Two political figures dominated the final months of the 2008 presidential campaign. One was the Democratic nominee, Barack Obama. The other had been unknown to all but 670,000 Americans only a few minutes before she was first introduced by the Republican nominee, John McCain, at a rally in Ohio on the Friday before the Republican National Convention, only 66 days before the November election.

By the close of that first weekend, Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska had become a national sensation. Two days after that, she delivered her debut address at the Republican National Convention as the party’s vice-presidential nominee—a dazzling stemwinder, it was all but universally acknowledged. McCain’s dramatic and unexpected bet appeared to have paid off in spades.

But by November 4, the day of the election, Sarah Palin had been transformed into one of the most divisive figures in recent American history. There was almost no middle ground between those who had come to adore her and those who believed she represented just about every dark and dangerous element of contemporary American politics. In choosing Palin, McCain had hoped to shake up the race; but the fault lines exposed by the Palin earthquake were not the ones he had thought they might be. He had wanted to run against the Washington status quo as a reformer with an independent streak. He believed he was picking a fellow reformist politician with a history of taking on the leadership of her own party, and that Palin would prove acceptable to the Republican base because of her social conservatism. Instead, Palin became an instant cultural and political magnet, attracting some and repelling others and dragging a helpless McCain into a culture war for which he had little stomach. Indeed, the overheated response to Palin’s presence on the national stage, from both friend and foe, was oddly disconnected from Palin’s actual actions, statements, and record. It was a turn of events no one could have anticipated, and one that has much to teach us about American political life in our day.

Click here to read the rest of this article from the February issue of COMMENTARY.

Among the most peculiar aspects of the very peculiar Democratic nomination contest now drawing to a close has been Hillary Clinton’s transformation into a beer-drinking, blue-collar everyman. It has been thoroughly and transparently dishonest, of course. But it worked reasonably well, and over the last few weeks in particular she ably played the cultural conservative in that race. It somehow seemed perfectly reasonable for a union organizer introducing Clinton at a rally last week to say that she was all that stood between the American people and “the Gucci-wearing, latte-drinking, self-centered, egotistical people that have damaged our lifestyle.” Until a few months ago, she was one of the icons of that very crowd. But thanks to Obama’s elitism, Hillary saw the “salt-of-the-earth Democrat” niche was open, and she went for it.

Clinton’s transformation into a teamster almost saved her–but not quite. In the end, the Democrats look to be nominating another elitist liberal who looks down on most of his voters, and so setting in motion a campaign certain to be shaped, once again, by clashing cultural self-images: the straight-talking patriot and the champagne-sipping intellectual; the worldly young progressive and the simple-minded Neanderthal.

This dynamic doesn’t pre-determine the winner, to be sure, and (as John Podhoretz persuasively argues below) Republicans should not lull themselves into imagining otherwise. But it is a pattern that has done grave damage to the Democrats for decades.

If they’re paying attention, the smart strategists among the Democrats will have learned something crucial in these past few months. A real (as opposed to a patently fake) blue-collar, everyman, salt of the earth Democrat–one who takes the rebukes of the MoveOn Left as a compliment and is even a tiny bit culturally conservative–could have a very real chance of winning the party’s nomination, would do especially well in states that are most crucial in the general election, and, most importantly, could be a knock-out winner in the fall. Is there any doubt that a genuinely anti-elitist, culturally moderate Democrat would crush  every Republican candidate we can conceive of today?

Of course, such salt-of-the-earth Democratic politicians are increasingly hard to come by, as cultural liberalism is the core of the party’s self-identity today. But maybe Clinton’s failed effort will get some conservative Democrats thinking. It would be good for the Democrats, and good for the country, if their leaders came to see that their cultural elitism, bordering on cultural separatism, is not only obnoxious but counterproductive. Maybe next time.

A few years ago, the Goliath of online booksellers, Amazon.com, purchased a company called BookSurge which offers on-demand publishing of thousands of books. Rather than keep an inventory of books in a warehouse, on-demand publishing allows buyers to choose the title they want and have it printed for them. This reduces the overhead associated with publishing a book, and so allows books that otherwise might not be published-since publishers expect they wouldn’t recoup the costs of producing them-to make their way to readers.

As a result of this foray into the on-demand book business, Amazon has become a publisher of books as well as a seller, and so has taken on an unusual level of responsibility for some of the content it now sells to readers.

