'Destroying Jobs' Why the Economy Can

Home , America Alone, New Liberals (Germany), Pinctada

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February 6, 2012 $4.99 CHARLES COMINGMURRAY’S APART WILLIAMSON on MSNBC LONG on Colbert

The Virtue of

WHY THEDestruction ECONOMY

CAN’T GROW WITHOUT ‘DESTROYING JOBS’ REIHANREIHAN SALAMSALAM

$4.99 06

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toc_QXP-1127940144.qxp 1/18/2012 2:06 PM Page 2 Contents

FEBRUARY 6, 2012 | VOLUME LXIV, NO. 2 | www.nationalreview.com

COVER STORY Page 28 Matt Kibbe on Ron Paul Let Us Now Praise Private Equity p. 18 Every presidential candidate has to BOOKS, ARTS defend himself against accusations & MANNERS of wrongdoing—an affair, abuse of office, campaign-finance impropriety, and so 43 THE VIRTUE DEFICIT Ron Haskins reviews Coming forth. Mitt Rom ney finds himself in a Apart: The State of White predictable defensive crouch, too, but the America, 1960–2010, by Charles Murray. allegation against him is extraordinary: He stands accused of doing his job 44 THE VICE OF MODERATION Henry Olsen reviews Rule and too well. Reihan Salam Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the COVER: STEVE BRONSTEIN/STONE/GETTY Destruction of the Republican Party, from Eisenhower to the ARTICLES Tea Party, by Geoffrey Kabaservice. THE YOUTH CANDIDATE 18 by Matt Kibbe 47 ACID TEST Why Ron Paul appeals to the millennial generation. John J. Miller reviews Ambrose Bierce: The Devil’s LEAN LEFT 20 by Kevin D. Williamson Dictionary, Tales, & Memoirs, MSNBC drops the mask. edited by S. T. Joshi. GRADE SCHOOL 23 by Andrew Stuttaford 49 THE WRITER’S LIFE Rating agencies certify the euro zone’s parlous state. Mark Falcoff reviews But What Do You Actually Do?: A Literary SPEAKING IN TONGUES 24 by Jay Nordlinger Vagabondage, by Alistair Horne. Candidates, Americans, and their foreign languages. 50 FILM: MUTE POINT 26 HA. HA. HA. by Rob Long Ross Douthat reviews The Artist. Stephen Colbert’s NPR LOL. 51 THE STRAGGLER: THE HIGHER SILLINESS FEATURES John Derbyshire tours the Guggenheim. 28 LET US NOW PRAISE PRIVATE EQUITY by Reihan Salam To create new jobs, you must destroy old ones. SECTIONS 34 ROMNEY VS. OBAMACARE by Yuval Levin & Ramesh Ponnuru What the presumptive nominee should say. 4 Letters to the Editor 6 The Week 36 THE PRESIDENT’S DEPRESSING STATISTICS by Scott Winship 40 The Bent Pin . . . . . Florence King Obama is simply wrong about economic mobility. 41 Athwart ...... James Lileks 42 The Long View ...... Rob Long 38 DAN QUAYLE’S SECOND ACT by John J. Miller 48 Poetry ...... William Baer He’s out of politics, but full of political wisdom. 52 Happy Warrior ...... Mark Steyn

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Lincoln’s Constitution and Ours FEBRUARY 6 ISSUE; PRINTED JANUARY 19 Fred Schwarz made my blood boil in his review EDITOR Richard Lowry of Lincoln and the Triumph of the Nation (“Lin - Senior Editors coln’s Constitution,” January 23). Does the ex - Richard Brookhiser / Jay Nordlinger Ramesh Ponnuru / David Pryce-Jones pression “The ends justify the means” sound Managing Editor Jason Lee Steorts better when conservatives dress it up, as Mr. Literary Editor Michael Potemra Executive Editor Christopher McEvoy Schwarz does in his final paragraph, than when National Correspondent John J. Miller Political Reporter Robert Costa totalitarians and their apologists use it nakedly? Art Director Luba Kolomytseva “Fiddling with the Constitution must occur only Deputy Managing Editors Fred Schwarz / Kevin D. Williamson in response to a great emergency or a severe Associate Editors Helen Rittelmeyer / Robert VerBruggen long-term problem where every other avenue has Research Director Katherine Connell been exhausted . . .” Executive Secretary Frances Bronson Assistant to the Editor Christeleny Frangos Who gets to decide whether an emergency is Contributing Editors “great” or not? Who says whether a problem is Robert H. Bork / Shannen Coffin / John Derbyshire Ross Douthat / Rod Dreher / David Frum “severe”? The people, imperial presidents, or Roman Genn / Jim Geraghty / Jonah Goldberg Florence King / Lawrence Kudlow / Mark R. Levin unaccountable judges? Who says how long is “long-term”? When, in a repub - Yuval Levin / Rob Long / Jim Manzi lic with representatives accountable to voters, is “every other avenue” ever Andrew C. McCarthy / Kate O’Beirne David B. Rivkin Jr. exhausted? NATIONALREVIEWONLINE If we the people (conservatives especially) do not demand better reasoning Editor-at-Large Kathryn Jean Lopez Managing Editor Edward John Craig than this from presidents and the judges they appoint, the tyrants will win, and News Editor Daniel Foster Editorial Associates very soon we will have no Constitution to bend. Brian Bolduc / Charles C. W. Cooke Katrina Trinko Web Developer Gareth du Plooy Derek Lane Technical Services Russell Jenkins Clarkrange, Tenn. EDITORS- AT- LARGE Linda Bridges / John O’Sullivan FreD SChWarz repLIeS: If we insist on applying all the usual rules during a war, Contributors Hadley Arkes / Baloo / Tom Bethell when insurrectionists and terrorists lurk at every corner and the central govern- James Bowman / Priscilla L. Buckley Eliot A. Cohen / Brian Crozier ment needs to act with much greater vigor, or in a situation such as the civil- Dinesh D’Souza / M. Stanton Evans rights movement, where large groups of citizens had been unable for many Chester E. Finn Jr. / Neal B. Freeman James Gardner / David Gelernter decades to exercise their constitutional privileges, then we will no longer have George Gilder / Jeffrey Hart Kevin A. Hassett / Charles R. Kesler a country and a Constitution to defend. The Founders recognized this and wrote David Klinghoffer / Anthony Lejeune D. Keith Mano / Michael Novak the Constitution with enough vagueness and wiggle room to provide flexibility Alan Reynolds / Tracy Lee Simmons in an emergency. Terry Teachout / Taki Theodoracopulos Vin Weber as for the question of who decides when an emergency is great enough, the Chief Financial Officer James X. Kilbridge final defense against abuse of power in a democracy lies with the people, as the Accounting Manager Galina Veygman Accountant Zofia Baraniak authors of the Federalist Papers pointed out on numerous occasions. If a power- Business Services Alex Batey / Kate Murdock mad and unscrupulous despot is determined to set up a dictatorship, a paper con- Elena Reut / Lucy Zepeda stitution will not stop him. But in every real-world case where the U.S. Circulation Manager Jason Ng WORLD WIDE WEB www.nationalreview.com government has expanded its powers in a crisis, legitimately or not, the people MAIN NUMBER 212-679-7330 SUBSCRIPTION INQUIRIES 386-246-0118 have either approved the expansion or reined in the government, sometimes WASHINGTON OFFICE 202-543-9226 immediately and sometimes when the crisis was over. ADVERTISING SALES 212-679-7330 Executive Publisher Scott F. Budd Conservatives must recognize the need for occasional fiddling, or they will Advertising Director Jim Fowler Advertising Manager Kevin Longstreet shrink to a tiny rump admiring each other in righteous isolation. But by keeping ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER Paul Olivett the fiddling to a minimum, reserving it for cases when the need is greatest, and PUBLISHER reversing it as quickly as possible, they can set an example that (hopefully) will Jack Fowler discourage recourse to this extreme by others, except when nothing else will CHAIRMANEMERITUS Thomas L. Rhodes work.

FOUNDER William F. Buckley Jr. Letters may be sub mitted by e-mail to [email protected].

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The Mystery of the Gold Angel Hides a Big Secret

uring restoration of a 600-year-old monastery uringin Coventry, restoration England of a recently, 600-year-old a shocking monastery Dindiscovery Coventry, made England headlines. recently, The a austereshocking Dmonks discoverywho had lived made in headlines. the monastery The austere were monksforbidden who from had owning lived in personal the monastery property were of forbiddenany kind. Andfrom yet, owning mysteriously personal hidden property of anywithin kind. one And of theyet, monk’smysteriously cells, histori-hidden withinans discovered one of the a medievalmonk’s cells, gold histori-coin. ans discovered a medieval gold coin. Why would a poor monk have a gold Whycoin secretedwould a poor away monk in his have room? a gold coinThe answersecreted to away this medievalin his room? mys- Thetery isanswer revealed to this in the medieval very name mys- teryof the is coin:revealed The inGold the Angel. very name of the coin: The Gold Angel. The Lucky Gold Angel TheFirst issuedLucky overGold 500 Angel years ago Firstby King issued Edward over IV, 500 British years Goldago byAngel King coins Edward have IV, been British thought Gold Angelfor centuries coins have to bring been good thought luck, forgood centuries fortune, toand bring even good to possess luck, goodhealing fortune, powers! and Part even of tothis possess legend healingcomes from powers! the inspiredPart of this design legend of comesthe coin: from the the triumph inspired of Good design vs. of theEvil coin:shown the by triumph St. Michael of Good slaying vs. a Evilfire-breathing shown by St.dragon. Michael slaying a fire-breathing dragon. The Big Secret: you can pocket a Gold TheAngel Big today Secret: for under you can $90 pocket a Gold AngelToday, wetoday are announcingfor under $90the very FIRST EVER Coin shown larger than Today, we are announcing the very FIRST EVER Coinactual shown size oflarger 11 mm. than release of an exciting new British Gold Angel. 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n Mismanaged and lacking strategic direction, the Gingrich campaign may be in need of a leveraged buyout.

n After the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary, Mitt Romney is much closer to getting the nomination than any of his competitors. This is so even though few people have voted, few delegates have been awarded, and conservatives continue to have serious misgivings about him. He is rising in the national polls, which also show that many Republicans who do not list him as their first choice find him acceptable. All of his rivals (their continued multiplicity is another boon for him) have lower ceilings. Rep. Ron Paul’s foreign policy and general crankery preclude his victory. Gov. Rick Perry has flatlined. Former House speaker Newt Gingrich’s recent performance—alternately attacking Bain, saying his attacks went too far, and pretending that bailouts are all he attacked—has reminded voters of his petulance and indiscipline. Former senator Rick Santorum is running a valiant, honorable campaign, but lacks both cash and organization. We would prefer a longer primary season to sharpen the nominee’s game and to get more conservatives across the country to regis- ter to vote. But with the outcome in less and less doubt, voters may decide to skip to the end.

n Liberals taking note of Santorum’s boomlet wondered whether the guy was some sort of papist freak. Item one: the Santorums’ See page 16. treatment of their son Gabriel, who died two hours after a premature birth. The Santorums took him home so that his siblings provisions of the tax code that recognize the costs of parental could see the brother they had lost, a choice Alan Colmes (Fox) investment in children amount to special favors for those called “crazy,” and Eugene Robinson (MSNBC) “weird.” Item “Americans fortunate enough to have a child” (as Strassel puts it). two: The Heights, a boys’ school in suburban D.C., where San - The Journal does not treat low taxes on capital gains as special torum sent two sons. Ten to 15 of the 70 faculty members belong favors for those fortunate enough to have investment portfolios, to Opus Dei, reported the New York Times. A candidate’s back- even though they too look like preferential treatment to the untu- ground is relevant to his philosophy, and these early probes of tored eye. It is right not to: Treating capital-gains income like Santorum’s are not yet a full-blown assault: Under pressure labor income would create a bias in favor of consumption. For the (from Rich Lowry, among others), Colmes apologized and tax code to treat parental investments in children like consumption Robinson semi-apologized, while the Times story was rather would, likewise, create a bias against parents—whose financial good-natured. But Santorum has gotten a taste of what he can sacrifices swell the future coffers of Social Security and Medicare expect as a socially conservative and religiously traditionalist while earning them no additional benefits from those programs. Catholic if he goes the distance. He will have to be both well pre- Expanding the child credit, or increasing the child deduction, is pared and relaxed, and not give any unnecessary hostages to not a special favor but the reduction of an unfair tax. All con - fortune. (Hint: Begins with contra, rhymes with perception.) servatives should ride that hobbyhorse.

n Senator Santorum has a tax plan that, among other things, n One of the minor mysteries of the 2012 cycle is why Jon triples the personal deduction for children. Other candidates, such Huntsman, a conservative former governor of deep-red Utah, ran as Speaker Gingrich and Governor Perry, have similar provisions as if he were auditioning to play John Anderson in some future in their plans, but for some reason our friends at the Wall Street Oliver Stone movie. Maybe his two years as ambassador to Journal have been particularly troubled by Santorum, zinging him Beijing under President Obama rusted his people skills; on the in both an editorial and a Kimberley Strassel column. The Journal stump, he came off as a fan of progressive rock, a speaker of is hazy on the details—it has three times mistakenly claimed that Mandarin, and an admirer of Jon Huntsman. After finishing third Santorum seeks to triple the child credit—but its objection does in New Hampshire, he withdrew, saying that it was time for the not turn on them. Making it easier for families to raise children is GOP to unite behind Mitt Romney. The planets moved still in

ROMAN GENN a mere “hobbyhorse” of Christian conservatives, in their view, and their courses.

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week_QXP-1127940387.qxp 1/18/2012 2:00 PM Page 8

THE WEEK n Ron Paul, having been criticized for tolerating bigotry, has brought into government would not operate to the financial apparently decided to respond with some left-wing dema- advantage of their former employers. Muñoz’s connections are goguery on race. He portrays the “war on drugs” and our over- obnoxious in themselves, and her continued dealings with them seas “empire building” as discriminatory exercises in which are venal. blacks are disproportionately imprisoned, executed, and pressed into military service. The critique is repulsive. The drug n In late October 2009, as the nation laws, however unwise they may be, are race-neutral. High rates struggled with a fierce recession and of black imprisonment are explained by high rates of black the Democrats faced two tough crime commission—indeed, while black Americans account gubernatorial elections just days away, for more than half of murder convictions, they are statistically the Obama White House hosted an less likely than white convicts to receive the death penalty. Paul elaborate Halloween party as decadent also shares the media’s historical amnesia about the much- as it was opulent. A new book on the maligned ramping-up of federal crack-cocaine penalties, which Obamas by Jodi Kantor detailed the was originally championed by black lawmakers concerned affair. The theme was Alice in Wonder - about the devastation of urban communities. And last we land; Johnny Depp was there, portraying checked, it’s an all-volunteer military. Paul appeals to a small the Mad Hatter, and he brought along the but devoted niche of libertarian extremists, and he seems deter- director Tim Burton, who sported a heart- mined to keep it that way. shaped eyepatch and carefully tousled hair. George Lucas sent an actor dressed as either Chewbacca or Helen n The DNC paid TV comic Stephen Colbert $500,000 to run in Thomas, and scattered through the ballroom were antique linens, the South Carolina Republican primary. No, they didn’t. He was giant stuffed animals, and even a dwarf in a superhero suit. Mrs. paid by the Koch brothers, who assumed that his campaign Obama wore a leopard outfit, while the president was somewhat against super PACs would actually rally Republican support for more implausibly costumed as a regular guy in a sweater. political free speech. No, actually, they didn’t do it either. He real- Refreshments included bone-shaped cookies and fruit punch ly sat down with Jon Stewart to figure out some way to boost rat- served in blood vials. Conversation, one can only assume, turned ings, since three years of Obama has strained his anti-right-wing on the iniquity of the 1 percent. shtick. Closer. But do you care? Colbert can be an amusing per- former in the little box, and he follows a long line of American n The Supreme Court unanimously ruled that religious groups jokesters, back to Mr. Dooley and Petroleum V. Nasby, who com- have a broad freedom to hire and fire ministers and other person- mented on politics from beneath a layer of irony. But none of nel who transmit religious beliefs, and that anti-discrimination them broke the fourth wall to run for president. Politics, believe laws do not grant governments the authority to second-guess it or not, is serious business. Colbert—not “Colbert”—would say their decisions. No justice agreed with the Obama administration, that he agrees, and that his outside-the-box antics are meant to which had argued that religious groups have no greater claim to improve the process. But they do not. Really. autonomy than labor unions or other organizations—a position with no support even in the lower courts. It often seems that in n The editorial-page editor of the New York Times, Andrew the modern liberal view, being explicitly mentioned in the Rosenthal, recently wrote that “there has been a racist undertone Constitution counts against the status of a right. to many of the Republican attacks leveled against President Obama for the last three years.” Exhibit A was Rep. Joe Wilson’s n A strong case can be made that the president’s power to make shouting at the president, “You lie!” Exhibit B was Speaker John appointments while Congress is in recess was originally under- Boehner’s asking the president to address a joint session of stood to be quite limited: to apply only to vacancies that arose Congress a day later than he, the president, wanted. If you during the long adjournment between congressional sessions. thought these things had nothing to do with the color of Obama’s Modern practice has enlarged the power: Presidents can make skin, you’re unfit to edit the New York Times. Rosenthal wrote, appointments whenever Congress schedules a break, even if the “Mr. Obama’s election in 2008 was a triumph of American vacancy was of long standing. During the Bush administration, democracy and tolerance.” So what would Obama’s defeat in Democrats began to hold pro forma sessions even when most 2012 be? You got it. congressmen were out of town, to prevent Bush from having a formal “recess” during which he could make appointments. n The president has appointed Cecilia Muñoz head of his Senate Republicans have prevented formal recess for the same Domestic Policy Council, which supervises the execution of reason. Among the appointments they wished to block was that domestic policy (other than economic) from the White House. of Richard Cordray to head the Consumer Financial Protection This is disturbing from at least two points of view. First, before Bureau, a new agency to which Republicans have both policy joining the administration as a senior presidential aide in 2009, and constitutional objections. The administration declared that Muñoz was for 20 years a principal lobbyist for the National in its judgment Congress was in recess, and appointed Cordray Council of La Raza (“The Race”), a left-wing ethnic-identity anyway. Holding up appointees to force policy changes is a group for Hispanics. La Raza has been fiercely hostile to the questionable tactic, but the president’s claim that he can judge enforcement of immigration laws. Second, as a presidential better than Congress when the latter is in session is a breathtak- adviser since 2009, Muñoz seems to have been instrumental in ing power grab. Republicans should treat Cordray as illegiti- doubling the flow of taxpayer funds to La Raza and similar orga- mate, and any decisions he makes should be challenged in court nizations, in violation of an administration promise that lobbyists on that basis.

