Folks, this is a bleg.  I need help.

Preparing to interview Gov. Rick Perry for Uncommon Knowledge down in Austin next month, I keep finding the same question coming to mind:  What makes Texas Texas? 

While my beloved California has raised taxes, imposed onerous regulations, and run vast budget deficits--and all this under both Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican, and Gov. Jerry Brown, a Democrat, demonstrating that dysfunction here in the Golden State has become bipartisan--while California has been doing all it could to drive business and enterprising citizens out of the state, Texas has welcomed business, keeping taxes low, imposing a relatively light and more or less sensible regulatory regime, and--this is Perry's personal accomplishment--enacting a tort reform that seems to have ended frivolous lawsuits against business.  Of the jobs created in this country in the last few years, according to some estimates, the majority have been created in one state, the Lone Star State.

Pretty clearly, Texas is now deep into a virtuous cycle:  Conservative policies have created jobs and wealth--and a hunger for more such policies.  But how did the cycle get started?  Does it all go back to Sam Houston and the hardy, self-reliant Anglos who moved into the state when it was still part of Mexico, then declared independence?  Does it have something to do with the willingness of the business class to participate in politics?  Whereas here in California loads of businesspeople shun politics--one of the proudest boasts of the Silicon Valley entrepreneur is that he refuses to have anything to do with politics--in Texas, I've noticed, they seem to play a more active role, helping to choose, and fund, good candidates.

The history of the place, the current business culture--what?

I repeat, What makes Texas Texas?

I'd be happy to hear from anyone who thinks he has an insight to offer, but, needless to say, I extend a particular invitation to the denizens of the Lone Star State.  Honestly, I just can't figure it out.  Say on!

An email from Ricochet member Jo:

Hi Peter,
Recently Ricochet solicited questions from members and what a thrill when mine was mentioned in a podcast - "how many last questions does Peter ask per episode [of Uncommon Knowledge]?" It was meant in warmth and fun. I'd always assumed your last questions were a result of your curiosity and passion and every last question made me smile.
But now it appears you're not using this technique any longer. I'm sad. I hope you didn't change your methods because of me. Please, more last questions!!

My reply:

Dear Jo,

Your comment, to be honest, did get inside my head, in that Dumbo-do-you-really-believe-that-feather-enables-you-to-fly kind of way.  All of a sudden, I realized that in taping Uncommon Knowledge I quite often promise a guest three, four or five times in a row that this question really is the last question.  But in each the last couple of episodes, I was very careful to ask only one last question, making the last question the last.

Now I'll try to reverse myself, going back to my old ways, proffering not just one last question, but a plenitude.  I warn you, though, that it won't be any easy.  Was Dumbo able to regrasp the feather?

As I say, I'll do my best.  But if in the next few episodes you see me crashing to earth--I lack Dumbo's saving ears--you'll all know why.

For more than three years, members of the political class have wondered why some Americans disagree with President Barack Obama's policies. Surely, after all, the problem can't be in the policies themselves. If only Americans understood individual mandates and Keynesian economics, they would grasp the logic of Obama's views.

Earlier this week in Iowa, Obama finally spelled out what the political class has suspected all along. His critics are just poorly informed. Here is an excerpt from his speech with the key line in bold.

And when enough of you knock on enough doors and pick up enough phones, and talk to your friends or your neighbors and your coworkers -- and you're doing it respectfully and you're talking to folks who don't agree with you, you're talking to people who are good people, but maybe they don't have all the information -- when you make that happen, when you decide it’s time for change to happen, you know what, change happens.  Change comes to America. 

In the first round of the Egyptian presidential election, which took place last week, the two top vote getters were Ahmed Shafiq, Hosni Mubarak's last prime minister (pictured to the left), and the candidate of the Muslim Brotherhood, Mohammed Morsi (pictured on the right).  (Morsi, incidentally, is an engineer trained in the United States.  His experience of this country seems to have turned him against us.)

These two candidates, both of whom received very nearly 25 percent of the ballots, will now proceed to a second and final round of voting, which will take place on June 16 and 17.

Mubarak's last prime minister or the candidate of the Muslim Brotherhood.  What a miserable choice--or so I thought until reading Fouad Ajami's piece in today's Wall Street Journal.  Even if the Muslim Brotherhood elects its man, Fouad argues, there will be a limit to how much damage he can do:

In the vision of the Islamists, Egypt would be ruled by Shariah law and the secularists reined in. This cannot be sustained on Egyptian soil. Theocracies like Iran, or Saudi Arabia for that matter, rest on oil wealth, on the margin such wealth allows the rulers to mold the society. In Egypt, so dependent on foreign aid, remittances, the revenues of tourism and the kindness of strangers, a religious utopia would be undone.