I tell you all this because this morning I received a press release by email from BookSurge, informing me in breathless tones of the publication of an exciting new book called Persecution, Privilege & Power, edited by Mark Green, and offering “a searing collection of articles about the organized-but often unrecognized-exploitation of political and cultural power in the United States.” Here is how the email describes the book:

In Persecution, Privilege & Power, Green has collected the sharpest commentaries and analyses from 30 different writers as they critically examine the role that Zionism plays in shaping U.S. policies abroad as well as cultural transformations at home. This riveting volume provides a broad and exhilarating inspection of Zionist machinations as well as the entrenched taboos and covert alliances that sustain them. Green’s array of commentators includes James Petras, Charlie Reese, Alison Weir, Kevin MacDonald, Gilad Atzmon, Ray McGovern, Joe Sobran and many others. Persecution, Privilege & Power unearths the unchecked malfeasance within the political wing of organized Jewry, specifically examining that international lobby’s political excesses from a multiplicity of perspectives.

The email is signed by Amanda Sullivan Wilson, BookSurge’s public relations manager, and it details the company’s status as “a subsidiary of Amazon.com Inc., (NASDAQ AMZN)”.

You have to wonder if anyone at Amazon realizes they are now the publishers of conspiracy theories about the “Zionist machinations” of “organized Jewry,” and that BookSurge is actively promoting the book in their name.

Last week at a campaign event, John McCain was asked to comment on the connection between Autism and the presence of mercury in childhood vaccines. His response, according to ABC News, was: “It’s indisputable that [autism] is on the rise amongst children, the question is what’s causing it. And we go back and forth and there’s strong evidence that indicates that it’s got to do with a preservative in vaccines.”

McCain thus marched headlong into the bitter autism wars of the last few years, and placed himself firmly on the wrong side. There has certainly been a sharp rise in autism diagnoses in the last thirty years, though it is actually far from clear whether this is because the condition has become more common or tests for it have become more frequent and advanced. Either way there is no evidence-none, zero-connecting autism to vaccines.

The preservative McCain mentioned is called Thimerosal. Thimerosal does contain a form of mercury, though it is a form called ethyl mercury which metabolizes very quickly and does not remain in the body. But Thimerosal has been removed from childhood vaccines, with the exception of the flu vaccine, in an effort to reduce the overall exposure of children to mercury, which in very high concentrations (very much higher than those ever found in vaccines) can of course be harmful.

The decision to remove Thimerosal from vaccines was not motivated by any connection to autism, and indeed, despite years of intense study, no such connection has ever been shown. On the contrary, studies conducted since the removal of Thimerosal from vaccines have shown no consequent decrease in autism diagnoses.

The supposed connection was proposed in the 1990s by a study that has since been shown both methodologically and ethically flawed (as detailed by Caitrin Nicol in a recent issue of The New Atlantis). But unfortunately some parents of autistic children latched on to the theory, and have engaged in an intense public effort to link vaccines and autism in the public mind.

The effort has included a lobbying campaign in Washington, which relies on the energy and devotion of the parents involved. In 2005, while serving as the White House staffer charged with such issues, I received thousands upon thousands of faxes from one autism group demanding that the government immediately remove any vaccines containing Thimerosal from the market. Several members of Congress have been persuaded, and in fact one early version of the 2008 budget bill covering the department of Health and Human Services included a provision prohibiting funds in the federal Vaccines for Children program from paying for vaccines that contain Thimerosal. The Bush administration strongly opposed the provision, arguing it “could result in children not receiving any flu vaccine,” and it was eventually removed.

But well beyond politics, the campaign has real consequences. By planting baseless fears in the minds of parents, it has caused a real decline in the number of children being vaccinated, which could contribute to the resurgence of some diseases thought to be things of the past, like mumps.

Autism is a very sensitive issue, and getting past the vaccine debate will require real care, and serious attention to the facts. Unfortunately John McCain showed neither in this instance, and his comment will no doubt needlessly extend the debate, as advocates of the vaccines-autism link point to his words for support, and (if he is elected) demand that he follow up with restrictions on vaccine availability. McCain should correct himself, and soon.

I first discovered William F. Buckley in my early teens. In an effort, I suppose, to become more serious and informed, I started regularly reading the Star Ledger—the closest thing to a real newspaper in New Jersey. On one occasion when I made my way through enough of the paper to reach the op-ed page in the back, I ran across a Buckley column, which I remember finding oddly intense and captivating. I was soon a regular reader—almost always with a dictionary in hand. It’s hard now to imagine what sense I could have made of Buckley then, but somehow he got me to think, and to laugh, and to read. And I was pleased to discover that this very strange and interesting voice found expression in more than brief columns but in books (so many books!) and on the pages of a magazine filled with other voices and views like his. He directed me to a world of ideas and good sense and good humor that I soon discovered was vast and deep. I was hooked, and have been an incurable conservative since.