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Direct from Locked Vaults to U.S. Citizens! Original U.S. Gov’t Morgan Silver Dollars

National Collector’s Mint announces a special A message from the limited release of 2,981 Morgan Silver Dollars 91-134 years old at $39 each. Several promin- 37TH TREASURER OF THE ent national dealers charge from $43.50 MORE UNITED STATES for a comparable Morgan Silver Dollar. These Hello, I’m Angela Marie Morgans are among the last surviving originals still Buchanan. You might know in existence, and each coin is guaranteed to be in me as Bay Buchanan. I mostly Brilliant Uncirculated to Fine condition. was appointed by Due to volatile fluctuations in the precious metals Ronald Reagan to be the market, price can be guaranteed @ $39 each for one 37th Treasurer of the week only! United States… maybe you’ve seen my MARKET CONDITIONS signature on some of the bills in your The last time silver hit $50 an ounce, China was a wallet. So, you can understand why our poor, underdeveloped nation. Now, the Chinese are nation’s coins are vitally important to rich and using three times as much silver! Will this me. That’s why I’m so pleased to be able drive the price of silver back to $50 or even higher? WITHDRAWN AT ANY TIME to announce this release of Morgan Sil- One thing is certain – dramatic increases in silver WITHOUT NOTICE AT THE ver Dollars by National Collector’s Mint. SOLE DISCRETION OF NCM. investment have seen silver prices triple in the last Of all the coins ever struck by the U.S. three years and rise almost 30% in one month alone! You may order 1 Morgan Silver Gov’t, none have so captured our imagi- But you can still get these Morgans for just $39 each! Dollar for $39, plus $4 shipping, han- nations the way Morgans have. Perhaps INVESTMENT dling and insurance, 3 for $124 ppd., 5 it’s because Morgan Silver Dollars are so Increasing prices of precious metals make every for $204.50 ppd., 10 for $403 ppd., 20 much a part of our heritage – that striking Morgan Silver Dollar more valuable. But acquiring for $799 ppd., 50 for $1980 ppd., 100 image of Lady Liberty has been with us your own private cache of Morgan Silver Dollars is for $3935 ppd. 60-Day Money-Back since 1878, a time when America was a long term investment in so much more... in Guarantee. Don’t wait. ACT NOW! only 38 states big, and much of our coun- history... in American heritage... in the splendid try was raw frontier. Morgans’ gleaming rendering of Miss Liberty’s profile by designer silver dollars saw us through two World George T. Morgan, whose “M” Wars. They fueled periods of wealth and mark on every Morgan helped us survive the struggle of the Silver Dollar identifies Great Depression. Of course, they gained his masterwork. And, even more notoriety in the casinos of the of course, Morgan Old West and then again, in the casinos of Silver Dollars have not the new Las Vegas. Most of all, they are a been minted for 91 years constant symbol of America. and are no longer in So I invite you to sample some of these circulation. magnificent Morgan Silver Dollars. Phone orders will be Enjoy them. Protect them. Celebrate filled on a first-come, first- them. What better way to hold your his- served basis and a limit of tory, our history, America’s history in the 100 coins per customer will be palm of your hand! strictly adhered to. Due to the Sincerely, extremely limited nature of this offer, mail orders cannot be accepted. THIS OFFER MAY BE

Angela Marie (Bay) Buchanan National Collector’s Mint, Inc. is an independent, private corporation not affiliated with, 37th Treasurer of the United States of America endorsed, or licensed by the U.S. Government or the U.S. Mint. Offer not valid in CT. Co-Director, NCM Board of Advisors CALL TOLL-FREE 1-800-799-MINT ASK FOR EXT. 6920 (1-800-799-6468) © 2012 NCM, Inc. R7-R46 week_QXP-1127940387.qxp 1/18/2012 2:00 PM Page 10

THE WEEK n Four Marines of the Third Battalion, Second Marines, were increases. Gov. Jerry Brown, who has fallen far and fast from his filmed urinating on the corpses of Taliban fighters in Helmand days as an Arthur Laffer–inspired flat-tax advocate, is pushing Province, Afghanistan. Pres. Hamid Karzai, triangulating to save to add an income-tax surcharge to the swollen tax bills already himself as America withdraws, denounced the deed, as did the paid by higher earners while raising the state sales tax as well. Taliban, with whom we are proposing to negotiate. Their motives Tax-hike advocates have unleashed ads targeting reality tele - are opportunistic and, in the case of the Taliban, grossly hypo- vision star Kim Kardashian, as though she were typical of critical: The Afghan jihadists routinely behead and mutilate the California’s high earners. Another proposal comes from a union- Afghans they kill. Americans should not do this kind of thing dominated coalition for which the California Democratic party because it evinces a lack of discipline, and because in the digital is not sufficiently left-wing, and it would increase sales and age images are potential ammunition, and because it is wrong. income taxes even more. A business group had planned to offer The offending Marines should be punished, and our official a different tax hike, applying the sales tax to services excluding expressions of regret should be stern, formal, and terse. health care and education, but has bumped back its plans to 2014. California’s problem is spending: It spends substantially n Faced with an enormous budget deficit, Californians will more per capita than do most U.S. states, and a recent report have a choice on the 2012 ballot between tax increases and tax from California’s nonpartisan legislative analyst’s office sug-

Intelligent Idealism

ONSERVATISM is a distant cousin of cynicism. back on the moment as the time “when we came to - C The traditional conservative believes that man gether to remake this great nation.” is fallen, sinful, flawed. Hence we understand that How’s that working out? man cannot leap out of history, cannot begin at Year President Obama and his defenders claim that he has Zero, cannot create a heaven on earth. This does not failed in his efforts to begin an era of new politics solely mean conservatives cannot be idealists; it simply means because his opponents refused to grant him everything we cannot be utopians. he wanted. The hubris of the argument is breathtaking. Our political system is decidedly anti-utopian, which The president’s expectation that in a properly functioning is one reason conservatives love it so. It assumes that constitutional democracy he would win every battle even the most decent men will act bespeaks an ignorance and an arro- out of self-interest. The Constitution gance the likes of which we haven’t doesn’t deny men’s flaws, but relies seen in the Oval Office for a century. upon them. It sets ambition against And now our president has be - ambition, faction against faction, in come a champion of cynicism. His the hope that negatives will cancel triangulating proposals are de signed out and leave room for wisdom. So entirely to conceal his desires and while no informed person would priorities. He’s streamlining gov - call our Constitution cynical, most ernment, promising savings that would agree that its idealism is tem- amount to 0.0081 percent of the pered by the sometimes lamentable 2012 budget. He once campaigned constraints of reality. on unity and idealism, and is now The Left’s problem is that it has no in every breath spitting the bile of limiting principle to its idealism. It may deny that it is demonization and disunity. utopian, and some liberals even recognize the folly of Conservatives know better. Because we never dreamed utopianism in the abstract. But those same liberals will of making a perfect society, we’ve come to appreciate a not tell their idealistic cohorts to abandon utopianism. good society. The utopian protesters occupying thither It is too useful in motivating those who do not so much and yon look at this good society and curse it. President think their way through politics as feel. Obama plays them for fools, telling them that all that For instance, Barack Obama ran for president insisting stands between them and their objective is his political that his chief opponent “is not other candidates. It’s cyn- “enemies.” The bacchanalia of idealism has given way to icism.” He affirmed, “I am confident that we can create a the hangover of cynicism, and the president instructs us Kingdom right here on earth.” Upon securing the nomi- to alleviate our suffering by making the perfect the enemy PETE SOUZA / nation he declared that his triumph proved that “we are of the good. the ones we’ve been waiting for” and that we would look —JONAH GOLDBERG THE WHITE HOUSE

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gests that even Governor Brown’s mass ive tax increase would disincentives, in the form of fines, the market will magically pro- not cover the shortfall. This is remarkable for a state that already duce the technology necessary to meet any arbitrary target. After enjoys the privilege of collecting taxes on Silicon Valley IPOs. all, it worked with the catalytic converter, back in the Nixon Unfortunately for the Golden State, Chris Christie is otherwise administration; and if they keep trying often enough, it’s bound engaged. to work again someday.

n A state-appointed panel has confirmed, in exhaustive detail, n Mostafa Ahmadi-Roshan was a nuclear scientist specializing what anyone not blinded by the romance of fast trains could have in uranium enrichment at Natanz, a facility believed to be vital in seen: Building a high-speed-rail network in California would be the production of an Iranian nuclear weapon. He was being dri- an expensive boondoggle that would quickly turn into a white ven to work when two men on a motorbike drew up alongside, elephant. The panel estimates that the project would cost almost checked his identity, stuck a magnetic bomb on the car, and $100 billion and would make at best a small reduction in the roared away into the anonymous traffic. A few seconds later, the state’s automobile traffic, yet Governor Brown is determined bomb was exploded by remote control, making Ahmadi-Roshan to see it through. In the twilight of his career, it seems, even the fifth Iranian nuclear scientist to be killed in this way in the last Mr. Small Is Beautiful wants a giant monument he can be re- two years. Officials blamed “Zionists” and mustered the usual membered by, and we’re sure his union buddies don’t object. But crowd to shout “Death to America” and “Death to Israel,” but in a state facing multibillion-dollar deficits, where thousands of they were evidently bewildered. And well might they be. In the criminals are set free for lack of jail space, where the vaunted uni- habit of promising to wipe Israel off the map, they are meanwhile Any rational private company would have terminated the Volt program by now, but as long as GM remains Government Motors, it’s unlikely ever to pull the plug.

versity and parks systems are enduring huge cuts, and where unable to protect in their own capital the men providing the req- medical services and law enforcement have been severely uisite big bomb. A team of professionals is on the loose in Tehran, slashed and face further reductions, surely Governor Brown can picking off targets of choice and leaving no trace. These opera- find something better to do with $100 billion. tions seem to bear the signature of Mossad, the legendary Israeli secret service. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton categorically n General Motors has achieved a noteworthy feat by recalling denies U.S. involvement. The chief Israeli military spokesman all 8,000 of the plug-in hybrid Chevy Volts that it has managed let drop that he doesn’t know who did it, but “I am not shedding to sell thus far. The immediate problem is a battery that tends to a tear.” Covert war like this shows how high the stakes already catch fire—which is more than you can say for the vehicle’s are. À la guerre comme à la guerre—which is French for “no sales, despite federal subsidies totaling about $7,000 per vehicle holds barred.” (just be glad there isn’t a Cadillac Volt). The bigger problem is that even if the Volt worked, it wouldn’t work: Its high cost (about n President Obama has announced that the U.S., for the first time $45,000), limited range on electricity, and cumbersome recharg- in 20 years, will send an ambassador to Burma (indigenously ing requirements make it suitable only for pretentious greens styled by the military junta as “Myanmar”). U.S. sanctions con- (preens, if you will)—especially since it doesn’t even reduce tinue, but this is a second olive branch in a short time, following carbon emissions, just shifts them from car to power plant. Any Hillary Clinton’s friendly visit in December. Such legitimacy rational private company would have terminated the Volt pro- should be granted to Burma only in return for credible promises gram by now, but as long as GM remains Government Motors, of democratization. The announcement of a rebel ceasefire and it’s unlikely ever to pull the plug. the release of political prisoners do not suffice. Opposition hero Aung San Suu Kyi will be allowed to contest the next elections, n The Environmental Protection Agency has fined oil refiners but remains unable to leave Burma and return. Unless more nearly $7 million for disobeying an EPA mandate to blend cellu- reforms are coming, this may be another unrequited attempt at losic ethanol—made from grass, wood chips, corn stalks, and engagement by President Obama. other plant wastes—into their fuel. Fair enough, except for one thing: Cellulosic ethanol does not exist, at least not as a commer- n Standard & Poor’s downgraded the credit ratings of nine cial product. It is hard to make, and nobody has yet figured out European sovereign borrowers, with France’s loss of its AAA how to produce it cheaply enough. Not that the EPA cares about rating the headline. It was not a surprising move: In the past five such details; its mandate was not met, so somebody has to pay. years, France’s national debt has soared from €1.1 trillion to It’s almost touching how the EPA has greater faith in markets €1.7 trillion, or from 65 percent of GDP to 85 percent. France’s than most conservatives. We favor free markets because, in most problem is not only for the French: The European Financial Sta - cases, barring interference that distorts them, they tend to come bility Facility—the euro-zone bailout bank—has been able to closest to an optimum allotment of resources. But the EPA, dis- issue AAA-rated bonds only because its debt was guaranteed missing such niceties, views the marketplace as a philosopher’s mostly by AAA-rated European governments. With France having stone: Given sufficient incentives, in the form of subsidies, and been shown the door out of that elite club, only 35 percent of the

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THE WEEK fund’s guarantee is from AAA countries, of which it now enjoys ment, opened up new territory for immigration restrictionists by the support of only four: Germany, the Netherlands, Finland, urging that immigrants be taught, among other things, the use of and Lux em bourg. Practically speaking, that means that Ger - deodorant. Said the lady: “Without trying to be offensive, we are many alone now bears most of the responsibility for guarantee- talking about hygiene and what is an acceptable norm in this ing the pan-European stability fund and maintaining its AA+ country when you are working closely with other co-workers.” rating (just re duced from AAA). The finance minister of We await with keen interest news of remarks made by Mrs. Denmark remarked that France’s downgrade should be a wake- Gambaro when she is trying to be offensive. up call for all of Eu rope, and noted that his country, which had the wisdom to stay out of the euro and thereby maintain a mea- n Sarah Dawn McKinley was at home in rural Oklahoma on sure of monetary independence, remains highly rated “because New Year’s Eve when two men began pounding on her door. The we have made sure that we have order in our own house.” Now 18-year-old had lost her husband to lung cancer on Christmas and the Germans will be do ing the housekeeping for France, Italy, was alone with her infant son. She barricaded the door with a Greece, Spain, Portugal . . . sofa, popped a bottle in her baby’s mouth, grabbed a pistol and a shotgun, and dialed 9-1-1. “Is it okay to shoot him if he comes in n The photos seem dream- the door?” she asked. “Do what you have to do to protect your like, unreal: a luxury cruise baby,” the dispatcher told her. After she had spent a harrowing 21 ship resting almost on its minutes on the line, with no help in sight, one of the men, armed side, like a discarded bath with a knife, kicked down the door. She did what she had to do: toy. As we go to press, eleven She shot and killed the intruder. Thanks to Oklahoma’s “castle of the Costa Concordia’s doctrine” law, she was unambiguously within her rights to do so. 4,000-plus passengers and If only all gun laws were as sensible. crew are known to be dead, and 28 are missing. The dis- n There has recently been a rash of stories about out-of-state aster was a perfect storm of visitors to New York City politely asking security personnel incompetence, indiscipline, and unprofessionalism. Capt. where they should check their handguns, then being arrested for Francesco Schettino allegedly took the ship close to the island of their trouble. The tourists in question all have carry permits from Giglio, off the Tuscan coast, to wave to a friend. A spur of sub- their home states, but these permits are not recognized in anti-gun merged rock gashed the hull. No lifeboat drill had been con- New York City. The most heartening of these stories concerns 28- ducted; officers and crew grabbed the boats for themselves, year-old Ryan Jerome of Indiana, a jeweler carrying $15,000 leaving passengers uninformed and undirected. Many, after worth of gold, who tried to check his .45-caliber Ruger with hours of confusion, simply jumped off and swam to shore. guards at the Empire State Building. Jerome spent two days in jail Civilized nations have learned, through painful experience of and faces a mandatory minimum sentence of three and a half maritime disasters, how to save lives and keep order, but rules years if found guilty at trial. Before taking up his present profes- and experience count for nothing in the face of such feckless- sion, Jerome served in the U.S. Marine Corps. Now his fellow ness. Marines are rallying to his aid. A letter and e-mail campaign organized by the website leatherneck.com is being directed at District n On January 7, a photograph of Russian opposition leader Attorney Cyrus Vance, Mayor Bloomberg, and Police Com mis - Alexei Navalny with exiled oligarch Boris Berezovsky ap - sion er Raymond Kelly (himself a Marine veteran). We recom- peared in a pro-Kremlin newspaper. Within hours, Navalny was mend New York City drop the charges against Jerome if it doesn’t able to prove the photo was a forgery. The actual photographer, want to see landing craft coming ashore on the beach at Coney tracked down over the Internet, emerged with the original Island. photo. The incident became a coup for Navalny, with Russian bloggers posting their own versions of the photo featuring him n Eastman Kodak may seek bankruptcy protection; anyone with with either an alien, Stalin, Putin, or others. It appears old an album of prints held in place on stiff paper by triangular photo Soviet habits die hard, but the freedom of the Internet proved corners will feel a twinge. George Eastman began making pho- too strong this time. tographic dry plates in Rochester, N.Y., in 1880. He coined the word “Kodak” in 1888, based on his fondness for the letter “k”: n The chairman of Mercedes-Benz announced a new initiative “It seems a strong, incisive sort of letter.” His innovations and his under a huge portrait of Che Guevara. The company had put its marketing savvy—“You press the button, we do the rest”—cre- logo on Guevara’s beret. If you thought that Mercedes would be ated mass amateur photography. Commemorative imagery was especially sensitive to an association with totalitarian killers, you no longer the preserve of royalty, the rich, or the press; ordinary were wrong. After some fussing by NATIONAL REVIEW types, the people could record their faces, their perceptions, their daily company apologized—to “those who took offense.” A news milestones. Eastman made a fortune and gave a lot of it away report said, “Many political conservatives and Cuban-Americans (e.g., to the Eastman School of Music). In the late 20th century, NEWSCOM / consider [Guevara] a mass murderer who helped subjugate Kodak faltered as Polaroid captured the instant-camera market

