Reason Magazine - Contributors

Republicans and Tax Realities

schapman@tribune.com (Steve Chapman) — Thu, 15 May 2008 12:00:00 EDT

In the 1980s, a Republican House member, fed up with bipartisan efforts to reduce the budget deficit, denounced Republican Sen. Bob Dole as the "tax collector for the welfare state." Newt Gingrich, who later became Speaker, had captured something essential about the party's mood. It was not against the welfare state. It was just against paying for it.

That remains the case today, as John McCain and his supporters make clear. He rules out tax increases to cut the deficit, while vowing to get tough on spending. But the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget says that while his proposals would slow the growth of spending, total outlays would still rise faster than inflation. Result: a larger deficit.

Republicans used to argue that keeping taxes down was the only way to restrain spending. But as taxes have been cut under President Bush, spending has soared by 29 percent (after adjustment for inflation). Meanwhile, a $236 billion budget surplus has morphed into a deficit of more than $400 billion.

If we want to cut federal spending, apparently we have to do it directly. And if we don't want to cut spending, the least we can do is pay for it ourselves instead of running up debts for our children to pay.

But Republicans object to raising taxes in general, and one in particular: the tax on capital gains. Obama's plan to increase the rate applied to the sale of assets has provoked howls of outrage on the right.

McCain said it proves Obama "doesn't understand the economy." An editorial in The Wall Street Journal claimed that lower rates yield higher revenues and drew a damning conclusion: "Either the young Illinois senator is ignorant of this revenue data, or he doesn't really care because he's a true income redistributionist who prefers high tax rates as a matter of ideological dogma regardless of the revenue consequences."

You don't have to be a Democrat to doubt that logic. Conservatives regard Obama as a true-blue liberal who itches to expand the size of the federal government. Do they think he would forfeit money to do that just for spite?

As it happens, Obama is the one who is heeding data rather than ideology. Most economists believe that in the long run, the 2003 cut in the capital gains rate reduced revenue rather than raising it. For that matter, even the Bush administration's budget admits as much. Keeping the rate at 15 percent rather than letting it revert to 20 percent, it estimates, would cause a revenue loss of $79 billion over the next decade.

It's true that rates and revenues may sometimes move in opposite directions. When the rate rose in 1987, capital gains realizations dropped. But there's an obvious explanation for that transitory effect. In 1986, seeing the increase coming, people hurried to cash in capital gains while the rate was low.

It's also true that after the rate fell in 1997, realizations rose. But as University of Michigan economist Joel Slemrod notes, that increase began well before the cut—and they plunged after 2000, without any rate increase. Assessing the last two decades, the Congressional Budget Office reports that any positive effect on realizations is "certainly not large enough to offset the losses from a lower rate."

Sensible people might not mind the lost revenue if the change strengthened the economy. But chances are it does just the opposite, by encouraging taxpayers to jump through hoops to reduce their tax liability.

A low capital gains rate hinders the free market by inducing people (especially very wealthy ones) to find ways to take earnings as capital gains instead of ordinary income. In other words, it encourages them to do things that would not make economic sense otherwise. A modestly higher rate would discourage such wasteful avoidance.

Like all taxes, capital gains taxes are a burden. But given that the federal government spends nearly $3 trillion a year, taxes are a regrettable necessity. When we cut capital gains taxes, we have to raise other taxes to make up the loss. Or we have to borrow more money—which means raising taxes in the future.

Republicans may abhor the obligation of paying for the welfare state they helped preserve. But for the moment, the only real choice is between doing that job better and doing it worse.

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Sailing into a Storm?

schapman@tribune.com (Steve Chapman) — Mon, 12 May 2008 07:00:00 EDT

The last couple of months have been springtime in paradise for Republicans: the loveliest of all possible seasons. They have been watching two Democratic presidential candidates in an endless battle to destroy each other—a process that does not appear to enhance the chance that the eventual nominee will win in November.

A recent Gallup poll shows John McCain leading both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in a head-to-head matchup. All this before Republicans even begin publicizing the worst that can be said about either of two candidates whose alleged defects provide a supremely target-rich environment.

But it's easy to let the individuals involved obscure larger factors that may prove more important. In a hurricane, even handsome, well-built boats can end up underwater. And right now, the GOP looks as though it may be sailing into a perfect storm.

Currently, 69 percent of Americans disapprove of the way President Bush is doing his job. That is the highest disapproval rating since Gallup began polling 70 years ago—higher than Lyndon Johnson during the Vietnam War, Richard Nixon during Watergate, or Jimmy Carter during the Iran hostage crisis.

Today, notes polling expert Karlyn Bowman of the American Enterprise Institute, more Americans think the country is on the wrong track than at any time since the late 1970s—which set the stage for the Republican resurgence of 1980, led by Ronald Reagan. The sentiment is even more negative now than it was in 1992, when the GOP lost the White House. Some 63 percent see the Iraq war as a mistake.

Bush's troubles have sent voters fleeing from his party. In 2004, 47 percent of Americans leaned toward the Democratic Party, with 44 percent leaning Republican—a 3-point difference. Today, it's 51 to 38 in favor of the Democrats—a gap of 13 percentage points.

To win, McCain will have to pry away a lot of voters who currently find the GOP unappealing. Obama (or Clinton), by contrast, will have only to avoid alienating those who are already favorably inclined to a change.

Issue after issue also promises to hurt Republicans. Among the topics creating the most anxiety are the economy, domestic matters like health care and immigration, and Iraq. Of those, immigration is the only one that might not favor the Democrats.

Richard Norton Smith, a historian who has run the presidential libraries of Republicans Herbert Hoover, Dwight Eisenhower, Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan, is pessimistic about the party's prospects. He thinks the correct analogy is not 1988 but 1920 or 1952—when an unpopular war and an equally unpopular president spelled doom for the party in the White House. He thinks 2008 is shaping up not only as a narrow defeat for the GOP but a decisive "repudiation."

Many Republicans see Barack Obama as the natural heir of George McGovern—an antiwar liberal with an avid but narrow base who is perfectly positioned to lose. They are also reminded of Michael Dukakis and his difficulty connecting with white males and working-class voters.

But Smith sees a big difference: In 1988, when Dukakis lost, the outgoing Republican president was popular, with an approval rating above 50 percent. Not so today.

Against trends like this, he strongly doubts that voters will put much weight on factors like Obama's associations with radical preachers or his flag-free lapel. Thanks to the Democratic contest, those matters have been fully aired, without fatal effect, and they are likely to sound stale and irrelevant by November.

In his view, the portents are all ominous for the Republican Party and its nominee. "Why do you think the race started so early? Why do you think turnout has been so high?" he asks. "A desire to put this chapter behind us."

The fallout is already apparent. In recent months, Republicans have lost two special elections to fill seats that had been GOP strongholds. Those shocks prompted former House Speaker Newt Gingrich to warn that come November, his party faces the prospect of "a real disaster."

The bad news for Republicans is that objective factors are conspiring to produce a Democratic victory. The good news? If the Democrats can't win this year, they may never.

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How to Lose a War

schapman@tribune.com (Steve Chapman) — Thu, 08 May 2008 13:00:00 EDT

When it comes to the war in Iraq and other foreign policy issues, Republicans like to harken back to the stalwart presidents of the Cold War. John McCain has invoked Harry Truman and Ronald Reagan as kindred spirits, and so has George W. Bush. Which raises the question: Why do they embrace those leaders while rejecting their policy?

The centerpiece of the U.S. approach to the Soviet Union was captured in a famous 1947 essay by American diplomat George Kennan, who rejected either war or retreat in favor of "a long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies."

Some conservatives, regarding this as appeasement, advocated "rollback" to liberate captive nations from oppression. But even resolute anti-communists like Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon saw the risks and costs were too high. They kept troops to guard Western Europe, built a robust nuclear deterrent and employed prudent measures to block Soviet expansion. That was containment.

But in the months before the Iraq war, it became a dirty word. "Containment is not possible," President Bush insisted, "when unbalanced dictators with weapons of mass destruction can deliver those weapons on missiles or secretly provide them to terrorist allies." The only remedy for such regimes lay in pre-emptive war. McCain agreed, saying the only option in Iraq was "disarmament by regime change."

Amid all the war hysteria, it was easy to forget containment worked against Stalin and Mao -- both unbalanced dictators with nuclear weapons. They were far more formidable tyrants with dreams of world domination. Yet we managed to preserve our security without pre-emptive war.

For that matter, containment had worked against Saddam Hussein. In the 12 years after the first Gulf War, we kept him in a box, where he was no threat to us or his neighbors. In 2002, he even had to accept the return of United Nations weapons inspectors -- who found no weapons of mass destruction because, thanks to our efforts, he had none.

But as Yale foreign policy scholar Ian Shapiro noted in his 2007 book "Containment: Rebuilding a Strategy Against Global Terror" (just published in paperback), the Bush administration was dissatisfied. One reason was its unfounded certitude that Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz also complained that containing Iraq had cost a staggering $30 billion over those 12 years.

Today, that sounds like a bargain. The long-term cost of the Iraq war, according to an estimate by Nobel Laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz, will exceed $3 trillion -- or 100 times the cost lamented by Wolfowitz.
Ronald Reagan took a different approach. In response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, he continued President Carter's covert aid to the rebels, but didn't send American troops. Likewise when a pro-Soviet regime gained power in Nicaragua. The key to containment was finding affordable means to constrain and weaken the enemy, without bleeding ourselves down in wars we didn't have to fight.

Our policy in Iraq has been just the opposite. And Iran could be the next mistake. McCain says Tehran cannot be allowed to acquire nuclear weapons -- which implies he would go to war to prevent it, no matter what the price in blood or treasure.

The claim is that the Iranians are too crazy to be deterred from using nukes against Israel or giving them to terrorist groups to use against us. One common trait of governments and their leaders is an overriding desire to survive. If Iranian nukes are ever used for aggression, the regime can be sure Iran will be, as Hillary Clinton so vividly put it, "obliterated."

Shapiro told me he sees no evidence that Clinton or Barack Obama would return to containment. But the challenges we face are likely to push them toward it. Those dilemmas, after all, have prompted a reconsideration by none other than President Bush.

One member of the Axis of Evil, North Korea, has acquired a nuclear arsenal. Instead of launching a pre-emptive strike, the Bush administration has chosen to 1) live with it if we have to, 2) negotiate with Pyongyang to give it up, and 3) maintain strong defenses in South Korea.

That route is plainly the least bad option toward North Korea. But don't dare call it containment. And don't get the idea it could ever work anywhere else.

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McCain Finds His Own Radical Friend

schapman@tribune.com (Steve Chapman) — Mon, 05 May 2008 07:00:00 EDT

Can a presidential candidate justify a long and friendly relationship with someone who, back in the 1970s, extolled violence and committed crimes in the name of a radical ideology—and who has never shown remorse or admitted error? When the candidate in question is Barack Obama, John McCain says no. But when the candidate in question is John McCain, he's not so sure.

