Reason Magazine - Staff

The Right Kind of Gun Rights

info@reason.com (Jonathan Rauch) — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 15:00:00 EDT

Yesterday, unbeknownst to itself, the Supreme Court heard arguments in a gay-rights case. To most people, admittedly, District of Columbia v. Heller is a gun-rights case. In fact, it's the most important gun-rights case in decades, one that may cast a shadow for decades to come. But to gay Americans, and other minorities often targeted with violence, Heller is about civil rights, not shooting clubs.

Nine years ago, one of the first columns I wrote for National Journal told the story of Tom G. Palmer. One night some years ago in San Jose, he found himself confronting a gang of toughs, as many as 20 of them, intent on gay-bashing him. Taunted as a "faggot," threatened with death, Palmer (and a friend) ran for their lives, only to find the gang in hot pursuit. So Palmer stopped, reached into his backpack, and produced a gun. The gang backed off.

If no gun? "There's no question in my mind," Palmer told me in 1999, "that my friend and I would have been at least very seriously beaten, and maybe killed."

Today Palmer lives in Washington, D.C., which has the most restrictive gun-control law in the country. You can't own a handgun in Washington unless it was registered before 1976 (or unless you are a retired D.C. police officer). You can own a shotgun or rifle, but it must be disassembled or locked (except while being used for lawful recreation or at a place of business; you can protect your store, in other words, but not your home). In Washington, therefore, Palmer could not legally protect himself with a gun, even if the gay-bashers had chased him right into his home.

Although gay life in America is safer today than it once was, anti-gay violence remains all too common. The FBI reports more than 7,000 anti-gay hate crimes in 2005 alone, and since 2003 at least 58 people have been murdered because of their sexual orientation. Perhaps because gay-bashings often begin in intimate settings, the home is the single most prevalent venue for anti-gay attacks. In public, of course, gay-bashers make sure that no cops are around. For that matter, sometimes the police are part of the problem, responding to gay-bashings with indifference, hostility, sometimes abuse.

Those facts are from an amicus brief that two gay groups—Pink Pistols and Gays and Lesbians for Individual Liberty—have filed in Heller. Pink Pistols is a shooting group, formed partly in reaction to stories like Palmer's (and partly, full disclosure, in reaction to an article I wrote urging gays to take up self-defense with guns).

"Recognition of an individual right to keep and bear arms," says the brief, "is literally a matter of life or death" for gay Americans. The Heller plaintiffs are asking the Supreme Court to strike down Washington's gun law as unconstitutional. One of those plaintiffs, not coincidentally, is an openly gay man: Tom Palmer.

At issue is the legal meaning and reach of the controversial Second Amendment, which says: "A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." Oddly, the Supreme Court has not definitively ruled on the amendment's meaning. The last important precedent came down a long time ago, in 1939, and it left the issue murky.

In most of the time since then, conventional wisdom assumed that the amendment confers no right on individuals, but instead empowers the states to form militias and other armed forces. In recent years, however, that interpretation has lost ground under academic scrutiny. It has become clearer that the Founders believed just what the amendment said: The people have a right to own firearms of the sort that would have been used in militia service in those days—that is, pistols and long guns.

Why would the Founders have cared? One reason is as relevant today as ever: Guns were needed for self-defense, a prerogative the Founders regarded as fundamental to freedom. As John Locke wrote, "If any law of nature would seem to be established among all as sacred in the highest degree, ... surely this is self-preservation."

The second reason, by contrast, strikes modern Americans as archaic, if not embarrassing: States' armed populations could resist and overthrow a tyrannical central government, acting as an insurrectionary militia—much as Americans had recently done in overthrowing British rule. That may have made sense in 1790, but today the insurrectionary rationale would seem to imply a right to keep and bear surface-to-air missiles and grenade launchers, among other things.

Between a right to keep and bear nothing and a right to keep and bear surface-to-air missiles lies a whole lot of middle ground. That the Supreme Court may finally provide some guidance is thus major constitutional news. But what should the Court do?

It could make the Second Amendment a dead letter by finding that it guarantees no individual right at all. This is what the District of Columbia wants. But judicially repealing the Second Amendment would be a mistake, both as a matter of constitutional literacy and also, more important, on moral grounds. The Declaration of Independence's great litany, "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," puts life first. A law that prevents people from defending their own lives, even in their own homes, denies the most basic of all human rights.

Instead, the Court could adopt the District's fallback position, which is that even if there is an individual right to gun ownership, the right is so weak that the District's gun law doesn't violate it. This would also be a mistake. If a near-total ban on handguns—even for self-defense in the home, and bolstered by a prohibition on operable long guns—does not violate the language and intent of the Second Amendment, then nothing possibly could.

What the plaintiffs in Heller want the Court to do is throw out the D.C. law as unconstitutional, without necessarily saying what other kind of law might pass muster. This keep-it-simple approach has a lot going for it. The Court would place an outer boundary on the argument over the Second Amendment, saying, in effect, "Right now we're presented with an easy case, so we'll make an easy call: The government can't indiscriminately ban guns in the home. What else the government may or may not be able to do we'll decide some other time, when those cases make their way to us."

But that approach would leave some ambiguity about the Second Amendment's reach, which is why the Bush administration is uncomfortable with it. The administration worries that flatly overturning the District's law could leave federal gun laws—restrictions on machine guns, for instance—vulnerable to challenge, so it is asking the Court to declare the Second Amendment a kind of intermediate right, one that individuals hold in principle but that the government could often override in practice.

That idea seems strange at best, mischievous at worst. It asks the Court to enshrine a new kind of constitutional right: a "sort of" right, which makes a libertarian gesture but won't get in Washington's way. Think of it as Big Government constitutional conservatism. For the Bush administration, importing Big Government conservatism into the part of the Constitution designed to protect individuals from Big Government may be par for the course, but it would be a far cry from what the Founders had in mind for the Bill of Rights.

A fifth approach makes more sense: The Court would overturn the District's law and add an explanation. Without trying to lay out detailed standards, the Court would clear up confusion about the Second Amendment by unambiguously identifying the core right it protects as reasonable self-defense by competent, law-abiding adults.

Reasonable self-defense leaves room for firearms regulation. Exotic and highly destructive weapons could be restricted or banned, because no one needs a machine gun or grenade launcher for protection against ordinary crime. Felons, not being law-abiding adults, could still be barred from gun ownership.

Most of the government's gun laws, in fact, would have no trouble passing the self-defense test (as the Heartland Institute calls it in an amicus brief), because most gun laws are reasonable and don't leave people defenseless. As for the insurrectionary purpose of the Second Amendment, the Court could either repudiate it explicitly or pass over it in silence, consigning it to irrelevance.

The self-defense test is good policy, because it aligns the Second Amendment with modern needs and sensibilities. It is good law, because it rescues the amendment from being a dead letter or an embarrassment.

And it is morally sound, because it honors in law what gay people know in our hearts: Being forced into victimhood is the ultimate denial not only of safety but of dignity.

© Copyright 2008 National Journal

Jonathan Rauch is a senior writer and columnist for National Journal and a frequent contributor to Reason. The article was originally published by National Journal.

Saved by McCain

info@reason.com (Jonathan Rauch) — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 07:00:00 EST

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., endured boos amid the applause when he spoke at last week's Conservative Political Action Conference. Good for him. And good for the Republicans. Those boos may not have been music to McCain's ears, but they were one indication that he is the healthiest thing to happen to the Republican Party since Ronald Reagan.

This year's primary season has been so full of healthy developments that you could package it with oat bran and hawk it at Whole Foods. The country can thank its lucky stars that the process has pushed forward—in McCain and in Democratic Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama—the three most formidable figures in American politics. If Obama wins the Democratic nomination, the result will pit the two most widely admired political figures of their generations against each other in a presidential race. The last time the country saw anything remotely like that was when Dwight Eisenhower faced Adlai Stevenson in 1952 and 1956.

Democrats can be grateful they have two tough races on their hands, first for the nomination and then, as now seems virtually certain, against McCain in the general election. Remember LBJ and Jimmy Carter? When Democrats win against weak opponents or crippled parties, they overreach, underperform, and lose touch with the country.

But the healthiest news of all is McCain's emergence as the presumptive Republican nominee. Of all the Republicans in America, McCain is best positioned to undo the errors and correct the excesses of Bush-era Republicanism. If the Bush years were snakebit, think of McCain as an antivenin.