I only met Buckley once, and only for a moment. I was in college, attending some sort of conservative conference at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington. I was with three friends, and we walked up to Buckley and introduced ourselves as the only four conservatives at American University (which was only a slight exaggeration). Buckley laughed at our travails, so familiar they must have been to him, and he said just two words, through a chuckle: “stay positive.”

He always did, and that was always an important part of his power and appeal. Conservatives easily get dour and down, and the rest of humanity finds such grumpiness unattractive. Buckley offered a smiling, confident, and very appealing conservatism that was at the same time also deeply serious. His good cheer was not an act. It was the proper response to the truth that moves conservatives: that the world we have inherited is a good place, worth defending and cherishing. As Buckley always seemed to understand, that’s a good reason to smile.

Others who knew Buckley will have much deeper and more meaningful things to say about him. But like most of those deeply in his debt, I didn’t know the man personally, and can think of nothing more profound and true to say in this sad moment than two plain and simple words I would have loved to say to him in person: thank you.

The vehemence of the opposition to John McCain in many conservative quarters this past week naturally raises the question of where these folks were before McCain gained momentum. Why wait until after Florida, when McCain seems well on his way, to roll out the most forceful criticism? Why wait until a few days before Super Tuesday to endorse Romney? The objections to McCain were always there, after all.

Looking over the dynamics of the past several months, and especially January, once the voting got going, I think you have to conclude that Romney’s negative charisma was the key reason. For months, many conservatives understood that a Giuliani or McCain candidacy could be a disaster, yet somehow there was never a serious coalescing around Romney. I don’t think his religion was to blame. Something about Romney just didn’t have the right ring to it; there was a sense that he would say anything and do anything, and that beneath the veneer might be another veneer, and another. It was—in a lesser dose, to be sure—something like the feeling so many Americans had about John Kerry in 2004.

So for months conservatives held out hope for Fred Thompson—the potential generic conservative mascot, acceptable to all—keeping an open mind about Romney but withholding serious support. Thompson, unfortunately, thoroughly failed to capitalize on the immense opportunity handed to him, and so throughout the summer and fall and into the winter the Republican race was held in a peculiar kind of limbo: the money wasn’t flowing, normally decisive opinion-shapers on the right remained uncommitted, and everyone seemed to be waiting to see what would happen (“maybe in this debate Thompson will show some energy”) rather than assertively making something happen. This created a race without any stable conservative presence, and opened the door for Huckabee’s temporary rise—which made any establishment conservative coalescence even less likely. Meanwhile Rudy Giuliani committed a kind of strategic suicide, and John McCain was left as the only simultaneously likeable and serious candidate running.

This was beginning to become apparent in the wake of Iowa, was reasonably clear after New Hampshire, and became crystal clear after South Carolina. But still many conservative heavyweights who were very eager to avoid a McCain candidacy did not line up behind Romney. Only after Florida, with his fate almost sealed, did a good number earnestly make his cause theirs. Why take so long? Why resist? Many conservatives seemed unable to get over a persistent concern about Romney, which naturally translated into distress about his electability in the general election. Once Thompson turned out to be a dud and the generic conservative slot was left empty, the nomination was Romney’s to lose. He seems very likely to have lost it.

Conservatives have serious reasons to worry about a McCain candidacy, to be sure. But if Mitt Romney couldn’t even win their votes all this time, shouldn’t we assume he would have had a lot of trouble winning other people’s votes in November?

Last night’s debate showed both why it’s terribly important for a Republican to prevail this November, and why it will be terribly difficult.

It is important because Clinton and Obama seem absolutely intent on ignoring the reality of what is happening in Iraq, and following through on a ruinous script their party decided to adopt a year ago. (Maybe the writers’ strike is to blame). For a half hour, they spoke as though the past year simply had not happened, and when they were then asked specifically what they thought about the progress that had been made, they responded by ridiculing the efforts of Iraqis to make the most of the military progress achieved by the surge, and by sending a clear message to all involved that if the Democrats take over, they’ll just pack up and leave. Maybe they’ll take care of the “translators and truck drivers” who helped our forces, they said. Great. They are intent on snatching disaster from the jaws of a real chance at progress in Iraq, and they simply don’t care if we lose. Neither of them came anywhere near words like success, or victory. It’s not in the script.

But the debate also showed again why it won’t be easy for John McCain to make much of this, or to win in November. It increasingly looks as though, crucial as it surely is, Iraq simply will not be the central issue of the 2008 election. This is a mixed bag for both parties, of course—focusing on Iraq might help McCain since it plays to his strengths, but it would hurt him too, since the public is not where he is on the war. But either way, Iraq seems to be falling into the background as conditions improve, and this could well be a domestic policy election.