Obama has been justly criticized for his ties to former Weather Underground member Bill Ayers, who in 1995 hosted a campaign event for Obama and in 2001 gave him a $200 contribution. The two have also served together on the board of a foundation. When their connection became known, McCain minced no words: "I think not only a repudiation but an apology for ever having anything to do with an unrepentant terrorist is due the American people."

What McCain didn't mention is that he has his own Bill Ayers—in the form of G. Gordon Liddy. Now a conservative radio talk show host, Liddy spent more than four years in prison for his role in the 1972 Watergate burglary. That was just one element of what Liddy did, and proposed to do, in a secret White House effort to subvert the Constitution. Far from repudiating him, McCain has embraced him.

How close are McCain and Liddy? At least as close as Obama and Ayers appear to be. In 1998, Liddy's home was the site of a McCain fundraiser. Over the years, he has made at least four contributions totaling $5,000 to the senator's campaigns—including $1,000 this year.

Last November, McCain went on his radio show. Liddy greeted him as "an old friend," and McCain sounded like one. "I'm proud of you, I'm proud of your family," he gushed. "It's always a pleasure for me to come on your program, Gordon, and congratulations on your continued success and adherence to the principles and philosophies that keep our nation great."

Which principles would those be? The ones that told Liddy it was fine to break in to the office of the Democratic National Committee to plant bugs and photograph documents? The ones that made him propose to kidnap antiwar activists so they couldn't disrupt the 1972 Republican convention? The ones that inspired him to plan the murder (never carried out) of an unfriendly newspaper columnist?

Liddy was in the thick of the biggest political scandal in American history—and one of the greatest threats to the rule of law. He has said he has no regrets about what he did, insisting that he went to jail as "a prisoner of war."

All this may sound like ancient history. But it's from the same era as the bombings Ayers helped carry out as a member of the Weather Underground. And Liddy's penchant for extreme solutions has not abated.
In 1994, after the disastrous federal raid on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, he gave some advice to his listeners: "Now if the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms comes to disarm you and they are bearing arms, resist them with arms. Go for a head shot; they're going to be wearing bulletproof vests. ... Kill the sons of bitches."

He later backed off, saying he meant merely that people should defend themselves if federal agents came with guns blazing. But his amended guidance was not exactly conciliatory: Liddy also said he should have recommended shots to the groin instead of the head. If that wasn't enough to inflame any nut cases, he mentioned labeling targets "Bill" and "Hillary" when he practiced shooting.

Given Liddy's record, it's hard to see why McCain would touch him with a 10-foot pole. On the contrary, he should be returning his donations and shunning his show. Yet the senator shows no qualms about associating with Liddy—or celebrating his service to their common cause.

How does McCain explain his howling hypocrisy on the subject? He doesn't. I made repeated inquiries to his campaign aides, which they refused to acknowledge, much less answer. On this topic, the pilot of the Straight Talk Express would rather stay parked in the garage.

That's an odd policy for someone who is so forthright about his rival's responsibility. McCain thinks Obama should apologize for associating with a criminal extremist. To which Obama might reply: After you.

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A Better Way to Fight Crime

schapman@tribune.com (Steve Chapman) — Thu, 01 May 2008 07:00:00 EDT

In June 2006, a minor brawl erupted at Ye Olde Six Bells pub in Horley, England. In the aftermath, police arrested Mark Dixie, a chef at the pub, who surprised them by breaking into tears.

He had good reason. As a standard practice in arrests, a DNA swab was taken from him. What the authorities didn't suspect, but he did, is that his DNA would match that of the man who raped and murdered an 18-year-old woman nine months earlier. He was eventually sentenced to life in prison.

This is just one of many cases that have vindicated the use of DNA in cracking crimes. Britain, which now has the world's biggest collection of such profiles, has found it abundantly useful as a law enforcement tool. In a typical month, police get 3,500 matches between samples recovered at crime scenes and DNA profiles in the database.

Now the U.S. government is set to expand its own database to include anyone arrested by federal agents, as well as many foreigners who are detained for one reason or another. It will add more than 1 million samples each year, greatly increasing the chances of getting "cold hits" from crime scenes.

But the expansion alarms some civil liberties advocates, who think it is dangerous to include people who may be innocent. They would prefer to see the files limited to those who have already been convicted of crimes. By that logic, we would throw out the fingerprints of anyone who is arrested but never prosecuted. In reality, we don't. Why? Not because we impute guilt to anyone who is arrested, but because a bigger database is more helpful in solving crimes than a smaller one. And because the only people who stand to be implicated by such information are those who are guilty of later crimes.

We could "protect" innocent arrestees by discarding such helpful identifying information. But we have reached the conclusion that the potential value of preserving it outweighs any burden it places on those who were wrongly arrested.

In some instances, the database can be a boon to the innocent. In 2004, when Chester Turner was implicated in a string of Los Angeles murders through DNA analysis, a man wrongly convicted for three of them was freed from prison.

Opponents of the new system fear that information from the federal bank may someday be used for purposes other than law enforcement—say, screening insurance applicants for certain diseases. But this is a weak excuse for rejecting the administration's proposal.

In the first place, the potential uses of the DNA information kept in databases have been greatly exaggerated. "The profile's not useful for anything much other than identification," says David Kaye, a law and life sciences professor at Arizona State University. "The 'medical' information is, and is likely to remain, no more significant than, say, a blood type."

The actual DNA swabs tell far more. But those are not what goes into the database. The privacy concern is an argument for getting rid of the original samples—not for getting rid of the identifying markers they yield.
Besides, the obvious way to address potential abuses of useful information is by enforcing appropriate rules.

The government might do something alarming with the existing fingerprint files—such as require employers to cross-check prints from all private-sector job applicants. But you don't need to throw out the fingerprints of anyone not convicted to prevent such misuse, as we have found. You can prevent it by not allowing it.

In the case of the DNA database, the looming imposition on the guiltless is minimal. Under the proposed policy, when someone is arrested or detained, his DNA will be taken and a profile included in the federal collection. If he is not convicted, though, that profile will be expunged on his request.

The American Civil Liberties Union thinks the removal should occur automatically. But if keeping the profile is of no concern to the innocent person in question, it's hard to see why it should be of concern to the rest of us. Those who consider it an intolerable invasion of privacy, after all, will avoid it. Those who couldn't care less won't.

DNA analysis is one of the most valuable instruments ever devised for snaring the guilty and exonerating the innocent. This expansion will make it even more potent.

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Clinton's Endearing Fictions

schapman@tribune.com (Steve Chapman) — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 08:00:00 EDT

During the Pennsylvania primary campaign, Barack Obama made a rather charitable gesture not only toward his Democratic rival but toward the presumptive Republican nominee as well. "You have real choice in this election," he told a crowd in Reading. "You know, either Democrat would be better than John McCain, but ... all three of us would be better than George Bush."

That was all it took to set off Hillary Clinton. She rattled off a list of McCain's misguided positions, asking her audience over and over, "Is that better than George Bush?" She concluded, "We need a nominee who will take on John McCain, not cheer on John McCain, and I will be that nominee."

It came as a revelation to hear that Obama, who I thought was plotting to become president, actually has been shrewdly maneuvering himself in position to lead the pom squad at McCain's inauguration. But there was something else that struck me as strange about Clinton's reaction: Obama was not the first of the two Democrats to say something nice about the Arizona senator. He was the second.

A few weeks ago, campaigning in Texas, Clinton sounded downright glowing about McCain. Referring to those 3 a.m. phone calls at the White House, she said, "I think you'll be able to imagine many things Sen. McCain will be able to say. He's never been the president, but he will put forth his lifetime of experience. I will put forth my lifetime of experience. Sen. Obama will put forth a speech he made in 2002."

Let's review. Clinton criticized Obama for ranking McCain No. 3 in a four-person assessment, ahead of Bush. But Clinton herself put McCain No. 2—or maybe even in a tie for No. 1—in her evaluation of the three candidates.

She thinks McCain is better than Obama and McCain is no better than Bush. Which can mean only one thing: Bush is better than Obama!

Of course that's probably not what she actually believes. But it's a tribute to her talent for bold deceit and bizarre logic that she can attack Obama for doing something that she herself had done so recently, and more fervently.

And it brings me to my real revelation about Clinton. In the wake of her Pennsylvania victory, I pondered what it is about her that appeals to so many voters, even when she looks hopelessly out of the race. And I decided only one thing can explain it: A lot of us like our politicians to lie and fudge—the more flagrantly, the better.

Why would that be? For the same reason women enjoy hearing that their eyes are like sapphires and guys like to be told they resemble Greek gods—even when they know full well that the person talking is not being entirely candid. If a politician won't mislead you to get elected, it seems as though he or she doesn't care enough to deserve the office.

Clinton has always been willing to do just about anything to win, which apparently endears her to many voters. Biographer Carl Bernstein, who made his name uncovering President Nixon's monumental dishonesty, judged her guilty of "Jesuitical lying, evasion, and ... stonewalling." The Bosnia sniper tale was unusual only in that her campaign actually admitted that what she said was not, uh, true.

And with Clinton, you get a double dose—one from her and one from her husband. For anyone who's forgotten his memorable performance of 1998 ("I did not have sexual relations with that woman"), he recently provided an encore. He told a radio interviewer that the Obama campaign "played the race card on me." Then, when a reporter asked him about the comment, he replied, "When did I say that and to whom did I say that?" before wagging a finger and insisting, "That's not what I said."

It was a vintage Billary performance. Say something false, then deny you said it, while blaming the person who's telling the truth. It may not be convincing, but it's mighty entertaining.

Some people are of the same mind as the rock band Monday In London, which sings, "Lie to me, baby, and I'll let you get away with it." And if Hillary Clinton gets elected, they are going to have a blissful four years.

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The Cops That Couldn't Shoot Straight

schapman@tribune.com (Steve Chapman) — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 07:00:00 EDT

When a rash of gun murders takes place, it makes sense for the police to do one of two things: renew tactics that have been effective in the past at curbing homicides, or embrace ideas that have not been tried before.

But those options don't appeal to Chicago Police Supt. Jody Weis. What he proposes is a crackdown on assault weapons.

I'm tempted to say this is the moral equivalent of a placebo—a sugar pill that is irrelevant to the malady at hand. But that would be unfair. Placebos, after all, sometimes have a positive effect. Assault weapons bans, not so much.

If there are too many guns in Chicago, it's not because of any statutory oversight. The city has long outlawed the sale and possession of handguns. It also forbids assault weapons. If prohibition were the answer, no one would be asking the question.

The recent spate of killings gives a misleading impression. Since the peak years of the early 1990s, the number of murders in Chicago has fallen by more than half. In the first three months of this year, homicides were down by 1.1 percent. No one would describe the current murder rate as acceptable, but the city has made huge progress.