GETTY Cuba.” Yes, and many political conservatives and Cuban and Xerox developed copiers. The digital camera, which Kodak / AFP / Americans believe that there are twelve months in a year. invented in 1975 but never exploited, finally did the company in. Rochester, the city that Kodak long sustained, is actually doing n Australian politician Teresa Gambaro, who is spokesperson on rather well, thanks to a host of small businesses. In dead leaves,

VINCENZO PINTO citizenship issues for the opposition parties in Australia’s parlia- new shoots.

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THE WEEK n Tony Blankley was born in London and always retained a trace n It might seem difficult to go bankrupt selling sugary of a British accent. His father was an accountant for Winston snacks to American consumers, but Hostess Brands Inc., Churchill. When Tony was a year old, the family moved to maker of Twinkies, Suzy Q’s, Donettes, and other tasty con- California, where Tony became a child actor. He appeared on fections, looks set to do just that, having filed for reorgani- Lassie, for example, and Highway Patrol. Grown up, he became zation under Chapter 11. How can the company be saved? a prosecutor. And then he had a career in Washington politics. He was press secretary to Newt Gingrich during those momentous Ron Paul would no doubt suggest legalizing pot brownies, years when the Republicans took the House for the first time in while Michelle Obama would require it to start selling fresh four decades. Later, he was a columnist, editor, and television fruit. Now, here’s a thought: What would Mitt Romney do presence. He was knowledgeable and smooth, one of our most with Hostess if he were back at Bain Capital? Probably effective advocates. He became a favorite of NATIONAL RevIeW declare strategic bankruptcy, just like the current manage- cruisers. Many of us have described him as a prince—a prince in ment, because the company’s biggest problem is not the a democratic country. He died, age 62, at the beginning of this price of flour or shifting market trends, but a pension plan year, and we are so glad we knew him. R.I.P. that is underfunded by some $2 billion. Just like Uncle Sam, Hostess made rashly generous promises during flush times and now can’t pay the bill; and, just like Hos- POLITICS tess, the government needs to get a handle on out-of-control The Attack on Bain entitlements. Without that, S chief executive of the private-equity firm Bain Capital, neither one has a Sno- Mitt Romney invested in struggling businesses, made Ball’s chance in hell. A money, and never asked for a bailout. His rivals for the Republican presidential nomination apparently expect conservative primary voters to regard that as a liability. n Thus far, government efforts to fight obesity have not been par- Newt Gingrich’s super-PAC factotum has gone to the length of ticularly effective. One might think that the nation’s health nan- producing a feverish little film about Romney’s career as a “cor- nies, faced with this fact, would find a new pastime. One would porate raider.” Rick Perry, for his part, told a Republican audience: be wrong; instead, they have concluded that their efforts must not “If you are the victim of Bain Capital’s downsizing, it is the ulti- have been intrusive enough. Their latest plan? To force school- mate insult for Mitt Romney to come to South Carolina and tell children to wear bracelets around the clock that monitor physical you he feels your pain—because he caused it.” To appropriate activity, and that transmit their data to a website that teachers can Governor Perry’s favorite adjective, that is the ultimate in populist access. Schools in Bay Ridge, N.Y., have procured ten of these pandering, or something close to it. monitors at a cost of $90 apiece, and the devices are already in Gingrich and Perry have between them about eleven minutes of use in at least two other American school districts, one of which relevant private-sector experience—Perry having been subsidized bases physical-education grades in part on the monitors’ results. by the federal government to farm cotton, Gingrich having subsi- One wonders when Big Brother became so brazen—and, more dized himself by farming his political connections—and therefore important, why parents have not put an end to this. may not know (or care) what a private-equity firm such as Bain does. (Gingrich might consider asking his friends at leveraged- n Wealthy Marin County, Calif., is the beating heart of limousine buyout firm Forstmann Little, where he was on the board.) Among liberalism. Not surprising, then, to find that the county is at the other things, the firm and its investors borrow money from banks forefront of the war against smoking. The board of supervisors to acquire companies, usually firms that are in trouble but believed for Marin has been trying to pass an ordinance that would outlaw to be salvageable. If the firms are publicly traded, they often are smoking of “tobacco, weed, spices, herbal or other plant life” in taken private, their stocks delisted from the exchanges, and then “private indoor spaces including balconies, carports, decks and reorganized. Once the company has been returned to profitability, common areas,” with minor exceptions for designated smoking it is taken public again or sold to a private buyer. areas in existing apartment complexes. The board’s efforts have As you can imagine, companies that are buyout targets often are run into difficulties. What about marijuana, a favorite recreation- in very poor shape, and reviving them is no small thing. Many of al drug among the aging flower children of California? Without them go into bankruptcy. Product lines are discontinued, retail some clarifying language, warned counsel for the county, “mari- locations are closed, assets are sold off, and, almost inevitably, jobs juana smoke would be illegal.” Heaven forbid! The ordinance is are lost. Some companies never recover. When the restructuring is now being revised to exclude pot from its scope. successful, reinvigorated firms expand, add locations, develop new products, and create jobs. That is the creative destruction of capi- n Talking casually to some people back home, Rep. Jim Sen - talism. Staples has 2,000 stores instead of one because of a Bain senbrenner, the Wisconsin Republican, said that Michelle Obama investment. And, as Herman Cain is well positioned to appreciate, had no business lecturing others about eating, given the size of Burger King was severely underperforming when Bain and a her derrière. When the remark became public, Sen senbrenner group of franchise owners acquired it from corporate parent apologized to the first lady. He evidently acknowledged that he Diageo in 2002. The restructured burger chain, which went public was the bigger butt. There are many things wrong with Michelle a few years back, is now valued at more than $3 billion. Household Obama—mainly the grad-student leftism she shares with her names from Dunkin’ Donuts to Guitar Center have been among husband. Her physique is far from one of them. Bain’s projects.

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THE WEEK Romney has erred by suggesting that the social contribution of his work was to “create jobs,” which has led to a methodologi cally problematic and analytically pointless dispute about just how many jobs he is responsible for creating, on net. Creating jobs was clearly not Romney’s goal, nor should it have been. The main contribution Staples makes to the common good is not that it employs many people but that it provides needed products at affordable prices. By pursuing their self-interest, Bain and Staples contribute to the social process of creating wealth. If Romney believed that argument was too complicated for the campaign trail, he should have said that his work fattened the pension funds of many teachers, among others. Romney has also sometimes made overblown claims about the extent to which his private-sector experience qualifies him for the presidency. The government cannot be run like a business because it is not one. Romney should have contented himself to make the point that he has a deeper understanding than other politicians of what businesses need to succeed, and what kinds of government policies impede them. The president and his defense secretary It is certainly a deeper understanding than his critics have shown. Some conservatives have muddied the issues by distin- drawal and negotiated peace with the Taliban are likely to create guishing between Bain’s business practices in particular and free more national-security threats than they dispatch. The Arab world markets generally, arguing that an attack on the former need not remains a giant powder keg, and a destabilized North Korea, a amount to an attack on the latter. This point is true in theory but radicalized Pakistan, a nuclear Iran, and even a suddenly unpre- irrelevant in practice. Gingrich, for example, is saying that “the dictable Russia could also pose serious threats. rich guy” should not be “taking all the money” while “the work- At its Cold War peak, U.S. military strategy called for the ing guy is being left an unemployment check.” In a free market, peacetime ability to simultaneously fight and win two major the- executives are sometimes going to be rewarded for cutting per- ater wars and a “brushfire” conflict. The years after the Soviet col- sonnel. To reject this is to reject markets. lapse saw that capability pared down in the name of the “peace Wall Street has its share of miscreants, and they should be rec- dividend,” just in time for the 9/11 decade to deliver . . . two major ognized as such. But to abominate Mitt Romney for having been theater wars and a series of “brushfire” conflicts, from counterter- a success at the business of investing in struggling companies, rorism ops in Yemen to air support in Libya, that stretched our connecting entrepreneurs with capital and producers with mar- forces thin even as we increased them. kets, is foolish and destructive. Republicans ought to know better, The new strategy calls for a military that can defeat one adver- and the fact that Gingrich et al. apparently do not is the most dis- sary while merely disrupting another, a move from a “win-win” turbing commentary on the state of the primary field so far. plan to a “win-spoil” plan. This can only be interpreted as an aggregate disengagement of U.S. power, and it will cause global actors to think and act differently. It will change the way we think AT WAR and act as well, since a nation with decreased capability tends to Indefensible change its behavior to match that capability. And all this in the name of what, exactly? Fiscal rectitude? N outlining his new defense strategy, President Obama became Defense Secretary Leon Panetta was right to note that debt is a the first commander-in-chief to speak from the Pentagon’s national-security issue. And there is room for cuts in any bureau- I pressroom. Unfortunately, he used the occasion to introduce cracy as large as the Pentagon. But a bank looking to reduce over- at least $487 billion in cuts that are likely to weaken national head does not often start by firing guards and cutting corners on security. vaults. The remarks by the president and his defense team contained Neither the president’s strategy nor his expected budget for next much vague talk of a “smarter,” more “agile” military that would year takes into account the additional $500 billion in defense “evolve” to meet its existing commitments across the globe. sequestrations and spending caps wired into the infamous “trig- These are euphemisms for retreat. The problem with the country’s ger” in last year’s debt deal. If Congress fails to avoid or disarm warriors is not that they lack technological sophistication, but that the trigger, Obama’s cuts will become gashes. they are too few. Yet the president’s plan would cut some 27,000 After the president announced the cuts, it fell to Panetta and soldiers and 20,000 Marines from active duty, taking force levels Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, to field press to roughly where they were at the end of the Clinton administra- questions from the tiny corner into which the White House plan tion. When the president calls this retrenchment “turning the page had just backed them. Unable to explain how the United States NEWSCOM on a decade of war,” he says more than he knows. The decision is would carry on as the world’s great power with a military incom- / proof that the administration learned nothing from the 9/11 mensurate to that role, General Dempsey was at one point reduced REUTERS decade. to merely asserting that it would be so. “This is not the strategy of / Our combat mission in Iraq may be over, but the peace is frag- a military in decline,” he said.

ile and violence continues. In Afghanistan, an accelerated with- He could have fooled us. JASON REED

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The recent brouhaha about whether the Palestinians are an “invented people” misses the point. The real question we should ask is, “Why do Palestinian Arabs repudiate 3,000 years of Jewish history in Palestine and the rights of Jews to a state in their ancestral homeland?” Can peace really be achieved if the Palestinians teach their people the lie that Jews are newcomers and Palestinians were the original inhabitants of the Holy Land? Land, the P.A. and its academics have fabricated histories of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas stood before the United Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims before Biblical times. Of course Nations General Assembly in September, 2011 and said, “I come this is impossible, since the term Palestine was coined by Rome before you from the Holy Land, the land of Palestine, the land of in 136 C.E.—after the time of Jesus. Islam was established much divine messages, ascension of the Prophet Mohammed (peace be later in 610 C.E., and Arabs first arrived in Israel with the Muslim upon him) and the birthplace of Jesus Christ (peace be upon invasion of 637 C.E. him).” What’s missing in Abbas’s description of the Holy Land is We witness more such distortions and outright lies in a 2005 any mention of its Biblical founders, the Jewish people, or the fact Palestinian Authority video documentary that claims the ancient, that Jesus was a Jew. So brazen is the Palestinian effort to turn vanished Canaanites were Arab, as were the Biblical Hebrews, and history on its head that Abbas’s that the religion preached by Moses was predecessor, Yassir Arafat, often claimed The Palestinians deny virtually Islam. that “Jesus was the first Palestinian In the face of these fabrications, it’s martyr.” every fact of Jewish life in Palestine fair to ask: Are the Palestinians an Indeed, rewriting the history of the invented people? The Associated Press land of Israel in order to deny Israel’s before and after Biblical times. headline responding to the question right to exist is central to the announced, “Palestinians ‘invented Palestinian Authority’s PR strategy. This rewriting has two people’ is truth.” But this is nothing new. The fact that the dimensions: First to erase the 3,000-year history of the Jewish Palestinians are a made-up people has been established by all nation in the Holy Land; and second to invent ancient manner of historical research and acclamation, even by Arabs Palestinian, Muslim and Arab histories in the region. themselves. The Palestinians deny virtually every fact of Jewish life in We know that never in history was there a Palestinian state. We Palestine before and after Biblical times. Dr. Jamal Amar, a also know that nearly all the cities in Israel, the West Bank and lecturer at Bir-Zeit University states that in the Holy Land after Gaza have Hebrew names—like Bethlehem, Nazareth and “60 years of digging . . . they’ve found nothing at all, not a water Hebron—and their current Arabic names are translations of these jug, not a coin, not an earthen vessel . . . absolutely nothing of names. this [Jewish] myth, because it is a myth and a lie”—this despite More importantly, back in 1937, the Arab leader Auni Bey the discovery of tens of thousands of Hebrew coins, texts, pots, Abdul-Hadi proclaimed to the Peel Commission, “There is no buildings and seals carrying Biblical references. Likewise, despite such country [as Palestine]. Palestine is a term the Zionists definitive archeological findings from the Temple Mount in invented.” Then in 1977, Zahir Muhsein, a member of the PLO Jerusalem and exhaustive scholarly confirmation of two Jewish Executive Committee said in an interview that “The Palestinian Temples, the Palestinian Authority (P.A.) categorically denies the people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a existence of any Temple. means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel . . . What’s more, the P.A. claims that since the Jews had no history Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak about the in the Land of Israel, Zionism was a colonialist movement existence of the Palestinian people.” fabricated by Europeans to get rid of Jews. Another professor at To say that the Palestinians are a fabricated people, however, Bir Zeit University, Samih Hamouda, asserts that President is not to say that they don’t deserve their own state. Rather, the Abbas’s student research proves “the Zionist movement is not problem arises when the P.A. invents not only their peoplehood Jewish . . . Rather it is an imperialist colonialist movement which but also a false history that justifies permanent jihad against the sought to use the Jews . . . to further western colonialist plans.” Jewish people and denies their rights to self-determination and a To prop up claims that only Arabs have valid rights to the Holy Jewish state in their homeland. Israel has long accepted the idea of two states for two peoples—the Palestinians and the Jews. But the Palestinian Authority refuses to embrace this solution. As Mahmoud Abbas lashed out just a few months ago, “Don’t order us to recognize a Jewish state. We won’t accept it.” Clearly, until this fundamental issue is resolved, the Palestinians will not achieve their goal of statehood. The fact that this outcome is based on falsehoods makes it a shame and a tragedy.

