isn't just the nomination that's available. The GOP's political vision is up for grabs.

The primary within the primary. The biggest battle in the Republican field right now isn't the fight for Iowa or New Hampshire. It's the contest to be the candidate of the party's social conservative wing. At a time when even the pro-choice Rudy Giuliani has managed to pick up the endorsement of a prominent right-wing evangelist—an aging Pat Robertson, whose declining lucidity is on sad display every day on The 700 Club—it's clear that this faction has no favorite. What it does have, despite Robertson, is a near-unanimous disdain for Giuliani. The two men who began the campaign as Rudy's biggest rivals, Arizona Sen. John McCain and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, have been assiduously courting the Christian right. But they have a history of statements and stances that put social conservatives on edge.

So for the so-cons, who hold enormous power until the end of the primary season, Giuliani is unthinkable, but neither Romney nor McCain is a comfortable alternative. On the other hand, they don't want to line up behind someone like Alan Keyes or Tom Tancredo, even if that means denying us the sublime joy of a Keyes-Obama rematch: To get nominated, you have to be plausibly electable. With that in mind, I predicted last spring that the party would nominate a man who embraces the social conservative agenda while exuding a personal charm that might appeal to swing voters in the general election. There was one tiny problem with my prediction -- just a typo, really. I referred to this candidate as "Fred Thompson," but apparently his name is spelled "Mike Huckabee."

That said, Huckabee's victory in the primary-within-the-primary is far from assured. If he stumbles, so-con support could still go to Thompson, to Romney, or even to a resurgent McCain. Meanwhile, Rudy himself can't take advantage of the divisions in his rivals' ranks, because he made a deliberate decision to focus his attention on the later primaries. And by the time those come around, he might be too weak to win: He has been bruised by scandals and is falling in the polls.

The economic agenda. Huckabee and Romney may be bidding for the social conservatives' support, but the interesting differences between them lie in their economic opinions. Romney is a classic K Street Republican: more pro-business than pro-market, but committed in theory if not always in practice to limiting the government's role in the economy. Huckabee's rhetoric is strikingly different, calling on the state to do more to help the disadvantaged. He favors a few free-market fads like the Fair Tax, a gimmicky proposal to replace the income and payroll taxes with a national levy on consumption, but those are anomalies. Like John Edwards on the Democratic side, he is frequently called a populist; like Edwards, he would be better described as a progressive. His pitches do not call to mind a prophet in bib overalls demanding power for the people. They suggest a speechwriter brainstorming programs that might appeal to the soccer moms.

Romney might not believe in anything, but he pays lip service to the standard Republican values. If this becomes a Giuliani-Huckabee contest, that means the Republicans will jettison either the social views that have been identified with the party for the last three decades or the economic views that have been identified with the party for the last three decades. Meanwhile, the dark horse in the race would jettison the international views that have been identified with the party for most of the last five decades.

War! Ron Paul is a libertarian congressman from Texas with a strong commitment to a non-interventionist foreign policy. He has enough money to stay in the race for as long as he'd like, and he has a devoted band of followers who aren't likely to jump to any other candidate. His opposition to the Iraq war is deeply unpopular with both the Republican establishment and the hawkish Republican base, and that makes it extremely unlikely that he'll win the nomination. But he is also the only candidate who speaks for the 30 percent of the party that wants to bring the troops home (and one of the few candidates whose free-market rhetoric reflects actual pro-market positions). That makes him an important barometer of dissent within the party, and among independent voters as well. The more he succeeds, the more he forces the other candidates to reconsider their assumptions about what the electorate will tolerate.

And people keep underestimating him, which magnifies the impact of his successes. He will probably do well in New Hampshire and in much of the west. And he might do well in less libertarian territories as well: As of Friday, he has been polling in double digits in South Carolina.