Not all Republicans see it that way, of course. Some would like to see more ruthless partisanship, more fiscal recklessness, more polarization, more presidential monarchism, more erosion of U.S. credibility on human rights, more immigration-bashing. Wiser Republicans, though, know better. They understand that the Big Four of post-Reagan, post-Gingrich Republicanism—President Bush, Vice President Cheney, former White House strategist Karl Rove, and former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay—steered the party to a dead end.

Wise Republicans know, to begin with, that the party is lost if it cannot rebuild its own center and appeal to the country's. Bush-era Republicanism was all about suppressing the center and mobilizing the extremes, on the (correct) assumption that conservatives outnumber liberals. It worked, for a while, because of 9/11 and because the Democrats unwittingly cooperated. Forced to choose between the Republican Right and the Democratic Left, independents leaned Republican or just stayed home.

Unfortunately for Republicans, the Democrats wised up and started choosing candidates with centrist appeal. Forced to govern from the center of their party instead of the center of the country, Republicans meanwhile swung too far to the right. Independents cut loose. Blood rushed back into the political center. Republicans found themselves marginalized by their own polarizing strategy. The wiser among them now understand that the only way back is through the middle.

McCain stands unrivaled among Republicans as a proven magnet for moderate and independent votes. He has a long record of working and talking across party lines. He not only understands independents, he needs them, because polarized partisans don't trust him (for good reason). Even if he wanted to, he couldn't run a Bush-style "50 percent plus one" strategy of playing to the base and picking off just enough moderates. "He may be able to bring the party back to the center, and that would be deeply useful," says Steve Bell, who, as a longtime senior aide to Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., has observed McCain for years. (Domenici has endorsed McCain, despite past encounters with McCain's epithet-laced temper.)

Democrats control both chambers of Congress and are expected to consolidate their majorities this year. In 2009, a Republican president is unlikely to be able to scare Democrats into submission, as Bush did for a while. Instead a GOP president would have to do a delicate job of triangulating between the Democratic majority and a sometimes truculent Republican base.

With his long record of working across party lines—on campaign finance law and global warming and judicial appointments and much more—McCain is uniquely equipped to provide Republicans with the last thing they expected to see post-Bush: a productive Republican presidency. "I think we might actually get some stuff done," Bell says.

Most Republicans understand that their loss of credibility on spending restraint and fiscal responsibility has damaged the Republican brand. Wise Republicans understand, further, that supply-side dogmatism has become part of the problem. The supply-side movement made sense when the top tax rate was 70 percent, taxes rose with inflation, and tax cuts were only one part of a program that also included deregulation and lower spending. It stopped making sense when Bush-era Republicanism turned it into an obsession, fixated on the idea that if you just cut taxes and then cut them some more, lower spending, smaller government, and shrinking deficits will follow.

McCain has a long record of vocal opposition to pork-barrel spending and congressional earmarks; he makes a point of calling for entitlement reform; and he is not a supply-sider, having voted against both of Bush's biggest tax cuts. Supply-siders hate that, and it's true that he has now rallied to them with expensive and unpaid-for promises to extend the Bush tax cuts and abolish the alternative minimum tax. Still, McCain's heart belongs not to the supply-side absolutism of the Bush era but to the tightfisted rectitude of the Eisenhower era. If anyone has a shot at restoring Republican fiscal credibility, it is McCain.

Wise Republicans understand that Bush has severely damaged both the sustainability and the reputation of the war on jihadism by trying to run it on presidential fiat, by claiming effectively unlimited power to detain anyone forever, and by cratering the world's faith in American values. In the eyes of too much of the world and too many Americans, Abu Ghraib, waterboarding, and contempt for Congress have become hallmarks of the war on jihadism.

McCain is tailor-made to repair this damage. A torture victim himself, he stood up to his own president and party to pass the 2005 Detainee Treatment Act. He led this fight knowing that it would devalue his stock with Republicans. He likewise stuck out his neck to pass legislation that put military detentions and trials on firmer legal footing, again with no prospect of political reward.

Bush has regarded Congress and the courts as nuisances to be circumvented whenever possible. Perversely, if predictably, his insistence on strengthening the presidency at any cost has weakened it instead, and has left the war on jihadism balanced precariously on one legal leg. McCain has led the way back toward the constitutional and moral high ground, understanding that the war won't be sustainable unless it is firmly rooted in America's best legal and humanitarian traditions.

Wise Republicans recognize that immigration-bashing—yes, even when ostensibly focused on illegal immigration -- produces an addictive political rush, followed by long-term debilitation. If the party effectively writes off Hispanics and sets itself up as the enemy of an open, compassionate America, it is doomed. McCain, despite his recent "enforcement first" conversion, remains one of the party's two major spokesmen for a pro-immigration future. The other is Bush, but he is a spent force. If anyone can negotiate a path through the immigration thicket and build a consensus that Republicans and the country can live with, it is McCain.

So McCain offers Republicans hope of a revitalized center, a connection to independents, a productive presidency, improved fiscal credibility, improved moral credibility, a restored constitutional balance, a firm instead of flimsy war on jihadism, and a way forward on immigration. You have to look back to Reagan to find such a serendipitous match between the man and the moment.

The eclectic McCain is a handyman, not an architect. His skills and positions are well suited to fixing the Bush-era mistakes and getting the country to listen to Republicans again. But he is not a man of ideas like Reagan, Barry Goldwater, or Newt Gingrich. He could lead the party out of the cul-de-sac and back onto the main road, but, at age 71, he does not look like the man to point it toward a new destination.

Still, in 2008 a lot of Republicans don't yet understand that they're lost. The first job of work is to loosen the grip of the party's ideological satraps and veto groups. Never mind whether he wins the presidency; just by closing in on the nomination, and by drawing boos at CPAC, McCain has begun cutting his party free.

Jonathan Rauch is a senior writer and columnist for National Journal and a frequent contributor to Reason. The article was originally published by National Journal.

Export Security, Not Democracy

info@reason.com (Jonathan Rauch) — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 08:20:00 EST

Freedom is on the march. Backward. "Global Freedom in Retreat," headlines a recent press release from Freedom House. In 2007, for the second consecutive year, the group's annual survey of democracy finds a global decline in political rights and civil liberties. In the Middle East, modest gains have halted. Egypt, Lebanon, and Syria are backsliding.

In his new book, The Spirit of Democracy: The Struggle to Build Free Societies Throughout the World, Larry Diamond, a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, looks at freedom in 23 "strategic swing states," countries outside the industrialized West with large populations or economies. More than half, he finds, have either remained firmly authoritarian or degenerated politically. "We have entered a period of global democratic recession," he writes, "with the swing states as harbingers of a possible broader downturn."

This is not what Dr. Bush thought he ordered when he prescribed a forward strategy of freedom. Perhaps even more alarming, and certainly more puzzling, is the collapse of American moral authority.

By American lights, President Bush's dedication to the cause of ending tyranny everywhere should have made the United States the world's white hat. Instead, as James Kitfield noted in this magazine last week, "Poll after poll shows the United States' standing and influence in the world sinking to unprecedented lows," with majorities in 10 of 15 recently polled countries saying they did not trust the United States to act responsibly, and majorities even in some closely allied countries—Britain, Canada, Mexico—calling Bush a threat to world peace.

After 9/11, democratizers, with Bush in the lead (and, full disclosure, with me among the followers), claimed plausibly to be the only true realists. "The policy of tolerating tyranny is a moral and strategic failure," Bush said last year. Extending freedom "is the only realistic way to protect our people in the long run."

Today, even some neoconservatives are wondering what went wrong. "These are hard days for democracy," Charles Krauthammer admitted in a Washington Post column in early January. Yet neocons still think they hold a trump card: No one has a better idea. "Six years after September 11," wrote Krauthammer, "there is still no remotely plausible alternative to the Bush Doctrine for ultimately changing the culture from which jihadism arises."

If that ever was true, it ceased to be as of last summer. That was when Amitai Etzioni published an important book called Security First: For a Muscular, Moral Foreign Policy. A professor of international relations at George Washington University, Etzioni argues that the United States should export security, not democracy.

If you want to discuss foreign policy in the age of terrorism, try consulting an ex-terrorist. As a teenager in the 1940s, Etzioni was a fighter in the Palmach, a Jewish insurgent group that tried to bomb the British out of what was then Palestine. The group aimed at infrastructure, not people, but Etzioni says the experience gave him a lifelong appreciation of the awfulness of war and the centrality of security.

Today, pondering the presidential race, Etzioni sees ample criticism of Bush, but nothing resembling an overarching alternative to the Bush Doctrine. American foreign policy needs a positive vision with a moral basis. But exporting democracy, Etzioni says, isn't it.

