Rereading Modern Novels

Hugh Hewitt is discussing the paucity of modern novels that repay re-reading. I think in general he is right that contemporary fiction has fallen on hard times, much of it self-inflicted, some of it a reflection of a marketplace where good writing is remunerated in the movies and television, or, for more literary work, through the writing of biographies or non-fiction books. A writer ambitious to become a cultural lion or just to make a living will stay away from the Iowa Writers' Workshop mentality of contemporary novelists and short story writers, and gravitate toward political writing, historical writing, biography, screenplays, etc.

That being said, Mr. Hewitt requests a list of "modern" novels that I have reread. I suggest:

James Gould Cozzens, The Just and the Unjust
James Gould Cozzens, Guard of Honor
James Gould Cozzens, By Love Possessed
John Marquand, Wickford Point
John Marquand, So Little Time
John Marquand, B.F.'s Daughter
John Marquand, Point of No Return

With the exception of Cozzens' By Love Possessed, these are all novels of the 1940s by serious, grown-up writers who wrote for serious, grown-up men and women living in a serious age, not for other academics or the writers' workship crowd --which didn't exist then and hadn't yet corrupted fiction-writing. Cozzens in particular is a major writer whose work does the work of all great novels by making us think deeply about how adults make moral decisions and trade-offs in a complex world. His Guard of Honor, about the management of a World War II air force base in the Deep South dealing with, among other things, the integration of the Army Air Corps, is by far the best book about World War II I have ever read, and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1948, besting Norman Mailer's inferior and overwrought The Naked and the Dead.

Cozzens was also openly conservative, which accounts in large measure for the way the American Lit professoriate has air-brushed him out of 20th Century American literary history.

Rathergate Denoument

Dan who? I don't watch network news and haven't done so for... well, forever. If I watch news shows on TV, it's opinion shows, which at least have the merit of being upfront that everyone has an agenda. I know Chris Matthews is left of center -- the guy worked for Tip O'Neill for crying out loud. I know Joe Scarborough is right of center -- he was a Republican Congressman. You get the picture. What I could never stand was the pretense, indefensible intellectually, that network news (or the NY Times or the Washington Post for that matter) were somehow objective journalists. Brent Bozell's Media Research Center has long since debunked that myth factually with hard data, but any schlump could have figured it out with a cursory understanding of human nature and the human mind. There ain't no such thing as objectivity that somehow permits an observer to stand outside of history and escape his own biases and background and desires. It cain't happen, no, sir, uh-uh. The fact that the talking heads would wink-wink and say that they're "journalists" was always propaganda for the booboisie. The fact that they were all left-liberal elitists only made the intellectual dishonesty of their pretense more galling.

So my reaction to CBS' announcement is.... Dan Rather rides off into the sunset? Hmmmmm.... I thought he'd left ten years ago.

Motor City Madmen

I have mixed feelings about the Pistons-Pacers-fans brawl last Friday night in Detroit.

On the one hand, Ron Artest is a troubled young man and probably needs to take a year off and get his head screwed back on, if he can. I don't say he's a "thug" -- his behavior is less gangsta and more like a cry for help. He needs some therapy. Stephen Jackson and Jermaine O'Neal of the Pacers also deserve long suspensions, and if anything their behavior was more reprehensible because no one threw a beer on them. And enough crap about how they were sticking up for their teammate -- they could have done that by pulling him out of there and trying to calm him down. Instead, they went up into the stands looking for white faces to punch.

(Artest... I don't know, if you take away the fact that he is playing a game that he gets paid $6 million a year to play, on national TV, and just put him in a bar or on the street, and someone throws a beer on him... hell, it's practically an unwritten rule that anybody who throws a beer in another guy's face gets his ass kicked, or at least should. My dad, who's pretty old school, would probably agree that people acted a lot nicer when they thought they might get punched in the nose if they didn't act like gentlemen in public.)

On the other hand, I'm also consistently amazed at the boorish behavior of young men at sporting events. Where are the adult men -- not at the end of the game, but at the beginning of the game, or at the beginning of the first game they went to as teenagers -- who will tell them to be quiet, sit down, tone down the language, act like gentlemen? It's not just the NBA either, it's baseball games and football games and hockey games (hockey might actually be the worst)... young people think they can use what Tom Wolfe calls (in his otherwise atrocious new novel, I Am Charlotte Simmons) the "Fuck Patois" of youth. When I have asked young men to tone it down when I take my son to a ball game, they immediately apologize and then generally do tone it down. I've even overhead them correcting each other afterwards. Young men want to be led by adults. But you have to do it in the first inning, you can't do it in the ninth when emotions are running high and the beer has been flowing for a couple of hours. I guarantee: if the grown up men in the audience at Auburn Hills had put the hammer down in the first fifteen minutes of the Pacers-Pistons game, nothing like what happened would have happened.