It has done so despite the alleged problem cited by Weis, which is the availability of guns, and particularly one type of gun. "There are just too many weapons here," he declared at a Sunday news conference. "Why in the world do we allow citizens to own assault rifles?"

Actually, in Chicago "we" don't allow citizens to own assault rifles. Elsewhere they are allowed for the same reason other firearms are permitted. The gun Weis villainized is a type of semiautomatic that has a fearsome military appearance but is functionally identical to many legal sporting arms.

And its bark is worse than its bite. As of March 31, there had been 87 homicides in the city. When I asked the Chicago Police Department how many of the murders are known to have involved assault rifles, the answer came back: one.

As it happens, we already have ample experience with laws against these guns. From 1994 to 2004, their manufacture and sale were banned under federal law. Yet the number of murders committed with rifles and shotguns began falling in 1991, three years before the law was enacted.

It's true that gun homicides also fell while the law was in effect. Does that prove the value of the ban? Not exactly, since stabbing deaths fell even faster, as did murders involving crowbars, baseball bats and other blunt objects. Obviously other factors were behind the improvement.

The irrelevance of the law was plain to see. In 2004, Tom Diaz, an official of the pro-gun control Violence Policy Center, said, "If the existing assault weapons ban expires, I personally do not believe it will make one whit of difference" in curbing gun violence.

No surprise there. Anyone with criminal intent had plenty of deadly options at hand. The so-called assault weapons, contrary to what you might assume, were no more powerful or lethal than other, unbanned guns.

Not only that, but criminals, the people most likely to commit violent crimes, were completely unaffected by the ban—for the simple reason that they are not allowed to buy or own guns of any kind.

As Florida State University criminologist Gary Kleck notes, most criminals arm themselves by stealing guns or buying guns stolen by someone else. So new restrictions don't make much difference to them. The federal ban was a classic illustration of how gun control works. Law-abiding people who rarely misuse their guns were deprived of options. Ex-cons went on as before.

Why wouldn't a gun ban dry up the supply of firearms available to criminals? Three reasons: There are more than 200 million guns in private hands. They have a very long useful life. And it doesn't take many to supply the nation's bad guys with all the ordnance they need.

Gun control hasn't worked as a remedy for crime. So what makes anyone think the answer is more gun control?

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Obama's Favorite Terrorists

schapman@tribune.com (Steve Chapman) — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 07:00:00 EDT

When William F. Buckley Jr. died in February, one of the things widely praised, by liberals and others, was his stalwart insistence on moral hygiene. Even when his conservative movement was small and embattled, he rejected the temptation to join forces with anti-Semites, the John Birch Society and other extremists. Later, he disavowed longtime confederates Pat Buchanan and Joseph Sobran for the sin of bigotry.

Buckley knew the importance of choosing allies carefully. But some people who expect such care from conservatives don't practice it themselves.

Among many liberals, extremism in the defense of "social justice" is no vice. When the folk singer Pete Seeger got a medal by President Clinton, no one cared that he was a veteran apologist for Stalin who still regarded himself as a communist. That indifference betrayed a double standard that conscientious liberals should reject.

By that standard, Barack Obama is a liberal, but not a conscientious one. I don't much care if he declines to wear a flag pin; I can overlook his wife's limited capacity for patriotic pride; and I defended his relationship with his former pastor. But his comfortable association with an unrepentant former terrorist should induce queasiness in anyone who shares the humane values that Obama extols.

When the issue came up in Wednesday's Democratic debate, the Illinois senator tried to duck it. "This is a guy who lives in my neighborhood, who's a professor of English in Chicago, who I know and who I have not received some official endorsement from," he said. He added that to suggest "knowing somebody who engaged in detestable acts 40 years ago, when I was 8 years old, somehow reflects on me and my values doesn't make much sense."

Obama went on, "I'm also friendly with Tom Coburn, one of the most conservative Republicans in the United States Senate, who during his campaign once said that it might be appropriate to apply the death penalty to those who carried out abortions. Do I need to apologize for Mr. Coburn's statements?"

This exercise in moral equivalence is unconvincing, if not dishonest. Would Obama be friendly with someone who actually bombed abortion clinics and defends that conduct? Not likely. But he is friendly with William Ayers, a leader of the radical Weather Underground, which in the 1970s carried out numerous bombings, including one inside the U.S. Capitol. (Though the last person who should object is Hillary Clinton, whose husband pardoned two Weather Underground members.)

Obama minimized his relationship by acknowledging only that he knows Ayers. But they have quite a bit more of a connection than that. He's appeared on panels with Ayers, served on a foundation board with him and held a 1995 campaign event at the home of Ayers and his wife, fellow terrorist Bernardine Dohrn. Ayers even gave money to one of his campaigns.

It's not as though Ayers and Dohrn have denied or repudiated their crimes. After emerging from years in hiding, they escaped federal prosecution because of government misconduct in gathering evidence, but they don't pretend they were innocent. In 2001, Ayers said, "I don't regret setting bombs. I feel we didn't do enough."

Dohrn has likewise rationalized the explosions, claiming that "our acts of resistance were tiny and symbolic." She even went to prison for refusing to testify about an armored car robbery involving her confederates. That crime was not tiny or symbolic to the two police officers or the security guard who were shot to death in the process.

All this is public record, and Barack Obama would have to be in a coma not to know it. Yet he showed no qualms about consorting with Ayers and Dohrn.

It's hard to imagine he would be so indulgent if we learned that John McCain had a long association with a former Klansman who used to terrorize African-Americans. Obama's conduct exposes a moral blind spot about these onetime terrorists, who get a pass because they a) fall on the left end of the spectrum and b) haven't planted any bombs lately.

You can tell a lot about someone from his choice of friends. What this friendship reveals is that when it comes to practicing sound moral hygiene, Obama has work to do and no interest in doing it.

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Springtime for Stupid Ideas

schapman@tribune.com (Steve Chapman) — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 07:00:00 EDT

In the realm of energy policy, there are a great many bad ideas and a very few good ones. The usual practice of presidential candidates is to 1) sift through all these proposals, 2) separate the wheat from the chaff, and 3) keep the chaff.

This year, the two parties are competing to show who is most eager to discard sound economics and long-term prudence in favor of appeasing aggrieved motorists. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are pandering with a proposal to punish oil companies with a windfall profits tax. John McCain has targeted the same group by urging a federal gas tax holiday from Memorial Day to Labor Day.

What motivates them is high pump prices, which are at odds with the popular view of cheap gasoline as a national birthright. One common defect of the candidates' measures, though, is that they would not actually reduce prices.

The Democratic option rests on the unshakable belief that Big Oil is guilty of chronic profiteering at public expense. In fact, from 1987 through 2006, oil and gas companies did worse than other industrial companies on return on investment in all but four years.

When the price of gasoline is high, drivers notice. But when it's low, as it has been for most of the period since 1982, everyone takes it for granted.

No idea can be definitively judged until it has been tried, which makes the Obama-Clinton approach particularly hard to defend. Congress, you see, enacted a windfall profits tax on oil back during the Carter administration. You would think Democrats would not want to remind voters of that president or embrace his errors, but you would be wrong.

By almost any standard, the last windfall profits tax was self-defeating. According to a 2006 study by the Congressional Research Service, it generated less than one-fourth of the revenues that were expected. Worse yet, it reduced domestic oil production by as much as 8 percent.

Obama has yet to provide details of his plan. Under Clinton's version, if a company's profits rose above a specified level, the government would take 50 percent of the "windfall"—in addition to what it reaps from the existing corporate income tax, which tops out at 35 percent.

The expropriation would deter investment in exploration and drilling by reducing the potential payoff. It would depress the supply of oil over the long run, which would push prices up, not down. Punishing Big Oil would mean hurting ourselves.

McCain avoids this error in favor of a different one. He wants to stop collecting federal gas taxes for three months, which he says "will be an immediate economic stimulus—taking a few dollars off the price of a tank of gas." It sounds like a simple, sure remedy, and it is simple and sure. It's just not a remedy.

As energy analyst Jerry Taylor of the Cato Institute points out, prices are now at the level required to balance supply and demand. Cut prices by the amount of the gas tax, and consumption will rise, pushing prices back up. So drivers would get no holiday, and the economy would get no stimulus.

About the only effect would be to "transfer money from the federal government to the oil companies," says Taylor. If the oil companies don't deserve a windfall profits tax, neither do they deserve an additional windfall. The gas tax hiatus would also enlarge the federal deficit, since McCain would take general revenues to make up the loss to the highway trust fund—and at the moment, there aren't any extra revenues waiting to be spent.

Besides proposing useless or damaging ideas, the candidates have also passed up the single best idea for energy policy: a carbon tax that would curb use of fuels that release greenhouse gases, while encouraging development of clean alternatives. Better yet would be a carbon tax whose revenues go to cut payroll taxes for Social Security and Medicare, rewarding work without raising the deficit.

It's a win-win concept with wide support among economists, but almost none among politicians. That's the nature of energy policy in an election year: Any bad idea may be adopted, while the good ones remain orphans.

COPYRIGHT 2008 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

You're Stranded? You're Welcome.

schapman@tribune.com (Steve Chapman) — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 07:00:00 EDT

The government crackdown on airlines over alleged safety lapses fits a familiar storyline: Conscientious regulators saving the public from heartless corporations that put lives at risk to fatten profits. It's a tale that would be perfect for a movie—since movies are famous for taking liberties with the truth.

In real life, this story may not have a happy ending. By forcing the cancellation of thousands of flights, the Federal Aviation Administration most likely did not prevent fatalities but caused them.

Commercial aviation, after all, is by far the safest form of travel. When people can't fly, many will drive. When they take to the road, they're at greater risk of ending up in the morgue. This is the law of unintended consequences with a vengeance.

What was the basis for the FAA's fateful action? Last month it slapped Southwest Airlines with $10 million in fines for flying planes that hadn't been inspected. Then American Airlines and other carriers scrubbed flights using MD-80 jets after the FAA took issue with how they secured certain wires in the wheel wells.

The agency said the wires have to be an inch apart, rather than the inch and a quarter American believed was sufficient. Executive Vice President Dan Garton said diplomatically that the FAA action suggests "a focus on extraordinarily strict adherence to specifics" that was not present in the past.

The FAA was embarrassed by the Southwest episode, which drew charges of dereliction from Capitol Hill, and it reacted with an uncharacteristic display of toughness on an old directive.

As The Washington Post reported, industry officials said that in the past, "the agency would probably have allowed the carrier to make the fixes over a period of days or weeks. They noted that the 2006 directive on the MD-80 wiring gave airlines 18 months to comply. That means that regulators, while concerned about the wiring, didn't believe that making the changes was a pressing safety matter."