On domestic issues, McCain’s problem is not that his views are too far from the public’s. It’s that he simply doesn’t care about any of the issues on the table. In fact (as I argue in next week’s issue of National Review) McCain doesn’t actually seem to care about any political “issues” at all. He is moved by honor and country, and this has driven him to be passionately active on a few domestic fronts, but for different reasons than those that motivate just about every other politician. (A misunderstanding of this point has, I think, been behind much of the often excessive distress at McCain’s apparent ascendancy in some quarters of the right this week). And he has not found a way to understand, say, health care in terms of honor, honesty, or character. So even though his campaign has offered a very strong conservative proposal for health care reform, McCain seems incapable of talking about it as though it were even remotely significant.

Both of the Democrats, whatever you think of their particular proposals, can communicate a sense of the significance and urgency of this and the other issues that seem increasingly likely to dominate the general election. McCain’s challenge is not only to persuade conservatives he can carry their banner, but to persuade himself that the concerns and aspirations of the middle class family matter. Although he may well be the Republican with the best chance of winning in November, this won’t be an election that naturally plays to John McCain’s strengths.

It’s too early to tell who either party’s nominee will be this year, but it’s not too early to say that the front-loading of the primary process has been a disaster for both parties—turning the primaries into a dizzying rollercoaster ride that has not helped the base or elites of either party much.

This year’s primaries not only started earlier than ever (in 2000, only Iowa voted on January 24th; this year six states had voted by that point), but were also pushed together far more tightly than in previous years. Most observers, and most of the party and state officials responsible for the change, expected the new calendar to shorten the process and hasten the selection of a nominee. “Cutting the length of the primary season by more than half by jamming the contests together raises the likelihood of a bandwagon developing for the candidate who wins the first few contests,” Karl Rove wrote in December, and “this would allow a candidate to sweep to victory in the subsequent contests that rapidly follow because all that voters will see is his (or her) face on the evening news and in the papers.” Expecting only the early states to matter, every state fought to stake out an early spot, which made the overcrowding all the worse.

But far from bringing about a quick decision, the process has left both parties contemplating the possibility of a brokered convention for the first time in many decades. The early states produced a surprising variety of winners—failing precisely to yield a bandwagon or momentum effect—and it is far from clear that the massive super-primary on February 5th will do much better. It increasingly looks like the later states, those that didn’t crowd the January calendar, and that therefore feared they would be left only to rubber stamp a settled matter, will turn out to play the truly pivotal role in both party’s contests. Virginia and Maryland suddenly look shrewd, if only by accident.

It is too soon to think about how to avoid such a fiasco in the future—we haven’t finished working through the fiasco just yet. But it’s not much too soon. In the Republican party, for instance, changing the primary process requires an arduous four-year rigmarole, which for the 2012 cycle would need to begin with this April’s meeting of the RNC’s rules committee. The Democrats are a little more flexible, but both parties would need the state legislatures to follow their lead, and that’s far from assured after this year’s apparent debacle.

All of which proves some old conservative maxims: if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it; and if you try to fix it, don’t imagine you can predict how things will turn out.

Daniel Casse argues that McCain’s victory shows that Republican voters know that Iraq needs to be their top priority. “John McCain won because he stuck to the war in Iraq,” he writes.

It’s a plausible view, but the exit polling suggests otherwise. Asked “how do you feel about the U.S. war in Iraq?” 63 percent of Republican voters said they approve of it, and 35 percent disapprove. Of those who approve of the war, Romney got 37 percent support and McCain 33 percent. Of those who disapprove, McCain got 44 percent of the vote and Romney 19 percent. In other words, Romney narrowly won among hawks, and McCain among doves.

That doesn’t mean voters are confused about McCain’s views on the war. It seems to mean the war just wasn’t a crucial criterion in deciding who to vote for.

In Australia this week, professor of obstetrics Barry Walters has called on his country’s Parliament to tax every couple with more than two children to offset the children’s carbon emissions. “Every newborn baby in Australia represents a potent source of greenhouse gas emissions for an average of 80 years, not simply by breathing but by the profligate consumption of resources typical of our society,” Walters says, and “far from showering financial booty on new mothers and rewarding greenhouse-unfriendly behavior, a ‘baby levy’ in the form of a carbon tax should apply, in line with the ‘polluter pays’ principle.” The polluter being made to pay in this instance is the parent, and so, at least implicitly, the pollution is the child. Lovely.