Why not? First, the Bush Doctrine suffers from Multiple Realism Deficiency Disorder. Democracy grows gradually from within, by stages, and cannot be imposed from without. The Bush Doctrine thus promises what it can't deliver. In any case, Washington often has little practical choice but to cooperate with friendly authoritarian regimes, such as those in Egypt and Saudi Arabia; we can't expect cooperation from regimes we're working to overthrow.

All of that you have heard before. Etzioni's signature contribution is an intriguing second argument. Putting democratization at the center of U.S. foreign policy, he says, is counterproductive. It turns against America millions of the very people it needs to win over: illiberal moderates.

The Muslim world is full of people who aver support for democracy. But comparatively few mean liberal, secular democracy, which is what Americans mean. Instead, they mean a combination of democracy and theocracy that Americans would not recognize as liberal-democratic at all. For example, they tell pollsters they want democracy while also saying their governments should be more Islamic.

These people reject American-style social liberalization, such as equality for women, which Americans regard as a democratic linchpin. On the other hand, the great majority of them abhor violence. Thus, writes Etzioni, "major segments of the Muslim world are neither pro-liberal-democracy nor pro-violence."

These "illiberal moderates," he argues, are "a kind of global 'swing vote,' " far outnumbering both illiberal extremists (who support violence) and liberal moderates (who support Westernization). A democratization agenda that implies American-style liberalization strikes illiberal moderates as a threat to their religion, not a promise of freedom. No wonder the Bush Doctrine offends them in droves.

But most of them will gladly support an American foreign policy in which basic security heads the agenda. Note the word "basic." To provide basic security, in Etzioni's framework, a government need not have a spotless human-rights record, independent courts, or even elections. It must merely protect its own people from genocide and ethnic cleansing, and refrain from invading other countries, supporting international terrorism, and posing a nuclear threat. If a regime provides that much internal and external security, the United States should promise not to overthrow it—even if it is unsavory or unfriendly in other respects.

Of course, the United States will still care about, and advocate, democratization and other core values. But top priority should go to basic security, on which everything else depends.

Realists insist that stability is the precondition for democracy; neocons, that democracy is the precondition for stability. Etzioni is saying that basic security is the precondition for both, a lesson stingingly learned in Iraq. "In Iraq our problem was that we did not focus on security," he says. "We focused on trying to build another America."

The template for Security First is Washington's handshake with Libya, a nasty regime that gave up weapons of mass destruction and terrorism and, in Etzioni's view, should have been more promptly rewarded for doing so. If Iran and North Korea were to follow Libya's example, they should get the same deal.

Shaking hands with the likes of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or Kim Jong Il for doing what any civilized regime should do is distasteful; but remember, exchanging peace for security is the beginning, not the end. Over time, governments that provide their people and the world with basic security furnish the soil in which civil society and, ultimately, democracy can take root.

Making security the centerpiece of U.S. foreign policy sounds pretty minimalist. But, Etzioni argues, it is both more practical than trying to democratize the world and more moral than hard-bitten realism. After all, Security First rests on the deepest and most universal of moral foundations, respect for human life and repudiation of deadly violence. It would authorize, indeed require, international humanitarian intervention against genocide, which the United States would help organize but not necessarily lead.

Is "Provide basic security!" an idealistic enough mission for an America that likes to think of itself as a light unto nations? "Talk about peace instead of security and we're there," Etzioni replies. Dwight Eisenhower got terrific mileage, at home and abroad, by dedicating America to peace, which he promised to uphold in the face of the Communist threat.

Does Security First resolve all of the dilemmas that authoritarian governments and humanitarian crises pose? Hardly. The United States would still have problems dealing with a non-nuclear North Korea or a nonterroristic Iran. It would still need to walk a tightrope in dealing with friendly governments that torture (like Egypt) or provoke their neighbors (like Pakistan).

What Security First has going for it, however, is its congruity with so much of what U.S. foreign policy winds up doing anyway. Whatever the heady rhetoric of John Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, or George W. Bush, for the most part Washington tolerates ugly regimes that provide basic security. It relies on Disney and consumer goods and the passage of time to do the rest.

Security First is realism with a caring face, idealism in sensible shoes. Maybe you need to be an ex-terrorist to think of it.

Jonathan Rauch is a senior writer and columnist for National Journal and a frequent contributor to Reason. The article was originally published by National Journal.

The Coming American Matriarchy

info@reason.com (Jonathan Rauch) — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 07:47:00 EST

Suppose you could memorize only a single demographic number and you set about choosing the one with the most far-reaching implications for change in America. You could do worse than 1.5.

Of course, there are plenty of possibilities: the birth rate, the teen-pregnancy or illegitimacy rate, the percentage of the population that is white or foreign-born, the percentage of elderly. But unpack 1.5 and you have the makings of a social inversion: a turning upside down of the male-dominated order that Americans have taken for granted since—well, since forever.

The number 1.5 is, in this case, a ratio. According to projections by the National Center for Education Statistics, in 2017 half again as many women as men will earn bachelor's degrees. In the early 1990s, six women graduated from college for every five men who did so; today, the ratio is about 4-to-3. A decade from now, it will be 3-to-2—and rising, on current trends.

What does this mean? And what's going on? Neither question is easy to answer. But start with the second.

A college degree used to be a rarity: a mark of privileged or professional status. As recently as 1950, fewer than half of Americans even finished high school, let alone went on to college.

Surprisingly, in the early decades of the last century, college attendees were as likely to be female as male. As the economists Claudia Goldin, Lawrence F. Katz, and Ilyana Kuziemko note in a fascinating 2006 article in the Journal of Economic Perspectives, things changed dramatically beginning in the 1930s. Men poured into universities, first to escape Depression-era unemployment, later with the help of the G.I. Bill, then to escape Vietnam. Above all, men were responding rationally to a labor market that paid a rising premium for advanced education. By 1957, three men took home a college diploma for every two women who did.

That imbalance defined the world in which all but the youngest of today's adults grew up. The education gap bolstered the presumption that men would dominate the professions and other elite careers; that men would boss women, instead of the other way around; that men, with their college-turbocharged earning power, would be the primary breadwinners; that, educationally speaking, men could expect to marry down.

Chapter 3 of the 20th-century story is as welcome as it is well known. Feminism, family planning (in the form of birth control, especially the Pill), and a meritocratic labor market opened not just jobs but careers to women, who streamed into the workforce and formed two-earner families. Expecting to work -- and also, as divorce rates soared, worrying about having to support themselves -- women also streamed to college. By about 1980, the gender gap in college enrollment had vanished. Young women had reached educational parity, with the promise of social parity not far behind.

The puzzle is what happened next. In the 1990s, the pattern changed again, but the surprise involved men. The wage premium for a college degree continued to rise smartly. Women responded just as economic theory predicts that rational actors would: Their college attendance rates kept climbing because the more they learned, the more they earned.

Men, however, ignored what the market was telling them: Their college attendance and completion rates barely rose. Why? "That's the big mystery," says Gary Burtless, an economist at the Brookings Institution.

Whatever the reason, the result was a new educational gender gap, this time favoring women. There is little sign that it will close: Projections by the National Center for Education Statistics show a 22 percent increase in female college enrollment between 2005 and 2016, compared with only a 10 percent increase for men.

In 2006, according to the Census Bureau, about 27 million American men held a college degree; so did about 27 million American women. This is a tipping point, however, not an equilibrium, because male college graduates tend to be old, and female graduates tend to be young. Among people age 65 and older, men are much more likely than women to be college-educated. Middle-aged men and women are at parity. Among young adults ages 25 to 34 years old, the college gap favors women almost as lopsidedly as it favors men among their grandparents' generation.

In other words, today's young people already live in a world where, among their peers, women are better educated than men. As the grandparents die off, every year the country's college-educated population will become more feminized. In a couple of decades, America's educational elite will be as disproportionately female as it once was male.

Perhaps men will wake up, smell the coffee, and rush off to college in greater numbers. Or perhaps the labor market will undergo a sea change and the premium on education will stop rising and start falling. As of now, however, both of those reversals appear far-fetched. Men might—certainly should, and hopefully will—raise their college attendance rates, but the likely effect would be to narrow the gap with women, not close it, much less flip it.

Meanwhile, millions of semiskilled workers in developing countries are entering an increasingly globalized labor market, which all but guarantees a rise in the relative premium commanded by a college diploma.

So what we are talking about, in all likelihood, is an America where women are better educated than men and where education matters more than ever. Put those facts together, and you get some implications worth pondering.

