The summer before last, I posted a series of pieces on www.biggovernment.com, exploring the nature of executive temperament and Barack Obama’s lack thereof; examining the virtues of Bobby Jindal, Chris Christie, and Mitch Daniels in this particular; and, finally, suggesting that executive temperament is not enough: that, in the absence of a firm embrace of first principles, it is positively dangerous.

When, in The Federalist, Alexander Hamilton observed that "energy in the executive is a leading character in the definition of good government,” I remarked, he quite rightly used the indefinite, as opposed to the definite, article. “What Hamilton had in mind,” I explained,

when he insisted on the necessity that the new nation be endowed with an energetic executive is the fact that a government in which the laws are not vigorously executed and in which emergencies are not confronted and handled with decision and dispatch is hardly a government at all. He knew that wisdom, prudence, and moderation are also required for a government to be good, and he recognized as well that the ends and sphere proper to government are limited. He was no less committed to the principles of the Declaration of Independence than was the man who had drafted it.

Hamilton was also aware that Julius Caesar and Oliver Cromwell had been energetic executives, and to their number we can now add such luminaries as Napoleon Bonaparte, Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, Mao Tse-Tung, Fidel Castro, and Pol Pot. The executive temperament necessary for good government is not, alas, sufficient to guarantee its achievement.

If, as I argued in mid-June, it is now abundantly clear that Barack Obama lacks the temperament requisite in an executive, if, as I contended, he is inclined to shirk responsibility, shift the blame, dither, and punt, his administration is beyond question a government insufficient for our needs. This does not mean, however, that – merely by demonstrating energy, vigor, and dispatch in shouldering the responsibilities of executive office – Bobby Jindal of Lousiana, Chris Christie of New Jersey, Mitch Daniels of Indiana, Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota, Mitt Romney of Massachusetts, Jeb Bush of Florida, Haley Barbour of Mississippi, or any of the other potential presidential aspirants in the Republican Party who have been effective governors has demonstrated that he possesses all of the qualities called for in the grave crisis we now face.

All of the individuals I have named are impressive – as are, for example, Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee. The moment has not yet arrived, however, for a thorough assessment of the qualities and outlook of each. There will be plenty of time for sorting through the candidates after the midterm elections.

At this point, however, it is proper that I reiterate the conclusion that I argued for in a series of posts – here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here – in the course of the last year: to wit, that we live in a time of grave danger and of unprecedented opportunity; that, by means of his healthcare reform and the other measures he has pursued, Barack Obama has both threatened what is left of our liberty and offered us the chance to recover it in full; that, by exposing the tyrannical character of the liberal, progressive project and by outing nearly all of his fellow Democrats, he has opened up for us the possibility of a return to first principles; and that, with the proper leadership and focus, we really can effect a realignment, roll back the administrative state, and escape what, with a nod to Alexis de Tocqueville, I called, in my recent book, soft despotism.

It is also now requisite that I say something about the other attributes, apart from executive temperament, that will be required if we are to wrest ourselves from modern democracy’s soft despotic drift.

Here is what is needed and what is likely to be sorely lacking in some, if not most, of the Republican presidential aspirants: an adequate understanding of the underpinnings of American republicanism, a firm and principled commitment to limited government, and a determination to put the limits back in place.

Most of the Republicans elected to the Presidency in the last century have been what I call “business” or “managerial progressives.” I do not doubt that Herbert Hoover, Richard Nixon, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush were preferable to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Lyndon Baines Johnson, William Jefferson Clinton, and Barack Obama. But there is no indication that any of them understood what was at stake. They differed from their Democratic opponents in being considerably more favorable to business and the free market and considerably more hostile to tax increases, but – if there was no obvious economic price – they, too, welcomed government intrusiveness whenever they thought that encroaching upon our prerogatives or those of the state and local governments was necessary if they were to do us what they took to be good.

Here lies the danger. What is needed is a repeal of Obamacare; what is needed is a paring back and even a gradual elimination of the welfare state; what is needed is a constitutional amendment banning unfunded and partially-funded  mandates; what is needed is a withdrawal of the federal government from spheres (such as education) left by the Constitution to individuals and the states; what is needed is a reinvigoration of local and state governments; what is need is a new spirit in Washington.

What we are likely to get, however, if we do not watch out, is more of the same.

I can easily imagine a Republican President thinking that what is really needed is what FDR called “enlightened administration.” I can easily imagine the Republicans thinking that Obamacare would be just fine if they were in charge. That is the spirit that guided Hoover, Nixon, Bush père, and Bush fils, and I fear that most of the men with gubernatorial experience whom I mentioned above would fit right in with these former Presidents. If our primary problem were Obama’s incompetence, that would be fine. Unfortunately, our problems go deeper – and if the Republicans muff the golden opportunity now in the offing, the game may be up.

I quote this argument at length because it articulates the presumptions underlying my assessment of the various aspirants, real or imagined, to the Republican presidential nomination. It explains why, writing later on Ricochet, I encouraged Governor Daniels to enter the race and criticized a number of his stands and why, when he chose not to run, I expressed misgivings about the likelihood that Mitt Romney would be the nominee and pulled out all stops to get Congressman Paul Ryan to run. In my judgment, Daniels is a proven executive with a spectacular record who had a first-hand knowledge of the federal budget; Governor Romney is not only a political chameleon, but also managerial progressive who does not understand, much less respect, the proper limits to the government’s reach; and Ryan, though he has never held executive office, has displayed executive temperament in boldly proposing legislation aimed at staving off the immediate fiscal and economic crisis we face and at moving carefully and prudently in the direction of paring back the administrative entitlements state, and in rallying the members of his party in the House of Representatives behind that legislation. He has, moreover, stood up to and outdebated the current President of the United States.

But, of course, Governor Daniels chose not to run, and Congressman Ryan followed suit. So, in later posts, I tried to separate the clowns from the contenders and took a look at Michele Bachman, Rick Perry, and Herman Cain – all of whom I eventually found grievously wanting. I touched on Newt Gingrich here, for example, and here but was dismissive:

His intelligence cannot be doubted. But his personal life cannot be defended, and he is a loose cannon – apt to line up with the likes of Nancy Pelosi on a fashionable issue like global warming. More to the point, he is a managerial progressive. Like Herbert Hoover, Richard Nixon, and both Bush père and Bush fils, he is always on the outlook for something additional that the federal government can do. He is in no position to articulate the case for limited government.

I thought the former Speaker of the House a dinosaur whose day was done. It never crossed my mind that he would become a contender, and I was not alone. Apparently, the Obama campaign has done not a whit of opposition research on Gingrich because those involved were as dismissive as I was. What we forgot was that in the world of the blind the one-eyed man is king.

The reasons for Newt Gingrich’s rise are fairly simple. For reasons that I have spelled out earlier, Michele Bachmann, Rick Santorum, and Ron Paul have no business being in the race, and, thanks to the debates, everyone now knows it. Rick Perry, who has an impressive record as Governor of Texas, blotted his copybook in the first few debates in such a way as to make one doubt whether he is or ever will be sufficiently well-informed about things outside Texas. Most prospective Republican voters share my misgivings about Romney, and Gingrich has demonstrated that he has a mastery of the requisite detail. Moreover, in the debates, he has treated his rivals with respect; he has repeatedly unmasked the buffoons asking questions as buffoons; he has stayed within the time allotted; he has hammered Obama; and he has frequently said things that cause one to stop and think. Where he has gone astray in the past – briefly embracing the individual mandate in 1993 and 1994, lining up with Nancy Pelosi on global warming, and breaking his wedding vows, etc.– he acknowledges folly and fault. It is refreshing to hear a Presidential candidate describe a stance he has taken in the past as positively stupid. The new Newt is not a loose cannon. He is neither conceited nor arrogant. He evidences a certain irony about himself and his conduct in the past. Or so, at least, it seems.

We need also consider Gingrich’s accomplishments in the past. He was born in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania; attended Emory University as an undergraduate; and did an M. A. and a Ph.D. in history at Tulane before taking up a teaching post at West Georgia College. He ran for Congress a couple of times in Georgia’s Sixth District against an entrenched incumbent who usually faced no opposition. He lost by a small margin on both occasions and then won in November, 1978. He held the seat through ten more elections and resigned in January, 1999. At least at that level, Gingrich is a seasoned campaigner.

More to the point, in 1981, in Congress, Gingrich was not, like most Republicans, content with being a member of the minority. He founded the Congressional Military Reform Caucus and the Congressional Aviation and Space Caucus; in 1983, he co-founded the Conservative Opportunity Society – much to the delight of Ronald Reagan. And in 1988, citing ethics violations, he spearheaded a successful effort to topple Democratic Speaker of the House Jim Wright. A year later, he became Minority Whip and initiated an effort to make the Republican Party what he called “a much more aggressive, activist party.” In 1994, he helped draft the Contract with America , persuaded his fellow Republicans in the House to sign on, nationalized the election, and led them to a victory in the midterm elections in which they gained fifty-four seats and secured control of the House of Representatives for the first time in forty years. Even this observation understates Gingrich’s achievement. For, in the sixty-four years following the stock market crash of 1929, the Republicans won the House twice – in 1946 and in 1952. On both occasions, they lost control two years thereafter. In the aftermath of 1994, however, the Republicans held onto the House for twelve years. If Ronald Reagan began the Republican revolution in 1980, it was Newt Gingrich who solidified it.

For four years, Newt Gingrich served as Speaker of the House. In his first hundred days in office, he brought each of the ten items mentioned in the Contract with America to a vote in that chamber as promised. In 1996, on his third try, he managed to get President William Jefferson Clinton to agree to welfare reform. In 1997, he secured the passage of the largest capital gains tax cut in American history, and he persuaded President Clinton to sign it. In 1998 and 1999, he managed to get Clinton to cooperate with him in balancing the budget, which was achieved in the latter year.

Eventually, to be sure, Gingrich’s dominion came a-cropper. In his struggle to force President Clinton to go along with the Republican minority in cutting the federal budget, there was a partial government shutdown; the liberal press managed to pin the blame on Gingrich (though it was a direct consequence of vetoes by Clinton); and he became highly unpopular. In time, moreover, he was sanctioned by the House for ethics violations; and, in the summer of 1997, there was an abortive attempt on the part of John Boehner and others to oust him from the Speakership. Shortly after the Republicans lost ground in the 1998 midterm elections, which took place on the eve of President Clinton’s impeachment, Gingrich resigned from Congress. It had been a very wild ride. His hegemony was widely resented in his own party; and, when Dennis Hastert replaced him as Speaker, the Republicans turned away from reform and became an old-fashioned pork-barrel party on the Democratic model.

Gingrich can certainly be faulted – for arrogance, for vanity, for negligence with regard to the ethical rules supposed to govern the conduct of members of Congress, and for marital infidelity. As Speaker, he was not apt to seek or accept advice. One of his former Congressional allies told me a couple of months ago, “The trouble with Newt was that you never knew what he was going to do.” He was also erratic. In one speech, he could articulate the case for limited government from the perspective of the Founding Fathers. Three days later, you could hear him touting all that government could do. Consistency was not his watchword. He was and is in love with technology; he was and is always looking for technological fixes; and he has often displayed the instincts of the social engineer. Indeed, in his years out of office, he touted one piece of social engineering after another. But whatever else he may have been, Newt Gingrich instigated a revolution in our national affairs, and for one brief, glorious moment, he turned what had been a hapless, hopeless party of patronage into a party of principle. He was a budget-balancer, a friend to low taxes, and a critic of the welfare state; and he brought to the Republicans in the House a measure of discipline not seen before or after his brief reign.

Almost all of the pundits – major and minor – have weighed in against Newt Gingrich – David Brooks, George Will, Peggy Noonan, Charles Krauthammer, Ramesh Ponnuru, Jennifer Rubin, Ron Radosh , Yuval Levin (I could go on; the list is long and getting longer every day). He is, they say, conceited, arrogant, vain, erratic, vulnerable to attack in the general election, and likely on a whim to lead us over the cliff. I am inclined to take what they say seriously. Newt Gingrich is a wild card. The fact that his own staff gave up on him and resigned on the eve of this campaign is a sign that, his appearances in the debates notwithstanding, the new Newt is not all that different from the old. If I had to vote today on the Republican nomination, I would vote against Gingrich and for Romney – not because I think all that highly of Romney (for I do not) but because he is notably steadier than his rival.

I write these words. Then, I read them and want to take two steps back – for Newt Gingrich, as those who have watched the debates have generally noticed, is far more formidable than Mitt Romney.

The latter has won one election in his life, and he did not stand a chance for re-election. He is careful, steady, methodical, politically timid, and easy to rattle. Ted Kennedy did just that, and Barack Obama may well do it again. Moreover, Romney is brittle, as the Bret Baier interview revealed, and he does not adjust quickly and gracefully to changing circumstances. The jury was in on anthropogenic global warming by December, 2009, but, as late as June, 2011, Romney was still spouting the same old nonsense. It was as if no news was news for him until The New York Times ratified it.

It was evident long ago that a commitment to the individual mandate and Romneycare could cripple a Presidential campaign. But once Romney settled on federalism as a gimmick for arguing that we should ignore his signature achievement as Governor, he stuck rigidly to it. The man is politically tone deaf –as the graduating seniors at Hillsdale College learned in 2007 and the attendees at the National Review banquet learned not long thereafter. Like many engineers and technocrats, he is not adept at sizing up an audience and making the right pitch. In consequence, he sometimes comes across as a robot. He is the sort of politician who could snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. He did so in 1994 and 2008.

Gingrich is, as I said, formidable. He took a pathetic, me-too caucus lead by the hapless Robert Michel, and he turned it around. He cornered the President of the United States and for a time made him do his bidding. But, of course, he also crashed and burned – and we cannot ignore the possibility (some would say, likelihood) that he would do so again.

It could be, however, that the peculiar time in which we live requires audacity and a man of formidable intellect, unsurpassed self-confidence, and uneven, erratic temperament with an impressive record of uniting his party around a set of political principles and of leading it to victory in a tense, divisive national election. On Thursday, Steve Hayward posted a piece on National Review Online, comparing the general take on Newt Gingrich today with that on Winston Churchill in 1940 when he became Prime Minister. It is sobering and reminds us how easily we human beings can misjudge – and Ramesh Ponnuru’s response is lame. There really is something to think about here.

I am very glad that the hour is not late – that we have months in which to make up our minds and that there will be debate after debate, caucus after caucus, and primary after primary in which the candidates will be tested. In my judgment, none of them is even remotely close to being ideal, and no one currently in the race deserves our active support. In stating that -- if I had to decide today between the contenders Romney, Perry, and Gingrich, I would choose Romney -- I reserve the right to change my mind as I learn more about them. Changing my mind on occasion is, after all, the only real proof that I have one.

When I travel abroad, as I do with some frequency, I am nearly always asked who the nominee of one party or the other is likely to be. And when I have my wits about me, if we are not already deep into the primary season, I reply that nobody knows. Politics in most countries is far more predictable than it is in the United States. Who would have predicted in January, 1991 that William Jefferson Clinton would be elected President in November, 1992? Who would have predicted in March, 2007 that Barack Obama would be elected President in November, 2008? Who would have predicted that either would be their party’s nominee? In the United States, politics is a bit like grand opera. It ain't over until the fat lady sings.

I say this as a prelude to drawing your attention to a blogpost by Rhodes Cook on Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball entitled 2012 Republican Race: The Field May Not Be Closed.  It examines with very great care the unfolding logic of the Republican race – with considerable attention paid to the order in which the primaries take place and the filing deadlines. Cook’s contention is that -- if Mitt Romney stumbles, or if neither Newt Gingrich nor Rick Perry garners a commanding lead in the early primaries and caucuses -- another contender could enter the race as late as Valentine’s Day and win the nomination. This has Bill Kristol at The Weekly Standard excited, as well it might.

