Since I’m linking to the good words of others this morning, here’s my Ethics and Public Policy Center colleague (and National Affairs editor) Yuval Levin’s excellent analysis on the CBO score — and specifically, his thoughts on the claim to fiscal restraint the Democrats are trying now.

In the words of Yuval:

The greatest of all the many painful ironies in the health-care debate of the past year may be that the Democrats’ closing “argument” is to claim the mantle of fiscal responsibility. Their leaders are doing their best to twist yesterday’s CBO score of their reconciliation bill to suggest that their plan will not only solve America’s health-care financing problem but reduce the deficit too.

It will do neither, and will make both problems worse.

His explanation as to why this is true is very much worth reading.

Last night Mark Levin interviewed Representative Paul Ryan on ObamaCare. It’s a very good and informative discussion — the link is here.

Picking up on several postings by Jen today, there are three sets of new data that should alarm Democrats. In increasing order of importance, they are these: First, according to the most recent Gallup poll, President Obama’s disapproval rating is now higher than his approval rating (47 percent vs. 46 percent). That is the first time this has happened for the president. It won’t be the last.

The second finding comes courtesy of the Wall Street Journal/NBC poll, which found an astonishing 21-point enthusiasm gap between the parties, with 67 percent of Republicans saying they are very interested in the November elections, compared with 46 percent of Democrats.

The third — and for Democrats arguably the most terrifying — data point: Republican candidates have, according to the most recent Rasmussen survey, now stretched their lead over Democrats to 10 points in the Generic Congressional Ballot, their biggest lead ever in nearly three years of weekly tracking. Historically Republicans have trailed in the Generic Congressional Ballot, even in elections they do well in.

When you combine these numbers, they point to an epic blowout for Democrats in the midterm elections. Many of us, in writing about the November elections, have been careful to see that things in politics can shift rapidly, and they can. But often the opposite happens: certain trends continue their trajectory. Things get worse rather than better. And that, I think, is what Democrats are facing today.

Things have been going badly for Democrats since around the late spring of 2009, when the popular uprising against Obamaism really began. It has proceeded more or less uninterrupted since then. In that span, we have seen three significant electoral losses – the gubernatorial races in Virginia and New Jersey and, especially, the Senate race in Massachusetts. What were initially troubling signs for Democrats have become a fairly entrenched pattern. It is getting to the point where it will be very difficult, absent some extraordinary intervening event, to shift things in a favorable direction for Democrats.

To make things worse for Democrats, they have continued to focus the nation’s attention on legislation that the public, by a wide margin, rejects – and they are using means to win votes that much of the public find to be somewhere between troubling and corrupt. If Democrats succeed in passing ObamaCare, their problems will be magnified.

Barack Obama is indeed turning out to be the embodiment of hope and change — hope for Republicans and change in the control of Congress.

What a perfectly terrible 13 months it has been for the president and his party. And things are going to get worse, much worse.

Sometimes in politics the ugliness of the process can become almost as harmful as the damaging substance of the policies themselves. That is what is occurring now, with Speaker Pelosi indicating a preference for a parliamentary tactic that would allow House Democrats to pass the Senate’s health care bill without voting directly on the bill itself (as you’ve no doubt seen mentioned in previous posts, this tactic is variously known as the “self-executing rule,” “deem and pass,” and “the Slaughter Solution,” named after Louise Slaughter, chairman of the House Rules Committee).

If you want a sense of how much this whole process is damaging the Obama administration — the apostles of “hope and change,” you’ll recall — take a look at Robert Gibbs trying to answer whether the “Slaughter Solution” constitutes the kind of up-or-down vote the president promised. It’s almost painful to watch. The unmasking of the Obama presidency continues, one day at a time.

Secretary of State Clinton, in the context of the decision by Israel to approve 1,600 new Jewish homes in East Jerusalem, said yesterday, “We are engaged in very active consultations with the Israelis over steps that we think would demonstrate the requisite commitment to the [peace] process.”

Here we go again. It is Israel that has to “demonstrate the requisite commitment to the [peace] process” — despite the fact that over the decades no nation on earth has given away more tangible assets or offered to give up more of its land for peace than Israel. That was the case with the Sinai Desert, the oil-rich land that Israel returned to Egypt in 1978 in exchange for Egypt’s recognition of Israel and normalized relations. For those keeping track, the Sinai desert is three times the size of Israel and accounted for more than 90 percent of the land Israel won in a war of aggression by Arab states against Israel in 1967. This was the case in 2000, when Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered almost all the territories in the West Bank and Gaza to Yasir Arafat, who rejected the offer and instead began a second intifada. And it was the case in Gaza in 2005, when Israel withdrew and did what no other nation — not the Jordanians, not the British, not anyone — has done before: provide the Palestinians with the opportunity for self-rule. In response, Israel was shelled by thousands of rockets and mortar attacks and Hamas used Gaza as its launching point.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict isn’t territorial, as Bret Stephens of the Wall Street Journal has written; it is existential. The Palestinian leadership has yet to make its own inner peace with the existence of a Jewish state. Until that happens, issues like building new Jewish homes in East Jerusalem — whatever you think of the idea and the timing of the most recent announcement — are at most peripheral matters. Yet the Obama administration has chosen to make the issue of the settlements not only of central importance; it has (as the Jerusalem Post story says) “led many to believe that US-Israeli ties may be at their lowest point in history.”

