Category Archives: Marketplace of ideas

Profumo showed what Sanford, Weiner, Spitzer should have done

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Peggy Noonan’s column this week is a good one.

After recounting the Profumo Affair that rocked Britain (and broke a government) 50 years ago, she draws a clear contrast between what a man of honor — which is what John Profumo proved in the end to be — does, and what the likes of Mark Sanford, Anthony Weiner and Eliot Spitzer do.

In case you’re confused — in case you are thinking, “Well, a man of honor wouldn’t get himself into such a situation” — let me remind you that we’re all sinners, in one way or another, some more spectacularly than others. What this is about is whether you do the honorable thing after you’ve done something terribly wrong.

Here’s the best part of the column:

Everyone hoped he’d disappear. He did. Then, three years later, he… announced he’d deepened and matured and was standing for Parliament “to serve the public.” Of course, he said, “It all depends on the voters, whether they can be forgiving. It’s all in their hands. I throw my candidacy on their mercy.”

Well, people didn’t want to think they were unmerciful. Profumo won in a landslide, worked his way up to party chief, and 12 years later ran for prime minister, his past quite forgotten, expunged, by his mounting triumphs.

***

Wait—that’s not what happened. Nothing like that happened! It’s the opposite of what happened.

Because Profumo believed in remorse of conscience—because he actually had a conscience—he could absorb what happened and let it change him however it would. In a way what he believed in was reality. He’d done something terrible—to his country, to his friends, to strangers who had to explain the headlines about him to their children.

He never knew political power again. He never asked for it. He did something altogether more confounding.

He did the hardest thing for a political figure. He really went away. He went to a place that helped the poor, a rundown settlement house called Toynbee Hall in the East End of London. There he did social work—actually the scut work of social work, washing dishes and cleaning toilets. He visited prisons for the criminally insane, helped with housing for the poor and worker education.

And it wasn’t for show, wasn’t a step on the way to political redemption. He worked at Toynbee for 40 years…

What Profumo did addresses what I’ve written about in the past, about actual remorse and penitence.

He did the right thing under the terrible circumstances that he himself had brought about. Sanford, Weiner and Spitzer have not. Shame on them for that. And shame on voters willing to let them get away with it.

John Profumo

John Profumo

Have the ‘Obama scandals’ indeed gone ‘up in smoke?’

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I meant to post this over the weekend, but the question still bears examining, I think.

Late last week, Andrew Sullivan wrote the following, under the headline, “The ‘Scandals’ Go Up In Smoke:”

There was always something desperate about them: an attempt somehow, after five years of remarkably scandal-free governance, to try once again and prove Michelle Malkin’s fantasies (and Peggy Noonan’s feelings) correct. Darrell Issa was the perfect charlatan for the purpose; and Roger Ailes desperately needed a new narrative in the post-election doldrums. But there really was no there there … and you can feel the air escaping from the hysteria balloons…

Here’s an excerpt from the Jonathan Chait piece that inspired him:

Do you remember how all-consuming the “Obama scandals” once were? This was a turn of events so dramatic it defined Obama’s entire second term — he was “waylaid by controversies,” or at least “seriously off track,” “beset by scandals,” enduring a “second-term curse,” the prospect of “endless scandals,” Republicans “beginning to write his legislative obituary,” and Washington had “turned on Obama.” A ritualistic media grilling of Jay Carney, featuring the ritualistic comparisons of him to Nixon press secretary Ron Ziegler, sanctified the impression of guilt.

It has come and gone, having left barely a trace. To be sure, the Obama scandals live on in the conservative world, where the evidence of deep corruption and venality grows stronger and stronger. But that is merely the confirmation of suspicions of “Chicago politics,” ACORN and so on, that predate recent events and don’t require any particular facts to survive…

Not one to sit still for that, Peggy Noonan responded:

‘Documents Show Liberals in I.R.S. Dragnet,” read the New York Times headline. “Dem: ‘Progressive’ Groups Were Also Targeted by IRS,” said U.S. News. The scandal has “evaporated into thin air,” bayed the excitable Andrew Sullivan. A breathlessly exonerative narrative swept the news media this week: that liberal groups had been singled out and, by implication, abused by the IRS, just as conservative groups had been. Therefore, the scandal wasn’t a scandal but a mere bungle—a nonpolitical series of unhelpful but innocent mistakes.

The problem with this story is that liberals were not caught in the IRS dragnet. Progressive groups were not targeted.

The claim that they had been rested mostly on an unclear, undated, highly redacted and not at all dispositive few pages from a “historical” BOLO (“be on the lookout”) list that apparently wasn’t even in use between May 2010 and May 2012, when most of the IRS harassment of conservative groups occurred.

The case isn’t closed, no matter how many people try to slam it shut….

But the truth is, I haven’t heard much lately about the IRS thing, or Benghazi. And the “scandal” that Edward Snowden supposedly revealed never was a scandal, and his own saga has become the kind of farce that reminds us of Father Drobney, who has been hiding in an embassy for years in Woody Allen’s play, “Don’t Drink the Water.”

But according to Ms. Noonan, this is all a matter of the liberal media trying to wish the scandals away. She gets particularly indignant about the IRS one:

No one has gotten near the bottom of this scandal. Journalists shouldn’t be trying to make the story disappear. The revenue-gathering arm of the federal government appears to be politically biased, corrupt in its actions, and unable to reform itself.

The only way to make that story go away is to get to the bottom of it and fully reveal it. It’s not a bungle, it’s a scandal.

What do y’all think?

Krauthammer: Syria as the Spanish Civil War

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PicassoGuernica

What with all the travelling I’ve been doing the last few days (I was working on the coast Wednesday and Thursday, drove to Memphis Friday, drove back yesterday), I’m just now getting to Charles Krauthammer’s column from late last week.

I liked his analogy:

The war in Syria, started by locals, is now a regional conflict, the meeting ground of two warring blocs. On one side, the radical Shiite bloc led by Iran, which overflies Iraq to supply Bashar al-Assad and sends Hezbollah to fight for him. Behind them lies Russia, which has stationed ships offshore, provided the regime with tons of weaponry and essentially claimed Syria as a Russian protectorate.

And on the other side are the Sunni Gulf states terrified of Iranian hegemony (territorial and soon nuclear); non-Arab Turkey, now convulsed by an internal uprising; and fragile Jordan, dragged in by geography.

And behind them? No one. It’s the Spanish Civil War except that only one side — the fascists — showed up. The natural ally of what began as a spontaneous, secular, liberationist uprising in Syria was the United States. For two years, it did nothing….

As will not surprise you, he is not satisfied with President Obama’s belated decision to help the rebels with nothing more than small arms and ammo.