But all of a sudden it became one, and the result was some 250,000 stranded travelers. The mass inconvenience would be justified if it meant saving even one or two lives. But unnoticed in the furor is that during all the time these carriers were doing something supposedly dangerous, it didn't cause any accidents. The carriers' definition of "safe" seems to have been vindicated.

That should come as no shock. As a rule, it makes sense to assume the industry puts great emphasis on safety. Aircraft manufacturers have a huge stake in producing safe vehicles, and airlines have powerful incentives not to crash those planes.

A carrier that truly shortchanges safety is not only risking the obvious loss of valuable equipment, hard-to-replace employees and loyal customers, but putting itself in danger of extinction. Get a reputation for recklessness, and travelers will flee your airline like the Titanic.

If greed were truly grounds to dispense with caution, the nation's tarmacs would be littered with corpses. Since 2001, the industry has lost some $27 billion—inspiring investor Warren Buffett to say that if there had been a far-sighted capitalist watching at Kitty Hawk, he would have shot the Wright brothers' plane down. If there was ever an industry that might be driven to desperate measures, this is it.

Yet as airline finances have suffered, safety has prospered. Just in the last decade, the fatality rate has plunged by 82 percent. Last year there was not a single death stemming from accidents involving scheduled carriers. The decline has occurred even as the number of planes and people in the air has greatly increased.
It's hard to believe this improvement stems from the stern vigilance of federal regulators. In the first place, Congress now tells us that, actually, regulation hasn't been nearly vigilant enough.

In the second, it's far-fetched to think that, in a business where there are nearly 27,000 flights per day, the FAA can prevent a reprobate carrier from cheating if it really wants to. The agency simply doesn't have enough personnel to monitor everything that could go wrong.

It may come as a surprise that the traveling public has to rely chiefly on the self-interest of airlines to keep their planes in one piece. But guess what? It works.

COPYRIGHT 2008 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

Patience is Not a Policy

schapman@tribune.com (Steve Chapman) — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 07:00:00 EDT

When he was the Democratic leader in the Senate, George Mitchell ruefully reflected that his job had given him "the best-developed patience muscle in Washington." The war in Iraq has done similar things for the rest of us. But the strengthening program is by no means done. Gen. David Petraeus was on Capitol Hill this week explaining why we need to keep on exercising forbearance, and keep on, and keep on.

By his reckoning, and that of Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, the administration's policy of escalation has been a success. Violence has come down, political reconciliation is underway, and the Iraqi government is showing more initiative. Heck, Crocker marveled, you even see the newly designed Iraqi flag in all parts of the country, not just some.

We poured in more troops, we accomplished what we set out to do, and now we can start bringing our troops home—which, after all, was the whole point of the surge announced by President Bush 15 months ago. Right? Wrong. It turns out that we have accomplished only enough to allow us to remain in Iraq indefinitely with more forces than we had when the surge began.

Where is Goldilocks when we need her? According to the administration, the circumstances for leaving are always too hot or too cold, but never just right. Petraeus thinks withdrawals should cease in July, at which time there will still be 140,000 American troops in Iraq—compared to about 132,000 when Bush embarked on this course.

The end of the drawdown is commonly referred to as a "pause" but it looks more like a full stop. Petraeus is not willing to commit to reduce troop strength even by September, more than a year and a half after the escalation began. "Withdrawing too many forces too quickly," he insists, "could jeopardize the progress of the past year." All he offers come September—grudgingly—is a promise to "commence a process of assessment" to see if he might be willing to trim the numbers just a bit.

What this illustrates is that no matter what happens in Iraq, the Bush policy is always the same: stay the course. Says Brookings Institution national security analyst Ivo Daalder, "First we couldn't withdraw because things were bad. Then we couldn't withdraw because things were getting better. Now we can't withdraw because things might get worse."

No one in the administration camp is willing to reject an open-ended commitment. Supporters of John McCain complain Democrats have distorted his declaration that he would be willing to stay in Iraq 100 years—since he said that "would be fine with me" only "as long as Americans are not being injured or harmed or wounded or killed."

Fair enough. So how long would he be willing to stay as long as Americans are being injured, harmed, wounded and killed? Apparently he is not willing to put any expiration date on our obligation. Sound policy, he told a Veterans of Foreign Wars audience in Kansas City this week, "will require that we keep a sufficient level of American forces in Iraq until security conditions are such that our commanders on the ground recommend otherwise."

Well, suppose security conditions never reach the desired point—which, judging from the recent eruption of violence, is entirely possible. Then what? McCain offers no option except continuing the fight—no matter how long it takes, no matter how bloody it is, no matter the long-term damage to the Army, no matter how slow the political progress, no matter how much it costs.

His Democratic rivals propose to begin a deliberate, phased withdrawal in 2009. To let this war go on for six full years before we finally begin turning it over to the Iraqis suggests, if anything, an excess of patience. Yet McCain portrays such talk as "reckless and irresponsible."

If so, that's only because the surge has yet to produce the dramatic overall progress that its supporters envisioned at the start. Petraeus says we have to stay because the gains are "fragile and reversible." And he acknowledged, "We haven't turned any corners. We haven't seen any lights at the end of the tunnel."

We may never. In that case, McCain and his allies are prepared to keep stumbling through the dark.

COPYRIGHT 2008 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

Validating Foreign Policy Folly

schapman@tribune.com (Steve Chapman) — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 07:00:00 EDT

It's an election year in wartime, and right now we seem to be having a real debate about American foreign policy. All three of the remaining contenders have been talking about Iraq for months, all have been touting their credentials to be commander in chief, and all have given major speeches mapping out their views.

But don't be misled. Instead of a real debate, we're having a make-believe one. The make-believe is the suggestion that there are clear, profound differences among the candidates. In reality, they represent a range that, on a color palette, would range not from red to blue but from cream to taupe.

It's true they have staked out distinctive positions on the Iraq war. John McCain was for it at the beginning and always will be. Barack Obama was against it from the start and hasn't budged. Hillary Clinton voted to authorize it but now wants to get out. They have also bickered over issues such as whether to negotiate with dictators and whether to go into Pakistan after Osama bin Laden.

Those disagreements are not trivial. It's safe to say a Democratic president would handle Iraq differently than a Republican one. But it's worth remembering what helped to get us into Iraq: a bipartisan consensus on foreign policy that favors U.S. military intervention abroad whenever we may be able to accomplish something that looks appealing. That was our national approach under the past three presidents, and it's a safe bet it will be our approach under the next one.

During the early 1990s, McCain was wary of the use of American military power. But he supported sending American peacekeeping forces to Bosnia in 1995. When a civil war erupted in Kosovo in 1999, he became a fervent voice for using American bombers and even ground troops against Yugoslavia—this when House Republicans were voting against giving President Clinton authority to go to war.

Soon after, McCain was urging a "rogue state rollback" policy. "We must be prepared," he said, to apply "military force when the continued existence of such rogue states threatens America's interests and values." Hmm. Whatever happened to that idea?

McCain's positions bear an eerie resemblance to those of Hillary Clinton, who vigorously favored her husband's decision to act in the Balkans. "I urged him to bomb," she said later. "You cannot let this go on at the end of a century that has seen the major holocaust of our time."

Her impulse to improve the world at the point of a gun was also on display in the run-up to the Iraq invasion. Besides supporting the war resolution, Clinton often sounded like a crusading neoconservative, envisioning that Iraq would be a "model for other Middle Eastern countries" that would "shake the foundations of autocracy."

If Barack Obama is averse to fighting wars to spread democracy or to advance other noble purposes, he hasn't let on. He claims the United States has a "moral obligation" to act against "genocide" in Darfur, and he supports sending NATO forces to stop the bloodshed. One of his chief foreign policy advisers—until she resigned over calling Clinton a "monster"—was Samantha Power, a self-described "humanitarian hawk," who excoriated Bill Clinton for ruling out U.S. military action in Rwanda in 1994.

In a recent speech, Obama rejected the idea of cutting back our expansive role in the world. "We can choose the path of disengagment," he scoffed, "and cede our leadership."

Attitudes like that got us involved in the Balkans, where we had no national interest at stake; in Somalia, where we found ourselves fighting a war we didn't anticipate; and in Haiti, where our good intentions accomplished very little. Iraq, where conservatives turned idealistic liberal ideas to their own ends, was the ruinous culmination of that approach.

If there has been a flaw in U.S. foreign policy in recent years, it has not been an excess of disengagement, but the opposite: an irrepressible urge to use force for purposes that do not enhance our security but expose us to needless risk. The result has been that we find ourselves with more enemies, weakened influence, higher costs, greater strains on our military and less safety.

After the Iraq debacle, you would think our leaders would be willing to undertake a fundamental examination of the long-established and broad-based folly that made it possible. Not a chance.

COPYRIGHT 2008 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

No Judgment? No Problem!

schapman@tribune.com (Steve Chapman) — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 07:00:00 EDT

Democracy does not cultivate a taste for deferred gratification: Politicians eyeing the next election want to give people what they want sooner rather than later. And in a time of economic turmoil, the impulse to do something immediately is even stronger. But the haste is misplaced. In the current climate of panic, policymakers need to learn patience, and they need to learn it right now.

A couple of alleged crises are getting all the attention at the moment. The first is the risk of a recession. The second, not unrelated, is the mortgage meltdown and the credit crunch it has helped to bring about. Just about everyone in Washington agrees that swift action is needed on both.

The scenario brings to mind what the late Ohio State football coach Woody Hayes said about throwing the football: Three things can happen, and two of them are bad. Efforts to micromanage the macroeconomy may be useless, or they may be destructive. In either case, they can impede a painful process that is needed to correct mistakes like the housing bubble.

For all the alarms about a repeat of the Great Depression, it's not a sure thing we'll even have a recession, much less a serious one. A recession is technically defined as two consecutive quarters of negative economic growth—meaning total output actually declines. A recent Wall Street Journal survey of 51 economists, however, found that, on average, they expect not shrinkage but very slow growth in the first and second quarters.

One economist interviewed by the Journal suggested that "there might not be even one negative quarter in this recession"—which is the equivalent of a damp drought. Herbert Hoover should have had such problems.

But let's suppose we face a real downturn. If the federal government can do anything to goose growth, it's already doing it. The Federal Reserve has slashed interest rates since last summer, and the Treasury is about to start sending tax rebates to 130 million families, who are supposed to rush out and spend it in a flurry of economic stimulus.

It may not work, but we may never know—since even if it doesn't, the economy will do what it normally does in a recession, which is to ultimately right itself. But the economic stimulus is no longer such an appealing option for Congress and the president, because it has already been done and therefore can't be done now, which is when they want to be doing something.

Fortunately, the mortgage mess is an excuse for additional intervention, which they can justify in the name of helping homeowners as well as the economy. As it happens, though, an effort to rescue people who can't pay their mortgages will probably make a bad thing worse.