Huckabee's economic program marks a shift from the traditional Republican rhetoric, but it's the natural next step after Bush's ballooning budgets and "faith-based" welfare spending. Giuliani's social views are a cleaner break with the old Republican platform, but they aren't far from the tolerant course the country has actually taken in the three decades since Reagan was elected president. Paul's foreign policy, by contrast, would be a radical contrast with the reigning Republican assumptions of the last eight years. He is returning to themes that were briefly resurgent in the '90s but haven't been part of the standard conservative playbook since the days of Robert Taft. If he inspires more Ron Paul Republicans to run for office, he too could push the party in a different direction, if not this year then in the years to come. And if the GOP refuses to listen to what he's saying, it's not clear whether that will be worse news for the non-interventionists or for the faltering Grand Old Party.

Jesse Walker is managing editor of reason.

The Real Mortgage Fraud

schapman@tribune.com (Steve Chapman) — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 06:48:00 EST

Nothing is more fun than doing noble deeds with someone else's money, and right now, Democrats are getting ready for a rollicking good time. Contemplating the subprime mortgage problem, with numerous borrowers unable to pay their debts, the party's presidential candidates and congressional leaders have a simple solution: Fleece the lenders.

The troubles arose because banks and finance companies offered mortgages to millions of people who, despite their imperfect credit histories, yearned to buy homes. The loans generally start out with a low interest rate that, after a couple of years, rises substantially. Some homebuyers now discover that the reset payments are more than they can handle. On top of that, falling real estate prices mean some can't recoup by selling, because the home is now worth less than the mortgage.

This spectacle has brought forth recriminations from politicians who picture the lenders as James Bond villains, cackling at the chance to toss hard-working families out on the street. In fact, this course is almost as bad a deal for lenders as it is for borrowers. They typically lose up to half the value of the mortgage on foreclosures.

From listening to the critics, you'd never guess that. Barack Obama denounces "predatory lenders" for "driving low-income families into financial ruin." Barney Frank (D-Mass.), who chairs the House Financial Services Committee, blames everything on an epidemic of "abusive lending."

But lenders who made bad decisions are already paying the price. Many mortgage companies have gone bankrupt. And if these loans are so unconscionable, the question is not why the foreclosure rate is so high but why it's so low.

According to the Mortgage Bankers Association, less than 5 percent of subprime adjustable-rate mortgages are in the process of foreclosure. The vast majority of borrowers are making their payments, keeping their homes and asking no one for a bailout.

Nor is it clear that soaring payments are the chief culprit. Foreclosures are most common in places where home prices are falling-such as California, Florida, Michigan and Ohio, which account for half of all foreclosures this year. Apparently many borrowers, seeing no point in paying off a $200,000 debt for the privilege of owning a $170,000 home, have elected to walk away from their obligations.

The remedies urged by Hillary Clinton, John Edwards and the like include placing a moratorium on foreclosures, freezing teaser rates for five years or more, and forcing lenders to reduce loan amounts to reflect deflated home values. These options are conspicuous for a couple major defects.

The first is that they punish lenders for the failings of borrowers. Why should someone who has kept the terms of a contract be penalized for the benefit of the party that didn't? A lot of people took a calculated gamble on interest rates and home prices. Had they bet right, they'd be reaping the rewards. Since they bet wrong, they are entitled to bear the consequences.

It's true that if lenders have committed fraud with phony information about their loans, they deserve to be separated from their ill-gotten gains. At the same time, honest ones shouldn't be punished for offering creative terms just because the loans sometimes go bad.

When we're talking about faceless institutions, it may sound reasonable to confiscate a share of their assets. But there's no reason to stop with these greedy usurers.

Say I sell my home at a handsome premium to someone who, we now learn, has been victimized by a "predatory" loan. Why should I benefit from the lending abuse? If the mortgage company has to sacrifice some of its profit so the buyer can avert eviction, why shouldn't I have to turn over a portion of mine? Most of us would fail to see the justice in this humane act of redistribution.

If the government imposes the punitive option, another problem will arise down the road: Lenders will be far less willing to offer credit to people with flawed credit records. Even the Bush administration's plan for mortgage companies to freeze rates on a small number of loans effectively warns lenders to steer clear of all but the soundest borrowers. As Yogi Berra might put it, if mortgage companies don't want to do business with certain customers, nobody is going to stop them.

The consequence of this approach is clear. We'd be robbing tomorrow's subprime borrowers for the benefit of today's. Of course, when it comes to proposed solutions, robbery seems to be the order of the day.