He gets way harsh on the pres with regard to Iraq:

The tragedy is that we once had a counterweight and Obama threw it away. Obama still thinks the total evacuation of Iraq is a foreign policy triumph. In fact, his inability — unwillingness? — to negotiate a Status of Forces Agreement that would have left behind a small but powerful residual force in Iraq is precisely what compels him today to re-create in Jordan a pale facsimile of that regional presence…

We had a golden opportunity to reap the rewards of this too-bloody war by establishing a strategic relationship with an Iraq that was still under American sway. Iraqi airspace, for example, was under U.S. control as we prepared to advise and rebuild Iraq’s nonexistent air force.

With our evacuation, however, Iraqi airspace today effectively belongs to Iran — over which it is flying weapons, troops and advisers to turn the tide in Syria. The U.S. air bases, the vast military equipment, the intelligence sources available in Iraq were all abandoned. Gratis…

I still think food stamps shouldn’t pay for junk food

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So I’m glad to see SC moving forward with this initiative, or at least taking a half-step in that direction:

After hearing all the pros and cons during several months of public input, the state health department has recommended that South Carolina apply for a waiver to ban the use of food stamps for sugary drinks, candy, cookies and cakes.

The SC Department of Health and Environmental Control stated its position in a letter sent Monday from director Catherine Templeton to Lillian Koller, director of the state Department of Social Services. Koller’s department administers the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, also known as food stamps, and will determine the content of a waiver request…

I have great respect for Sue Berkowitz and other advocates for the poor who have concerns about this. And the “food deserts” concern is a real problem.

But I just can’t see the taxpayers subsidizing purchases that are killing people instead of nourishing them. As Ms. Templeton says, we’re able to make WIC work with restrictions; why not this?

Is it really ‘hypocrisy’ when partisans switch sides on national security? Or is it something more promising?

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Meant to post about this Friday night, but got too busy…

NPR posted this Friday under the headline, “Why Partisans Can’t Kick The Hypocrisy Habit:”

American politics has become like a big square dance. When the music stops after an election, people switch to the other side on a number of issues, depending on whether their party remains in power.

That was pretty clear this week, when polls revealed more Democrats than Republicans support tracking of phone traffic by the National Security Agency — the exact opposite of where things stood under President George W. Bush.

A Washington Post-Pew Research Center released Monday showed that 64 percent of Democrats support such efforts, up from just 36 percent in 2006. Republican support, meanwhile, had dropped from 75 percent to 52 percent.

It’s not just a question of whether you trust the current president to carry out data mining in a way that targets terrorists and not innocent Americans. Partisans hold malleable positions in a number of areas — foreign policy, the economy and even who continue to serve under a new administration.

“People change their views depending on which party is in power, and not based on objective conditions on the ground,” says George Washington University political scientist John Sides….

But is “hypocrisy” the right word? You know me; I like to trash partisanship whenever I can. But maybe in this case at least some of the partisans are getting a bum rap.

As usual, I was very interested in what E.J. Dionne and David Brooks had to say on the subject Friday night.

Here’s what Brooks said, regarding the way Joe Biden has changed his tune on surveillance practices that he once called “very, very intrusive:”

Actually, there’s education, not hypocrisy… You get into office and you learn the threats. You get the daily intelligence brief. Maybe you get sucked in by the National Security apparatus, but I’d like to say you just learn. And so you do things you wouldn’t otherwise do because you learn the truth…

Indeed. And as you know, I have welcomed the Obama administration’s pragmatism on so many points of consideration in the realm of national security.

E.J. also saw something more positive than mere “hyprocrisy,” although he saw it from a different angle:

You know, in only partial defense of Biden, I would say that we have more legal limits now than we did at the time he spoke. But I think there’s been a lot of hypocrisy on this, and oddly enough, I kind of welcome it. On the one hand, you do have some liberals who were critical of Bush and now support Obama, and you have a lot of conservatives who supported Bush but now suddenly say the same things are bad.

But you also have consistency. You have liberals who are mad at Bush, mad at Obama, conservatives who support Bush, support Obama. I think the fact that there is – people have switched sides reflects a deep and intelligent ambivalence. We want to be safe. We also want to be free. And we want to have our privacy protected. And we know it’s complicated to have all of those at the same time.

And I think the fact that the partisan and ideological lines have been scrambled might actually help us have a debate on the merits…

Good points from both. For my part, I take the good breaks we can get. If Obama is able to get the political room to act on these things for the same reason Nixon could go to China, well, more power to him. Pun intended.

By the way, in the realm of putting these surveillance programs into a clearer perspective, I liked this, from Brooks:

As for the point [Biden] made, Charles Krauthammer in a column today said it’s like the outside of an envelope. The government has a right to keep track of what’s on the outside of the envelope.

They do not have to read what’s in the envelope and that’s essentially what they’re doing with the calls. I’m old enough, I can remember getting a phone bill where every single call you made was listed on your phone bill. Is that keeping track? Is that an invasion of privacy? I think a minimal one.

Another great Brooks column, on the nature of moderation

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In response to my praise of David Brooks’ column from earlier in the week, Cindi Scoppe Tweeted this:

.@BradWarthen It’s a very good column, but if it’s the best you’ve seen in years, you obviously missed THIS one http://nyti.ms/QJ87fm 

Well, she knows what I like to read, which shouldn’t be surprising, since I first became her editor in 1987.

The column, from Oct. 25, 2012, was headlined “What Moderation Means.” Excerpts:

First, let me describe what moderation is not. It is not just finding the midpoint between two opposing poles and opportunistically planting yourself there. Only people who know nothing about moderation think it means that.

Moderates start with a political vision, but they get it from history books, not philosophy books. That is, a moderate isn’t ultimately committed to an abstract idea. Instead, she has a deep reverence for the way people live in her country and the animating principle behind that way of life. In America, moderates revere the fact that we are a nation of immigrants dedicated to the American dream — committed to the idea that each person should be able to work hard and rise.

This animating principle doesn’t mean that all Americans think alike. It means that we have a tradition of conflict. Over the centuries, we have engaged in a series of long arguments around how to promote the American dream — arguments that pit equality against achievement, centralization against decentralization, order and community against liberty and individualism.

The moderate doesn’t try to solve those arguments. There are no ultimate solutions….

The moderate creates her policy agenda by looking to her specific circumstances and seeing which things are being driven out of proportion at the current moment. This idea — that you base your agenda on your specific situation — may seem obvious, but immoderate people often know what their solutions are before they define the problems.

For a certain sort of conservative, tax cuts and smaller government are always the answer, no matter what the situation. For a certain sort of liberal, tax increases for the rich and more government programs are always the answer.