In 1978, when I was a freshman in college, I met a woman who told me she was in law. "Oh," I said, "you're a secretary?" Her gentle but mortifying reply: "No, I'm a lawyer." Few of today's young people can even imagine making that kind of faux pas. According to census data, a higher share of women than men already work in management and professional jobs (37 percent versus 31 percent, in 2005).

Look for that gap to widen. A generation from now, the female lawyer with her male assistant will be the cliché. Look for women to outnumber men in many elite professions, and potentially in the political system that the professions feed. (The election of a female president is a question of when, not whether.)

Women's superior education will increase their earning power relative to men's, and on average they will be marrying down, educationally speaking. A third of today's college-bound 12-year-old girls can expect to "settle" for a mate without a university diploma. But women will not stop wanting to be hands-on moms.

For families, this will pose a dilemma. Women will have a comparative advantage at both parenting and breadwinning. Many women will want to take time off for child-rearing, but the cost of keeping a college-educated mom at home while a high-school-educated dad works will be high, often prohibitive.

Look, then, for rising pressure on government to provide new parental subsidies and child care programs, and on employers to provide more flextime and home-office options -- among various efforts to help women do it all. Look, too, for a cascading series of psychological and emotional adjustments as American society tilts, for the first time, toward matriarchy. What happens to male self-esteem when men are No. 2 (and not necessarily trying harder)? When more men work for women than the other way around?

Some of these adjustments will have international dimensions. Goldin, Katz, and Kuziemko note, "Almost all countries in the OECD"—the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a group of advanced industrial countries—"now have more women than men in college and have had a growing gender gap among undergraduates that favors women." Yet much of the developing world, especially the Muslim world, remains predominantly patriarchal.

Many tradition-minded cultures in the Middle East, Africa, and parts of Asia already regard the Western economic and social model as emasculating. Radical Islam, in particular, abhors feminism. As the United States and Europe continue to feminize, will the anti-modern backlash, already deeply problematic in the Muslim world, intensify? As sex roles and expectations diverge, might hostility and misunderstanding mount between the West and the rest?

No, men are not about to disappear into underclass status. They will not become mothers anytime soon, and they will not stop secreting testosterone. Men's ambition will ensure ample male representation at the very top of the social order, where CEOs, senators, Nobelists, and software wunderkinds dwell. Women will not rule men.

But they will lead. Think about this: Not only do girls study harder and get better grades than boys; high school girls now take more math and science than do high school boys. If there is a "weaker sex," it isn't female.

© Copyright 2008 National Journal

Jonathan Rauch is a senior writer and columnist for National Journal and a frequent contributor to Reason. The article was originally published by National Journal.

Right the First Time, Senator Clinton

info@reason.com (Jonathan Rauch) — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 12:07:00 EST

If Hillary Rodham Clinton's presidential campaign goes south, historians are likely to remember October 30 as the date of departure. In a Democratic presidential debate in Philadelphia, Clinton was asked about New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer's plan to issue special driver's licenses to illegal immigrants. Unflappable until then, she gave an answer that commentators and other candidates derided as confused and contradictory.

The day after, Clinton tried to clarify her stance, announcing that she "supports governors like Governor Spitzer who believe they need such a measure." Two weeks after that, she flipped: "As president, I will not support driver's licenses for undocumented people." So much for her vaunted sure-footedness.

She could be forgiven for stumbling. Something like 12 million unauthorized immigrants live in the United States. If Clinton was conflicted about them, so is the country. Everyone wants something done, but the nation is a long way from knowing what to do.

Opinion polls show that the public distinguishes between legal immigration (good, mostly) and illegal immigration (bad). The public believes strongly that the federal government is not doing enough to keep out illegal immigrants, overwhelmingly that more should be done to punish employers who knowingly hire them, and crushingly—by about 9-to-1—that illegal immigration is a serious problem. In other words, the public wants more done to stanch the inflow, both at the borders and in the workplace.

But what about the millions who are already here? Think of these as illegal residents, not just immigrants. Many have lived here for years, worked here, raised children (who are often U.S. citizens), put down roots in their communities. The public is ambivalent about cracking down on them. Even people who favor deporting illegal immigrants are ambivalent, because they doubt—justifiably—that mass deportation could work. In a May CBS News/New York Times poll, only a third of respondents said that illegal immigrants should be deported; even among that hard-nosed third, 42 percent said that finding and deporting most illegal immigrants wouldn't be possible.

On the other hand, mass amnesty, even with conditions attached, splits the country. Rewarding millions for breaking the law seems unfair and anti-social. And any blanket scheme to regularize illegal immigrants, regardless of what it's called, risks attracting more of them.

No wonder Washington is paralyzed. But state and local governments are not.

"Nature abhors a vacuum, and the current federal law is not enforceable and is not being enforced," says Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano, a Democrat. "So states and local governments are jumping into the fray." This year Arizona passed a law suspending the business licenses of companies that intentionally hire illegal workers; a second offense means revocation. (The law is being tested in court.) Arizona is not alone: States have enacted 244 immigration-related laws in 2007, almost triple the number enacted in 2006, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Many of these new laws make life harder for unauthorized immigrants.

According to the NCSL, Tennessee and West Virginia passed employer sanctions similar to Arizona's. Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, and Utah curtailed state benefits to illegal residents.

A few places, however, have gone the other way. Illinois made it a civil-rights violation for employers to demand more or different documents than those required by U.S. immigration law. San Francisco is moving to issue municipal identification cards regardless of recipients' legal status. Spitzer, a Democrat, tried to go in the same direction (and might have had better luck if his effort had been less ham-handed).

Washington's own backyard is a microcosm of the ferment: Anne Arundel County in Maryland and Prince William and Loudoun counties in Virginia have pursued measures cracking down on illegal immigrants; Virginia's Arlington County, along with the municipalities of Manassas Park, Va., and Takoma Park, Md., have fired back with resolutions repudiating such crackdowns.

When analysts notice this welter of state and local activity, they tend to dismiss it as a stopgap, a second-class substitute for action in Washington. They should consider the opposite possibility: that local activity is a _precondition_ for effective federal action. At the moment, there are three reasons that states and localities are better suited than Washington to cope with illegal residents.

First, states and localities can experiment, and thus innovate. They can learn. If illegal immigrants are offered ID cards or special driver's licenses, how many will come forward to take them? If health benefits are cut, will emergency-room costs rise? How reliably can regulators and prosecutors tell if illegal workers were hired on purpose? What will an employment crackdown do to the local economy? These are empirical questions that need experiential answers. States and localities are ideally positioned to do the research.

Second, localization allows for variety. Some communities are up in arms about illegal residents; others welcome them. Some feel besieged economically; others have jobs going begging. There is no reason Phoenix and Manhattan, or Detroit and Raleigh, or Prince William County and Arlington County should have the same policy—not, at least, until the country as a whole has a much clearer idea of what it wants to do.

Third, letting states and localities take the lead reduces social friction. States and municipalities that are angry about illegal immigration can vent without dragging the whole country along.

In the longer term, state and local action could provide the test bed from which a national consensus might grow. "It's not just the cliche about being laboratories of democracy," Napolitano says. "I do think different approaches need to be looked at in terms of what really works. Out of chaos may come order."

Immigration advocates worry that states and localities, left to their own devices, would run a race to the bottom by competing to punish illegal immigrants. Rick Swartz, a Washington consultant who has long been active in immigration reform, argues that crackdowns would become contagious as illegal immigrants were pushed from state to state.

Maybe. But crackdowns may lose their popularity when dishes go unwashed and houses unbuilt. In the wake of Arizona's new law, some businesses in Chandler, an immigrant-heavy community near Phoenix, "now seem like ghost towns," according to The Arizona Republic. "Many of these shops that cater to the undocumented population are struggling to stay afloat as many of their customers either pack up and move or save money as they wait to see if the new law will go into effect." Until now, anti-illegal-immigrant agitation has been a form of social protest. When the backlash begins to sting, look for a backlash against the backlash.

A second objection to state and local leadership is that immigration is a federal responsibility. But Washington's monopoly on immigration policy has not been a big success lately, and in any case states are muscling in. Instead of trying to reform everything at once, Congress might be better advised to hang back and give states and localities their head.

"The centrality of illegal immigration to the current discontent about the direction of the country may be taking us back again to a welfare moment," write Stanley Greenberg, Al Quinlan, and James Carville in a recent report for Democracy Corps, a Democratic-leaning research group. The comparison is telling. As with welfare a generation ago, the problem strikes deep cultural chords, the solution is not obvious, and the country is divided. In the case of welfare, Washington's answer was to abdicate to the states, whose innovations ultimately paved the way for a new national policy -- one that proved both stricter and more humane.