COPYRIGHT 2007 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

The Friday Political Thread: No Hand Shows Edition

dweigel@reason.com (David Weigel) — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 17:28:00 EST

We survived two debates this week, an occurance which won't be repeated until... well, until three and a half weeks from now, when the Democrats and Republicans do back-to-back Jan. 5 debates in New Hampshire. Robert Novak's report is especially thorough this week and worth reading.

Unconvincing quote of the week...

"I always knew it would be hard." - Hillary Clinton, Dec. 14. Two weeks earlier she said she never considered the possibility of losing the nomination.

The week in brief...

- The much-loathed Des Moines Register debates hardly moved the needle in either campaign, although Fred Thompson showed signs of life, Hillary Clinton sounded flustered, and John Edwards announced plans to nationalize Hit & Run.

- New Hampshire Clinton backer Bill Shaheen (husband of the Democrats' Senate nominee against John Sununu) speculated—just being helpful!—that Republicans would pillory nominee Obama for his lifetime of hardcore drug use and dope dealing. Shaheen resigned.

- The energy bill, which needed 60 votes to break cloture, got 59.

The GOP rises again! This might be a half-baked theory based on a bunch of random results and fooferah, but consider:

- Last Friday, Kentucky Secretary of State Crit Luallen, a Democrat, decided not to challenge Sen. Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, whom polls show has been weakened over the last year.

- On Tuesday, Republicans held on to two open House seats in Virginia and Ohio by 21 points and 14 points respectively. The Virginia result wasn't much of a surprise, but Democrats actually made a play for Ohio, spending DCCC money, sending Gov. Ted Strickland and Sen. Sherrod Brown to campaign for Democrat Robin Weirauch after a nasty primary (the Club for Growth went in against him) apparently weakened Republican Bob Latta. Latta's win was at the high end of Republican hopes.

- On Thursday, former Mississippi Attorney General Mike Moore, a popular Democrat, decided not to run for Trent Lott's open Senate seat.

- The first poll pitting Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu against GOP Treasurer John Kennedy (who switched parties to run against her) has the second-term Democrat up only 46 to 42.

It feels very different from the winter of 2005, when Democrats were rushing into less-than-sure-thing races and Republicans were resisting Karl Rove's appeals to run for Senate. (Rove's the guy who flipped Kennedy in Louisiana.) Democrats are still cleaning up in fundraising and winning the general election, but the climate's a little worse than it was last year.

Final point: In the latest CNN poll (PDF), only 54 percent of undeclared voters want to vote in the Democratic primary. That's down from a high of 70 percent, and it's a factoid Democrats have been pushing all year as proof of their continued strength and the GOP meltdown.

Honest Barry. I try to get into the heads of Joe and Jane Iowa Voter, I really do... but it falls apart when the issue is drugs. Plenty of people think drug use is a character flaw, and I don't. So the way that Obama deals with his past drug use, as an awful youthful mistake that no boy should repeat, is probably the way to handle it even though it leaves me cold. Craig Crawford argues that it's not enough.

Throughout the 2000 presidential campaign, George W. Bush managed to dodge detailed questions about his partying past in the same way that Obama's team is now doing – by calling foul against anyone who brings it up.

I don't think that's quite fair. Karl Rove's strategy included denying that Bush had ever used drugs and hoping that reporters would get tired of asking. Rove et al knew that Bush had been arrested for a DUI and simply covered it up for the entire campaign. That's not what Obama is doing. He's wisely been admitting what drugs he did (and what crimes he committed) for years. Still, we're a long way away from the maturity of Australia, where Bob Hawke probably became prime minister because of his legendary boozing abilities.

Debates are stupid. Fred Thompson's going all in and stumping Iowa from next week to Jan.3. His tour is dubbed "The Clear Conservative Choice: Hands Down." That's a reference, of course, to his refusal to put his hand up or down to answer the DMR debate question on global warming. John Edwards put in a manful performance at the Democratic debate, but the second-day story was all about Obama smacking around Clinton when she laughed at a question about how many Bill Clinton advisers worked for him: "Hillary, I'm looking forward to you advising me as well." It's not like we're leaving behind a great era of American politics, but... seriously? Fred's angina counts for more than Romney's precision or Giuliani's daydreaming about endless meetings?