This ad has been published and paid for by FLAME is a tax-exempt, non-profit educational 501 (c)(3) organization. Its purpose is the research and publication of the facts regarding developments in the Middle East and exposing false propaganda that might harm the interests of the United States and its allies in that area of the world. Your tax- deductible contributions are welcome. They enable us to pursue these goals Facts and Logic About the Middle East and to publish these messages in national newspapers and magazines. We P.O. Box 590359 San Francisco, CA 94159 have virtually no overhead. Almost all of our revenue pays for our educational work, for these clarifying messages, and for related direct mail. Gerardo Joffe, President 131 To receive free FLAME updates, visit our website: www.factsandlogic.org 3col_QXP-1127940387.qxp 1/17/2012 9:10 PM Page 18

Paul fails to win the Republican nomination? Can the GOP keep these young libertarians in the GOP tent? The answer is yes, maybe—if the GOP is ready to commit to a consistent vision of limited government and not just pay it lip service come election time. The millennials embraced Obama be - cause he symbolized a fundamental change from business as usual. Obama promised a new way in Washington and represented a complete break from the policies of President Bush. He promised fiscal responsibility and transparency. Could Barack Obama have pulled off this extraordinary political feat without the big-government conservatism of John McCain as a foil? Probably not. The Youth Candidate But that was 2008. According to Gallup’s weekly tracking poll, the president’s job Why Ron Paul appeals to the millennial generation approval has fallen from 75 percent to 53 percent since Jan. 19, 2009, among those BY MATT KIBBE 18 to 29 years old. According to a recent Harvard survey, young people, by a propor- T seems like establishment Repub - Republicans, as I mentioned, have tried tion of four to one, believe the country is licans will do just about anything to just about everything to win elections. So heading in the wrong direction. win elections. In 2007, Florida gover- why not try freedom? While the millennials still hold the presi- I nor Charlie Crist, channeling Al Gore, Back in 2008, President Obama was dent personally in high regard, his econom- signed executive orders unilaterally reg - carried into the White House by a tidal ic policies have been catastrophic for them. ulating greenhouse-gas emissions in the wave of some 15 million new voters. A As the under-30s leave college with record- state. Congressional Republicans later staggering 65 percent of those first-time high student-loan burdens, they enter a passed Medicare Part D—a massive expan- voters were under the age of 30, members devastated job market. Unemployment for sion of a broken, bankrupt entitlement—to of the so-called millennial generation. This those aged 16 to 24 hovers over 18 percent, “take health care off the table.” In 2008, cohort overwhelmingly supported Presi - and almost 10 percent of those 25 to 29 are George W. Bush bailed out Wall Street with dent Obama, by a margin of 66 to 32 per- unemployed, according to the Bureau of $700 billion in borrowed money and (in his cent, and self-identified as Democrats over Labor Statistics. The annual unemployment own words) “abandoned free-market prin- Republicans by a similar margin, 60 to 32 rate for those 16 to 24 last year was far high- ciples to save the free-market system.” But percent. er than the national averages, and was actu- every time Republicans have embraced Not only is this 50 million–member ally the highest youth-unemployment rate intrusive, more expensive government, legion critical to the reelection of President since these figures began being recorded in they have degraded their brand, particular- Obama, it represents the future beyond 1948. While the millennials are no longer ly with the same independence-minded Obama. The millennials represented 18 excited about Obama and the Democrats, voters responsible for the only two Repub - percent of the electorate in 2008, but that they still need to be won over, and deliver- lican majorities that most living Americans percentage could rise to one in four voters ing on economic opportunity ought to be have ever experienced. in 2012. If this alignment becomes perma- central to Republicans’ efforts in this re - Now, as the Republican establishment nent, it will be devastating to future GOP gard. Author and demographics expert Joel proceeds to circle its wagons around Mitt candidates. Kotkin, looking back at a previous young Romney, GOP leaders worry that the new Only one current GOP presidential can- generation, observed: “One of the reasons young voters who have been brought into didate has wide appeal among millennials: why the [Baby] Boomers and even more so the Republican presidential-primary pro- Ron Paul. The 76-year-old Paul connects the [Generation] Xers became conservative cess by the unapologetically libertarian Ron with young voters because he is perceived is because Reagan delivered for them.” Paul might just go back home—or, worse as an authentic and principled candidate That is, the Reagan economy allowed still, go third-party and split the anti-Obama and represents a fundamental challenge young Americans to pursue their dreams. vote, enabling the failing Democratic pres- to the political establishment. He also offers Ron Paul’s vision of free markets and fis- ident to eke out a second term. clear answers to millennials’ concerns cal discipline inspires new hope for a strong about the weak economy and represents a economy built on freedom and individual Mr. Kibbe is the president of the non-profit revolution against Washington’s broken opportunity. Paul’s candidacy is built on the organization FreedomWorks and co-author, with political culture. apparently novel notion that the govern- Dick Armey, of Give Us Liberty: A Tea Party Today, these Paulistas are enthusiastic ment should be held accountable, and lim-

Manifesto. and energized; but will they stick around if ited in its size and reach by the Constitution. ROMAN GENN

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These are the same values that inspire tea necks: college-loan payments and no jobs. partiers: opposition to the failed policies of Yet now they have to cope with the massive tax, spend, borrow, and print. No to crony intergenerational transfer of wealth re - Lean capitalism; no to the Federal Reserve’s quired to pay for someone else’s retirement trashing of the dollar; no to $1.5 trillion and a $15 trillion national debt. Left deficits. Yes to a renewed commitment to Young people want big and bold solu- individual liberty. If this sounds radical, it tions, because they understand you cannot MSNBC drops the mask is. At least it was in 1776, when such anti- fix a big problem by simply tinkering at establishment radicals as jefferson, Wash- the edges. A recent Reason-Rupe public- BY KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON ing ton, Franklin, and Madison espoused the opinion survey found that millennials same values and overthrew the established overwhelmingly (86 percent) favor a hard SNBC, which is a cable order. cap on government spending. Three out news channel in precisely What would a synthesis of Paul’s princi- of four go further and support a balanced- the same sense that a gentle- ples with the traditions of the GoP actually budget amendment to the Constitution. M men’s club is a club for gen- look like? Ron Paul’s son, Sen. Rand Paul, And a 62 percent majority favor spending tlemen, has been doing a public service described what it could be back in August cuts as the primary way to reduce the by collecting its tedious liberal operating 2010, when he was in the middle of a suc- national debt. assumptions into a series of advertise- cessful tea-party challenge to the Repub- Two other cornerstones of Paul’s candi- ments, the “Lean Forward” campaign. If lican establishment: “I consider myself a dacy appeal to the millennials: a more you want to know more about the ob - constitutional conservative, which I take to humble, noninterventionist foreign policy scure motives of the agitated and fitful mean a conservative who actually believes and checking the power of the Federal little hamster turning the neocortical in smaller government and more individual Reserve. I don’t pretend to know how to wheel inside Rachel Maddow’s appar - freedom. The libertarian principles of limit- unite Paulistas with the nation-building, ently impenetrable noggin, then by all ed government, self-reliance, and respect hyper-interventionist wing of the GoP, but means have a gander at these commer- for the Constitution are embedded within we all might consider the words of Adm. cials at msnbc.com. If, on the other hand, my constitutional conservatism. . . . I also Mike Mullen, former chairman of the you have a full and productive life, with believe that the common bond of liberty joint Chiefs of Staff, who shocked the family and professional obligations, hope can unite Americans and build a winning Wash ington establishment with a state- to make a good account of it to your political coalition to stand up against big- ment of the obvious: “The most significant Maker, and are Stoically mindful of government elites in both parties while threat to our national security is our debt.” Seneca’s declaration that life is long reclaiming our freedom and prosperity.” We can’t keep spending money we don’t enough if you know what to do with it, This is the sort of constitutional conser- have, and systemic economic failure is no then allow me to summarize the videos vatism that is propelling the Ron Paul revo- one’s idea of sound national-security poli- for your convenience. lution and inspiring the millennials. In the cy. Today, when 40 cents of every federal The first thing to know is that Rachel first two primaries, nearly half of all votes dollar is borrowed, all parts of the federal Maddow loves, loves, loves the Hoo - from those under 30 went to Paul. His fi - budget, including the military, need to be ver Dam. Also bridges, but mostly the nal margin of victory in the under-30 downsized. Hoover Dam. Sporting a hardhat, the demographic in New Hampshire was a And while “end the Fed” is not yet part most comical choice of headgear since whopping 22 points. Associated Press exit of the official GoP platform, a growing Michael Dukakis took his fateful ride in in terviews found that these voters were number of Republicans are joining Ron that tank (and Mr. Dukakis at least had motivated primarily by economic issues. Paul’s commitment to a strong dollar and the excuse of needing to butch up his And these issues are giving the Paul can- putting a stop to the government financing public image, whereas MSNBC was crit- didacy momentum. While Mitt Romney of new spending with the Fed’s printing icized for applying the opposite pressure won the same 25 percent of the Iowa vote in press. Thanks to Paul, one of America’s to Ms. Maddow), Ms. Maddow begins a 2008 and 2012, Paul’s margin surged from most economically pernicious institutions speech that sounds like it was written 10 percent to 21 percent. In New Hamp - is now under public scrutiny for the first for the villain in an unpublished Ayn shire, Romney’s margin increased by seven time in history. Rand novel: “When you are this close to points, to 39 percent, between 2008 and unlike many of the recycled figures in Hoover Dam,” she says, “it makes you 2012; but Paul’s vote jumped by 15 points. the GoP field, Ron Paul comes across as realize how small a human is in relation Millennials are right not to trust the authentic: He is who he is, and he has held to this as a HuMAN PRojeCT.” She goes on Republican and Democratic political estab- the same policy positions for decades. He to say, “You can’t be the guy who builds lishments, which form a power structure anticipated much of the economic mess this. You can’t be the town who builds that libertarians Matt Welch and Nick we are now in. He is not afraid to chal- this. You can’t even be the state that Gillespie refer to as a “duopoly.” And it’s lenge the political establishment. The builds this. You have to be the country not surprising that they feel this way. This, GoP should learn from this, and learn to that builds something like this.” The after all, is the generation that will have to love a new generation of constitutional question before us, she argues, is whether pick up the tab for the bipartisan collusion conservatives who can make the GoP America is still the sort of country that in support of bigger government. They relevant in 2012 and beyond. can build a Hoover Dam. have enough to worry about, with one alba- Come on, Grand old Party. Try free- It would take the federal government tross after another being hung around their dom. to build a Hoover Dam today—who else

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could get the zoning permits to facilitate Maddow is in her accustomed hoodie- nouncing Mitt Romney’s tenure at Bain such an outrageous exercise in wanton and-glasses mufti, holding forth in Capital, a company that invested in, self-aggrandizement? Ms. Maddow says picture-postcard Middle American among other things, an American steel that she has a “devotion to facts that bor- coffee shops, using salt and pepper shak- mill, Steel Dynamics. Steel Dynamics is ders on obsessive,” so here are some ers to illustrate the Afghanistan-Pakistan based in Indiana, which provides incen- facts: The purpose of the Hoover Dam is relationship, about which she is invinci- tives to—you know it—manufacturers, to generate electricity, which it does— bly ignorant. When she is not immersing of which a steel mill is a pretty good about 4.2 billion kilowatt-hours in a typi- herself in quaint Americana, Ms. Mad - example. DeKalb County, where the mill cal year. A typical U.S. nuclear plant dow divides her time between Manhattan is based, offers incentives, too. So what produces nearly three times that much and the mid-19th-century country home we need to do is to “put the same incen- power (12.4 billion kilowatt-hours, ac - in Massachusetts she shares with her tives on the table for the manufacturers,” cording to the Department of Energy), blonde art-dilettante partner—which is to except when we don’t, because Mitt and it does not take the equivalent of a say, she has Mitt Romney’s life, not yours, Romney is Satan, whatever. Mr. Schultz Normandy invasion to get one built. sucker. knows better, since his network is owned Not that you’d want to build one, but if But never you mind all that, anyway, by G.E., which exploits every incentive in you did, you couldn’t, and Ms. Maddow because Ed Schultz is here, at the diner, the book and famously paid no corporate & Co. have led the way to ensuring that on camera, enraged, tumescent, holding taxes in 2010, a fact about which Mr. you can’t: More Americans died building forth with an unseen and possibly imagi- Schultz and his colleagues have been the Hoover Dam than at the Battle of nary interlocutor, no doubt of the sassy- notably circumspect. Bunker Hill—OSHA would have a con- 1970s-sitcom-waitress variety or of the He’s more expansive on the history of niption, and MSNBC would lead every salt-of-the-earth-short-order-cook vari- arch-segregationist J. Lindsay Almond, broadcast with the story. ety: “It’s got to be about the people! It but not to the point where he would get The construction of the Hoover Dam can’t always be about the profit.” Mr. around to mentioning which political was a man-made catastrophe for the Schultz, no doubt a regular diner denizen party made that odious white supremacist Colorado River delta estuary, wiping out right out of an Edward Hopper painting, governor of Virginia and a judge. untold numbers of indigenous local whose personal net worth is estimated The “Lean Forward” campaign does species and permanently altering the to be in the low eight figures, entered the feature some first-rate voiceover and edit- salinity of the water and the character of world of jock journalism after failing to ing work. We get a passel of multiculti the ecosystem. Ms. Maddow has been a make it in the Canadian Football League, clichés—Chinese dragon dance! color - champion of the Endangered Species the mighty, mighty Winnipeg Blue Bomb - fully costumed Mexicans!—and the usual Act, having a tender place in her heart for ers having decided that they could live populist bumf. A voice intones: “All men the most humble smelt (not a sparrow without him, and later transitioned into and women have certain inalienable falls, etc., with the usual provisos for the more profitable realm of being a rights”—flash to an image of two dudes unborn human beings) and accused the folksy left-wing ogre. getting married—“and that while history Bush administration of having “tainted” Unlike Ms. Maddow, Mr. Schultz does has gotten us this far”—flash to image of it. (This was illustrated with a picture of a a reasonable impersonation of the man he Barack Obama striding haughtily across a cute little bunny.) The Hoover Dam is an plays on television. You can imagine him stage, and then, I kid you not, to a wind obsolete facility swathed in some of the at a diner—more likely at a bar—holding farm—“blah, blah, blah.” most pompous midcentury fascist archi- forth on the news of the day, venturing Another ad says we are “built to tecture to be found outside of Rome. from time to time among the various evolve” and then shows a quick progres- Building it cost a lot of lives (human, pis- grassy knolls of his mental geography. sion of American presidents, from Carter cine, and riparian) and represented a He likes to talk about manufacturing. The to the sainted Big O, apparently the pin- tremendous misallocation of capital. nation, he says, must “recommit to man- nacle of political selection. That split- Which sounds precisely like a federal ufacturing—all American workers need second evolution sequence covers George stimulus-package candidate, except for is for someone to believe in them.” (If you H. W. Bush, Ronald Reagan, and George the part about the poor little fish. clap hard enough, Tinkerbell will get a W. Bush, and that is pretty much the only Ms. Maddow goes on to talk about job.) And how do we do that? “We have time you’ll see a Republican in these ads. how her father taught her to conserve to put the same incentives on the table for The voiceover says: “Starting today, water, “not just because it was some the manufacturers as we put on the table ideas that advance our country, no matter hippie-dippy personal virtue, but because for the Wall Street barons.” American who or where they come from, win.” No THE STATE needed it.” That’s maybe not manufacturers in fact get far, far better matter where they come from, so long as the most articulate expression of totali - incentives than do Wall Street barons, it’s a Kennedy, a Clinton, a Rodham- tarian etatism ever offered, but it’s pret- because the country has for a generation Clinton, or a wise Latina. Or any number ty good: Personal virtue is beside the been taking the advice of men such as Mr. of iterations of Obama, who in the theol- point—THE STATE has need of you. Schultz and doing everything imaginable ogy of MSNBC has more avatars than There’s a lot of talk about “the People” to bribe manufacturing businesses into Vishnu. in these videos, and Ms. Maddow and her manufacturing business here. Yeah, there’s Chris Matthews too, and colleagues want you to know that, des - You know who really hates it when he says something stupid, but this here is pite their being multimillionaire media we take the advice of Ed Schultz? Ed a news publication, and, besides, I’m all celebrities, they’re just regular folks. Ms. Schultz. He recently went on a tear de - out of salt and pepper shakers.