What is the end game for the Obama administration? It could well be that Obama and his team are simply amateurish, reacting emotionally rather than strategically. It may be that there is an unusual animus toward Israel within the administration. Or it may be that, as Jeffrey Goldberg reports, Obama wants to “force a rupture in the governing coalition that will make it necessary for [Benjamin] Netanyahu to take into his government [Tzipi] Livni’s centrist Kadima Party” in the hopes of creating a “stable, centrist coalition” that is the “key to success.”

If that’s the case, then, as Noah Pollack argues here, Obama is in for a rude awakening. Inserting himself into the affairs of Israel to this degree, via this method, would be quite astonishing. And it’s worth recalling that in order to justify his timid early words regarding the Iranian suppression of liberty in the aftermath of the June 12 elections, Obama declared, “It’s not productive, given the history of U.S.-Iranian relations, to be seen as meddling … in Iranian elections.” There’s that old double standard again. When it comes to our ally Israel, like our Latin American ally Honduras, meddling seems to be a habit. With Iran we need to speak with solicitousness, with respect, and with words of assurance.

Tough on your friends and weak on your adversaries isn’t a winning formula in international affairs, or in life, as Barack Obama will (hopefully) soon discover during his tenure as president. Unfortunately, there is quite a cost to our nation in the process. Let’s hope that it’s Mr. Obama’s learning curve that accelerates and not tensions between America and Israel.

I received a note from a reader in the context of my exchange with Tom Ricks. He is someone who reads me fairly regularly and said this:

I thought you were being way too hard on the guy before, and was saddened to see you double down on it today.

In my experience, lots of people use that kind of “lesser of evils” locution (”x is wrong, but not-x is even more wrong!”), and pretty much never do they therefore mean “so I condemn x.”  While that may not be the most perspicuous language (though some serious philosophers and theologians would argue otherwise — didn’t Reinhold Niebuhr, e.g.), holding Ricks to that philosophically high of a standard is unfairly tough, especially when he clearly all things considered meant in effect the opposite of what your most prominent excerpt implied.

So nail him on his verbal failure or conceptual gaffe, if you want — but make sure it’s clear that that is a philosophical critique, not a policy criticism. It’s easy for me to see why he would be outraged at that partial quotation, and I’d guess many of your most faithful readers shared my shock when reading his whole quote. (I should have written to you then — seriously considered it, but life is busy, and I’m not even nearly as efficient with my time as God calls me to be….)

The reason I found Ricks’s initial quote quite bothersome has to do with the locution he used. “I think staying in Iraq is immoral,” Ricks said. “Immoral” has a particular meaning: transgressing accepted moral rules, corrupt, unscrupulous, or unethical. The rest of Ricks’s statement, “but I think leaving Iraq is even more immoral,” struck me as relevant only if I were to use Ricks’s quote to argue about his position as it relates to pulling troops out of Iraq today. That actually wasn’t my point. It was that despite the enormous sacrifice this country is making for Iraq and the good that has come of it, Ricks still sees it fit to characterize our presence as “immoral.” That troubled me then, and it troubles me now.

At the same time, I can certainly understand why the way I used the quote would lead one to believe that Ricks favors a withdrawal of our troops from Iraq. He doesn’t, and the way I framed his quote obviously (and understandably) led some people to believe he did. So I owe Ricks and my readers an apology. He, and they, hereby have it.

The Obama administration’s dramatic escalation of tensions with Israel, in the aftermath of Israel’s decision to begin new housing in East Jerusalem, is both puzzling and disturbing. John provides excellent background and analysis of the unfolding events here.

I would add to what he wrote by saying that this may be the latest manifestation of something we have seen before: the president’s tendency to treat our allies (such as Israel, Honduras, Poland, the Czech Republic, and Colombia) in a manner that strains relations while treating our adversaries (such as Iran, Venezuela, Russia, and China) in a way that that radiates irresolution.

Compare the Obama administration’s heated response to Israel, our best ally in the Middle East and one of our best friends in the world, with how Obama has treated Iran, a repressive regime that has a burning hatred for America (and Israel), actively supports terrorism, is trying to destabilize Iraq, is in breach of international laws, and is accelerating it nuclear enrichment program in order to build a nuclear weapon.