Below the fold...

- Jim Geraghty dreams about President Ron Paul: "I can’t deny that it appeals to some dark corner of my fiscal conservative psyche."

- The Iowa Independent (part of the Center for Independent Media's new web mag network) has an Iowa cattle call that puts Ron Paul in third place.

- Matt Taibbi swoons for Barack Obama. (Fair warning: His last political crush was Kucinich.)

- Mark Hemingway tries to understand the youth-Ron Paul axis.

- Phil Klein talks to Arkansans about Mike Huckabee's pardons.

- Rich Lowry denies him clemency.

In a week that ended with buzz about drugs and dealing, I award the Politics 'n' Prog slot to Can. You can guess why.

Democratic Debate VIII: The One Nobody's Watching

dweigel@reason.com (David Weigel) — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 14:00:00 EST

The Democrats, following the GOP, are making the abysmal Des Moines Register debate their last dog-and-pony show before the Iowa Caucus. Occasional commentary will appear here, but you're probably flipping around looking for the steroids-in-baseball press conference.

The debate's online here.

2:02: I'm watching the Fox broadcast of this debate, which features a focus group and moving dial. Obama's bland answer on balancing the budget blows the yellow and blue lines off the screen.

2:03: Richardson's specifics - line-item veto, balanced budget amendment - get less fuzzies than Obama's pablum. Breaking news: Obama is more charismatic than Richardson. (Interestingly, liberals like the phrase "no more earmarks" more than moderates.)

2:05: Biden: Slash the hell out of waste in the military budget. Good answer, and I predict he will win the 1988 presidential election.

2:08: Edwards knocks around corporations who've "literally taken over the government. We need a president who's willing to take these powers over." Two things Iowans love: Subsidies and fascism!

2:10: I wasn't around for the mid-1990s balanced budget amendment debate, but if we change the Constitution to demand balanced budgets how do we bypass it "in times of war" like Richardson suggests? By declaring war? Yeah, well, nobody does that.

2:13: Biden calls paradigm "a fancy word my conservative friends use," and rejects the idea that we need to pay for things - but let's cut military spending, you know, for kicks.

2:15: Obama tries some of the Edwards tonic and, to me, sounds more credible and less crazy than Edwards - nail corporations that are cheating on their taxes, don't just attack their foundations with a sledgehammer. The focus group seems less enthused, though.

2:17: Sorry, I don't like the DMR idea of "fairness." Dodd and Biden and Richardson, who'll be back at their old jobs in two months, keep getting questions. Obama and Clinton (less Edwards) are very occasionally thrown a talking point opportunity.

2:20: Senator Clinton, are we spending too much on entitlements? Yes, which is why we need more of them. Boldly, she wants to "convene a bipartisan commission" on Social Security.

2:23: "Universal health care is a human right," says Bill Richardson, as I destroy copies of my column on his libertarian instincts.

2:25: They're in free statement mode. Obama sounds like Obama; Edwards sounds like Ralph Nader.

2:26: Biden's "voted against every trade agreement since CAFTA," giving him a mighty, 2-year record voting against trade agreements. (He's been in the Senate since 1973.)

2:30: China killed John Edwards's daddy!

2:32: Maybe this is my red-hot anti-Edwards bias talking, but I think Obama's doing a good job answering the questions with his pet issues. He talks airily about amending NAFTA and then pulls Gitmo out of nowhere... as something we need to look at to improve our image in the world. The dial (I'm addicted to it) hurtles up.

2:37: Big prediction here: None of them are going to say anything contentious about energy. I'm taking a Doddbreak to get some water.