In the first place, it will slow down what has to happen to bring back the housing sector—which is for prices to drop to a level that will clear out the existing oversupply. In the second, it will shift the burden of bad lending and borrowing decisions from the people who benefited from them to the people who didn't.

Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., is pushing a bill to let the Federal Housing Administration guarantee "at risk" mortgages if lenders agree to reduce the total debt. It might be callous of me to say this approach amounts to rescuing "people who were imprudent and bought more house than they should have." But I didn't say it. Barney Frank did.

If the FHA guarantees all these mortgages—up to $300 billion worth, if Frank has his way—it will be putting its trust in people who have already shown themselves to be a bad bet. So taxpayers could end up eating a lot of delinquent loans.

The mortgage problem has had the useful effect of forcing financial institutions to exercise greater care in scrutinizing their customers. A lot of the credit crunch is not a bad thing but a good thing, reflecting a tightening of standards that got way too loose. A bailout, by contrast, can only weaken the lesson we should all learn from this episode.

Acting in a hurry without considering the long-term consequences, you may recall, is how we got into this predicament. Fixing major mistakes is not an overnight task. But in time, foreclosures will subside, the housing sector will return to normal and the economy will regain its usual vigor. Here's what Washington should do to help: Let them.

COPYRIGHT 2008 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

You Can't Always Believe Your Eyes

schapman@tribune.com (Steve Chapman) — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 07:00:00 EDT

Editor's Note: Steve Chapman is on vacation. The following column was originally published in February 2005.

In September 1985, Dennis Brown heard the words that sent him to prison for rape. The victim took the stand and had no doubt who had attacked her. "I had his face this close for at least 20 minutes," she said, holding her hand inches from her face, "and he's the man." Brown was convicted of aggravated rape and sentenced to life without parole.

But in October 2004, the 36-year-old Brown walked out of the Louisiana State Prison in Angola, having been exonerated by DNA evidence. Prosecutors dropped the charges. After being locked up for 19 years, more than half his life, an innocent man was free.

Like many people in his ill-starred position, Brown was snared by a mistaken identification. The victim picked him out of a police lineup, and her testimony provided the bulk of the evidence against him.

His case illustrates the dangers of relying on what used to be seen as the best kind of evidence—a person who was present at the scene of the crime who can attest, "I saw him do it." Time and again, thanks to DNA evidence, we've seen that a victim can be absolutely sure in identifying her attacker—and be absolutely wrong. Amy Klobuchar, prosecutor for Hennepin County, Minn., which includes Minneapolis, says faulty identifications are "the single most common error" generating bad convictions. [Ed—Klobuchar vacated this position in 2006 when she was elected to the U.S. Senate.]

What is most disturbing is that the mistakes we know about represent only a tiny share of the total. Most of the exonerations involve rapes—where DNA can definitively establish the perpetrator. But police rarely find bodily fluids in robberies, muggings, burglaries and other far more common crimes. So if someone tabs an innocent person, the innocent person probably won't ever be cleared.

Many of the mistakes occur during police lineups, where witnesses try to pick out the perpetrator from a group of people or pictures. Experiments have shown that when confronted with several possible suspects at once (a "simultaneous" lineup), the witness is prone to choose whoever most resembles the actual criminal - even if the actual criminal is absent. Presenting the choices one at a time (a "sequential" lineup) is more likely to yield a correct identification.

In 2001, the New Jersey attorney general required all police departments to change the way they handle lineups to prevent errors. The change that got the most attention was the adoption of sequential lineups. But Gary Wells, a psychology professor at Iowa State University who has been the chief pioneer in studying eyewitness identification, says that was not the most important reform. Even more critical was the use of "double-blind" testing—where the police officer conducting the lineup doesn't know which of the people is thought to be the guilty party.

Why does it matter? Because an officer can consciously or unconsciously steer a witness. In 2005, Wells, speaking at a Minneapolis conference on wrongful convictions, said that when a witness chooses the "wrong" suspect, the lineup administrator may say, "Are you sure?" or "Take another look at No. 3." But when the witness chooses the right suspect, the response may be, "Tell me about him."

Sometimes the police buttress the witness's memory by saying something like, "You got the right one." In an armed robbery in Iowa, Wells recalls, the victim was asked in the trial how detectives responded when she chose the defendant's photo. "They clapped," she said.

Normally, the cops aren't trying to manipulate the witness; they're just being human. But occasionally, the tilt is intentional. In 2002, the city of Chicago was ordered to pay $15 million to James Newsome because two detectives had rigged the lineup in which he was identified, leading to his mistaken conviction for murder. One witness said he was repeatedly told to look at Newsome. Newsome said he saw one detective point him out to another witness.

Problems like these can be avoided—by turning the lineup over to someone who knows nothing about the case, or by presenting the photos so the administrator can't see them, perhaps on a computer. Such changes have worked well in New Jersey, where 91 percent of respondents to a statewide survey of law enforcement agencies said the new methods created no major problems.

Eyewitness testimony can be extremely useful in catching criminals, but it needs safeguards to make sure it doesn't nab the innocent. After all the wrongful convictions in recent years, no one should have trouble seeing that.

The News Media vs. the Innocent

schapman@tribune.com (Steve Chapman) — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 07:00:00 EDT

Years ago, Ray Donovan, Ronald Reagan's Labor Secretary, was prosecuted for corruption, only to be acquitted. After the verdict, Donovan asked plaintively, "Which office do I go to to get my reputation back?"

Steven Hatfill knows where to go to get his reputation back. But upon arriving there, he finds the door blocked by someone who says her privileges are more important than his good name. That someone, of course, is a journalist. And, not surprisingly, she enjoys the broad support of other journalists, who have proved to be slow learners about the obligations they share with their fellow citizens.

Hatfill was a casualty of the anthrax scare of 2001. Just after the 9/11 attacks, someone mailed letters containing anthrax spores to several news organizations and a pair of U.S. senators. Some 22 people were infected, and five died. In the aftermath, the Justice Department labeled Hatfill, who had done research on biological warfare for the army, a "person of interest." Secret information leaked to the press suggested he was the terrorist behind the attacks.

But the suspicions were wrong. Hatfill asserted his innocence, and he was never charged in the case. He sued the government, The New York Times and others for damages. Federal Judge Reggie Walton concluded that the claims have "destroyed his life" even though "there's not a scintilla of evidence to suggest Dr. Hatfill had anything to do with" the anthrax attacks.

Years later, Hatfill is still awaiting vindication. Last week, he inched closer when the judge ordered Toni Locy, a former USA Today reporter, to disclose her sources about Hatfill—or else face fines of up to $5,000 a day for contempt. A host of news organizations, including Tribune Co., filed a friend-of-the-court brief urging that she be spared from providing evidence.

Here we find ourselves on depressingly familiar ground. Back in 2005, Times reporter Judith Miller refused to say who told her that Valerie Plame was a CIA agent. She went to jail for contempt before finally acknowledging it was vice presidential aide Lewis "Scooter" Libby.

Five reporters didn't want to reveal their sources about Los Alamos nuclear scientist Wen Ho Lee, who was tarred for alleged espionage but convicted only of a single minor count of mishandling classified data. Their demands got nowhere, forcing their employers to reach a costly settlement with Lee.

The news media keep losing these cases, yet journalists and their attorneys refuse to recognize reality. They continue to insist on their right to keep evidence of wrongdoing and lawbreaking from the courts, no matter what the collateral damage.

Locy reported on the suspicions about Hatfill based on interviews with confidential sources in the Justice Department and the FBI, who may have violated federal law in leaking information about him. Since she discarded her notes and says she can't remember which of 10 people told her about Hatfill, the judge says she has to turn over the names of all 10 so Hatfill's lawyers can question them.

Judge Walton found that the identity of her sources "goes to the heart" of his case, and that there is no other way he can get the information. Without Locy's testimony, the damage done to Hatfill would go unpunished and unrepaired.

The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and its allies also think the $5,000-a-day fine, which the judge says she must pay herself, is outrageously excessive. But the point of such fines is not to accommodate the financial resources of the person who is defying the law—it's to force her to comply, in the interests of justice.

Justice should not be at odds with the job of the news media. But in this instance, it is. University of Chicago law professor Geoffrey Stone, one of the premier experts on the First Amendment, thinks the press has overstepped. "It's important to remember here," he told me, "that these sources were not blowing the whistle on government wrongdoing but were allegedly doing something wrong in revealing the information about the identity of the suspect."

Journalists and citizens may disagree on the proper role of the news media in a free society. But when the press finds itself protecting the guilty at the expense of the innocent, it's made a wrong turn somewhere.

COPYRIGHT 2008 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

The Wright-Obama Divide

schapman@tribune.com (Steve Chapman) — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 07:00:00 EDT

The important thing about Jeremiah Wright, the inflammatory former pastor of Barack Obama's church, is not that he thinks America is "controlled by rich white people," that the 9/11 terrorist attacks were the result of our "chickens are coming home to roost," or that God should "damn America" for its sins against blacks. It's that Wright is supporting a presidential candidate who clearly believes none of these things, but instead puts his faith in what Lincoln called "the better angels of our nature."

It's as if the Minuteman Project were to endorse a candidate who favors more Hispanic immigration. Wright has gotten behind a leader whose success badly undercuts the pastor's belief in the irredeemability of America.

That is a good thing. If there are people, black or white, who hold such a bitter, distorted view of this country, it's reassuring that the most congenial political figure they can find is one who radiates—in fact, embodies—our national faith in freedom and progress.

Wright apparently sees this nation as defective and divided beyond repair. Obama thinks the defects are only a part of the story, and that a unity transcending ancient racial distrusts is achievable.

What has fueled his candidacy is neither black anger nor white guilt, but a desire by people of different complexions to minimize the role of race in our society. In his book, A Bound Man, Hoover Institution scholar Shelby Steele writes that Obama is "a living rebuke to both racism and racialism, to both segregation and identity politics... [H]e also embodies a great and noble human aspiration: to smother racial power in a democracy of individuals."

If the pastor truly believed his more vitriolic comments, he would have no choice but to treat Obama as a fool for aspiring to the presidency. Instead, Wright has been forced to entertain the notion that white people would choose a black male for the most powerful office on Earth.

When Ronald Reagan ran for governor of California in 1966, liberals attacked him for getting support from members of the ultra-conservative John Birch Society, which regarded Dwight Eisenhower as a Communist agent. Reagan responded, "If anyone chooses to vote for me, they are buying my views. I am not buying theirs."

His career illustrates that political shrewdness often requires attracting not only savory but unsavory people to a cause. When he ran for president, he was criticized for tossing the occasional bone to racist white Southerners by endorsing "state's rights." But by appealing to many of those who had once supported the venomous white supremacist George Wallace, Reagan helped defang those forces, while advancing his own political agenda.