Count me a skeptic, but do not for a second suppose that I know what I am talking about. I thought that Rick Perry would be formidable. I never imagined that Herman Cain would emerge, even briefly, as a front-runner. I did not think that Newt Gingrich, given his record, had a chance. My mistake was that I failed to recognize just how great an impact the televised debates would have.

One of the reasons that one cannot predict what is going to happen in Presidential sweepstakes is that there is always a new wrinkle in the campaigns. Last time out, Mike Huckabee used e-mail lists to mount a low-cost campaign and win the Iowa Caucus. Last time out, Barack Obama outwitted Hillary Clinton and gamed the caucus states. Who knows? Rhodes Cook may be right that this time out the schedule of the Republican primaries and caucuses provides an opening for a late entry.

Read Cook’s piece. Judge for yourself. And let me know what you think. And if there were a late entry with the moxie to pull this off, who might it be? Jeb Bush? Paul Ryan? Marco Rubio? Mitch Daniels?

In a piece that he published this past Monday in The Washington Examiner, Michael Barone (who went to high school with Mitt Romney) related a conversation which he had with an individual who had worked at Bain Capital alongside the Presidential contender. When Barone asked what Romney was really like, his interlocutor responded, “"Which four or five of the Romneys do you mean?" Romney, as Barone explains, had a knack for adapting “his approach and manner to each company's particular culture.”

In the business world, this makes sense. To be successful when you shift from one corporate environment to another, as turn-around artists frequently do, you need to be a chameleon of sorts. You cannot afford to have a steadfast manner, much less firm principles. Your task is management, and you have to be willing to do whatever it takes to get the job done.

The same skills can be useful in politics. When Bill Clinton and Al Gore were running for office in Arkansas and Tennessee, they were anti-abortion. When they sought to position themselves as possible candidates for the Presidential nomination of the Democratic Party, their thinking ”evolved.” The more successful of the two was the one with the fewest compunctions about jettisoning one set of principles and allies for another when opportunity knocked.

Mitt Romney resembles Clinton and Gore in this particular. When he ran for the Senate in 1994, as this video makes crystal clear, he presented himself to the electorate in Massachusetts as an out-and-out liberal – a supporter of abortion rights, gay rights, and affirmative action eager to distance himself as far as possible from Ronald Reagan and George W. H. Bush. In August, 1994, he told an interviewer from the gay newspaper Bay Windows:

There’s something to be said for having a Republican who supports civil rights in this broader context, including sexual orientation. When Ted Kennedy speaks on gay rights, he’s seen as an extremist. When Mitt Romney speaks on gay rights he’s seen as a centrist and a moderate.

It’s a little like if Eugene McCarthy was arguing in favor of recognizing China, people would have called him a nut. But when Richard Nixon does it, it becomes reasonable. When Ted says it, it’s extreme; when I say it, it’s mainstream.

Romney left everyone with the impression at the time that he favored same-sex unions indistinguishable from marriages but wanted to reserve the m-word for unions between women and men.

When critics point to the posture he adopted in the 1994 Senate race, Romney responds that he changed his position on the crucial issues and argues that he should not be held responsible today for mistakes that he made seventeen years ago. When, in this video, staged in 2007 with an eye to the 2008 Presidential race, Romney directs our attention to his putatively conservative record as Governor in Massachusetts, he glosses over his gubernatorial campaign in 2002 and his first two and a half years in office in an attempt to leave its viewers with the impression that he had long ago abandoned the positions he espoused in 1994. In fact, however, as The Washington Post recently reported, when running for the Governorship in 2002, he presented himself to the advocates of abortion precisely as he had in 1994. He was, he intimated, the Republican who, if he made it to the national stage, would turn the Republican Party around on the issue. “You need someone like me in Washington,” he told them. To the gay activists and the environmental lobby, he made similar assurances – and for most of his term in office he was as good as his word, defending abortion as a woman’s right, pushing cap-and-trade, and, in 2004, developing the Massachusetts Climate Protection Plan.

It was not until the late spring of 2005 – when it became clear that he had little chance of being re-elected as Governor and he started planning a Presidential run, instead – that Romney began changing his posture, and then according to a recent report in The Wall Street Journal, he did so on a host of issues, lining up with the National Rifle Association, which he had hitherto kept at arm’s length; announcing that he was pro-life; and backing off from his commitment to the radical environmental agenda.embodied in the Massachusetts Climate Protection Plan he had for the most part authored himself. It is possible that Mitt Romney had a real change of heart at this time, but, given what we know of his flexibility at Bain Capital, the comment offered The Wall Street Journal by Rob Garrity, a Republican environmentalist and Romney supporter who served in his gubernatorial administration, seems more plausible: “You have to understand, Mitt Romney is very pragmatic, and I think what happened was the issue became, 'How do I win the presidency of United States?'" For an aspiring prince, Machiavelli tells us in Il principe, flexibility is the supreme political virtue.

There are, of course, stands that Romney espoused as Governor that he still holds to. Like Michael Bloomberg, another businessman who ran for executive office in a Democratic stronghold on the Republican line, Romney is a budget-balancer. He worked hard at that in Massachusetts. He promises to do so again if elected President of the United States – and on this promise, I believe, we can rely. If he were elected, Bloomberg would do the same. Neither of these men is a utopian progressive on the model of Barack Obama. Neither is inclined to suppose that radical will is sufficient. They are managerial progressives. They pride themselves on their competence, and they despise fiscal irresponsibility – for they recognize that expenditures cannot indefinitely be sustained without sufficient revenues.

Apart from fiscal responsibility, there is only one other policy of any real salience that Romney embraced in his early years as Governor and that he still supports, and that is Romneycare. Managerial progressives have little truck with first principles. George W. H. Bush was speaking contemptuously when he referred to “the vision thing.” In this particular, they tend to be tone-deaf. The elder Bush had no notion of the damage that he was doing to himself when he agreed to a tax hike, and Romney simply cannot understand the visceral dislike that conservatives have for the individual mandate.                                                        

There is a problem, he was told. There are people who do not have health insurance, and some of those with pre-existing conditions cannot find affordable insurance. Moreover, those who work for themselves and are not part of the large pools of employees who work at large firms have to pay exorbitant rates. He knew of two proposals for solving the problem. One proposal called, in effect, for the extension of Medicare and Medicaid to the whole populace; the other, developed by the Heritage Foundation, operated on the premise that those already insured be left with their current arrangement and that everyone else be forced to join a pool sponsored by the government and buy insurance through that pool. Progressives are utilitarians. They have little use for or understanding of individual rights – and so Romney could not conceive why anyone would object to everyone being forced by the government of Massachusetts to buy health insurance. It never crossed his mind that there is something tyrannical in the government’s interference in the minutiae of our lives. Without the individual mandate, he recognized, without forcing all of the uninsured into a pool so that those without pre-existing conditions could pay for the healthcare of those with pre-existing conditions, the problem that, he had been told, was pressing could not be solved. When utilitarians have to choose between solving putative problems and respecting the rights of individuals to run their own lives, they always choose to solve the putative problems. Because progressivism is a hammer, we are thought of us nails.

In the spring of 2006, when he signed the bill providing for Romneycare, Romney expected that it would be his signature achievement and that his accomplishment in this particular would be his selling point in 2007 and 2008 when he sought the Republican nomination, and in an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal he touted it as a model for other states. By February, 2007, he was holding Romneycare up as “a model for the nation,” and in the hardback version of his campaign book No Apology, which came out in March, 2010, Romney wrote, “From now on, no one in Massachusetts has to worry about losing his or her health insurance if there is a job change or a loss in income; everyone is insured and pays only what he or she can afford….We can accomplish the same thing for everyone in the country….” In the paperback version, which was released in February, 2011, that last sentence was dropped. If Romney was all along opposed to the establishment of a national health insurance system on the model of Romneycare, as he now claims, he was remarkably inept in his choice of language.

In a sense, however, all of this is a red herring. For, as he made clear back in October during the Las Vegas debates and again this week in his interview with Bret Baier, Romney sees absolutely nothing wrong with the individual mandate and he is inordinately proud of Romneycare. This ought to give all conservatives pause – for it says a great deal about his attitude regarding individual rights and his willingness to use the power of the government to run our lives. He may or may not be sincere when he now argues that the individual mandate introduced by the federal government is unconstitutional, but this does not matter a great deal. In other spheres, where the federal government has wide discretion, he will not be restrained by any political principles from using it to run our lives if he thinks that there is a problem in need of a solution.

What this means in practice is that Romney is no more a conservative than Michael Bloomberg is. He has virtues. He is managerial and not a utopian progressive.  If elected, he will for a time be mindful of the commitments he has made. He will fight for the repeal of Obamacare, for, If he does not do so, he will be toast, and he knows it. He will also work hard to put our fiscal house in order, for he really does believe in managerial competence, but I would not rule out tax increases. After all, he agrees with Barack Obama that those who take in more than $200,000 a year should pay more than they do now. If there are any openings on the Supreme Court in his first couple of years in office, Romney will probably nominate conservatives. But, after the midterm elections in 2014, all bets are off. Managerial progressives see elections as problems to be solved. They re-tailor their positions to the tastes of the electorate they expect to face (at least, as they understand that electorate).

Even more to the point, Romney is not going to make the conservative argument – and that matters enormously. When Lincoln said, “Public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed,” he spoke the truth. In my lifetime, there has never been a moment when the American public was more open to the conservative argument than it is now. Barack Obama, his “stimulus” bill, Obamacare, and Dodd-Frank have given liberalism a very bad name. This could be the turning of the tide. It could be the moment in which we begin to pare away at the administrative entitlements state. But that can only happen if we win the argument over its legitimacy. And if we do not make that argument, we certainly cannot win it. Nothing that Romney has said in any of his speeches to date or in any of the debates suggests that he believes that there is anything fundamentally wrong with the administrative entitlements state. It needs a bit of tweaking here and there. Expenditures and revenues must be brought into balance. But it is in principle sound. That is what he believes. That is the position he will espouse.

I cannot see how any conservative can support Mitt Romney. I can see how conservatives might vote for him – certainly, if he is the only alternative to Barack Obama, and also if there is no other plausible Republican candidate, as Ramesh Ponnuru argues on National Review Online. But if we do vote for him, we should not lie to ourselves about what we are doing, and we should keep the heat on him if he is elected.

I should perhaps add that I do not regard Mitt Romney as a shoo-in. He is not an especially accomplished politician. He is a man who won one election. When he ran for Senate, he lost. When he considered running for re-election as Governor, he chose not to do so because he knew that he would lose. When he ran for the Republican nomination in 2008, he lost. If you watch his debate with Ted Kennedy and his interview with Bret Baier and consider the manner in which he misrepresented Romneycare in the Las Vegas debates, you can see why he lost. His responses, when he is not mouthing boilerplate that he has memorized, seem contrived. He is evasive and sometimes petulant. One can see him calculating with regard to what would best play with the general public, and what he says and does is often inept. He often looks like what he is: a man with no political principles who is pandering, and he is actually pretty bad at pandering. He is not quick in discerning which way the wind is blowing. He spent the last four years preparing for the 2011/12 campaign, and he blundered and blundered badly in the manner in which he positioned himself for the race. It is perfectly possible that Barack Obama will make mincemeat of him in a televised debate. Ted Kennedy did.

Thanks to the efforts of T. Elliot Gaiser, who is a regular contributor to Ricochet on the Student Feed, Herman Cain braved the blizzard now besetting south-central Michigan to speak at Hillsdale this evening, and I got a chance to hear him. The turnout was huge, the forbidding weather notwithstanding. Fortunately, I had a reserved seat – as it happens, in the front row.

I have attended such events on occasion in the past. Back in the last millennium, one summer when I was briefly a reporter for the now-defunct Oklahoma Journal in Oklahoma City, I actually heard George Wallace speak. The tone of that event was worrisome. Some antiwar undergraduates staged a walk-out in the middle of his speech, and the audience went berserk with fury.

The Cain event had an entirely different tone. The man could not be more genial, and the audience was in a good mood. He told us that this was not the first time that he had spoken at Hillsdale; he added that it would not be the last time; and everyone cheered. Cain has a deep, resonant, warm voice that is easy to listen to, and he delivered a stump speech with a foreign policy focus, explaining what he had in mind when he amended Ronald Reagan’s theme – “Peace through Strength” – by making it “Peace through Strength and Clarity.” He touched on the nation’s Founding principles with some frequency. He discussed the degree to which military strength is dependent on economic and moral strength. He pointed to the dearth of American warships on the high seas – fewer than at any time since 1915, he said.

Towards the end, he spoke of his time at Morehouse College, of the lectures given by its President, and he recited a Negro spiritual mentioned in one of those lectures. He concluded with a discussion of what his parents had taught him: Believe in God, believe in yourself, and believe in this country despite its challenges.

The speech was long on abstractions and short on specifics. Cain has a great deal of experience giving inspirational speeches both as a businessman and as a Baptist preacher. He profited from that experience. Before the speech, I was of the opinion that he was not ready to be President of the United States. Afterwards, my opinion was the same.

I do not doubt, however, that he is a fine man, and my instinct is to suppose that the charges lodged against him by various women are untrue. The two who have come forward have track records suggesting that they are greedy and unreliable. The settlements given the two women who worked at the National Restaurant Association were too paltry to be suggestive of misconduct on anyone’s part. And there was every indication that Cain is the real article.

I spoke with him briefly at a reception after the event. I could not bring myself to ask him whether he would be leaving the race. The very idea seemed obscene. Someone else I know who had a more extensive conversation with him than I did told me that he was staying in. My only comment to him was that I regretted that he had not sung the spiritual he recited. He responded, “I would have, but I have to save my voice. I have three events tomorrow.”

Now that Michele Bachmann has self-destructed and Rick Perry has four times stumbled over his tongue, Herman Cain has inherited the spot reserved, in this electoral cycle, for a conservative Presidential contender who is not the godfather of Obamacare. In the polls, he either leads the Republican field or is tied with Mitt Romney. In the latest Rasmussen match-up, he is the only Republican who leads Barack Obama.

None of this means much. Given the way that Barack Obama is running his campaign – as a nasty, divisive attempt to pit the poor, the shiftless, and their enablers against the rich – and given his incompetence at actually governing, he is likely to lose to almost anyone the Republicans nominate. BHO is the Democratic Party’s answer to Herbert Hoover. He has taken a severe economic downturn and prolonged it, and he is now intent on raising taxes on the investing class in the midst of that downturn. Come November 1012 all that the Republican nominee will have to do is ask: “How would you like four more years like the last four?”

Cain’s surge in the polls guarantees only two things – that his proposals will be closely examined and severely criticized by liberals and conservatives alike, and that, in the next debate, Romney’s proxies – Bachmann and Rick Santorum – will go after him as they went after Perry. Romney’s plans will, I think, escape close scrutiny and criticism for the simple reason that an economic plan consisting of fifty-nine different items cannot be described, much less attacked, in a soundbite. What no one can understand, no one can neatly summarize. It says something about Romney’s competence as a candidate that – except with regard to repealing Obamacare – he has engineered things so that no one can really say what he would do if he were elected.

Cain has chosen the opposite tack. His proposal is simple and straightforward and has a catchy title. His is a high-risk strategy – appropriate for a candidate who would ordinarily be marginal, appropriate for a candidate who cannot afford to sail under the radar.

The 9-9-9 proposal is radical. Regarding that, there can be no doubt. We now find ourselves with a choice between a candidate who is by instinct a social engineer, who does not regard the individual mandate as tyrannical, who is prepared to embrace the administrative entitlements state, and who thinks it more or less sufficient to take us back to 2006 – and a candidate who believes that we need to rethink the entire progressive project.

Cain’s proposal is radical, as I said. The real question is whether it is not also mad. Michele Bachmann argues that it is a mistake to add a national sales tax. This would open up an entirely new revenue stream for the federal government, and in time Congress would be apt to increase the tax. She has a point. The income tax started out small, and it grew and grew.

