Effect Of Stimulus Package

Aren't you glad we did the "second stimulus" after President Obama took office?  Here's a handy chart to remind you what President Obama said would happen if we didn't pass the stimulus, and comparing it to what has actually happened.

Gee, if we hadn't have passed the stimulus, we'd have had close to 9% national unemployment by now!  As it is, we now have... um... 10%.  But hey, it could have been much, much worse!  Vice President Biden assures us that in fact, the Obama Administration's wise leadership in getting that stimulus package has saved a million jobs!  (Props if you, too, can spot the error in the Vice-President's math.  Diss if you actually believe what he's trying to sell you.)

Economists don't have to be right to earn their paychecks.  They just have to be credible.  All the same, this just goes to show what some people were saying back then -- you can't spend your way out of a problem caused by not having enough money in the first place.

Hat tip to the as-usual-spot-on Doug Mataconis, on days like today a one-man engine of pithy, informative, principled, and most of all, smart political commentary.  Below the Beltway is easily my favorite political blog and if you're not already subscribed to it -- why ever not?

That's Why We Have Joe Biden, After All

If Steve Jobs dies any time soon, will the board of directors at Apple prop him up and carry his corpse around like Weekend at Bernie's? At this point, I think they'd have to, in order to preserve shareholder value. This is the direct result of not-good leadership by Jobs. Seems to me that if Jobs were doing a good job as a leader, Apple would be in a strong enough position to continue as a viable company in his absence. No one, not even the guy at the top, should be indispensible -- and it's the responsibility of the guy at the top to see to it that this is a reality.

Meet The New Boss

There's this cool classic rock song from The Who, Won't Get Fooled Again. It's used as the theme music for one of the CSI shows. I've always liked the interplay between the Hammond pipe organ and Pete Townsend tearing up the guitar chords through it. But these days, I can't get the lyrics out of my head as I follow political news.

The world looks just the same,
And history ain't changed.

Barack Obama has brought change and hope to Washington. Right? Let's take a look at what we've seen so far from the Obama Administration.

Today we saw the Senate pass its version of the stimulus bill. In that debate, we learned that criticism or dissent from the Administration's line is something that the American people "really don't care" about them:

Thanks for that reminder to toe the Administration's line, or else, Senator Schumer! But, we didn't really need it. After all, the President himself went out of his way to praise the "patriotism" of Republican Senators who crossed party lines to vote for the bill.

By extension, then, are we to assume that Republicans who voted against it or who offer alternative suggestions for ways to solve the problems the bill addresses are not patriotic? Ah, but I forget. We're in a post-partisan era now. An era in which, regardless of party or political alignment, everyone is supposed to agree with the President on all things or else risk being portrayed as un-American. So much, then, for dissent, particularly on the stimulus issue.

Now, bear in mind that while the House stimulus bill was for $820 billion, much of it spending, and the Senate bill was for $838 billion, with relatively more tax cuts incorporated into that total as compared to the House bill. So they're likely to compromise at something like $900 billion. Where is money is going to come from or how it's going to be paid back no one has yet explained. Until then, you can compare the competing versions of the stimulus bill here.

At the same time, we also learn that the "uniquely qualified" Treasury Secretary, Tim Geithner, he for whom we collectively chose to begin overlooking the non-payment of taxes, has no particular clue about what to do next with this money to fulfill his mission of pulling the economy out of the downward spiral in which he finds it. Oh, sure, Secretary Geithner's speech is professionally written, but it amounts to three policy items:

1. A "bad bank," which is what TARP was supposed to be when it was originally passed by Congress.
2. Government purchase of temporary equity in failing banks and other major financial and industrial institutions, which is what TARP became in the lame-duck period of the Bush Administration. (This after having already guaranteed to put all this public money in the hands of the people in whom we should have the lowest expectations of excellence.)
   
3. Expansion of the power of the Federal Reserve to participate in the market, within its own discretion.
   

Regarding this (amazingly familiar-sounding) plan, Secretary Geithner also promises to "seek input from market participants and the public as we design it." The sparse level of detail in the policy produced snorts of sarcasm and outright laughter during a Congressional policy briefing. In response to this early-morning announcement, the stock market lost nearly five percent of its value today. Good jorb, Mr. Secretary!

I'll smile and grin at the change all around me,
Pick up my guitar and play.
Just like yesterday.

Three Obama appointees got in trouble for not paying their taxes and two of them (Nancy Killefer and former Senator Tom Daschle) had to withdraw their nominations. Daschle's problem was particularly bad from a public relations perspective -- he didn't pay income taxes on free limousine service he received, graphically demonstrating that he is literally a limousine liberal who thinks that taxes are for other people to pay and the money thus generated for him to dispose of. Secretary Geithner was confirmed, although the degree of his tax problems appeared to be substantially the same (in kind although worse in amount) than Ms. Killefer's. The President's response: "I screwed up." But he still wanted these people.

Is this really so different from George W. Bush sticking by guys like Donald Rumsfeld, Mike Brown, Alberto Gonzales, and Doug Fieth?

And now our team on the left
Is now our team on the right

Still, President Obama is no shrinking violet, make no mistake about that! He plans to expand military activities in Afghanistan for the purpose of combating an insurgency there. It's not clear that we're on particularly good relations with the democratic government we erected in that state after we toppled the former government there, and it's also far from clear that we're wanted or liked.

Secretary of State Clinton calling Afghanistan a "narco-state" isn't helping things. But you can't say that I didn't warn you that Hillary Clinton was not temperamentally suited for the position of top diplomat, because I did.

And the delicate diplomatic situation there didn't stop Vice President Biden, on a state visit to Afghanistan's beleaguered Prime Minister Hamid Karzai, from serving up a deadly insult to the government there. Granted, Karzai dropped a whopper during dinner, claiming that there was "no corruption" in his government, but on the other hand, Diplomat Joe had pretty much brazenly accused Karzai of tolerating corruption. Nevertheless, dropping his spoon and storming out of the dinner was not the appropriate reaction even to such a baldfaced lie -- and I question whether, in Afghan etiquette, Karzai did the wrong thing. This is the sort of issue to address carefully and through diplomats trained in the gentle and subtle art of communicating that sort of thing.