Finally, I don't know quite what to make of the almost unspeakable fact that the players fighting were all black, and the fans were all white. The Man from Mars who didn't know better would look down and see a race riot. But the oddity, of course, is that it wasn't poor blacks or poor whites fighting, a la gang wars. It was millionaire players fighting middle or upper middle class fans (the type who can afford courtside seats). Weird. What makes all of them so angry? What makes that a fun thing to do on a Friday night?

I bet David Stern doesn't like that last question.

UPDATE: I posted these comments on Polipundit.

Not necessarily in this discussion, but throughout the media discussions in various places, it seems that one must blame the players, Artest, Jackson, O’Neil & Company (aka, the “thugs"), or else blame the fans (the “beer throwers,” the “hooligans") for what happened. But it’s not two problems, it’s one problem – the general degradation of societal standards for behavior. And that’s not the fault of the Pistons arena for not having enough “security” or enough police. Whatever happened to self-policing?

The Pistons-Pacers situation would have been defused if, in the first quarter of the game, the first time one of the hooligan fans shouted the “f-word,” a half dozen grown men in suits (preferably former military men) would have given them the “let’s not have any more of that talk around the womenfolk” talking-to. That’s what used to happen. My dad is fond of pulling out pictures he has of St. Louis Blues hockey games from the 1960s and noting what seems astonishing from the vantage point of 2004 – every adult man is in a coat and tie. Did that make them have less fun at the games? No. Did it make them act more like gentlemen? Obviously. Does a critical mass of adult gentlemen in an arena make it less likely that adolescent males will act like thugs or hooligans? You bet it does.

Kennedy Assassination Conspiracy Theories Debunked in Haiku

Lee Harvey Oswald
Acted alone or else you
Must believe too much.

It isn't worth thinking about the who-killed-Kennedy, the Mob-Castro-Lyndon Baines Johnson-Marilyn Monroe's hairdresser, Oliver "Magic Bullet" Stone conspiracy nutocracy any longer than that. As the hustlers say, "Get a job!"

Recount Hysteria!

I am getting sick/alarmed about the Democratic Party's continual efforts to delegitimize President Bush's election by fomenting insane conspiracy theories about electronic voting fraud in Florida using Diebold machines, etc. Lest you think the national Democratic Party isn't really behind the speculation, here's quote from the Ohio Democratic Party's own website: "If you would like to urge Kerry to withdraw his concession or share information about election fraud, Cameron Kerry, John’s brother is collecting comments. His email is: vri@dnc.org." Eeek!

Here's the gravamen of their claim:

1. Forget that President Bush won the popular vote by 3.3 million votes.
2. Forget that we all (meaning the Dems) took the position in 2000 that the popular vote somehow mattered.
3. We only lost in Ohio by 68,000 votes. (This is the new mantra you see in Democratic circles, with the reasoning being that, although Kerry lost by 136,000 votes to Bush, he would have only had to convince 68,000 Bush voters to vote the other way, see?, so it's OK if we claim that we only lost by 68,000 votes, because it doesn't sound like as much as 136,000 votes.)
4. If Ohio had gone the other way with those extra 68,000 votes, Kerry would have won the electoral college by 272-266. (And see Nos. 1 and 2 -- we now believe that only the electoral college matters.)
5. Finally, forget that, if only 4,600 votes had gone the other way in New Hampshire (margin of victory for Kerry of 9,200), or 5,400 had gone the other way in Wisconsin (Kerry margin = 10,800), either way Bush would have won even if Ohio had gone for Kerry.

This is why we have elections on a particular day and why grown-up Americans throughout history have accepted the results of those elections. The system will crack up and fall apart if Democrats continue to try to delegitimize every Republican victory.

Big Donors Get Appointed to Be Ambassadors? Stop the Presses!

The AP is running a story about how "pioneers" -- big donors to the first Bush campaign in 2000 -- got appointed to be ambassadors. The only response to this kind of faux outrage is Captain Renault's from Casablanca: "I'm shocked, shocked to find that politics is going on in Washington."

Meanwhile, a Marc Rich, a felon who was pardoned by President Clinton in the last week of his Presidency, gave millions for the Clinton Library. AP? Is that a "news story"?

As Howard Dean said, "Yeaaarrrggggggghhhhhh!"

David Friedman on Tariffs

A friend forwarded me this explanation of why tariffs are stupid from David Friedman, son of Milton Friedman. It's so smart I wanted to share:

Growing Hondas. There are two ways we can produce automobiles. We can build them in Detroit or we can grow them in Iowa. Everyone knows how we build automobiles. To grow automobiles, we begin by growing the raw material from which they are made--wheat. We put the wheat on ships and send the ships out into the Pacific. They come back with Hondas on them.