2:41: As Clinton and Obama and Edwards talk about "enlisting people" in their Five Year Plans for Glorious Energy Independence, it reminds me a little of Ron Paul's rhetoric. Not, obviously, his rhetoric about policy. Paul, who's only recently started thinking about actually being president, realizes that an estimated 434 members of the House disagree with him about policy. (Give or take Paul Broun.) So he envisions the REVOLution continuing, pressuring members, holding rallies, etc. It's similar to the scenario Edwards paints for when he's president and the Senate disagrees with his plan to take away their health care. He'll stuff it in their face, campaigning in their districts, finding opponents to kick their asses, etc. The last time a president really tried that, or something like it, was when Woodrow Wilson worked himself to death in 1918... still, I wonder how the model would work today.

2:46: Or, as Geraghty puts it: "A big theme is that if you just make something a high enough priority, solutions appear and the situation gets better."

2:50: Edwards's education solutions include univeral pre-K, that moderate idea that was rejected by California's hard-hearted right-wing voters, and a "national teaching university" ("like the Naval Academy"), which I'm pretty sure Jonathan Pryce graduated from in Brazil.

2:59: Would Biden endorse Obama (or anyone else) if they just agreed to call their Iraq strategy "the Biden Plan"?

3:02: "There sure are a laaaht of promises for that first year" says Edwards, who has pledged to arm-wrestle every member of Congress with his right arm and strangle the Fortune 500 with his left arm. (Is he ambidextrous? I hope not.)

[An update on yesterday's debate: Turns out Ron Paul got the second-least amount of time to speak, only 13 seconds more than Fred Thompson after he refused to answer a question. Duncan Hunter got a minute more than Paul, and Alan Keyes got about 90 seconds more.]

3:06: It is very important to get Joe Biden on the record about his racial gaffes, because he is the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination. If he wasn't, this would be such a waste of time.

3:09: "I have been fighting them my entire life, and I have been winning my entire life," says Vice President John Edwards. Former Vice President Dick Cheney could not be reached for comment.

3:15: Good stuff from Hillary on signing statements - she's said it before, but I wonder if it's sinking in. And how much Democratic voters want the next president to power down and hand back the powers Bush got.

3:16: John Edwards rejects George W. Bush's expansion of executive power. "We don't have a royal presidency," says the guy who wants to lock companies out of legislative discussions and take away congressional health care.

3:18: Godwin alert! Chris Dodd remembers an America "where Nuremberg used to mean something."

3:23: What's everybody love about Iowa? Dodd loves their "independence." As long as they love desperation, boredom, and flop sweat, I think he's got an upset coming.

WINNERS, LOSERS, AND DODD
I felt a twinge of sympathy for Dennis Kucinich at one point, when Washburn asked a black-and-white question about repealing NAFTA. I just pictured him at home, tossing his bowl of Kix at the TV and yanking off his tiny necktie.

Done good
1) Edwards - He spent the year slowly, slowly falling in the Iowa polls as he slashed up the national frontrunners. With some difficulty, he's tamped down that instinct and started just slashing at corporations, job-killers, stuff Iowans hate. He's morphing from Gephardt 2004 (who attacked Dean and imploded) to Gephardt 1988 (who claimed "America is in decline" and won).

2) Obama - Obviously well-prepared for this but elastic enough to get laughs, which he's never been very good at. As good as Edwards at squeezing his arguments into the narrow spaces of the questions. I don't think his policy prescriptions are any less radical than Edwards, but he sounded a little more realistic arguing for them.

Done alright
3) Biden - Calmer and less obviously whiny than he's been before, fairly convincing on his key issues.

4) Clinton - No huge mistakes, but now that everyone's looking for her weakness, she looks pretty weak. The attack on Edwards and Obama wasn't just telegraphed, it was sent by pony express. The laughter when Obama was asked about his backers from the Clinton administration came off as arrogant. There's a balance to be struck between "I've got experience from the 90s" and "I'm going to turn the Wayback Machine to 1993" and she didn't quite strike it.

Ain't done nothing
5) Richardson - Just didn't break through.

6) Dodd - This is the last debate you'll see him in. Wave goodbye!

Democrats Make a Bad Trade

schapman@tribune.com (Steve Chapman) — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 12:27:00 EST

Democrats yearn for the bounteous days of Bill Clinton's presidency, when the economy was flourishing, there were good jobs at good wages, and poverty was on the wane. So it's a puzzle that on one of his signature achievements—the North American Free Trade Agreement -- the party's presidential candidates are sprinting away from his record as fast as they can. It's as though Republicans were calling for defense cuts while invoking Ronald Reagan.