The other mode of attack, found in a piece published by the editors of National Review Online, is to carp. And carp one can. Retirees – at least those whose incomes are modest – will find the sales tax an annoyance, if not a burden.

I am, nonetheless, inclined to side with Paul Ryan and the mysterious economist at Stanford with whom Peter Robinson recently had lunch (my bet is that he was an advisor to Sarah Palin and is already being touted as Ben Bernanke’s successor at the Fed) in welcoming the proposal. It has three great virtues. It broadens the tax base. It encourages investment. And it shifts some (but not all) of the tax burden from personal income to consumption.

In the end, I do not find Bachmann’s criticism compelling. I very much doubt that the sales tax component would be increased. Taxes that we feel every time that we go to the store tend not to go up dramatically. What we notice we resent. Hidden taxes – such as the old corporate tax – are another matter.

In any case, we got into the mess we are now in at least in part because we borrowed too much and spent it. Cain’s proposal would not discourage savings and investment. If it were enacted, we would have the lowest corporate tax rate in the world. Multinationals based in the US would repatriate their profits and pay taxes here. The United States would again be a place where people wanted to do business; there would, I think, be a boom; and unemployed Americans would soon find work.

I am inclined to think that, even if we could somehow claw our way back to 2006, it would just be kicking the can down the road. The entitlements state is bankrupt, and tinkering with it will only put off the day of reckoning and make that day more of a disaster. It would be comparable to rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. We need to point our ship of state in a different direction – away from its inexorable drift towards soft despotism. What Cain is suggesting would be a start.

I wish that I could be confident regarding Herman Cain’s competence in other spheres. The Republican Party has let us down. Think of what we had to choose from in 2008 – Mike Huckabee, Rudy Giuliani, Fred Thompson, John McCain, and Mitt Romney. Then think about the choices we have this year. There really is no excuse. 

We will have to see what Herman Cain is made of. Helping us sort out that question may not be what comes first to the minds of Bachmann and Santorum, but they will help us nonetheless.

An interesting exchange took place on the thread that Claire Berlinski started fifteen hours ago. I had written the following in an earlier post:

Is it not odd that, in a time when the country is increasingly open to the suggestion that the administrative entitlements state is on its last legs and that the moment has come for rolling back its encroachment on the prerogatives of the states and the rights of individuals, there is not one seasoned Republican officeholder capable of articulating the argument for limited government who is willing to step forward, shoulder the burden, seize the opportunity, and take the bull by the horns. What has this country become?

And, in response, Claire wrote: "But here we have the contrary problem: a cohort of men who are dangerously disinclined to seek power. Is there any historic precedent for that?"

In the comments, Copperfield responded, "Perhaps it's the waning of duty as a compelling factor." And Katievs replied, "None of these men has a duty to run for President.  They do have definite duties toward their families."

This gave me pause. "Does one's duty to one's country," I asked myself, "trump one's duty to one's family?" I think it does, and I think it does for reasons that Katievs will be forced to acknowledge. So, here, I will elaborate on the comment I posted in response to her comment, and I will do so in a way intended also to challenge the more radical of the libertarians in our number.

In my opinion, we all have a duty to serve our country. And when it is in deep trouble, those best situated to get it out of the mess it is in have a duty to come forward. That is why I think Governor Mitch Daniels and Congressman Paul Ryan were wrong to put family concerns first in deciding whether to mount a campaign for the Presidency. I do not mean that I do not sympathize with their decision. I do. I have a family myself. I would not enjoy running for public office, and I do not think that the process would be good for my family. But, in the end, I think that both men are guilty of a dereliction of duty.

Why do I take such a stand. I begin by thinking about those who have served in our armed forces. Every soldier who served during World War II understood what we are now all too apt to forget: to wit, that one's duty to one's country takes precedence over one's duty to one's family.

The reason is simple and straightforward and you can find it articulated in the opening chapters of Aristotle's Politics: The family is not self-sufficient.

To begin with, it cannot adequately defend itself if attacked. If the country goes down in a great war, it takes the family with it. Those who fought in World War II knew that if the Japanese and the Germans won their families would be at the mercy of men not apt to show any mercy to them.

But that is not all. The family is also not self-sufficient economically. It cannot sustain itself in the absence of a division of labor and commercial exchange. If the country within which a given family exists grossly mismanages the larger economy, as every American now knows or ought to know by now, that family is apt to be toast.

And there is more. The family is also not self-sufficient morally. What I have in mind is this. When children are young, their world is the household. When they get older -- especially when they become adolescents -- their world to an ever-increasing degree consists of their contemporaries. When they are young, we, their parents, can provide guidance. When they are older, they gradually emancipate themselves from our supervision. As I wrote in response to Katievs on the thread mentioned above, "You and I and every sane parent in this country worry that the larger decay in American life will draw in our children." And let's face it: we do.

Let me elaborate. We worry that our children will become druggies. We worry that they will be swept up in the sexual revolution. We worry that they will be the victims of a criminal enterprise.

All of these concerns lead us into the political arena. Because our families are not self-sufficient, because the well-being of our loved ones depends to an astonishing degree upon the survival and health of the political community, we have a duty to serve.

In my judgment, our political community is not in good health. In my judgment, constitutional conservatives in high office have a duty to step forward, and the failure of the most distingiushed of these to do so is rooted in the opinion -- widely held among social conservatives and libertarians alike -- that Katievs articulated.

They are, I believe, dead wrong -- and as long as this opinion holds sway, this country is apt to drift towards its destruction. "The best lack all conviction; the worst are full of passionate intensity."

Yesterday, I listened twice to Rick Perry’s first advertisement. This afternoon – at the office where the internet connection is fast – I listened carefully to the first speech of  Rick Perry’s campaign. And I can say that I am both pleased and mildly worried.

The video I thought fabulous. It was low-key, gentle, soothing, and devastating. It muted the drama and appealed to the intellect, pointing to the obvious and quietly encouraging the listener to compare President Obama with Governor Perry and to judge them by their accomplishments. If Perry and his team can keep this up, he is likely to win. I am of two minds, however, about his announcement speech.

On the one hand, he sounded the right themes. The antidote to this country’s soft despotic  drift is decentralization. When Alexis de Tocqueville wrote about this question, he had his eye on France, and he was offering the American example – federalism, decentralization within the states, religion, and the nuclear family – as an antidote. As I argued two years ago in Soft Despotism, Democracy’s Drift, our troubles today today arise from the partial collapse of the family, from religion’s decline, and from our abandonment of federalism. Think through the implications of Terrence Moore’s first post – on the welfare state – and you will get the picture. In his speech and video, directly or obliquely, Perry touched on all three of these questions, reasserting the central importance of the integrity of the family, intimating that religion is our moral anchor, and demanding a return to federalism. If he thinks through the logic of his own commitments – and perhaps he has done so already – his instincts will be pretty consistently sound.

On the other hand, Perry was folksy throughout – and that worries me a bit. The tone of the speech and the manner of delivery were pitch-perfect for Texas. I am not, however, certain that this will play for a national audience. I do not mean to suggest that Perry should never be folksy. He comes from Paint Creek, and this comes naturally to him. Moreover, he needs at the outset to gather to him those who belong to his natural constituency – which is made up of white people who live in the countryside and in small towns. But to persuade a wider audience, Perry will have to pitch his argument to an audience that thinks itself more sophisticated. I am not arguing that the city slickers really are more sophisticated; I am arguing that they are in the grips of a powerful prejudice against people from places like Paint Creek.

You will respond that Bill Clinton came from Hope, Arkansas, and you will be correct. But Bill Clinton went to Georgetown University and Yale Law School, and he did a stint at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. He was vetted. Perry is an outsider. Even in some circles in Texas, Aggies are regarded as hicks. It is easy to see what sort of campaign David Axelrod and his associates will gin up against Perry. It will draw on the instinctive bigotry that made it so easy to demonize Lyndon Baines Johnson and the younger Bush. Obama cannot run on his record. To win, he must demonize the alternative. It is going to be ugly.

Perry is an exceedingly successful Texas politician. He comes from a place that is self-regarding in the extreme (I speak as a native of Oklahoma) and inward-looking. He has never operated outside its borders, and he may be unaware of its parochial character. If he is, he needs to wake up right away – and Mitt Romney is perfectly situated to give him that wake-up call.

Here is what Perry needs to do. He needs to anticipate the assault.

For example, if Obama’s people play anti-Texas prejudice against him, he should mock their advertisements. Indeed, he might do well to hit them hard the day they play this card – by preparing humorous advertisements ahead of time comparing Texas . . . with Chicago. They could touch on corruption, gangsters, population explosion and population implosion, political practices. And it could all be done with a light touch.

The larger problem is this, however. Most Americans – outside Texas – associate a West-Texas accent and a folksy manner with stupidity. The Obama people – and, perhaps more subtly – the Romney people may try to depict Perry as a hick. This he can head off if he has the wit to recognize the obvious: that what plays in Texas may not play as well elsewhere.

My suggestion would be that he give two or three speeches at venues associated with the conservative intelligentsia. The speeches should be low-key, gentle, and, above all else, thoughtful. In them he should outline in a manner almost academic what he intends to do and why. One could deal with defense and foreign policy. Another could focus on healthcare. A third could take economic growth and the prerequisites for economic growth as its theme. In these speeches, his purpose should be to demonstrate that he is anything but a hick, anything but stupid, and that he has thought in depth and carefully about the larger issues we face. There should not be a hint of the campaign speech in them. They should be intellectually devastating without being polemical. His aim should be to dispel once and for all the suspicion that he is just another hot dog from Texas running his mouth in predictable ways.

I mention this now in the hope that someone in Perry’s entourage reads Ricochet. What Perry did in South Carolina on Saturday was appropriate for the occasion. But there are other occasions, and most of us are not Texans. If I were the head of the American Enterprise Institute, I would get on the phone tomorrow and invite Perry to give three lectures in DC. The trick here is to get out ahead of the onslaught and to kill the appeal to prejudice before it is even launched.

One of the downsides of getting older – I am now 62 – is that one’s friends die. Friday, it was the turn of Patrick Leigh Fermor, aged ninety-six, and I am having trouble accepting that he is gone.

I first met Paddy in the summer of 1983. I was working then – oddly enough, as I am working right now – on a book on classical Sparta, and I had a grant and a hunch. The Spartan way of life was based on something like slave labor. The Spartans ruled the southernmost two-fifths of the Peloponnesus and drew their livelihood from farms worked by their helots (the word in Greek means captives), who reportedly outnumbered them seven-to-one. In their realm, there were and are two river valleys – one in Laconia and the other in Messenia – divided by a mountain range named Taygetus, and there was and is mountainous terrain elsewhere in Messenia. I had read extensively about the history of slavery, and I was persuaded that there must have been gangs of runaway helots in the hills of Messenia, as there later were in early modern Jamaica and in other locales where servile labor was the norm and there was wilderness nearby. I knew that the Greek resistance during the Second World War had operated in the mountainous country of northern Greece, but I knew little about their operations in the Peloponnesus. A fellow ancient historian who had lived in Greece for some years and had tried to make it as a novelist said to me, when he heard of my hunch, “You ought to talk to Paddy Leigh Fermor. He lives down there, and he fought with the resistance on Crete. He lives in Kardamyle. You should look him up.”

And that is precisely what I did. With the grant I had been given, I bought a plane ticket, and I spent some weeks in the company of a former student who hailed from Thessalonica, exploring the Peloponnesus – by boat, in a rental car, and on foot. Kardamyle was in the Mani – the southernmost prong of the Taygetus range, and it was one of the towns that Agamemnon had offered Achilles in an attempt to get him to take the girl back. When we got there, however, Paddy was away. So I mailed him a brief note and moved on. When we returned, I telephoned him – and he immediately invited the two of us to lunch.

(photo by Maggie Rainey-Smith)

Leyla, who had long been their cook, produced a sumptuous feast. We ate, and we drank, and then we drank some more – and the next thing we knew it was 5 p.m. Paddy and Joan, fearful that we were too intoxicated to successfully traverse the half-mile on foot back to Kardamyle, offered us beds. It was one of the most delightful afternoons that I have ever spent. The historian and journalist Max Hasting has observed that Paddy was “perhaps the most brilliant conversationalist of his time.” Never have I encountered anyone as entertaining.

Paddy was – there is no other word for it – a hero. He lived the strenuous life. There was in him an exuberance that could not be contained. Christopher Marlowe, who was of a similar temperament, managed to make it through the King’s School in Canterbury, but Paddy did not. There was some hanky-panky with the daughter of a greengrocer, but that cannot have been the whole story. “He is a dangerous mixture of sophistication and recklessness,” his housemaster wrote in an official report, “which makes one anxious about his influence on other boys.” I would have been anxious myself.

Not long thereafter, with the support of his mother, who mailed him a fiver from time to time, Paddy set out in December, 1933 by ship for the Hook of Holland – and walked from there to Constantinople and on to Mount Athos and its monasteries. It took him more a year, and you can read about his adventures in two of the books that he later published – A Time of Gifts (1978) and Between the Woods and the Water (1986) – which together constitute what the Germans call a Bildungsroman. In those volumes, you will encounter a world of peasants and aristocrats, of socialists and fascists that no longer exists.

On that journey, Paddy met an older woman. He was nineteen. She was married and thirty-one. You can find a description of the beginning their affair in the second of the two volumes mentioned above.  Her name was Bălaşa Cantacuzino, and she was a Romanian princess descended from the Byzantine royal house. When his trip was over, they settled down together, oscillating between Athens and at her country house in Moldavia. Then came the Second World War, and he volunteered for the British army. The two would not meet again until after the fall of Nicolae Ceaușescu in 1989.

During the war, Paddy fought in Albania, Greece, and on Crete. After being evacuated to Cairo, he joined the Special Operations Executive and spent much of the remainder of the war running guerrilla operations in the mountains of Crete. He left the island in May, 1944 under truly exceptional circumstances. On 26 April 1944, on a bet made with friends back in Cairo, Paddy, W. Stanley Moss, and a group of Cretan shepherds kidnapped General Karl Heinrich Georg Ferdinand Kreipe, the German commander on the island.

The two Englishmen dressed up as German police corporals and stopped Kreipe’s car as he was making his way back one evening to his villa near Knossos. Having eliminated the chauffeur, Paddy put on the general’s hat, and Billy Moss drove the car. Kreipe was hidden beneath the back seat – on which three hefty Cretan andartes sat. They then bluffed their way through Heraklion and an addition twenty-two checkpoints before ditching the car and hiking into the mountains – where, for three weeks, they evaded German search parties before being picked up by a British motor launch on the south coast.

At one point, as they neared the top of Mount Ida at the break of dawn, Kreipe quoted the first line of Horace's ode Ad Thaliarchum – "Vides ut alta stet nive candidum Soracte" (See how Soracte stands white with snow on high), and Paddy finished the poem to its end. “At least,” the general remarked, “I am in the hands of gentlemen.” In the days that followed, before they were evacuated to Cairo, the two discussed Greek tragedy and Latin poetry. In 1972, they would meet again in Athens to tape a television show. Afterwards, Paddy once told me, they went out to dinner and sang old German drinking songs. Well before that time, however, Billy Moss had published a book on the incident entitled Ill Met by Moonlight, and Michael Powell had made a movie with the same name in which Dirke Bogarde was cast as Paddy.

Before the war, Paddy had begun his literary career with a translation of of CP Rodocanachi's novel Forever Ulysses (1938). Afterwards, he began to write books of his own. The first of these was a travel book, focused on the West Indies and entitled The Traveller’s Tree (1950). It won the Heinemann Foundation Prize for Literature. Soon thereafter he published a novel set in Martinique entitled The Violins of Saint-Jacques (1953), which  was turned into an opera by Malcolm Williamson; a meditation on monasticism entitled A Time to Keep Silence  (1957); and two travel books focused on two of the wilder regions of Greece: Mani (1958) and Roumeli (1966). That all of these remain in print is no surprise. Five years ago, Paddy was described to me by an Oxford don as the greatest living master of English prose.