Egypt may grow worse, in other words, but only by so much.

Well, that's some comfort, anyway.

In the latest edition of Radio Free Delingpole, I discuss with my old Oxford mucker Toby Young the bizarre disappointment that is yet another of our old Oxford muckers - British prime minister David Cameron. How could someone from the most brilliant Oxford generation in the university's entire near-1000-year history - and a notional conservative to boot - have made such a dreadful hash of running Britain, possibly eclipsing even his unlamented predecessor Gordon Brown in total ruddy awfulness?

As Toby and I show, before getting distracted by the much more interesting subject of Game Of Thrones, there is no easy answer to this. But since then an explanation has occurred to me - prompted by one of the readers on my Telegraph blog (H/T coming your way as soon as you remind me who you are). When you think about it the answer is obvious and has been staring us in the face all along: David Cameron is a Soviet double agent.

This will no doubt strike a chord with US readers - since it's highly likely that President Obama is a Soviet double agent too. The left's Manchurian Candidate, indeed. But enough of that depressing subject, I want to tell you more about my Cameron conspiracy theory.

Here is what we know, as admitted by Cameron last year on a visit to Russia:

In a speech at Moscow State University, the Prime Minister said: "I first came to Russia as a student on my gap year between school and university in 1985.

"I took the Trans-Siberian Railway from Nakhodka to Moscow and went on to the Black Sea coast.

"There, two Russians - speaking perfect English - turned up on a beach mostly used by foreigners.

"They took me out to lunch and dinner and asked me about life in England and what I thought about politics.

"When I got back I told my tutor at university and he asked me whether it was an interview.

"If it was, it seems I didn't get the job!"

All right, so the Soviet system is theoretically dead. But old loyalties die hard. And the clincher, for me, is what happened next.

In a joint press conference later, Mr Medvedev said: "I'm pretty sure that David would have been a very good KGB agent.

"But in this case he would never have become Prime Minister of the UK."

No, of course not Mr Medvedev. Perish the thought.

Manifestos ignite people into action. The best manifestos are so emotionally charged that their catalytic influence can endure for centuries. The Ten Commandments and the Declaration of Independence are good examples. As recently as fifty years ago, an emotional speech delivered from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial established a clear and compelling purpose for American Civil Rights. Today, MLK's I Have a Dream is arguably the most inspiring manifesto of the 20^th Century.

Though manifestos are best known for political movements, the ideals and intent of such potent texts can also move people to excel on behalf of the organizations that employ them. Apple is a very good example. Tim Cook stated the Apple Way six months before Steve Jobs passed away. Cook’s declaration left employees and investors believing that Apple could go on without Steve Jobs. Read it and you’ll understand why. Cook said,

We're on the face of the earth to make great products.
We're constantly focusing on innovating.
We believe we need to own and control the primary technologies behind the products that we make and participate only in markets where we can make a significant contribution.
We believe in saying no to thousands of projects so we can focus on the few that are meaningful to us.
We believe in deep collaboration and cross pollination in order to innovate in a way others cannot.
We don't settle for anything other than excellence in any group in the company, and we have the self-honesty to admit when we're wrong and the courage to change.
Regardless of who is in what job, those values are so embedded in this company that Apple will do extremely well.

Crafting a company manifesto is no easy task. For the statement to be effective it must:

1. State a Compelling Purpose. Apple’s purpose is all about existing to make awesome products and operating under deep emotional principles.

2. Capture Core Values. Apple’s manifesto is loaded with core values – admitting error, simplifying, collaborating, innovating, and demanding excellence.

3. Tell the Truth. Mission Statements are full of illusionary and distant visions. Great manifestos instantly strike the emotions when they are true.

4. Link Business Life to Personal Life. The Apple Manifesto does not touch on this. It likely doesn’t have to, because unlike most industries, tech life and home life is intertwined – certainly the case at Apple.

5. Be Inclusive. The manifesto must touch (and move) everybody. I don’t know if Disney, Nike, Cirque du Soleil, or the New England Patriots have a manifesto. But they sure as hell act like they do.

6. Differentiate. There is nothing more powerful than differentiation in a competitive arena. That goes for business and sports. Even war.