Even Hillary Clinton can't bring herself to defend the deal her husband pushed through. Asked during a recent debate if she thought it was a mistake, she did everything but deny she'd ever met the man.

"All I can remember from that is a bunch of charts," she chortled, in possibly the least believable statement of the 2008 campaign. "That, sort of, is a vague memory." In the end, though, Clinton declared that "NAFTA was a mistake to the extent that it did not deliver on what we had hoped it would."

She has plenty of company. Barack Obama is on record as saying he "would not have supported the North American Free Trade Agreement as it was drafted." John Edwards has flogged the treaty like a rented mule, calling it "a complete and total disaster." And Dennis Kucinich thinks all copies of NAFTA should be humanely shredded and used as compost on shade-grown fair trade coffee, or something like that.

What did NAFTA ever do to deserve this abuse? Critics claim it destroyed a million jobs -- forgetting that its implementation coincided with the longest peacetime expansion in American history. During that period, the unemployment rate fell to its lowest level since the Vietnan War. If that was a disaster, I'm Hannah Montana.

Ordinary workers, contrary to myth, benefited from NAFTA. In the decade before it took effect, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, average hourly earnings (adjusted for inflation) fell by 5 percent. In the decade after, they rose by 10 percent.

Even supposing the deal did eliminate a million jobs, that actually doesn't amount to much. Every year, millions of jobs vanish and millions materialize, as old companies cut back or close and new ones sprout. What counts is net growth, and since 1994, the total number of jobs in this country has risen by 26 million.

Candidates blame NAFTA for pushing American companies to close plants here and move production south. But from 1994 through 2001, reports the Cato Institute, U.S. manufacturers invested $200 billion a year at home -- and only $2.2 billion a year in Mexico. After NAFTA passed, U.S. manufacturing output soared, and it's now at the highest level ever. American farmers have seen their exports boom.

From listening to the Democrats, you'd never guess that our exporters got more out of the deal than Mexico's did. NAFTA actually made it easier for U.S. companies to stay here and sell products in Mexico. How? By phasing out tariffs on goods shipped there -- which, on average, were 2.5 times higher than ours. We gave nickels to get dimes.

Edwards and Co. hold fast to the superstition that tariffs and other trade barriers are essential to our prosperity. Reality is that admitting imports makes Americans more prosperous by reducing prices of consumer and capital goods. It also strengthens American companies by forcing them to be more efficient and innovative.

So why do so many people, including approximately 100 percent of those who turn up at Democratic debates, hold this and other trade agreements in such contempt? One obvious reason is they want to appeal to labor unions, which generally prefer protectionism.

But Gary Hufbauer, an economist at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, suspects one reason lies in a different issue: illegal immigration. Some NAFTA supporters thought it might generate enough growth in Mexico to keep Mexican workers at home. When the tide of illegal immigrants grew, it bred resentment here.

That reaction partly helps to explain the Democratic retreat. By denouncing NAFTA, the presidential candidates can appeal to Americans alarmed about our porous borders without offending Hispanic voters.

But they should remember two crucial things: Bill Clinton presided over an era of enviable prosperity, and he did more to expand free trade than any president since Franklin D. Roosevelt. If they want to get back to the land of Oz, Democrats would be advised to follow the same Yellow Brick Road.

COPYRIGHT 2007 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

Quotes

Sat, 01 Dec 2007 21:50:00 EST

“It’s always darkest right before you get clobbered over the head with a pipe wrench. But then it actually does get darker.”
—anonymous GOP pollster on Republicans’ chances in 2008, quoted in The Washington Post, September 1

“I’m going to be honest with you—I don’t know a lot about Cuba’s health care system. Is it a government-run system?”
—Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards at a campaign event in Oskaloosa, Iowa, August 16

“Even the Nazis didn’t put artists out of work.”
—Andrew Keen, author of The Cult of the Amateur, on the negative impact of the Internet, The Colbert Report, August 16