In 1984, I was offered by the Institute of Current World Affairs a fellowship two years in length, which would take me to Greece, Turkey, and Cyprus, and I jumped at the chance to situate myself in Istanbul (where I lived in the neighborhood in which Claire Berlinski now resides) and to explore the landscape and experience the seasons in the world within which the ancient Greeks had made their home. I spent most of my time in Turkey, exploring its nooks and crannies and writing long newsletters about contemporary affairs. From time to time, however, I hopped a plane to Greece, interviewed various figures in Athens, and partied with some journalists I knew (Robert Kaplan was based in Athens in those days).

On those occasions, I always took a bus to Kardamyle and spent a few days with Paddy and Joan. Their house, which Paddy had designed himself, was built out of stone and situated on a bluff overlooking the sea. We rose when we chose, ate breakfast separately, and Paddy put pen to paper while Joan saw to the management of the establishment – and I read a novel, a travel book, or something pertinent to the composition of my first book Republics Ancient and Modern (which Paddy would later review for the Christmas books section of The Spectator).

After lunch, where we drank a considerable amount of wine, we would nap. Then, we would go back to work, and, at about 5 p.m., Paddy and I would head off for an extended walk in the mountains. He was about seventy at the time, but he was astonishingly vigorous. Every day he would go for a long swim, disappearing into the drink and reappearing a half hour later. On his seventieth birthday, he swam the Hellespont – something that very few men half that age could manage. (I know. I watched from a motor launch once while a thirty-something friend gave it a try).

Before dinner, there were drinks. “C’est le moment,” Paddy would say, quoting Victor Hugo, “quand les lions vont boire.” Dinner itself was a feast, and it often ended with the singing of songs. Paddy taught me The Foggy, Foggy Dew, and I taught him They Call the Wind Maria. After a week or so, I would take the bus back to Athens and head on to Greek Cyprus or back to Istanbul. On one such occasion, I carried to the British embassy the manuscript of Between the Woods and the Water. From there, I gather, it was sent on by diplomatic pouch to Paddy’s publisher in London. He had served his country well, and his compatriots took good care of him. He was offered a knighthood in 1991 and finally accepted one in 2004.

In the 1990s, when I came to Greece in the summer, I would fly in to the Athens international airport, and then I would generally take a bus across to the domestic airport, go up to the counter, look over the available flights, and book a ticket for an island that I had never visited. Then, after a week or so on, say, Paros, I would go down to the harbor and catch whatever boat there happened to be – for Lemnos or Andros or some other unfamiliar spot. Eventually, after having spent three or four weeks exploring, I would return to Athens and go down to the Mani to see Paddy and Joan. The routine in Kardamyle was the same – except that, towards the end of the millennium, Paddy was less able to hike in the mountains.

After I got married, there was less traveling. In 2003, however, I did manage to see Paddy in England at their country house in Gloucestershire (Joan was the daughter of a Viscount). Ours was a subdued lunch. Joan had died at the age of ninety-one in Kardamyle hardly more than a week before. I last saw him in Kardamyle in March, 2006. I had spent Michaelmas and Hilary Terms as a Visiting Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford, and I was about to take up a similar fellowship at the American Academy in Berlin. There were, however, two weeks in which we had no place to call our own. So my wife, our daughters, and I flew to Greece, rented a car, and, after a brief visit to Athens, headed to Delphi and on from there to the Peloponnesus – where we stopped at Olympia, the Apollo Temple at Vassae, Mycenae, and other sights. I tried to call Paddy, but the Greeks had added a digit to the old number, and I could not figure it out. So we drove to Kardamyle and then out to his house on the outskirts of town, and I rang the bell.

And there he was – older, quite a bit slower in his gait, but very much himself. "Paul Rahe," he said. "I don't believe my eyes. Come in, my dear boy.” And when I mentioned my family, his response was immediate: “Bring them in. You can all stay here.” And so we did. That night we took him to dinner at the restaurant in town that Leyla now runs, and we sat up late talking and drinking. His eyesight was not good. He had glaucoma and in the candlelight at one point was not sure that we were still there. He had had a heart attack and had a pacemaker. He could hardly walk up the drive to the highway. But there was still a twinkle in his eye, and he was as alive as ever.

He was also writing, and in his nineties, after decades of resistance, he had actually learned how to type (no one could read his handwriting). A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water were intended to be the first two parts of a trilogy. With the third part, he had had a terrible time. After 1989, he had returned to Roumania and Bulgaria to retrace his steps, and it was not as he remembered it. When I visited in the 1990s, I would ask about the third volume, and Joan would pull me aside and tell me not to mention it. “He is having trouble with it. He is very frustrated. That trip back to review his path robbed him of the confidence he had in his memory,” she once said.

When I saw Paddy in 2006, however, he was halfway done with the manuscript, and he was going over it to look for things that could be cut. I gather that somewhere in the house at Kardamyle there is a manuscript and that on the cover it reads “Volume Three.” I wonder what he called it. That last night just over five years ago, he, my wife, and I tried to come up with a title, and we could not think of anything satisfactory.

If and when the third volume of his trilogy does come out, I will buy a copy. Reading it will, I am confident, bring back the man. His other books do. I doubt, however, whether I will ever meet the like again – and that I very much regret. Perhaps the biography that Artemis Cooper is writing will relieve my gloom.

On Monday – which is to say, on Memorial Day – Jennifer Rubin posted a short squib on The Washington Post website. In it she goes after politicians of merit who shy away from running for higher office with the excuse that their decision was based on the needs of their families. She asks pointedly whether this is supposed to mean that those who do run are therefore “less devoted” to their families. She intimates that the whole thing may be “a bit of a dodge.” And to make her point, she directs our attention to the women and men serving in the armed forces.

This weekend, however, I saw firsthand why this reason (however true) is really not an appropriate rationale for politicians. My family and I spent the weekend in Norfolk. There are multiple Army forts and Navy bases in area. On and off base there are thousands of homes, filled with a single spouse and multiple children. Usually it is the dads who are gone six months, but often it is much longer. Having a spouse deployed is not reason for complaint. Life goes on, children go to school, mothers cope and there are no weekends home for the absent dads.

So if a pol doesn’t want to run for office, that’s fine. If he thinks his family is a higher priority than serving in Congress or the White House, many of us can relate. But they should save the sanctimony. Who’s more noble: the pol who decides not to run for the White House or the soldier, marine or sailor who goes overseas no matter how much he loves his family?

If a pol believes his country needs him, is the family dislocation — which involves no personal danger, comes with many perks, permits weekends and vacations with the family, and allows (if they so desire) relocating the family to Washington — justification for not serving? Patriotism, the extraordinary courage and everyday stress borne by our military and their families are something to admire. Many of us could not imagine undertaking it. So if a pol can’t tolerate a far more minor inconvenience, perhaps he should keep it to himself, lest the rest of us think worse of him.

This could be read as a dig at Governor Mitch Daniels, and it does give one pause. But I think that Rubin has Paul Ryan in mind. She has already made it clear that she thinks that he should run, and she has an argument.

There are times – let’s face it – when one woman or man may be as good as another. Virtually any Republican in office (apart from Ron Paul) would be more serviceable as President than the current incumbent. But there are other times when one woman or man is not as good as another. George Washington brought something to the Presidency that no one else could have brought, and it may have made all the difference. Abraham Lincoln did the same in circumstances that were even more trying.

We are not in a crisis as grievous as the crises that these two Presidents faced. The survival of the Union is not at stake. But I believe that there is a great deal on the line – as much as, if not more than at any point in my lifetime. We face a grave crisis, and every such crisis is a golden opportunity.

If President Obama is re-elected, I fear that the die will be cast – that we will go the way of Europe: dependency, crony capitalism, personal irresponsibility, economic stagnation, and military weakness. We are already a long way down that road. What Barack Obama is doing may make our further progress down that road irreversible.

If, on the other hand, we elect a Bob Dole clone – someone more serviceable than the incumbent who would be content to be the tax collector for the welfare state (a category that has long encompassed most Republicans) – there will be a pause in our progress down the road to perdition. But it will only be the kind of pause necessary from time to time if a man on the march is to catch his breath and pull himself together for further marching. The direction will remain the same. The only thing at stake would be the pace. That is what we chose when we elected Eisenhower, Nixon, Bush père, and Bush fils. Every single President on this list increased the size and the scope of the administrative state – just not as much and not as fast as their Democratic opponents would have done.

There is a third possibility. We could actually nominate and elect someone who recognizes the problem as a problem, someone who sees that soft despotism really is liberal democracy’s drift, someone who recognizes the moral resources that the American regime has within it to combat this tendency and who understands how to capitalize on them, someone who would seize the opportunity afforded by the crisis of the entitlements state, make the American people look into the abyss, speak truth to them about the necessity for and the virtues of limited government and personal responsibility, and persuade them that we must now decisively reverse our course.

I do not mean to pour scorn on Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, Rudy Giuliani, and George Pataki. They all possess estimable qualities. But I do not think that any of these men have the wit to rise to the occasion. At best, they would do an unseemly imitation of Bob Dole. I think highly of Herman Cain, but he is politically unseasoned, and he knows far too little about the larger world. Businessmen tend to get sideswiped when they become political executives. Service in a cabinet post might down the road make of him a better candidate.

Tim Pawlenty is, I believe, the only plausible candidate in the race – and the truth is that he seems plausible only because we do not yet know him well. He may pan out, and I hope that he does. But he may not. I would hate to have to bet my last dollar on him.

I was of the opinion that Governor Daniels might be the man. I hold to my high opinion of him. But for reasons all his own he has not made himself available. That leaves Paul Ryan – whom I have long thought the best of them all. He has considerable experience in government; and though he has never served in executive office, he has demonstrated in the course of the last year that he has an executive temperament, and he has managed to unite his party behind a program. He is certainly not afraid of taking responsibility.

I could reel off the names of various Congressmen – stretching from Carl Albert to Nancy Pelosi – who have played a prominent role in my lifetime. None of them could be called a statesman. They were competent, clever partisan politicians. Ryan is something different. He has attained a stature that no Congressman in my lifetime has achieved. When I cast my mind back in the past in search of comparable figures, I can come up with only two – James Madison in the First Federal Congress, and Henry Clay, when he was Speaker of the House. There were no doubt others, but the list is not long, and I doubt whether there would be anyone on it who served in the last hundred years.

Ryan is already the standard-bearer of the party. When anyone, such as Newt Gingrich, departs in any serious way from the program that Ryan has outlined, he is told in no uncertain terms by nearly everyone he meets to sit down and shut up. Ryan understands what is at stake. The speeches that he has given indicate that he understands the connection between the social issues (abortion, out-of-wedlock births, and the like), the crisis of the entitlements state, the growth of the administrative state, and the likelihood that we will face economic stagnation and a high level of structural unemployment. He understands this, and he has outlined a program that will start us in the direction of fixing what is wrong.

Some would argue that we need Ryan in the job he now holds. “For what?” I would reply. The man has already done everything that a Congressman could possibly do. To implement the program that he has so skillfully developed and so persuasively presented, he would have to be . . . President of the United States.

I do not know Paul Ryan. I am not acquainted with him. I have never even met the man. If I knew him at all well, I would walk into his office and slap down on his desk Jennifer Rubin’s post. As she points out, lots of Americans in uniform have answered their country’s call. Here is the question I would ask Ryan: “In this crisis, how can you of all people justify not doing what those soldiers have done?” And here is the argument that I would make: “You have the preparation; you have the training; you have the temperament; you have the knowledge; you have the persuasive capacity. We now face a great crisis, and you understand what has to be done better than anyone else. Your country needs you. In the circumstances, what possible excuse could trump that? You have a duty to serve.”

More by Paul Rahe

Until now, I have been relatively sanguine. As I pointed out in a detailed post last June, Barack Obama does not have an executive temperament, and there are plenty of Republicans – e.g., Chris Christie, Bobby Jindal, and Mitch Daniels – who do. Christie may not be sufficiently seasoned, I thought. Jindal may not have found a way to display sufficient gravitas. But Governor Daniels was extremely plausible. His record as Governor was impeccable, and in his personal life he had displayed a patience, reliability, and steadfastness that borders on the heroic. His wife left him and their children for another man. He took it upon himself to rear their children; and when she had second thoughts and returned, he took her back. He is a good, good man.

As regular readers of Ricochet know, I nonetheless harbored misgivings with regard to Governor Daniels. An executive temperament – a genuine willingness to take responsibility – married to bad principles is apt to be disastrous. Witness Lyndon Baines Johnson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. When Governor Daniels called for “a truce” on the social issues, I feared that, if elected President, he would spurn social conservatives, try to make a tactical alliance with those who are socially liberal and fiscally conservative, appoint pro-abortion lawyers to the United States Supreme Court, break up the coalition between those who are libertarian on economic issues and conservative on social questions that sustains the Republican Party, and leave evangelical Christians and church-going Catholics with no compelling reason to vote Republican. When he spoke of taking an ax to the defense budget, I worried that he would be the American Stanley Baldwin.

In time, by joining the Republicans in the Indiana legislature in defunding Planned Parenthood in that state, he allayed the first of my concerns; and, in a long post on Ricochet, examining the various possible Republican presidential candidates, I took a look at Newt Gingrich, Mike Huckabee, Mitt Romney, Tim Pawlenty, and Mitch Daniels. Of these, it seemed to me Governors Pawlenty and Daniels were the most plausible. And of the two, Governor Daniels was by far the better qualified.

I was, as I say, relatively sanguine. As President, Barack Obama has been a disaster, and the American people understand as much. They witnessed the passage of the so-called “stimulus” bill, of Obamacare, and of Dodd-Frank. They were aware that these bills were thousands of pages in length and incomprehensible. They knew that the process by which they were passed was anything but transparent, and they recognized that the economic policy followed by the Obama administration has hindered recovery; they feared the implementation of Obamacare; and they spoke their minds in the midterm elections in 2010, restoring the Republican Party to a strength at the state level not known since the 1920s.

All that it took, I thought, was for the Republicans to choose for themselves a standard-bearer who could articulate the principles that distinguish their party from the Democrats. It helped immensely that John Boehner had marshaled the Republican majority in the House of Representatives behind a program based on those principles and that Paul Ryan had defeated President Obama in the debate concerning the necessity of paring back the welfare state. In my opinion, no one – apart from Ryan himself – was better situated for articulating those principles than Governor Daniels.

I will not mince my words. We as Republicans and we as Americans have been ill-served by the Governor. I understand perfectly well why he has decided not to run, and I respect his reasons. Were he to become a candidate, the spotlight would be focused on his family, and, given their history, that would undoubtedly be hard on his wife. But Governor Daniels has known this all along. The matter was mentioned in a Weekly Standard  profile published late last Spring, and he could and should have sorted this out with his family then. Instead, he strung us along until the last minute. He caused other possible candidates to assume that he would be in the race, and able individuals like John Thune, Mike Pence, and Haley Barbour calculated the likelihood of success and, in the circumstances, rightly chose to turn away.

In ordinary times, Governor Daniels' conduct might not much matter. But we are living in an extraordinary time. Barack Obama has led us to the edge of a precipice, and he has forced us to look into the abyss. For the first time in my lifetime the American people understand tolerably well what is at stake. If we do not set things straight now – if we do not find a way to pare back the entitlement state and get our fiscal house in order without raising taxes to a level likely to choke economic growth – we are apt to go the way of France in combining economic stagnation and high structural unemployment with military incapacity. And if that happens, the results will be far worse for us than for the French. They had the Americans to defend their interests, and we have . . . no backstop. If, for understandable personal reasons, Governor Daniels was not going to be in a position to become our standard-bearer, it was incumbent on him to say as much long ago.