From our standpoint, "growing Hondas" is just as much a form of production--using American farm workers instead of American auto workers--as building them. What happens on the other side of the Pacific is irrelevant; the effect would be just the same for us if there really were a gigantic machine sitting somewhere between Hawaii and Japan turning wheat into automobiles.

Tariffs are indeed a way of protecting American workers--from other American workers.

So Last Year

Maybe it's me, but I can't summon any anger about Bill Clinton anymore. His library opened. Fine. Like all Presidential libraries, it tends to gloss things the former President wants glossed, like, say, oral sex in the oval office. That's fine too. Kids will be going there to learn about American history. We want them to know facts, sure, but we also want them to respect their government, including the Presidency. There's only been 43 of the fellows, after all. If I met Bill Clinton, I'd shake his hand and say, "Hello, Mr. President." It was a close question, he could have been impeached for lying under oath, but he wasn't, and on the whole, as a conservative (in the Burkean sense) I think we shouldn't impeach Presidents where the question is a close one.

Hating Bill Clinton, that's so last year. Particularly where the more recent Democratic nominees, Al Gore and John Kerry, make him look almost lovable by comparison.

No Shame

Kerry Lawyers Scrutinizing Vote in Ohio. Eeek! The funniest line is where they say they're not doing this to challenge the outcome, only to ensure that every vote is counted. But, note, they're not scrutinizing the votes in, say, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Oregon, Wisconsin or New Hampshire, five states where Kerry won by a margin less than Bush's margin in Ohio. Of course, we've always known what Democrats mean when they say "let every vote count." They mean, "Let every Democratic vote count where it can change the outcome of an election."

I Am Not Charlotte Simmons

I am in the process of reading Tom Wolfe's new novel I Am Charlotte Simmons about the degradations of college life ca. 2000. I wish I could say I am enjoying it, because he's relatively conservative (for a novelist), but I'm not. It reads like a cartoon version of a sociological essay --almost like those 1930s Marxist novels about the working class. I don't believe in the reality of the characters, and nothing they do has surprised me yet -- the great flaw in any novel. Nor do I even believe in his point as sociology -- yes, some young people may be vulgar, yes, rap is vulgar, yes, the emphasis on athletics at universities is overwrought, yes, young people may have too much sex too soon, yes, many colleges, even elite colleges, have "dumbed down" their liberal arts course offerings. But there are also young people who went in droves to see the Pope when he came to America, there are young people who listen to Christian music, or play classical music themselves, there are athletes who are well-rounded people (and the number who play "big time" colleges sports like basketball and football at big-time universities is dwarfed by the number who play sports like soccer and lacrosse and field hockey and tennis and swimming, etc., and the number who play sports at smaller colleges), and there are young people who aren't having sex all the time. The part of the novel that makes the point that literary culture ain't what it used to be... well, all right, I agree. Movies and television have usurped the novel as cultural touchstones, sure. But maybe that's why we have supposedly "great" novelists like Wolfe who can't hold a candle to the "middlebrow" authors of the 1950s like John Marquand, James Gould Cozzens, or John O'Hara. Read Cozzens' By Love Possessed after you read I Am Charlotte Simmons to see what has happened to the novel... it's like you suddenly are picking up a work of juvenile fiction.

I hate to agree with Michiko Kakutani about anything, but she's right in her NY Times review: it's "a novel that feels as if its author were merely going through the motions."

Ah, well, I'll probaby finish it. Then I'll go back to reading Ron Chernow's great biography of John D. Rockefeller, Titan. Query: why are contemporary biographers so good (see, e.g., Edmund Morris' Theodore Rex, David McCullough's John Adams, or Chernow's recent Alexander Hamilton), while contemporary novelists are so dreadful?

This, on the other hand, is real data.

While, as noted below, the chart going around the Internet about the relative IQs of blue states and red states is a HOAX, this chart, showing the relative generosity of blue states and red states, isn't. The top twenty-five states in terms of generosity (a relationship between a state's affluence ranking and its rank in terms of giving) are all red states. Massachusetts, the home of various smart guys like John Kerry, ranks 49th.

Oh, by the way, remember the stories all over the news media about how John Kerry, when he was between heiresses in the early 1990s, couldn't find a way to give a dime to charity, even though he was making $130,000 or so as a U.S. Senator? Oh, right. The media never picked up on those stories. Hmmmm.... wonder why?

One more item in the file of "What If A Republican Did That?"

IQ and "Blue" Democrats

The Democratic meme of how "ignorant" the red states are continues in full force. I got an email today from an otherwise intelligent liberal colleague with a list that purports to show that blue state residents have wildly higher average IQs than red state residents. This, of course, is an Internet hoax that has long since been debunked. On its face, the list doesn't pass the smell test, with Connecticut (114 avg. IQ) and Utah (87 avg. IQ) more than a standard deviation higher and lower than the mean... it just can't happen.