To add to the point, let's take a look at the fulfillment of the promise of "openness" in the Obama Administration. In response to a lawsuit concerning extraordinary renditions, lawyers representing the government, taking orders from Attorney General Holder, made precisely the same argument about the state secrets doctrine not allowing courts to permit discovery into issues concerning that controversial alleged activity on the part of U.S. agents engaged in fighting terrorism.

To say this has profoundly disappointed the President's core group of supporters is something of an understatement.

I'll get all my papers and smile at the sky,
For I know that the hypnotized never lie.

Then, there's the matter of faith-based initiatives, now called faith-based neighborhood partnerships which is the same thing, only more of it. Not only has Obama maintained this unconstitutional division of the White House, whose only purpose in existence is to funnel government money to churches, he has expanded it. To be sure, his new "focus" for the office, combating poverty, is itself a laudable goal. But the mechanism for doing it is to subsidize and support religious groups engaged in charitable works, which incorporate and blend in their efforts to proselytize. Both by making the religious charity look good, and by giving it money to engage in the charitable work, the government is underwriting those groups, and thus paying for someone else's religion with my money.

And he refuses to establish any kind of guidelines for determining the Constitutionality of either the office, its programs, or anything it does, preferring instead to decide these things on an ad hoc basis. (More making it up as he goes, which may be a theme for a while.) This despite the fact that the new nominee for Solicitor General of the United States, who would be the government's top lawyer before the Supreme Court, has herself written of the deep and apparently insoluble Constitutional problems inherent in the existence of such an organ of government.

I'll tip my hat to the new constitution,
Take a bow for the new revolution.

Moreover, three Cabinet-level officers in the Administration are at least debatably disqualified from service by the Constitution. That would be Secretary of State Clinton, Secretary of Commerce Judd Gregg, and Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar, all of whose most recent terms in Congressional service saw them vote raises for the offices that they now occupy. Granted, this is only a "technicality" in the Constitution and they all got the Saxbe fix to cut their pay by a few thousand dollars a year that they don't care about anyway. After all, the Framers didn't really mean what they wrote, did they?

But the point here is that the Constitution has been treated as an obstacle to Obama governing in the manner in which he pleases, rather than as a guideline for how he should govern. This is a foreboding and disappointing thing to see from the Administration of a man who once made his living as a Constitutional Law professor at one of America's most prestigious law schools.

There's nothing in the street
Looks any different to me
But the slogans were all replaced overnight.

Let's sum up. Here's what I've been hearing and seeing coming out of the White House over the past couple of weeks:

• We haven't a clue what to do about the economy. But while we're figuring that out, we're going to deficit-spend your children's money until we get tennis elbow from shoveling so many bricks of hundred-dollar bills onto the bonfire. Even if it's an abysmally bad idea (at least, according to the only guy on Wall Street who saw the recession coming) because frankly, we can't think of anything else to do.
  
• We're also going to subsidize religious activities and not concern ourselves with whether doing so is compliant with the Constitution.
• Please ignore the personal and professional shortcomings of our appointees. These are really the people we want and it's not really your place to criticize those choices. Even if your criticism is based in, you know, that pesky Constitution thingy we vaguely recall hearing about back in law school.
  
• We're expanding the war on terrorism in a far-off nation overseas where the people aren't particularly fond of us and where we've gone out of our way to ham-handedly insult the government that's supposed to be helping us.
• You, the American public, may not question or inquire into anything that we're doing about that terrorism or anything else we find particularly embarrassing, including torture or extraordinary renditions, which we're not saying that we're actually doing but even if we are we're certainly not going to tell you anything about it. Once again, don't you worry your little heads about the Constitution, just put your trust in us that we'll do right by you.
  
• Criticism of this agenda will be labeled as "unpatriotic" or words to that effect by the President and his minions.

If this all sounds wearyingly familiar, it should. These are, by most measures, the same sorts of things that had me and many others complaining about the Bush Administration for some time in various degrees, particularly in its waning days.

Meet the new boss
Same as the old boss

Well, don't say I didn't warn you that this was coming, because I did.

Hillary Clinton Has Got To Be Pissed About This

Take a listen to Jill Biden at about 1:45 during this interview with Oprah:

There's a "clarification" later which basically disclaims the whole thing that Dr. Biden blurted out (and which caused her husband's face to turn red).

A Cup Of Joe Before The Inauguration

There's nothing like having a talented, experienced, significant member of your team who has your back when you're under fire. That's a great feeling of support and a powerful show of strength, one that you can use to your advantage to prevail against adversity. Too bad for Barack Obama that he isn't getting that from Vice President-Elect Joe Biden.

Biden, in a frankly unsurprising and presaged show of his contrarian and arrogant personality, showed up to be sworn in as a United States Senator for his seventh term and began to use his fiffteen days in Congress to start building up legislative support for his President's honeymoon legislative proposals.*

Which, as it turns out, consists of calling Obama's choice of Leon Panetta to head the CIA "a mistake," declared September's financial markets collapse the equivalent of the 9/11 terrorist attacks and declared the nation "at war" as a result, and revealing that he's about to take a state trip to Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan (this information was still under wraps for security reasons). Wow. Talk about being on board with the big guy's plans. Obama had to know that he'd wind up butting heads with his former colleagues in Congress at some point. He just didn't expect one of the first salvos to come from his running mate.

Well, he does have a much higher IQ than you, so you really ought to listen carefully to what this very smart man has to say. After all, he understands the grave threat that high fructose corn syrup represents to the average American.

Some people who follow politics worry that there's not enough news to follow at a point like this. You've gotta write about something and for the most part, Cabinet picks are not that interesting subjects. But Joe Biden is the new administration's gift to them.


* The Constitution provides that the new Congress is sworn in on January 3, which this year fell on a Saturday, so the new Congress took office on the next business day, which was Monday the 5th. But the Constitution also provides that the new President is sworn in on January 20. So there's a little bit more than two weeks' time between the new Congress convening and the new President taking office. In addition to winning election as Vice President, Biden also won his bid for re-election as Delaware's senior Senator because a Delaware law allows a candidate to run for a national office simultaneous to running for statewide office. So, Biden was re-elected Senator and elected Vice President; he gets to be Delaware's Senator until he takes his oath of office as the Vice President.