One would think it would be obvious where our loyalties should lie. Yet the Obama administration uses its most provocative and incendiary language against Israel. The U.S. “condemned” the announcement of the construction of new housing that is still years away. As Elliott Abrams put it, “The verb  ‘condemn’ is customarily reserved by U.S. officials for acts of murder and terrorism — not acts of housing.” Things have now traversed from rhetorical blasts to symbolic acts against the Jewish state, with the administration postponing Middle East envoy George Mitchell’s trip to the region. This step, in the words of the Associated Press, “appeared… to deepen one of the worst U.S.-Israeli feuds in memory.”

Toward Iran, on the other hand, Obama and his administration seem deferential, cautious, and hesitant, parsing every word in order not to offend — so much so that Obama was reluctant to speak out against the brutal crackdown we saw there in the aftermath of the fraudulent June 12 elections. He clearly wanted to maintain a dialogue with Iran’s theocratic dictatorship even at the expense of expressing solidarity with the freedom movement there.

It is as if Obama viewed Israel as a punching bag and Iran as a delicate porcelain doll.

What motivates such conduct is hard to determine. It is probably of a piece with Obama’s worldwide American apology tour, where he engaged in serial apologies for America for wrongs past and present, large and small, real and fictional. President Obama has repeatedly gone out of his way to disparage the nation he was elected to lead in the hopes of improving America’s image abroad. His effort has been an utter failure. Increasingly we are seen as a superpower that can be pushed around.

We saw in the Carter administration this pattern of undermining our allies and placating our adversaries. It didn’t work then; and it won’t work now.

Tom Ricks is upset because I wrote this:

Those like Joe Klein and Tom Ricks, who claimed the Iraq war was “probably the biggest foreign policy mistake in American history” (Klein’s words) and “the biggest mistake in the history of American foreign policy” (Ricks’s words), were wrong. Ricks went so far as to say in 2009 that “I think staying in Iraq is immoral.”

Commenting on my post, Ricks went on to say, “The rest of my comment, of course, was that, ‘but I think leaving Iraq is even more immoral.’” Ricks then added this:

On the other hand, it is good for a journalist (or recent journalist, which is what I am) to be misrepresented on occasion, to remind one of how it feels. And I think we have an answer as to how intellectually honest Pete Wehner is. Or maybe he’ s just sloppy, because I recently wrote a piece for the New York Times about why I think we need to keep tens of thousands of troops in Iraq for many years to come.

All of this, you see, qualifies as a “world class bogus quote job.”

Here’s the problem for Mr. Ricks: he said precisely what I quote him as saying. He did in fact say, “staying in Iraq is immoral” — which is (to be generous) a really foolish statement to make. The fact that Ricks added that leaving Iraq is even more immoral doesn’t rectify his reckless use of words. In fact, I was happy to link to Ricks’s original comments since I’m sure people might wonder whether a recent journalist who professes knowledge of Iraq could say such a ridiculous thing. But he did.

If Tom Ricks wants to try to justify his comment that America’s presence in Iraq, which is an act of selflessness and great sacrifice by our nation, is “immoral,” he should do so. And if he wants to elaborate on why he believes our young men and women, who are fighting and dying for the liberation of the Iraqi people, are instruments of immorality — which is the logical conclusion of Ricks’s statement — then he should make that case, too. If he does, you can be sure I’ll respond to him again.

There is, of course, another alternative. Ricks could apologize for his words and admit that he made a mistake.

Steven A. Cook, a senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, published an article in Foreign Policy titled, “What the NeoCons Got Right.” Mr. Cook does not include Iraq in what neoconservatives got right, though his dissent is intelligent and reasonable. But he argues that neoconservatives got Syria, Iran, and democracy right. He argues that the real problem we face with Iran is ontological, having to do with the metaphysical nature of that regime. And he argues that neoconservatism’s “forceful advocacy of democracy and freedom in the Middle East may have grated on many, but it did much to advance those causes in a region once described as ‘democracy’s desert.’”

As I said in my earlier post, on the matter of the Iraq war, we’re seeing evidence of a significant (and encouraging) climate change of opinion on national-security matters.

It’s a good reminder that with enough patience, things do have a way of working out.

Gallup analysis of U.S. public-opinion trends on abortion shows that generational differences in support for broadly legal abortion have diminished over the past decade. According to the survey:

Two important changes are apparent. One is a significant drop in the percentage of seniors saying all abortions should be illegal. This fell from 32% in the earliest years of the trend to 16% in the first half of the 1990s, but has since rebounded somewhat to 21%. This long-term 11-point decline among seniors compares with a 9-point increase — from 14% to 23% — in support for the “illegal in all circumstances” position among 18- to 29-year-olds since the early 1990s.

As a result, 18- to 29-year-olds are now roughly tied with seniors as the most likely of all age groups to hold this position on abortion — although all four groups are fairly close in their views. This is a sharp change from the late 1970s, when seniors were substantially more likely than younger age groups to want abortion to be illegal.

