Jay Hogan, in the Comments section on my previous post, points out that William McKinley and Franklin Roosevelt both died early on in their second and fourth terms respectively, leaving the presidency to newly minted vice presidents, Theodore Roosevelt, in office only six months, and Harry Truman, in office less than three.

Neither had much in the way of foreign-policy experience when he inherited the presidency. TR had been assistant secretary of the navy for a year and Truman a United States Senator who rose to prominence investigating waste in the World War II defense program. Being briefly vice president didn’t add to their résumés much, as in those days vice presidents were the ultimate Washington nonentities. (”There once were two brothers. When they grew up, one went to sea and the other became vice president. Neither was ever heard of again.”)

But both Roosevelt and Truman became very successful foreign-policy presidents. Roosevelt won the Nobel Peace Prize for negotiating an end to the Russo-Japanese War and Harry Truman crafted the strategy that eventually led to victory in the Cold War.

This reveals a dirty little secret about foreign policy: experience actually counts for very little. It’s a bit like the game of chess. Anyone can learn the rules of the game in ten minutes flat. But if they don’t have the right instincts for the game they will never be any good at it no matter how much they play. If they do, they will become very good immediately. (An anecdote: Stephen Sondheim was not only taught how to write musicals by Oscar Hammerstein II, he was also taught to play chess by him when he was about 12 years old. Hammerstein was an avid and excellent game player, very aggressive, and cut kids no slack whatever. Sondheim beat him in the second chess game they played.)

Neither President Carter nor President Reagan had any foreign policy experience. Carter made an utter hash of it and Reagan a triumph. To be sure, Reagan had luck on his side more than Carter but, as Louis Pasteur explained, “Chance favors only the prepared mind.”

John McCain is 72 and actuarially has a higher risk of dying in office than a younger man. But he is in good health (he’s released over 1,000 pages of his medical records; Obama, with typical parsimony, has released one page) and 72 is a good deal younger than it was in earlier times.  He is hardly likely to shuffle off this mortal coil immediately after the inauguration.

Out of 43 presidencies, only two ended in the very early days of the administration. William Henry Harrison, age 70, took the oath of office on March 4th, 1841, gave the longest inaugural address in the history of the Republic, caught pneumonia as a result, and died a month later. (Joe Biden might want to note this example of the hazards of oratorical prolixity.) James Garfield, age 49, took the oath on March 4th, 1881, and was shot by an assassin on July 2 that year. He lingered for two and a half months until his incompetent doctors finally managed to kill him.

With modern medicine, both Harrison and Garfield would have been back at work within two weeks.

The fact is, if John McCain were to die after only a year in office, Vice President Sarah Palin would have more foreign policy experience, by far, upon entering the presidency, than four of the last five presidents, who were, like her, all governors and had never held federal office.

Yesterday the New York Times ran a story about Medicare fraud in which it was reported that not only was fraud rife in the system, but that Medicare officials had done their considerable best to prevent the truth from coming out. The report specifically covered Medicare claims involving durable medical equipment, which means such things as walkers, wheelchairs, hospital beds, etc.

You’ve probably seen the ads on television promising that Medicare will pay for it, so you should order your motorized wheelchair or diabetes kit now. Medicare officials boasted that fraud in this area had been reduced to only $700 million, a mere bagatelle by federal bureaucratic standards. The inspector general has now determined that it was $2.8 billion, four times what Medicare had reported, and involved a staggering 31.5 percent of all claims for durable medical equipment.

One claim in three, in other words, shouldn’t have been paid. No private, profit-seeking insurance company would be solvent for a week with such massive amounts of fraudulent claims.

Today, the Times’s lead editorial quite properly demands action to correct this mess and points out that Congress is hardly blameless here, having “postponed a new competitive bidding program for durable medical equipment that would require a more intense look at the qualifications and integrity of the suppliers.”

I’m glad the Times is demanding action on this. But I have one question. If the federal government can’t run a program providing healthcare for those over 65, why is the Times in favor of turning everyone’s healthcare–and one-sixth of the American economy–over to those wonderful folks who have brought you Medicare?