Rating The Vice Presidents

There's a poll that CNN is featuring prominently in which 23% of Americans say that Dick Cheney is the worst Vice President in American history. This is about the dumbest poll I've ever heard of.

First of all, bear in mind that in other polls looking at similar populations, only 69% of the people could name the Vice President at all. Also in a recent poll of all Americans about their beliefs, 44% of Americans believe in ghosts, 36% in UFOs, 31% in witches and astrology, and 24% believe that they are reincarnated. 47% believe in evolution, 40% believe in creationism, which leaves 13% who apparently believe in neither. So we're not talking about a particularly well-informed population responding to the poll here.

So then let's get down to the real issue here. What is it that distinguishes a good Vice President from a bad one? By what criteria are we to distinguish Charles Fairbanks from Levi Morton? For much of our history, the Vice President's job has consisted of waiting around for the President to die, accepting bribes, and staying sober enough to cast the occasional tie-breaking vote in the Senate.

This does not seem like a particularly difficult job. To a very real extent, then, a successful Vice President is one who does not die in office. Yet seven Vice Presidents have not found themselves up to the task of continuing to breathe for the amount of time demanded of them by the Constitution so as to be able to take over in the event of such a need. Aside from that, it's kind of hard to figure out how to rank the performance of these forty-six men in discharging the minimal and vague duties of such a peculiar office over more than two hundred years of history.

Vice President Cheney has done and said a lot of controversial things over the past eight and a half years. I'm very much not a big fan of his sweeping vision of nearly unchecked executive power. He has taken a very active hand in guiding the shape of our government's policy as a trusted advisor to the President. He's been abrasive with Congress and high-handed towards the rest of the government and at times even to the rest of the country. Which is to say, he can be a real tool when he wants to be.

At the same time, he's damned smart. He did a lot to streamline the bureaucracy and make the flow of information and commands into and out of the White House more efficient. He's been a strong advocate for beefing up the military and has been a significant architect of the Administration's policies both good and bad. He has quietly served as an example of tolerance for gays in a party that at times seemed to be building its social policy platform on prejudice. He has willingly taken on the job of spokesman for the Administration's more controversial policies and gone out of his way to maintain press contacts to assist with that purpose. For better or worse, he has been a powerful political and influential policy force within and for the Administration, and the Bush White House would likely have been worse off without him. So there's some things to admire, too, even if you disagree with the particular policies in question.

Now, I'm neither defending nor attacking the choice of Cheney as "worst Vice President ever." But it does seem to me that the poll respondents have not really taken stock of some of the other available choices. Some Vice Presidents have excelled at odiousness, distinguished themselves as some of the most repugnant figures in our national history.

Consider, for instance, Aaron Burr. After killing one of the most prominent members of George Washington's inner circle, Burr distinguished himself by trying to raise a private army to wrest control of the Louisiana Territory and the Ohio River Valley so as to have himself made King of those lands, then tried to incite war with Spain, and was only narrowly acquitted of treason. Burr stands out as one of the great villains of American history. Is Cheney better or worse than this?

Have the poll respondents considered convicted extortionist, alliteration specialist and admitted bribe recipient Spiro Agnew? The author of wonderful political assessments such as "Ultra-liberalism today translates into a whimpering isolationism in foreign policy, a mulish obstructionism in domestic policy, and a pusillanimous pussyfooting on the critical issue of law and order," Agnew added luster to the remarkable emergence of criminal records from the Nixon Administration.

John Calhoun spent much of his time in the #2 office (under two different Presidents) laying the intellectual foundation for the secession of the Confederacy, most specifically the doctrine of nullification. 'Nuff said there.

The first two Vice Presidents, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, did not grace the office particularly well, either. Adams excelled in his role as the Washington Administration's official public surrogate for the President for purposes of absorbing policy criticisms, and compounded his role by periodically going to the Senate and attempting to control the debates there, not leaving until he was literally hooted out of the place by the actual office-holders. Jefferson, as Adams' Vice-President, spent as much time and effort as he could using his considerable political talents to undermine Adams' Presidency and thwart the policy goals of the Adams Administration -- of which he was nominally part.

Thomas Marshall probably should have become President when Woodrow Wilson had a stroke that rendered him paralyzed and unable to communicate with others. He was, however, kept in the dark about President Wilson's condition and for all intents and purposes, Edith Wilson was the functional President during Wilson's convalescence. Marshall should be faulted for allowing himself to be that far out of the loop, to have that few connections with the President, and that little juice that he could be shipped off to golf courses and chamber of commerce meetings instead of doing his job and taking the reins of the White House during the country's time of need.

And the Cheney critics appear very likely to have forgotten an even more recent favorite whipping boy.

Joe Biden has got his work cut out for him if he wants to sink to the bottom of this barrel, that's for sure.

But for the time being, the very concept of rating Vice Presidents is spectacularly silly. It's only in recent years that the Vice President has had much of an active role in government at all. Al Gore and Dick Cheney are the only two I can think of who actually were given any kind of substantial hand in crafting policy. The rest of them spent time doing ceremonial work, heading up token commissions, or at best, working the back channels with Congress. It's only when and if the Vice Presidents are called upon to step up to the plate and assume the powers of the Presidency that we can take their measure.

Gerald Ford pardoned Nixon (himself an undistinguished Vice President) and he took a political bullet for doing it. But it was the right thing to do, it let the country move past Watergate and the realization that their President had been not only a crook but a world-class criminal. A decent man, who realized that he had all kinds of odds stacked against him, he used his time in the Oval Office wisely and quickly and when it came time to pay the price, he took it like a man. But that's really evaluating his performance as President, not his performance as Vice President.

John Tyler may have succeeded in the greatest coup in American history. When his President, William Henry Harrison, became the first to die in office, a strong argument could have been made that because the Constitution only provided that if the President died, "the Powers and Duties of the [Presidency] shall devolve on the Vice President," Tyler had no right to say that he was actually the President. But he seemed to win out in the political struggle and finished the rest of Harrison's term. His example was precedent for the assumption of the Presidency by seven successors. It only became enshrined in the constitution in 1967 and fortunately, we have not had to resort to it since then. Does that make him a good Vice President or a bad one? He was only Vice President for a month, anyway.