George W. Bush followed a similar route in 2000 by speaking at Bob Jones University, which had lost its federal tax exemption for banning interracial dating and whose founder once called Bush's father a "devil." Being politicians, Reagan and Bush found ways to lure in bigots at little cost, while rejecting their most cherished beliefs.

Obama likewise hopes to co-opt black radicals, whose convictions will be sorely tested if he wins the presidency. A candidate should not be condemned if he or she can persuade extremists to support a campaign that offers no extreme positions but many sensible ones.

In this case, of course, the complaint is that Obama doesn't merely accept Wright's support but that he joined his church and remained there. Why didn't he leave? One reason, as Obama said in his speech, is that the outrageous statements are only a small part of what he knows about the man, and that Wright's spiritual guidance and the church's vital missions in the community were far more important.

Anyone choosing a church has to accept its flaws, which can be considerable. Good churches and good pastors can be hard to find, and perfect ones impossible. I suspect Obama figured that if Trinity United Church of Christ excelled in its most important functions, he could put up with some foolishness in the peripheral area of politics—something lots of white churchgoers are accustomed to doing.

What is crucial, though, is Obama simply can't accept the view he heard expressed from the pulpit that America is an evil, oppressive, racist society. Come November, Wright may have serious grounds for doubt as well.

COPYRIGHT 2008 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

Why Would Any President Want A Second Term?

schapman@tribune.com (Steve Chapman) — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 12:00:00 EDT

Editor's Note: Steve Chapman is on vacation. The following column was originally published in April 2004.

Calvin Coolidge was probably not the smartest president this country has ever had, but he once composed a statement that in retrospect can only be described as brilliant: "I do not choose to run for president in 1928." If he had been re-elected, he would have presided over the Crash of 1929, to his eternal discredit. Instead, the shantytowns of jobless people that sprung up during the Great Depression were called, in honor of his unlucky successor, Hoovervilles.

But presidents refuse to learn from Coolidge's example. About the only thing that can prevent a president from running for re-election is the certainty of losing. George W. Bush was the latest to put in his bid for a second term, even though making a second term successful is about as easy as making a souffle rise twice.

The thinking among politicians and historians is that two terms are required to vault a chief executive from the ranks of the good presidents to the ranks of the greats. But re-election is also a good way to go from good to terrible. Few presidents have enhanced their stature in their second term, and many have blown their reputations to bits.

Bill Clinton would be remembered with far less controversy had he stepped down in 1996, with the nation at peace, the economy healthy and the federal budget deficit well on the way to erasure. Instead, he stuck around for the pleasure of having his sex life dissected in public and becoming the second president ever to be impeached.

Disgrace is a recurring theme of second terms. Ronald Reagan achieved the bulk of his economic program and defense buildup in his first four years, leaving much of his remaining time for the Iran-contra scandal—which involved the secret sale of weapons to Iran, with the proceeds going to rebels fighting the Marxist government of Nicaragua.

Richard Nixon, of course, had Watergate—which erupted because his aides mounted a break-in at the Democratic National Committee office in a crazed effort to ensure his, yes, re-election. He found that winning a second term doesn't guarantee you'll complete it.

But even presidents who don't embarrass themselves rarely do much to distinguish themselves, either. Dwight Eisenhower's first term gave him the opportunity to end the Korean War. His second term allowed him to enjoy a recession, the launch of the Soviet satellite Sputnik and a scandal involving his chief of staff.

Franklin Roosevelt is remembered as a great president today not so much because of what he accomplished in his second term, which featured an economic downturn and his Court-packing debacle, but what he accomplished in his third and fourth—reviving the economy and winning World War II. But presidents may no longer be elected to more than two terms.

Anyone presuming to hang around for that long can expect voter affection to cool. As presidential historian Richard Norton Smith asks, "How many TV sitcoms last eight years?" When someone invades your living room for nearly 3,000 days in a row, you're likely to forget why you ever liked him, assuming you're one of those who did like him.

Long-serving presidents face other traps. One is that they rarely have any particular vision for their second term. They ask to be re-elected mainly to complete the goals they've already begun, which often begin to look tired and irrelevant after five or six years.

That contributes to another obstacle, in the form of Congress. Midterm elections in the second term generally bring big losses for the incumbent president's party, which means the final two years are often devoted to fruitless bickering between the executive and legislative branches.

Meanwhile, notes Brookings Institution scholar Stephen Hess, presidents find that most of the trusted aides they brought to Washington are gone or on their way out. At Cabinet and White House meetings, says Hess, "They look around and they ask, 'Who are these people?'" Those few who stay may be mentally and physically exhausted long before they're done, and their boss may end up phoning it in as well.

There's something to be said for leaving too early rather than too late. But it's a rare president who has the wisdom of stripper Gypsy Rose Lee's mother in the musical "Gypsy." Her advice to her daughter: "Make them beg for more—and then don't give it to them."

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Fiscal War, AWOL Candidates

schapman@tribune.com (Steve Chapman) — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 07:00:00 EDT

For some time now, the three presidential candidates have been striving to outdo each other on what Hillary Clinton calls "the commander-in-chief" test. She says that she and John McCain have passed it. McCain's response has been on the order of, "What do you mean, 'we'?" Recently, Barack Obama assembled a passel of retired generals and admirals to publicly salute him.

It's good to know they are preparing themselves for that 3 a.m. phone call. But I'm not convinced any of them is ready for the 8 a.m. call from the budget director reporting that the deficit is raging out of control. When it comes to combating the fiscal menaces we face, these three are all absent without leave.

The budget situation is already dire. In the last six years, the federal government has spent some $1.8 trillion more than it has taken in. This year, the deficit will hit an estimated $410 billion. If the economy falls into a recession, the gap will grow.

Believe it or not, these are the good old days. In the next few years, the budget will begin to show the effects of a mammoth event that has long been dreaded: the retirement of the baby boomers. Social Security and Medicare already account for one-third of federal spending, and over the next 30 years, they are expected to nearly double in cost as a share of the total economy.

A recent report from the Brookings Institution found that just to pay for all federal outlays, we would have to raise taxes by at least one-third by 2030. To avoid such tax increases without cutting Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, our leaders would have to make cuts of 50 percent or more in all the other federal programs. Or we could slash benefits for the elderly.

Clearly, some hard fiscal decisions will have to be made. But you would never know any of this from listening to presidential campaign speeches. The candidates all act as though we've time to kill and money to burn. None has made a priority of finding ways to live within our means.

The parties do have their differences. Obama and Clinton spend most of their time dreaming up new programs. The National Taxpayers Union Foundation (NTUF) estimates that his plan would boost federal spending by some $287 billion a year, while hers would carry an annual price tag of $218 billion.

They claim they can pay for most of this by raising taxes on the wealthy and ending the war in Iraq. But the first would bring in no more than $100 billion a year or so. And the money we are spending in Iraq is money we don't have in the first place. It's like saying, I can't afford a Hawaiian vacation, so
I'll take the money I'm not spending on that to buy a Mercedes. The clear implication is that either of the Democrats will finance their proposals the same way President Bush has financed his—by sending the bill to our kids.

For all his stern talk about eradicating earmarks, John McCain would take a similar approach. True, he is much less inclined to launch new initiatives, but he spurns the notion of paying for all the expenses we currently have, much less the ones looming ahead.

He says he would not increase taxes under any circumstances. That would be lovely if McCain were proposing deep cuts in the federal budget to eliminate the growing deficit. In fact, NTUF calculates, his plans would increase federal spending by $7 billion a year.

As the Brookings report put it, "Some people might believe that the federal government should both tax and spend at about 18 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), while others might believe it should tax and spend at about 30 percent of GDP. No reasonable person, however, would argue that the government should tax at 18 percent and spend at 30 percent. ... Yet, this is the future we will get if we try to fund the spending required by current law with today's level of taxation."

It's 8 a.m., a fiscal crisis is at hand, and the phone is ringing in the White House. Will the next president take the call or let it go to voicemail?

COPYRIGHT 2008 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

The Other Prostitution Scandal

schapman@tribune.com (Steve Chapman) — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 07:00:00 EDT

Politicians take people's money with a promise to fulfill desires that supposedly can't be attained any other way. Prostitutes do the same, though by reputation, they are more reliable in delivering. It's not surprising for people in the same line of work to gravitate toward one another, as Eliot Spitzer and a woman named Kristen reportedly did in a Washington hotel room.

I understand why Spitzer's alleged hiring of a call girl was stupid, selfish, reckless, immoral and a betrayal of his family. What I don't understand is why it was illegal.

It's not as though sex is otherwise divorced from money. If it were, hot young women would be found on the arms of poor older men as often as they are seen with rich ones. Had the New York governor wanted to buy a $4,300 bauble to seduce someone of Kristen's age and pulchritude, only his wife and his financial adviser would have objected.

It was Spitzer's effort to hide this pastime that attracted law enforcement attention. Prosecutors investigated him not because he had lipstick on his collar, but because he took steps to conceal his patronage of Emperor's Club VIP. By transferring cash to accounts controlled by fake companies, he roused suspicions of political corruption. By now, he probably wishes he had only taken a gratuity to grease a contract.

It's hard to feel excessive sympathy when a colossal hypocrite is exposed. Recently, Spitzer signed a measure increasing penalties for men caught paying for sex, who can now go to jail for as long as a year. But schadenfreude is a weak justification for laws that intrude into the bedroom.

As with laws against illicit drugs and unsanctioned gambling, this policy tries to suppress powerful human appetites and consistently fails. What one New Orleans mayor said applies to a segment of every human society: "You can make prostitution illegal in Louisiana, but you can't make it unpopular."

Alternative newspapers, telephone directories and online sites are replete with ads for massage parlors, escort services and women "eager to meet you!"—proof that when individuals yearn to find each other for mutually gratifying transactions, they are bound to find a way.

Even the prospect of arrest and public humiliation doesn't deter a lot of people on either side of the business. What should be obvious by now is that they are willing to spend far more effort achieving these encounters than the rest of us are to spend preventing them.

Outlawing this commerce serves mainly to make things worse, not better. It assures income to criminal organizations with long experience evading the law. It makes prostitutes vulnerable to abuse. It prevents measures to protect the health of providers and patrons.

It exempts an industry from the taxes and fees that legitimate businesses have to pay. It squanders police resources that could be used to fight real crime, while clogging jails and courts with offenders who will soon be back plying their trade.

Supporters of the status quo say the sex industry is filled with victims of human trafficking—foreigners forced to work in servitude. Whether such modern-day slaves amount to more than a tiny fraction of hookers, however, has never been proved.

Similar claims have been made about migrant farm laborers and domestic workers—which is not taken as grounds to ban fruit picking or home cleaning. Someone whose very job is illegal, in fact, is an ideal candidate for such exploitation, since she is unlikely to go to the cops.

But all this is secondary to the priority of human freedom. We no longer believe the government has a right to prevent homosexuals or heterosexuals from engaging in sexual practices. In 2003, the Supreme Court had the wisdom to strike down a Texas sodomy prosecution against two homosexuals caught in the act.