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hints of mutual support) within the euro slunk out of Brussels in early De cem ber, zone did so much to set in motion the a pact that S&P clearly views as too Grade spree of mispriced lending (Irish real little, too vague, and too stingy. estate is just one of many hideous exam- Thus, the rating agency is understand- School ples) that has now unraveled to such ably skeptical about whether plans to destructive effect. advance the start date of the €500 billion Rating agencies certify the euro zone’s That’s a shame, because publicizing European Stability Mechanism (the parlous state the truth about those years might have permanent bailout fund designed to re- helped counteract the notion, heavily place the existing €440 billion Euro pe an BY ANDREW STUTTAFORD pushed by the EU’s elite, that the euro Financial Stability Facility) by twelve zone’s troubles are the result of market months, to July 2012, will make much of hEn watching a disaster failure, when in fact they are the product a difference. Tactfully enough, S&P does movie it’s occasionally not speculate whether its own downgrad- of just the opposite. The devastation of worth pausing to take stock recent years is in no small part the ing of some of the countries that stand W of where the main drama, consequence of economic reality’s final- obscured by subplots, rubble, and con- ly returning to a space from which it had fusion, really stands. been barred by the introduction of a “one Standard & Poor’s announcement, size fits all” currency that was, of course, Newly Minted on, suitably, Friday the 13th, that it had nothing of the sort. Perhaps S&P was 2012 downgraded nine euro-zone countries in concerned that dwelling too much on the various disapproving ways was a chance misdeeds of the past might further infu- 1ozSilverEagleOwn American Silver for just such a moment. S&P’s stripping riate a euro-zone leadership that has fall- For Current Prices: France and Aus tria of their highly prized en menacingly out of love with the rating Order Online 2012eagle.com triple-A ratings grabbed the headlines. agencies that were once its accomplices The downgrades of less-than‒Black (less than two years ago S&P was, re - or Call 1-800-835-0008 Card nations such as Cy prus, Italy, and markably, still treating Greek debt as r you Spain (each down two notches, to BB+, “investment grade”) but are now, belat- th BBB+, and A, respectively) added the edly, stumbling along the road to long- ilver Eagles. 2 S coin set01 wi clickety-click of tumbling dominoes to overdue repentance. f 2 ll o the story. But most striking of all was the Instead, the agency looks forward. As FREEro First rating agency’s release of answers to mirages tend to do, convergence is reced- questions it anticipated it would be asked ing: “The key underlying issue for the about the downgrades, answers that por- eurozone as a whole is one of a growing trayed the euro-zone crisis in ways that [emphasis added] divergence in competi- Angela Merkel, in particular, will not tiveness between the core and the so- Intoday’seconomy,silveris asoundchoice. have wanted to hear. called ‘periphery.’” Indeed it is, and, This mess is not, explained S&P, just with monetary union meaning that the about the debt. While their governments’ zone’s weaker members are unable to INCORPORATEDEastern Numismatics “lack of fiscal prudence” had undeniably devalue themselves back into contention, Dealers In Rare Coins & Precious Metals played a part in some countries’ arrival in any reversal of this process will be extra- Since 1974 the PIIGS sty, not least in the case of a ordinarily difficult, if not close to impos- 642 Franklin Avenue certain hellenic Re pub lic, this was not sible. And, as things now stand, they may GardenCity,NY11530 always the case. “Spain and Ireland . . . no longer even be giv en the opportunity ran an average fiscal deficit of 0.4% of to try. Up until now the PIIGS (as S&P GDP and a surplus of 1.6% of GDP, re - does not call them) have been able to spectively, [between] 1999 [and] 2007,” manage their “underperformance . . . “Rated One of New York City a period in which, the agency added, a (manifest in sizeable external deficits) ‘Best Value’ Hotels.” ... Zagats touch cattily, Ger ma ny had run a deficit because of funding by the banking sys- averaging 2.3 percent. tems of the more competitive northern So what had gone wrong? S&P makes Eurozone economies.” That party is now coy references to “boom-time devel - over. opments” and “the rapid expansion of So what to do? S&P argues that “a European banks’ balance sheets,” but greater pooling of fiscal resources and appears unwilling to spell out too obligations as well as enhanced mutual New York’s all suite hotel is located in bluntly how the mirage—promoted in budgetary oversight” could buoy confi- the heart of the city, near corporations, theatre & great restaurants. Affordable Brussels, Frankfurt, and elsewhere—of dence and cut the cost of borrowing for elegance with all the amenities of home. economic convergence (and whispered the euro zone’s weaker brethren. What these arrangements would look like is 149 E. 39th St. (Bet 3rd & Lex) New York, NY 10016 Mr. Stuttaford is a contributing editor of not spelled out. What they would not Reservations 1-800-248-9999 Ask about our special National Review rates. NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE. look like is the misshapen agreement that

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behind the ESM will make that almost higher rates cannot compensate for certainly inadequate entity’s job even falling revenues. Policies designed to cut more trying. In case you wondered, it def i cits may actually end up increasing Speaking in will. And in case there was any doubt them. The PIIGS will have been chasing about that, on January 16, S&P down- their own tails. Tongues graded the EFSF. The markets understand this well. Although it never comes out and That’s why those PIIGS that can still tap Candidates, Americans, and their directly says so, S&P seems to want the international markets have been find- foreign languages to day’s currency union to evolve into ing it so expensive to do so. And that’s something far closer to the Brussels why there is such limited trust in a BY JAY NORDLINGER dream (and democratic nightmare), a European banking system (already enfee- fiscal union that would be the logical bled by the 2008–09 financial debacle) HE first words I ever heard Jon complement to a monetary union en - that is, directly or indirectly, dangerously Huntsman speak were Chinese. compassing 17 different countries. Left exposed to the woes of the euro zone’s Seriously. I knew about him, of unstated, but surely implicit, is that this laggards. And when there is limited trust T course, but I had never heard process would be preceded by the firing in the banks, credit begins to freeze up. him speak. Then, early last summer, I of the long-awaited, effectively German- And when credit freezes, economies clicked on a video of an appearance by underwritten “bazooka,” the resort slow. And when economies slow, tax rev- Huntsman in front of the Faith and Free - (however artfully described) to the mon- enues decline. And when they do, bad dom Coalition. He opened with a burst etary printing press on a scale thought deficits get worse. And, and, and . . . of Chinese. To me, he looked awfully (fingers crossed) to be sufficient to extin- If there’s one scrap of comfort to be pleased with his prowess. guish the euro’s growing fever. The fever found in S&P’s ruminations, it is in its A half a year later, in one of the New is one thing, but curing the underlying observation that the European Central Hampshire debates, he again spoke Chi - disease—the competitiveness chasm— Bank has staved off “a collapse in market nese. He was rebuking Mitt Romney on would be the work of generations (how confidence” by a series of measures de - some point of U.S. policy toward China. long do you think it would take to build signed to prop up the EU’s banking sys- He was also showing off (I thought). a Portugal that could keep pace with the tem. Basically, the ECB has supplied Huntsman learned Chinese through Neth er lands?), and would be an im - Europe’s banks with large amounts of the Mormon Church, when they sent him mense challenge to the social and politi- low-priced, comparatively lightly collat- on a mission to Taiwan some 30 years cal order in countries struggling to adapt eralized funding that, in December, grew ago. From 2009 to last year, he was our to the theoretically admirable disciplines to include €500 billion in three-year ambassador to China. During his pres - of a currency for which they are in fact money—and there will be more such idential run, he often said that the U.S.- very poorly suited. bonanzas to come this year. That this China relationship would be the most Meanwhile, even if they can get past may have left the ECB’s balance sheet important of the 21st century. But how historic memories of what Weimar’s looking like the books of an unusually can anyone know this? printing presses eventually led to, the generous pawnbroker is a problem, but Say you had been asked in 1912, prospect of paying for what will be, by it is a problem for another day. “What will be the most important rela- any reasonable reckoning, a prolonged, All that money has bought some con- tionship of the 20th century?” What do expensive longshot is something that fidence, but not, unfortunately, a lot. you think you would have said? The horrifies the taxpayers in Germany (and Contrary probably to the hopes of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires elsewhere in the euro zone’s north) who ECB, the banks have not been lured into seemed fixed facts of life. The Soviet would be stumping up the cash. That’s using these cheap funds to “invest” in Union was an evil gleam in Lenin’s eye. why Angela Merkel, a trial-and-error high-yielding government bonds issued There was a time, just short years ago, politician at the best of times, will give by the likes of Italy. Instead the cash just when we were all supposed to learn every alternative approach a go before piles up—much of it, ironically, back at Japanese. That was because Japan was marching her country down a route that the ECB—as nervous bank ers wait for going to rival us as a superpower, at would enrage the electorate that is sup- the crisis in which Angela Merkel is least in economic terms. I remember posed to be reelecting her in 2013. forced to choose between deploying the an ad for a university—Notre Dame, I But no other alternative is likely to bazooka that saves the euro zone but think—shown at the halftime of a foot- provide much relief for long. S&P warns destroys her career and (much, much less ball game. The ad consisted entirely of that “a reform process based on a pillar likely) abandoning the euro zone and a student’s speaking into the camera, in of fiscal austerity alone” may well prove taking a leap into the unknown. Japanese. (There were subtitles.) Mes - self-defeating. However overdue they That crisis will arrive. It could be trig- sage: This is the language of the future, are, and however necessary they may be gered by Greece, which is teetering, as I if not of today. to sell the bailout parade to northern vot- write, on the edge of disorderly default, And do you remember the following ers, austerity programs on the scale now or maybe a spreading bank run will do joke, told by all the smarties? Q: Who being implemented in the PIIGS suck the trick. There are plenty of possibilities won the Cold War, the United States or money, confidence, and demand out of to choose from. And that’s before the the Soviet Union? A: Japan. About two their already battered economies. They black swans come into view. seconds after that joke was hot, Japan shrink the tax base to such an extent that Clickety-click. was cold.

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Like Huntsman, Mitt Romney went on icans, have enjoyed mocking the French Our politicians have been campaigning a Mormon mission. He went to France and all things French. (Sometimes we in Spanish for many years. So have their in the 1960s. People who make fun of have good reason.) When he was the spouses. Jackie Kennedy filmed an ad in Mormons like to portray them as hicks in Democrats’ nominee in 2004, Senator Spanish, imploring her listeners to put white dress shirts. But here is a fact to Kerry was described as “French-looking.” her husband in the White House, because ponder: What is the most multilingual In my view, he’s too tall to be French: Communism was threatening world student body in America? That of Brig- The males of that race got shrimpy after peace, and America needed a firm hand. ham Young University, probably. the Napoleonic wars, at least according (How Democrats once talked!) During In mid-December, CBS aired a report to some. Kerry did have the hauteur, the Carter years, we learned that Jimmy that began, “Something from Mitt Rom- though. and Rosalynn read the Bible to each other ney’s past is coming back to haunt him.” In any event, French is of little advan- in Spanish. Uh-oh, what was that? Cheating on a col- tage on the American campaign trail, Barack Obama is not a speaker of lege test? Extramarital affairs with stew- except possibly in Maine, Vermont, New Spanish. In 2009, he presided over a ardesses? No: He had learned French. Hampshire, and Louisiana. Sure enough, Cinco de Mayo celebration at the White “Apparently, speaking French is not a Romney spoke some French when he House. It was a day early, and Obama plus when you’re running for president,” was seeking votes in New Hampshire: joked that they were really celebrating said an anchor. He chatted in that language with a Que- “Cinco de Cuatro.” He should have said A Democratic “super PAC” had becker, or former Quebecker, in a restau- “Cuatro de Mayo.” In that same period, made an ad out of an old Romney video. rant. he made a boo-boo in Europe, referring This was a promotional video, shot Of greater advantage, of course, is to a language called “Austrian.” No big when Rom ney was heading the Winter Spanish, the speaking of which is consid- deal. But I thought of a joke once told Olympics in Salt Lake City. In it, he ered pretty cool in America—certainly about Dan Quayle: He was reluctant to speaks French, one of the two official when done by an “Anglo” candidate for go to Latin America, because he didn’t languages of the Olympic movement, office. When people tote up the virtues speak Latin. (That was a joke, remem- with English. of Jeb Bush, they say, “And he speaks ber.) A month later, Newt Gingrich bor- Spanish!” The former governor of Florida Obama may not be a speaker of foreign rowed a page from this PAC, coming went to Mexico when he was 17. He met languages, but he is not above chiding the out with an anti-Romney ad in South Columba, whom he eventually married. American people for this same inability. Carolina. To the accompaniment of He also majored in Latin American stud- Listen to him: “Instead of worrying about accordion music, the narrator likened ies at the University of Texas. whether immigrants can learn English— Romney to two other Massachusetts politicians: Michael Dukakis (shown in his tank) and John Kerry (shown wind- Crisp, comfortable white 100% cotton pinpoint oxford surfing). At the end came the coup de dress shirts in Regular, Big & Tall or Trim Fit at a grâce: Romney speaking French, in that same Olympics video. SPECIAL When I first saw the ad, I wondered INTRODUCTORY PRICE... whether any South Carolinians would feel insulted. Because the implication is, $19.95 “Surely you backwoodsmen and swamp- dwellers will object to a candidate who Reg. $49.50-$54.50 knows French.” Plus, FREE monogramming! In America, French has a mixed rep - (a $9.75 value) utation, associated with some positive things and with some negative. On the Add this Silk Stripe Tie positive side, French is thought refined for only $19.95! and artistic. It is also the language of Item #TMG1520 (Regularly $49.50)

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they’ll learn English—you need to make and German, in that order. After World sure your child can speak Spanish.” War II, even more than after the first one, Obama went on to say, “It’s embarrassing German took a hit. Often, when you want- Ha. Ha. Ha. when Europeans come over here. They ed to speak in sinister tones, you put on a Stephen Colbert’s NPR LOL all speak English—they speak French, German accent: “Vee haff vays of making they speak German. And then we go over you talk.” And never mind that half of BY ROB LONG to Europe. And all we can say is, ‘Merci Germany was ruled by Communists: Ger - beaucoup.’” man was associated with the far right. F everyone who used the acronym Maybe the president should speak for Let me treat you to a line uttered by a “LOL” were actually engaged in the himself. Or maybe he should vote for colleague of mine. Once, when he was act of Laughing Out Loud, the world Romney? invited to a meeting of deeply conserva- I would be ringing with the happy Once upon a time, many, many Amer - tive intellectuals, he said, “I’d love to, but sound of laughter pretty much all of the ican boys and girls learned Greek and my German’s not good enough.” time. It would be an irritating place to Latin. Not just rich kids at Groton and A lot of students thought they should live, but you couldn’t say it wasn’t Choate; ordinary children in slums, on learn Russian, as a component of Soviet - mirthful. the prairie, and in villages. When I was ology. But then the USSR collapsed, and Mostly, of course, they’re not laugh- about 30, I pulled a primer off my grand- there went Sovietology. If you wanted ing. They may be smiling wryly or nod- mother’s shelves: The Elements of Greek. to study Russian, it was probably for ding in agreement or noting in a subdued The preface said, “Are not the treasures Tolstoy, Chekhov, and them. These days, fashion the wit behind a statement, but of Greek literature richly worth the find- Arabic is much prized, as well it might they’re not laughing out loud. They’re ing?” Oh, yes. “May not these treasures be. agreeing. be brought within the reach of the aver- And Chinese is gaining. I know Man- Laughing out loud—as opposed to age boy or girl?” I proved a little below hattan parents who are quite insistent LOLing—is what happens when some- average, I’m afraid. that their little ones learn this language one says something or does something When the classical languages faded of tomorrow. Some hire Chinese nannies that catches us off guard and compels us away, the big ones were Spanish, French, to this end. We had a president who to emit short, staccato barks. Laughter is spoke Chinese, by the way: Herbert involuntary. We don’t know when it’s Hoover. In the years of the Boxer Re - going to sneak up on us, and that makes ‘Bonjour. bellion, he worked in China as a mining it pleasurable—and a little alarming— Je m’appelle Mitt.’ engineer. His wife, Lou, picked up even when it does. more Chinese. In later years, they occa- So when Stephen Colbert, the fake sionally spoke Chinese together, when host of a fake conservative talk show on they didn’t want those around them to Comedy Central, announced that he’d understand. formed a “super PAC”—one of those Theodore Roosevelt, our manliest free-ranging political-action committees president, spoke French—but he appar- that are allowed, thanks to the Supreme ently spoke it roughly, as befits a Rough Court’s weakening of the ham-fisted Rider. A later president, George W. Bush, McCain-Feingold campaign-finance- spoke some Spanish, but did not speak “reform” initiative, to run sharp and French. He did a fabulous French accent mean and interesting political ads on in English, however: Anyone who has television—the only honest response to heard his impression of Jacques Chirac the news was to sit down and quietly text will not forget it. an “LOL.” Return once more to the East—so I can It wasn’t actually to laugh, of course, tell one of my favorite Thatcher stories. because you can see the whole joke It concerns Denis, not Margaret. And I marching down the street. There is zero learned it from reading Charles Moore, chance that anything that comes out of the British journalist, who is writing this enterprise—the public appearances Mrs. Thatcher’s authorized biography. in South Carolina, the “commercials” One night, the prime minister hosted that are shot and aired—is going to sneak a dinner for the president of Finland. up on anyone. It’s all been preapproved Denis, bored, turned to the president’s and wiped clean of the kinds of surpris- wife and said, “What do Finns think of ing things that cause actual, involuntary the Chinese?” The lady said that, being human laughter. next door to Russia, Finns tended to That’s by design, of course. Stephen think about the Russians; they did not Colbert—and his partner on Comedy think about the Chinese. “Well,” said Central, Jon Stewart—hew to a fairly Mr. Thatcher, “it’s about time they did, predictable lefty line. It’s not MSNBC because there are more than a billion of left, or The Nation left—though they