The moderate does not believe that there are policies that are permanently right. Situations matter most. Tax cuts might be right one decade but wrong the next. Tighter regulations might be right one decade, but if sclerosis sets in then deregulation might be in order….

Very, very good stuff. I can see why Cindi would like it, and not only because Brooks uses the trick of an inclusive “she” rather than the traditional inclusive “he” to indicate a hypothetical person whose gender doesn’t matter, which is something Cindi does.

More to the point, it should be easy to see why I would like this column as much as the one I praised earlier this week. Both of them speak for me, and the way I see the world. (Which is an argument for why Brooks should have used “he” instead of “she.” Hey, there are bits where he should have just gone ahead and written “Brad.”) There are particularly sharp insights in both columns, expressed in ways that had not yet occurred for me. Some of the highest praise I’ve gotten from readers over the years is when they say, “You write what I think, but don’t know how to say.” Brooks did a better job of explaining some things that I believe than I have been able to do.

I particularly appreciate this statement: “The moderate does not believe that there are policies that are permanently right.” That’s pretty much what I’ve been trying to say in everything I’ve written about the UnParty and the Energy Party and the Grownup Party. (Brooks later says that moderates are misunderstood because they don’t write manifestos. Well, I’ve at least tried to do so….) This is such an important point because there are so many deluded souls out there who fervently believe that there are policies that ARE right in every instance. Promising, for instance, always to vote against tax increases (or, as Brooks said, for higher taxes for the wealthy) is as arbitrary as promising to vote “yes” on all bills that come up on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

I don’t know that I like that column from October better than the Snowden one. But they are both really, really good, and I wish everyone would read them. They say things that are profoundly true, but counterintuitive for too many Americans. These things need to be said as often as possible, and by someone who says them as well as Brooks does.

David Brooks’ piece on Snowden the best column I’ve seen in years

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David Brooks’ Monday column in The New York Times (which The State ran today) is the best column of any kind, by anyone, that I have read in years. (People whose thoughtfulness I respect keep bringing it to my attention, and I say, yes, thanks; I saw it — and intend to say something about it.)

Basically, you need to go read the whole thing. And then read it again. I can’t quote everything in it that is awesome without stomping all over the Fair Use standard, but let me describe briefly what the piece does.

It explains exactly what is wrong with Edward Snowden and what he did. Brooks accomplishes this in spite of the fact that we lack the common vocabulary in this country to express such things in a manner that everyone can understand. People who sort of get that what Snowden did is wrong, and that his actions reflect something fundamentally wrong with Snowden himself, don’t know how to explain that wrongness. So they either clam up, ceding the floor to the more simple-minded cheerleaders for Snowden’s brand of “transparency,” or they use a word that gets them dismissed, as John Boehner did when he resorted to “traitor.”

In explaining what is wrong with Snowden, Brooks explained something fundamentally wrong with our society and our politics today — something that is eating away at our ability to be a society governed by representative democracy, because it’s eating away at basic civil. social assumptions that make it possible for free people to live together.

The piece is headlined “The Solitary Leaker.” An excerpt:

Though thoughtful, morally engaged and deeply committed to his beliefs, he appears to be a product of one of the more unfortunate trends of the age: the atomization of society, the loosening of social bonds, the apparently growing share of young men in their 20s who are living technological existences in the fuzzy land between their childhood institutions and adult family commitments.Brooks_New-popup-v2

If you live a life unshaped by the mediating institutions of civil society, perhaps it makes sense to see the world a certain way: Life is not embedded in a series of gently gradated authoritative structures: family, neighborhood, religious group, state, nation and world. Instead, it’s just the solitary naked individual and the gigantic and menacing state.

This lens makes you more likely to share the distinct strands of libertarianism that are blossoming in this fragmenting age: the deep suspicion of authority, the strong belief that hierarchies and organizations are suspect, the fervent devotion to transparency, the assumption that individual preference should be supreme. You’re more likely to donate to the Ron Paul for president campaign, as Snowden did….

After acknowledging that the procedures Snowden has revealed (or rather, revealed in greater detail than what we knew previously) could be abused at some future time, Brooks continues:

But Big Brother is not the only danger facing the country. Another is the rising tide of distrust, the corrosive spread of cynicism, the fraying of the social fabric and the rise of people who are so individualistic in their outlook that they have no real understanding of how to knit others together and look after the common good.

This is not a danger Snowden is addressing. In fact, he is making everything worse.

For society to function well, there have to be basic levels of trust and cooperation, a respect for institutions and deference to common procedures. By deciding to unilaterally leak secret N.S.A. documents, Snowden has betrayed all of these things…

OK, that’s as much as I dare quote. But Brooks goes on to catalog the various personal, social and institutional betrayals of Edward Snowden, and the ways that such betrayals unravel the social fabric that allows a healthy civilization to exist.

It is a very, very good piece. Please go read the whole thing.

Aw, Jeez, Edith — here we go with the ACLU again

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Consider that headline my tribute to Jean Stapleton.

There are some things that bring out the Archie Bunker in me, and the ACLU suing the government for doing its job is one of them:

 WASHINGTON — The American Civil Liberties Union on Tuesday filed a lawsuit against the Obama administration over its “dragnet” collection of logs of domestic phone calls, contending that the once-secret program — whose existence was exposed by a former National Security Agency contractor last week — is illegal and asking a judge to both stop it and order the records purged…

Oh, and for those who don’t think the government is “doing its job” in this case — well, yes it is, by definition.

On a previous thread, Mark Stewart wrote:

The issue is not whether bureaurocrats’ believe that data mining Americans’ communications is the most appropriate way to “protect” our country; rather it is whether Americans have decided that such “protection” is in the best interests of our society.

And we have not…

On the contrary, Mark — we have.

We’ve decided it through our elected representatives, which is how it works in a representative democracy. This is not a direct democracy; nor should it be.

We’ve had years and years to decide whether we want to elect people other than the ones who decided to follow this course, and we’ll have more such opportunities in the future.

Again, I stress that the fact that the government was doing these things is not new information. We’ve had this discussion before. It’s just that some new details have brought it back into headlines, and a lot of people who weren’t paying attention before are startled.