We will now have to rethink. In my next post, I will consider what is likely to happen if we let things drift. Then, in another post, I will try to suggest what might be done.

On Monday, I tried to make sense of the pessimism and defeatism that have long had conservatives in their grip. On Tuesday, I argued that the reasons for pessimism and defeatism no longer apply – that circumstances have changed dramatically, that Barack Obama is the answer to our prayers: that he has brought us to the edge of a precipice and forced us to look into the abyss, and that a majority of Americans now recognize that things cannot go on as they have in the past. As the 2010 election suggested, and as recent events have confirmed, this is our moment – this is for us what 1932 was for the progressives. We in America are on the verge of a new birth of freedom.

There is, of course, a fly in the ointment. The Republican Party has a gift for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. That party ordinarily nominates the next fellow on the list without much regard to the man’s suitability at the time whether as a candidate or as a President. I do not mean to denigrate Bob Dole and John McCain. They put in years of largely admirable service, but it is no surprise that, in their dotage, they lost to Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. Americans do not want to be governed by the living dead. They want someone alive who exudes vitality and capacity.

The Republican Party is replete with talent. But many of those of obvious capacity – Chris Christie of New Jersey, Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, Marco Rubio of Florida, to name the most obvious – are not yet seasoned, and the best known of those running or likely to run are unsuitable. I will not mention Donald Trump. He is doing good service, forcing Barack Obama to reveal what has long remained hidden, and focusing attention on the question whether the man pretending to be President of the United States has the requisite qualifications. But Trump is not a Republican in any understandable sense, and he is a clown. I will limit myself to figures with gravitas.

I admire Mitt Romney. He is a capable businessman and a fine manager. He did wonders for the Olympics in 2002, and he managed to get elected and to serve one term as Governor of Massachusetts. But we have to face facts. He had his chance in 2008, and he blew it. Here is a telling story. In 2006 or 2007, he was invited to Hillsdale College to speak at graduation. In anticipation, everyone was excited, my colleagues tell me; and in the event, everyone was disappointed. He did not respond to the situation. He gave a stump speech, and he was upstaged by the undergraduate who spoke as valedictorian after him (a young man who now holds public office, let me add). I am told that, at about the same time, he disappointed the attendees at the banquet held each year under the auspices of National Review and that he did so in precisely the same fashion. He had no sense of occasion. To this, I can add something substantive. Romney is flexible in the way that businessmen learn to be. In Massachusetts, he was pro-abortion; on the national stage, he was anti-abortion. And let’s face it, Romneycare really was the model for Obamacare. Mitt Romney should not be in the race. He is not in a position to articulate the case for individual freedom and limited government. The great danger is that – in the environment shaped by McCain-Feingold – the fact that he has money of his own means that, in the Spring of 2012, he will be the last man standing.

Similar things can be said about Newt Gingrich. His intelligence cannot be doubted. But his personal life cannot be defended, and he is a loose cannon – apt to line up with the likes of Nancy Pelosi on a fashionable issue like global warming. More to the point, he is a managerial progressive. Like Herbert Hoover, Richard Nixon, and both Bush père and Bush fils, he is always on the outlook for something additional that the federal government can do. He is in no position to articulate the case for limited government, and what applies to him applies to Mike Huckabee as well. Just look at his record as Governor of Arkansas.

That leaves Tim Pawnlenty. I was in Minneapolis a couple of weeks ago, circulating in circles friendly to the cause of limited government. I asked everyone I met what they thought of him. He was universally praised. In his two terms as Governor, he had prevented any number of things that would have done the state great harm. It was due to him that it is emerging from the recession in relatively good shape. Everyone said that they would vote for him again if he ran for Governor. No one trashed him, but no one was fully confident that he was presidential timber. That is one indicator.

There is another. Governor Pawlenty is not taking the lead. No one is sure where he stands on the crucial issues of our time. In the background, a great deal of calculation seems to be going on, and it appears to be the case that he is inclined to check the polls, take the public pulse, and determine his stands on that basis. If what I surmise is in any way true, he is not the man of the hour. We need a man of conviction.

Mitch Daniels would appear to fit the bill. As Governor of Indiana, his record is stellar, and what he has done there in bringing the state’s budget into balance, in taking on the public-sector unions, in preparing his state to weather the recent recession is closely similar to what is now needed in Washington; and in laying the groundwork for an improvement of the state’s grade schools, middle schools, and high schools, he has shown others the way. Governor Daniels has a superb understanding of the crisis of the welfare state. He was director of the Office of Management and Budget under George W. Bush. He knows where the money comes from and where it goes, and, over the last few months, he has repeatedly spoken up regarding our current fiscal crisis. He is in his forthrightness in this regard everything that Governor Pawlenty has not been thus far.

As regular visitors to Ricochet know, I have in the past been sharply critical of Governor Daniels. On one count – his appointment of a particular state Supreme Court judge – David Pippen, the Governor’s General Counsel, persuaded me that the criticism I directed at him was unjustified. On the other two counts, I remained deeply concerned – until yesterday.

In a speech delivered some months ago, Governor Daniels called for “a truce” on the social issues. He appeared to think that this would help him put together a coalition of Democrats and Republicans willing and able to tackle the fiscal crisis we face. I was, frankly, appalled, and here is what I wrote:

In the period since 1973, evangelical Christians, who had long voted for the Democratic Party, and Roman Catholics began drifting into the Republican Party. They did so for any number of reasons, but the primary driver was the stance of the Democratic Party regarding abortion. The Republicans welcomed them into their ranks, and they committed themselves to rolling back Roe v. Wade. But to date they have not delivered, and the evangelicals and the Catholics are restive in our ranks. Many of them are attracted – foolishly, I think – by the social welfare policies promoted by the Democratic Party. For generations, the Catholic bishops and priests have encouraged Catholic parishioners to think of social welfare as a form of charity, to mistake resources taken by coercion for free gifts, and many a Protestant preacher has in similar fashion come to preach the Social Gospel. Nonetheless, they are appalled – and rightly so – by the massacre of fifty million unborn Americans, and this has shaken them from the grasp of the progressives.

I am not arguing that the next election should or will be fought over abortion. No Republican presidential candidate has done so to date. What Mitch Daniels proposes, however, is not that the Republicans emphasize the fiscal crisis in 2012. No one would object to that. He is arguing that the social issues be set aside – temporarily, he says, until we have dealt with the fiscal crisis. In the meantime, we will have to form a larger coalition that takes in large numbers of those who favor abortion.

I have no idea whether Daniels has the wit to understand the implications of what he is proposing. I would like to think that he lacks the wit, for I would prefer to judge him a fool than to think him a knave. In any case, what I will say is that this is a matter that cannot be taken off the table any more than slavery could be taken off the table in the 1850s, Stephen Douglas to the contrary notwithstanding. We cannot have a “truce” over the legitimacy of the massacre of fifty million innocents. Truce is a euphemism for surrender – and if the Republicans surrender, the evangelicals and the Catholics will wander out of the coalition in much the same fashion in which they wandered in. And, then, what will be left?

My words were harsh – some would say, unduly harsh, and they may perhaps be right. But I do not regret pressing the matter. In my judgment, a great deal was and is at stake, and I am not alone in thinking as much. I have it on good authority that a number of Republicans, far more experienced in and knowledgeable about electoral politics in this country than I am, made the same point to Governor Daniels in private. I was told some weeks ago that, in the face of their suggestions, he stubbornly adhered to his original stance.

In consequence, I was greatly relieved to learn of Governor Daniels’ announcement yesterday that he intends to sign a bill passed by the legislature in Indiana that defunds Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers and that imposes stringent restrictions on the provision of abortions in that state. This suggests to me that we can trust him to appoint women and men as judges who will see to it that Roe v. Wade is reversed and that the question of abortion and other matters of moral police are returned to the citizens of the particular states – where their merits and demerits can be properly debated. In this and other regards, I have faith that the American people are competent to govern themselves.

One concern remains. Here is what I wrote in February:

[O]ur fiscal crisis is not the only particular that the next President will have to address. It is pressing. It may seem to be the most pressing of our problems. But I could easily imagine difficulties that would outweigh the fiscal crisis. Indeed, I suspect that such difficulties may soon present themselves. Our strategic situation is less strong than it was in the recent past. In the Pacific, the Chinese are behaving like bullies, and step by step, at a far more rapid rate than we had anticipated, they are putting military pieces in place intended to guarantee them strategic superiority offshore. What this means no one knows. But it would be foolish not to plan for the worst. My bet is that over the next fifteen years they will try to duplicate Japan’s achievement in establishing a Greater Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere. In other words, their aim will be to achieve hegemony – both military and economic – over all of their neighbors: from Australia and New Zealand in the South to North and South Korea in the North.

I also believe that we are witnessing a strategic shift in the Mediterranean and the Near East. I have argued elsewhere, at some length, that Arab nationalism is finished – and that it is highly likely that the world of Sunni Islam will follow Shiite Iran in the direction of what I call “Islamic Revivalism.” Put simply, the Arab nationalism that emerged in the 1920s and came of age in the 1940s has failed. To the Arabs, it has brought neither prosperity nor military strength, and next to no one in the younger generation (apart from opportunists) is on its side. They are turning to the only remaining cultural force that has purchase in the post-Cold War world. They are turning to Islam, and to it they now look to answer all of their questions. I cannot predict the short-term consequences of the uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Jordan, and Bahrain. But I believe that I can predict the long-term drift of politics in that part of the worlds and in Turkey as well. Those states will become more fiercely Islamic and much more hostile to us, to our European allies, and, of course, to Israel.

To this picture, we should add the Iranian quest to gain nuclear weapons. If that quest is successful – and I see no clear indication that, under Barack Obama, we are going to do anything decisive to stop it, the theocrats in Iran will become much more aggressive, and the Sunnis will move heaven and earth to get their own nuclear weapons. Given the concentration of oil in the states surrounding the Persian Gulf, this bodes ill for us and for our allies in Europe.

What does Mitch Daniels know about any of this? We have no indication. All that we know is that he believes that the military budget needs to be cut in the same manner as the rest of the federal budget. This I regard as profoundly dangerous. In the wake of the Cold War, we cut back massively – in the number of ships, the number of planes, and the number of men – and in recent years we have cancelled one procurement program after another, ignoring the gains made by the Chinese and our changing strategic situation in and beyond the Mediterranean. If Daniels thinks he can cut the budget further, I would want to know what missions he thinks we can safely drop. What we have done in recent years is to extend the responsibilities of the military while cutting back their resources. That way lies disaster.

To date, Governor Daniels has not addressed these concerns in such a manner as to allay them. It is by no means too late. He will soon decide whether to become a candidate for the nomination. He has completed his work as Governor of Indiana. He has situated himself perfectly for the political struggle ahead should he choose to undertake it. I hope that he does run and that, within the next month or two, he finds occasion for an address in which he outlines his understanding of our strategic situation and of the resources that we will need to deploy if were are going to be equal to the tasks we are apt to face.

In one or two of the comments on my earlier post, I was accused of being hostile to Governor Daniels. I was not hostile then, and I am certainly not hostile now. Of the candidates running or rumored to be running, he seemed to me then and he seems to me now to be the one best qualified to be our standard-bearer. My worry then was that he had two major blind spots and that they might portend disaster for our cause and our country. I thought it best that I express my concerns in the firmest manner possible – if only to give Governor Daniels ample opportunity to reflect on them. I restate the last of these concerns now in the hope that he will soon display in this regard the same keen understanding he has displayed in dealing with the fiscal and the educational concerns of his fellow citizens in Indiana.

Apart, perhaps, from Governor Pawlenty, who has not yet shown his cards, I know of only one Republican with sufficient seasoning who can bear comparison with Governor Daniels, and it is to this admirable man that I will devote my next post.

For reasons that I spelled out in some detail yesterday, it once made sense for conservatives to be disheartened and even defeatist. They have been fighting a rearguard action for nearly one hundred years. But, as I argued, circumstances have changed dramatically. Barack Obama has brought us to the edge of a precipice, and a majority of Americans now recognize that things cannot go on as they have in the past. The welfare state is bankrupt. The Social Security trust fund is paying out more than it is taking in. The Medicare entitlement is unsustainable, and Obamacare threatens to hurl us into the abyss.

We must either roll back entitlements and the administrative state or raise taxes to a level that is bound to extinguish growth and kill the goose that lays the golden eggs – and Americans now recognize the fact. The speech that Barack Obama delivered at George Washington University on 13 April was a reprise of his performance when he accepted the necessity of extending the Bush tax regime in December. He was angry, petulant, and rude to the guests whom he had invited to attend, as is his wont on such occasions. But he caved.

Consider the graph that accompanied John B. Taylor’s discussion in Friday’s Wall Street Journal of the budgets proposed by Barack Obama and Paul Ryan:

As you can see, the President’s original budget envisaged sustaining federal spending at a percentage of GDP (24%) dramatically above the level it reached in the penultimate year of George W. Bush’s Presidency (ca. 19.6%). Paul Ryan’s budget is aimed at bringing it back down to the latter level, and Barack Obama’s second budget, though hardly austere, is considerably less extravagant than its predecessor.

Why did so radical a President give so much ground? The answer resembles the reasoning that explains why he gave in on the Bush tax regime back in December. He may bitterly hate the fact, but he is trapped, as he has often been trapped while President, between his own heart-felt convictions and reality. The economy is sluggish and slowing. As even The New York Times has been forced to acknowledge, Ben Bernanke’s strategy of quantitative easing has failed to generate growth and reduce unemployment. It seems to be producing inflation, instead. We are also on the verge of a fiscal crisis. PIMCO has dumped its treasury bonds, and the Chinese hint that they may throw up their hands and stop purchasing them. S&P has raised questions about the reliability of the federal government’s credit. The dollar is plunging in value, and the price of oil and other commodities is going through the roof. Can you imagine what the misery index is going to look like on the first Tuesday in November, 2012?

The truth is, as Irwin Stelzer intimates, that Barack Obama is going to have to give much more ground. He is not doing at all well in the polls; the independents who put him in the Oval Office have fled. Right now he is grudgingly, reluctantly on the run. But events are moving at a considerably faster pace; he is virtually certain to get the blame for the stagflation on the horizon; and he knows as much. He has to try to dodge responsibility, and he has no hope at all of doing that if he does not to a considerable degree acquiesce. Even then, if truth be told, he is likely to get the blame. A President who pretends to be a Messiah can run, but he cannot hide.

Abraham Lincoln once observed, “Public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed.” Obama’s greatest problem is that he has lost the debate. Politely, calmly, steadily, patiently, and over a considerable period of time, Paul Ryan has in his gentle way explained to our fellow citizens that we cannot continue to live beyond our means – not, at least, on the scale that President Obama has in mind. In the meantime, the housing market has not cleared; unemployment has not fallen appreciably; no one wants a tax increase; and Congressman Ryan’s stock has gone steadily up.

Let me add that Obamacare has not fared well with the public. Time has passed, and sentiments have hardened. The latest Rasmussen poll suggests that, by a margin of almost three-to-one, Americans think that Obamacare will increase, not lessen, deficits and medical costs; that by a margin of two-to-one they think that it will worsen, rather than improve, the quality of medical care; and that those wanting repeal form a majority of the populace and outnumber the measure’s supporters by thirteen percent.

So, what is the upshot? Barring a major foreign policy crisis (Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran?), the election in 2012 is going to turn on two issues: the economy and Obamacare. There is very little chance that either will play to President Obama’s advantage. My judgment is that the presidential election in 2012 is the Republicans’ to lose.

If the Republicans nominate one of the living dead, as they did in 1996 and 2008, the President may eke out a victory. If, on the other hand, they nominate a woman or man capable of articulating the case for limited government on principled grounds, the case for a balanced budget on prudential grounds, and the case for repealing Obamacare and dismantling the administrative state on every conceivable ground, the Republicans could sweep in such a fashion as to usher in a new political era defined by balanced budgets, low taxes, and decentralization. All that we have to do is find the right standard-bearer.