This should come as no surprise. Throughout the 20th century, every fashionable leftwing cause seemed somehow to conclude in a call for population control. The early environmentalist movement was no exception: its proponents called unabashedly for a decrease in the human population to protect the earth’s resources. In his popular 1968 book Population Bomb, the biologist Paul Ehrlich put the matter bluntly:

The first task is population control at home. How do we go about it? Many of my colleagues feel that some sort of compulsory birth regulation would be necessary to achieve such control. One plan often mentioned involves the addition of temporary sterilants to water supplies or staple food. Doses of the antidote would be carefully rationed by the government to produce the desired population size.

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A week ago, two teams of scientists announced they had successfully produced the equivalent of human embryonic stem cells by “reprogramming” skin cells, without the need to use embryos. It was a much hoped-for and anticipated development, and very welcome news. And the transformation of the stem cell debate in just the few days since has been nothing short of amazing.

Witness this article in yesterday’s New York Times. Nothing like it could have been written before last Tuesday—and not just because of the way it begins to speak of the stem cell debate in the past tense, but because of the honesty with which it speaks of the realities and limits of stem cell research: “Scientists still face the challenge of taking that abundant raw material and turning it into useful medical treatments, like replacement tissue for damaged hearts and brains,” the Times notes, “and that challenge will be roughly as daunting for the new cells as it has been for the embryonic stem cells.

That daunting challenge, and the likelihood that, quite apart from one federal funding policy or another, treatments using such cells will likely not be possible for many years (if ever), were never much on the lips of Times reporters and editorialists in the past.

The article even notes that until last week’s announcement, there was only one way to create genetically matched pluripotent stem cells:

Some scientists have been trying to make disease-specific embryonic cells by creating a cloned embryo of a person with the disease. But that effort requires women to undergo sometimes risky treatments to donate their eggs.

In the past, when the paper has mentioned this technique, they did not admit so frankly that human cloning was involved or that women were at risk. Just this past June, speaking of exactly the same method, the Times noted that researchers:

want to develop embryonic stem cells by nuclear transfer, the replacement of an egg nucleus with one from an adult cell. A major benefit of nuclear transfer would be to walk a patient’s cell back to an embryonic state so disease processes could be better understood.

They dared not call it cloning, or mention any drawbacks. Only now that science may have provided a way around the ethical (and therefore political) dilemma, and that, as the godfather of embryonic stem cell research James Thomson told the Times last weekend “a decade from now, [the stem cell wars] will be just a funny historical footnote,” can they speak openly about what they had so long been advocating.

It is to Thomson’s credit (and to that of all the many other stem cell researchers quoted in the press this past week) that he’s willing to speak frankly about how momentous this advance may really be. He’s willing, too, to see the consequences for the political fight over stem cells—and they are good consequences for both sides of the argument: the science can go forward without raising ethical concerns. (Unsurprisingly, some of the politicians involved in the fight seem to want the argument more than the science.)

It seems, though, that even the New York Times—which has been tenaciously partisan and frankly dishonest in its advocacy for embryo-destructive research in the past decade—now sees that the fight may be drawing to a close, and it’s time to put away the word games and speak openly about what has always been at stake. If these new cells can make the Times do that, maybe they really are a panacea.

On Tuesday, New Jersey voters defeated a state ballot referendum that would have put $450 million of taxpayer funds into stem cell research. It was a rare electoral victory for opponents of embryo-destructive research—made all the more surprising by its Garden State venue. New Jersey, after all, has some of the most extreme pro-cloning and embryo research laws in the country, explicitly permitting, for instance, the creation of cloned embryos and their development in the womb until the moment of birth.

In search of an explanation, the New York Times offers up the absence of a massive media campaign with deep pockets, of the sort employed in similar referenda in California in 2004 and in Missouri in 2006. In both cases, tens of millions of dollars were spent on ads attempting to persuade voters of the promise of embryonic stem cells—often using starkly dishonest and distorted arguments.

In Missouri, for instance, the advertising campaign coined the clever term “early stem cell research” (as in this ad) to avoid using the word “embryo,” and asserted that embryonic stem cells would cure Alzheimer’s (despite a near consensus to the contrary among researchers). In California, where a similar effort resulted in the creation of a $3 billion stem cell institute in 2004, pre-election deceptions about how the project would work continue to plague the new institute, which has now gone through several difficult leadership changes. Most recently, the institute hired as its director an Australian scientist who was caught lying to the Australian parliament in 2002 in order to obtain support for stem cell research.

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Let us stipulate that it is not easy to run the House of Representatives. With its 435 massive egos, each subject to unique pressures and whims, each accustomed to being the biggest fish in his or her own district pond, the House is bound to be unruly. The culture of the place is also not always conducive to following a leader. It hasn’t changed all that much from the scene Alexis de Tocqueville encountered when he visited the Capitol in the early 1830’s:

When you enter the House of Representatives in Washington, you feel yourself struck by the vulgar aspect of this great assembly. Often the eye seeks in vain for a celebrated man within it. Almost all its members are obscure persons, whose name furnishes no image to one’s thought. They are, for the most part, village attorneys, or those in trade. . . . In a country where instruction is almost universally widespread, it is said that the people’s representatives do not always know how to write correctly.

