“John the Careless”

In today’s Post, George Will on “John the Careless.”

From the invasion of Iraq to the selection of Sarah Palin, carelessness has characterized recent episodes of faux conservatism. Tuesday's probable repudiation of the Republican Party will punish characteristics displayed in the campaign's closing days. Some polls show that Palin has become an even heavier weight in John McCain's saddle than his association with George W. Bush. Did McCain, who seems to think that Palin's never having attended a "Georgetown cocktail party" is sufficient qualification for the vice presidency, lift an eyebrow when she said that vice presidents "are in charge of the United States Senate"?

She may have been tailoring her narrative to her audience of third-graders, who do not know that vice presidents have no constitutional function in the Senate other than to cast tie-breaking votes. But does she know that when Lyndon Johnson, transformed by the 1960 election from Senate majority leader into vice president, ventured to the Capitol to attend the Democratic senators' weekly policy luncheon, the new majority leader, Montana's Mike Mansfield, supported by his caucus, barred him because his presence would be a derogation of the Senate's autonomy?

Perhaps Palin's confusion about the office for which she is auditioning comes from listening to its current occupant. Dick Cheney, the foremost practitioner of this administration's constitutional carelessness in aggrandizing executive power, regularly attends the Senate Republicans' Tuesday luncheons. He has said jocularly that he is "a product" of the Senate, which pays his salary, and that he has no "official duties" in the executive branch. His situational constitutionalism has, however, led him to assert, when claiming exemption from a particular executive order, that he is a member of the legislative branch and, when seeking to shield certain of his deliberations from legislative inquiry, to say that he is a member of the executive branch.

Palin may be an inveterate simplifier; McCain has a history of reducing controversies to cartoons. A Republican financial expert recalls attending a dinner with McCain for the purpose of discussing with him domestic and international financial complexities that clearly did not fascinate the senator. As the dinner ended, McCain's question for his briefer was: "So, who is the villain?" McCain revived a familiar villain -- "huge amounts" of political money -- when Barack Obama announced that he had received contributions of $150 million in September. "The dam is broken," said McCain, whose constitutional carelessness involves wanting to multiply impediments to people who want to participate in politics by contributing to candidates -- people such as the 632,000 first-time givers to Obama in September.

Why is it virtuous to erect a dam of laws to impede the flow of contributions by which citizens exercise their First Amendment right to political expression? "We're now going to see," McCain warned, "huge amounts of money coming into political campaigns, and we know history tells us that always leads to scandal." The supposedly inevitable scandal, which supposedly justifies preemptive government restrictions on Americans' freedom to fund the dissemination of political ideas they favor, presumably is that Obama will be pressured to give favors to his September givers. The contributions by the new givers that month averaged $86.

One excellent result of this election cycle is that public financing of presidential campaigns now seems sillier than ever. The public has always disliked it: Voluntary and cost-free participation, using the check-off on the income tax form, peaked at 28.7 percent in 1980 and has sagged to 9.2 percent. The Post, which is melancholy about the system's parlous condition, says there were three reasons for creating public financing: to free candidates from the demands of fundraising, to level the playing field and "to limit the amount of money pouring into presidential campaigns."

The first reason is decreasingly persuasive because fundraising is increasingly easy because of new technologies such as the Internet. The second reason is, the Supreme Court says, constitutionally impermissible. Government may not mandate equality of resources among political competitors who earn different levels of voluntary support.

As for the third reason -- "huge amounts" (McCain) of money "pouring into" (The Post) presidential politics -- well: The Center for Responsive Politics calculates that, by Election Day, $2.4 billion will have been spent on presidential campaigns in the two-year election cycle that began in January 2007, and an additional $2.9 billion will have been spent on 435 House and 35 Senate contests. This $5.3 billion is a billion less than Americans will spend this year on potato chips.

The Temperament of McCain

On the Daily Dish, Andrew Sullivan highlights the final two paragraphs of the recent George Will column on John McCain that raised so many eyebrows.

Will: Conservatives who insist that electing McCain is crucial usually start, and increasingly end, by saying he would make excellent judicial selections. But the more one sees of his impulsive, intensely personal reactions to people and events, the less confidence one has that he would select judges by calm reflection and clear principles, having neither patience nor aptitude for either. It is arguable that, because of his inexperience, Obama is not ready for the presidency. It is arguable that McCain, because of his boiling moralism and bottomless reservoir of certitudes, is not suited to the presidency. Unreadiness can be corrected, although perhaps at great cost, by experience. Can a dismaying temperament be fixed?

Sullivan: We forget that McCain has no executive experience, just as Obama has no executive experience. But in terms of judgment, of selection of a running mate, of calm in crisis, of a smooth operation, it is McCain who is revealing his total inexperience and unreadiness for the job, not Obama. In fact, there is no comparison. One campaign is chaotic, secretive, impulsive, unpredictable and losing. The other is supremely well-run, as transparent as a campaign can be, unflappable, very predictable, and winning. I know which man I'd prefer to be runing the country in a crisis. Not hotheaded, mercurial, impulsive, gambling McCain.