“Starbucks is a multibillion-dollar corporation. So I guess that must mean we’re bad.”
—Starbucks attorney Daniel Nash in his opening statement to the National Labor Relations Board on allegations of union busting, July 9

“I’m just disappointed in you, sir. I just really am. I expect this from the guy that we get out of the hood. I mean, people vote for you.…No wonder why we’re going down the tubes.”
—Officer Dave Karsnia, during a taped interview with Sen. Larry Craig (R-Idaho), whom he arrested for lewd behavior in a Minneapolis airport rest room, June 11

Hillary Clinton Learns from Experience

schapman@tribune.com (Steve Chapman) — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 15:13:00 EST

KNOXVILLE, IOWA -- Spending a day following Hillary Clinton on the campaign trail, I was not surprised to hear her quote Franklin Roosevelt, any more than I've been surprised when she has invoked other Democrats like Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy. But when she began talking about the importance of electing a president with experience, she brought to mind a very different president.

In her speech here Monday, Clinton said that "there is one job we can't afford on-the-job training for: That is the job of our next president. That could be the costliest job training in history." She went on: "We need a president who understands the magnitude and complexity of the challenges we face and has the strength and experience to address them from day one..."

If I were Barack Obama or John Edwards, I might have taken offense. But I might have taken even greater offense if I were George H. W. Bush. In 1992, after he lost his re-election bid, Bush probably never expected Bill Clinton's wife would someday be running for president while delivering lines seemingly inspired by his criticisms of Bill Clinton.

Back then, Bush was the one with the long years of service in government—as a congressman, ambassador, CIA director and vice president. The candidate named Clinton was the one with the comparatively modest resume, consisting mostly of 12 years as governor of a small state.

So Republicans warned that inexperience could be calamitous. "I ask you to close your eyes and imagine in a crisis situation an American leader totally without experience, completely untested, about whom we know very little, if you get down to it," Bush implored his listeners. When Clinton urged a change in policy on the Balkans, a White House spokesman dismissed him as a callow youth: "It sounds like the kind of reckless approach that indicates he better do some more homework on foreign policy."

The Clinton campaign, of course, had a different view. "If they're such whizzes on foreign policy," scoffed running mate Al Gore, "why is Saddam Hussein thumbing his nose at the entire world, claiming victory and still in power?"

By Tuesday, Hillary Clinton was abandoning the previous day's subtlety. "Now voters will judge whether living in a foreign country at the age of 10 prepares one to face the big, complex international challenges the next president will face," she said, in reference to Obama's childhood residence in Indonesia. "I think we need a president with more experience than that."

As a summary of Obama's experience, that's the equivalent of saying, "Now voters will decide whether redecorating the White House prepares one to face the big, complex international challenges the next president will face." Her attack was enough to draw a rebuke from John Edwards, whom she recently accused of "mud-slinging," and who was struck by the irony of Clinton's sudden dive into the mire. "Like so many other things, when it comes to mud, Hillary Clinton says one thing and throws another," Edwards responded.

By stressing this issue, Clinton inadvertently raises the question of whether her experience really measures up to the claims. On the campaign trail, she brags that she has "35 years of experience"—which suggests that she expects to get credit not only for her time as first lady of the United States but also for her time as first lady of Arkansas, not to mention her time practicing law in Little Rock.

What Clinton doesn't mention is that she has just under eight years of experience in elective office—one more than John Edwards and four fewer than Obama. Being first lady no doubt has some value as preparation for the Oval Office, but no one would suggest that Laura Bush should run for president.

In 1992, of course, Bill Clinton, then a youthful 46, took the view that experience was overrated. He had a point: Richard Nixon was a failure despite years in high office in Washington, while Ronald Reagan was a success even though his entire political resume consisted of two terms as a governor. By the time Clinton completed his presidency, most Democrats would have said he proved that fresh ideas trump establishment credentials.

Over the last 15 years, however, Hillary Clinton has acquired a profound new respect for the value of Washington experience. And one thing that sort of experience teaches you is not to reverse yourself on an important issue, unless you need to.

COPYRIGHT 2007 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.