A tough crowd to corral, surely. But looking at Nancy Pelosi’s record of accomplishment after nearly a year, the question arises: can it really be this hard to run things?

For the first time in two decades, the Congress has failed to send the President even one budget bill before the end of October. The Democrats have failed, too, to make much of a dent in the war effort—after having promised their party’s most ardent constituents to reverse course. They have so far failed to capitalize on the opening offered them by the fight over the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, and they’re plotting an effort to combine the Veterans and Defense appropriations bills with a bloated Health, Education, and Labor bill—which would allow Republicans to paint them as holding American troops hostage to the pet projects of Democratic interest groups.

Almost as important, though, has been the basic failure of day-to-day management by Speaker Pelosi. Again and again, she has allowed her most vulnerable members to be trapped by Republican floor tactics. Again and again she has been too aggressive with the most moderate Republicans, costing her party a chance to win crucial cross-over votes at key moments. Again and again she’s spoken too quickly and had to backtrack embarrassingly (this week, for instance, her staff was caught trying to edit a transcript of a public event to make it appear that she didn’t mean what she clearly said.)

The public has noticed, of course. Congress’s approval ratings are significantly lower than even President Bush’s. Pelosi’s standings in her home state have fallen sharply (as have those of the Senate’s Democratic leader Harry Reid).

Before the 2006 elections, some conservatives argued that a loss in Congress would have a silver lining for Republicans, by giving the GOP a chance to regroup and refocus, and especially by showing voters what the Democrats were like in power. Almost a year into the 110th Congress, it is hard to argue with them.

Three weeks ago, Congressional Democrats passed a reauthorization of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), which they knew the President would veto. It would have increased the program’s budget by $35 billion, eliminated a requirement that states cover the neediest eligible children before covering middle-class ones, and increased the tax on tobacco—which amounts to a tax on the poorest Americans—to give slightly more affluent Americans health care.

President Bush had proposed a more modest reauthorization that would still increase the program by about 20 percent (or $5 billion, rather than $35 billion), and would insist the funds first went to the poorest of those eligible, to keep the program from becoming a tool to prod families off of private insurance and onto government-funded health care.

Sure enough, Bush vetoed the Democratic proposal, and his veto was sustained in the House. Now, “sensing a political advantage” (as the New York Times puts it), the Democrats are rushing through another version of the bill, which they hope will peel off enough Republicans to pass. This version still suffers from basically all of the flaws that made it unacceptable to Bush last time, though some are hidden behind flimsy gimmicks.

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Yesterday in Florida, Fred Thompson announced his immigration reform plan. The plan is in some ways fairly run-of-the-mill in this Republican primary season: Thompson opposes amnesty, wants tougher enforcement of existing laws, calls for cracking down on employers, and wants to tighten the rules governing legal immigration without reducing the number of legal immigrants. But Thompson’s approach does stand out in a few ways, and also highlights a potential Republican advantage on immigration that the Democrats have yet to notice.

More than most other Republicans this year, Thompson has addressed the state of legal immigration in his plan, as well as the quandary of contending with the millions of immigrants now here illegally. He calls, for instance, for the narrowing of family immigration categories, by permitting new Americans to obtain immigration status only for their spouses and minor children—not, as is currently the case, for siblings, parents, and adult children. This would cut down dramatically on so-called “chain immigration,” which accounts for an enormous portion of legal immigrants to America, and distorts the aims of our immigration system. (I discussed this problem at some length, and called for the same kind of reform, in the May issue of COMMENTARY.)

Thompson also calls for an end to the utterly senseless visa lottery program, and for a greater preference for labor-based immigration—both of which make good sense (and which I also discussed in that same essay).

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The most interesting thing about Hillary Clinton’s rollout of her health care plan yesterday was not the substance of the plan—which is not much different from what John Edwards and Barack Obama have offered—but the cautious and defensive tone she and her campaign have taken toward it. Clinton constantly repeated, during the rollout, that this idea was different from the “HillaryCare” proposal of 1993. “This is not government-run,” she told a cheering audience, “there will be no new bureaucracy.”

The chief reason for Hillary’s circumspection, of course, is her leading role in the Democrats’ last health care debacle. In one respect it actually seems like she is probably over-reading the importance of that line on her resume—how many voters really remember the ‘93 debacle or think of it as a great shadow over Hillary Clinton? This seems like a Washington cliché that has taken on a life of its own.