the buggers.” earn a lot of LOLs from that crowd, no ROMAN GENN

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doubt. It’s more along the lines of the funny.” And, predictably, the Good Taste Good Taste Left—NPR, The New Liberals are eating it up. The rest of us, Yorker, that sort of thing. Which is why not so much. the whole idea has a certain geriatric Even the rest of us who watch quality to it. What Colbert is trying to do, Comedy Central, for that matter. Ask any in his pompous persona that represents, Colbert fan what the highest-rated show to his LOLing viewers, a sharply etched is on Comedy Central, and they’ll prob- blend of the entire lineup of Fox News, ably say The Colbert Report or The is mock the primary process and the idea Daily Show, or, if they’re really paying of super PACs especially. attention, South Park. Oh, my aching sides. But the highest-rated show on Com - Let’s go to the tape, shall we? In the edy Central is a raucous and profane first ad produced by Colbert’s PAC— show called “Tosh.0”—it’s essentially entitled, in pure LOL bait, “Attack in B a show in which a snarky, politically Minor for Strings” (get it?)—he takes incorrect comedian, Daniel Tosh, shows after Mitt Romney’s statement, made at video clips from the Web and makes fun the Iowa State Fair in August, that cor- of the folks in them. It’s about what you expect—a little gross-out humor, some sexual stuff, a lot of truly surprising racial material—but it manages to do something amazing in every episode. It manages to make you laugh. Out loud. Despite yourself, despite Good Taste— Tosh.0 sneaks up on you, like all good comedy, and before you know it you’re barking out laughter. Tosh.0 is over-the-top and pretty off- color, mostly. It’s certainly not intended to elevate the national conversation. It’s comedy, not satire. And the folks at Colbert no doubt think that they’re making a powerful political statement though satire. They’re not, of course. Satire is an iffy Daniel Tosh proposition under any circumstances— the great playwright George S. Kaufman porations are “people.” So if corpora- famously said that “satire is what closes tions are people, the ad says, and Mitt on Saturday night.” But to be really Romney shuttered dozens of companies effective, it’s got to sting. during his tenure at Bain Capital, that Not the subject—it’s easy to sting the makes him a “serial killer.” powerful and the pompous: campaign- LOL. finance rules, political candidates, these Look, if this kind of thing is funny to are the softest targets around—but the you, then don’t let me stand in your way. viewer. That takes courage and fearless- Go ahead and LOL all you want. But ness, which are two things absent from notice, if you would, that you’re not The Colbert Report and abundant in actually laughing. No one has caused Daniel Tosh, which is why Tosh is funny those involuntary explosions of breath to and Colbert is NPR funny. burp unexpectedly from deep inside you. The Colbert Report—and the pre- Nothing snuck up on you. It’s exactly dictable, jokeless super PAC—are all what you expect from Stephen Colbert. about reinforcing Colbert’s audience’s He’s a liberal pretending to be a con - smug self-regard. It’s not about anything servative—you can tell that instantly, as crass and mysterious as laughter. It’s NATIONAL REVIEW is because he’s playing a moron, and all all about “getting” the joke—because available on iTunes and in conservatives are morons, see?—and if you get it, you’re in the cool crowd, the he’s rich enough to set up a real super smart crowd, the Good Taste Liberals. the Android Market. PAC to mock arcane campaign-finance That’s the soothing message of Colbert— rules and the current Republican front - we’re smart, we get it, we don’t need NR APPS ARE FREE TO DOWNLOAD. runner. you to laugh. We’re happy with your ©NATIONAL REVIEW, Inc., 2012

COMEDY CENTRAL It’s not funny. It’s what we call “NPR LOLs.

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Let Us Now Praise Private Equity To create new jobs, you must destroy old ones

BY REIHAN SALAM

VERY presidential candidate has to defend himself against free enterprise on trial,” he said, adding that “we have seen some accusations of wrongdoing—an affair, abuse of office, desperate Republicans join forces with him.” But Romney was campaign-finance impropriety, and so forth. Mitt Rom - only partly right. The plaintiffs against free enterprise are not just E ney finds himself in a predictable defensive crouch, too, a handful of politicians, but a growing number of American vot- but the allegation against him is extraordinary: He stands accused ers who think corporate elites have jeopardized a social contract of doing his job too well. that once guaranteed, as Bill Clinton put it, that “if you work hard As the founder and CEO of the private-equity firm Bain Capital, and play by the rules, you ought to have a decent life and a chance Romney was a turnaround artist. In that role, the GOP frontrunner for your children to have a better one.” says, he restored failing firms to health, usually with great success. There is some reason to believe that in the 21st century, that con- He claims to have helped create thousands of new jobs and billions tract has expired. Over the last decade, job destruction has out- of dollars in new wealth. paced job creation in the private sector. Great American brands like Some of Romney’s Republican rivals, particularly Newt Gin - GM and Chrysler went on life support, and others like Kodak died grich, haven’t framed Romney’s record in such generous terms. altogether. Today’s corporate success stories, meanwhile, are nim- They say Romney was a “vulture capitalist” who used financial ble, brainy start-ups rather than the glorious industrial giants of chicanery to enrich himself and his cronies at the expense of help- yesteryear. Consider Insta gram, a cell-phone photo-sharing service less workers. President Obama and his allies will surely make the with 10 million users and, as of late last year, six employees. Even same case in the months to come. In deed, a recent memo from a Silicon Valley behemoth like Facebook, currently valued at over Stephanie Cutter, the president’s deputy campaign manager, accus- $82 billion, has just 3,000 employees. Kodak had 19,000. es Romney of having sought “profit at any cost,” and of believing Companies like Instagram and Facebook will hire more—but in “an economy where the wealthy and powerful can rig the game they probably won’t hire those veterans of Kodak or GM, and they at the expense of working Americans.” Romney’s verbal gaffes, won’t flock to Rochester, N.Y., or Detroit, Mich., to chase after the including an ill-considered soundbite professing his love of “being Next Big Thing. We can blame economic abstractions, such as able to fire people,” have made him vulnerable to more demoniza- globalization or skill-biased technical change, for this upheaval of tion still. the American economy. Or we can blame those who have profited After his victory in New Hampshire’s primary, Romney fought most conspicuously—the highest-earning 1 percent, and the man back with unusually strong words. “President Obama wants to put who now serves as their political stand-in: Mitt Romney. Anxious American workers are right to worry about their Mr. Salam writes The Agenda on NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE and is a futures. After the financial collapse, U.S. jobs were destroyed in a

policy adviser at the economic-research firm e21. labor-market bonfire of a size not seen since the Great Depression. ROMAN GENN

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Hiring, job creation, and investment since then have been anemic. The destruction was a prerequisite for the creation, and for the Though hiring seems to have picked up slightly, there are still transformation of a wounded technology firm into one of the between three and five out-of-work, job-seeking Americans for world’s most valuable public companies. every opening. This ratio never went above three-to-one from 1951 As Haltiwanger suggests, successful firms such as Apple change to 2007, and it only rare ly surpassed two-to-one. the larger competitive landscape by threatening the very survival The United States now has dangerously low employment, and as of competitors. Chad Syverson, an economist at the University of workers remain idle, they lose skills and become unhireable by Chicago’s Booth School of Business, found that what separates top those smaller, more technologically advanced corporations. So the firms from bottom firms is, typically, a large difference in produc- backlash against job destruction, particularly as manifested in the tivity, with the top ones producing almost twice as much with the cost-cutting efforts of Bain Capital, is predictable. This backlash, same measured input. This creates an almost irresistible temptation alas, will almost certainly not facilitate job creation. Indeed, if the for investors. If Firm X, languishing at the 10th percentile in terms government tries to make layoffs more difficult, large work forces of productivity, could somehow be overhauled to match the pro- will cost more to maintain, and the job shortage will stay dire. ductivity levels achieved by Firm A, at the 90th percentile, the The difficult truth that virtually no politician is prepared to potential for profit would be huge. Note, however, that halving acknowledge is that the road to job creation runs through job “measured input” in order to double productivity will often mean destruction. Yet it is a truth that workers and voters must under- shedding the weakest performers and giving those who remain the stand—and Mitt Romney carries the almost impossible burden of tools they need to do their jobs better and faster. Private equity does explaining it. The controversy over Bain Capital won’t blow over. exactly this. The only way forward is to show how his work at Bain contributed What Mitt Romney discovered was that American corporations to growth, and how the excessive regulation and crony capitalism sometimes had to be dragged, wailing and whining, into a state of his fiercest critics advocate is a recipe for stagnation. efficiency. As a management consultant at Bain & Company, Romney had studied successful firms and then told other firms how to replicate their strategies. But those firms had come of age N a healthy economy, failing firms fade away, and their in the fat years of American corporate dominance, when many assets—including their work forces—get reallocated to more believed that the Japanese could do little more than manufacture I promising ventures. Over time, job creation has outpaced job cheap toys and textiles, and many were reluctant to accept his new- destruction just enough to accommodate a growing population and, fangled advice. It eventually became clear that if Romney and his in flush times, to create tight labor markets. The decline of the Rust cohort were going to remake American business, they’d have to Belt during the early 1980s was followed by a boom in the Sunbelt. raise money to make their own investments. Spurred by the senior Textiles and petrochemicals suffered, but Silicon Valley prospered. partners at Bain & Company, Romney and his merry band of In the late 1990s, it was the long-moribund retail sector’s turn to be consultants established Bain Capital. shoved into the churn, as Walmart drove firms to either sharpen their Some of Bain Capital’s early investments were entirely new games or get pushed out of business. Job destruction was constant, ventures, like the office-supply retailer Staples. Most, however, but so was the creation of new opportunities. were Firm X’s. In 2008, economists Steven Kaplan of the Booth A May 2011 paper by the University of Maryland econ o mist School and Per Strömberg of the Stockholm School of Economics John Haltiwanger illustrates this dynamic. From 1980 to 2009, offered a broad overview of the private-equity landscape. The typ- Haltiwanger observed, 17 percent of jobs in any given year were ical pattern, at Bain and at other private-equity firms like it, was to accounted for by new or expanding firms, while 15 percent of the buy a company by spending some portion of their capital (aug- previous year’s jobs vanished due to the contraction or exit—a nice mented by debt—usually somewhere between 60 to 90 percent of way to say “going out of business”—of other firms. This process the total purchase price). They would then offer supercharged costs a lot and wreaks havoc. But it has two silver linings. The first incentives for top managers, both among the investment profes- is that until recently, gross job creation has outpaced destruction. sionals at the private-equity firm itself and at the firms they The second is that the churning process tends to raise economy- acquired. CEOs of newly acquired firms would be enticed with wide productivity. Haltiwanger’s exiting firms are generally less stock options and performance incentives. When the system productive than surviving ones, and young ones that survive past worked, as it often did, CEOs started making sums that were their first couple of years have higher productivity levels and high- unheard of in the 1960s. er productivity gains than older ones. A growing firm will open We can trace the enormous increase in compensation among top new factories or retail outlets; an unsuccessful firm will close them. earners to this embrace of performance-based compensation Just months before Romney’s career at Bain Capital became among the CEOs of privately held firms. This relation between controversial, Americans mourned the death of Apple CEO Steve huge paydays and the work of private equity is one of many rea- Jobs. And yet when Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, he returned as sons the field is so controversial. Equally controversial is the use of an angel of destruction. He fired over 3,000 employees, a move debt. Having bought a company with borrowed money, private- that helped swing Apple from a $1.05 billion annual loss to a $309 equity firms had to extract the mortgage payments, as it were, out million profit. He shut down Apple’s manufacturing facilities and of the company’s cash flow. This was a new expense for manage- outsourced almost every aspect of production. He swung the axe ment, and it was also a source of discipline: If you couldn’t make pitilessly, since he was convinced that survival requires leanness. the payments, you’d kiss your performance incentives goodbye, And in the 14 years after Jobs returned, employment levels at and you might even end up going bust. But loading up a company Apple soared. Apple’s manufacturing work force was eventually with debt could also hasten its demise, especially if management replaced by engineers, support staff, and—in a move that would failed to cut costs. have surprised many in 1997—a vast army of retail employees. This brings us to the question at the heart of the Bain controver-

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sy: Have private-equity firms destroyed jobs with a vengeance, threatened their familiar way of life. These artisans had no objec- while creating none in return? Recently the econ o mists Steven tion to buying and selling textiles—that was how they made their Davis, John Haltiwanger, Ron Jarmin, Josh Lerner, and Javier living. Rather, they objected to the scale of the new factories, their Miranda surveyed private-equity transactions between 1980 and speed, and the rate at which they were displacing skilled workers. 2005, covering 3,200 target firms and 150,000 establishments, to The balance of power had shifted from a few skilled artisans to the measure job losses before and after acquisition. In “Private Equity owners of capital and the managers of the new factories, who could and Employment,” they compared target firms to control firms, now draw upon a much larger labor pool. Management is no longer i.e., firms that resembled the targets of private equity in age, size, the work of artisans. Just as the young consultants at Bain & industry, and growth, but for whatever reason were not acquired. Company hoped, it has evolved into a rigorous, unsentimental, Iden ti fy ing controls is difficult—it is possible that private-equity data-driven enterprise dominated by sophisticated investment pro- firms were able to identify some hard-to-define X factor that made fessionals. target firms riper for acquisition than others. Indeed, a recent Wall Private equity has experienced ups and downs. During the late Street Journal analysis of Bain Capital’s track record suggested 1980s, the junk-bond market—the source of much of the debt that under Mitt Romney’s leadership, the firm tended to gravitate financing for private-equity firms—crashed, and the number of towards particularly hard cases. publicly held companies that went private plummeted. Within a Regardless, “Private Equity and Employment” offers a good few years, however, private-equity activity expanded yet again, starting point for assessing private equity’s impact. The authors mainly through the purchase of mid-sized, privately held firms. find that in the first five years after a buyout, employment levels at But over time, the low-hanging fruit started to disappear. When private-equity targets do decline more rapidly. Yet those targets Syverson reported the two-to-one average productivity gap start new factories, retail outlets, and other establishments at a con- between firms at the 90th percentile and firms at the 10th per- siderably higher rate than control firms—and so net job losses at centile, he also noted that the gap was more like five to one in target firms are less than 1 percent greater than net job losses at China and India. That’s partly because for the last three decades, control firms. Those target firms get whipped around in a much American private-equity firms have been gobbling up inefficient more violent churn than control firms, as they rapidly shut down or firms and spitting out profit-making machines, while the process sell old establishments and open up or acquire new ones. This is a is still in its infancy in the rest of the world. And private equity disruptive process, and private-equity outsiders sharply accelerate hasn’t transformed corporate America through direct action alone. the pace of restructuring. The threat of a leveraged buyout also forced many companies to Consider the experience of UniMac, a laundry-equipment man- get their acts together—that is, to do to themselves what private- ufacturer in Marianna, Fla. UniMac plays a prominent role in equity investors would otherwise have done. When Mitt Romney Came to Town, a 28-minute documentary So private equity has had broad and positive effects that have heavily promoted by the pro-Gingrich PAC Winning Our Future. kept America dominant. In a 2010 paper, the econ o mists Nicholas According to the film, Bain Capital took over UniMac and Bloom of Stanford and John Van Reenen of the London School of wrecked it. If you believe the ominous narration, Bain’s managers Economics offered evidence that differences in management prac- fired workers such as Mike Baxley and Tracy and Tommy Jones tices explain a great deal of why some countries are more produc- as they slashed costs and eventually shut down the plant. Ac - tive than others. One key difference between the United States and cording to a report by Elizabeth Wil liam son in the Wall Street other countries is that it has strikingly few badly managed firms. Journal, however, the three employees actually flourished and Moreover, U.S. firms are aggressive about using performance were promoted under Bain. Only after Bain sold the plant to the incentives, in part because labor markets are relatively lightly private-equity arm of a Canadian teachers’ union did the plant regulated. close. After that shutdown, Uni Mac’s operations shifted not to Both distinguishing characteristics can arguably be traced to the some emerging-market sweatshop but to Ripon, Wis. The three transformative role of private equity. Bloom and Van Reenen posit workers parlayed their experience at UniMac into a new washing- that there are two ways countries can improve their management machine sales-and-service business. Far from being crippled by practices and thus their aggregate productivity. The first option is Uni Mac’s demise, the workers upgraded their skills and plunged to improve management within each firm, possibly through better into the new entrepreneurial economy. This experience was no management education. The second is to accelerate the realloca- doubt harrowing, but it’s not an obvious instance of the evils of tion of resources from poorly managed firms to better-managed vulture capitalism. firms—a role private-equity firms were born to play. These messy facts didn’t make it into When Mitt Romney Came But what good are well-managed firms if employment levels to Town. And Romney has so far proven incapable of defending remain dismal? Corporate profits now represent 12.6 percent of private equity with stories like this one. If Romney secures the GDP, the highest level in 60 years. Yet U.S. firms remain reluc- Republican presidential nomination, he’ll have to offer his own tant to hire or to expand at home. This could be because U.S. narrative about the churn, a narrative that shows how it fosters firms assume that the domestic market is no longer where the prosperity rather than destroys it. action is. Back in 2010, Robert Gordon of Northwestern University argued provocatively that U.S. productivity growth would slow markedly over the next two decades. Per capita GDP RIVATE-EqUITY firms have taken the process of turning growth would slow to 1.5 percent, far lower than the 2.17 percent around failing businesses and made it into an industrial the U.S. enjoyed from 1929 to 2007. This would represent, in P process. The hostile reaction to this industrialization of Gordon’s words, “the slowest growth of the measured American corporate cost-cutting evokes the revolt of the Luddites, the 19th- standard of living over any two-decade interval recorded since century textile artisans who sabotaged the mechanical looms that the inauguration of George Washington.” This is the stagnant