The trend toward a stronger pro-life position among the millennial generation is particularly interesting.

This Gallup survey should be compared with an earlier one that shows how America has, since the early 1990s, become significantly more pro-life: the percentage saying abortion should be legal only under certain circumstances increased from 48 to 57; the percentage saying it should be legal under any circumstances has dropped from 34 to 21; and the percentage saying abortion should be illegal in all circumstances increased from 13 to 18. Michael Gerson explains why in his fascinating column today.

The Financial Times published a piece, “Don’t Be So Sure Invading Iraq Was Immoral,” written by Professor Nigel Biggar of Oxford, a leading theologian and moral philosopher. According to Professor Biggar:

The decisive issue in evaluating the Iraq invasion is not whether it was morally flawed or disproportionate or illegal, but whether it was really necessary to stop or prevent a sufficiently great evil.

No one disputes that Saddam Hussein’s regime was grossly atrocious. In 1988 it used chemical weapons against Kurdish civilians in what, according to Human Rights Watch, amounted to genocide; and from 1988 to 2003 it murdered at least 400,000 of its own people. Critics of the invasion would presumably not tolerate such a regime in their own backyard; and an effective international policing authority would have changed it. Is the coalition to be condemned for filling the vacuum? Yes, there have been similar vacuums that it (and others) have failed to fill – Rwanda, Zimbabwe, Darfur. But is it not better to be inconsistently responsible than

consistently irresponsible?

Now add the concern about weapons of mass destruction. This was sufficiently grave to rouse the UN to litter the period 1991-2003 with 17 resolutions calling on Saddam to disarm permanently. Given the shocking discovery in the mid-1990s of Iraq’s success in enriching uranium and coming within 24 months of nuclear armament, and given the regime’s persistent flouting of the UN’s will, there was good reason to withhold benefit of doubt and to suppose that it was developing WMDs. It was not just Messrs Bush and Blair who supposed this. So did Jacques Chirac, then French president, and Hans Blix, the UN’s chief weapons inspector.

We now know this reasonable supposition was mistaken and that the problem was less urgent than it appeared. But it was still urgent. Saddam was intent on acquiring nuclear weapons and support for containment was dissolving. David Kelly, Britain ’s chief expert on Iraqi WMDs, famous for being driven to commit suicide, is less famous for being convinced that the problem’s only lasting solution was regime-change.

Maybe critics of the war view with equanimity what might have happened without the 2003 invasion, trusting that the secular rationality of Realpolitik would have prevented the rivalry between Iraq’s atrocious Saddam and Iran’s millenarian Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad from turning catastrophically nuclear. In this age of suicide bombers, however, such faith is hard to credit.

Well said. And that it was said is further evidence, I think, that we are seeing a climate change when it comes to the debate about the Iraq war.

Before his interview with Democratic Representative Eric Massa, who is embroiled in an ugly sexual-harassment scandal, FOX’s Glenn Beck said that Massa may “decide the course of this nation.” How understated. Near the end of the interview, Beck declared, “America, I’ve got to shoot straight with you. I think I’ve wasted your time. I think this is the first time I have wasted an hour of your time. And I apologize for that.”

I would take issue with the claim that this is the first time Beck has wasted America’s time, but it was a train wreck of an interview. Mr. Massa comes across as creepy and unstable. And the interview is a reminder of why, if conservatives were to embrace Mr. Beck as a leader and a spokesman for their cause, it would do substantial damage.

Glenn Beck is a man with some real talent and some serious drawbacks. But whatever he is, he is not what conservatives should want to be or what conservatism is all about.

Jen, I too was impressed with Bret Stephens’s powerful column on Iraq – and grateful that he quoted the late Michael Kelly. I have written about Mike before. He wrote so well on so many topics, from politics to his family to matters of war and peace. On the matter of Iraq and the tyranny of Saddam, these words are worth recalling as well:

I covered the Gulf War as a reporter, and it was this experience, later compounded by what I saw reporting in Bosnia, that convinced me of the moral imperative, sometimes, for war.

In liberated Kuwait City, one vast crime scene, I toured the morgue on day and inspected torture and murder victims left behind by the departing Iraqis. “The corpse in drawer 3… belonged to a young man,” I later wrote. “When he was alive, he had been beaten from the soles of the feet to the crown of the head, and every inch of his skin was covered with purple-and-black bruises…. The man in drawer 12 had been burned to death with some flammable liquid…. Corpses 18 and 19… belonged to the brothers Abbas… the eyeballs of the elder of the Abbas brothers had been removed. The sockets were bloody holes.”

That was the beginning of the making of me as at least an honorary chicken hawk. After that, I never again could stand the arguments of those who sat in the luxury of safety – “in advocating nonresistance behind the guns of the American Fleet,” as George Orwell wrote of World War II pacifists – and held that the moral course was, in crimes against humanity as in crimes on the street corner: Better not to get involved, dear.