Unlike the stereotypical corporate mission or the vision statement, a manifesto tells everyone who you are, what you believe in and why you are prepared to invest yourself in the cause. As for a simple manifesto on this thing we call life, I suggest you take a moment to breathe it all in and love it all out.

The above image comes courtesy of Kal Barteski http://www.kalbarteski.com/

My recent book, Taming Globalization, argues that globalization presents profound  challenges to the American constitutional order because it gives rise to international law and institutions that demand the transfer of sovereignty in response. Ted Carpenter of the CATO Institute posted a  review at Liberty Fund's new website, here.

While generally favorable, Carpenter criticizes the book for its slight mention of the Bricker Amendment and for being too favorable toward presidential interpretation of treaties and international law (as opposed to the courts).

My reply is here.

I think  Ricochet readers will find interesting both disagreements, but in particular the Bricker Amendment, which was an effort to amend the Constitution to prevent treaties from having any legal effect within the United States.  It failed by only one vote in the Senate.  Although Bricker was from the Midwest, I argue that the Amendment was an effort by Southern senators (led by Lyndon Johnson, among others) to prevent human rights treaties from undermining segregation.

The writer and literary scholar Jonathan Gottschall has a new book out called The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human. Like other books in the pop-science field--David Brooks' The Social Animal and Robert Wright's The Moral Animal come to mind--this work is the latest in an effort to understand some facet of the human condition that seems distinctively human, and to explain it in evolutionary terms by drawing on neuroscience and Darwin.

Gottschall has made his career thinking about these issues. In 2005, he edited a volume of essays called The Literary Animal: Evolution and the Nature of Narrative (with a foreword by E. O. Wilson) and in 2008 he wrote The Rape of Troy: Evolution, Violence and the World of Homer. 

The evolutionary origins of stories is a theme in his latest book as well. From the cave paintings at Lascaux to the horror stories of Stephen King to our table talk at dinner, telling stories is something that is an innate part of the human experience:

Flip through the sacred scriptures of any society in the history of the world, and you will be flipping through an anthology of stories.  Religion is the ultimate expression of story’s dominion over our minds.  The heroes of sacred fiction swarm through the real world, exerting astonishing influence over life on earth.

In the preface to his new book, Gottschall writes:

Tens of thousands of years ago, when the human mind was young and our numbers were few, we were telling one another stories. And now, tens of thousands of years later, when our species teems across the globe, most of us still hew strongly to myths about the origins of things, and we still thrill to an astonishing multitude of fictions on pages, on stages, and on screens--murder stories, sex stories, war stories, conspiracy stories, true stories and false. We are, as a species, addicted to story. Even when the body goes to sleep, the mind stays up at night, telling itself stories.

This book is about the primate Homo Fictus (fiction man), the great ape with the storytelling mind.

The question that The Storytelling Animal asks is this: Is telling stories so innate that it is literally hard-wired into our brains? Can science explain why human beings tell stories? Gottschall argues that it can.

We all have a set of left hemisphere brain circuits that force story structure onto the chaos of our lives.  When these circuits run amok we get schizophrenia, wild conspiracy theories and, sometimes, immortal works of poetry and fiction.

With that question answered (though perhaps not finally settled), he moves on to another one: Do stories make us more moral? He claims that “The only way to find out is to do the science,” and concludes, predictably, that the science confirms his hypothesis (although he does acknowledge, perhaps unwittingly, that maybe, just maybe, there's more to it than that: This book, he writes, is "about the deep mysteriousness of story. Why are humans addicted to Neverland?")

But the New Yorker's Adam Gopnik is not convinced. Gopnik picks apart Gottschall's argument:

Do entertaining stories make us more ethical? “The only way to find out is to do the science,” Gottschall says, reasonably enough, and then announces that “the constant firing of our neurons in response to fictional stimuli strengthens and refines the neural pathways that lead to skillful navigation of life’s problems” and that the studies show that therefore people who read a lot of novels have better social and empathetic abilities, are more skillful navigators, than those who don’t. He insists that storytelling is adaptive, on strictly Darwinian terms, but surely this would only have meaning if he could show that there were human-like groups who failed to compete because they didn’t trade tales—or even that tribes who told lots of stories did better than tribes that didn’t. Are societies, like that of Europe now, which has mostly rejected religious storytellers, less prosperous and peaceful than ones, like Europe back when, that didn’t? Would a human-like society that had lots of food and sex but no stories die out? When has this happened? (It’s true that there are those who think that the “symbolic” revolution among our sort of people doomed the Neanderthals, but this is, to put it mildly, a very speculative story, more “Star Trek” than “Mr. Wizard.”)