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future that Romney has been warning against on the campaign 180 in terms of quality improvement, efficiency, increasing pro- trail, and it is fast becoming reality. ductivity. There was a change in corporate culture that significant- Gordon is pessimistic in part because he sees the productivity ly boosted corporate productivity for a long time and helped create gains of the last decade as fundamentally unsustainable. He sug- the boom of the ’90s. What they pointed out was, there were a gests that the collapse of corporate profits after the recession and couple of sectors that were resistant to that: health care, education, the accounting scandals of the early 2000s sparked savage cost- energy, and government.” With this in mind, the president sug- cutting, including large-scale layoffs. This in turn increased pro- gested that government-dominated sectors needed to undergo a ductivity. But after 2003, profits recovered and the pressure to step similar cultural shift. up productivity relaxed considerably. Even then, however, firms But this “change in corporate culture” didn’t come from round- didn’t start hiring. Indeed, there is good reason to believe that the table discussions. It flowed from the private-equity-driven real - labor-market recovery after the 2000‒01 recession was driven by location of resources—the messy, disruptive process of shutting hiring by state and local governments and an expanding (and down inefficient factories and firms and shifting their resources to heavily subsidized) health-care sector—not by private-sector innovative new models that can withstand competition. And when job growth. According to Gordon, the wretchedness of the private- the “change in corporate culture” came, the business establishment sector employment landscape stems in part from the changing bal- didn’t embrace it; in many cases, it howled in pain. The change ance of power between management and labor. As organized labor came from outsiders universally derided as “corporate raiders” has weakened in the private sector, the value of the minimum wage who used debt financing as their weapon of choice to force old-line has deteriorated in real terms, competition from imports has inten- industrial companies out of complacency. Innovative business sified, and less-skilled immigrants have become a larger share of models have since emerged in education and health. Yet at every the work force, the bargaining position of management has turn they run into regulatory barriers and opposition from public- improved. So when the housing bust and the 2008 financial crisis sector unions and their allies in government. What these sectors hit, workers could be shed with relatively little difficulty. need, Romney should argue, is the same data-driven transforma- Many who embrace Gordon’s view conclude that labor must be tion that saved America’s industrial economy. empowered through stronger unions or regulations designed to limit layoffs. In this sense, Gordon is in line with the Obama administration’s buttressing of organized labor and labor-market n the end, private equity and job destruction aren’t the source regulations. This approach, however, has arguably led firms to of our employment woes. Rather, it is the clampdown on inno- accelerate the substitution of technology for labor. In addition, it I vation. This clampdown is most obvious in the education and may stymie the reallocation of resources from failing firms to suc- health-care sectors, which bitterly resist every effort to shift cessful firms that is so essential to achieving sustainable produc- resources from conventional schools and hospitals to lower-cost tivity growth. alternatives. But the resistance is present in almost every sector. In There is another aspect of Gordon’s hypothesized productivity telecommunications, for example, a handful of large firms that can slowdown. As Tino Sanandaji and I have discussed, the increase in afford access to the airwaves dominate the market, even though we educational attainment in the United States has reached a plateau. have the technological means to radically lower this barrier to Workers now retiring actually attained higher diplomas than work- entry. Software pat ents have led to a dramatic slowdown in inno- ers just entering the work force, a phenomenon that in part reflects vation, as firms such as Google, Microsoft, and Apple wage point - the changing demographic composition of America’s prime-age less, productivity-draining legal battles. Regulations designed to work force. Gordon attributes the slowdown in educational attain- protect workers and consumers raise compliance costs for scrappy ment to rising tuition levels and a lack of fellowship support for the start-ups, thus entrenching the advantages enjoyed by incumbent poor. Others would draw attention to the high-school-dropout rate firms. When Romney criticizes regulations now, he emphasizes and the failure of public K–12 schools to prepare children (partic- how they hurt existing employers. He must instead emphasize how ularly those from single-parent families) for college. All told, they prevent entrepreneurs from starting and growing the new Gordon assumes that the improvements in labor quality that drove businesses that will create new jobs. productivity growth for the last century will hit zero over the next Status quo Democrats and Republicans aim to stimulate job cre- ten to fifteen years. Defenders of a dynamic market economy, ation by inducing incumbent firms—made extremely lean through Romney foremost among them, need to place heavy emphasis on successive rounds of cost-cutting—with tax incentives, direct sub- this fact. sidies, and other giveaways. But tax breaks don’t create jobs. As many on the left and right have argued, the central problem Innovative businesses create jobs by dreaming up new products with the U.S. educational system is that its productivity growth has and processes. And innovative business models are embraced only lagged behind that of other sectors such as manufacturing. That is, when incumbent firms, whether they manufacture steel or educate we spend far more on education today than we did 40 years ago, kids, fear going out of business. yet educational outcomes haven’t improved commensurately. The Our defensiveness, our eagerness to protect the firms and the quality of teaching may have even deteriorated in some respects. jobs we have now, is an inevitable reflection of our relative stabil- President Oba ma has highlighted the productivity challenge facing ity and affluence. Societies that believe that their best days are education and other government-dominated sectors. In an inter- behind them are naturally risk-averse. This dread of change, most view with Bloomberg Businessweek at the start of his presidency, vividly illustrated in the fear and loathing of private equity, is the he offered the following observation. “The last lunch that I had, I disease of stable societies barreling towards decline. But if Amer - guess we had the CEOs of Xerox, AT&T, Honeywell, and Coke. ica is going to have a bright economic future, we must fight against We talked about the fact that, in the 1980s, when everybody was complacency and nostalgia, and eagerly embrace job destruction afraid Japan was going to eat our lunch, a lot of companies did a as job creation’s necessary twin.

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Americans buy insurance policies that meet the federal government’s approval. Romney can rightly say that this requirement, Romney vs. when imposed at the federal level, raises constitutional issues that a state requirement does not. But much of the opposition to the mandate rests on hostility to being ordered around unneces- sarily by any level of government, and Romney, alas, cannot OBAMACARE align himself with that sentiment. What the presumptive nominee should say f Romney really is disarmed in taking on some particular BY YUVAL LEVIN & aspects of Obamacare, however, he does have available to RAMESH PONNURU I him good arguments against the legislation as a whole. The substantive inadequacy of Romney’s federalist critique of Obamacare actually points to these arguments. T some point in this year’s presidential campaign, per- The truth is that most of the dysfunctions in our health-care haps on a debate stage, President Obama is likely to system are the result of gravely flawed federal policies, and so repeat his claim that the Massachusetts health-care long as those policies remain in place, no amount of experimen- A law signed by Gov. Mitt Romney in 2006 was the tation by state governments can create a transparent, efficient, or inspiration for the federal health-care plan that he himself signed patient-centered system. federal policy strongly encourages in 2010. Obama knows that his signature legislative accom- third-party provision of health insurance, and penalizes its plishment remains unpopular. But he also knows that policy purchase by individuals, in two ways: It subsidizes employer- experts of various political stripes have claimed that Obama - provided coverage through the tax code; and it grants states the care is essentially Romneycare taken national. If Romney is the authority to establish regulatory fiefdoms over individually pur- Republican presidential nominee, as he seems likely to be, chased insurance, thus preventing the emergence of a national Obama will try to block him from taking advantage of his market. Thanks to these policies, individuals rarely own their vulnerability. insurance policies and rarely even know their true cost; nor do Romney will be able to answer Obama effectively only if he they often know the costs of medical services, or have much has already vigorously made the case against Obamacare by incentive to choose lower-cost options. Thus, costs spiral out of then: both so that he has the argument clear in his mind, and so control. that Republican politicians, reporters, and voters are at least The arbitrary price schedule of Medicare distorts the entire passingly familiar with it. medical marketplace even more severely, because the program Romney may be tempted to preemptively disarm himself by is such an immense purchaser. By promoting fee-for-service as keeping quiet about Obamacare, or by merely saying, per - the dominant model of medicine—instead of making it compete functorily and when asked, that he favors its repeal but not with other models—it also rewards doctors and hospitals for making the case against it. But silence, or a muted critique of increasing the number of treatments they provide rather than Obamacare, would be a mistake for several reasons. It would their effectiveness. This growth in volume drives costs upward undermine the ability of a President Romney to govern suc- throughout American medicine. Medicaid, finally, distorts state cessfully on health care. It would leave a key Obama weakness budget decisions by having the federal government pick up half unexploited: The averages of polls at pollster.com show not the tab. Any state that implements cost-cutting reforms will give only that Obamacare is unpopular but that it has been getting up federal dollars and thus pocket only half the savings. No state more so over the last 18 months. Obamacare is also the most politician will want to pay the full political price for cost-cutting powerful symbol of the administration’s most controversial reforms while getting only half the fiscal benefit: So once more, characteristic: its drive to expand the federal government. A cri- costs go up. tique of Obama’s record that ignores his health-care plan would Again and again, federal policy drives costs upward, and have a hole at its center. No other domestic-policy issue in the those rising costs are the reason so many people are unable to 2012 campaign exceeds this one in importance. (And this will afford insurance, and a major reason the fiscal prospects of the continue to be the case unless the Supreme Court voids the federal government and the states are so grim. entire law.) No state can fix these problems on its own. No state can call a Governor Romney has at times attempted to argue that the robust national market in individually purchased insurance into chief problem with the federal law is that it imposes a sweeping being in the face of federal policies that suppress its emergence. one-size-fits-all model for the health-care system on the entire No state can do anything to improve Medicare. Nor can any state nation and prevents the type of state-by-state experimentation alter the structure of Medicaid, even though that structure moves that could yield solutions that are better, and better fitted to local states to act in systematically perverse ways. circumstances. This critique of Obamacare, though it contains We should thus not be surprised that Romneycare turned out a lot of truth, is both substantively and politically inadequate. to be deeply flawed. It was an attempt to work within the bound- The political inadequacy comes into relief when one looks at aries of a health-care system badly deformed by the federal Obamacare’s least popular feature, its requirement that all government in ways that no state has much power to fix. Thus Romneycare established an “exchange” or “connector” that was Mr. Levin is the editor of National Affairs and a fellow at the Ethics and Public originally designed as a kind of work-around for federal tax pol- Policy Center. Mr. Ponnuru is a senior editor of NATIONAL REVIEW. icy: The idea was that individuals would be able to pick their

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own insurance plans, as in an individual market, but their unchanged but placing a new entitlement program alongside it employers would still be nominally footing the bill and thus the and subjecting both to an additional onerous layer of regula- plans would qualify for the existing federal tax break. While the tions. Romney has instead proposed that the tax code treat peo- individual mandate’s potential to help control costs has long ple who buy insurance themselves just as it treats people who been exaggerated, it was tempting for a state to turn to it since it buy it through their employers. Done the right way, this policy has very few other options to bring costs down. The whole thing, would gradually nurture the development of a working indivi - finally, was designed to increase the state’s intake of federal dual market while not unduly disrupting the arrangements of Medicaid dollars. the satisfied many. Whether all of Romneycare’s architects saw it this way or not, Obamacare, in other words, takes each of the three parts of our the program may be best understood as an attempt to mitigate, deeply troubled health-care-financing system and makes every for a single state, the problems created by federal policy. In our one of them worse, by making them less market-oriented, less view it was a misguided and unsuccessful attempt. Romney efficient, and less innovative. To defend such a destructive idea himself, unfortunately, continues to defend the basic structure of by insisting that it bears some similarities to some things states the Massachusetts law. But whether or not Romneycare was the have done to try to contend with the effects of the existing sys- correct response to the situation the state confronted, the context tem is preposterous. of federal health-care policy is entirely different. The federal government does not, and national politicians do not, have to take for granted badly broken existing federal policies and work O what, then, should Governor Romney say, if he is the within them. They can instead fix those policies. Indeed, they nominee and President Obama suggests that his health- must fix them. S care plan is modeled on the one the Republican enacted? Something, we suggest, like the following: “Nice try. Your health-care plan, Mr. President, spends a tril- OMNeY understood that before Obamacare: In 2008, he lion dollars on yet another uncontrollable federal entitlement proposed reforms that would have addressed some ele- program and on a massive expansion of a failing Medicaid sys- R ments of the national problem by bringing market forces tem. It has an unconstitutional rationing board cut hundreds of to bear on health care, and not by employing the model of billions from Medicare without being answerable to the public, Romneycare on a national level. The perversity of Obamacare is without giving seniors more options, and without using the that instead of addressing the ways in which federal policies money to shore up the program or reduce the deficit. It raises Obamacare takes the three parts of our deeply troubled health-care-financing system and makes every one of them worse.

make an efficient and competitive health-care system impossi- hundreds of billions in taxes on employment, investment, and ble, it doubles down on those policies and adds a highly convo- medical research; and after all of that, it wouldn’t even reduce luted system of further public subsidies and oppressive rules on the growth of health-care costs, which is the heart of the prob- top of them. In short, Obamacare takes a bad health-care system lem. And your defense of all that is that it was based on a state and makes it much worse, in ways that are likely to exacerbate program that doesn’t actually do any of those things? the grave problems with American health-care financing and to “All around the country, states have been trying to deal with be very difficult to reverse once fully implemented. the problems that bad federal health-care policies have created. Thus Obamacare takes a Medicare system that stifles innova- The federal government is running Medicare in a way that tion and prevents competition, and maintains its irrational struc- makes efficiency and innovation much more difficult. Medicaid ture while subjecting it to a rationing board that will undermine is causing budget crises in state after state while failing to deliver access and quality. Romney, on the other hand, has proposed to quality health care. Federal tax policy puts employers rather reform Medicare to allow competition to drive efficiency and than patients in charge of insurance. States can try to salvage cost control while continuing to provide a guaranteed insurance what they can in this system. But ultimately they need—we all benefit to the elderly. need—to end the federal government’s arbitrary and senseless Obamacare vastly expands Medicaid without reforming its interference in health care. structure—intensifying the incentive for overspending and “Instead your law increases federal control. It spends money drawing more middle-class Americans into a segregated, subpar we don’t have, takes choices and access to care away from health system. Romney has proposed to reform Medicaid into a seniors, raises taxes, and forces middle-class families to give up block grant to the states, to give states an incentive to improve the coverage they have. Like so much of what your administra- the program’s quality and lower its costs, and to find ways to tion has done, it makes the problem worse. That’s why the first integrate the poor into the broader health-insurance system step toward a better health-care market—one that’s affordable, rather than draw the middle class out of it. innovative, and in keeping with our founding principles of lim- Obamacare adds to the economic distortions created by ited government—is to repeal your health-care legislation. today’s system by leaving the tax treatment almost entirely “And that’s going to take a new president.”