The last two sentences of Bret’s column are these:

I still miss Kelly. Sunday’s election was his vindication, too.

So do I. And yes it was.

Watching a candidate, especially a sitting lawmaker, melt apart before your eyes is discouraging. Florida Governor Charlie Crist, who now trails Marco Rubio by a staggering 32 points in the Republican primary, is doing just that. He’s getting desperate and, in the process, looking petty and small-minded. The latest charge by Crist is that Rubio can’t possibly be a fiscal conservative because Rubio spent $130 on a back wax – “maybe” – and a haircut. This silly charge will only diminish Crist in the eyes of, well, everyone.

Politics is a serious profession; I wish more of its practitioners acted as if it were.

Charlie Crist will lose, and losing can be very hard to take. But at this stage, he should think about maintaining his dignity and reputation.

If you want to get a better sense of where things stand in the world we face and in the wars we are in, I’d highly recommend watching this recent interview between Charlie Rose and General David Petraeus. They cover the waterfront, from Iraq to Afghanistan to Iran to Pakistan. No one knows these issues better than General Petraeus, and no individual has done more to change the trajectories of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. If you’ve got some time to set aside and want to see human excellence on display, take a look.

Peter Slevin of the Washington Post reports from Mason City, Iowa, and finds this:

Republican Terry Branstad’s lines have a familiar ring as he campaigns to return to the governor’s office after 11 years away. He blasts the incumbent Democrat for “mismanagement,” promising an “economic comeback” and the end of “more government than we can afford.”

The pitch is working. Early polls show Branstad with a lead as large as 20 points over Gov. Chet Culver (D), who is battling a poor economy and frustration fueled by Capitol Hill vitriol that incumbent politicians are not delivering.

The state that launched Barack Obama toward the presidency just two years ago is looking like a tough sell for Democrats in 2010. Culver is in trouble, Rep. Leonard Boswell (D) is threatened, and President Obama’s popularity has dropped by one-third since he took office.

Obama’s approval rating is 15 percent among Republicans — and only 38 percent among independents, a 10-point drop in three months. The biggest issues are the deficit, health care, and the economy. Republican strategist Craig Robinson sees “a dissatisfaction with everything Washington.” Republican state representative Pat Grassley, the 26-year-old grandson of U.S. Senator Charles E. Grassley, says, “I’m seeing people who have never e-mailed me in four years getting involved in issues. There’s frustration out there.”

There is indeed. There is in fact nothing at all unusual about this story from Iowa — which is itself noteworthy. What is happening there seems to be happening almost everywhere in America.

Democrats have a reason to be afraid. Very afraid.

A couple of days ago Andrew Sullivan wrote, “This week Peter Wehner read Newsweek’s Iraq cover story and declared victory.” He added this:

How many times has Pete Wehner declared victory? I’ll be covering the elections this weekend with purple fingers crossed. But I remain a pessimist on Iraq, which is always a safe thing to be.

The answer to Andrew’s question is: none. In virtually every posting I have done on Iraq, I have inserted necessary qualifiers, as I did in the piece Sullivan links to. I wrote, for example, that “the successes there remain fragile and can still be undone. Iraq has proven to be treacherous terrain for foreign powers.” I added, “Nothing is guaranteed; ‘Everything in Iraq is hard,’ Ambassador Crocker once said.”

My points were rather different from what Andrew says, and fairly obvious. They were that: (a) the progress in Iraq has been truly remarkable, especially when one considers where things were at the end of 2006; (b) the “emergence of politics” that we are seeing in Iraq is unprecedented in the Arab world; (c) President Bush’s decision to champion a new counterinsurgency strategy was right, wise, and politically courageous; (d) the opponents of the surge were wrong and in some instances irresponsible; and (e) the surge is one of the greatest military turnabouts in American military history. None of these assertions is really in dispute. Neither is the claim that Iraq is on the mend.

What eventually happens in Iraq is impossible to know; it increasingly depends on the Iraqis, themselves. We will see what unfolds in the months and years ahead. It will take at least that long before a final judgment can be rendered. But what we do know is that America has given Iraq a chance to succeed, to live in freedom, to be free of a sadistic ruler. And doing that was, in fact, a noble act by our nation. Why is Sullivan reluctant to acknowledge this, even as one can still debate the wisdom of the war itself?

I will leave the last word to Sullivan’s Atlantic colleague Jeffrey Goldberg, who put things this way: “Andrew Sullivan doesn’t know that much about the Middle East.”

“There’s no worse crime in journalism these days than simply deciding something’s a story because Drudge links to it,” according to NBC’s chief White House correspondent, Chuck Todd. Really? No worse crime? Not Dan Rather’s use of forged documents in a one-sided 60 Minutes hit piece intended to cost President Bush re-election? Not the plagiarism and fabrications of former New York Times reporter Jayson Blair and the New Republic’s Stephen Glass?