As of now, only one presidential candidate has had a kind word for local leadership on illegal immigrants. Her name is Hillary Clinton. In the fuss over her poor debate performance, few observers focused on what she actually said on October 30 about Spitzer's licensing plan:

"I did not say that it should be done, but I certainly recognize why Governor Spitzer is trying to do it.... Do I think this is the best thing for any governor to do? No. But do I understand the sense of real desperation, trying to get a handle on this? Remember, in New York we want to know who's in New York. We want people to come out of the shadows. He's making an honest effort to do it."

Articulate, this was not. But neither was it nonsense. On a better day, Clinton might have said more or less the same thing this way: "I don't particularly like what Spitzer is doing, but New York should be allowed to try it." That was the right answer. She should have stayed with it.

© Copyright 2007 National Journal

Jonathan Rauch is a senior writer and columnist for National Journal and a frequent contributor to Reason. The article was originally published by National Journal.

Can the Democrats Own Prosperity?

info@reason.com (Jonathan Rauch) — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 06:40:00 EST

In America, politics is usually like the weather, changing from day to day in ways that are often capricious, rarely meaningful, but always useful as fodder for unproductive conversation. Besides, everyone complains about politics, but no one does anything about it. Once in a while, however, the political climate changes. Long-standing patterns shift in ways that alter the weather for decades, not just days. Something like that may be happening now. Consider, by way of a barometer, this graph:

Not many polling questions have been asked continuously for more than five decades, and fewer still remain as revealing today as they ever were. One such rarity is this question, which the Gallup Organization has asked in most (not all) years since 1951:

"Looking ahead for the next few years, which political party do you think will do a better job of keeping the country prosperous?"

This is the granddaddy of political polling questions not just because it is venerable but because it has earned its keep. If you had to pick only one political indicator as the most fundamental of all, this would be a good choice—because, to a first approximation, the party of prosperity is the default majority party.

The chart begins in 1951, when Harry Truman was president, and it shows how decisively the Depression and New Deal had bestowed "party of prosperity" status on the Democrats. Only occasionally did the Republicans even touch them. The Democrats' prosperity advantage seemed to be their birthright, part of the natural order of things, unlikely to be challenged or changed. Even well into the 1970s, as stagflation set in, few Democrats foresaw the trouble ahead.

That trouble arrived in the person of Ronald Reagan, whose greatest political achievement was to seize prosperity for the Republicans. He knew what he was doing when he made famous the phrase, "Are you better off than you were four years ago?" By the time he was finished, Reagan had exorcised Herbert Hoover's ghost. Now it was the Democratic Party, once seemingly synonymous with modern economic management, that seemed inept and obsolete.

A recession and a bumbling Republican campaign nonetheless helped put a Democrat in the White House in 1993, and the succeeding eight years brought the Democrats news both good and bad. The good news was that a turbocharged economy lifted them back to parity. The bad news was that a turbocharged economy lifted them only to parity. Perhaps the memory of stagflation was too fresh in the public's mind; perhaps divided government muddied the picture. For whatever reason, by the time George W. Bush took office, the Democrats had not made the sale. The country had no party of prosperity.

Seeing opportunity, Bush set out to recapture and fortify Reagan's redoubt. His weapon was tax cuts—large and aggressive ones. That, plus five years of economic growth, should have pleased the public.

The results? Devastating. Crushing. Not only did Bush and his party fail to make the sale, the public slammed the door in their faces. Just why is hard to say. Worries about economic insecurity, and the failure of the median household income (adjusted for inflation) to rise during the Bush years, undoubtedly played a part. Bush's personal unpopularity and the public's displaced anger over the Iraq war may also figure.

In any case, by September 2006, Democrats had opened up a 17-point lead on prosperity. This September, the gap widened to 20 points, confirming that the change was no fluke. Democrats enjoy a lead on prosperity whose like they have not seen in a generation.

The prosperity gap is best viewed not as the jaws of oblivion for the Republicans but as a window of opportunity for the Democrats, because the public is more angry at Republicans than sold on Democrats. Anti-Republican sentiment, of course, is likely to do the Democrats some good in next year's election, but it is mere weather, likely to be transient. To change the climate, the Democrats need to own prosperity for years, not months.

Winning the presidency and keeping the economy healthy would be essential, but even that, as Bush's case shows, may be insufficient. Democrats also need a prosperity narrative: a compelling story about why the public can better trust them to make the economy flourish.

The Democrats' postwar narrative was Keynesianism: By managing demand, the government would balance the economy instead of the budget. Reagan's narrative was supply-side: He would reignite stagnating productivity by reducing tax rates, deregulating, and shrinking a bloated public sector. Bill Clinton preached fiscal responsibility and globalization, a program that succeeded economically but lacked staying power politically, partly because Al Gore seemed to repudiate it.

Bush adopted the supply-side story, but in a primitive form in which tax cuts, deregulation, and smaller government became tax cuts, tax cuts, and tax cuts. The public has responded with something between indifference and contempt, leaving Republicans without a leg to stand on.

As for the Democrats, they have an audience. For the first time since the Great Society era, the public is receptive to a Democratic prosperity narrative, even eager for one. What the party does not have, yet, is the narrative.

Various bits and pieces are in circulation. Fix health care. Improve income security. Restrict trade. Raise taxes on the rich. Democrats hope to speak to middle-class America's feelings of economic vulnerability, which is probably the right tree to bark up. But while some Democrats strike notes of class resentment, others seem to blame foreigners. No candidate has found a package and a tone that tell a story not primarily about populism or nationalism but about prosperity: raising the tide to lift all boats.

A prosperity narrative does not need to be conceptually elegant. It merely needs to be more right than wrong economically and in touch with the times politically, as Keynesianism and Reaganism were. What became known as Reaganomics was in fact a messy pastiche of Republican remedies old (tight money, fiscal restraint) and new (tax cuts, entrepreneurship) that Reagan assembled over the course of his 1980 campaign. The pieces hung together only inasmuch as they suited the candidate and his time—but that was what counted.

It may be that the Democrats will not find a prosperity story next year. Still, the potential for climate change is there. As Reagan exorcised Hoover's ghost, so the way appears open for the Democrats to exorcise Jimmy Carter's—and to haunt Republicans with the shade of George W. Bush.

© Copyright 2007 National Journal

Jonathan Rauch is a senior writer and columnist for National Journal and a frequent contributor to Reason. The article was originally published by National Journal.

The War Was Right, the President Was Wrong

info@reason.com (Jonathan Rauch) — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 09:24:00 EDT

Five years ago, Congress and President Bush made the most consequential and, as now seems more likely than not, unfortunate decision of this country's still young century. On October 16, 2002, Bush signed a resolution authorizing the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Should war supporters apologize?

Democrats certainly think so. In the five years since then, many of them have said "I told you so" -- many more, in fact, than told us so. In a recent paper, Gary C. Jacobson, a political scientist at the University of California (San Diego), unearthed figures suggesting that some Democrats have edited their memories. Before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, 46 percent of them favored the war, according to an average of a dozen surveys. In 2006, only 21 percent of them said they had favored the war. Hmm. Do the math.

Those 25 percent of Democrats who were for the war until they had always been against it were probably not dissembling. They were just being human. "Memory is a self-justifying historian," says Carol Tavris, a social psychologist and a co-author (with Elliot Aronson) of the recent book Mistakes Were Made (but not by me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts. "Our memories are a better indication of what we believe and how we see ourselves today than of what actually happened."

I believe her, because I was not above a little memory repair myself. Recently, after a book review of mine appeared in The Washington Post, an angry reader wrote, "It will come as no surprise that Rauch was an advocate of invading Iraq." Who, me? I recalled myself as an agonized fence-sitter, more anti-anti-war than pro-war (an important distinction, you understand), maybe marginally in favor but more worried than convinced.

Just double-checking, I reread my columns from the period and promptly found one, from February 2004, in which I described myself as an, er, "advocate of the war." Gee. Imagine that.

So let me say for the record: I was wrong. Like most Americans, I have long since come to believe that the Iraq war was a strategic mistake -- with luck. (Without luck, it will be a strategic calamity.) But let me also say what I was wrong about.

In that February 2004 article, I called the war a "justified mistake." When a cop shoots a robber who has murdered in the past and who brandishes what looks like a gun, we blame the robber, not the cop -- even if it turns out that the robber was brandishing a toy or a cellphone. The robber was asking for it, and so was Saddam Hussein.