I think that George H.W. Bush (Bush the Elder) did a good job as VP. When Reagan was shot, it looked for a few hours like Defense Secretary and Nixon Administration alumnus Al Haig was trying to cut Bush out of the picture and take the reins of power for himself. Bush bitch-slapped Haig back into place while President Reagan recuperated -- and then, when Reagan was back on his feet, Bush readily stepped back into the shadows.

I've always had a soft spot in my heart for Andrew Johnson, too. Here's a guy who made himself as lonely as a political figure could be -- a Democrat in a Republican administration, a pariah from his own party for his Unionist sympathy, and firmly insistent on the personal power of the Presidency against what was then an overreaching Congress. (I know, it seems hard to believe in today's world, but that's what Johnson had to deal with.) But as Vice President, he stepped up to the role of symbolically trying to reunify the nation, to reach out to the people who had fought against the Union and let them know that there was a home for them again.

So, it is possible to form a list, or at least the top and bottom of one. I really don't think there's much that we can do to sort out the muddled middle of the list -- it's senseless to take a John Nance Garner and decide, well, let's call him #23, but George Dallas, he was a little better, so we'll make him #22. To even attempt such a thing requires a deeper knowledge of American political and legal history than a lot of people possess -- even me and I think I've gotten pretty obscure here as it is. But I'm not the first to confront the issue.

If forced to choose, I think I'd start with such a list with these guys first:

1. John Calhoun -- for laying the groundwork that led to the Civil War.
2. Aaron Burr -- for killing Alexander Hamilton, inciting war with Spain, and apparent commission of treason.
3. Spiro Agnew -- for being a corrupt, petty bastard who presaged his President's fall from grace.
4. Thomas Marshall -- for letting himself get edged out of power by the First Lady.
5-11 (tie). In no particular order, George Clinton, Elbridge Gerry, William Rufus King, Henry Wilson, Thomas Hendricks, Garret Hobart, and James Sherman -- for dying in office and thus rendering themselves unable to fulfill their singular duty of being alive to be President if necessary.
12. Schuyler Colfax -- for nearly bringing down his President's Administration into the biggest corruption scandal in American history.
13. John Adams -- for getting hooted out of the Senate and ruining whatever chance there was of the Presidency having a direct hand in guiding legislation. (He made a fine President, by the way, particularly considering that Washington was a hard act to follow -- but he was not a good Vice President.)
14. Dan Quayle -- for allowing himself to be made into a laughingstock, whether deservedly or not.
15. Thomas Jefferson -- for four years of stabbing his President in the back. (Also a very fine President, but not such a good Vice President.)

At the "best VPs" end of the list, I'd have to put all the men who actually did the real job of Vice President -- which is taking over and becoming President themselves in an emergency situation. So that would be John Tyler, Millard Fillmore, Andrew Johnson, Chester Arthur, Teddy Roosevelt, Calvin Coolidge, Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson, and Gerald Ford. Of them all, I admire Gerald Ford the most, Roosevelt next, and both Johnsons right after him -- but it's difficult to separate their deeds as Vice President from their deeds as President. And Tyler, for setting the precedent, should get a high spot, too. Also worth a mention would be Charles Dawes, who was the first American Vice President to win the Nobel Peace Prize.

Cheney? I'd downgrade him for his scary vision of a nearly autocratic Presidency and his efforts to make that vision a reality; but I'd upgrade him for competence, political juice, and contribution to the effectiveness of his President's Administration. Really, I think that puts him pretty close to dead center of the list, at least until we move along in our history and start to gain some perspective freer from contemporary political biases than we possibly can be while Cheney is still holding the office.

NOTE: Wikipedia was not used in the drafting of this post.

And A Cheerful Good Morning To You, Too!

We can look forward to a nuclear or biological attack on the United States by terrorists taking place within the next four years, most likely in the form of weaponized anthrax. And there is probably nothing we can do to avoid the attack taking place; we can only hope to mitigate the damage once it occurs. This according to a bipartisan Congressional report being delivered to Vice-President Elect Biden and other Obama Administration officials-in-waiting this morning.

While preparing this post, I did a Google image search for anthrax. That was a bad, bad mistake. This is nasty stuff. The link in this paragraph goes to the CDC informational on it. Now I don't even want to link to a picture of the heavy metal band.

So, you can think about that while enjoying your coffee this morning. There is some good news; you can vaccinate against anthrax. If we do a massive vaccination program, then the bad guys may have to shift their focus to less easily-weaponizable kinds of organisms.

Here's something else you probably haven't thought about. Smallpox vaccinations haven't been administered to people in any kind of a regular way since right about the year I was born. If you've been vaccinated for smallpox, you should have the scar on one of your shoulders. I've got no such scar. I don't know many people under age 40 who do. Smallpox is pretty nasty stuff, too; its lethality rate back in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was about half and half; the virulence of the surviving strains of the disease are thought to have decreased to about 30% but given that nearly two generations have grown up with no exposure to the pathogen at all, that's an educated guess. The CDC claims that there is enough smallpox vaccine to vaccinate every man, woman, and child in the United States in the event of an outbreak, but that they're not going to do it unless there is a public health emergency. That would be defined as a single confirmed case of the disease.

You don't want to do an image search for what smallpox looks like, either. Trust me on this.

But, if you've enjoyed this post, you may want to peruse the list of readily-weaponizable organisms that the CDC is aware of, including the naturally-occuring ones like tularemia and Q fever as well as everybody's favorite pathogen, Yersina Pestis, otherwise known as Bubonic Plague.

If you disagree with me on everything else that I write, trust me on this: you really, really, really don't want to do an image search for what a plague victim looks like. Treasure, cherish, and protect your ignorance on this particular subject matter.

Have a nice morning!

Ineligible For Office?

Hillary Clinton cannot be Secretary of State. Why? Article I, Section 6 of the Constitution, sometimes called the Enoluments Clause, reads as follows:

No Senator or Representative shall, during the Time for which he was elected, be appointed to any civil Office under the Authority of the United States which shall have been created, or the Emoluments whereof shall have been increased during such time; and no Person holding any Office under the United States, shall be a Member of either House during his Continuance in Office.

Senator Clinton was a member of Congress in January of 2007, when cabinet salaries were increased by an Act of Congress from $186,600 to $191,300. A salary is an "emolument" of office, and therefore no sitting member of Congress is eligible for a Cabinet position.