There are, in fact, an endless number of “crimes” in journalism that are worse than deciding something is a story because Matt Drudge links to it.

And while we’re on this topic: exactly who should decide what qualifies as a news story? Chuck Todd believes Chuck Todd should. Mr. Todd, of course, works for NBC and MSNBC – the latter being the most partisan and reckless cable news network in America, home to such magisterial journalists as Keith Olbermann, Ed Schultz, Chris Matthews, and Rachel Maddow. So why should we trust Todd’s judgment over Matt Drudge’s? Because Todd is part of the “old” media, of course. Because he’s an “objective journalist” who is able to sort through all the news of the day and determine what merits attention and what does not.

Mr. Todd’s comments embody a particular mindset – one deeply resentful that the MSM is no longer the gatekeeper of the news, that there are now hundreds of outlets and blogs that influence the news and allow the American people a choice in what they are able to watch. The old guard hates the competition – and they hate the end of their monopoly. That’s understandable; every person who has been a part of a monopoly has resented its end, even if it advances the public interest.

Chuck Todd and his colleagues can continue to howl into the wind. They can continue to complain and plead their case. It doesn’t much matter. Events have moved way beyond them. The genie is out of the bottle, and there’s no turning back.

Unlike a number of the bloggers at the New Republic, William Galston is a serious, mature, and insightful writer and thinker. He is an accomplished academic who was also a high-ranking figure in the Clinton White House. I worked with him on some projects in the 1990s, which only increased my admiration for him. So his recent blog post caught my attention.

“With the passage of time,” former Bush administration official Pete Wehner writes today, “President Bush’s decision to champion a new counterinsurgency strategy, including sending 30,000 additional troops to Iraq when most Americans were bone-weary of the war, will be seen as one of the most impressive and important acts of political courage in our lifetime.” Wehner may turn out to be right. And his argument has broader implications that deserve our attention.

Wehner tacitly defines political courage as the willingness to go against public opinion in pursuit of what a leader believes to be the public interest. Fair enough. And unless one believes—against all evidence—that democracies can do without courage, so defined, it follows that there’s nothing necessarily undemocratic about defying public opinion when the stakes are high. After all, the people will soon have the opportunity to pass judgment on the leader’s decision. And they will be able to judge that decision, not by the claims of its supporters or detractors, but by its results.

Galston goes on to write this:

Note that to accept this argument, as I do, is to deny that President Obama and the Democrats are acting high-handedly—let alone anti-democratically—in moving forward with comprehensive health insurance reform. They genuinely believe that the public interest demands it­—and that the people themselves will eventually agree. And they know that the people will have the last word.

This approach has the firmest possible roots in our constitutional traditions. The Framers deliberately established a republican form of government that is representative rather than plebiscitary. And Alexander Hamilton explained why in Federalist #71: “[T]he people commonly intend the PUBLIC GOOD. … But their good sense would despise the adulator who should pretend that they always reason right about the means of promoting it.” In a republic, the people are always the ultimate source of legitimacy. They are not always the proximate source of wisdom.

Many conservatives don’t seem to understand this distinction…. So today’s conservatives have a choice: They can contest health reform and the rest of the Democratic agenda on its merits, or they can go down the populist road that Sarah Palin and her followers represent. But let’s call that populism by its rightful name—namely, shameless flattery of the people and the manipulation of public fears and prejudices for short-term political advantage. Honorable conservatives such as Wehner know better. We’re about to find out how many of them there are.

As it happens, two days before the piece that Galston cites appeared, I wrote a post for CONTENTIONS in which I said this:

The Speaker [Nancy Pelosi] touched on one of the important debates in American political history, which is what the role of legislators is. Is it to reflect the views of their constituents, rather like a seismograph? Or, as Edmund Burke put it when speaking about constituents, “Their wishes ought to have great weight with him; their opinions high respect; their business unremitted attention.” But in the end, a legislator owes them something more: his “judgment.” He should not be guided by merely “local purposes” or “local prejudices.” Parliament, Burke insisted, was a “deliberative assembly.”…

I place myself in the latter camp, more now than ever — in part based on my own experience in the White House, when President Bush was advocating a new counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq that was unpopular with the political class, with Congress, and with the American public. He proceeded anyway; and the results were stunningly successful. If the surge had failed — if Bush had pulled back, or listened to key Republicans, or decided that his job was to mirror public sentiment — America would have been dealt a terrible geopolitical and moral defeat. What George W. Bush did was right — and it was also politically courageous.