About the identity of the appropriate standard-bearer I have a thought or two. Stay tuned.

More by Paul Rahe

Conservatives are inclined to be defeatist. It is hard to blame them. They have been fighting a rearguard action against the friends of the administrative state for almost a century.

It all started in 1912 when Woodrow Wilson was elected President after a campaign in which he forthrightly criticized his compatriots for not getting “beyond the Declaration of Independence,” arguing that our founding document can be “of no consequence to us unless we can translate its general terms into examples of the present day and substitute them in some vital way for the examples it itself gives, so concrete, so intimately involved in the circumstances of the day in which it was conceived and written,” and intimating that such a translation cannot be accomplished given that the Declaration is “an eminently practical document, meant for the use of practical men;  not a thesis for philosophers, but a whip for tyrants; not a theory of government, but a program of action.”

Wilson was not satisfied with the old freedom – constituted by the right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” – articulated in the second sentence of the Declaration. He wanted what he termed, in giving a name to his administration and to the book fashioned from his campaign speeches, The New Freedom, and he articulated his vision of that freedom in opposition to the thinking of Thomas Jefferson with his theory of the natural rights of the individual, his commitment to limited government, and his conviction, most fully expressed in his First Inaugural, that “the sum of good government” is “a wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuit of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned.” In his campaign, he issued a “call for emancipation of the energies of a generous people” – by which he mean regulating everyone’s pursuit of industry and improvement, and taking from the mouths of select laborers the bread they have earned.

In Wilson’s opinion, the Constitution of the United States was the great obstacle standing in the way of his “new freedom.” Thanks to the baron de Montesquieu – the only opponent, apart from Jefferson, whom he mentioned by name in his speeches – the American constitution “was founded on the law of gravitation” and “was to exist and move by virtue of the efficacy of ‘checks and balances.” The “trouble,” Wilson asserted, with “the theory” underpinning federalism, the separation of powers, and the system of checks and balances

is that government is not a machine, but a living thing. It falls not under the theory of the universe, but under the theory of organic life. It is accountable to Darwin, not to Newton. It is modified by its environment, necessitated by its tasks, shaped to its functions by the sheer pressure of life. No living thing can have its organs offset against each other as checks and live. On the contrary, its life is dependent upon their quick cooperation, their ready response to the commands of instinct or intelligence, their amicable community of purpose. Government is not a body of blind forces; it is a body of men, with highly differentiated functions, no doubt, in our modern day, of specialization with a common task and purpose. Their co-operation is indispensable, their warfare fatal. There can be no successful government without the intimate, instinctive co-ordination of the organs of life and action. This is not theory, but fact, and displays its force as fact, whatever theories may be thrown across its track. Living political constitutions must be Darwinian in structure and in practice. Society is a living organism and must obey the laws of life, not of mechanics; it must develop.

“All that progressives ask or desire,” Wilson concluded, “is permission – in an era when ‘development,’ ‘evolution,’ is the scientific word – to interpret the Constitution according to the Darwinian principle; all they ask is recognition of the fact that a nation is a living thing and not a machine.”

Wilson’s polemic would not have been so forceful and so effective had it not been buttressed by the argument articulated by Theodore Roosevelt – first in the speech The New Nationalism that he delivered in 1910 and then, even more emphatically, in the platform of the Progressive Party which he formed in 1912 when he failed to wrest the presidential nomination of the Republican Party from William Howard Taft. The simple fact that Taft came in third in the presidential race that year settled the direction that the country would take.

In 1913, the United States began dismantling the Constitution and eliminating the barriers to limited government. First came the Sixteenth Amendment – which, by legalizing the federal income tax, opened the way for a massive expansion of the national administration. Then came the Seventeenth Amendment—which, by substituting the direct popular election of Senators for their selection by the state legislatures, eliminated the capacity of the states as corporations to defend their prerogatives against federal encroachment and prepared the way for a gradual subversion of federalism.

That same year, at Wilson’s urging, Congress established the Federal Reserve Board, and we began our century-long experiment with what Franklin Delano Roosevelt would term “rational administration.” The estate tax followed in 1916, and during World War I these new federal taxes, as applied to the well-to-do, were raised to sky-high levels. It was during that war that progresssives and Americans more generally got their first taste of a centralized administration of the economy. The latter did not like it.

In consequence, in 1918, it was by no means obvious that progressivism was the wave of the future. Calling for “a return to normalcy,” Warren G. Harding was elected by a landslide. And, in the aftermath, he and his successor Calvin Coolidge pared the federal administration, paid down the national debt, and steadily lowered income taxes. It was not until the election of the progressive Republican Herbert Hoover as President in 1928 that storm clouds returned to the horizon, and it was his response to the recession that began in 1929 – which involved raising tariffs and federal income tax on high earners to very high levels, keeping interest rates high, and bailing out bankrupt businesses through the Reconstruction Finance Corporation – that laid the groundwork for the New Deal, turned the recession into a depression, and prepared the way for the election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Since that moment, the size and scope of the administrative state has grown by leaps and bounds, the courts have come to operate in accord with Wilson’s Darwinian principles, and hardly anyone has had the temerity to look back. In 1946, the newly elected Republican congress did manage to persuade the Truman administration to eliminate wage and price controls, and that congress also managed to limit union power by passing the Taft-Hartley Act. In the early 1980s, Ronald Reagan managed to reduce taxes, and George W. Bush later proceeded in the same direction. But for the most part, the Republicans have aided and abetted the growth of federal administration. Lyndon Baines Johnson may have launched the Great Society. But it was Richard Nixon who made it work. We owe to him affirmative action, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Occupation Safety and Health Administration. Ronald Reagan was not a typical Republican, and he was notably unsuccessful in his attempt to reduce the size and scope of the administrative state.

Since Reagan’s time, no Republican presidential nominee has done more than give lip service to the notion of limited government, and none of them has articulated a principled argument in defense of that notion with an eye to the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States. George H. W. Bush, Robert Dole, George W. Bush, John McCain – they were no doubt preferable to the alternative on offer. But we have to face the facts. They were all progressives of one sort or another. Their claim was that they were better than the Democrats at managing the administrative state. None of them sought to reduce it in size and scope or to dismantle it, and the two who did get elected left it considerably larger and more intrusive than they had found it.

Let me add that most of the Republicans apt to run for their party’s nomination in 2012 are cut from the same cloth. Mitt Romney is a capable, experienced businessman. By instinct, he is a manager, and in Massachusetts, with Romneycare, he demonstrated that he knows of no principles limiting the proper scope of government. Newt Gingrich is a man of ideas, and some of them are excellent. All honor to the Congressman who invented the 401k! But he, too, is a managerial progressive, perfectly capable of joining Nancy Pelosi in launching a campaign against global warming. Mike Huckabee is no better. Just look at what he did as Governor of Arkansas.

It is not hard to see why this country has entered on the road to serfdom. As I argued in my book Soft Despotism, Democracy’s Drift, the progressive agenda suited the opinion-makers educated in our best universities. It flattered their vanity by promising to put them and those crafted in their image in control. And that agenda suited many of the men in the street. As I argued in that book, the freedom provided in liberal commercial societies such as our own brings with it a less pleasant companion – the psychological state that Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Tocqueville called inquiétude, which is to say, uneasiness. In the best of circumstances, the inquietude that accompanies political and economic liberty can give rise to what was called in the eighteenth century political jealousy – i.e, to the wariness and vigilance that makes one sensitive to tyranny’s approach. In the worst of circumstances, however, it can eventuate in servility: in our trading liberty for a promise of security.

“What was our hope in 1932?” asked Franklin Delano Roosevelt in an address that he delivered at Madison Square Garden in October, 1936. “Above all other things the American people wanted peace. They wanted peace of mind instead of gnawing fear.” FDR was no fool. He was a political genius. He understood perfectly the psychological foundations of liberal democracy’s despotic drift, and he exploited this understanding to the hilt.

How, then, can one blame conservatives for being defeatist? They have been defeated time and again. As FDR’s aide Harry Hopkins reportedly once said, “We will tax and tax and spend and spend and elect and elect” – and so they did.

There is, however, one fly in the ointment. As Margaret Thatcher one observed, “The trouble with socialism is that sooner or later you run out of other people’s money.” Then, you can no longer elect and elect if you tax and tax and spend and spend.

That day has come. We went from the New Freedom to the New Deal, from the New Deal to the New Frontier, from the New Frontier to the Great Society, and from the Great Society to Barack Obama’s New Foundation – and now, thanks to that same Barack Obama, we stand on the edge of an abyss, and we are beginning to think about returning to the old foundation.

Everyone knows that we stand on the edge of an abyss – and grudgingly, bitterly, angrily, petulantly, as is his wont, in his speech at George Washington University on 13 April, Barack Obama admitted as much. When was the last time that a President of the United States had to abandon his proposed budget within two months of submitting it? The issue now is not whether the administrative state is going to be rolled back. It is by how much.

I read on the front page of today’s Wall Street Journal that the “financiers” are switching to the GOP – that the “hedge-fund titans who backed [the] Democrats” are opening “their wallets for [the] Republicans.”

Ladies and gentlemen, the rats are leaving the ship.

If I am an optimist and think that conservatives should embrace the slogan “Hope and Change,” it is because things are so bad that they are apt to get much, much better, not worse. Thanks to Barack Obama – the best friend we conservatives have had in the White House since Calvin Coolidge, we are on the verge of what I described last April as a new birth of freedom.

More by Paul Rahe

The phrase politically correct has its origins in the Stalinist left. Its revival not so long ago by America’s New Left was an ominous development. Its pertinence to the present discontents points to a propensity visible now, even among mainstream liberals, for politicizing nearly everything.

There was a time, however, in American life when the personal was not considered political and the political was not regarded as personal. The distinction was, in fact, a principle central to American life – for the modern liberal republic stands or falls on the conviction that religion and politics are separable. It is this notion – that what is primordially personal (religious faith, first and foremost, but other things as well) can be made for the most part politically irrelevant – which distinguishes the limited government peculiar to modern times from all prior government, which assumed the contrary. When the personal is made political and the political, personal, it is no longer theoretically possible to distinguish public from private, and it is no longer politically possible to restrict the government’s reach. This inability brought with it considerable disadvantages in earlier times. In an era in which modern technology has extended the reach of surveillance in manifold ways, it is a catastrophe.

It is, of course, an open question whether these distinctions can in practice be sustained. In the eighteenth century, figures such as Denis Diderot presumed that it was possible to sustain a civil society in which the citizens were atheists. Diderot’s erstwhile friend Jean-Jacques Rousseau harbored grave doubts about this. The history of the 20th century suggests that Rousseau may have had a point, for the totalitarian movements that first emerged in Europe in the wake of World War I – at the very moment when the world had purportedly been made safe for liberal democracy – were secularized religions. Communism in Russia, fascism in Italy, and National Socialism in Germany were all-encompassing. All three subscribed to a secularized vision of salvation history. All three denied the distinction between private and public, between the personal and the political. All three re-occupied the space from which, within liberal democracy, religion had been made to withdraw.

None of this would much concern us today, all of this would be a matter of mere antiquarian interest, were there not powerful indications that the totalitarian temptation persists – not least in the countries never subject to communism, fascism, or National Socialism. I was put in mind of all of this by a trivial but nonetheless revealing, recent event – a tempest in the teapot of surgical science.

In the February issue of Surgery News, a distinguished surgeon named Lazar Greenfield, the lead editor of the journal and president-elect of the American College of Surgeons, published a light-hearted editorial regarding St. Valentine’s Day regarded as so offensive by some of his fellow surgeons that he has been forced to resign his editorship and may tomorrow be barred from assuming his presidency. Since the editorial has been suppressed and the pertinent issue of the journal is no longer available online, I will reprint it, as others have, in its entirety. The offending passage can be found in the final two paragraphs:

One of the legends of St. Valentine says that he was a priest arrested by Roman Emperor Claudius II for secretly performing marriages. Claudius wanted to enlarge his army and believed that married men did not make good soldiers, rather like Halsted’s feelings about surgical residents. But Valentine’s Day is about love, and if you remember a romantic gut feeling when you met your significant other, it might have a physiological basis.

It has long been known that Drosophila raised on starch media are more likely to mate with other starch-raised flies, whereas those fed maltose have similar preferences. In a study published online in the November issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, investigators explored the mechanism for this preference by treating flies with antibiotics to sterilize the gut and saw the preferences disappear (Proc. Nad. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 2010 Nov. 1).

In cultures of untreated flies, the bacterium  L. plantarum was more common in those on starch, and sure enough, when L. plantarum was returned to the sterile groups, the mating preference returned. The best explanation for this is revealed in the significant differences in their sex pheromones. These experiments also support the hologenome theory of evolution wherein the unit of natural selection is the “holobiont,” or combination of organism and its microorganisms, that determines mating preferences.

Mating gets more interesting when you have an organism that can choose between sexual and asexual reproduction, like the rotifer. Biologists say that it’s more advantageous for a rotifer to remain asexual and pass 100% of its genetic information to the next generation. But if the environment changes, rotifers must adapt quickly in order to survive and reproduce with new gene combinations that have an advantage over existing genotypes. So in this new situation, the stressed rotifers, all of which are female, begin sending messages to each other to produce males for the switch to sexual reproduction (Nature 2010 Oct. 13). You can draw your own inference about males not being needed until there’s trouble in the environment.

As far as humans are concerned, you may think you know all about sexual signals, but you’d be surprised by new findings. It’s been known since the 1990s that heterosexual women living together synchronize their menstrual cycles because of pheromones, but when a study of lesbians showed that they do not synchronize, the researchers suspected that semen played a role. In fact, they found ingredients in semen that include mood enhancers like estrone, cortisol, prolactin, oxytocin, and serotonin; a sleep enhancer, melatonin; and of course, sperm, which makes up only 1%-5%. Delivering these compounds into the richly vascularized vagina also turns out to have major salutary effects for the recipient. Female college students having unprotected sex were significantly less depressed than were those whose partners used condoms (Arch. Sex. Behav. 2002;31:289-93). Their better moods were not just a feature of promiscuity, because women using condoms were just as depressed as those practicing total abstinence. The benefits of semen contact also were seen in fewer suicide attempts and better performance on cognition tests.

So there’s a deeper bond between men and women than St. Valentine would have suspected, and now we know there’s a better gift for that day than chocolates.

Let me preface my remarks by saying that I have no idea whether the most recent of the studies referred to in the penultimate paragraph is sound. We live in the era of junk science. But what got Dr. Greenfield in hot water was not his citation of any particular studies. It was his presumption that the “bond between men and women” is natural and runs deep. In short, what every student of biology knows – that within nature there is a teleology having to do with the survival of the species which underpins the distinction between the two sexes and produces between them a natural affinity for one another – no surgeon who knows what is good for him may now say.

It is telling that Dr. Greenfield has not defended himself and that he is abject in his apologies. It is even more telling that, within the community of surgeons, no one has stepped forward to speak up publically in his defense. To an ever-increasing degree – in the academy and in the professions – we live in a moral and intellectual atmosphere that is stifling. We live in a time in which those who want to advance in the professions must pretend to believe what we all know to be untrue. The totalitarian temptation persists. I doubt that it will ever go away.

UPDATE: On Sunday, Lazar Greenfield resigned his position as president-elect of the American College of Surgeons.

More By Paul Rahe:

Krugmanitis Fells Another Nobel Prize-Winner

Tyranny's Allure

Lazar Greenfield Takes the Fall

Here is some news that, before too long, some of you may be able to use. There is a new technique for diagnosing prostate cancer. It is being deployed on an experimental basis at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Washington, DC. And it works. I know. I am a guinea pig.