With gas at $4.00 a gallon, there is, once again, much talk of tightening CAFE standards for automobile mileage that have been around since 1975, when there were gas lines that were blocks long. The acronym stands for Corporate Average Fuel Efficiency. According to Wikipedia it is “the sales-weighted harmonic mean fuel economy, expressed in miles per gallon . . . of a manufacturer’s fleet of current model year passenger cars or light trucks.”

Translating that into English, it means that the “fleet” of cars and light trucks manufactured by an automobile company has to meet a certain average standard of miles per gallon. The trouble, of course, is that people don’t buy fleets, they buy individual vehicles, which ones depending on their individual needs, predilections, and pocketbooks. So if too many people opt for low-mileage vehicles, the company, in theory, would have to raise the prices on those vehicles and/or lower the price on high-mileage cars in order to get customers to buy the right mix of cars and thus sustain the average fuel efficiency required by the law.

To paraphrase George Orwell, this is a method of raising average vehicle gas mileage so idiotic that only a politician could have conceived it. It has been singularly ineffective (European and Japanese car fleets average twice the gas mileage of American cars and SUV’s). It is subject to endless lobbying. What, after all, is a “light truck”? Write the definition one way and–presto!–millions of vehicles are exempt from CAFE standards.

If Congress were serious about improving the average miles per gallon of the American automobile fleet, here’s how to do it cheaply, efficiently, and very effectively. 1) Set a standard for miles per gallon, say 25 MPG at first. 2) Pass an excise tax of, say, $500, for every mile per gallon a model falls below the standard. 3) Give people a tax credit of, say, $500 for every mile per gallon the vehicle they buy is rated above 25 MPG. 5) Raise the standard one MPG per year until it reached, say, 40 MPG.

Under this system a car that got only 20 MPG would cost a whacking $5000 more than its competitor that got 30 MPG, a huge incentive to buy an efficient car instead of a speedy/sexy/humongous one, while leaving people free to buy the car they want if they’re willing to pay for it. More, it would unleash a torrent of innovation from the automobile companies that would increase fuel efficiency in ways that minimally impacted other desirable traits. Instead of spending their energies lobbying, they would spend them designing better, and much more fuel efficient, cars. No new bureaucracy would be needed to implement the policy.

This would be a perfect example of the power of the law of self interest–”make it in people’s self interest to do something and they will do it”–to effectuate good policy. Don’t hold your breath, however. The self-interests of politicians always come first.

You have to love the headline on the AP story about McCain’s health-care plan: “McCain’s Health Plan: a Threat to Employer Plans?” This is a bit like headlining a 1950’s health-care story: “Salk Vaccine: a Threat to Polio?”

Employer-paid health insurance has been the primary cause of the situation we are now in and the whole point of McCain’s plan would be to end it. These plans are ubiquitous (covering over half the population) only because of an accident of history. Employers, desperate for workers during World War II, couldn’t compete with higher salaries because of wage and price controls. So they began throwing in non-wage benefits, such as health insurance. After the war, the IRS moved to tax this form of income. But by that time so many people had “free” health insurance from their employers that they howled and Congress forbade the IRS to do so.

This created the economically ridiculous situation of employers paying for health insurance with pre-tax income and individuals having to buy it with after-tax income. (Only recently have long-suffering free lancers–such as the present writer–been able to deduct health insurance as a business expense.) No small part of the current health insurance mess comes from this one fact. For the history that led to that mess, see here.

McCain’s plan would give individuals a tax credit to buy health insurance, while employer-paid health insurance would become taxable as income (but not subject to the FICA payroll tax). In other words, it would move the tax deduction from the company to the individual. It would make individual insurance more affordable and much employer health insurance more expensive, causing people to drop the latter and buy the former while employers increasingly drop coverage altogether.

Individuals would then be able to buy the sort of health insurance best suited to them, instead of having no economically rational choice but to take the one-size-fits-all plan of the employer. A 25-year-old bachelor in good health is very unlikely to get seriously sick in the next year. What he needs is inexpensive catastrophic health coverage in case of very bad luck. A 55-year-old might well prefer a more comprehensive policy, given the propensity of 55-year-old bodies to have things go wrong and to develop chronic conditions that require frequent monitoring.

The McCain plan, along with a law allowing individuals to buy health insurance anywhere in the country (thus enabling them to escape the often dozens of unwanted and expensive mandates pushed through many state legislatures by special interests), would go a very long way to solving the problem of affordable health care and reducing the number of uninsured with minimal government interference.