"The petitioners are entitled to respect for their private lives," asserted the court. "The state cannot demean their existence or control their destiny by making their private sexual conduct a crime. Their right to liberty under the Due Process Clause gives them the full right to engage in their conduct without intervention of the government."

Some brilliant lawyer ought to ask the courts why the state may ban one type of sex between consenting adults but not another. Maybe Eliot Spitzer would like to take it on.

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Disenfranchising Michigan and Florida?

schapman@tribune.com (Steve Chapman) — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 07:00:00 EDT

The vote was once denied to women. It was denied to blacks. It was denied to those without land. And today, Florida Gov. Charlie Crist and Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm tell us, it is being denied to their people.

The Democratic and Republican parties are depriving them of delegates to the nominating conventions because they held their primaries too early, and the governors are horrified at this treatment. "The right to vote is at the very foundation of our democracy," they said in a statement.

"It is intolerable that the national political parties have denied the citizens of Michigan and Florida their votes and voices at their respective national conventions."

Hear that sound? It's a tiny sad song, being played on the world's smallest violin.

Let's review what happened here. Back in 2006, the Democratic National Committee approved rules for when states could hold their primaries. They decreed that no states except Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina could vote before Feb. 5—and that any state jumping the gun would lose its convention delegates. (The Republican National Committee cancelled just half of their delegates.) According to the DNC, the members from Florida and Michigan supported that policy.

But then some people in those states had a better idea. They were sick of seeing Iowa and New Hampshire hog all the attention. So the legislatures and governors decided to flout the approved schedule and hold their primaries in January. They figured they were so big and important that the presidential candidates would show up to campaign anyway—and that the party would ultimately cave in and seat their delegates.

Saul Anuzis, head of the Michigan Republican Party, summed up the prevailing sentiment among politicians on both sides of the aisle: "We understand that this violates the rules of both the Democratic National Committee and the Republican National Committee. We don't care."

But come 2008, the defiant ones got a surprise: Their ploy was a bust. The Democratic candidates all refused to campaign in either state (the exception being Dennis Kucinich). If that's not bad enough, the Democratic Party has refused to budge.

Says DNC Chairman Howard Dean, "You can't change the rules in the middle of the game. Florida and Michigan voted for a set of rules and then decided that unlike the other 48 states, they would do something different. That's not fair, and it doesn't respect either the Clinton campaign, the Obama campaign, or the other 48 states."

But Crist and Granholm are not alone in protesting. Hillary Clinton feels their pain. As a press spokesman said last week, "The people of Florida and Michigan have already voted, and their voices ought to be heard. That's why Senator Clinton is urging her delegates to vote to seat both delegations at the convention."

What a surprise. After all, she won both. But she owes her victories to the fact that her opponents didn't campaign in Florida or Michigan. Having profited because her rivals followed the rules, she now wants to benefit because those states didn't.

Barack Obama's campaign, on the other hand, has floated the novel idea of putting aside the results and simply splitting the delegates evenly between him and Clinton. That option would have the completely unintended effect of keeping his current delegate lead perfectly intact.

It's true that if the DNC stands firm, the people of Florida and Michigan may have no role in choosing the nominee. But Crist and Granholm shouldn't blame the DNC for that—they should blame themselves. The DNC apparently would be willing to let them have "do-over" caucuses or primaries.

But those would cost millions of dollars, which neither the states nor the state parties want to spend. And the DNC says it won't pay them to do what they should have done in the first place.

Of course, the DNC could simply surrender and let those who broke the rules get away with it—thus assuring that next time, there will be primaries in December or November or October instead of January.

Better to tell the state parties that they chose to forfeit their delegates and their choice will be respected. If losing out makes the politicians in Florida and Michigan unhappy, I can speak for most people in the rest of the country in saying: We don't care.

COPYRIGHT 2008 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

McCain's Consistent Folly on Iraq

schapman@tribune.com (Steve Chapman) — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 07:00:00 EST

On the campaign trail, John McCain has retreated on immigration, changed his mind on tax cuts and admitted economics is not his strong suit. But all that's unimportant, we are told, because he was Right On Iraq—back at the beginning, when he endorsed the invasion, and again over the past year, when he has stoutly supported the surge. So, whichever Democrat he faces, the November election could be a referendum on the Iraq war and his support for it.

If so, that may not be a plus for McCain. McCain has been consistent about Iraq, in the sense of being consistently wrong. If the American people get a long look at what he's said and a clear picture of our fortunes in Iraq, he may yearn for the days when he was being pilloried for offering "amnesty" to illegal immigrants.

McCain portrays himself as uniquely clear-eyed about the war. In fact, those eyes have often been full of stars. When Army Gen. Eric Shinseki forecast that more troops would be needed for the occupation, McCain didn't fret. Shortly before the invasion, he said, "I have no qualms about our strategic plans." As the online magazine Salon reports, he predicted the war would be "another chapter in the glorious history of the United States of America."

He brags now that he criticized Donald Rumsfeld's handling of the occupation. But McCain didn't declare "no confidence" in him until a year and a half after the invasion. And let's not forget the day he took a stroll through a Baghdad market, guarded by attack helicopters and 100 soldiers in full combat mode, to prove how safe Iraq was. The following day, 21 Iraqis were abducted from the market and murdered.

McCain's attempts to show off his expertise often turn into banana peels. Recently he attacked Barack Obama for saying that in the future, he might send forces back in "if al-Qaida is forming a base in Iraq." Jeered the Arizona senator, "Al-Qaida already has a base in Iraq. It's called al-Qaida in Iraq."

But al-Qaida in Iraq has about as much to do with al-Qaida in Afghanistan as the San Diego Padres have to do with the Catholic Church. It's a separate, independent and largely homegrown group that is focused on slaughtering Iraqi Shiites, not targeting American cities. And here's a newsflash for McCain: It didn't exist until our invasion created conditions favorable to violent insurgency.

It's true that eventually, McCain did call for more troops, and eventually, President Bush agreed. Last January, he announced that he was boosting forces to quell violence—while telling the Iraqi government to move promptly toward internal reconciliation and power-sharing. All this would produce a stable, democratic Iraq and "hasten the day our troops begin coming home."

More than a year later, security is better. But nothing else is. The Baghdad government has failed to do the things Bush called for, and there is no sign that our troops will be coming home anytime soon, if ever.

Provincial elections, which were supposed to be held last year, remain somewhere over the rainbow. A landmark de-Baathification law turned out to be a scam, with the purported beneficiaries complaining it was even worse than the old policy. Bush said the Iraqi government would assume responsibility for security across the entire country by November 2007. We're still waiting.

The point of the surge was to catalyze rapid progress that would facilitate our departure. But now the Pentagon says that come July, we'll still have more troops than the 132,000 we had before. When Lt. Gen. Carter Ham was asked if the number will fall below 132,000 by the time Bush leaves office, he replied, "It would be premature to say that."

McCain says the current "strategy is succeeding in Iraq." His apparent definition of success is that American forces will stay on in huge numbers as long as necessary to keep violence within acceptable limits. We were told we had to increase our numbers so we could leave. Turns out we had to increase our numbers so we could stay.

Five years after the Iraq invasion, we've suffered more than 30,000 dead and wounded troops, incurred trillions in costs and found that Iraqis are unwilling to overcome their most basic divisions. And no end is in sight. If you're grateful for that, thank John McCain.

COPYRIGHT 2008 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

Don't Capitulate to Tragedy

schapman@tribune.com (Steve Chapman) — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 07:00:00 EST

The University of Texas Tower is one of the glories of Austin. The 71-year-old limestone skyscraper rises 307 feet above the tree-shaded campus, dominates the city skyline and, on special occasions like a national championship, is lit up in the school's signature orange. Turn on the PBS show Austin City Limits sometime, and you'll see it glowing behind the musicians.

But the building's history is not all happy. In 1966, Charles Whitman carried several guns up to the observation deck and began firing at passersby on the ground. By the time police shot him to death, he had killed or wounded dozens of people and assured that he and the tower would forever be linked.

Yet the university and the city refused to let that be the final chapter. Not only did the tower stay, but the public was allowed back in, though it was closed in 1975 after a rash of people jumping to their deaths. In 1999, after the installation of a shield to prevent suicides, the administration once again opened the doors. Four decades later, the association with Whitman is inescapable. But that is only a small part of what the tower means.

There are lessons there for any institution that goes through a similar tragedy: Be strong. Hold to your own purposes. Understand that this will pass. Don't let a psychopath govern you from the grave.

But none of these was offered by the governor of Illinois or the administration of Northern Illinois University in the aftermath of the Valentine's Day slaughter in a lecture hall on the DeKalb campus. In what must come as a shock not only to the people of the state but the rest of the country, they propose to bulldoze the building and replace it with a new one, at a cost of $40 million.

If the facility were an ancient firetrap, this might be the right moment to do the inevitable. But Cole Hall is a perfectly functional building that, having been built in 1968, is younger than your average tenured professor.

Until now, as The Chicago Tribune reported last week, no one thought it needed replacement: "Instead, a $20 million request to renovate the Stevens Building, which houses the anthropology department and theater program, has consistently been at the top of the university's capital requests."

Officials, however, insist it would be unthinkable to use a building scarred by terror. NIU President John Peters said he "made the decision that we had to raze that, we had to demolish that building and replace it with something fitting, something fitting our needs and as a memorial." NIU board chairwoman Cherilyn Murer agreed, "Instincts told you that we cannot have students in this building."

But a lot of people in the state have instincts that say something very different: You don't squander $40 million to erase a memory that can't be erased. Lots of places have witnessed nightmarish events. But we normally don't punish the building. We mourn, we remember, we use the site to help us understand and overcome what happened, and we press on.

That's what happened at the University of Texas. It's what happened at Virginia Tech, where a mass shooting took place last year. It's what happened at Columbine High School.

Ford's Theater in Washington remains an operating playhouse even though Abraham Lincoln was shot there. The Louisiana State Capitol in Baton Rouge, where Gov. Huey Long was assassinated in 1935, still serves as the seat of state government.

No one would have seriously suggested levelling those buildings just because something awful happened in them. They are part of history, and history is often dark and savage. To wipe out a place merely because of a grim event is not an act of healing but an act of capitulation.

Returning to Cole Hall after the massacre promises to be painful for students at NIU. But pain is a part of life that college students, like everyone, must learn to endure, preferably with courage and resolve. Restoring the building to the noble use for which it was meant -- higher education -- would help in that process.

Most important, it would allow NIU students to show what they are made of. As President John Kennedy said, some things are worth doing not because they are easy, but because they are hard.