I went on to add this:

The acid test on these matters is always the wisdom of the act itself. Insisting on political courage from Members of Congress on behalf of a legislative monstrosity would be unwise, whereas insisting on political courage from Members of Congress on behalf of a piece of legislation that advances the common good would be commendable. Since I consider ObamaCare to fit in the former category, I naturally believe what Nancy Pelosi is asking her caucus to do is politically insane. Why issue political death warrants to your allies in behalf of a terrible idea? But her broader point, which is that self-perpetuation in Congress should not be the lawmaker’s primary concern, strikes me as quite right — and since she believes that nationalization of health care is in the public interest, her argument is understandable.

I don’t believe, and have never believed, vox populi, vox Dei.

As for Sarah Palin: I’ve made my concerns about her — and people like Glenn Beck and Tom Tancredo — known in several different forums. And while I wouldn’t go as far as Galston in my criticism of populism, I have expressed concerns about the dangers of it, as well as about what I consider to be reckless attacks on government. For example, I recently wrote this:

And [the GOP] can be responsible by taking the public’s scorn for government and channeling it in a constructive manner, in a way that translates into an actual governing and reform agenda. It is not enough to simply pour kerosene onto the bonfire. Republicans need public figures (like Gov. Mitch Daniels, former Gov. Jeb Bush and Rep. Paul Ryan) who can articulate an alternative view of government in a way that isn’t simplistic, that isn’t angry, or that doesn’t appeal (as I worry Sarah Palin sometimes does) to cultural resentments.

So I believe Professor Galston and I are making somewhat similar points. Which is reassuring to me, given my regard for him.

These comments by the hapless Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid — declaring that “this is a big day in America” because “only 36,000 people lost their jobs today,” which is “really good” — will be ones he comes to regret. His combination of cluelessness and indifference to real human suffering is not the type of thing Democrats need right now. They are in plenty of hot water as it is. The temperature just went up.

The Wall Street Journal reprints the remarks of Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wisc., at last week’s health-care summit, with an accompanying editorial, “Paul Ryan v. the President.” Together, they provide an excellent case about why White House claims about the true costs of health care are – let’s be generous here – mistaken. Both pieces are worth reading.

According to press accounts, “Shortly after Obama concluded his statement, the White House announced that the President will barnstorm on health care reform with events in Philadelphia and St. Louis next week.” So that’s been the problem all along. President Obama hasn’t been talking about health care often enough.

Barnstorming the country on behalf of ObamaCare will undoubtedly make it a hugely popular piece of legislation. Because — didn’t you know? Haven’t you heard? — the White House had a “communications problem.” Guess they’ve fixed it.

Jen, to add to your point about Charlie Rangel and Eric Massa: we are seeing the different elements required to form a political thunderstorm amass — a storm that will likely batter Democrats in November.

Three ingredients are required to form the real thing: moisture, an unstable airmass, and a lifting force. The political version of this meteorological event are a bad economy, unpopular ideas, and corruption. Democrats are facing all three.

The corruption issue manifests itself in several ways. There are legal forms of corruption, like the “Nebraska Kickback,” the “Louisiana Purchase,” and special tax benefits for union members, all part of the unseemly wheeling and dealing needed to jam through ObamaCare. There is the misuse of power we are seeing from the president in the form of trying to use reconciliation to pass ObamaCare. And there is the kind we see with Representative Rangel and New York Governor David Patterson — and now, we have just learned, Representative Eric Massa, a Democrat from New York, will not seek re-election after only one term in office. Politico.com has this: “According to several House aides — on both sides of the aisle — the House ethics committee has been informed of allegations that Massa, who is married with two children, sexually harassed a male staffer.” And it certainly won’t help matters if a grand jury indicts John Edwards on campaign violations stemming from his extramarital affair.

At some point these things can metastasize and presto!, the opposition party can run a campaign based on the “culture of corruption.” Democrats did that very well in 2006, when many Republican Members of Congress (understandably) lost the trust of many Americans. We saw the same thing happen to Democrats in 1994, with the House banking scandal and other things. And we may well see it again come November.

My hunch is that the storm in the making is, at least at this stage, more powerful and disruptive than any of the ones that came before it. And soon we’ll reach the point where there is very little they can do about it.

Today, we are told, the president will signal his support for using reconciliation to pass ObamaCare. The arguments against using this legislative approach have been well stated, including in a powerful Wall Street Journal editorial today. But an additional point must be made.

It seems like it was another era, but it was as recently as 2008 that Barack Obama — more than any figure I can recall — based his campaign on the aesthetics and romance of politics, on “hope and change,” and on a new, uplifting, transpartisan brand of politics. “’I will listen to you, especially when we disagree,” Obama said on the night of his election.

This victory was made possible only because he portrayed himself as “a figure uncorrupted and unco-opted by evil Washington,” as Harry Reid told Obama. David Axelrod believed the road to success was in Obama’s promise to be “a unifier and not a polarizer; someone nondogmatic and uncontaminated by the special-interest cesspool that Washington had become,” in the words of the book Game Change. Obama’s public appeal derived from his “rhetoric of change and unity, his freshness and sense of promise.”