It is clear, at least to me, that the left wants the current system to collapse altogether and so make a government-run system unavoidable. That’s why nothing has been done to rationalize the current health-care situation in the last fifteen years, since I wrote the article cited above. Barack Obama is being disingenuous, to put it mildly, when he complains that the McCain plan would “shred” the employer-based health insurance, as though he were its greatest defender.

The lead story in the New York Times this morning reports that the people worst hit by $4.00-a-gallon gasoline are those living in rural areas, where public transportation is poor and commutes often long. These are, of course, areas where per capita income is usually lower than the national average. In some rural counties, according to the Times, people are now spending as much as 13 percent of their income on gas, a big chunk of their very limited disposable income.

There are many reasons for rising oil prices to be sure, but a major one has been the furious resistance to developing any new domestic sources of oil. Oil company executives were dragged before Congress recently and berated for their “obscene profits” and their failure to plow more of those profits into exploration.

But where are these American companies supposed to explore? The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge? Off limits, thanks to the Democrats. Off shore on the Pacific coast? Off limits, thanks to the Democrats. Off shore on the Florida Gulf and Atlantic coasts? Off limits, thanks to the Democrats. The Chinese are drilling for oil less than a hundred miles off the Florida coast, in Cuban waters, but not American oil companies.

Even known domestic reserves of huge potential are off limits. The oil shale of Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming have upwards of 800 billion (yes, billion) barrels, three times more than the total oil reserves of Saudi Arabia. Two-thirds of all the oil shale in the world is in the Great Basin of the United States. But the Senate Appropriations Committee just killed a bill that would have ended a moratorium on developing the rules for exploiting this gigantic bonanza on federal lands, where most of the oil shale is located. It was a Democratic Senator who provided the crucial vote.

So, not only can we not exploit the oil shale we cannot even develop the rules for exploiting the oil shale.

This seems incredibly perverse. Just consider. Much of the country’s negative balance of trade is due to importing over half our oil supply. Every barrel of new domestic oil would improve the balance of trade by $136.78 (as of 9:09 this morning). Because the best oil shale is on federal land, the government would reap huge royalties if it were fully exploited. A new oil source of such proportions, once brought on line, would put intense downward pressure on oil prices globally, helping even further the balance of payments, the American economy (oil is an input in almost everything), inflation, and, just by the way, the people who are now spending 13 percent of their limited incomes on gasoline. Even the announcement that oil shale development was to begin might well cause speculators to flee the oil futures markets, bringing down prices almost immediately.

The Democrats are supposed to be the party of the little guy — what’s going on here? Simple, environmentalists are a major special interest of the Democrats, right up there with tort lawyers and unions. And environmentalists are solidly upper middle class. So four-dollar gas doesn’t impact their disposable income significantly and they, like most people, are perfectly willing to see others suffer for a noble cause.

Their objection to oil shale is, at least nominally, that it would be environmentally damaging. That need not be the case.

This would seem to be an opening the size of the Grand Canyon for McCain, and Republican candidates for Congress, to exploit this year. To be sure, McCain has always opposed drilling in ANWAR, but he can simply say that four-dollar gasoline has changed the situation, showing a flexibility he has not always shown. Then he just hammers the Democrats as the party of four-dollar gasoline in TV ad after TV ad.

Would it work? Well, that ever-reliable barometer of public opinion, the late-night TV talk shows, indicate that it will. Jay Leno recently noted that the Democrats say it would take ten years to get oil from ANWAR. He also noted that ten years ago, Bill Clinton vetoed a Republican bill that would have permitted it, and if he hadn’t, the oil would now be on line and we could sure use it. The audience roared.

As an addendum to Jennifer Rubin’s thoughtful piece on the anniversary of D-Day, let me add that it is not only in military casualty statistics that the media so often fails to provide a historical framework to make the numbers meaningful. They almost never do when it comes to economics.