But what interests me is the sudden willingness of liberals to talk about IQ. Do they really want to go there? Consider: Wisconsin is a "blue" state, OK, fine. Wisconsin also has ranked #1 in average ACT scores in the nation. Ooh, there must be a lot of smart liberals in the state, right? But where do you think those high ACT scores are coming from... Wisconsin's "blue" counties (Milwaukee County) or Wisconsin's "red" counties (say, Ozaukee or Waukesha, affluent suburbs of Milwaukee)? The data is in.... Milwaukee's kids score the lowest in the state, while the suburban kids score among the highest. But if Republicans started talking about how the average ACT scores in areas that voted predominantly, even overwhelmingly, Democratic, are very low, and using that as a rationale for somehow delegitimizing an election... well, you know what they'd be saying about us.

I do hope, however, that it makes them all feel better about themselves.

Four more years!

Veterans' Day

I am not a veteran. I was born in 1959, and the time when military service (or attending a military academy or joining ROTC) would have presented itself to me, roughly my college years from 1977 through 1981, were the years of the Carter presidency and "malaise." Military service when I was in college (and perhaps partly because of the college I attended, Princeton, where the liberal elites inculcated a profoundly anti-military ethos) was unthinkable. We were a generation weaned on images of military defeat in Vietnam, as filtered through the news media and Hollywood (Apocalypse Now, The Deerhunter, etc.). None of my friends joined the military; no one I knew joined the military. In retrospect, this fact is among my deepest regrets... I look back on my own shallowness and shudder.

For I have long since realized that the myth of the "madness" of the Vietnam veteran, and the myth of the incoherence and futility of American efforts to defeat communism there and around the world, were myths founded on propaganda. Now, in this campaign season I have witnessed the self-sacrifice and courage of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, and the ultimate defeat of the anti-Vietnam War candidate, John Kerry. And, more recently I have watched (more than once) Mel Gibson's paean to the Air Cavalry in the Ia Drang valley in 1965, We Were Soldiers. Finally, at long last, American culture seems to have returned to sanity about the Vietnam era.

God Bless the WW II and Korean War vets from my father's generation. God Bless our Vietnam vets. And God Bless our young men fighting today in Fallujah.

Blue Devils!

Now that time has passed, I have accustomed myself to the disappointment of the Cardinals losing the World Series. To my friends who are Red Sox fans, I simply note that the Cards beat the Red Sox in 1946 and 1964, so we're still up 2 to 1.

Now, on to the next annual ritual of fanaticism in our household... the Duke Blue Devils' season is about to begin. Many polls have, I know, picked the Blue Devils to finish fourth in the ACC behind Wake Forest, North Carolina, and Georgia Tech. Hear it here first... ain't gonna happen. Coach K has five McDonald's All-Americans still. Yes, I know, we lost Luol Deng and Chris Duhon. Deng was great and would have been the Player of the Year. But Duke has lost players like that before... Elton Brand, Corey Maggette, Mike Dunleavy, etc. But, come on! Are you telling me that GTech or Wake has a starting five that can go with Sheldon Williams, Shavlik Randolph, Daniel Ewing, JJ Redick, and Sean Dockery? NFW!

Duke will win the ACC. Duke will make the Elite Eight, at least. Duke will have at least two first team All-ACC players (Williams and Redick), and Randolph by the end of the year is going to look like the Top 5 talent he was coming out of high school before he got hurt. Duke will, at some point in the year, be ranked #1 in the country. Because that's what Duke does.

Man, am I juiced up! Duke-Princeton, January 5, 2005, at Cameron! Yah, yah, yah!

What If a Republican Did... Oh, Never Mind!

One of the great Republican parlor games/dinner table rants is to describe something that Democrats have done and then ask, "What if a Republican had done that? What would the media have said?" Usually it occurs in the context of politically incorrect speech. Democratic Senator Byrd's comments about "white n*****rs" comes to mind. Sometimes it takes the form of a substitution: we cite something that Democrats have said about, for instance, the stupidity of white rural Christians (see Jane Smiley's now infamous Slate screed), and ask what would happen if you substituted "black urban Christians," or complained about New York Jews, etc. (Interestingly, I have literally never heard a Republican of my acquaintance say anything remotely like this.)

Here's another one. On election day, twenty vans that were rented to help Republicans GOTV efforts in Milwaukee had their tires slashed. In a state where Kerry won by less than 12,000 votes... the closest race in the country. But, here's the kicker... the individuals arrested or questioned so far in connection with this vandalism were the sons of the newly-elected Congresswoman from Milwaukee, Gwen Moore (who won by about 75%-25% and didn't need to do this sort of thing), and the son of the former mayor of Milwaukee, Marvin Pratt, who, not incidentally, was Kerry's Milwaukee campaign chief.