That answer, although still reasonable, no longer seems as convincing. Since 2004, it has become clearer that the Bush administration's prewar hype portrayed the intelligence on Saddam's alleged weapons of mass destruction as solider and starker than it really was. Not enough people, including people in the media, asked enough hard questions. I should have been more skeptical of the WMD hard sell. That was mistake No. 1.

Mistake No. 2 was forgetting the difference between experts and poseurs. Over the past few years, it has become clearer that the hazards of the U.S. occupation of Iraq were not unforeseeable. In fact, quite a few people foresaw them. And warned about them. And went unheeded. Partly that was because the Bush administration wasn't interested, but partly it was because a lot of us in the media gave a lot of ink and airtime to pontificators who had never been to Iraq, who had never fought in a war or served in an embassy or worked on a reconstruction team, and who did not know Iraq's language, culture, people, leaders, history, or region. Other than that, they were experts.

In 2002 and 2003, of course, there was no way of knowing which of countless forecasts and opinions would prove correct. The experts were divided; sometimes fresh-eyed amateurs see what jaded experts miss; the previous U.S. Iraq policy was no big success. All true. Still, the fact that so many of the war's sturdiest proponents were journalists and pundits -- in other words, hacks, like me -- should have rung more alarm bells. That was mistake No. 2.

Those, however, were small mistakes compared with the fundamental one. It was not, really, a mistake about the war at all. It was a mistake about the president.

Fool me twice, shame on me. In 1990, I was fooled once. In the prelude to the Persian Gulf War, I misjudged President George H.W. Bush. In those days, America's most resounding recent military triumphs had been against the Lilliputian forces of Panama and Grenada, against which weighed the 1975 defeat in Vietnam, the 1980 fiasco of Desert One (President Carter's failed hostage-rescue attempt in Iran), and the 1983 humiliation in Lebanon (where U.S. forces turned tail after losing more than 200 marines to a Hezbollah truck bomb). Saddam Hussein's forces looked formidable and well entrenched in 1990. The sandstorms looked forbidding. And President George H.W. Bush looked hapless. I opposed the war.

The U.S. military proved virtuosic, the Iraqi military proved worthless, the desert proved tractable, and, much the most important, the elder Bush proved dazzling. He marshaled an unprecedented coalition. He won decisively in hours. He quit while he was ahead. He even got other countries to pay. He should not have stood by as Saddam savagely put down postwar rebellions; but otherwise his performance was masterly, not least in its realism and restraint.

As I came to the 2002-2003 Iraq debate, I was determined not to make the same mistake twice. Another Bush was president, and the younger one looked as decisive as his father had once seemed dotty. This, after all, was the George W. Bush who had impressively rallied the nation and the world after September 11.

His foreign-policy team looked easily the equal of his father's, or anybody's. Vice President Cheney was the wise man of Washington and the elder Bush's successful Defense secretary. Secretary of State Colin Powell was the magisterial architect of the Gulf War. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was the man whose plan had worked like a charm in Afghanistan. If Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, was not the equal of her 1990 predecessor, Brent Scowcroft, she was no lightweight. Surely if any war Cabinet could inspire confidence, this was it.

Wrong again. Zero for two.

George W. Bush had more than his share of bad luck in Iraq. He bet that Saddam would have an active nuclear or at least biological-weapons program; that Iraq's social and physical infrastructure would be functional; that the war would be short. None of those bets was crazy, but he lost all three.

Still, a good gambler never bets more than he can afford to lose; he scrubs the odds with a sharp eye on the worst case; he hedges to give himself options. Above all, he keeps abreast of the game.

Bush placed too large a bet, padded the odds, and didn't hedge. Worst of all, he never caught up with the state of play. Again and again, he and his team were too slow in understanding and reacting to events, if they reacted at all. They were late to react to wholesale looting; late to understand the scale of the effort and to commit sufficient forces (arguably they still haven't); late to recognize they confronted an insurgency and to fight it with proven counterinsurgency tactics; late to recognize the emergence of a Shiite-Sunni civil war. Today, almost five years on, they are still behind the curve: As Senate Foreign Relations Chairman Joseph Biden, D-Del., plausibly argues, Bush clings to an insistence on a strong central government in Baghdad, despite that strategy's failure and signs that regionalism would work better.

Some optimists say that in Army Gen. David Petraeus, Bush has finally found his Gen. Grant. That may or may not be true, but it is beside the point. The problem is that Petraeus has not yet found his President Lincoln.

Judging presidents' wartime performance before the war starts is hard. No one could have known in 1860 that Lincoln, a lawyer and military novice, would develop into a commander-in-chief of genius. As lessons go, "Don't misjudge the president before committing to a war" is roughly as useful as "Buy low, sell high."

It does, however, provide some insight into the key mistake of five years ago. In February, asked for the umpteenth time to recant her war vote, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., for the umpteenth time refused. "The mistakes were made by the president," she said. In 2004, she said, "I do not regret giving the president authority.... What I regret is the way the president used the authority."

She had a fair point. She might have sharpened it by saying what I have come to say: I do not regret giving the president authority; I regret giving this president authority. I am sorry. I made a mistake five years ago. But not about the vote. About the leader.

Jonathan Rauch is a senior writer and columnist for National Journal and a frequent contributor to Reason. The article was originally published by National Journal.

The Grown-Up in the Race

info@reason.com (Jonathan Rauch) — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 12:01:00 EDT

Senator A
"The best way to protect our security and to pressure Iraq's leaders to resolve their civil war is to immediately begin to remove our combat troops. Not in six months or one year-now."

Senator B
"It is long past time that the president ended American combat involvement in Iraq's multi-sided, sectarian civil war.... It is time to begin ending this war. Not next year, not next month, but today."

Senator A
"While we change the dynamic within Iraq, we must surge our diplomacy in the region."

Senator B
"As we redeploy our troops, we will replace our military force in Iraq with an intensive diplomatic initiative in the region."

Senator A
”The final part of my plan is a major international initiative to address Iraq's humanitarian crisis."

Senator B
"As we are leaving Iraq-and after we have left-we need to engage the world in a global humanitarian effort to confront the human costs created by this war."

Senator A
"We must get out strategically and carefully, removing troops from secure areas first, and keeping troops in more volatile areas until later."

Senator B
"Withdrawing troops is dangerous and difficult....We should redeploy our troops steadily and consistently, not in fits and starts.

***

Here's a fun puzzler for the whole family. The box on this page contains quotations from two leading Democratic presidential contenders' plans for Iraq. One column excerpts a July speech in Iowa by Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York; the other, a September speech, also in Iowa, by Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois. See if you can tell which senator is which. (Answers at the end of this column.)

Then there is Sen. Joseph Biden (D-Del). To paraphrase Sesame Street, one of these candidates is not like the others.

By now, even cynics can't help noticing something different about Biden. Different from his previous presidential run, in 1987, and different from the other candidates today. The glibly garrulous wonder boy of two decades ago can still talk a blue streak; but age (he is 64), his institutional position as chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, and the prospect of a devastating U.S. setback in Iraq have made him the leading contender for the most beloved (among columnists) and dreaded (by candidates) designation in American politics: that of the grown-up in the race.

While other Democrats talk Iraq, health care, and change, Biden talks Iraq, Iraq, and Iraq. At a press conference this month on the steps of Iowa's Capitol in Des Moines, he seized the occasion of an endorsement by the state's House majority leader to proclaim, "I know how to make America safer!"

He continued, "Immediately begin to draw down American combat troops.... Immediately give the troops all the protection they need while we're drawing them down." So far, just like Clintama. But then he veered sharply off Hillarack. "Make sure you recognize a fundamental flaw in the strategy," he said, "and that is, there will not be a central government in Iraq, out of Baghdad, capable of governing that country in anyone's lifetime standing out in front of this Capitol. You must change the policy to put in place a federal, decentralized Iraq, giving the warring factions breathing room to establish their own security [and] control over the fabric of their daily lives."

For a year and a half, Biden (along with Leslie H. Gelb, a former president of the Council on Foreign Relations) has advocated devolving power to autonomous regions in Iraq. The presidential campaign has brought the plan into sharper focus -- and, as Biden argues, into sharper contrast with what he plausibly regards as the wishful thinking prevalent in both parties.

The Bush administration has spent most of the past four-plus years trying to stand up a national government in Baghdad: first a unity government, then a Shiite-led government. Biden says, as he told NBC's Tim Russert on "Meet the Press" this month, "There is no possibility, no possibility, of a central government governing Iraq in any near term." Which means President Bush's strategy is "pushing on a rope."

