The Profiling Prof, the Pandering President, and the Poisonous Precedent

James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal's OpinionJournal writes in his Best of the Web blog of the kerfuffle between Prof. Gates and the Cambridge Police:

We still think, as we wrote yesterday, that in the incident itself, Crowley was more in the wrong than Gates. In a confrontation between a policeman and a private citizen, the former has far more power, and concomitantly more responsibility. But in a public debate over race, the black Harvard professor is the one with authority. Neither Gates’s social status nor his race absolves him from the responsibility of acknowledging and working to overcome his own prejudices.

I disagree with Mr. Taranto and I believe his criticism of Prof. Gates seriously underestimates the harm the professor's behavior has done.

About 15 years ago, Animal Control officers in Oakland, California, called on the home of a young Black man who owned a pit bull accused of biting a neighbor, and when the owner could not produce a current certificate of rabies vaccination, the Animal Control officers were obliged to take the dog in for quarantine. When the owner resisted, the officers called for backup. The responding officers were unable to get the young man to calm down once his dog was in custody, and so had to arrest him for disorderly conduct and interfering with a police officer.

But as OPD Officer William Grijalva attempted to handcuff the owner, he became violent. Though the officers used pepper spray, they were unable to subdue him, and he ran into his home, where his father kept a loaded shotgun behind the front door. When Officer Grijalva saw the shotgun leveled at him, he turned to find cover, and the shotgun pellets hit him in the side, where his bulletproof vest didn't provide protection. Despite his mortal wound, Officer Grijalva returned fire through the front door, as did his partner: the dog's owner was killed, but so was his disabled father, who was in a wheelchair behind the door.

As a leading scholar in African-American studies, Prof. Gates serves as a role model for Black American men. His behavior toward the police who responded to a call to protect his property appears from all accounts -- including the professor's -- to have been driven by his resentment of how police in the United States have treated Black men in the past. He chose to behave in a provocative and belligerent fashion toward the police officers in order to make them fully aware that he put his pride as an African-American man above his obligation as a citizen to allow the police to carry out their legitimate and necessary duties.

Prof. Gates's behavior, especially with President Obama's implicit endorsement, is likely to encourage young Black men to emulate him and "stand up to police racism" with belligerence and defiance. As Officer Grijalva's family can attest, that can easily lead to an escalation with consequences far more dire than mere charges of disorderly conduct. Prof. Gates and President Obama should both consider how their high dudgeon may well lead to unnecessary deaths of young Black men and police officers who encounter them in situations that otherwise could easily be defused.

The Affirmative Action Candidate

No, not Barack Obama.

Geraldine Ferraro.

Let's look at what she said, to Jim Farber of the Torrance (Calif.) Daily Breeze:

"I think what America feels about a woman becoming president takes a very secondary place to Obama's campaign - to a kind of campaign that it would be hard for anyone to run against," she said. "For one thing, you have the press, which has been uniquely hard on her. It's been a very sexist media. Some just don't like her. The others have gotten caught up in the Obama campaign.

"If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position," she continued. "And if he was a woman (of any color) he would not be in this position. He happens to be very lucky to be who he is. And the country is caught up in the concept."

That's pretty specific. She's saying that Barack Obama is where he is because he's a Black man.

In other words, he's the beneficiary of affirmative action.

Not the affirmative action that may or may not have had anything to do with his opportunities for education or employment -- Ferraro is postulating that the Democrat Party electorate is weighing Obama's race as a specific factor in evaluating him as a candidate. By inference, then, they are both forgiving his lack of objective qualifications for the office of the President, and overlooking Hillary Clinton's obviously superior qualifications for the office.

It's bunk.

Let's be clear: affirmative action is how you pick a running mate. A Mondale picks a Ferraro not because a Ferraro has any clue how to take over the top job if the Mondale keels over, but because by picking her the Mondale shows how enlightened he is, and creates through the choice itself the sort of excitement his corpse-like appearance and demeanor could never muster.

How you get to the top of the ticket relies on a more objective process. Set aside the question of objective qualifications for the Presidency -- the "who do you want taking the 3 AM phone call?" or the "great speeches are wonderful, but it takes spade work to pass legislation" (and let's also set aside the Clinton campaign's choice of the metaphor "spade work"). Let's focus on the process of choosing a candidate.

Candidates and their campaign operations present an image and message to the electorate. The electorate turns these into subjective assessments of whether they want that candidate to be the nominee. And then the electorate provides the sole form of objective evidence about the candidate's qualifications for the party's nomination: votes.

It doesn't matter whether Barack Obama would, in fact, crumple into a quivering mass of jelly if Hezbollah terrorists detonated an atomic weapon in Houston, leading to the collapse of American power in the world and relegating the USA to second-world status. One could make a very good argument that such an eventuality is possible or even probable -- but it's still a conjecture, a forecast, and therefore subjective.

But a tally of state contests won and delegates pledged is an observable, measurable and concrete fact. It is objective evidence -- in fact, the only objective evidence that counts for anything in this process -- that a candidate is more qualified to be his or her party's nominee than the rival candidates.

If any other objective criteria about experience, temperament, gravitas, and all the qualities a President should have made a dime's difference in this process, Bill Richardson would have won the nomination handily. But for whatever reason, he did not, and for whatever reason, Barack Obama has amassed a lead in pledged delegates, states won, and even the popular vote. That makes him inarguably the most qualified of the Democrat candidates in the same sense that Chauncey Fauntleroy is the most qualified pitcher on the sandlot if he's the only kid who owns a ball and bat: whatever you think of his ability to do the job once he has it, he's got an inarguable claim to the job based on the relevant selection process.