In another respect, her caution is absurd and misleading. The notion that an entirely new scheme of nationalized health insurance regulation will involve “no new bureaucracy” is risible. The idea that the new public insurance options to be part of the menu on Hillary’s plan won’t expand government-run coverage is ludicrous.

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One of the most illuminating moments of the 2008 presidential race came this past Sunday. Speaking to an audience in Iowa, John Edwards said that under his proposed universal health care plan, Americans would be required to go to the doctor regularly for preventative exams:

It requires that everybody get preventive care. If you are going to be in the system, you can’t choose not to go to the doctor for twenty years. You have to go in and be checked and make sure that you are OK.

This raises some obvious practical questions: What’s the penalty for choosing not to go to the doctor? Will the government keep records of people’s doctor visits? Are you also required to comply with doctor’s advice about diet and exercise? But it also offers some political and philosophical insight into the long, bitter argument over health care.

Politically, it highlights the extent to which the Democrats have begun to make themselves vulnerable on health care by overreaching. In part because Republicans have been absent from the debate, Democrats have convinced themselves in recent years that the public wants a universal, single-payer system. Their internal debate has been about whether the government should merely fund or actually own and run that system.

This is basically nuts. Examined carefully, public concerns about health care do not amount to a rejection of America’s private health insurance system. Rather, these concerns express anxiety about access to that system, and about portability and stability of coverage. Republicans slowly are coming to champion modest reforms that address these anxieties. In time, Democrats will find that they have vastly overshot the mark with their arguments for replacing the current system with a massive bureaucracy. Calls for mandatory doctor visits won’t help them refute criticisms on that score.

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The annual Census Bureau report on income, poverty, and health insurance coverage was released yesterday, and set off the usual flurry of confusion and bad ideas on the last of those three subjects. The number of Americans without health insurance increased last year to roughly 47 million Americans, or 15.8 percent of the population. The raw number is less important than the percentage: in a growing population the raw number of both those without insurance and those with insurance is likely to grow (and indeed, the number of insured Americans increased by about 800,000 last year, while the number of uninsured increased by about 2 million.) But at 15.8 percent, the proportion of the uninsured matches its highest level ever (last reached in 1998).

In looking at this figure, though, a great deal of caution is warranted. As Eric Cohen and I pointed out in the February issue of COMMENTARY (and as the Census report itself notes) the number masks much nuance.

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Several of the Democratic presidential candidates gathered yesterday in Iowa for a debate and forum on cancer sponsored by the Lance Armstrong Foundation. Armstrong, a cancer survivor and advocate for research, began the event by telling the crowd that “the next occupant of the Oval Office must discuss this critical issue with voters.”

But as the forum went on, it became increasingly difficult to see what exactly there is to discuss. Of course everyone agrees that cancer treatment and research are critically important. Cancer in its various forms kills more Americans than any other disease (having surpassed heart disease for that top spot in 2005). And cancer research receives about $5.5 billion a year in funding from the National Institutes of Health, far more than is allocated to any other disease and about 25 percent more than was spent on cancer research in 2001.

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The conventional wisdom during the opening months of the 2008 presidential campaign has been that the campaign has started far too early, leaving us endless months of jockeying that could prove meaningless when the real struggle for the nominations starts.

The problem with this is that it’s no longer true, despite our repetitions of it. Yes, this campaign began earlier than most. Yes, by the time it’s over it will have lasted nearly two years. But we are well into it now, and in some respects this year’s race is actually beginning to fall behind the kind of campaign schedule that has become the norm in the past few decades.

This is especially true when it comes to defining campaign themes and messages, and particularly on the Republican side. Every serious presidential campaign needs at some point to define a candidate’s ambitions in a clear thematic way: to offer a general vision for governing, followed by particular policy proposals. In the 2000 campaign, for instance, George W. Bush ran on a new way to think about how government can work with civic organizations to revitalize civil society and help the poor. Bush laid this out as the vision of his presidential campaign in a major speech in Indianapolis, which really marked the beginning of the substantive stage of the 2000 GOP race; McCain was by then already working out the substance of his “straight talk” theme as well.

Bush’s speech is well worth a read, especially for those conservatives who think they remember what “compassionate conservatism” meant as Bush originally used it, or who want to apply the term to everything they haven’t liked about the Bush years. But the most striking thing about the speech may be the date of its delivery: July 22, 1999. More than eight years ago; earlier in that election cycle than we are now in ours. The Democratic candidates this year have begun to do some of this kind of the thematic and substantive work—Edwards and Obama, in particular. But neither the serious Republican contenders nor Hillary Clinton (so in other words none of the people likely to be elected President) have really done anything like this yet. All have given some policy speeches, yes, and some have released what passes for specific policy proposals here and there, but none have really offered an overarching definition of themselves in terms of a vision of governing, or of purpose.