Can you imagine if, say, in Florida in 2000, it turned out that the sons of Katherine Harris and Jeb Bush had been caught doing something like this? Can you imagine if, say, in Ohio in 2004, it turned out that the sons of Voinovich and Blackwell had been caught slashing Kerry vans' tires? The media equivalent of nuclear war would have immediately ensued.

This is not just an after-the-fact academic question... if Ohio had gone the other way, the narrow Kerry victory in Wisconsin would have given him the victory. Where is the FBI in this case? Isn't committing a crime in an effort to deprive someone of their right to vote a federal offense?

It would be if Republicans had done it.

Fallujah

The Belmont Club is doing invaluable work in reporting and commenting on the assault on Fallujah. The following passage posted there sends chills down my spine when I think of the brave young men doing this difficult task:

"I got myself a real juicy target," shouted Sgt James Anyett, peering through
the thermal sight of a Long Range Acquisition System (LRAS) mounted on one of
Phantom's Humvees. "Prepare to copy that 89089226. Direction 202 degrees. Range
950 metres. I got five motherf****** in a building with weapons." A dozen loud
booms rattle the sky and smoke rose as mortars rained down on the co-ordinates
the sergeant had given. "Yeah," he yelled. "Battle Damage Assessment - nothing.
Building's gone. I got my kills, I'm coming down. I just love my job."
...
The insurgents, not understanding the capabilities of the LRAS, crept along
rooftops and poked their heads out of windows. Even when they were more than a
mile away, the soldiers of Phantom Troop had their eyes on them. Lt Jack Farley,
a US Marines officer, sauntered over to compare notes with the Phantoms. "You
guys get to do all the fun stuff," he said. "It's like a video game. We've taken
small arms fire here all day. It just sounds like popcorn going off."

This engagement is all the more chilling because it probably happened at night. Five enemy soldiers died simply because they could not comprehend how destruction could flow from an observer a mile away networked to mortars that could fire for effect without ranging. All over Fallujah virtual teams of snipers and
fire-control observers are jockeying for lines of sight to deal death to the
enemy. For many jihadis that one peek over a sill could be their last..... From UAVs wheeling overhead to Marines going through alleys linked by their intra-squad radios (a kind of headset and boom-mike operated comm device), the US force is generating lethal, real-time information which is almost immediately transformed into strike action. Against this, the jihadis have no chance.... terrorism has unleashed a terrible engine upon itself. Capabilities which didn't exist on September 11 have now been deployed in combat. It isn't that American forces have become inconceivably lethal that is scary; it is that the process has just started.

More on Specter

Hugh Hewitt raises some interesting questions about the wisdom of toppling Specter. I'm not sure whether I buy all of this -- I don't, for instance, care much in the long term whether Lincoln Chafee or Olympia Snowe want to become Dems, because those seats will probably go Democratic when they retire anyway, and they are effectively voting that way now. But I do think if Republicans can get the Judiciary Committee up to 11-8 it may be the better part of valor to leave Specter where he is so we can make the argument that we are a "Big Tent" party that isn't afraid of different opinions.

Jane Smiley Isn't Smiling

Jane Smiley isn't smiling today. The novelist cum political commentator is frothing on Slate in a diatribe against Republicans and the people who vote for them that has to be read to be believed. Slate, of course, is always a pretty good barometer of where the Left is at mentally... not quite as rabidly out there as Salon or The Nation or, God forbid, democracyunderground. If I can cut through the rhetoric -- is she really considered a good writer? -- her thesis is that people who vote for Republicans are stupid. Indeed, she subtitles her screed "The Unteachable Ignorance of the Red States."

This has been a left-wing meme for generations, of course: law school dropout Adlai Stevenson was brilliant, while Dwight Eisenhower, who only led 10 million men to victory in Europe, was a dolt; Jimmy Carter was a nuclear scientist, while Ronald Reagan was an actor -- both true as far as they go, but then why does the left now consider actors like Sean Penn and Tim Robbins and Danny Glover, etc., to be so brilliant as political thinkers?; and then Al Gore, who couldn't help flunking out of Divinity School for crying out loud, and John Kerry, who suspiciously never released his college or law school grades or SAT scores, but who also suspiciously went to Boston College rather than Harvard,were both oh so much smarter than George Bush, who only went to Yale and Harvard MBA school.

This is not necessarily a brief for the relative intelligence of Eisenhower, Reagan or Bush at all. I hold no such brief. It is only to note that you would think grown-ups would stop thinking that all people who disagree with them are necessarily stupid or, worse, evil. Or that grown-ups would bump up against the fact that a majority disagrees with them and maybe re-examine the evidence supporting their own positions. In fact, isn't that what the liberals all want to teach our kids in Freshman Comp? Openness to different ideas? Unteachable, indeed! Can you imagine the grades Jane Smiley gives to anyone who has the temerity to believe something different than what she's selling in her English classes? Or who wears a cross to her class?