Rand Paul believes in Big Brother, but does not love him

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The most popular item on the Wall Street Journal’s website at the moment is this morning’s op-ed headlined “Big Brother Really Is Watching Us” by — who else? — Rand Paul. As usual, Sen. Paul is dead serious. An excerpt:

Official PortraitThese activities violate the Fourth Amendment, which says warrants must be specific—”particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.” And what is the government doing with these records? The president assures us that the government is simply monitoring the origin and length of phone calls, not eavesdropping on their contents. Is this administration seriously asking us to trust the same government that admittedly targets political dissidents through the Internal Revenue Service and journalists through the Justice Department?…

OK, first, there is no evidence that the “government… targets political dissidents through” the IRS. That suggests an actual policy on the part of the whole government. Whereas all that has been granted, or proven by anyone, is that some underlings exercised some lousy judgment. Second, there is a logical fallacy here. If the government “admittedly” does the things you mention, why should you distrust it when it says it’s not doing something else? Make up your mind. If the government is such a big, fat liar, maybe it’s lying to you when it admits the IRS and Justice Department things…

Another excerpt:

What is objectionable is a system in which government has unlimited and privileged access to the details of our private affairs, and citizens are simply supposed to trust that there won’t be any abuse of power. This is an absurd expectation. Americans should trust the National Security Agency as much as they do the IRS and Justice Department….

First, I’ve seen no indication that the government has access to the “details” of my “private affairs.” That’s not the way I read what’s been reported. Second, I do trust the NSA as much as I do the IRS and the Justice Department. They are institutions that do the jobs we assign them to do, and when they do something wrong, that’s anomalous. I know that’s going to sound weird to someone who believes the collection of taxes is inherently evil, but there it is…

NSA data-mining vs. actual invasion of privacy

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I thought the WSJ made an interesting point in an editorial this morning:

The NSA is collecting “metadata”—logs of calls received and sent, and other types of data about data for credit card transactions and online communications. Americans now generate a staggering amount of such information—about 161 exabytes per year, equal to the information stored in 37,000 Libraries of Congress. Organizing and making sense of this raw material is now possible given advances in information technology, high-performance computing and storage capacity. The field known as “big data” is revolutionizing everything from retail to traffic patterns to epidemiology.

Mr. Obama waved off fears of “Big Brother” but he might have mentioned that the paradox of data-mining is that the more such information the government collects the less of an intrusion it is. These data sets are so large that only algorithms can understand them. The search is for trends, patterns, associations, networks. They are not in that sense invasions of individual privacy at all.

If the NSA isn’t scrubbing vast amounts of data, then it can’t discover who is potentially a threat. The alternative to automated sweeps is more pervasive use of lower-tech methods like wiretaps, tracking and searches—in a word, invasions of persons rather than statistical probabilities. The political attack on data-mining could increase rather than alleviate the risk to individual rights.

Snowden spills his guts, again

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My old roommate John peers out from our room in Snowden just before the Honeycombs were torn down.

My old roommate John peers out from our room in Snowden in 2006, just before the Honeycombs were torn down.

“Snowden” is one of those names that sticks with you. Or with me, anyway. It was technically the name of the particular one of the Honeycombs I lived in that one semester I went to USC in 1971 — although I seem to recall that a lot of people called it by a letter designation. Was it “J”? I don’t know. Maybe. “Snowden” sticks better.

That’s probably because I was so hugely into Catch-22 at the time. I had first read it the summer before my senior year of high school. Then, at the start of the senior year, our English teacher, Mrs. Burchard, let us pick several of the books we would read. I pushed, successfully, for Catch-22. (not just because I’d already read it — I looked forward to discussing it) We also read Cat’s Cradle and Stranger in a Strange Land, at the urging of some of my classmates. Mrs. Burchard did make us read several of Ibsen’s plays, which I enjoyed — especially “An Enemy of the People” (“A majority is always wrong” seemed so true to me at that early age.)

Snowden, of course, was the pivotal character in Heller’s novel. He only appeared in one scene, but that scene was repeated — or rather, portions of it were repeated — over and over in the novel. All he ever had to say was “I’m cold.” But that was enough.

The novel is structured around that incident, until the very end. The plotline keeps looping around back through time, flashback after flashback, and Yossarian’s memory keeps returning to the incident with Snowden. Each time, that memory is unfolded a little more completely, toward the final, full, horrible revelation that changes Yossarian permanently.

“I’m cold,” said Snowden.

“There, there,” said Yossarian, tending the wounded gunner back toward the rear of the plane. Even after Snowden had spilled his terrible secret, that’s all Yossarian could say.

Anyway, that’s what goes through my mind as I read the name of the guy who took it upon himself to reveal the NSA’s programs. He’s a guy who looks like he could be Yossarian’s Snowden. He certainly looks young enough, unformed enough. Yet he’s a guy who’s taken on a self-righteousness akin to Ibsen’s Thomas Stockman, someone who’s decided he knows better than everyone else, and is prepared to take the burden of revelation upon himself.

Snowden 2

Glad to see the administration on board with Colombia trade

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Some of y’all — those who carry grudges — will recall that one of my reasons for endorsing John McCain in 2008 was that he supported the Colombian Free Trade Agreement. This caused some Obamaphiles to freak out, it just seemed so esoteric to them.

But to me, it was important to cite. First, the large portion of my childhood spent in South America causes me to care more about that part of the world than do most people in this country. I find Yankee indifference to the rest of the hemisphere pretty appalling, frankly. One reason I got into reading British publications years ago was that they actually covered news events in Latin America. Most media in this country do not, for the simple reason that their readers and viewers aren’t interested.

I also saw this as a little-discussed microcosm of a difference in judgment and decision-making with regard to foreign policy in general, one that for me made McCain look better.

I went into why I thought it was important in this post.

Anyway, spin forward more than four years, and I’m pleased to read this piece by Joe Biden in The Wall Street Journal, headlined “The Americas Ascendant.” It begins:

Last week, during a five-day trip through Latin America and the Caribbean, I visited a cut-flower farm outside Bogota, Colombia, an hour’s drive from downtown that would have been impossibly dangerous 10 years ago. Along the way I passed office parks, movie theaters and subdivisions, interspersed with small ranches and family businesses. At the flower farm, one-quarter of the workers are female heads of households. The carnations and roses they were clipping would arrive in U.S. stores within days, duty free.

What I saw on the flower farm was just one sign of the economic blossoming in the year since a U.S. free-trade agreement with Colombia went into force. Over that period, American exports to the country are up 20%…

Yeah, and we could have been enjoying that increase in trade years earlier, had not Sens. Obama and Clinton opposed it, to the gratification of Big Labor.

But hey, welcome aboard. I’m glad the administration gets it now.

I thought it particularly interesting that the vice president focused on the cut-flower trade. So did Nicholas Kristof in an April 24, 2008, piece that had helped focus my attention on the need for the agreement. It began:

BOGOTÁ, Colombia

For seven years, Democrats have rightfully complained that President Bush has gratuitously antagonized the world, exasperating our allies and eroding America’s standing and influence.