And if these claims seem almost too large to argue, the more central claim—that stories increase our empathy, and “make societies work better by encouraging us to behave ethically”—seems too absurd even to argue with. Surely if there were any truth in the notion that reading fiction greatly increased our capacity for empathy then college English departments, which have by far the densest concentration of fiction readers in human history, would be legendary for their absence of back-stabbing, competitive ill-will, factional rage, and egocentric self-promoters; they’d be the one place where disputes are most often quickly and amiably resolved by mutual empathetic engagement. It is rare to see a thesis actually falsified as it is being articulated.

I think Gopnik is missing the point. First of all, college English departments hardly read stories anymore. They read literary theory. To the extent that they do read stories--like, say, Hamlet--it's through the dark veil of theory (i.e. was Hamlet gay?). Second, stories, by definition, make us more empathetic. They have to. The dictionary defines empathy as "the intellectual identification with or vicarious experiencing of the feelings, thoughts, or attitudes of another." This is exactly what a story does: It takes us inside another person's world and help us understand how that person is feeling and why they react to certain dramatic events in the way that they do or why the take action to achieve a certain goal.

Empathy makes us more moral, then, by helping us identify and consider another person. As Gottschall writes, "Contrary to the claims of moralist and literary critics, most successful fiction—from folk tales to novels to TV dramas—is conventionally ethical. Far from degrading a culture’s moral fabric, fiction pulls us together around common values."

This just in from our beloved Dave Carter, who wanted me to know why he probably wouldn't be posting for a couple of days.  Dave, always thinking of Ricochet--even under duress.

Dear Peter,

Well, the bad news is that I'm in the hospital again with another kidney stone....

The good news that my nurse is interested in joining Ricochet.  He's a very conservative gentleman, and anxious to learn more about Ricochet, which I am happy to help grow, one stone at a time.

Pass the pain meds,

Dave

Spare a prayer for Dave.  He may remain the very picture of good cheer, but this hurts.

Administrative law has long been understood to be a law unto itself. Charged with the interpretation of complex statutes, the Supreme Court has taken a consistently deferential position toward agency interpretations of the statutes that they administer.

Nowhere was that more evident than in the case of Astrue v. Capato, decided earlier this week, where the question was whether IVF twins, conceived after their father died of esophageal cancer, could claim survivor benefits under the Social Security law.

The catch in the case was that the decedent’s will did not mention these posthumous children, so that the question of whether they counted as his children turned on Florida inheritance law. Michael Astrue, the Social Security Commissioner, decided to play hardball on the issue, and the Supreme Court--after an extended, mind-numbing exegesis of the word “child” under the Social Security law--held that his interpretation was correct, or at least correct enough to command the respect of the Court.

When I think about the problems of potential abuse in the administration of the Social Security system, this one does not rank in the top one million. No one has the slightest desire to heap indignity and deprivation on top of family charity. Yet the United States Supreme Court proved that, when it comes to administrative law, it does not have a heart, and it does not care about the personal issues involved in the case. That is, oddly enough, the correct attitude to take on legal matters.

But the same cannot be said for the Social Security Commission, which should have looked elsewhere to close down its own yawning deficit. One only hopes that Congress will pass a bit of ad hoc, retroactive legislation that says in this case, and all others like it, these children conceived after the death of their father should receive their benefits, regardless of the state laws of inheritance, which should be amended to cover the case in any event. If there were ever a case for big government this is it, so let’s hope that Congress can open this one purse string a little wider.

Another Saturday night special edition of The Hinderaker-Ward Experience is ready for your listening pleasure.  It’s John Hinderaker of Power Line and Brian Ward of Fraters Libertas breaking down the big stories of the week.  These include President Obama’s straight-faced claims of leading the most fiscally responsible administration in the last 60 years and Obama’s perhaps not unrelated difficulties in cracking 60% of the vote running against convicted felons and “none of the above” in Democratic primaries around the country.

Special guest this week is New York Times best selling author Edward Klein.  His latest book is THE hot buzz story on the Internet this week, it’s The Amateur: Barack Obama in the White House.   Via hundreds of personal interviews with political and Obama insiders Ed provides previously undocumented details on the President’s background and performance in office over his first term.   Lots of juicy tidbits as well, including Bill Clinton’s real opinion of Obama, Valerie Jarrett’s undue influence in the White House, and the acrimonious rivalry between Michelle Obama and Oprah Winfrey.