I am in my early sixties, and I have four children under the age of twelve. A maternal cousin died of prostate cancer – after having his prostate removed – when he was in his mid-sixties. After discovering that he had an elevated Prostate Specific Antigen (PSA), my brother had  a biopsy; on the basis of what his physician found, he had his prostate surgically removed; and today, almost two decades thereafter, he is in fine fettle. So mindful of the fate that might be mine, I watch, I wait, and I read what the standard websites have to say on the question. I have no particular desire to die right now; I have even less desire to abandon my wife and children; and my wife seems to think that it might be a good thing if I were to hang around for a while.

Not long ago, my PSA, which was low, took a sudden jump. The websites – this one  is a good place in which to start – indicate that this is a warning sign. If one’s PSA doubles in eighteen months, I learned, it may be an indicator not only that one has prostate cancer, but that the cancer is aggressive as well. The distinction matters. Something like 60% of men my age have prostate cancer. In most cases, however, it will take something like thirty years for it to become a threat to their health, and most of them will no longer then be around. But if one has aggressive cancer and it is not caught and dealt with forthwith, one is done for.

Unfortunately, diagnosis is not easy. The PSA test is unreliable. Among other things, it does not distinguish between slow-growing and aggressive cancer. The digital rectal exam is more indicative, but there are no nodules on the prostate that a physician can detect with his fingers until fairly late in the process of a cancer’s development.

Even more to the point, the process for taking a biopsy – the only procedure that can eventuate in a reliable diagnosis – is hit and miss. An ultrasound is taken to map the prostate of someone suspected of having cancer; it is then divided into twelve sectors; and the biopsy, guided by the ultrasound, takes a single sample from each of the twelve sectors. If the cancer is quite advanced – as was presumably the case with my cousin – the biopsy will catch it. If it is small and in its early stages, it can very easily be missed.

When my PSA took a jump, I called a distinguished urologist whom I have known since we were children. I laid out the family history, and I mentioned my PSA results. He consulted Dr. Peter A. Pinto at NIH, asked him what he recommended, and I was invited to assist him in his research by serving as a subject. In consequence, over Spring vacation, back in March, I spent two days in our nation’s capital, undergoing a set of procedures that will soon in all likelihood, I am told, be more generally available.

On day one, the staff at the Molecular Imaging Program subjected me to trans-rectal Magnetic Resource Imaging (MRI) with Gadolinium. This involves the insertion of an endorectal coil into the rectum, the inflation of a balloon to hold it steady, and the introduction of an intravenous contrast material into one’s veins. In the course of the MRI, one is slid into a machine that produces a powerful magnetic field – where, from time to time for about an hour, one is assaulted by radio frequency pulses. With the help of sophisticated software, the technicians who operate the machine con produce a detailed picture of the prostate. And here is the kicker – if you have cancer, it shows up as a splotch in the picture, and those working with these procedures can grade any splotches they see with an eye to the likelihood that they are cancerous.

If nothing suspicious is found in the course of the MRI, that is the end of the story. If, however, there are suspicious splotches, one returns to NIH on day two to have a biopsy, which was my fate. Using sophisticated software, the technicians initially map the picture of the prostate produced by the MRI onto the picture produced by ultrasound. Then, guided by these images, a surgeon, performing the biopsy, samples the precise places where the MRI found suspicious splotches. To supplement this procedure, he then performs an ordinary biopsy, taking samples from the twelve sectors into which the ultrasound divides the prostate.

The first set of procedures is not a joy, but they are considerably less unpleasant than a colonoscopy; the second set involves some discomfort, but, at NIH, they use novocaine to deaden the prostate and reduce the pain. In my case, the MRI team identified five suspicious patches – three of them moderately likely to be cancerous, two of them worrisome but much less likely to be malignant. The biopsy revealed two minuscule patches that were cancerous. Each made up something like 2% of the biological material in the particular sample taken. In neither case was there any indication that the cancer is aggressive.

So, in a year or so, I will undergo another trans-rectal MRI. If nothing has changed that will be the end of it. If the MRI indicates the existence of more suspicious patches or if the previously existing patches have gotten larger, I will undergo another biopsy. If and when they find aggressive cancer, I can opt for treatment – which is most likely to be either surgery or radiation.

In the last quarter-century, I was told while at NIH, there has been a dramatic drop in the number of deaths from prostate cancer. The reason appears to be that PSA testing, digital rectal testing, and biopsies – when these techniques are all in play – often enough enable physicians to detect aggressive prostate cancer early on. And, when early detection is followed by surgery or radiation, they can usually stop the cancer in its tracks.

The new techniques, being pioneered by Dr. Pinto and his team, promise to identify the tissue that is suspect and to enable those conducting biopsies to hone in on the suspect tissue. When these techniques are sanctioned for general use, they should make early diagnosis easy, and they should then dramatically reduce the number of deaths resulting from prostate cancer.

Believe it or not, some of our tax dollars are actually being put to good use.

Last summer, I wrote a series of posts, examining the question of executive temperament. I started by exploring in detail its absence on Barack Obama; went on to examine its presence in Mitch Daniels, Chris Christie, and Bobby Jindal; and ended with a piece suggesting that executive temperament, which Franklin Delano Roosevelt possessed in abundance, is insufficient: we need a President who is principled, and there are no better principles than those on which this country was founded.

I did not hear President Obama’s speech this afternoon. In the class that I am teaching with a colleague entitled Shakespeare: History, Politics, and Poetry, we had a guest lecturer, his subject was Hamlet, and I figured that I would learn more from listening to him than from listening to the President of the United States.

All of this notwithstanding, I could not help thinking of our President as I listened to the lecture – for he bears a certain resemblance to Hamlet. Like the Prince of Denmark, he is a product of the university. He may not have been taught at Occidental College and Columbia University what Hamlet was presumably taught at Wittenberg: that man is totally depraved, that the world in which we live is itself fallen as a consequence of original sin, that salvation is by faith alone, and that works are epiphenomenal and inconsequential. But he does appear, in the course of his education, to have come to believe that nothing is right or wrong but thinking makes it so, and he evidently prefers speech to deeds.

These days, to be sure, he gives fewer speeches. His handlers, who recognize the damage that overexposure can do, see to that. But he does even less – unless you consider playing golf, partying, and vacationing here, there, and everywhere a species of praxis. He could not get around to thinking about the Libyan crisis because he had . . . ahem . . . a scheduling problem. And when he finally made a move, it was, typically, too little, too late.

This afternoon’s speech – which, as a penance for my sins (which must be many and grievous), I just ploughed through – was in keeping with the President’s habitual practice. He said nothing, and he said it at considerable length. Paul Ryan and the Republicans in the House have laid out a plan to balance the budget over a considerable span of years. It is imperfect, but it is also impressive. The recent budget agreement, negotiated by John Boehner with the Democrats may be a con, as many now contend. But Paul Ryan’s budget is nothing of the sort. It is a serious, responsible attempt to chart out how we might cope with a crisis that poses a grave threat to our long-term well-being.

Obama’s response was to posture – to take cheap, predictable shots at some of the cuts proposed by the Republicans; to propose severe cuts in defence, the one part of the federal budget that may merit an increase; to lie, just as he has in the past, about the putative savings implicit in the healthcare bill passed last year, and to propose tax increases on “the richest Americans” – which is to say, on anyone who threatens to become prosperous. In typical fashion, he made dramatic claims and mentioned large numbers but provided no information as to how those numbers were generated.

In short, he went through the motions. He acknowledged that the times are out of joint and that there is something rotten in the state of America: to wit, that the national debt poses a threat to our well-being. He promised to defend the programs that lie outside the constitutional prerogatives of the federal government; he proposed to cut the programs that are central to the constitutional responsibilities of the federal government; and he lied through his teeth with regard to the fiscal consequences of our raising taxes on those who aspire to be prosperous and not repealing his healthcare reform.

I will not revisit what I detailed last summer in my examination of Barack Obama’s lack of an executive temperament. Here it is sufficient to say that, whereas Harry Truman had a sign on his desk saying, “The Buck Stops Here,” the motto of the Obama administration ought to be, “Passing the Buck."

You have to hand it to Muamar Gaddafi and Bashar al-Assad. They and their minions have an unerring instinct for finding what Lenin called “useful idiots,” and they know their prey.

For a measly quarter of a million a month, the Libyan tyrant hired the Monitor Group, founded by a group of faculty members at Harvard, to shill on his behalf, and in the process he managed to snare not only the London School of Economics but also – as I pointed out last week – an American political scientist inclined to think he is “an internationally renowned political theorist,” who has even now not yet figured out that he and a host of others were snookered by Gadaffi’s well-heeled and charming son Saif.

Gadaffi’s Syrian counterpart is evidently up to similar tricks, and I would not be surprised to learn that he, too, recently made an appearance among the clients of the Monitor Group. In an article which that “internationally renowned political theorist” wrote for The Huffington Post  in early February, he not only told his readers that Gaddafi “rules by means other than fear” and is “not detested in the way that Mubarak has been detested.” He also fawned on “former ophthalmologist Bashar Assad and his British-educated, banking career wife Asma,” whom he describes as “relatively popular among Syrians with whom they mix regularly at restaurants and in the Sukh, where they wear blue jeans.” These two, he tells us, “are not passionate Baathists, but members of the Alawite minority and Syrian patriots who have experimented (ever so cautiously) with opening society, engaging young people, developing a pluralistic cultural legacy (through a new program with the Louvre).”

I quote this passage as I did in my earlier post – because you will find sentiments of a strikingly similar sort in an article published in this month’s Vogue. Entitled Asma al-Assad: A Rose in the Desert, it begins by telling us, “Asma al-Assad, Syria’s dynamic first lady, is on a mission to create a beacon of culture and secularism in a powder-keg region – and to put a modern face on her husband’s regime.”

She is, you see, everything that Vogue readers admire: “glamorous, young, and very chic – the freshest and most magnetic of first ladies. Her style is not the counture-and-bling dazzle of Middle Eastern power but a deliberate lack of adornment. She’s a rare combination: a thin, long-limbed beauty with a trained analytic mind who dresses with cunning understatement. Paris Match calls her ‘the element of light in a country full of shadow zones.’ She is the first lady of Syria.”

Now I will readily admit that Bashar al-Assad has an eye for the ladies. If we are to judge by the photographs taken by James Nachtwey for Vogue, we have to admit that Asma al-Assad is easy on the eye. “Dark-brown eyes, wavy chin-length brown hair, long neck, an energetic grace. No watch, no jewelry apart from Chanel agates around her neck, not even a wedding ring, but fingernails lacquered a dark blue-green.” You get the picture: a classy dame – well worthy of your admiration – what every woman wants to be, and what every man desires.

One has to wonder, nonetheless, just how much her husband’s minions paid Vogue to have Joan Juliet Buck write regarding Syria that “it’s a secular country where women earn as much as men and the Muslim veil is forbidden in universities, a place without bombings, unrest, or kidnappings” and to remark that “Asma’s husband, Bashar al-Assad, was elected president in 2000, after the death of his father, Hafez al-Assad, with a startling 97 percent of the vote.”

Of course, Ms. Buck is not stupid. She provides herself with ample cover. When she speaks of Syria as “the safest country in the Middle East,” she acknowledges that “the State Department’s Web site says, ‘the Syrian government conducts intense physical and electronic surveillance of both Syrian citizens and foreign visitors,” and she prefaces her discussion of Assad’s election with the observation that Syria’s “shadow zones are deep and dark.” But this literary maneuver is not only self-protective; it also serves to increase the Syrian tyranny’s allure. Who, after all, would not want to explore “shadow zones” that are, ahem, “deep and dark.”

I will not spoil all the fun. You can read the article for yourself. In it, you will earn about Asma’s education in computer science, her career at JP Morgan in London, the beginnings of her whirlwind romance with the son of the president of Syria, and their marriage nine years ago not long after he succeeded his father. You will be told about the visit of Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt, and you will be taken on a tour of the apartment Asma shares with Bashar and their children. You will be told that “the household is run on wildly democratic principles.” It is all quite endearing.

But anyone who has read the book Strong Democracy by that “internationally renowned political theorist” or who paid attention to his description in The Huffington Post of Saif Gaddafi  as a man who has written “two forthcoming books focused on liberalism in the developing world,” in which he “has pioneered a gradualist approach to civil society in Libya, insisting along the way that he would accept no office that wasn't subject to popular elections,” will find a mite bit familiar Buck’s claim in Vogue that the “central mission” undertaken by Syria’s 35-year-old first lady “is to change the mind-set of six million Syrians under eighteen, encourage them to engage in what she calls ‘active citizenship.’” “‘It’s about everyone taking shared responsibility in moving this country forward, about empowerment in a civil society’” Asma al-Assad reportedly told Buck. “’We all have a stake in this country; it will be what we make it.’” In 2005, we are told,

she founded Massar, built around a series of discovery centers where children and young adults from five to 21 engage in creative, informal approaches to civic responsibility. Massar’s mobile Green Team has touched 200,000 kids across Syria since 2005. The organization is privately funded through donations. The Syria Trust for Development, formed in 2007, oversees Massar as well as her first NGO, the rural micro-credit association FIRDOS, and SHABAB, which exists to give young people business skills they need for the future.

And then there’s her cultural mission: “People tend to see Syria as artifacts and history,” she says. “For us it’s about the accumulation of cultures, traditions, values, customs. It’s the difference between hardware and software: the artifacts are the hardware, but the software makes all the difference—the customs and the spirit of openness. We have to make sure that we don’t lose that. . . . ” Here she gives an apologetic grin. “You have to excuse me, but I’m a banker—that brand essence.”

In short, Asma al-Assad is the Saif Gaddafi of Syria, and she is peddling to the American press the same snake oil that her Libyan counterpart sold to that gullible “internationally renowned political theorist” I wrote about last week. When I read of her achievements, I cannot help but suspect that the Syrian and Libyan tyrants are advised by the same public relations firm, and I wonder just how often the “internationally renowned political theorist” taken in by the debonair son of Muamar Gaddafi has been taken for a ride by the lovely bride Bashar al-Assad brought from London to Damascus.

More By Paul Rahe

The Vanity of the Intellectual

The War Between the Sexes

Intellectuals have a tendency to become whores. They are not especially well paid, and they resent the fact. But modest compensation is not the thing that bothers them the most. What they really crave is recognition, and in its pursuit they are apt to become slaves to fashion. But pursuing the latest intellectual fad is not the greatest of the sins that they are inclined to commit – for they are even more apt to adopt a servile and submissive posture when in the presence of political power. Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, and Mao all had an intellectual claque in the West. Fidel Castro still does. Even Kim Jong-il and Muamar Gaddafi have had such admirers.

As it happens, I am acquainted with the most prominent of those who cozied up to Gaddafi. I came across his name this morning in this connection when I googled Gadaffi, and on the website of my acquaintance, I read the following announcement – which was posted last Tuesday:

Dr. Benjamin R. Barber, the internationally renowned political theorist and Distinguished Fellow at the policy center Demos, released the following statement announcing his resignation from the governing board of the Qadaffi Foundation.

This gave me pause. For I had lost touch with Ben. I had no notion that he had gotten himself involved with Gaddafi, and, though I had always thought him imprudent, I would never have imagined him capable of folly on such a scale.

We first met thirty years ago at a meeting of the Conference for the Study of Political Thought. I was a neophyte making my debut by delivering the keynote address at that particular gathering, which took place at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and Ben was the first to ask a question after the talk. It was a revealing moment – for, instead of simply posing a question, he first gave a five-to-ten minute talk that had everyone in the room rolling his eyes and then asked whether I agreed with him. I do not remember the substance of his mini-lecture, but I do remember my answer which was as brief as his “question” was long. “No!” I said, “Next question!” And the audience roared with laughter.

Most professors are prone to vanity. None of us are immune. But some are off the charts, and Ben was among these. When I encountered him in later years, I always found him genial. But, if truth be told, though I profited from one or two of the articles that he had written as a young scholar, I never found his books of any interest at all. I remember being amused when I read that he had become an advisor to Bill Clinton and was going to DC every week to conduct a tutorial for the President. That was his dream.