But now the Democrats are doing the same thing on trade. In Latin America, it is Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton who are seen as the go-it-alone cowboys, by opposing the United States’  free-trade agreement with Colombia….

That piece, too, focused on the cut-flower industry in Colombia. The headline was “Better Roses Than Cocaine.” Indeed.

The vice president today writes,

There is enormous potential—economically, politically and socially—for the U.S. in its relations with countries of the Western Hemisphere. And so the Obama administration has launched the most sustained period of U.S. engagement with the Americas in a long, long time—including the president’s travel to Mexico and Costa Rica last month; my own recent trip to Colombia, Trinidad, and Brazil; Secretary of State Kerry’s participation in the Organization of American States’ annual meeting in Guatemala; the president of Chile’s visit to Washington this week and a planned visit to Washington by the president of Peru. Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff arrives in Washington in October for the first state visit of the second term.

As leaders across the region work to lift their citizens out of poverty and to diversify their economies from commodity-led growth, the U.S. believes that the greatest promise—for Americans and for our neighbors—lies in deeper economic integration and openness.growth, the U.S. believes that the greatest promise—for Americans and for our neighbors—lies in deeper economic integration and openness.

I agree. And welcome aboard, Mr. Obama.

No, Obama isn’t Nixon, much less worse. It’s not even close

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It’s getting to where I find Peggy Noonan more and more tiresome, but keep reading, hoping for flashes of the grace and thoughtfulness I used to admire.

Her column over the weekend was a typical sad example. An excerpt:

The Benghazi scandal was and is shocking, and the Justice Department assault on the free press, in which dogged reporters are tailed like enemy spies, is shocking. Benghazi is still under investigation and someday someone will write a great book about it. As for the press, Attorney General Eric Holder is on the run, and rightly so. They called it the First Amendment for a reason. But nothing can damage us more as a nation than what is happening at the Internal Revenue Service. Elite opinion in the press and in Washington doesn’t fully understand this. Part of the reason is that it’s not their ox being gored, it’s those messy people out in America with their little patriotic groups.

Those who aren’t deeply distressed about the IRS suffer from a reluctance or inability to make distinctions, and a lack of civic imagination.

An inability to make distinctions: “It’s always been like this.” “Presidents are always siccing the IRS on their enemies.” There’s truth in that. We’ve all heard the stories of the president who picked up the phone and said, “Look into this guy,” Richard Nixon most showily. He got clobbered for it. It was one of the articles of impeachment.

But this scandal is different and distinctive. The abuse was systemic—from the sheer number of targets and the extent of each targeting we know many workers had to be involved, many higher-ups, multiple offices. It was ideological and partisan—only those presumed to be of one political view were targeted. It has a single unifying pattern: The most vivid abuses took place in the years leading up to the president’s 2012 re-election effort. And in the end several were trying to cover it all up, including the head of the IRS, who lied to Congress about it, and the head of the tax-exempt unit, Lois Lerner, who managed to lie even in her public acknowledgment of impropriety.

It wasn’t a one-off. It wasn’t a president losing his temper with some steel executives. There was no enemies list, unless you consider half the country to be your enemies.

Let’s just list a few of the things wrong with those few paragraphs:

  • “The Benghazi scandal was and is shocking…” I’m not yet persuaded that “Benghazi” actually is a scandal, despite the efforts of people I respect, such as Lindsey Graham and John McCain, to portray it as such. Much less that it is widely accepted among others, outside of certain Republican circles. Much, much less that it is not only a scandal, but a shocking one. Yet she begins her column throwing it out there as something that doesn’t even need discussion, as an established fact on the way to what she really wants to talk about. It’s like she’s gotten into the habit of writing only for people on the right. She assumes all her readers think Benghazi is a shocking scandal, and she goes ahead and acknowledges that out of hand. It’s like there are no other kinds of readers out there looking at her column. And if she keeps writing like this, she’ll be right in that assumption.
  • “Part of the reason is that it’s not their ox being gored, it’s those messy people out in America with their little patriotic groups.” Really? Tell me again which ox was gored. “Gore” means to deliver a serious, perhaps fatal, wound. Did any of these “patriotic little groups,” a characterization we could debate all day, lose their ability to do what they do? Were they indeed “gored”?
  • Richard Nixon is mentioned, followed by “But this scandal is different and distinctive.” As in, she implies, worse.

What Richard Nixon did with regard to the IRS was indeed an article of impeachment. Because of the abuses of power that he, Richard Nixon, carried out.

Excuse me, but I have yet to see the evidence that indicates, even remotely, that Barack Obama was involved in this mess over at the IRS. (Please give me a link if I’ve missed it.)

And this particular scandal has been proceeding how long? A month or so? (Actually, the first press reports were in March 2012.) I seem to recall that the Watergate scandal connected directly to the White House on Day One. Reporter Bob Woodward, then a nobody, was assigned to go cover the arraignment of some guys caught breaking into Democratic headquarters, and that day found that one of them worked in the White House.

Yeah, pretty different, all right.

Oh, and by the way, I should probably say for the benefit of Steven Davis and others who labor under the delusion that I’m a Democrat or something: I don’t say “Barack Obama isn’t Nixon” because I think Obama is so awesome and Nixon was pure evil.

If I’d been old enough to vote in 1968, I’d have voted for Nixon, without hesitation. For that matter, I was solidly for him in 1960, although you may discount that because I was only 7 years old. I would have voted for him in 1972, the first time I ever voted, if not for Watergate. I pulled the lever for McGovern after standing and debating with myself in the booth for about 10 minutes. I firmly believed that Nixon was the better president — in fact, I was convinced that McGovern would be a disaster. But I was also convinced that the Democrat had zero chance, so this seemed like a safe way to register my concerns about Watergate.

(I did the same thing, only with the parties reversed, in 1996. I respected Bob Dole more as a man than I did Bill Clinton. But Dole had run such a horrendous campaign that I doubted his ability to be a good president. I actually thought Clinton better suited to the job. But I had a lot of problems with Clinton by this time and, knowing that Dole had no chance of winning, I pulled the lever for him as a protest.)

Nixon was in a number of important ways a pretty good president, on the big things. Probably better than Obama in a number of ways (although I haven’t thought deeply about that, and it’s difficult to compare, since the challenges facing them are so different). But his abuse of power on stupid, petty things did him in. And I’ve seen no evidence so far Barack Obama has done anything of that kind.

So no — Obama’s not as bad as Nixon in this regard, much less worse. It’s not even close.