Questions for McCain

In a recent Newsweek column, George Will poses some interesting questions for John McCain.

You say you are not "ready to go to war with Iran," but you also say the "one thing worse" than "exercising the military option" is "a nuclear-armed Iran." Because strenuous diplomacy has not dented Iran's nuclear ambitions, is not a vote for you a vote for war with Iran?

You say that although Russia has blocked "everything we have tried to do" through the United Nations, you are confident that a "league of democracies" that "control so much of the world's economy" can modify the behavior of Iran, which has "a lousy economy." Does that mean war can be avoided only if France, Germany, Japan and China, which have important commercial relations with Iran, impose severe sanctions, and they break Iran's nuclear ambitions?

Your goal in Iraq is "success," which you define as "the establishment of a generally peaceful, stable, prosperous, democratic state." Would a "generally" peaceful, stable, prosperous but authoritarian state be unacceptable? Or a mildly prosperous and "generally" stable state but one with simmering violence—which describes a number of nations today, including Iraq? Does the task of making your four adjectives descriptive of Iraq require and therefore justify more years of military involvement in the suppression of groups that are manifestations of sectarianism, criminality and warlordism? What other nations should we police?

In 1999, during U.S. intervention in the Balkans, you advocated mobilizing infantry and armored divisions to show Serbia's Slobodan Milosevic that there was "no self-imposed limit to our determination to liberate Kosovo from his tyranny." You described your policy as "rogue-state rollback" against those who threaten "our strategic interests and political values." How did Serbia threaten America's strategic interests? Are America's political values threatened by any state that does not practice them? If so, how long is your list of nations eligible for "rogue-state rollback"?

You vow to nominate judges who "take as their sole responsibility the enforcement of laws made by the people's elected representatives." Their sole responsibility? Do you oppose judicial review that invalidates laws that pure-hearted representatives of the saintly people have enacted that happen to violate the Constitution? Does your dogmatic deference to popular sovereignty put you at odds with the first Republican president, who nobly insisted that there are some things the majority should not be permitted to do—hence his opposition to allowing popular sovereignty to determine the status of slavery in the territories? Do you also reject Justice Antonin Scalia's belief that the Constitution's purpose is "to embed certain rights in such a manner that future generations cannot readily take them away"? Does this explain your enthusiasm for McCain-Feingold's restrictions on political speech, and your dismissive reference to, "quote, First Amendment rights"? Would you nominate judges who, because they think those are more than "quote … rights," doubt McCain-Feingold's constitutionality?

You say that even if global warming turns out to be no crisis (the World Meteorological Organization says global temperatures have not risen in a decade), even unnecessary measures taken to combat it will be beneficial because "then all we've done is give our kids a cleaner world." But what of the trillions of dollars those measures will cost in direct expenditures and diminished economic growth—hence diminished medical research, cultural investment, etc.? Given that Earth is always warming or cooling, what is its proper temperature, and how do you know?

You propose a "cap and trade" system to limit the carbon dioxide that many companies can emit. Is not your idea an energy- rationing proposal akin to Bill Clinton's BTU tax?

You say "some greedy people" on Wall Street "perhaps need to be punished." So, government should treat greed as a crime—as punishable? What other departures from virtue deserve punishment? How do you distinguish between greed and the socially useful pursuit of personal gain? Your top 20 contributors include this dozen: Merrill Lynch, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Credit Suisse, Lehman Brothers, Bank of New York Mellon, Morgan Stanley, Wachovia Group, Bridgewater Associates, Blackstone Group and Bear Stearns. Are any contributions from these financial institutions so tainted by greed that you are returning them?

Having raised $95 million in February and March, Barack Obama is reconsidering whether to rely on taxpayer funding in the general election, which would limit him to spending only $84.1 million. You denounce Obama for this, but your adviser Charles Black says, "We could sit down in July or August and say, 'Hey, we're raising a lot of money and maybe we should forgo [taxpayer financing].' We don't have enough data." Really, how does your position differ from Obama's?

More than 90 percent of taxpayers refuse to use the $3 checkoff on their tax forms to fund campaigns—even though doing so would not increase their tax bill. Given such annual landslide "votes" against taxpayer funding, why is relying on it more virtuous than Obama's expected reliance on voluntary contributions from dedicated individuals?

"Iowa's Histrionic Hucksters"

George Will, the Washington Post's conservative sage, wrote a scathing column about the populist rhetoric used by Edwards and Huckabee. Will's best shot was at Huckabee's and Edwards' policy solution to battling the "special interests" that have a stranglehold on our Democracy --

"Although Huckabee and Edwards profess to loathe and vow to change Washington's culture, each would aggravate its toxicity... The way to achieve Edwards' and Huckabee's populist goal of reducing the role of "special interests," meaning money, in government is to reduce the role of government in distributing money. But populists want to sharply increase that role by expanding the regulatory state's reach and enlarging its agenda of determining the distribution of wealth. Populists, who are slow learners, cannot comprehend this iron law: Concentrate power in Washington, and you increase the power of interests whose representatives are concentrated there."

There are other comments worthy of praise. Read it here.