Later, Loon of the Week (top Democrat official claims of unnatural relations between Romney and a corporate entity) and This Week in Gate Keeping (how changing one word can REALLY affect the accuracy of a story).

We hope you enjoy, and comments and feedback are always most welcome.

In the Ukrainian parliament yesterday, there was a fight over the use of the Russian language.  And when I say "fight," I mean fight:

If only they had fought like this over here when Obamacare was enacted.

(I'm only 70% kidding about that, by the way....)

It's impossible, after the taxpayer-backstopped interventions into the financial markets in 2008 and 2009, to read this story without getting just a little bit cranky.

JP Morgan, the giant -- and mismanaged -- investment bank, reported a $2 billion loss a week or so ago, because of risky trades in one of its own accounts.  An account, hilariously, that was designed to be a hedge against other, riskier, accounts.

Who was in charge of risk management for the bank?  From Bloomberg:

The three directors who oversee risk at JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM) include a museum head who sat on American International Group Inc.’s governance committee in 2008, the grandson of a billionaire and the chief executive officer of a company that makes flight controls and work boots.

What the risk committee of the biggest U.S. lender lacks, and what the five next largest competitors have, are directors who worked at a bank or as financial risk managers. The only member with any Wall Street experience, James Crown, hasn’t been employed in the industry for more than 25 years.

Okay, stipulated: JP Morgan is a publicly-traded company.  If the shareholders want to get rid of the incompetents who manage the bank, they should move to do so.  None of my business.  (Well, actually, it's some of my business: I own some JP Morgan shares....)

But let's all remember this episode the next time the banks come, hat in hand, for taxpayer-subsidized bailouts.

I've said it before in this space, but it bears repeating: the only -- only -- banking regulation that's effective is the sight of bankers selling apples on the street.

Next time, let them sink.

Had the revelations about young Barry's recreational drug habits surfaced four years ago, maybe they wouldn't have mattered.  To be sure, those details wouldn't have hurt his popularity in stoner cities like Santa Cruz, Berkeley, or San Francisco.  But it's still uncanny that it all went unremarked upon in 2008. 

Mollie already highlighted Obama's old habit of "snagging joints from his buddies’ hands and shouting ‘Intercepted!’ before taking an extra hit," but BuzzFeed has published the complete User's Guide to Smoking Pot with Barack Obama based on excerpts from David Maraniss' new book.  I wonder when we'll see the President interviewed about his activity in the "Choom Gang" (choom is a verb that means "to smoke marijuna").  Specifically, I'd like to hear him tell us about his trendsetting ways:

As a member of the Choom Gang, Barry Obama was known for starting a few pot-smoking trends. The first was called "TA," short for "total absorption." To place this in the physical and political context of another young man who would grow up to be president, TA was the antithesis of Bill Clinton's claim that as a Rhodes scholar at Oxford he smoked dope but never inhaled.

Take a look at the Guide.  Maybe it'll provide inspiration for a conversation to have with your children about drugs.

From the Economist, describing a recent study by a psychologist at the University of California at Riverside:

Parents claimed more positive emotions and more meaning in their lives than non-parents, and a closer look revealed that it was fathers who most enjoyed these benefits. Moreover, further analysis revealed that this enhanced enjoyment came from activities which involved children rather than those (such as watching television alone, or cooking) that did not.

It looks, then, as if evolution has bolted into men a psychological mechanism to keep them in the family. At first sight, it is strange that women do not share this mechanism, but perhaps they do not need to. They know, after all, that the children are theirs, whereas the best a man can do is hope that is true.

The assertion that fathers are happier strikes me as entirely understandable.  (Just to run a little personal experiment, I stopped and thought for a moment just now about my happiest moment over the last few days.  Easy.  Watching my 15-year old at bat in a Babe Ruth game this past Saturday morning.  He quickly got into a hole, 0-2.  Then he took a deep breath, and with a sense of calm that struck me as almost preternatural, stared the pitcher down.  Four pitches later, he was walking to first.)  Come to think of it, "happier" isn't quite the right word--nor is it the word that seems to have been used in the study.  Children bring all kinds of worries--and, often enough, if temporarily, unhappiness.  What they provide unfailingly, though--at least in my experience--is a sense of meaningfulness.

But the second finding?  That mothers report no more positive emotions than non-mothers?  This runs so entirely counter to all that I myself have observed--my nephew's wife just gave birth to their second child, and there it was, in all the hospital photos on Facebook, that look in his wife's face that she had just done something that made her feel a kind of cosmic contentedness--that I find it utterly baffling.