The contemptible SC Senate kills Medicaid expansion

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Of course, in the Senate’s defense, it is merely doing what the contemptible SC House and our contemptible governor did before them:

COLUMBIA, SC — The state Senate killed Medicaid expansion on Tuesday, the last hope for supporters who wanted to extend health insurance benefits to South Carolina’s working poor.

The vote was 23-19, with two Republicans – Ray Cleary of Georgetown and Paul Campbell of Berkeley County – joining all of the Senate’s 17 Democrats present in voting for the expansion. Four senators, one Democrat and three Republicans, were absent.

The proposal would have accepted $795.8 million in federal money to pay for health insurance for about 320,000 South Carolinians beginning Jan. 1. There would have been no direct cost to the state. Because the proposed Medicaid expansion was an amendment to the state budget, it would have expired after one year. Lawmakers would have had to vote to expand coverage again next year…

Congratulations to Sens. Ray Cleary and Paul Campbell for doing what is unquestionably, indubitably the right thing. I can’t say I know either of them, really, but I’ve heard Paul Campbell speak, and suspect that he’s one of the brightest people in the Legislature. The retired regional president of Alcoa, he’s a man of accomplishment who seems to have a good grasp of how the world actually works. This vote is consistent with that impression.

As for the rest, particularly those who voted against this for no better reason than the fact that it has the name “Obama” attached to it, and that’s what you’re expected to do if you’re a Republican in South Carolina… well, you’ve just demonstrated once again why I hold partythink in such low regard.

Yes, one can rationalize all day and all night about how there are better ways to achieve the goals of Obamacare, but when you’re all done, you haven’t changed the fact that this is the only plan in effect, or likely to come into effect. This is it. You either do it, or give the idea of significantly broadening access to health care the back of your hand.

Kevin Fisher on Sanford, Kathleen and me

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Kevin Fisher is a thoughtful columnist. He called to leave a message and warn me that I’d be mentioned in his column this week, as follows:

I realize that sentiment cuts to the quick of Sanford bashers, including people I like and respect. For example, former editorial page editor of The State and local blogger Brad Warthen sometimes seems obsessed with Sanford’s misdeeds, real or imagined.

Meanwhile, South Carolina’s own superb nationally syndicated columnist Kathleen Parker badly missed the mark in a prominent column leading up to the recent election, writing “Sanford’s candidacy is on life support … not only did his former wife Jenny not stand by her man, she wrote a book, went on TV and recently took him to court for trespassing … Where the wife goes, so go the people.”

Apparently not, to the dismay of not only the usually astute Warthen and Parker but also the inevitably smug and self-righteous commentators of MSNBC.
While partisan hacks are now the norm on cable news (both left and right), Chris Matthews and company repeatedly made fools of themselves by ridiculing the idea of a Sanford comeback, all while assuring each other that the people of SC-1 would not be such knaves as to vote for him…

Kevin always does that. He doesn’t really have to, when he’s saying something that mild, but I’m impressed that he does.

I did call him back to make a couple of points: One, that I never shared Kathleen’s belief that Sanford was toast. I sort of marveled at the fact that she seemed so convinced of it. In fact, I cast doubt on it at the time — even though between the time she wrote her column and I reacted to it, a poll had come out showing him 9 points behind. This is me then:

I think it’s premature to count Mark Sanford out. That district is so Republican, and he won the crowded GOP primary. The same people who voted for him all those times before seem poised to do it again. Relying on those voters not to show up on election day seems like a thin premise.

I now think he may lose. [That was because of the PPP poll.] I’d very much like to see him lose, because it would go a long way toward bolstering my faith in democracy in South Carolina, which frankly has been repeatedly bruised over the last few years. It would show that voters in that district have some sense.

But I’m not counting on it, not on the basis of information currently available to me…

And on the day before the election, I flatly wrote, “he is likely to win tomorrow…”

As for Kevin’s observation that “Brad Warthen sometimes seems obsessed with Sanford’s misdeeds, real or imagined,” I have two things to say. I write like that — very insistently and repeatedly — when I’m worried that something bad is going to happen. In this case, the bad thing being Mark Sanford returning to public office. It was a clear and present danger, as the outcome confirms.

Looking back, I think my best statement of the reasons voters shouldn’t have elected Sanford came after the election, when it was too late. That was in this comment:

Nor should voters have voted against Sanford because of the Argentina thing. Or the pathologically narcissistic interview a week later in which he droned on about his “soulmate.” (Michael Jackson died to save Mark Sanford from further humiliation, but he just had to grab the spotlight back.) Or messing up the State House carpet with the stupid piglet stunt. Or vetoing the entire state budget in 2006 (hours after it was too late for anyone to vote for his opponent in the GOP primary). Or the constant contempt he has heaped on his fellow elected Republicans over the years. Or being the only governor in the nation who didn’t want his state to get the stimulus money that they’d be on the hook for just as much as taxpayers in the rest of the country.

Not even for his maddening verbal tics. I would say.

No, at the end of the day (if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em), it should have been cumulative. People should have learned from the totality of his record in public life.

But they didn’t.

Note that those are real, not imagined, misdeeds. 🙂

And somehow, in all of that, I failed to mention his 37 ethics violations, including flying 1st or business class instead of coach as state regs required, using state aircraft for personal travel and spending campaign funds for noncampaign expenses. Mind you, this is the guy who was such a watchdog of public money that he made state employees double up in hotel rooms when they were on state business. And you know, that’s why his supporters supposedly love him — because he’s so respectful of their money. Which is hogwash, just for the record.

Jim DeMint not getting much respect on immigration — and that’s among conservatives

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Jim DeMint, former far-right kingmaker, isn’t getting a lot of respect in his new role at the Heritage Foundation — even among conservatives.

Earlier this week, he put out a report suggesting that immigration reform as envisioned by the Gang of Eight will cost the country $6.3 trillion. The report is, quite understandably, ridiculed and excoriated on the left. But conservatives, people DeMint would once have counted as allies, aren’t very positively impressed either.

Kimberley Strassel made a point of that in her column in the WSJ today:

The Heritage Foundation on Monday released a report designed to kill immigration reform. A few days later, nearly 30 leaders, hailing from the core of the conservative movement—think tanks, faith groups, political and advocacy organizations—signed a public letter backing the congressional process. Which got more notice?

The media glory in conflict, and so they devoted this week to the angry feud/war/battle in the GOP over immigration reform. The evidence? One research document from one think tank. The real news is the growing unity among conservative leaders and groups over the need to at least embrace the challenge of reform. This is no 2007.