More recently, the administration has segued toward tactical alliances with Sunni tribes and fighters, giving them de facto local police power, plus military training and money, in exchange for opposition to Al Qaeda and a de facto truce with the Shiite central government. This de facto devolution has produced security gains in Anbar and Diyala provinces. Biden, like most analysts, welcomes it as a reality-based adjustment.

Bush, however, still sees the local alliances as bridges to a national rapprochement. "Local politics will drive national politics," he said at a press conference last week. "As more reconciliation takes place at the local level, you'll see a more responsive central government." For Bush, the alliances are a military tactic, useful steps along a road that leads back to Baghdad.

Biden is saying that the alliances need to be not just tactical but part of a whole new political strategy, which would give up on Baghdad and enshrine decentralization as an end, not just a means. Only if Sunnis see autonomy and responsibility for their own security as the endgame, goes the thinking, will they feel safe enough to lay down arms.

A stable federalism is "not going to happen organically," said a Biden aide. As in the Balkans a decade ago, the United States, in Biden's view, must embrace regionalism, get allies and neighboring countries on board, and lock Iraqis in a room -- figuratively -- until they agree on a devolutionary framework.

The result, Biden stresses, should be federalism, not partition. Iraq would remain one country, and the central government would distribute oil revenue and patrol the borders. Such an arrangement is already provided for in the Iraqi constitution, he says.

The plan offers, he acknowledged in Senate remarks this month, just "the possibility, not the guarantee, of stability." But it is better than Bush's wishful thinking, which, he recently told a Nebraska audience, will leave the country "right back where we started" once the military surge subsides next year.

It is also better, he argues, than a brand of wishful thinking offered by his Democratic competitors. This holds that Iraqis will get their act together once U.S. forces withdraw, or that if Iraqis don't get their act together it won't matter much, or both.

Dangerous illusions, says Biden. In Iowa, he has run a television spot alluding to the parents of killed U.S. troops and intoning, "We must end this war in a way that doesn't require us to send their grandchildren back." Elaborating at a Democratic debate last month, he sounded like, dare one say it, Bush: "If we leave Iraq and we leave it in chaos, there will be regional war. The regional war will engulf us for a generation."

This is not something many Democratic activists and primary voters want to hear. "What they want is red meat, and he's giving them a sober reality check," says Will Marshall, the president of the Progressive Policy Institute, a centrist Democratic think tank. "Biden is hands down the most candid candidate when it comes to Iraq. There's all this glib promising to end the war immediately and bring the troops home. There's an air of unreality about it. Biden, to his credit, has refused to indulge in these kinds of fantasies."

Even an inexpert Washington columnist can come up with a dozen reasons the Biden plan might fail. What if Shiites, Sunnis, and Kurds can't agree on a regional framework, or on a revenue-sharing deal? What about Baghdad and other mixed areas? What if the autonomous regions go to war? What if the Shiite or Sunni region degenerates into intrasectarian chaos? What if Iran colonizes the Shiite region?

A conversation with Biden's aide yielded answers that were plausible but iffy. The more relevant answer, however, is the one Biden gave in a speech at the Brookings Institution in February: "To those who disagree with my plan, I have one simple question: What is your alternative?"

Morris Udall, John Anderson, Bruce Babbitt, Paul Tsongas, Richard Lugar: All won editorial writers' praise for their seriousness, and all lost their presidential bids. Maybe Biden will be the exception. Maybe, on the other hand, this column's headline is the kiss of death.

Sometimes, though, grown-ups earn history's respect for surfacing important problems or innovative solutions; and sometimes they shape the agenda of whoever wins the White House. If Bush proves unwilling or unable to rethink his Iraq strategy, and if he manages to hold Iraq together with a large U.S. deployment until the end of his term, then his successor will have some hard choices to make. Biden's plan crossed party lines Wednesday to win the Senate's nonbinding support; no one should be surprised if it ends up providing the next administration's road map.

In any case, "Get out and jawbone" and "Stay in and pray," the leading partisan positions, are not very convincing solutions to the Iraq conundrum. Biden's candidacy will earn its keep if it does nothing more than elicit better ones.

------------------

Jonathan Rauch is a senior writer and columnist for National Journal and a frequent contributor to Reason. The article was originally published by National Journal.

Flying Blind in a Red-Tape Blizzard

info@reason.com (Jonathan Rauch) — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 20:22:00 EDT

Attention, fans of smaller government: Ever helpful, this correspondent has found yet another reason to be unhappy with President Bush. He appears to be the biggest regulator since the Nixon-Ford years.

In June the Mercatus Center at George Mason University and the Weidenbaum Center at Washington University in St. Louis released their latest annual report on regulation in Washington. (The study, by Jerry Brito and Melinda Warren, is available at mercatus.org.) These numbers need to be handled with caution. They measure how much money the government’s departments and agencies are spending to regulate and how many people they are employing to do it. They give, at best, a rough indication of how quickly the regulatory wheels are turning.

The left panel of the chart (below) tells the story. (The percentage calculations are mine, based on data supplied by the Weidenbaum Center.) From 2001 through 2006, Bush has increased inflation-adjusted regulatory spending by 6.5 percent a year and increased regulatory staffing by 6.3 percent. You have to go back before President Carter to find a president who has done as much regulatory spending and hiring as Bush. (Adding the projected figures for 2007 does not substantially change the picture.)

A cruder, but still suggestive, measure of regulatory activity is the annual page count in the Federal Register, where the government publishes proposed and final regulations. Burdensome regulations may be concise, of course, and deregulation can run to hundreds of pages. Still, if the page count moves in the same direction as regulatory spending and staffing, that deepens suspicion that something is really happening. Sure enough, as the right panel of the chart shows, Bush outstrips Carter, the previous record-holder for average annual Register pages.

A new report by Wayne Crews of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a free market think tank, estimates that federal regulation now costs the economy more than $1.1 trillion a year. Crews also notes one data series that points in a contrary direction. The raw number of final rules published in the Federal Register is down since the 1990s; indeed, it has been declining since the 1970s. “But that doesn’t tell you about the costs of those rules,” Crews cautions.

Nor does it tell you about the benefits. Asked about the rising indicators of red tape, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) points to its recent draft report to Congress on the costs and benefits of federal regulation. The OMB found that the average annual cost of major regulations issued during the Bush years was almost 50 percent lower than in the 1980s and ’90s, and that the average benefits were more than twice as large as in the Clinton years.

Note the word major: To earn that sobriquet, a regulation must cause an estimated economic impact of $100 million or more. Fewer than 1 percent of regulations qualify, so the OMB’s figures give an incomplete picture. Moreover, some regulatory economists take the administration’s cost-benefit analyses with a grain of salt. “Over the years, I have found that many analyses done by government regulatory agencies have major flaws,” says Robert Hahn, the executive director of the AEI-Brookings Joint Center for Regulatory Studies. Agencies, after all, are inclined to produce analyses that justify what they do.

That said, OMB may have a point. If liberal public interest groups’ portrayals of Bush as the anti-regulatory antichrist are any indication, the administration may be acting as a stricter gatekeeper than its predecessors did. Even so, the Bush administration may be regulating both more efficiently and more extensively. It may be raising the cost-benefit bar for major rules in such traditional domains as the environment while also extending regulation’s reach. The only way to be sure would be to analyze the thousands of regulations promulgated in recent years and score them on efficiency and scope.

According to the Mercatus-Weidenbaum report, the bulk of the increase in regulatory spending and staffing is for homeland security: such functions as airport screening, maritime and border enforcement, and new air cargo rules. Subtract homeland security, and Bush turns out to be as tight a regulator as Reagan was, with annual growth of regulatory spending and staffing at rates of 2.6 percent and 0.1 percent, respectively.

Prepare, then, for a shock of recognition: On regulation, as on everything else, the Bush administration’s war on terrorism is driving an expansion of government.

Are we getting our money’s worth from Bush’s security-driven burst of regulation? The answer, unfortunately, is that no one knows. The science of cost-benefit analysis, which took decades to get a handle on economic and social regulation, has yet to find any purchase at all on security regulation.

Figuring out whether a 20 percent reduction in particulate emissions makes economic sense is difficult (it depends on many intangibles, such as how much human health is worth), but it is at least roughly doable. Security costs and benefits, by contrast, are notoriously conjectural. We can estimate the cost of an attack on the Brooklyn Bridge but not the attack’s likelihood. Estimating the benefits of security is even more difficult, because averted attacks are generally invisible and because hardening one target may merely displace terrorist activities to others.