Ricoteeers?

A few days ago I had the opportunity to hear Alan Murray of the Wall Street Journal interview Fred Smith, the founder of FedEx.  Murray is an exceptionally skilled interviewer, and every sentence he elicited from Smith proved fascinating--if you want to know what's going on in the world, ask a man whose company flies thousands of planes to hundreds of cities every day--but looking over my notes just now I found that Smith kept coming back to the importance of increasing domestic oil production.

In 2001, he said, the typical American family of four spent $1,500 a year on gasoline.  Last year that figure had risen to $4,000.  "What we've witnessed," Smith said, "is the largest transfer of wealth [a transfer from the West to the oil-producing nations] in the history of the world."

"If the U.S. gets any significant economic growth," Smith said, "you can count on the price of oil being raised to extract a large share of the value."

"The oil producers would do that intentionally?" Murray asked.

"Of course," Smith replied.  "There are a lot of smart people in Riyadh."

Since oil represents a globally-traded commodity, Smith noted, increasing production here in the United States wouldn't affect the price.  But instead of transferring them to oil-producing nations, he insisted, we should "keep all those dollars bouncing around the fifty states."

Smith lost his father when he was just four, grew up in small-town Mississippi, attended Yale before serving two tours of duty in Vietnam with the Marine Corps, and then founded and built one of the greatest companies in American business history.  If Mitt Romney is still pulling together his vice presidential prospects, he could do a lot worse than to add Smith to the list.

Gallup came out with its annual poll on whether people identify as pro-life or pro-choice:

PRINCETON, NJ -- The 41% of Americans who now identify themselves as "pro-choice" is down from 47% last July and is one percentage point below the previous record low in Gallup trends, recorded in May 2009. Fifty percent now call themselves "pro-life," one point shy of the record high, also from May 2009.

The poll has always shown some volatility, although it's worth noting that the first data points from 1996 are 56% pro-choice and 33% pro-life, so the trend line is impossible to ignore.

I'm curious why we're seeing such a dip in people willing to identify themselves as pro-choice.

The president is the most supportive of abortion rights we've ever seen. The Secretary of Health and Human Services has declared a "war" on those who don't support abortion on demand. And the media are so in bed with Planned Parenthood that we saw their greatest supporters thanking each other for their work defaming the Susan G. Komen foundation when it dared try to avoid funding the country's largest abortion provider.

So why do these polls suggest that people are moving away from the pro-choice label when all the cool kids are embracing it?

I remember when I was younger, and identifying as pro-life, that some of my more liberal teachers explained to me that this was a settled issue and that I was the wrong side of history. It's a cliche of progressive thinkers that history always moves in one direction. But anyone who has studied life issues knows that a widespread embrace of eugenics, for instance, is not as loved as it once was by the Nazis and other political leaders in the West. Are we seeing the same turning away from abortion culture? And, if so, why?

At White House Dossier earlier this week, reporter Keith Koffler speculated (tongue seemingly half in cheek) about the possibility of President Obama moving Vice President Biden to the Supreme Court to open up the bottom of the Democratic Party's presidential ticket.

Putting Biden on the Court is just a plot by the comedy writers union to keep themselves in business long after the Obama administration has left the stage. Not only would it keep everyone's favorite gaffe artist around, but it would give Biden a regular speaking opportunity every month during oral argument, where he would have a captive audience of at least two oral advocates. One must pity the counsel who would have to listen to Biden's speeches -- I mean, answer his questions--from the bench. And imagine the possibilities: Biden not just on gay marriage, but on physician-assisted suicide, religious groups in school, abortion, GPS tracking.

But the serious point is that it might not be so bad to have someone other than a judge on the Court.  Agree with their decisions or not, but the two greatest Chief Justices in Supreme Court history -- John Marshall and Earl Warren -- were not lower court judges. Experienced judges bring a particular viewpoint to the job, one that lawyers will generally applaud since they all come from the same culture and have the same training and professional values.  But it may not be the best view (or at least one that should be exclusive) on a Court that is becoming increasingly embroiled in political issues.

Find some way, and soon, of having the candidate quote Calvin Coolidge--yes, Calvin Coolidge.