Ah, well. As Elvis Costellos sang, Let them talk, let them talk, let them all talk. It's Morning in America!

UPDATE: I didn't know it at the time I wrote this, but apparently Jane Smiley went to the toniest prep school in my hometown of St. Louis, the John Burroughs School. Normally I would conclude that she is an elitist snob with her disdain of people like me who had the misfortune to attend public high school -- Lindbergh, as it happens (Go Flyers!). But I had a couple of college buddies at Princeton who went to John Burroughs too, and they were good rowdy know-nothings just like me. So maybe you shouldn't draw conclusions about things like where someone lives or goes to church or where someone went to school when you're evaluating their character or intelligence. But, then, that was my whole point.

Arlen Specter Needs to "Come to Jesus"

Around my firm, litigators occasionally will use the phrase "come to Jesus," as in, I need to sit down with the client and have a "come to Jesus" talk about the likely outcome of his litigation, or, more frequently, to opposing counsel, you need to "come to Jesus" about the likelihood that the judge is going to let you get away with stiffing me on discovery I've duly requested. The meaning is... you have to get real about where the power in a particular situation is and what will happen to you if you continue down your current path.

So I don't want this to have a religious connotation, but.... President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Bill Frist, somebody, please, needs to have a "come to Jesus" talk with Arlen Specter. Somebody, please, needs to explain to him that (1) there is such a thing as the Republican Party; (2) the Republican Party has certain principles; (3) when there is a Republican President, those principles are defined by what the President wants; (4) the job of a Republican Senator under a Republican President is to get with the President's program; (5) if a Republican Senator cannot get with the program, he can be an Independent like Jim Jeffords, because at 55-44, we don't need to take that crap; and (6) anybody hear from Jim Jeffords lately?

Specter can be an iconclast from the back bench. He can't be one if he wants to be Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. That's the bottom line. This President has shown he is willing to break taboos... the Senate's seniority rules should be the next one.

Jobs, Jobs, Jobs

There were 337,000 new jobs created in October according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. They also revised August and September upward, so the total uptick is something on the order of 400,000, with the total number of jobs created since August 2003, when the Bush tax cut was passed, coming in at around 2.3 million. There is very little chance now that Bush will end his first term with a net job loss a la "the worst jobs record since Hoover" mantra of the Dems during the campaign. The facts, of course, always were:

1. Everything is relative. We had a "jobs bubble" in the late 1990s. That "hyper"- employment made it inevitable that the next few years would appear to be bad for jobs, when we've really been doing well in terms of unemployment straight through. Anyone who looks at the longitudinal data available at the Bureau of Labor Statistics can see for themselves that the unemployment figures in 2001-2003 were nowhere near historical figures in previous recessions.

2. The September 11th effect. Again, anyone who looks at the BLS data will see that the bulk of job losses under Bush -- more than a million -- took place in the four months immediately after 9/11.

It's nice that at least 51% of Americans saw through the demogoguery of the MSM to understand that, this time, it wasn't the economy, stupid. On the other hand, if it hadn't turned out that way, the next few years would have been known as the "Kerry Boom."

Kerry and Edwards

Had to say for the record: Kerry did himself proud yesterday by conceding. Of course, Kerry didn't have much of a chance to overturn the vote in Ohio, so the facts on the ground may have made his decision for him. But he did the right thing at the right time. Another hard-fought election and peaceful transition of government... the eternal miracle of America!

Meanwhile, I would have ordinarily noted that I didn't much like Edwards' concession speech with its populist rhetoric of various fights "raging on." But we have to give him the benefit of the doubt given his wife's now-revealed cancer... I think he probably just was numb (I would be) and tired and went into campaign mode rather than conceding more gracefully. Anyway, our prayers are with his family.

And with the families of all the candidates for that matter. Presidential campaigns are man-killers, methinks; it's hard to see how any remotely normal person would want to go through it. I hope they all get a lot of sleep. They need it and deserve it.

More on "Blue Cities" v. "Red America"

I noted yesterday that if you take away the six biggest cities in America Bush wins by 7 or 8 million votes, not 3 million. Here's a different way to look at it that puts the question in more focus.

First, consider that, if you take away just three counties: Wayne County, MI (Detroit), Philadelphia, and Cook County, IL (Chicago), Bush would have won Pennsylvania, Michigan and Illinois easily. Absent the inner city Democratic power machines in those three places, Bush wins, not 286-252, but more like 350-180, a landslide. If you take away inner city Milwaukee and inner city Minneapolis, Bush wins Wisconsin and Minnesota too, so it would be 370-160 or so. An even bigger landslide.