I missed the beginning of Ben’s love affair with Gadaffi. It appears to have begun in 2006 – about a year before Cécilia Sarkozy, then married to the French President, negotiated the release of five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor who had been condemned to death in Libya for purportedly spreading HIV among children in a hospital there.

In an op-ed published in The Washington Post in the wake of this event, to which he gave the title Gaddafi’s Libya: An Ally for America? Ben argued, plausibly, that Gaddafi was “the real architect of the release.” Then he went on to say:

Written off not long ago as an implacable despot, Gaddafi is a complex and adaptive thinker as well as an efficient, if laid-back, autocrat. Unlike almost any other Arab ruler, he has exhibited an extraordinary capacity to rethink his country's role in a changed and changing world.

“I say this from experience,” he added, citing “several one-on-one conversations” that he had had in the previous year with Gaddafi, who had told Ben “that in the Libya that comes after him there would be no new Gaddafi but self-governance,” and who had purportedly held comparable meetings with Robert Putnam of Harvard and other political scientists, including Francis Fukuyama and Joseph N. Nye. In his op-ed, Ben dismissed the notion that Gaddafi’s comments were “mere bluster,” explaining,

Surprisingly flexible and pragmatic, Gaddafi was once an ardent socialist who now acknowledges private property and capital as sometimes appropriate elements in developing societies. Once an opponent of representative central government, he is wrestling with the need to delegate substantial authority to competent public officials if Libya is to join the global system. Once fearful of outside media, he has permitted satellite dishes throughout his country, and he himself surfs the Internet.

Libya under Gaddafi has embarked on a journey that could make it the first Arab state to transition peacefully and without overt Western intervention to a stable, non-autocratic government and, in time, to an indigenous mixed constitution favoring direct democracy locally and efficient government centrally.

Such a thought may seem absurd to Western observers who remember only Gaddafi's insurgent past and the heinous terrorist act over Lockerbie. Yet Gaddafi also wrote a direct democratic manifesto ("The Green Book") in the 1970s and convened hundreds of "People's Conferences" where women and men have met regularly for the past 30 years. Have they wielded much actual power? No. Could they be built upon? Yes.

Completely off the radar, without spending a dollar or posting a single soldier, the United States has a potential partner in what could become an emerging Arab democracy smack in the middle of Africa's north coast. This partner possesses vital sulfur-free gas and oil resources, a pristine Mediterranean shoreline, a non-Islamist Muslim population, and intelligence capacities crucial to the war on terrorism. Gaddafi, for example, ardently opposes the al-Qaeda brand of Wahhabist fundamentalism that Saudi Arabia sponsors.

Cynics will disregard all this; but after America's "realist" experiences in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, this may actually turn out to be a recipe for peace and partnership in the unlikeliest of places.

These comments earned Ben more than one rebuke. On the Harper’s website, Ken Silverstein compared him Leni Riefenstahl, and on Abu Aardvark, Marc Lynch wrote Ben an open letter:

You presented some very interesting ideas about Libya in your Washington Post op-ed.  I found particularly interesting your ideas about Col. Qaddafi's experiments with direct democracy and efficient government. I know just the person you should talk to about these ideas - a brave journalist exposing official corruption in Libya by the name of Dhayf al-Gazzal. Be careful shaking his hand, though, because about a year and a half ago he had his fingers cut off before his body was riddled with bullets and abandoned in the desert. Hey, wasn't that right around the time you were having such pleasant chats about direct democracy and the Green Book with the flexible and adaptive Colonel? How embarrassing! Anyway, since he's dead, he might not be as vivacious a conversationalist as Col Qaddafi. But I'm sure he'd be fascinated by your notions of Qaddafi's enlightened rule and might even have some notes.

This criticism had no apparent effect. And on 1 February 2011, after the collapse of the regime in Tunisia and the uprising in Egypt, Ben wrote an even more embarrassing piece for The Huffington Post, arguing that “neither Libya nor Syria are likely to follow Egypt into a chaotic uprising, and neither Qadaffi nor Bashar Assad are likely to be forced into exile any time soon.”

Take Libya: Libya has a small population of around five million, ample supplies of natural gas and oil, a history of being anything but a proxy of the West; it also has a tradition of participatory local governance (if in non-essential matters) because of Muammar Qadaffi's long interest in participatory democracy and peoples' committees (see his Green Book from the 1970s!). Moreover, Qadaffi himself is not detested in the way that Mubarak has been detested and rules by means other than fear. His son Saif, with a Ph.D. in political philosophy from the London School of Economics and two forthcoming books focused on liberalism in the developing world , has pioneered a gradualist approach to civil society in Libya, insisting along the way that he would accept no office that wasn't subject to popular elections. No dynasty likely there.

Syria is governed by old Baathists as Iraq formerly was, but its ruling family has now passed into the hands of the former ophthalmologist Bashar Assad and his British-educated, banking career wife Asma, both of whom are relatively popular among Syrians with whom they mix regularly at restaurants and in the Sukh, where they wear blue jeans (not exactly Mubarak!). They are not passionate Baathists, but members of the Alawite minority and Syrian patriots who have experimented (ever so cautiously) with opening society, engaging young people, developing a pluralistic cultural legacy (through a new program with the Louvre). Bashar spoke this week in a Wall Street Journal interview about the need for change. But like Qadaffi, Assad is not lumbered with a reputation for being an American stooge – a key element in the popular indictment of Mubarak and the Shah of Iran before him.

I do hope that recent events in Libya have caused the author of these observations to have second thoughts about Bashar Assad, who runs one of the world’s most efficient police states. But my aim is not to score points against poor Ben, who is as amiable as he is silly. The main point that I want to make is that vanity, the vice that besets the intellectual, can make a man into a moron. Flattery from on high is apt to corrupt almost anyone who desperately hankers after recognition.

UPDATE: In linking to this post, Glenn Reynolds at www.instapundit.com drew attention to a report on the Monitor Group, which fronted for Gaddafi in this country and arranged his trysts with would-be public intellectuals. There is also a piece on the Huffington post.

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Troy Senik’s post Defining College Down  deserves close attention – for it identifies a serious defect in American public policy very much in need of remedy. As the study by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa  to which Troy points – Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses – demonstrates, most of what goes on at institutions of higher education in this country is a terrible waste of time and resources. This is especially true at the larger public universities where next to nothing is learned by students in their first two years on campus. As that same study shows, however, this is far less likely to be the case at our more prestigious private universities and liberal arts colleges.

I do not think that the reforms suggested by Troy would change things much, however. Dormitories exist at the schools where serious learning is far more apt to take place, and nearly all freshman and sophomores at such schools live in dormitories. Moreover, teaching and research are no more separate functions at those institutions than they are at the larger public universities. The reports that Troy cites tell the tale. As CBS News puts it by way of summary:

Not much is asked of students . . . . Half did not take a single course requiring 20 pages of writing during their prior semester, and one-third did not take a single course requiring even 40 pages of reading per week.

If “45 percent of students show no significant improvement in the key measures of critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing by the end of their sophomore years,” it is because, during their first two years in college, they have not been asked to do much critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing in their courses. That is the bottom line.

I do not doubt that the professoriate is, in part, at fault. The modern public university is a bit like the old Soviet Union. In the latter, the following slogan pertained: we pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us. The modern public university is based on a tacit social contract quite similar in character: students pretend to study, and the professors pretend to teach.

There is more of a reason for this than you might at first think. The real problem is that something like half of the students who go off to college in this country are not prepared to do college-level work and have not the slightest desire to do so. So what happens is that our universities take their parents’ money  or the money that the students themselves have borrowed and give the students what the majority of them want. Of course, a student at one of these universities can get an education if he wants to.  All that he has to do is to seek out those professors who are really interested in teaching and are demanding (and they are, in fact, numerous). The university takes care of those who have no interest in getting an education as well. It is a country club and a brothel all rolled up into one. What more could a half-wit eighteen-year-old ask?

I teach now at Hillsdale College – where the students are made to work very hard and love it. That is what they come expecting, that is why they come, and every year applications jump dramatically (something like 40% last year). I have taught at Yale University and Cornell University, where the same thing is true. But for twenty-four years I taught at the University of Tulsa – a not too terribly selective private university that had its origins as a municipal private university attempting to make up for the absence in Tulsa of a public university.  TU is far more rigorous than Oklahoma State University or the University of Oklahoma, but it is not all that demanding.

Every Fall while there, I taught a course in ancient history aimed at freshman. In my first few years there, in the pep talk I gave on the first day of class, I said the following: “I have sometimes heard it said that at this university there are some students who want a degree but not an education. I cannot believe that anyone would waste a large sum of money and four years on such a thing. But if there is any truth in the claim and if there is anyone here today who falls into this category, that person is in the wrong place – for I am here to give you an education or, at least, the beginning of an education, and this course is not a gut.” Every year, a third of my students self-identified and immediately dropped the course.

I profited from this – I had a class full of enthusiastic students who wanted to learn (a consummation devoutly to be wished), and the whiners and those apt to be resentful had taken flight – but my department lost out.  Our universities are run by bean counters.  In most places, no one asks whether the students are learning anything. The more students a department processes (teach is not the proper word), the more faculty lines it gets. In consequence, for those interested in building academic programs, all of the incentives militate against offering general education courses for freshmen and sophomores that are demanding in any way. A newly minted assistant professor who is demanding is apt to be quickly shown the door.

When I became department chairman and realized the consequences of what I had been doing, I stopped giving that pep talk. I still taught in the same way, however – and each year one-third of my students flunked the course. They took the first exam, flunked it, and did not write any of the papers subsequently due and did not show up for the second exam and the final. Had I really been cynical, I would have dumbed the course down, cut the reading load radically, and stopped requiring that the students write papers. I had colleagues who did just that.

There were, in fact, entire departments who did just that. It was said of the psychology department (which had a distinguished niche graduate program, let me add) that undergraduates who enrolled in the courses it offered could do the reading or attend the lectures but that they certainly did not have to do both, and more than half of those enrolled were awarded A’s. Psychology was, as a consequence, the largest major in the university.

The public universities in Oklahoma, I learned from transfer students, were even less demanding, and the same is true nearly everywhere. While I was at the University of Tulsa, the business school at the University of Arkansas added a math requirement. I guess that they had finally gotten around to thinking that businessmen might need to know how to add, subtract, multiply, divide, and track costs and sales. That semester, I was told by a friend who taught at Arkansas, one third of the students in the business school transferred to the school of communications, which did not have a math requirement. Guess which school then got more resources from the administration to do hires?

So what is amiss? And what can be done? In my judgment, all of this arises from the fact that too many young Americans go off to college. This was not always true. It is a product of public policy. Back in the 1950s, Dwight D. Eisenhower asked Nelson Rockefeller to chair a commission focused on America’s future, and that commission recommended that many more young Americans attend college. What happened in the aftermath is that our colleges and universities accommodated these students.

All of these students had high school degrees; many were, however, only semi-literate. It is easy to separate the sheep from the goats. In class, I often ask students to read out loud a document, a paragraph from a political tract, a poem, or something or the sort. The literate can do so without difficulty; semi-literate freshmen read out loud less well than my elder daughter did when she was five: they stumble, skip words, and mispronounce other words because they do not comprehend what  is on the page. The latter cannot be expected to read more than forty pages a week. If asked to do so, they will balk. Moreover, they cannot write to save their lives. Correcting their papers for errors in grammar and diction takes real labor and is ordinarily a waste of time – for they generally have no interest in improving and they pay no heed to the comments on their papers.

The word student comes from a Latin word meaning “he who is eager.”  If the “students” discussed in the study Troy cites are eager for anything it is for entertainment and pleasure. The universities accommodate these desires. They do not properly police conduct in the dormitories. In the bathrooms, they sell condoms, instead. They provide luxurious sports facilities and golf courses. They sponsor sports programs that function as entertainment, and they bend all of the rules to accommodate athletes who are not even semi-literate. They provide bogus academic programs, and they reward those within the professoriate who cynically exploit the situation.

It is, moreover, likely to get far, far worse –  for the bean counters are on the march, and they have the backing of many political conservatives. Back in October, The Wall Street Journal published an article entitled Putting a Price on Professors, which reported that the administration at Texas A&M had done a study evaluating  its expenditures by way of a 265-page spreadsheet that “amounted to a profit-and-loss statement for each faculty member, weighing annual salary against students taught, tuition generated, and research grants obtained.” Earlier this month, the editorial page of that newspaper celebrated the fact that Texas A&M was going to use “such metrics of value added as research dollars brought in by a professor and student evaluations of how well a teacher performs in the classroom” to determine the allocation of salaries, and it expressed the hope that “the school’s regents succeed in their efforts to spread pay-for-performance accountability to other public universities.”

On the face of it, this might seem to make sense. Who could object to linking pay and performance? And perhaps with regard to the sciences it really does make sense. In that field, research grants that include stipends for overhead may be an indication of the quality of the work that a particular scientist does (though there is a danger – witness climate science – that these grants are a sign of political correctness on the part of the researcher). There are no such grants – none that provide for overhead at the university – for the fields of philosophy, history, literature, music, and art. In those areas, Texas A&M will depend on two metrics – the number of students taught and student evaluations.

And guess what? At large public universities, large courses are nearly always a sign that the professor is entertaining and the course is a gut, and professors who conduct themselves in this fashion generally receive stellar student evaluations .  I remember a geology course nicknamed Rocks for Jocks, a history course called Moonlight and Magnolias, a psychology course called Nuts and Sluts, and an astronomy course called Astrogut.  Moreover, anyone who assigns more than forty pages a week to freshmen and sophomores and demands that they write anything like twenty pages in a semester will  have fewer students to teach and will be punished in the student evaluations by the semi-literate.

What The Wall Street Journal, the administrators at Texas A&M, and administrators at a great many other academic institutions have forgotten is that the university is not a hotel and those who go there are not consumers. Hotels do not make demands on their guests. They do not grade them.  And they have no interest in their improvement.  It is appropriate that consumers evaluate the products they purchase and the service they receive. Freshmen and sophomores are not very good judges of the instruction they receive, and those in their numbers who are semi-literate (roughly half of the students at Texas A&M, I would guess) are apt to resent those who make demands on them.

What can be done? First, we need to stop pretending that we can educate everyone. A fair number of institutions should shut their doors. Others should become much smaller and more selective. All of them should become more demanding. Grade inflation should be replaced by grade deflation.

What would it take to produce such a result? Hard times would help. An end to federal and state aid to higher education would do no harm. The federal subsidy for student loans could be eliminated. And – here is the kicker – the accrediting agencies could start doing their job.

Think what it would mean if the accreditors paid close attention to the rigor and quality of the general education courses required of students in their freshmen and sophomore years. If they did so, presidents, provosts, deans, and department chairs would find it in their interest to police the teaching of these courses – to make sure that ample reading of a high quality is assigned, that the students are made to do a great deal of writing; and that their examinations and papers are rigorously graded, marked up with an eye to errors in grammar and diction, and returned to the students in a timely fashion. They might even find it in their interest to punish departments for grade inflation by denying them new lines.

So let me sum up. The problem that Troy pointed out is rooted in the fact that the incentive structure at all but the highly selective colleges and universities is badly askew. The fault lies with the administrations at our colleges and universities – but, at a deeper level, it is a product of public policy. Almost everything being done with the purpose of improving things will make them worse. To get things right, we would have to admit what we are loath to admit – that something like half of the students in college do not belong there.

Let me add that the college guide published by what remains of US News & Report does more harm than good. Among other things, it downgrades colleges and universities for a high attrition rate. Back before the Rockefeller Commission Report, a high attrition rate at a public university was a sign that it was doing its job – offering a wide range of students the opportunity to get an education, and busting out freshmen who did not perform.