As a case in point, in the 1992 election, one of the constantly reiterated Democratic talking points was that the United States was suffering through “the worst economic times since the Great Depression.” (Translation: George H. W. Bush is Herbert Hoover; elect the new FDR and all will be well.) I don’t remember any mainstream media seriously disputing what was utter historical nonsense. Unemployment in the recession of 1991-92 (in retrospect one of the mildest in American history) peaked in June, 1992, at 7.6 percent. Less than ten years before, in the far worse recession of 1981-82, unemployment peaked in December, 1982, at 10.8 percent, nearly half again as many people out of work.

Of course sixteen years ago, a conscientious reporter (please pardon what so often seems an oxymoron when it comes to historical context) would have had to go to the company reference library to look the data up. Now he can do it at his or her desk or even from the neighborhood bar. I’ll even save reporters the necessity of googling. To find the unemployment rate for every month since 1948, go here and here:

I’m always amazed at how many political reporters and editors seem to think that it is their duty to report what a politician says accurately but not to check on whether what he says is a bald-faced lie, especially when statistics are involved. They should. As one of the greatest politicians of the 19th-century English-speaking world, Benjamin Disraeli, noted, mendacity comes in three forms: lies, damned lies, and statistics.

The New York Times today endorsed John McCain for President. Here’s an excerpt:

Mr. Obama has asked to be judged by something more than his positions. He offers himself as an experienced leader who would end the culture of bickering in Washington and use wisdom and resoluteness in dealing with domestic social problems and international crises. But his resume is too thin for the nation to bet on his growing into the kind of leader he claims already to be. He does have great personal charm. But Mr. Obama’s main professional experience was a few undistinguished years as a back bencher in the Illinois and U.S. Senates. His debates with his primary opponents exposed an uneasiness with foreign policy that cannot be erased by his promise to have heavyweight advisers. John F. Kennedy, as a far more seasoned new president, struggled through the Cuban missile crisis while his senior advisers offered contradictory advice on how to confront a Soviet military threat on America’s doorstep. The job description is for commander in chief, not advisee in chief.

The Senator from Arizona has admitted to his limitations as a speaker. But John McCain has a heart–and a mind–prepared for presidential-scale challenges. When it comes to the details of policy making, he will not need on-the-job training.

OK, OK: this actually ran on October 29th, 2000, when the Times–to exactly no one’s surprise–endorsed Al Gore over George Bush.

Here’s the remarkably little altered original:

Mr. Bush has asked to be judged by something more than his positions. He offers himself as an experienced leader who would end the culture of bickering in Washington and use wisdom and resoluteness in dealing with domestic social problems and international crises. But his resume is too thin for the nation to bet on his growing into the kind of leader he claims already to be. He does have great personal charm. But Mr. Bush’s main professional experience was running a baseball team financed by friends and serving for six years as governor in a state where the chief executive has limited budgetary and operational powers. His three debates with Mr. Gore exposed an uneasiness with foreign policy that cannot be erased by his promise to have heavyweight advisers. John F. Kennedy, as a far more seasoned new president, struggled through the Cuban missile crisis while his senior advisers offered contradictory advice on how to confront a Soviet military threat on America’s doorstep. The job description is for commander in chief, not advisee in chief.

The vice president has admitted to his limitations as a speaker. But Al Gore has a heart–and a mind–prepared for presidential-scale challenges. When it comes to the details of policy making, he will not need on-the-job training.

One of the most prominent tort lawyers in the country, Melvyn Weiss, was sentenced yesterday to 30 months in federal jail after pleading guilty to paying plaintiffs to file class-action suits. He must report by August 28th. His former partner Bill Lerach, equally well known, is already in jail for the same crime, serving two years.

Richard Scruggs, perhaps the most famous and certainly one of the richest tort lawyers in the country (he made hundreds of million in the tobacco settlement case), recently pled guilty to the attempted bribery of a judge. He will be sentenced July 2nd and faces up to five years.

To be sure, these stories have all been covered in the mainstream media, usually on page 12. But they have been treated as separate stories, with no dots connected. But let’s do a simple thought experiment. Suppose that the CEO’s of three very well-known Wall Street financial firms had pled guilty to major felonies with regard to the conduct of their businesses over the course of six months and were all headed to the slammer or already checked in at Club Fed. Do you think that the New York Times et al. would have handled the matter in the same way? Or would there have been no end of “news analyses” and chin-pulling editorials about the ethical swamp that Wall Street has become as its denizens shamelessly lust after Mammon?