Second, sit back and think to yourself.... is voter fraud on a massive scale more likely occuring in the inner city precincts of the south side of Chicago, or is it more likely happening in a small town in rural southern Illinois? Where are people passing out cigarettes in exchange for votes, Milwaukee, or LaCrosse? Where are people registering felons, Philadelphia or Lancaster?

Third, ask yourself, you liberals out there.... would you want to send your kids to public school in any of those inner cities? Would you want to live there and depend on the government there to protect your kids and keep your family safe?

The only reason the Democratic Party can even claim to be a major party is because it has a firm hold on the political machinery in some of the most dysfunctional inner city communities in America. Otherwise, it's probably closer to a 60-40 red-blue split.

Supreme Court Over and Under

Now that Kerry has conceded, it's time to get ready for the next great political battle. What's the over and under for when President Bush gets resignation letters from Chief Justice Rehnquist and Justice Sandra Day O'Connor? They are 80 and 74, respectively, and who have both suffered from or (in Rehnquist's case) are suffering from cancer.

My guess: the letters are in the mail, which means we'll be having hearings in January or February. Rehnquist and O'Connor will correctly read this as the best possible time for them to go and for conservative replacements to be nominated, because the Senate is 55-44, and the President has political capital to spend.

Who gets the nominations? Tough question.

My guess: President Bush will want to appear conciliatory with the Dems, so he will nominate Justice Breyer, a Clinton appointee, as Chief Justice, which won't cost him any votes on any important cases, but gives the appearance of bipartisanship. Then he can nominate conservatives to fill the associate slots opened up by Breyer and O'Connor. I would choose an intellectual heavyweight like Alex Kozinski of the Ninth Circuit as one, and I would look for Bush to follow in his father's footsteps and nominate Janice Rogers Brown from the California Supreme Court as the first African-American woman justice. That gibes with his "compassionate conservative" streak, would probably insulate her from really tough hearings, and would look good in the history books.

UPDATE: An important question is, of course, how the President will overcome the Dems' filibusters of appointments. Perhaps it won't be as big an issue with S.Ct. justices, since, after all, they can't obstruct forever, because you have to have nine of them. But that's probably wishful thinking. So we have to think about how we can turn five Dems away from their party on the filibuster issue. Here are the Democratic Senators from red-states that went to Bush by 10% or more who will be up for election either in 2006 or 2008:


Ben Nelson
Neb.
35% (Bush margin of victory)
2006 (up for reelection)

Kent Conrad
N.D.
27%
2006

Tim Johnson
S.D.
21%
2008

Max Baucus
Mont.
20%
2008

Mary Landrieu
La.
15%
2008

Jay Rockefeller
W.Va.
13%
2008

Mark Pryor
Ark.
11%
2008

That's seven targets. (I've left off Robert Byrd of W.Va., who's up for reelection in 2006, because I view him as a complete party hack.)

Cities v. Suburbs

The six biggest cities in the country, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, and San Francisco, had John Kerry winning over George Bush by approximately 3.8 million votes. (For New York that's the sum of Manhattan, Queens, Brooklyn and the Bronx. For San Francisco, it's S.F., Alameda and San Mateo Counties by my reckoning.) My half-assed estimate is that these cities account for approximately 10-12% of the electorate, or about 12-14 million votes. So John Kerry won them easily, probably somewhere up around 65-70% in total, with many of the cities going much higher.

But that also means that George Bush won the remaining 88-90% of the country by 7-8 million votes, a resounding victory that could be as high as 10%). I think one way of conceptualizing this election is as a repudiation of urban elites and their culture, including the dependent underclasses they have created in our major cities. This is the revenge of "Fly Over Country."

Et tu Pennsylvania?

Has anybody noticed that Pennsylvania, which was called, oh, nine days ago for Kerry, actually has a closer margin of victory for Kerry than Ohio has for Bush? Using the Dems' apparent logic, why shouldn't Bush be challenging the results their (not to mention my home state, Wisconsin, which went for Kerry by only 13,000 votes)?

I'm not advocating this. I'm just saying that Kerry's best argument is that, if a 150,000 votes were changed in Ohio, he would have won by 272-266. Bush could just as easily say that if 150,000 votes were changed in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, he would have won comfortably with 318 electoral votes. That's the way elections work, you win some, you lose some, and at the end of the night you add them up, thank your volunteers, drink a beer, and move on to the serious business of governance.

Do the right thing! John Kerry, concede!

P.S. Chris Matthews last night let slip that the reason Pennsylvania went for Kerry and Ohio didn't was "walking around money." He said this like it was a political fact that everyone who was hep already knew... that the Dems pay people to vote. Do the Dems really want someone to open the sewer that is Philadelphia precinct machine politics?

Whew!

Well, that was too close, but not so close, methinks, that the Dems can or will want to cheat. Now, John Kerry, be a mensch! It's "for the good of the country" time.