At the height of that past fray over immigration—as restrictionists whipped up seething grass-roots anger against reform, drowning out proponents—Heritage released a similar report. It fueled a raging fire, and played a singular role in derailing reform…

Very interesting. I don’t know to what extent this truly reflects a growing “conservative” consensus for sensible immigration reform, but it’s promising. (It would also be good news for Lindsey Graham for next year, although the DeMint faction in SC remains large.)

My own favorite comment on this general subject came more from the center-right — from David Brooks — earlier in the week. For him, it was a pretty scathing piece. An excerpt:

The opponents of immigration reform have many small complaints, but they really have one core concern. It’s about control. America doesn’t control its borders. Past reform efforts have not established control. Current proposals wouldn’t establish effective control.

But the opponents rarely say what exactly it is they are trying to control. They talk about border security and various mechanisms to achieve that, but they rarely go into detail about what we should be so vigilant about restricting. I thought I would spell it out.

First, immigration opponents are effectively trying to restrict the flow of conservatives into this country. In survey after survey, immigrants are found to have more traditional ideas about family structure and community than comparable Americans. They have lower incarceration rates. They place higher emphasis on career success. They have stronger work ethics. Immigrants go into poor neighborhoods and infuse them with traditional values.

When immigrant areas go bad, it’s not because they have infected America with bad values. It’s because America has infected them with bad values already present. So the first thing conservative opponents of reform are trying to restrict is social conservatism….

It goes on in that vein. Good stuff.

What Charles Ramsey did — now THAT’S redemptive (as opposed to what Mark Sanford did the next day)

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My initial purpose in writing this is to second what Joan Walsh says on Slate — that despite very bad things in Charles Ramsey’s past, including domestic violence, what he did the other day still makes him a hero:

In hindsight, maybe Charles Ramsey was trying to tell us something when he insisted to Anderson Cooper Tuesday night that he’s not a hero. “No, no, no. Bro, I’m a Christian, an American. I’m just like you,” he told the news anchor.

Maybe he knew the whole hero story line would come with an unhappy ending: Now we’ve learned, via the Smoking Gun, that Ramsey was charged with and served time for multiple domestic violence counts. He was also convicted and imprisoned on drug charges and receiving stolen property.

All of that is awful, particularly for his ex-wife and daughter. But it doesn’t change the fact that Ramsey was a hero when he helped Amanda Berry escape Monday night. It may make him even more admirable, if he had an inkling that his sudden fame might expose his troubled past…

Of course he’s a hero — one with deep flaws. But all heroes are flawed. That Mr. Ramsey’s are what they are makes what he did this week, if anything, more laudatory.

I’m not dismissing his past offenses as some sort of colorful details. To me, there is no crime more contemptible than domestic violence, except the abuse of children — which is its close relative. Wife-beaters are right down there among the lowest of the low.

But what he did Monday was a redemptive act. One more excerpt from the piece:

To dismiss the character Ramsey showed in rescuing Berry is to suggest that nobody who’s ever done something bad should try to do something good, because the bad will always matter more. It would be a shame if Ramsey’s exposure, and the cackling about his past from some quarters, served to discourage other ex-convicts from helping others for fear that their pasts will come back to haunt them.

What Mr. Ramsey did on Monday didn’t erase his past offenses. Those are still on his ledger. But it was still heroic, and it has redemptive value.

This brings us to Mark Sanford.

I was pretty upset with the news headlines I saw in a couple of SC newspapers saying that Sanford had achieved “redemption” through his victory. Note again, these were news stories about the election, not opinion pieces, expressing a highly debatable opinion about the meaning of his win. More offensively, they were using the language of faith, of theology, making an assertion about the salvation of a man’s soul. Unless they were talking about trading in pop bottles for the deposit — the only other common use of the word “redeem” I can think of — and we don’t do that in South Carolina.

They had no business doing that. Especially since Mr. Sanford presumes to speak for the Almighty a lot, with his line about the God of… what’s he up to now, by his own count… eighth chances? (As I said in a comment yesterday, I think God should get a good lawyer and seek an injunction to stop Sanford from going around blaming the election result on Him.)

Managing to con a Republican district into voting for you with a campaign that consists of frightening them with a big picture of Nancy Pelosi — a cheap, generic, off-the-shelf, appeal to visceral partisanship — does not constitute “redemption.” Showing Nancy Pelosi and saying “Boo!” is like striking Republicans on the patellar ligament with a rubber hammer — you get a reflexive response. Earlier, when he was talking about himself, he was losing.

So don’t talk to me about redemption.

“Oh, but that’s just your opinion, Brad,” you say. Absolutely. It’s a carefully considered, supportable opinion that I think a lot of people would share. Which is why that word shouldn’t have appeared in those headlines.

I’m about to get back to Charles Ramsey, in just a moment…

For close to four years now, Mark Sanford has been going around asking us to forgive him, being careful to mention that God has forgiven him — the heavy implication being, so what are you people, better than God? He does this in that casual, unconcerned way that he has of expressing himself. Within the context of his other actions — such as his repeated violations of the terms of his divorce decree — it all comes across as just another element in his powerful sense of self-entitlement. Mark Sanford does whatever he wants — ditch the job to run off to Argentina, abandon his boys on Father’s Day weekend, lie to his staff about where he’s going, veto the entire state budget, block stimulus money that his state needs so he can posture on FoxNews about it 46 times, carry defecating piglets into the State House to make a cheap political point and leave others to clean up the mess, use state funds to visit his mistress in the Southern Hemisphere when he’s making state employees on state business double up in hotel rooms (because he’s such a fiscal conservative), enter his ex-wife’s house without permission repeatedly, because he feels like it. Because he’s Mark Sanford, and he’s entitled. And if any of it gets him into trouble, then we’re supposed to forgive him.

Meanwhile, Charles Ramsey is a sinner who’s done jail time for his crimes. He doesn’t ask us to forgive him, much less expect us to forgive him. He doesn’t ask anything of us. He exhibits no sense of entitlement. He’s just this dude who, when a woman cried for help while he was eating his McDonald’s, went out of his way to help her. A guy with a low-enough opinion of himself that when a pretty young white girl comes and hugs him, he knows something is wrong.

What he did doesn’t erase what he’s done in the past, and he doesn’t go around telling us that it should. But it was a redemptive act, and it was heroic.

Missing the point about the wicked Lowcountry

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Last night before the results were in, a friend shared with me this Facebook update from John Dickerson of CBS and Slate:

If Mark Sanford wins tonight it will mark a real evolution for South Carolina as a state where values voters play a big role. Sanford, Gingrich’s win in the SC GOP primary. This is not the state where George Bush spoke at Bob Jones in 2000.