Now, this is not the first time the problem has come up. In 1973, President Nixon wanted Ohio Senator William Saxbe to be Attorney General; Saxbe had voted in 1969 to increase the Attorney General's pay. The "fix" to this problem was for Saxbe to voluntarily accept the pre-1969 salary and remit the raise. This was, however, condemned by Democrats as Constitutionally suspect and a strict construction of the Enoluments Clause would suggest that those Democrats were right.

It's safe to say that Senator Clinton does not care about the $4,700.

The strictest construction of the Enoluments Clause would be that any Member of Congress who votes on (or even against) a pay raise for any executive office is thereby barred, forever, from holding that office. Since the Enoluments Clause applies to both elective and appointed positions, that would seem to apply to the offices of President, because Congress fixes the salary of the President, too. (The Vice-President's salary is now treated as a high-level civil service job for compensation purposes, and is equal to the salary paid to the Speaker of the House. Thus, the Vice-President's salary is at the moment beyond the reach of the Enoluments Clause, but that could theoretically change.)

And, the Twenty-Seventh Amendment now makes an exception to the Enoluments Clause in that a Member of Congress can vote a raise for his or her own seat, provided that the raise does not take effect until the next term of office.

Most recently, George Bush, and Al Gore would not have been affected by the Enoluments Clause because they were not sitting Members of Congress in 2000. But John McCain would debatably have been barred from assuming the Presidency had he won the 2000 Republican nominations and then the general election, having served in the Congress that voted in the 2001 pay raise, and debatably, John Kerry would have been ineligible to serve as President had he won election in 2004. Nor is Senator Obama barred from becoming President Obama, because he was not a Member of Congress in 1999. Joe Biden was a Member in 1999, but he is becoming Vice-President, and that is a civil service salary not enlarged (directly) by Congress.

Now, here's the interesting scenario. Let's say in a year, "something happens" to Obama, and Joe Biden has to become President. In 1999, Joe Biden served in a Congress that voted a salary increase for the President. Is he now barred from assuming that office by virtue of the Enoluments Clause?

One sidestep to this might be to say that Biden would be neither "elected" President nor "appointed" President in that case. Rather, he would "succeed" or "accede" to the office.

But I don't think that this sort of wordplay is really what was intended by the Framers. The Framers wanted to keep Members of Congress from creating sinecures for themselves. They surely knew that Members of Congress would be considered for the Presidency and for Executive positions, and indeed it has happened many, many times in our history that sitting Members have been recruited into an Adminsitration (and sometimes elected into one).

Still, if you want to be technical about it, this is an operative part of the Constitution, and it says what it says. The historical precedent has been a sidestep by way of foregoing a salary, not any sort of interpretation of the Clause itself. And so a strict reading of the Constitution is such that Biden cannot become President if Obama dies in office, and Hillary Clinton cannot serve as Secretary of State.

(P.S. Careful Readers will note the creation of a "Joe Biden" tag, which has been retroactively applied to all posts concerning the Vice-President-Elect.)

So Here's What I Want To Know

My automatic lawn sprinkler control device fritzed out this morning. It won't turn off (there must be a power feed from somewhere I can't control) and one of the gates stayed open for four hours, watering one portion of my lawn continuously for at least two hours.

So is Barack Obama going to fix that for me? Whaddya mean, no?

I've got some debt piled up on our credit cards left over from our trip to visit our families in Wisconsin. I haven't paid it off in full in one month and you know, the interest is starting to pile up.

Is Joe Biden going to pay that off on my behalf? Come on, Joe, help a brother out. (And I mean that in an entirely race-neutral way.)

My car needs a new catalytic converter. You know what they make those things out of? Platinum, one of the most expensive metals on the planet. A new one will set me back something like fifteen hundred bucks and of course the car won't pass a smog test and will make a funny rattling noise until it gets fixed. So what's the government going to do to help me out? Nuthin', that's what.

Change, my ass. Change is what I'm hoping I have left over when all this crap gets fixed. Hope? I hope I'll be able to get all this crap resolved and paid for before more comes up. That's what I hope.

Here's The Prediction

It seems to be the thing that every blogger is doing tonight, predicting what the outcome of the election tomorrow will be. So here's mine -- as optimistic for McCain as I can reasonably forecast. My prediction map shows an electoral vote of 353 for Obama-Biden and 185 for McCain-Palin. In the popular vote, I call it almost exactly a 5% advantage for Obama when all the votes are finally counted. We won't know for sure for a few days.

Hidin' Biden

You know, I haven't heard anything from Joe Biden lately. Is it because of stuff like this?

What Biden says in the video: "The fact of the matter is, the only thing succeeding in Iraq right now is the plan that Barack and I talked about that Petraeus is implementing … giving local control in the very areas with a limited central government."

What Biden said in 2006: "I will not to support a surge of troops unless it's tied to some reason for me to believe that they have a political solution," and any proposal to send about 30,000 more U.S. troops to Iraq should only follow a political solution that will end sectarian violence and civil unrest.

No safe harbor here. Sen. Biden, you were against the surge back in 2006. I was, too. Difference is, I've got the stones to say, "Nope, I was wrong, it worked. And I'm glad it did." You, on the other hand, are now trying to take credit for the success of a policy which you opposed. Pants on fire.

Or maybe we haven't heard a lot from Ol' Joe because of stuff like this:

(State Senator Chuck Graham is confined to a wheelchair.)

Or maybe it was this recent remark:

And let's not forget all of these:

That last one does include a replay of Nominee Biden asking the state politician in the wheelchair to stand up.

And if Dan Quayle had said this, we'd have been all over him like a Latin American potato:

But Joe Biden is not Dan Quayle. He's a Democratic. That means he gets a pass because the media myth is that it's Republicans who say dumb things and Democrats who say smart things. Even the Associated Press has been forced to concede that media coverage has been biased in favor of the Obama campaign. But this is demonstrably not the case -- every politician says dumb things.

It's not that Joe Biden is dumb. Far from it. But he is arrogant (which is kind of to be expected) and he sometimes puts his mouth in gear before his brain is out of idle. And Obama and his people had to have known that about him before they picked him to be the running mate.

Now, at this point, the Obama campaign needs to, above all, NOT F--- THIS THING UP. Which means, among other things, muzzling the running mate so that more stuff like this doesn't happen.