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Why Are These People So Ashamed of NAFTA?

schapman@tribune.com (Steve Chapman) — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 07:00:00 EST

Democrats often pillory Republicans for their economic errors. From the 1930s on, they reminded Americans of Herbert Hoover's Great Depression. In 1960, they blamed Dwight Eisenhower for slow growth. In the 1980s, they decried the "trickle-down" policies of Ronald Reagan. And today, they excoriate the damage caused by the North American Free Trade Agreement passed under... Bill Clinton.

Even Hillary Clinton treats the accord with a warmth she normally reserves for Kenneth Starr. She never misses a chance to denounce what she calls "the shortcomings of NAFTA," or to insist she was always against it. But she has to deal with Barack Obama, who often gives the impression that his opponent's name is Hillary Nafta Clinton.

So Tuesday's debate in Cleveland devoted a lot of time to the question: Are you now or have you ever been a supporter of NAFTA? Both candidates denied any complicity, past or present, and both vowed to scrap the treaty if the Mexican government doesn't agree to changes.

Obama makes a special theme of blaming this and other trade agreements for setting off a race to the bottom that destroys American jobs. "In Youngstown, Ohio," he said in a Texas debate, "I've talked to workers who have seen their plants shipped overseas as a consequence of bad trade deals like NAFTA, literally seeing equipment unbolted from the floors of factories and shipped to China."

Why NAFTA would induce a company to move production to China is a puzzle, but you get the idea.
His campaign claims a million jobs have vanished because of the deal. That sounds devastating, but over the last 14 years, the American economy has added a net total of 25 million jobs—some of them, incidentally, attributable to expanded trade with Mexico. When NAFTA took effect in 1994, the unemployment rate was 6.7 percent. Today it's 4.9 percent.

But maybe all the jobs we lost were good ones and all the new ones are minimum-wage positions sweeping out abandoned factories? Actually, no. According to data compiled by Harvard economist Robert Z. Lawrence, the average blue-collar worker's wages and benefits, adjusted for inflation, have risen by 11 percent under NAFTA. Instead of driving pay scales down, it appears to have pulled them up.

Manufacturing employment has declined, but not because we're producing less: Manufacturing output has not only expanded, but has expanded far faster than it did in the decade before NAFTA. The problem is that as productivity rises, we can make more stuff with fewer people. That's not a bad thing. In fact, it's essentially the definition of economic progress.

We're not the only country facing that phenomenon. China makes everything these days, right? But between 1995 and 2002, it lost 15 million manufacturing jobs.

Even if the candidates don't want to acknowledge the gains of the last 14 years, it's hard to see how they can blame NAFTA for economic troubles in Ohio or elsewhere. The whole idea was to eliminate import duties in both the United States and Mexico (as well as Canada). What everyone forgets is that we got the best of that bargain, since our tariffs were very low to begin with.

"Mexico had very good access to the U.S. market" already, says Charlene Barshefsky, who was U.S. Trade Representative in the Clinton administration. "What NAFTA did was level the playing field."
Critics complain that while exports to Mexico have risen, imports from Mexico have risen even faster.

But that's not because we embraced free trade. It's because our economy has been more robust than theirs. Prosperous consumers buy more goods, from both home and abroad, than struggling consumers. Absent NAFTA, the trade imbalance with Mexico would not be smaller. It would be bigger.

None of this is a revelation to economists. The candidates' broadsides require them to ignore not just a wealth of evidence but the overwhelming consensus of experts. Gary Clyde Hufbauer, an economist at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, estimates that 90 percent of the people in his profession regard the accord as a good thing.

Jagdish Bhagwati, a Columbia University trade economist, supports Obama and thinks his positions on trade are generally better than Clinton's. "But on NAFTA," Bhagwati told me, "he is dead wrong."
Clinton is also in error, but on the question of which candidate has more consistently and vehemently denounced the accord, Obama has opened up a clear lead. Now there's a race to the bottom.

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The Enemies of their Enemy

schapman@tribune.com (Steve Chapman) — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 07:00:00 EST

A couple of weeks ago, John McCain was straining to ingratiate himself with the activists gathered at the Conservative Political Action Conference. It was an uphill climb: By that point, some movement icons had publicly renounced the presumptive Republican nominee, and attendees were urged not to boo him. Some did anyway, and McCain was left to ponder the possibility of being abandoned by much of his party's base.

He shouldn't have worried. All it took to rally conservatives behind him was the intervention of The New York Times. Thursday, it published a flimsy, anonymously sourced story suggesting that nine years ago, he may have canoodled with a cute female lobbyist whose clients had business before his committee. How bad was the article? Years from now, if you type into Google, "Why do people hate the news media?" this story will pop up.

Those who had been angered by McCain's gentle treatment by liberal journalists were angered to see him handled roughly by the same scribes. They quit attacking McCain and began blasting The New York Times, which had given them plenty of ammunition. Note to the Times: When Sean Hannity sounds like the voice of responsible journalism, you've done something wrong.

And with that, the great Republican civil war was pretty much over. Conservatives will never embrace McCain for his views on immigration, campaign finance or global warming. But they may come to echo what was said about Grover Cleveland when he was nominated for president in 1884: "We love him most for the enemies he has made."

The closing of the rift should come as no surprise. After eight years in which they were about the only people to stick with the Republican president, conservatives have gotten used to thinking of the GOP as a wholly owned subsidiary of the right. In reality, though, they have never gained full control of the party, and as the pending McCain nomination suggests, they probably never will.

The party has long consisted of two groups, who might be called Eisenhower Republicans and Goldwater Republicans. In their narrative, conservatives relate a straight line of succession from Barry Goldwater to Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush. In fact, the party took some major detours on the way.

After Goldwater in 1964, it veered toward the center, settling on Richard Nixon and then Gerald Ford. When Reagan neared the end of his presidency, GOP voters could have elevated any of several conservative candidates, including Jack Kemp, Paul Laxalt and Pat Robertson. Instead, they chose George H.W. Bush, long considered the embodiment of bland, moderate, East Coast Republicanism.

In 1996, the party faithful passed up Pat Buchanan, Steve Forbes, Phil Gramm and Dan Quayle in favor of Bob Dole, whom Reaganites once branded the "tax collector for the welfare state." Even in 2000, George W. Bush raised some suspicions on the right, due to his centrist pedigree and his habit of calling himself a "compassionate conservative," lest anyone mistake him for that other kind.

In the end, Bush won over conservatives, partly thanks to opposition from their nemesis, John McCain. But polls then showed that most Republicans, far from embracing Bush's support of tax cuts, preferred to concentrate on reducing the national debt. Theirs was, and is, a conservative party, but not that conservative. Hence, McCain.

The experience of the last 40 years shows two things. One is that conservatives can never be sure of getting their kind of presidential nominee. The other is that, as far as the fortunes of the party are concerned, it doesn't matter. Once the nomination is assured, the Republican candidate will always embrace conservative themes, and conservatives will close ranks behind him.

How come? Because somewhere between February and November, many things happen to remind them how powerfully they detest the common enemy. Not just the Democratic nominee, but all the Democratic Party elders, interest groups, celebrities and leftish ideologues.

McCain may seem unappealing when he's debating policy with Mike Huckabee or even Mitt Romney. But let him start taking fire from Al Gore, Gloria Steinem, antiwar groups, environmental activists and teachers' unions—not to mention The New York Times—and suddenly he will look lovelier than the Taj Mahal at sunset.

As a rule, mobilizing people in politics is not about giving them someone to love. It's about giving them someone to hate.

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The Imperial Presidency is Here to Stay

schapman@tribune.com (Steve Chapman) — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 15:00:00 EST

After the United States won its independence from Britain, some soldiers had the idea that America should have a king of its own—namely George Washington, their commander. Washington promptly scotched the idea. But if he were to see some of the powers asserted by his successors, he might wonder why he bothered.

Few presidents have interpreted their authority more broadly than George W. Bush. He has claimed the right to defy a federal wiretapping law, used "signing statements" to nullify provisions of law that he dislikes, ordered Americans arrested on U.S. soil to be held as enemy combatants without access to the courts, and generally taken a view of his power that echoes Buzz Lightyear: "To infinity ... and beyond."

He has had fervent support from legal thinkers who worship at the altar of a strong executive branch. The United States signed an international convention banning torture, which is also against federal law, but former Bush Justice Department official John Yoo, asked in 2005 if the president could encourage a suspected terrorist to talk by crushing his child's genitals, didn't say no. He said, "I think it depends on why the president thinks he needs to do that."

This indulgent approach contrasts with the thinking of conservatives 50 years ago, who thought the presidency was evolving toward virtual dictatorship. A lot of today's conservatives agree, but wish it would evolve faster.

For those who think government powers need firm limitations, the good news is that all three prospects to replace Bush say he has overreached. The bad news is that whoever wins, things probably won't change much.

Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John McCain are on the record rejecting the supersized presidency. All three say they would curtail or abandon the use of signing statements. They believe Bush's detainment of American citizens as enemy combatants was wrong.

They agree that the president may not authorize torture. All, asked by The Boston Globe if the president could bomb Iran without congressional authorization in the absence of an imminent threat, said no.

But can they be trusted? Clinton raises doubts because her husband did not shrink from claiming the right to do as he pleased. His Justice Department insisted that the president may refuse to enforce laws he regards as unconstitutional, much as Bush has done. Clinton sent troops to Haiti, which posed no military threat, without bothering to ask Congress.

Worse still, he went to war in Kosovo even though Congress had voted down a measure authorizing it (a decision his wife urged him to make). Cato Institute policy analyst Gene Healy, in his invaluable new book The Cult of the Presidency, writes that "when it came to presidential prerogatives, Bill Clinton behaved little differently—and in some ways, more aggressively—than his Republican predecessors."

McCain doesn't always sound skeptical of executive authority. When I asked his director of foreign policy and national security, Randy Scheunemann, if McCain agreed that Bush has the right to ignore the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to engage in warrantless eavesdropping, he replied, "I haven't ever heard him publicly challenge the president on bypassing FISA." Asked by the Globe if he thought Bush had violated constitutional restrictions on his power, the pilot of the Straight Talk Express took a detour, declining to answer.

Pledges of a less imperial presidency are a welcome change, and some, like those on torture and the detention of U.S. citizens, will most likely be kept. But it may be too much to hope that any of the candidates will really shrink the office. Presidents want to be able to do what they want to do. Sharing responsibility with Congress sounds palatable only until Congress demands something different from what the White House wants.

So the reflex of any administration is to keep—if not augment—existing powers. The terrorist threat can only strengthen that tendency, since any attack will be blamed on the president.

Even a leader who wishes Bush had less authority may easily rationalize the status quo once in office: "I wouldn't use those powers unless I really need to, so what's the harm in keeping them?" Ceding authority would be especially hard for McCain, who would face fierce opposition within his party.

But even the Democrats would be bucking history as well as self-interest. It would take a special president to voluntarily relinquish powers that could someday prove useful. And George Washington isn't coming back.

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