There is, of course, a delicious irony to Ferraro's comment. A Black man couldn't possibly have achieved the front-runner position in the Democrat Party's nominating process on merit -- no, he must have been given a leg up unfairly just because of his color. The affirmative action mentality taints any success on the part of a minority member with a whiff of suspicion that the success was not so much earned as bestowed by the white male establishment under duress from the enlightened (also mostly white) liberal establishment. As political conservatives and a certain segment of Black social commentators have observed, this is perhaps the most insidious poison of affirmative action.

Triangulating McCain

John Bicknell at Congressional Quarterly hits the nail squarely on the head: The Real Conservative Conundrum: A President McCain Working With a Democratic Congress.

Conservatives who have opposed McCain during the campaign have cited his positions on a range of issues — immigration, campaign finance, climate change, tax cuts, legal rights for detainees — where he has sided with Democrats.

But the positions McCain has taken are only part of the problem for conservatives.

As president, with a Democratic Congress, it is the other part — the stylistic part — that will prove to be a much greater problem for conservatives.

When McCain has been on the conservative side, as he has been on the vast majority of issues, he gives it full-throated support. He is not afraid of giving offense to appropriators when he sticks up for cutting spending, and he has not been shy about deriding Democrats who oppose the war in Iraq, to cite two potent examples.

But when he is with the Democrats, he is really with them. McCain is not someone who simply reaches across the aisle to form coalitions with the other side. He walks across the aisle, puts on the other team’s uniform and sings the other team’s fight song.

If he wants to accomplish things — and every president wants to accomplish things — he will have to do so on the Democrats’ terms.

That means his agenda will include those things on which he agrees with the Democratic majorities in the House and Senate:

• A cap and trade regime for climate change.

• Expansion of McCain-Feingold regulations for campaign finance.

• Expanded legal rights for enemy combatants, and probably the closing of Guantanamo.

• Comprehensive immigration overhaul, with a guest worker program and a path to citizenship for the millions of illegal immigrants already in the country.

This will not be a “reaching across the aisle.” This will be a full partnership of the president and the Congress, who just happen to be of different parties. The shrunken GOP minority in the Senate might serve as a brake, especially on immigration. But it will be only a brake, not a standing astride history yelling “stop!”

Compare and contrast (excerpt from same article):

In his victory speech on Super Tuesday, McCain laid out his GOP credentials.

“I am a Republican because, like you, I want to relieve the American people of the heavy hand of a government,” he said. “I am a Republican because, like you, I believe government must defend our nation’s security wisely and effectively,” he said. “I am a Republican because I believe, like you, that government should tax us no more than necessary, spend no more than necessary,” he promised.

And, he said, “I am a Republican because I believe the judges we appoint to the federal bench must understand that enforcing our laws, not making them, is their only responsibility.”

Except that he's likely to be so busy selling out conservatives on the things the Democrats want that he's unlikely to be able to push back on those same Democrats for the conservative values (lower taxation, less government, non-activist judges and strong defense) that he claims he wants too. The Democrats are willing to accept compromise from opponents but never offer it in return (unless their re-election prospects are on the line): they're funny that way.

"... it would require an act of deep duplicity by Mr. McCain."

In his Feb. 7 Wonder Land column in the Wall Street Journal, Daniel Henninger advises conservatives to shut up and get with the McCain program:

Conservatives, for whom any glass is always half full, have sold themselves short. Notwithstanding the moderate pedigrees of the three major GOP candidates on entry, all emerged from the debates as Reagan conservatives on what matters: taxes, spending, regulation and national defense. Most of the worrisome moderate positions were in the past.

When Reaganomics appeared in the late 1970s, the Republican establishment mocked it. Voodoo economics, someone said. Today for a Republican presidential candidate, it's gospel.

This is an achievement.

Some will say the debate promises were just politics. As opposed to what? Presumably moving people toward one's position is the point of all this daily political heavy-lifting. To now call a candidate's embrace of your ideas unacceptable is churlish and self-defeating. Conservatives won a decades-long debate in their party. Bank it. The demand now that Sen. McCain repudiate that old vote on the Bush tax cuts is an attempt at public humiliation. Ain't gonna happen. If life doesn't work for you without public penance, join a monastery.

Most of the distrust of the McCain candidacy is rooted in personal ill will. He's a hard case, and activists are often brittle. The fear is that one of the strongest impulses in a McCain presidency will be payback, and that he might sell out conservatives on taxes and the judiciary. That is possible, though by now it would require an act of deep duplicity by Mr. McCain. Here again, the conservatives should show more self-confidence.

Hmm... I don't think conservatives lack self-confidence. Rather, they are all too confident in their knowledge that Senator McCain is capable of acts of deep duplicity. Bill Clinton ran as a centrist and immediately began to govern as a hard-left liberal, until Newt Gingrich and the new GOP majority in Congress forced him to "triangulate" back to the center. Who in Congress will force a President McCain to triangulate, and in which direction? What in his record in the Senate indicates that he would even wish to stand up to Congressional Democrats to defend conservative domestic policies -- especially given the likelihood that they will demand he cave to their domestic policy priorities in return for allowing him some leeway on foreign policy and military affairs?