“We have something special here,” Axelrod reportedly said. “I feel like I’ve been handed a porcelain baby.”

Perhaps. But that porcelain baby is in the process of being shattered into a thousand pieces. The “special-interest cesspool that Washington had become” has become worse since Obama stepped foot inside the Oval Office. Obama, himself, is the most polarizing first-year president in our lifetime. And he has contaminated himself and his party to a startling degree.

Pushing reconciliation to pass ObamaCare — and in the process, overturning the tradition and misusing the rules of the Senate to get his way — shows yet again that Obama’s campaign was built on cynical, misleading, and downright untrue claims. He simply could not have meant what he said, based on his conduct in office. Now, it’s true that his rhetoric was so soaring, and the bar was set so high, that no person could have met the expectations Obama created. But to have fallen this far so quickly is still hard to believe.

The public doesn’t like to be played for fools. Obama has done that. And he’s only compounding his problems by pushing for reconciliation. Mr. Obama has decided to take a massively unpopular piece of legislation and abuse his power to get his way. This is not what a figure uncorrupted and un-co-opted by evil Washington would do.

The unmasking of Barack Obama continues. It is not a pleasant thing to watch. And he and his party will pay a huge political price for what they are doing, perhaps unlike any we have seen.

Jonathan Chait continues his tireless attempt to defend the indefensible: ObamaCare. In his latest iteration, titled “Paul Ryan’s Hokum,” he criticizes Ryan and those who have praised him, including Matthew Continetti of the Weekly Standard, Investor’s Business Daily, and me.

According to Chait, “Ryan’s argument holds a lot of superficial appeal to people who are looking for reasons to oppose the health care plan but lack a firm grasp of the details. On close examination it falls apart.”

Actually, the arguments that are superficial and misleading, and which fall of their own weight, are Chait’s.

Mr. Chait argues two things. First,

Ryan claims that the [Obama] plan is phony because it ignores the fact that Congress is going to have to increase reimbursements for doctors who treat Medicare patients. The problem is, that reimbursement fix is going to happen anyway, regardless of whether reform occurs. So to count that cost as a hidden cost of health care reform is simply incorrect.

Second, Chait insists that “Ryan misleadingly portrayed the health care plan as hiding its costs, by phasing in benefits more slowly than costs.” Chait proceeds to quote himself from an earlier posting:

Ryan objected that the Senate health care bill does not really reduce the deficit, because it raises taxes and reduces spending over ten years, but pays out benefits over just six. If that was true, it would be a sharp rebuttal to Obama’s claim of reducing the deficit. And you could certainly design a bill like that. By spreading out the savings over a long time and delaying the benefits, you’d have a bill that technically saves money over a ten year window, but starts to lose money by year ten, and to bleed more red ink after that.

But it’s not true. The benefits do phase in slowly, but so do the savings. The CBO finds that the Senate bill reduces the deficit in year ten. It would reduce the deficit by more than a trillion dollars in the next ten years.

Let’s deal with these arguments in order. The so-called “doc fix” — which would restore reimbursements for doctors who treat Medicare patients — is most certainly a hidden cost. It was originally in the House bill but was stripped out in the summer and treated as a separate bill precisely because keeping it in the original health-care legislation would (rightly) balloon the total cost. By stripping the “doc fix” provision out, it allowed ObamaCare to be scored at a much lower figure. The more honest way to proceed would have been to add the cost of “doc fix” to ObamaCare, since the costs will be paid by the federal government. So Ryan is correct; what we’re dealing with is, in fact, a hidden cost. That was the whole purpose behind the Democrats’ strategy.

Second, no one with any knowledge of this situation — not even Jonathan Chait — believes that future Congresses will effect over half a trillion dollars of in cuts to Medicare. Yet the Democrats’ health-care bill relies for its claim of cutting the deficit beyond 2020 on — you guessed it — those huge Medicare cuts. Think of it as a giant “magic asterisk.” Baking fictional cuts into the cake is why the Congressional Budget Office says the bill will save more money in the long term. They are forced to score plans based on the premises they are given, including fictional ones. Ryan’s point is that the cuts won’t happen, so the savings won’t, either.

A final point: “doc fix” is itself a good example of why Medicare cuts on the scale we are talking about will never happen. “Doc fix” refers to a provision of the 1997 Balanced Budget Act. It called on cuts in reimbursements to physicians treating Medicare patients. The reality, though, is that those cuts have been rescinded year after year after year. The supposed cost savings haven’t materialized — and neither will massive cuts in Medicare. But defenders of ObamaCare need to pretend they will, in order to argue that their plan will reduce the deficit.

In sum: Ryan is right and Chait wrong. This may be because Chait lacks a firm grasp of the details. But there are other possibilities, too.

If this is the best Chait and his allies can do in defending Obama and criticizing Ryan, the GOP is in better shape than even I imagined.