From Coolidge's magnificent "Speech on the Occasion of the One Hundred and Fiftieth Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence":

We live in an age of science and of abounding accumulation of material things. These did not create our Declaration. Our Declaration created them. The things of the spirit come first. Unless we cling to that, all our material prosperity, overwhelming though it may appear, will turn to a barren sceptre in our grasp. If we are to maintain the great heritage which has been bequeathed to us, we must be like-minded as the fathers who created it. We must not sink into a pagan materialism. We must cultivate the reverence which they had for the things that are holy. We must follow the spiritual and moral leadership which they showed. We must keep replenished, that they may glow with a more compelling flame, the altar fires before which they worshiped.

Principled, passionate, and informed by a deep knowledge of American history.  Traits, in other words, with which Gov. Romney would do well to associate himself.  Come to think of it, why not schedule a Romney speech in honor of the Declaration of Independence for this coming Fourth of July?

(A tip of the hat to our own Ben Domenech, who reminded me of the Coolidge passage by using it to conclude an issue this week of his daily roundup of news and politics, "The Transom.")

From time to time, we suddenly look up from our computers and think, "Hey!  Ricochet has a lot of new members."

So from all of us, Welcome!  If you've got a moment and are so inclined, introduce yourself below.

Jump right in.  There's lots to talk about.

Phil Klein, whose thinking is referenced by Ben Domenech below, is in all likelihood right. Mitt Romney is no more a socialist than Bloomberg. But he has never been a conservative, and in the past -- before he moved to the national stage -- he distanced himself as much as possible from conservatives and even from the Republican Party. In the 1990s, when he was the Republican nominee for the Senate in Massachusetts, he insisted that he was not the same kind of Republican as Ronald Reagan. A decade later, he insisted that he was "a progressive" in his views and that he should be thought of as "a reformer" and not as a Republican. His record in office as Governor of Massachusetts -- with regard to Romneycare and global warming, for example -- is consistent with this. He deserves our support in the upcoming election but he has not earned and should not be accorded our trust.

That having been said, I would not rule out the possibility that Romney will as President earn that trust. Circumstances -- and I have in mind the grave fiscal crisis threatening the administrative entitlements state -- may persuade him to rethink. He is a man of goodwill and evident integrity. Moreover, he knows a failing enterprise when he sees it; he recognizes the limits of the state's capacity to extract revenue from those who actually work; he has seen the threat that the administrative entitlements state poses to religious and political liberty. If he is in any way intellectually agile, he will by now have realized that the path he was on as Governor in Massachusetts is unsustainable and that, when pursued at the federal level,  it will concentrate power and influence in the hands of the federal government on a scale inconsistent with our retention of the liberties we have enjoyed for more than two hundred years.

I realize that there is something to the adage: "You cannot teach an old dog new tricks." At my previous university, I watched one new president after another arrive on the scene, and I learned that, if I really wanted to know what he would do, all that I had to do was to call someone who worked at the institution he had most recently served. But I persist in entertaining the possibility that some old dogs do learn new tricks. At Bain Capital, Romney got a reputation as a chameleon. He took on the coloration, so to speak, of the institution he was trying to turn around. He adopted its culture; he joined its team.

Romney's flexibility is, needless to say, worrisome. But it offers hope as well.

The Washington Examiner's Phil Klein, one of the best journalists on the right, makes the case in his new book that conservatives will need to have a very different relationship with a Mitt Romney White House than they did with President Bush (or rather, than they did with Bush until Harriet Miers).

In his book, Klein writes:

“There’s always some argument partisans will make to discourage conservatives from criticizing Republicans. In the coming months, those of us who criticize Romney from the right will be told we should save it until after November, or else we’re just helping Obama. When we do so after the election – should he win – we’ll be told he deserves a honeymoon period and needs to rack up a few accomplishments first before moving to items on the conservative agenda. Eventually, it will be that we can’t weaken him before the midterm elections, and then later, that we have to loudly support him, or else he’ll lose reelection to an even worse liberal boogeyman (or boogeywoman) in 2016.”

You can purchase it here. It's just $2.99 and well worth the price.

From Politico's Playbook this morning:

[David] Maraniss’s Obama is sympathetic, and in contrast to his exotic background, he emerges as a normal, well-adjusted guy. At Occidental, ‘Barry’’s Mick Jagger impression was legendary, and as a teen at Honolulu’s Punahou School, he was known for snagging joints from his buddies’ hands and shouting ‘Intercepted!’ before taking an extra hit. Halfway through the book, Maraniss describes a day when a high-school teacher asked Obama what people should most fear. ‘Words,’ uttered the boy who would be known for his stirring speeches. ‘Words … can be weapons of destruction.’