Here's the ideal victory speech for Joe Biden as far as the Obama campaign is concerned:

"America, thank you very much. Now, it's my privilege to welcome to the stage our next President, Barack Obama."

Nineteen words. And if Biden never says another word in public for the next four years, they'll be pretty stoked about that. If I were on Team Obama, I'd be hidin' Biden too.

Unrealistic Expectations

No, Barack Obama will not pay your mortgage for you. Joe Biden will not give you a free fill-up.

You may even have to hold on to that job you don't necessarily like.

Lawyers In High Office

Something I read in this post made me wonder – could that really be true? Prof. Kalt writes:

Republicans tend to put non-lawyers on their tickets: going back to 1984, seven of their nine candidates were not lawyers; only Dole and Quayle were” and “the Democrats tend to put lawyers on their tickets: going back to 1984, ten of their eleven candidates were lawyers; only Al Gore was not, though he did attend law school for a year and a half before dropping out.

Wow! If that was right, that's actually a pretty remarkable cleavage between the parties. So I figured, let’s go to the record books and check:

Year	Republican Candidate	Education	Republican Running Mate	Education	Democratic Candidate	Education	Democratic Running Mate	Education
1984	Ronald Reagan	A.B. (economics), Eureka College, '32	George H.W. Bush	A.B. (economics), Yale '48	Walter Mondale	J.D., U. of Minnesota Law School ’56	Geraldine Ferraro	J.D., Fordham Law School ’60
1988	George H.W. Bush	A.B. (economics), Yale '48	Dan Quayle	J.D., Indiana University, Indianapolis, Law, '74	Michael Dukakis	J.D., Harvard Law ‘60	Lloyd Bentsen	J.D., U. of Texas Law School ’42
1992	George H.W. Bush	A.B. (economics), Yale '48	Dan Quayle	J.D., Indiana University, Indianapolis, Law, '74	Bill Clinton	J.D., Yale Law ’73	Al Gore	B.A. (English), Harvard University, '69 Vanderbilt Law and Vanderbilt Divinity from ’74-’76, quit without J.D. or Th.D.
1996	Bob Dole	J.D., Washburn U. Law School '52	Jack Kemp	B.S. (physical education), Occidental College '57	Bill Clinton	J.D., Yale Law ’73	Al Gore	B.A. (English), Harvard University, '69, some law and divinity school
2000	George W. Bush	MBA, Harvard Business, '75 (unsuccessfully applied to U. Texas Law School in '70)	Dick Cheney	M.A. (Political Science), U. of Wyoming, '66 (some doctoral work at UW-Madison)	Al Gore	B.A. (English), Harvard University, '69, some law and divinity school	Joe Lieberman	J.D., Yale Law ’67
2004	George W. Bush	MBA, Harvard B-School, '75	Dick Cheney	M.A. (Political Science), U. of Wyoming, '66, with some pre-Ph.D. work	John Kerry	J.D., Boston College Law ‘76	John Edwards	J.D., UNC-Chapel Hill Law ’77
2008	John McCain	B.S., United States Naval Academy at Annapolis, '58	Sarah Palin	B.S. (Communications-Journalism), University of Idaho '87	Barack Obama	J.D., Harvard Law ’91 magna cum laude	Joe Biden	J.D., Syracuse Law ’68

So yeah, since 1984 it's been all lawyers for the Democrats except for Gore, and he got through nearly two years of law school (and divinity school at the same time) at Vandy before bailing out to follow in his daddy’s footsteps answering the call to public service.

Does the public like lawyers in the White House? Only one lawyer has been elected President in this time, Bill Clinton. Dan Quayle won election as Vice-President but I don’t recall his law degree having much to do with that. Well, I’m sure it didn’t hurt. But Obama and Biden, both lawyers, are on the verge of being elected.

Another thing is interesting, comparing the lawyers and non-lawyers and their highest levels of educational achievement. About half of these men and women took their degrees at elite schools. The other half took them from decidedly middle-of-the-road sorts of places. I mean, Fritz Mondale got a great education at the U, I'm sure, but it just doesn't enjoy the same kind of reputation that Harvard and Yale have. The University of Wyoming is, I'm sure, the best four-year institution in the entire state of Wyoming and I'm sure they're good and proud of alum Cheney. But it's still not quite the same thing as Michigan or Stanford, is it? And for some reason, people seem to diminish John McCain's education at Annapolis -- Annapolis is an academically rigorous institution and McCain's low class position is largely the result of his disciplinary problems rather than any intellectual or academic shortcomings there; his classroom grades were pretty good. But for whatever reason, it doesn't seem to enjoy the same kind of academic prestige of a Berkeley or Chicago.

Now, I'm going to be clear -- not having a law degree does not mean one is unqualified for high office, or that one is not smart enough to hold high office. As I wrote a moment ago, all it means is a familiarity with a particular area of knowledge and governmental activity.

Bet You Couldn't Have Seen This One Coming

I didn't watch the Joe and Sarah show tonight. Instead, I went out to dinner with lawyers in my firm and my wife tonight instead. I heard about three minutes on NPR and Palin didn't sound like a fool -- it was a fast-paced, polarized exchange that illuminated nothing about whose tax and health care plan would be good and whose would be bad. But I saw a graphic of poll respondents' reactions on the TV as we left the restaurant. You'll never guess what it showed:

Republicans thought Sarah Palin won. Democrats thought Joe Biden won. Independents were about evenly split.

Dinosaurs and Presidential Succession

Some might ask why be concerned about Sarah Palin anymore. Tina Fey has lampooned her to within an inch of her political credibility on SNL (and props to Amy Poehler for being such a good foil for that):

And the latest projections are as bad for the McCain-Palin team as I've seen since Gov. Palin joined the ticket.

But where I had been initially intrigued and pleased with her, I've had to ask myself whether I would want this woman becoming President under troubled circumstances (when the President dies, it is by definition a crisis) and all the jokes and lampooning aside, I'm not comfortable with the idea of her hand at the helm. She thinks that the world is six thousand years old and that dinosaurs walked the earth along with humans. To her credit, she does not seem anxious to impose that belief system on others. But as I wrote earlier this month, if someone holds and expounds a bizarre world view, that fact alone raises a serious issue about their judgment and therefore their qualification for high office.