Those analytical problems are compounded by a strategic one: The greater a potential vulnerability, the less willing officials are to help economists quantify it. Douglas Holtz-Eakin, who was the Council of Economic Advisers’ chief economist in the first two years of the Bush administration before becoming director of the Congressional Budget Office, recalls asking agencies to justify proposed security regulations by providing specifics about threats. “They said, ‘There’s no way we can disclose that,’ ” he says. In the government, he adds, “I don’t know of any serious thinking about the benefits and costs” of homeland-security regulation.

Jeremy Shapiro of the Brookings Institution notes that since 9/11 federal homeland security spending has roughly tripled. He writes, “Policy discussions of homeland-security issues are driven not by rigorous analysis but by fear, perceptions of past mistakes, pork-barrel politics, and insistence on an invulnerability that cannot possibly be achieved.” Regulation has been no exception.

Upsetting old structures and balances but not managing to replace them with sustainable new ones—in effect, governing as if in a perpetual state of emergency—has become a defining pattern of Bush’s presidency: in foreign policy (notably the Middle East), in fiscal policy (unsustainable spending increases and tax cuts), in legal affairs (executive overreach in the handling of detainees). To the list of the next president’s headaches, add untangling the reels of red tape that the Bush years have unspooled.

Jonathan Rauch is a senior writer and columnist for National Journal. A version of this article appeared in the July 14 edition of National Journal.

Be Angry—but Patient

info@reason.com (Jonathan Rauch) — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 15:55:00 EDT

Pity Gen. David Petraeus, the military commander in Iraq. Before Memorial Day, his September progress report from Baghdad was expected to be a turning point in the Iraq war. By Labor Day, it looked like most of the other turning points in this strange war: one where nothing turned.

Partisans worked through the summer to show that nothing as trivial as the field commander's assessment would influence their views. In July, Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean announced, "We do not need to wait until September" to know that President Bush's "surge" strategy had failed. In August, Bush's allies shot back that the strategy was plainly succeeding.

People who knew better than to listen to partisans paid more attention to a raft of August progress reports: a partially declassified National Intelligence Estimate; a leaked draft report [PDF] from the Government Accountability Office; early accounts of a congressionally commissioned study of Iraqi security forces; and reports from members of Congress and think-tank experts who traveled to Iraq.

The assessments disagreed on some details, such as how much Iraq's security forces are improving, if at all. Taken together, however, they painted a coherent picture, which Petraeus's report seemed unlikely to change.

Tactically, which is to say militarily, the troop surge is making headway. Partly thanks to Sunni tribes joining with U.S. forces against Al Qaeda, and partly because the Pentagon is devoting more resources to a better plan of attack, security has improved in Iraq's contested central regions. But:

Iraq is still a dangerous and volatile place, far from stable. Sectarian militias, foreign terrorists, and domestic insurgents remain potent; violence remains unacceptably high. And:

Strategically, which is to say politically, the surge is working much less well. As the National Intelligence Estimate summarized, "Broadly accepted political compromises required for sustained security, long-term political progress, and economic development are unlikely to emerge unless there is a fundamental shift in the factors driving Iraqi political and security developments."

Absent a political settlement, Iraq's government and security forces are too incompetent, sectarian, and corrupt to stabilize the country without continued large-scale U.S. intervention.

The troop surge is not sustainable much beyond next spring unless combat tours are extended, which would strain the Army to or near the breaking point. Pre-surge forces could be maintained a while longer but not indefinitely.

In sum: The surge has temporarily stabilized what had become a downward spiral and, by doing so, has bought some time. But not much time, and the Iraqis have done little with it.

Here's a startling headline: "More Troops, Better General, and Smarter Strategy Yield Some Results." It would have been surprising if the troop surge had _not_ yielded tactical improvements. (To the extent that the surge is working, it gives a depressing taste of how much better this war could have gone if Bush had provided adequate manpower and leadership four years ago.) The question has always been whether tactical progress -- suppression of the conflict -- could be translated into strategic gains, in the form of political stability.

Partisans draw opposite conclusions by focusing on different parts of the picture. Bush and his Republican allies use tactical military success to argue that politicians should not undermine the surge just when it is showing some momentum. War opponents and their Democratic allies use the absence of strategic gains to argue that the surge is an exercise in futility.

The problem is that both sides are right. The car has stopped rolling backward, which is good. But it has yet to find a road forward, which is not good. To put the point more precisely, the surge appears to be doing better at peacekeeping than pacifying.

Pacification uses military force to reshape a contested political landscape so as to create conditions for peace on favorable terms -- usually by turning the balance of power decisively in favor of one faction or another. Pacification is what Bush still thinks he is doing in Iraq: turning the balance of power in favor of Sunni and Shiite moderates.

Peacekeeping, by contrast, merely interposes force between parties to a conflict. Instead of rebalancing the power, it suspends the fighting. When peacekeepers leave, fighting tends to break out again.

War opponents believe that, regardless of what Bush thinks, what he is doing in Iraq is peacekeeping -- at an exorbitant cost, if not counterproductively. In July, Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois, a leading Democratic presidential candidate, told the Associated Press bluntly that preventing potential genocide in Iraq is not a good enough reason to stick with Bush's policy. "When you have a conflict like this," he said, "military efforts and protective forces can play an important role, especially if they're under an international mandate as opposed to simply a U.S. mandate. But you can't solve the underlying problem at the end of a barrel of a gun."

In a speech last month to a Veterans of Foreign Wars convention, Bush warned of a humanitarian calamity if the U.S. were to leave Iraq in turmoil. But he must know that not even Republicans will sustain a massive and open-ended U.S. commitment to peacekeeping in Iraq. In last month's VFW speech, the president decried the humanitarian cost of America's failure in Vietnam; revealingly, however, he stopped short of suggesting that the United States should have stayed in Vietnam on humanitarian grounds.

For what an amateur's view is worth, I tend to believe, with Obama, that the war has devolved into de facto peacekeeping. I see little evidence that Sunnis would accept any political offer that the Shiite majority would abide by, and vice versa. My reading of the evidence is that Iraqi fundamentals are more conducive to war than peace, and that there is not much the United States can do to change that.

Even so, what's the Democrats' hurry to end the surge? U.S. combat fatalities are tragic, but withdrawing in the midst of an escalating war could bring even more of them. Nor is it anything like obvious that, as Obama told AP, America's presence is making Iraq more dangerous for Iraqis by attracting terrorists and encouraging irresponsible politics. As Bush told the VFW, those who said that the people of Vietnam and (especially) Cambodia would be better off under Communism were wrong.

Here is something that Democrats might want to think about before rushing to shut down the surge: If they managed to ram through a withdrawal or timetable on party lines this fall, when most Republicans think the surge is working, they would be flayed for a generation as the party that seized certain defeat from the jaws of possible victory. For years to come, Republicans would insist that Democratic pusillanimity emboldened jihadism, an ugly narrative that some are already rehearsing. (Last month Peter Wehner, who recently left the White House for a post at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, sent out an e-mail pointing to jihadists' claim that America is a "weak horse" that runs when bloodied. He continued, "If the critics have their way and deny Gen. Petraeus the time he needs to help bring about a decent outcome in Iraq, the jihadists will be right.")

Fortunately, without Republican support, Democrats can't pull the plug or impose a strict timetable this fall. And they don't need to. The war is on a timetable already, one dictated by military constraints and political reality. "I think everyone understands that, by a year from now, we've got to be a good deal smaller than we are right now," Petraeus said last month. By this time next year, Bush's reluctance to scale up the Army to match his rhetoric will have caught up with him.

The military schedule synchronizes with the political one. By this time next year, if Iraq has not turned the corner, a good guess is that the Republican presidential nominee will be facing a choice: Promise to wind down the war, or lose the election. Whichever choice the nominee makes, the die will be cast.

Democrats have every reason to be angry at Bush's evasion of political accountability for the mess he has made in Iraq. Democrats, Republicans, and all other Americans have every reason to be angry at Bush for making the mess to begin with. They have every reason to feel about him the way the wildlife of Prince William Sound felt about Joseph Hazelwood, the captain of the Exxon Valdez.

But anger does not justify impatience. If Petraeus says he needs more time, he should get it. If he fails, a course correction won't be long in coming. The 22nd Amendment has seen to that.

Jonathan Rauch is a senior writer and columnist for National Journal and a frequent contributor to Reason. The article was originally published by National Journal.