Exit Polling and the Herd Instinct

Much of the conservative Internet was ablaze earlier with rumors of exit polls showing big Kerry leads in various states. It is astonishing that these politically savvy people, after all that has been talked about and written about over the past months, could fall for it. It shows innumeracy: Kerry up 20 points in Pennsylvania simply could not be true given the history of polls in the state, the history of past election results, etc. -- it's simply too far outside the confidence interval to possibly be accurate. It also shows a lack of common sense: consider that exit polls are taken by human beings (often pretty young, maybe something like a graduate student or an AP stringer) standing outside polling places, likely not very well-trained, likely not very well-paid, likely not very happy to be standing in the rain with a clipboard, and likely semi-embarrassed at having to accost complete strangers who are hurrying off to work after voting. Are they really going to create a truly random sample? Are they going to get responses from the woman who is pushing a stroller and dragging a toddler out of the poll? Are they even going to bother to ask the grown up man with a real job who is wearing a suit and a scowl to stop and fill out his little form? Come on. He's going to ask the people who look like him and act like him because they are less threatening to him and have the time to answer. And, more likely than not, the type of person who wants to be an exit poll taker -- like the type of person who wants to go to Journalism School -- is going to be liberal. There is going to be bias in all of these things.

Perhaps most importantly, it pays to remember that everything costs money. Paying the bus fare or the mileage for an exit poller costs money. Paying for his travel time costs money. So where do you think the exit polls are going to be? Cities? Suburbs? Rural areas? Probably cities, which probably means they'll skew Democratic that way too.

Keep the faith. GOTV!

The Election

I am reminded of the moment in the movie Gettysburg when Robert E. Lee realizes that, although he did not want the battle to occur when and where it occurred, fate had brought the Union and Confederate armies together on that particular field at that particular time. Lee says, "It is in God's hands now."

And so it is.

It's the Economy, Stupid?

In 1992, when the economy had already pulled out of a fairly mild recession, Bill Clinton rode to victory as a challenger on a theme of "It's the Economy, Stupid!" That was effective demogoguery, and perhaps even excusable -- in the days before the Internet, the Mainstream Media was so effective in selectively editing economic news that you couldn't really blame a Democratic candidate for counting on Dan and Tom and Peter to obfuscate good news and accentuate bad.

Now (at least I hope), Kerry and the Democrats and the MSM won't be able to get away with it. There is simply too much access to longitudinal data sets on the economy that allows regular folks like me to refute arguments about the economy. Want to argue that the Bush economy stinks? Here's what the GDP growth was for the six quarters before Clinton was reelected in 1996:

1995q2 0.7
1995q3 3.3
1995q4 3.0
1996q1 2.9
1996q2 6.7
1996q3 3.4

Average = 3.33%

Here's the GDP growth for the six quarters running up to Bush's reelection campaign in 2004:

2003q2 4.1
2003q3 7.4
2003q4 4.2
2004q1 4.5
2004q2 3.3
2004q3 3.7

Average = 4.53%

Source: U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of Economic Analysis.

Meanwhile, unemployment under Bush in September 2004 was 5.4%, trending downward from 5.6% in January 2004, while unemployment under Clinton in September 1996 was 5.2%, trending downward from 5.6% in January 1996. Source: U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics. The Dow right now is over 10,000; on November 1, 1996, it was just a tad over 6,000. Source: Yahoo Finance, Dow Jones Historical Prices. Etc., etc., etc.

Yes, kids, you can do this at home! GOTV!

Halloween and "Divided" America

The premise of much of the punditry over the past few years is how "divided" America is, and how angry people are, and how Red State America and Blue State America are so fundamentally different that it's hard to believe the country can avoid civil strife. Well, I live in a "blue" state, Wisconsin, that might just go "red" this year, and IMHO all that is self-dramatizing by the media elites and our chattering classes. America is not that divided.

How do I know? Halloween. This weekend we went out for Halloween to trick-or-treat in our neighborhood with the young-uns, and I ran into literally hundreds of friends from our neighborhood and parish, and I didn't hear one political comment. Not one. The weekend before the election where "so much is at stake." In a "swing" state. After months of being barraged by political ads. No one was angry. No one was "mean-spirited." Everyone was nice to each other, and having a grand time passing out candy to Disney princesses and Pirates of the Caribbean.

Maybe this is a bad thing. Maybe people should care more about politics. But I think it is a sign of fundamental health in our society that, three days before a presidential election, my friends -- college-educated, profesional people for the most part -- are talking about the Packers, fall home improvement projects, how the capital campaign at the church is going, whether our kids are going to do indoor soccer this year, etc., etc., etc. They are not talking about the election, I think, because they fundamentally trust that all will be well.

And, the bonus is, a Happy America, is an America that re-elects incumbents.

Bush, PV 53-46, EV 330-188.