John McCain is a mortal man. He would be the oldest President in our history -- as old when he takes office as Ronald Reagan was when he left office.* Some have questioned his mental abilities, although personally I do not see cause for alarm there. But he is also a cancer survivor who must live with a lifelong threat of remission. And of the 43 Presidents we've elected, eight (Harrison I, Taylor, Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, Harding, Roosevelt II, and Kennedy) have died in office. That's a Presidential mortality rate of just under 19%. And it's been made deliberately obscure just how physically and mentally up to the job some other Presidents who survived their terms were by the end -- Woodrow Wilson had suffered a debilitating stroke and Ronald Reagan was beginning to feel the effects of Alzheimer's during his last days in office, for instance. Never mind Presidents who had become politically unviable like Buchanan, Johnson I, Ford, or Carter. Those men were all, at least, alive and physically and mentally able to discharge their duties; they were just incredibly unpopular by the ends of their terms.

All told, 14 of our 46 Vice-Presidents (just over 30%) have gone on to become President themselves one way or another. Eight of those 14 have done it during the twentieth century, and Al Gore came really close to doing it in 2000. So the office has become a better launching-point for the top job in modern times.

So on the currently about one-in-five chance** that McCain-Palin defeats Obama-Biden, there's a better than one-in-four chance of Sarah Palin becoming President herself. Much as I would like to throw my support wholeheartedly behind McCain, I haven't been able to make myself feel even reasonably comfortable with the idea of President Palin.

None of which makes Barack Obama look any better to me. We can't afford to implement his platform, especially not after our government takes out a second mortgage on our future to the tune of three-quarters of a trillion dollars in order to shore up financial institutions from the consequences of their own bad decisions. So do I hope for Obama to get elected but for his administration to suffer legislative stalemate? That doesn't seem reasonable, either.


* I've heard suggestions that because his parents and grandparents were all long-lived, that means McCain has a prolonged life expectancy, too. I've no way of evaluating that claim and I am moderately interested in actuarial data -- not anecdotes -- to see if there is anything to that.

** While my favorite projection site currently reports Obama winning just over 80% of its projected elections based on current state-by-state polling numbers, we can expect those numbers to narrow as the election draws closer simply because that's what the imminence of an election does. And I'm still feeling pretty good about that bottle of scotch, Mr. "Grant."

If My Mom Were Sarah Palin

My name would be Bash Budweister Palin. What would you be?

(By the way, I broke down and made a "Sarah Palin" category. No "Joe Biden" category yet, though, he's just not interesting enough. Maybe later.)

News I Can Use

If, like me, you frequent political blogs, you're probably sick to death of Sarah Palin already. Okay, I understand why people are talking about her. She's new to the scene. We've been watching Barack Obama and John McCain and Joe Biden run for President for a year and a half now. Literally eighteen months. So she's a fresh face, someone new that we haven't examined for policy inconsistencies, psychological imbalances, suspicious donors, and enlarged nasal pores yet. So that's bound to attract some eyeballs. But enough already! I'm calling a moratorium on Sarah Palin blogging here -- until further notice, until she does or says something interesting. Until then, I know enough about Gov. Palin that I can feel informed in my ambivalence about her.

So here's some real news for you. Something that very likely will affect you, personally. Well, it affects me, and that's what counts. Even if your mortgage isn't with Sallie Mae or Freddie Mac, there is enough money involved that this will affect your mortgage, or your ability to get one. It could cause rates to drop as much as a point, knowing that the government is protecting these lenders. By the way, the Fed is concerned about inflation, so the next time it meets, the question will be whether or not it will raise the prime rate. You know what that means -- time to refinance!

Quote Proves True

I picked as my quote of the moment an anonymous but ethusiastic GOP staffer who effused that Sarah Palin "completely changes the narrative," lifted from a report in the increasingly-partisan Political Animal. This has proven true -- Sarah Palin is indeed a game-changer. She has not changed the game in ways that the McCain camp would have liked, necessarily. Here's how the game has changed:

• McCain's best avenue of attack -- Obama is not experienced enough to be trusted with high office -- has been blunted to the point of uselessness. Something big will have to happen before we get to candidates attacking one another on that subject again; I think that particular chess game is now stalemated. If Democrats attack Palin's experience, Republicans can attack Obama's. I think that steers us back to arguing policy preferences (a good thing) and personalities (a bad thing).
• She has managed to suck all the air out of the room on both sides of the aisle. No one is talking about anything but Sarah Palin -- unless they're talking about her family. She's drawn out a tremendous amount of ugliness from both sides of the aisle, although I must exonerate the national candidates and their campaigns from this nastiness.
• The presence of a newly-elected Governor of a small (in terms of popularion) state highlights the fact that aside from Gov. Palin, no one else nominated for national office has any executive experience at all. This makes me fidgety because executives use a different set of skills than legislators -- extensive, Biden-like knowledge about policy is not relevant to one's skills as an administrator.*
• As I thought, women voters have been quick to say that a candidate's gender is not enough to attract their votes. Hillary Clinton voters are much more concerned with Palin's stance on issues than they are with the fact that she is female. This, by the way, is as it should be.
• The religious right, formerly the weakest part of McCain's electoral coalition, is really on board with him now. They recognize in Gov. Palin one of their own. This pushes McCain's campaign towards the same strategy, forming the same coalition, as the two Bush-Cheney campaigns in 2000 and 2004.

That last point doesn't mean that a McCain Administration would be Bush-Cheney III, but the campaign will. And it doesn't mean that McCain's move towards the 'same old thing' was a bad one. The Bush-Cheney strategy got Republicans in the White House twice in a row. It's hard to be too critical of emulating a winning strategy. But it remains to be seen if the Democrats will be able to tag McCain-Palin with the "incompetent" meme that has adhered so well to George Bush over the past several years (especially after Katrina stuck New Orleans). But this election has begun to look a lot more like 2004 than I would have hoped for.

I thought 2004 was a particularly dismal and insipid election while it was going on and in fact, 2000 wasn't really all that exciting, either, at least not until after Election Day. Looking back on it, 1996 wasn't really all that interesting, either, since Bob Dole was such a weak opponent to Bill Clinton. We haven't had a really interesting election, with a real old-versus-new sort of debate about ideas, since 1992. This was shaping up to be a really interesting season, but that appears to not be the way things are going right now.