The same experiment, of course, might be run regarding Congress. Committee chairmen (at least when Democrats control Congress) love to drag the likes of oil company executives and bank chairmen before the cameras to explain themselves and be lectured to by their self-appointed moral superiors in Congress. (No sniggering, please.) But there hasn’t been a peep out of Capital Hill over a trio of nationally famous and felonious tort lawyers.

Just a wild guess, but I suspect the fact that tort lawyers are one of the top two funding sources for Democratic candidates might have something to do with this.

At ten o’clock this morning, the town of North Salem, New York, held its annual Memorial Day Parade. The Veterans of Foreign Wars and the American Legion led the way, followed by boy scouts and girl scouts, a fabulous old Packard convertible, the North Salem high school band, the 4-H club, the Ambulance Corps, the Lions Club, and a few other groups.  The fire trucks of the Croton Falls Volunteer Fire Department–each polished to within an inch of its life–took up the rear.

After the parade passed, the few hundred people, children, and dogs watching from the sidelines followed it up the hill to the old high school, where there is a monument to those who fought in the wars of the twentieth century. The Pledge of Allegiance was recited, those in uniform saluting, those not with their hands over their hearts. Several of the younger Boys Scouts–presumably southpaws–saluted left-handed, I noticed, and no one seemed to mind. The band played the Star-Spangled Banner surprisingly well. The commander of the local American Legion spoke briefly, as did the town supervisor and a few others. The names of locals who had fallen in the nation’s wars were read out.

And then it was over. The people walked back down the hill to the town ball field for hot dogs, potato salad, soda, and conversation and then slowly dispersed to go about their business on a perfect early summer day.

I was moved, as I always am, by this unaffected, unostentatious, unself-conscious and quintessentially American holiday celebration. My family has lived in North Salem for ninety years now. The town was deep in the countryside when my grandparents bought a farm here in 1919 to use as a summer place, and it is now on the outer fringes of New York’s suburbs. Many commute daily to the city. But only  about 5000 people live here and it is still very much a small town, like ten of thousands of other across this vast land, despite being only forty-odd miles from Grand Central. And the chords of memory bind it still. The names of my father and uncle, both long gone, are on the monument among those who fought in World War II. Some names of those who lost their lives in the Civil War are familiar today, because their families still live here.

As I both watched and participated in this Memorial Day celebration I found myself thinking about the election in November. Does Barack Obama and the urban chattering classes who have lionized him know this America at all, this small-town, God-fearing, country-loving, optimistic, friendly America? With his all-that-is-wrong-with-the-country-to-be-made-right-by-me stump speech and a wife who thinks this is a mean country with little for its citizens to be proud of, I doubt it.

But if he doesn’t know this America, doesn’t seek to connect with it, he will not win in November no matter how eloquent he is or how much water is carried for him in the media over the next few months.  For it is in the North Salems of America, not the Hyde Parks and Upper West Sides, where the nation’s political center of gravity is to be found.

Barack Obama is a supporter of the special-interest cesspool called the Agriculture Bill. I would hope John McCain — against it from the getgo — would make a very big deal of it, as it would be interesting to see Obama defend a bill giving subsidies to Kentucky thoroughbred horse breeders (a downtrodden group if ever there was one–I’ve heard some of them can’t even afford a private jet).

Someone please tell me why the following would be wrong, naïve, or counterproductive: Congress sends the bill to the White House. The President asks for fifteen minutes on TV, during which he 1) signs the veto message, 2) does a quick show-and-tell on the bill’s more egregious features, 3) says that this piece of legislation is Exhibit A of how and why Washington doesn’t work for the benefit of the people any more, 4) says this is the time to stop this sort of thing and 4) tells the people to E-mail their congressmen and senators (helpful crawl giving the House and Senate websites) and to say that they’re mad as hell about this and they’re not going to take it any more.

The president isn’t going to get anything out of Congress in the next eight months anyway, so he has nothing to lose by enraging Capitol Hill big time. Doing this would 1) cause the Congressional servers to collapse under an avalanche of irate e-mails, 2) raise his approval ratings, and 3) get the veto sustained.

It would also be a big boost to McCain, who actually has a track record against special-interest legislation, which Obama lacks.