No, no, no. Apples and oranges. As I responded:

It’s the Lowcountry. Stuff like that never mattered as much in the Lowcountry. Bob Jones is in the part of the state where they think Charlestonians are all heathens.

I could have added, “drinking, swearing, gambling, fornicating heathens,” but it was a text, so I kept it short.

The Calvinist/fundamentalist part of the state, where Bob Jones is, is the Upstate. It’s like confusing Maine and Florida, only on a smaller scale. Charleston is where the hell-raisers live, and let live. It has always been thus.

Mr. Dickerson compounded his error with a piece in Slate this morning headlined, “Paris, South Carolina:”

South Carolina conservatives may still say a candidate’s sins matter, but they aren’t voting that way. In fact, if you weren’t privy to the state’s strong social conservative history, you could almost mistake South Carolinians for city folk—people who vote for experience, policy, and political leanings and show a sophisticate’s relativism toward personal moral failings. These days, South Carolinians seem almost Parisian when they enter the voting booth.

It’s a clever angle. And accurate, in that Charleston is, indeed the Paris of South Carolina. The difference is that South Carolina isn’t France.

It’s true that the values voters don’t have the impact statewide that they did back in the early 90s. The two strains of libertarianism (economic, not cultural) — the Club for Growth types who love Sanford, and the more populist Tea Party types who love Nikki Haley — have crowded them out to a great extent.

But they’re still here. And just because Sanford won in the Lowcountry doesn’t mean their influence isn’t still felt. Maybe he would have won in another part of the state. But winning down there doesn’t prove it.

The Gingrich angle that Dickerson brings up is indeed intriguing. But I don’t think that’s a good example. South Carolinians had a fit and broke with their history of choosing the eventual nominee because Gingrich at that moment was coming across as the guy who most wanted to rip out Barack Obama’s throat with his teeth. It was a weird moment. He appealed to something dark and visceral and atavistic in the SC electorate, something that for me hearkened back to Tillmanism. There was that, and the fact that a lot of establishment Republicans didn’t want Nikki Haley’s candidate to win.

I don’t think the two instances mark a trend away from family values. But yeah, Charleston is Paris if you like…

There’s nothing ‘right-wing’ about Mark Sanford

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Just saw this fund-raising appeal from the Democrats:

ROLL CALL: Conservatives Buy Airtime for Mark Sanford

If you think Elizabeth Colbert Busch has a clear path to victory on Tuesday, think again.

She’s neck and neck with Mark Sanford — 46-46. And now, right-wing groups are throwing everything they’ve got at keeping this seat in Republican hands.

Brad — We can’t allow Elizabeth to be pummeled like this if we want to win on Tuesday.

There are only 4 days left. Will you dig deep for Elizabeth and Democrats in tough districts like hers?…

… and want to quibble with the wording.

Yeah, I get why the DCCC would want to say “right-wing.” Because it pushes their peeps’ buttons.

But Sanford isn’t “right-wing;” nor are those who tend to flock to his banner. He is libertarian, a classical liberal, which is why, even as his party establishment deserts him, he is backed by the likes of Ron and Rand Paul.

I looked up the group that Roll Call said was backing Sanford. It’s called “Independent Women Voice.” (Note that the Dems did NOT mention the name of the organization, because it might have provoked a positive response in their target audience, which of course is why the group calls itself that.) The organization describes itself this way:

IWV is dedicated to promoting limited government, free markets, and personal responsibility

Note that there’s no mention of traditional values, or a strong defense, or any of the other traits associated with conservatism, much less the “right wing” — only the libertarian values are mentioned.

Kathleen Parker writes as though Sanford were toast

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The State today ran this column by Kathleen Parker, which doesn’t come right out and say “Mark Sanford’s gonna lose,” but seems to assume that to be the case throughout. Here’s how the piece ends:

Sanford didn’t even have the decency to resign from office but rather finished his term and vanished for a couple of years only to re-emerge in pursuit of a fresh legacy. He recently won the Republican primary for an open congressional seat and faces Elizabeth Colbert Busch (sister of TV’s Stephen Colbert) in a special election May 7.

To many South Carolinians, especially women, Sanford’s candidacy is an embarrassment of Weiner­esque proportions. But if history is any guide, his candidacy is on life support. Not only did his former wife, Jenny Sanford, not stand by her man, she also wrote a book, went on TV and recently took him to court for trespassing. This in the wake of his fiancee showing up at his primary victory party and appearing onstage with him and two of his sons, one of whom had not previously met his future stepmother.

Sanford’s lack of empathy for his family, not to mention his impeachable judgment, should disqualify him from further public service, an opinion apparently shared by the National Republican Congressional Committee, which recently withdrew support for his candidacy.

Where the wife goes, so go the people…

An interesting detail to note is that this piece is several days old. It’s dated for April 19, which was three days before the PPP poll showed Elizabeth Colbert Busch leading by 9 points. So Kathleen was just sort of going on gut on this — assuming that her theory, that if the wife doesn’t forgive the voters won’t, would apply.

I think it’s premature to count Mark Sanford out. That district is so Republican, and he won the crowded GOP primary. The same people who voted for him all those times before seem poised to do it again. Relying on those voters not to show up on election day seems like a thin premise.

I now think he may lose. I’d very much like to see him lose, because it would go a long way toward bolstering my faith in democracy in South Carolina, which frankly has been repeatedly bruised over the last few years. It would show that voters in that district have some sense.

But I’m not counting on it, not on the basis of information currently available to me.

And I don’t think you can predict it based on any generalizations about sex scandals elsewhere in the country. National media (and I know Kathleen isn’t like other national media, since she lives in SC, but the audience she’s writing for is national) keep making the mistake of lumping Sanford in with Weiner and others, as though there were a connection. When there isn’t.

This is related to another fallacy that national media treat as gospel — that you can make generalizations about individual congressional elections based on party. As though a Democratic or Republican victory at one end of the country indicates a trend that will bear out at the other end of the country. Which utterly ignores the fact that every candidate is different, and is running under different conditions, in a different venue with different voters.

And just as with Tolstoy’s observation that “every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” every sex scandal is different. And one involving Mark Sanford is necessarily more different than others, because Mark Sanford is utterly unlike any politician I’ve ever encountered in my long career. The odd ways that he relates, or doesn’t relate, to other human beings (including, and perhaps especially, member of his own party) is just unique. I’ve never seen anything like it.

Therefore the psychology of what motivates people to vote for him is also unique. His political appeal is a strange animal, hard to understand and harder to predict.

So I would not dismiss him yet, as much as I may want to. But to do so, I’d have to be more certain that I am that voters who show up on May 7 in that district will act sensibly, rather than embarrass our state. And there are just too many quirky variables to predict with confidence.