The following appeared in the DC Examiner earlier this week:

House members are dumbing down their speeches, or they are just getting dumber themselves.

That's a conclusion suggested in a new analysis by the Sunlight Foundation, which used an interesting website called Capitolwords.org to analyze the most popular words lawmakers utter on the Senate and House floor every day.

According to Sunlight, Congress speaks nearly a grade level lower than lawmakers did in 2005. Sunlight concluded that Congress speaks at the level of a mid-year high school sophomore. Back in 2005, lawmakers were speechifying like high school juniors

...

The report also calculates that the nation's most historical documents are far, far more sophisticated than any recent floor speech.

The U.S. Constitution, for instance, written at a 17.8 grade level, the Federalist Papers at a 17.1 grade level, and the Declaration of Independence at a 15.1 grade level.

But President Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address comes at an 11.2 grade level and Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech is at a 9.4 grade level.

First, a word in defense of our inarticulate elected officials. It's apples and oranges to compare speeches with written documents such as the Federalist Papers or the Declaration (the Constitution is an even worse example, since its primary function is as a legal document). And based on the Sunlight Foundation's research, it looks like they're still lapping the public at large:

Lawmakers of both parties still speak over the heads of the average American, who reads at between at 8^th and 9^th grade level.

That's a statistic that will come to mind every time that proposals for expanding voter participation (a topic we've touched on recently) come up.

It seems to me incontrovertible that over the history of our nation we've increasingly valued the democratic over the republican. We've instituted the direct election of senators, made the Electoral College essentially a bizarre quasi-ratification of the popular vote, and in places like California we're approximately 18 months away from deciding that the best method for determining the proper way to cook a roast is to put it to a popular referendum. In essence, we've done everything we can to promote the demotic in American life. The result: elected officials that share the idiom of people who pre-purchase tickets for the "Twilight" movies. Let me go on record now as saying that any public policy that arrests that downward spiral is fine by me.

By the way, one bit of fun for your Friday: Sunlight also has a page showing which SAT words are used most in congressional chambers and which members employ them the most often. An examination of the list shows that Patrick Leahy is the legislator most prone to using the word "asylum." Seems to me that there's some poetry in that fact.

If you accept the premise that partisanship, political polarization, and gridlock are all bad things —and count me among those who, like Jeffrey Bell, don't accept that particular premise—what solutions might you propose to curb political extremism?

In an op-ed in the Washington Post today adapted from their recent book, It's Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided with the New Politics of Extremism, Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein list a few ideas that they argue won't do a thing to remedy the political dysfunction in Washington (which, by the way, they blame entirely on Republicans).  And then they enumerate a few solutions that they think will, in fact, work.  Among these proposed solutions:

Expand the electorate

Consider the Australian system of mandatory attendance at the polls, where not showing up results in a fine of $15 or so. This modest penalty has spurred participation of more than 90 percent since the 1925 reform. Australian politicians can count on their bases turning out, so they focus on persuadable voters in the middle. Instead of campaigning on marginal wedge issues, they talk about the economy, jobs, education — and they seek to attract a majority from the entire citizenry.

In the United States, such near-universal voting could eliminate the parties’ incentive to diminish the turnout of their opponents’ supporters and to mobilize the ideological extremes. Boosting overall turnout would help tilt the balance back toward where most Americans actually are: closer to the middle of the playing field.

Other promising avenues to expand the electorate include automating the registration process (so voters can register online and carry their documentation with them when they move from one state to another) and to open up the primaries, as California has done, to all voters. Over time, open primaries could produce more moderate elected officials.

Finally, if we can’t persuade more Americans to vote with the threat of a fine, how about the promise of untold riches? Millions lined up — sometimes wasting all night — for a shot at the Mega Millions lottery in March. How about another lottery, where your vote stub is a ticket, and where the prize is the money collected from the fines of those who didn’t vote? The odds of the mega-jackpot were about 1 in 176 million — we’d like to believe that the chances of fixing American politics are a bit better than that.

A mandate to vote in political elections is to me an idea so viscerally distasteful that it's hard to know where to begin except to reaffirm that basic American precept that holds that ordinary individuals have the capacity and responsibility to make their own decisions.  This may include a decision not to vote, for any number of reasons —whether due to the self-awareness that the individual is not well enough informed, or because the individual does not approve of any of his options on the ballot, or something else.

The right not to vote aside, it seems as though far too many people vote without taking the time to inform themselves about the issues at hand.  You can expand the electorate with carrots and sticks, but you cannot so easily expand the informed electorate.