Perhaps Fred Thompson, who brings less of a personal story and less political experience to bear than most others, plans to introduce himself this way, and run on an idea rather than on…whatever it is that the current crop of Republicans is running on. It is no longer too early to be seriously running for President in 2008. It is beginning to be too late.

A minor scuffle has broken out among several conservative and liberal bloggers about the meaning of eugenics and its connection (if any) to today’s progressive movement.

No one questions the link between the progressivism of a century ago and the eugenics movement (or almost no one: Washington Monthly’s Kevin Drum seems never to have heard of it). The eugenics movement understood itself to be improving the human future by enlightened and scientifically informed intervention. As a progressive cause it was ideal, and was championed to varying degrees by nearly every prominent American progressive. That doesn’t mean the progressives of today would support it. But to the extent that they want to identify explicitly with the original progressive movement, they probably should contend with it.

Today, a rather different sort of effort to apply control and selection over the next generation is emerging, in the form of a growing inclination to test developing human embryos and fetuses for ailments and weaknesses (or even just the wrong sex), and to eliminate those found to bear them. The trend itself is undeniable. Ninety percent of Down’s syndrome pregnancies are aborted, for instance. And according to one recent study, “40 percent of infants with any one of 11 main congenital disorders were aborted in Europe.”

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Earlier this summer, when Senate Democrats (with significant support from some Republicans) offered a bill that would expand federal subsidies for children’s health insurance , conservatives accused them of trying to bring government-funded health care in through the back door. Now, as if to prove the point, House Democrats this week are preparing to introduce a much more ambitious plan to fortify and expand the government’s role in health care.

The New York Times reported that the plan, slated to be made public in the coming days, would not only vastly expand the scope of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), it would also reduce the incentive for private health plans to participate in the Medicare program, and eliminate the requirement in current law to limit Medicare’s reliance on general revenue for its funding.

Two points about why this bill is a smart play by the Democrats. First of all, it’s intended to make the Senate plan (which would increase SCHIP funding by more than $35 billion) appear to be the most moderate of three alternatives, mediating between the White House’s proposal of a $5 billion increase and the House’s $50 billion.

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When the great physicist and futurist Freeman Dyson puts pen to paper, as happens too rarely nowadays, the result is worth a look. Dyson is certainly not always right—indeed it’s probably fair to say he’s rarely right—but he sees things others don’t, and offers engaging explanations.

Dyson’s latest contribution, “Our Biotech Future,” in the current New York Review of Books, is no exception. It sees far and deep, but also misses the obvious. Taking up a number of the themes of his fascinating 1999 book The Sun, the Genome, and the Internet, Dyson agrees with the common cliché that the 21st century will be the age of biotechnology, but he argues that most people who make that claim have failed to see what it will mean.

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A study published last Friday in the journal Science reopens the heated debate over environmental (as opposed to genetic) effects on intelligence. An enormous survey of sibling IQ scores in Norway found that firstborn sons had IQ scores about three points higher than second-born sons, and four points higher than the third-born (the study looked only at men, because it was based on IQ tests given to newly-drafted Norwegian soldiers in the 1960’s and 70’s.)

At first glance, this birth order effect would seem to suggest a biological cause—having to do perhaps with the higher levels of immune antibodies in the womb after a first pregnancy. But the study also looked at second-born siblings whose older brothers died in infancy, and found that in terms of IQ scores and relation to younger siblings, they belonged with the firstborns, not the second-borns. In other words, the cause seems more likely to have to do with how parents (or others) treat the oldest brother. (For Joseph Epstein’s meditations on birth-order theory, read his 1997 article O, Brother.)

But as large-scale as this study is (it examined almost a quarter million men), it still acts to highlight just how little we understand about intelligence and its relation to genetics and environment, and how prone we are to over-read and misread statistical data on intelligence.

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The Food and Drug Administration, created in 1906, has been one of the most successful regulators in history—carrying out the monumentally complicated task of keeping America’s pantries and medicine cabinets free of harmful products even as the food and drug businesses have grown exponentially more complex. But as the drug business in particular has gone global in the past few decades, the FDA’s job has moved from extremely difficult to well-nigh impossible. Unless, of course, it can make some radical changes.

The drug business has been an international market for a very long time. Until recently, this has just meant that many of the most familiar drugs in your pharmacy have come from France or Switzerland—countries whose regulators work closely with the FDA. No one really worries about the quality of imported Canadian or European drugs, and the FDA is well positioned to inspect and certify those drugs.

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