So yes, Palin has proven to be a game-changer. She's made an unpredictable, new sort of game look more like the games we're familiar with from election cycles past. Some changes are guardedly good for McCain, some are obviously bad.


* That's not to say that a President should be an ignoramus about policy; the President should have an ample understanding of all of the areas of public policy that the Federal government attends to. But the President should be a policy generalist rather than a specialist; there is a threshold of detail beyond which knowledge and decision-making must necessarily be delegated to subordinates.

Sarah Palin The Lightweight

Okay, so there had to be a big bone thrown to the right wing. And while you're at it, make a play for at least some PUMAs. That makes sense. And you can argue that Sarah Palin provides some balance for "youth" and "newness" and doubles down on "maverick" and "integrity." I might add in Palin's defense that her experience has been on the executive side of things rather than on the legislative, and there are different skill sets involved in being a good legislator as opposed to being a good executive.

Nevertheless, the big concern is that she's a lightweight of the sort we haven't seen since Dan Quayle.

Upon further reflection, and despite the political pressures that I described in the first paragraph, I'm really quite amazed that McCain has thrown the best arrow in his quiver away. McCain's best argument against Obama was that Obama is too new to the game, too inexperienced, and unready to take on the job of President. If he makes that argument again, he needs to explain how Sarah Palin will be ready to be President at a moment's notice in a way that Obama, who has been running for President for more than two years now, will not be. That's a tough sell.

This pick has got Obama supporters launching attacks on the issue of experience. Obama formed his Presidential exploratory committee 743 days after first taking national political office. Sarah Palin has held serious political office for 635 days before being named as the presumptive vice-presidential candidate for the Republican Party. We're talking about a difference of 108 days of political officeholding between the two of them to learn what's what. Either way, if we're talking experience, it's a bit like me saying I'm qualified to be Attorney General because I once covered an appearance for a colleague on a misdemeanor charge of contracting without a license.

About the best thing that I can say about Palin's inexperience is that if elected, she will be the Vice President and not the one actually sitting behind the desk in the Oval Office. If it were really a question of who would be ready to go if something happens to the President on day one, then that would make the choice fantastically easy. But we don't pick our Presidents on the theory that they'll be assassinated immediatley upon swearing the oath of office. The person on the top of the ticket is the one who really matters.

Now, until proven otherwise, I'm going to assume that Sarah Palin is a smart politician. I doubt she has been properly schooled on the array of policies and issues that would confront a President at the moment. She's going to have to learn then, and fast. If she's smart, and McCain gets some good people to school her, that can happen. But the election is nine and a half weeks away, and that isn't a lot of time to become an expert on pretty much everything the Federal government does, both at home and abroad.

At some point in the campaign, she's going to have to face Joe Biden -- a formidable and quick-thinking debater possessed of a keen intelligence, a lifetime of political experience and policy knowledge, and one scarcely able to restrain a biting, Churchillian sarcasm. He seems to have been genetically bred for the role of attack dog in a vice-presidential debate.

I'm going to reserve judgment on her until that debate, until we can see how she does. Politicial wonks who have followed her brief career suggest that she may just be able to hold her own. I say, keep your expectations low against someone like Biden. For her sake, I fear the possibility of a Lloyd Bentsen Moment -- all the elements of such a thing are there. But if she can hold her own in that debate, I'll say that would be good enough to demonstrate the intelligence and mental ability that would be necessary to finish out McCain's term should something happen to him.

But one other point, and it's really about McCain. A good leader has an eye to the future, meaning that the leader understands that his position, like all others, is temporary and one day someone else will need to succeed him. McCain is 72 years old today (happy birthday, Senator) and come election day in 2012, he will be as old as Ronald Reagan was when he retired. McCain has a sharp need to groom a successor. If McCain does not run for re-election in 2012, Vice-President Palin would be the obvious and probably only choice for the Republicans to run in that cycle. At 48 years of age she would be older, and more experienced in national politics, than Bill Clinton was when he assumed office in 1993.

I've not yet made "Joe Biden" or "Sarah Palin" categories for blog labels, because VP choices are going to fade in importance fairly quickly. The person on top of the ticket matters way more than the Veep.

Played It Safe Or Took A Risk?

I was thinking it would be Crist at the last minute. But McCain picked Sarah Palin, Alaska's photogenic young Governor, as his running mate. Back in March, I would have said, "No way." But I'm pleased with the choice.

Here's the thing I've been thinking about -- is this a "play it safe" pick or is it a gamble?

The "play it safe" reasoning is that Palin was the best available choice to appeal to Hillary Clinton supporters -- to deny Obama that key constituency, without which he cannot win. Palin is not a well-known figure and new to the national scene, so she has not built up a squadron of enemies or gaffes or scandals. Presumably, she will be coached and educated and trained by the campaign's handlers and molded into a good fit and a good complement for the candidate. She is likeable and has just a trace of an accent -- enough to be endearing to most folks but not enough to be distracting. She seems to have done a good job as Governor, bringing competence, sound fiscal sense, and a nice spirit to the state. Best of all, she is a double-down on the integrity and ethics issues that McCain wants to make his signature issue -- she has spearheaded an effort to reform the governmental ethics laws of Alaska and made elimination of corruption a centerpiece issue of her political persona.

But there is a risk of a huge downside. First and most importantly, this lays down the 'inexperience' argument against Obama, one of the strongest cards McCain has to play. Three years ago, she was the mayor of a city of less than six thousand residents and she hasn't even completed her first term as Governor of Alaska. On the ethics side of things, she suffers from a minor ethics scandal concerning alleged intervention into the administration of the state police, but it looks to me like she's handled it appropriately and it should blow over. Oh, and Joe Biden looks ready to eat her alive in a debate, but no one but policy wonks, political junkies, and the candidates' immediately families, will watch the vice-presidential debate at all.

The big risk here is that she might turn out to be Dan Quayle all over again. Of course, if it's gaffes you're looking for, let me introduce you to Senator Joe Biden, the man who commended his party's nominee for being "clean" and "articulate." So if you're using the "first, do no harm" rule, both candidates have taken something of a gamble.

One thing's for sure. McCain didn't need any help in Alaska, any more than Obama needed any help in Delaware.