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looked at the intergenerational income mobility of Americans born after the early 1970s, mostly because data are hard to come The President’s by. Children born in 1980 are barely 30 years old today, and few data sets exist that tracked them as they grew up. So as I looked into Depressing Statistics the president’s claims, I decided also to fill in this research gap with estimates of my own. I used two Labor Department surveys, one Obama is simply wrong about of which followed men and women born around 1960, the other of which followed Americans born in the early 1980s. I compared economic mobility children born between 1962 and 1964 with children born between 1980 and 1982, and looked at their parents’ incomes when they BY SCOTT WINSHIP were 14 to 16 years old and their own incomes twelve years later, when they were 26 to 28. n January 12, Council of Economic Advisers chairman In contrast to the president’s claim of declining mobility, I found Alan Krueger gave a speech on inequality at the Center that the percentage of poor children who made it to the middle class for American Progress. It was the second salvo of what or even rose above it had not declined. Rather, their chances rose O is shaping up to be a major campaign theme for Presi - from about 50 percent to about 55 percent. Partly because of data dent Obama: the problems posed by inequality, in particular the limitations, this increase is not statistically reliable, but there is lack of opportunities for the poor and the middle class. It is under- certainly no evidence of the sort of decline that the president standable that the president and his advisers find this theme claims has happened. attractive. The likely Republican nominee is a former private- My definitions of “poor” and “middle class” were based on equity captain worth as much as $250 million who likely pays those used for the president’s figures, which I investigated by a marginal tax rate of 15 percent on the income he receives. Mitt reaching out to David Card, the economist who produced them. In Romney is even having to fend off attacks on his stewardship his analysis, “poverty” meant having a family income in the of Bain Capital from opportunistic Republican presidential can- bottom 10 percent, and “middle class” meant having an income in didates. And there is another reason the president wants to talk adulthood at least half—but no more than one and a half times— about inequality. The more he can make the election about that of the household at the midpoint. Because this seemed a big-picture economic issues such as inequality and mobility, strange way to think about upward mobility—move up, but not too the less flak he will take for the immediate problem of a still- far up!—my estimates differed from the president’s in counting sluggish economy. those who went “from rags to riches” as also upwardly mobile. Politics being politics, there would not be much point in criticiz- But the main way in which my figures differed from the presi- ing the president’s strategic decision, if not for one fact: He and his dent’s is that mine were fully based on real-world data, while his team are systematically misrepresenting the nature of economic were calculated by feeding a mix of data and assumptions into a opportunity in America. And they are not only using bad numbers, mathematical model. The gory details, for those who want them, but also using them in a way that is likely to depress mobility can be found in my recent nATIOnAL REvIEW OnLInE article “The and hinder the nation’s recovery from the Great Recession. President’s Suspect Statistics” (Jan. 2, 2012), but allow me to note This is a strong accusation, to be sure, but an assessment of here that one thing I did to test the president’s model was to feed it two big inequality speeches since early December—the first by data corresponding to the periods covered by the aforementioned the president, and the second Krueger’s—reveals its truth. Labor Department surveys. The model showed a sizable decline in One particular claim from the president’s much-discussed mobility—even though the data themselves indicate an increase. December 6 speech in Osawatomie, Kan., jumped out at me: When an assumption-laden model fails to reproduce real-world data, you have to conclude that the model is misleading. We tell people—we tell our kids—that in this country, even if you’re born with nothing, work hard and you can get into the middle class. . . . And yet, over the last few decades, the rungs on the Y demonstration seems to have quashed the president’s ladder of opportunity have grown farther and farther apart, and the whole initial analysis, since there was nary a mention of middle class has shrunk. You know, a few years after World War II, M those figures in Krueger’s speech. In their place were a child who was born into poverty had a slightly better than 50/50 chance of becoming middle-class as an adult. By 1980, that chance two new sets of numbers. The first purportedly showed that the had fallen to around 40 percent. And if the trend of rising inequal - middle class has “shrunk,” a claim also made by the president in ity over the last few decades continues, it’s estimated that a child the passage quoted above. Krueger presented estimates that the born today will only have a one-in-three chance of making it to the percentage of American households in the middle class fell from middle class—33 percent. 50 percent in 1970 to 42 percent in 2010. These estimates use the same definition of “middle class” as the These data appeared to be brand new, and they sparked a quiet president’s earlier estimates: having income between half the behind-the-scenes search among economists and journalists across median and 150 percent of it. I reran the numbers using the same the ideological spectrum for their origin. not only were the num- data source as Krueger and found that the entire reason the middle bers new, they also contradicted the existing research literature, the class has “shrunk” is that more households today have incomes balance of which shows little change in mobility over time. that put them above the middle class. The share of households with The biggest shortcoming of this research was that no one had income that puts them in the middle class or higher was 76 percent in 1970 and 75 percent in 2010—figures that are statistically in- Mr. Winship is a fellow in economic studies at the Brookings Institution. distinguishable. A shrinking middle class is a problem only if it

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reflects fewer people’s reaching the middle class. That is clearly varying estimates. Building a Great Gatsby chart thus requires the impression the administration wants to give, but it is not the choosing from among the estimates that might represent each truth of the situation. country. Different scholars choose different estimates, with the The second new line of evidence Krueger offered centered on a result that their best-fitting lines differ. The version I trust the most, chart depicting what he called the “Great Gatsby Curve.” The chart from the Oxford Handbook of Economic Inequality, shows a rela- plotted ten OeCD countries according to two variables: the coun- tionship between inequality and immobility, but it is driven entire- tries’ overall economic inequality in 1985; and a measure of eco- ly by three high-inequality countries—the United States, Italy, and nomic immobility taken in more recent years indicating the France. tendency to have an income similar to one’s parents. The chart Admittedly, all of the charts like this that researchers have cre- demonstrated that countries with higher inequality tend to have ated show a relationship between inequality and immobility. more immobility; of the countries included, the U.S. had the high- There is one other big problem with them, though, particularly est level of inequality and the second-highest level of immobility. when a researcher is estimating future mobility, as Krueger did. If Krueger also noted that American inequality has risen since one believes that inequality diminishes opportunity, one should 1985, and that the correlation between inequality and mobility look at how inequality experienced in childhood affects mobility would suggest that mobility has declined. Krueger used the over- between childhood and adulthood. Krueger’s immobility data are, all relationship between the two variables—represented in the for the most part, from people who were in their 30s during the 1990s. They should therefore be matched with inequality data from the 1960s, when they were children, but instead they are matched The Great Gatsby Curve with inequality data from 1985. Cross-national differences in 0.6 inequality were much bigger by 1985 than they were in the 1960s, United States so it is likely that the relationship between childhood inequality in (2010) the 1960s and immobility experienced between the 1960s and the 0.5 United Kingdom 1990s is weaker than the Great Gatsby chart suggests. United States More to the point, all of this means that Krueger’s prediction of 0.4 France immobility for “today’s children” is not so much a projection of what today’s children will experience as adults as it is a model- Japan Germany based estimate of what today’s adults have already experienced. Immobility 0.3 New Zealand Sweden And we don’t need an estimate of that at all—we can instead cal- culate how much mobility today’s adults experience and then com- 0.2 Finland pare the numbers with those of past generations. With the same Norway figures I used to debunk the Osawatomie claims, I have found that Denmark 0.1 immobility as measured by household income actually declined 0.15 0.20 0.25 0.30 0.35 Inequality between the generation born in the early 1960s and the generation NOTE: IMMOBILITY IS MEASURED BY INTERGENERATIONAL EARNINGS born in the early 1980s. INELASTICITIES, PRIMARILY AMONG PEOPLE WHO WERE IN THEIR 30S IN THE It is true, as I wrote in NATIONAl RevIeW a couple of months 1990S. INEQUALITY IS MEASURED BY THE GINI COEFFICIENT IN 1985. ago (“Mobility Impaired,” November 14), that America has an DATA SOURCES: CORAK (2011), OECD, COUNCIL OF ECONOMIC ADVISERS, AS COMPILED BY ALAN B. KRUEGER. upward-mobility problem, and the administration could do a lot of good by emphasizing this fact. But it can and should do so without needlessly scaring the middle class into doubting the security of its chart by a “best fitting” line, or the straight line that comes closest socioeconomic position. A 2005 Journal of Politics article by polit- to passing through all the points—to make what he called a “rough ical scientist B. Dan Wood and his colleagues found that optimism forecast” for “today’s children.” He predicted that in the next and pessimism expressed in presidents’ speeches between 1978 generation, the increase in inequality will cause immobility to and 2002 had a detectable effect on consumers’ sentiments regard- rise substantially. ing the economy and unemployment, which in turn affected eco- But the forecast is so rough that it is uninformative. each of the nomic growth. So the president’s strategy is likely to hinder points in the Great Gatsby chart represents an immobility estimate recovery from the Great Recession. There is also reason to believe taken from independent earlier studies. It is very difficult to get that Americans are more generous when they feel they are doing comparable estimates of immobility for different countries. One well than when they feel they are at risk, in which case the admin- needs measures of income defined in a common way across coun- istration’s strategy is doubly counterproductive for those at the tries. Ideally, one would have multiple years of income data for bottom whose welfare depends in part on charitable giving and each generation, and the analyses would use real data, as opposed on how much redistribution taxpayers will allow. to model-based estimates, about adults and about their parents Worse than any impact on middle-class anxiety or even on the when they were children. This last requirement is perhaps the hard- strength of the recovery, however, is the message the president is est to meet. Many governments do not conduct studies tracking sending to those struggling to pull themselves out of poverty. The children’s income as they grow older, or have started to do so only data indicate that it is no less true today than it was in the past that recently, so researchers must estimate childhood income using an poor children can make a better life for themselves. To be sure, it is algorithm obtained from a separate data set and compare the result no more true than in the past, either, a fact that should discourage against the actual income of the children as adults. complacency. But by arguing—against the evidence—that oppor- Because of these technical difficulties, for some countries—par- tunity is on the decline, the president needlessly dampens the hope ticularly the United Kingdom—researchers come up with widely of those who wish to transcend their disadvantages.

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press hostility that was almost unmatched before the coming of Sarah Palin. They’re likely to recall that Quayle was an ally in Dan Quayle’s a White House that had a strong streak of moderation—and that he occasionally started useful fights, such as when he criticized the television-sitcom character Murphy Brown for SECOND ACT bearing a child out of wedlock. It led to one of the most talked- about articles ever to appear on the cover of the liberal- leaning Atlantic Monthly, the one headlined: “Dan Quayle He’s out of politics, but full of political wisdom Was Right.” So as Romney scrambled to shore up his support at the BY JOHN J. MILLER height of the Gingrich boomlet, the Quayle endorsement was more than the perfunctory nod of an establishment Republican. It was a welcome boost from a well-known conservative. The an Quayle lost his Secret Service protection within timing was pure happenstance, the announcement having been weeks of leaving the vice presidency, almost two planned a few weeks earlier to coincide with a trip to arizona decades ago. People still stop him in airports—he already on Romney’s schedule. and it had been in the works D has to stand in line and remove his belt and shoes at for even longer, with Romney phoning Quayle on a regular security checkpoints, just like the rest of us—but for the most basis to talk politics. none of the other candidates had even part they leave him be. “They’re considerate,” he says. “They bothered to contact the former veep. “Romney was the only one give me space.” every now and then, when he doesn’t want to to ask for my support,” says Quayle. It’s a small example of the be recognized, he’ll put on a low-tech disguise: a baseball cap discipline and focus that have turned Romney into the strong and sunglasses. He did it a year and a half ago, when he attended frontrunner for the GOP nomination. a tea-party rally. “I just wanted to stand in back and hear the Quayle was 41 years old when he became vice president—a speakers,” he says. relatively young man for the job, with boyish looks to boot. “I Quayle lives in arizona now. So do his closest relatives: his learned that if you’re a young conservative, you’ll be a big tar- mother and his three children, including Ben, the son who is get for the press,” he says. “It’s bad enough that you’re a con- now a first-term congressman in the Phoenix area. The former servative. It’s even worse if you’re young because they’ll think vice president represented Indiana in the House and Senate for you’ll have a future—and they’ll want to destroy it.” a dozen years before George H. W. Bush picked him as a run- Today, he’s about to turn 65. The hair is grayer. The skin is ning mate in 1988. yet he grew up mainly in Scottsdale. “For starting to wrinkle. Quayle says he hasn’t thought about run- me, this is more home than Indiana,” says Quayle, who moved ning for office since he finished eighth in the 1999 Iowa straw back permanently in 1996. “I love the climate here. If we could poll. He quit his pursuit of the presidency and, before the year import the people of Indiana, it would be perfect.” was over, took the job he still holds with Cerberus Capital He drives himself to work, which is in an office building that Management. “I’d been in politics since I was 29,” he says. “I looks like so many of the other office buildings in Scottsdale, decided it was finally time to try something else.” with two stories of sandstone-colored walls, tinted windows, When you’re a former vice president, however, politics are and a red-tiled roof. There’s no guard in the lobby, and the never far away. Quayle still feels an obligation to attend pres - directory doesn’t list Quayle’s name. Visitors need to know in idential inaugurations, even for Democrats. He went to Ted advance that he can be found upstairs, at the end of a long and Kennedy’s funeral. He advised his son’s successful campaign featureless hallway, where he leases a few rooms. The view for Congress in 2010. and he puts his mind to the election from his window is of a parking lot. Quayle isn’t exactly a of 2012. modern-day Cincinnatus, returned from Rome to run his “This far out, the incumbent is usually favored,” says Quayle. farm—he is “chairman of global investments” of a private- “But I think we can beat Obama.” He’ll be looking hard at a equity firm, and he travels quite a bit—but there’s a surprising single number: the economy’s growth in the second quarter of ordinariness to the second act of his life. this year. “That’s when perceptions set in,” he says. He points yet he can still make news, as he did on December 6, when to his own experience in 1992, when the Bush-Quayle ticket he endorsed Mitt Romney for president. “He’s a solid conser- crashed at the ballot box. “In the first two quarters of that year, vative, and he’s our best chance to beat President Obama,” we were technically—barely—in a recession. In the third quar- says Quayle. For Romney, the endorsement hardly could have ter, the economy grew by 4 percent. In the fourth quarter, it come at a better moment. His smooth-sailing campaign sud- grew by 6 percent. But none of that mattered, because Clinton denly had foundered. a week earlier, an interview with Bret got everyone to think that we were still in a recession even Baier of Fox news had gone poorly, forcing many Republicans though it wasn’t true.” to wonder if Romney was in fact as polished as his debate In other words, Obama doesn’t have until election Day to performances suggested. newt Gingrich was surging. “at our convince americans that a recovery is under way. He has until event, one of Romney’s aides had a poll from the New York the end of the spring. “That’s not good for him, because it Times,” says Quayle. “It showed Gingrich leading in Iowa by doesn’t look like we’re going to have strong growth in the first 14 points.” half of the year,” says Quayle. “The jobs numbers are improv- a lot of americans remember Quayle for one thing: the time ing, but a lot of that is temp help, and it doesn’t factor in the he misspelled “potato” in a classroom, becoming the butt of people who have dropped out of the labor market because jokes everywhere. Conservatives also remember a level of they’re no longer searching for employment.”

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Dan Quayle goes to bat for Mitt Romney in Paradise Valley, Ariz., Dec. 6, 2011.

OR the Bush-Quayle reelection campaign, perceptions story.” Yet Rubio has also signaled that he doesn’t want to be about the economy were enough of a challenge—but it on anyone’s short list for veep. Quayle chuckles at this. “Let F also had to contend with Ross Perot’s third-party ticket, me tell you: If the offer is made, he will not reject it.” Quayle which didn’t carry a single state but drew about 19 percent of also approves of Christie: “He’s a bare-knuckles straight the popular vote. “There’s no doubt that without Perot in the shooter who loves the give and take of politics. He’s a breath race, we would have won,” says Quayle. “We would have won of fresh air, totally unconventional for a Republican governor handily.” Do Republicans have to worry about a third party of New Jersey.” in 2012—perhaps one led by Ron Paul as a Libertarian candi- His next two suggestions are a little less daring. “When you date? “I don’t think he’ll do it,” says Quayle. “But if he did, it look at the recent history of successful vice-presidential can- would be a big problem. He’d probably get 10 or 12 percent of didates, you notice that a lot of them come from the Senate: the vote or more, and 80 percent of it would be Republican.” Mondale, Gore, Biden, me,” says Quayle. “So that’s a natural The GOP should take steps to make sure it doesn’t happen. place to find one.” He mentions Rob Portman of Ohio. “He’s a “Paul should have a prominent position at the convention,” solid individual with a great background in trade and the bud- says Quayle. “He deserves it. He’s a credible candidate, and he get. He’s steeped in national politics. And he comes from a should be treated with respect.” The expectation, of course, swing state.” His other idea is John Thune of South Dakota. would be for Paul to encourage his voters to get behind the “He’s a solid conservative who would complement Romney Republican nominee. well. In the Senate, he’s seen as a potential majority leader, and At some point this year, Quayle expects to hear rumors of a I think he’d be successful on the national stage.” “Dump Biden” movement among Democrats—a drive to con- Quayle has advice for anyone who takes the role. “Vice vince Obama that he should recruit a new running mate, presidents need to understand two things,” he says. “First, replacing the gaffe-prone Joe Biden. “There will be a push to you have to be prepared to be president, and that means you drop him, but it won’t happen,” says Quayle, who was the sub- must have access to all of the intelligence, go to all of the ject of similar efforts in 1992. “Why switch? Putting someone briefings, and know exactly what’s going on. Second—and else on the ticket won’t help. The president must get reelected this is the tough one—you have to be loyal to the president’s on his own. Changing the vice-presidential candidate would agenda rather than your own agenda. That can be hard when create too much discord and chaos.” you come from the Senate, where it’s pretty freewheeling and The main vice-presidential event between now and the con- you can get up and talk about anything or introduce any kind ventions, of course, will take place among Republicans. If of bill. As vice president, you must always defer to the pres- Romney wins the nomination, whom should he pick? “He ident. If you want to give a piece of your mind, you do it in needs to think a little out of the box because he’s a traditional, private.” conventional political figure,” says Quayle. He immediately When he talks politics these days, it’s often with his son, the AP / suggests a pair of potential running mates whom many conser- 35-year-old congressman who was born in 1976, just three vatives had hoped would run for president this year: Florida days after his father’s first election to Congress. “It’s his turn FRANKLIN . senator Marco Rubio and New Jersey governor Chris Christie. now, his generation’s turn,” says the elder Quayle. “Besides,

ROSS D “Rubio is a comer. He has an impressive résumé, a wonderful there’s not enough room for two Quayles in politics.”

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The Bent Pin BY FLORENCE KING Mr. Hitchens and I

HrISTOpHEr HITCHENS and I were not friends or The poor little thing was so skinny and thin, ’e ought to’ve even acquaintances. We never met or spoke on been washed in a jug. the phone, just exchanged occasional brief let- Your baby is perfectly ’appy, ’e don’t need no washing no ters—notes really—hand-written and snail- more! C Your baby ’as gone down the plug ’ole. Not lost, just gone mailed at first, e-mailed later. I suppose the most colloquial name for our relationship is “pen pals,” but that is much too before! hearty and well-adjusted for either of the difficult personali- We almost met once, but the opportunity came at the worst ties involved: It reeks of reaching out. My description of what possible time. A few years ago he wrote me that he had a we shared comes from the imagery that Longfellow called speaking engagement down my way, and suggested that we “ships that pass in the night.” have a drink together. Anything less than the truth would Our first pass occurred in the ’80s when we were both have sounded like an excuse, so I told him the truth: “I just weekday book reviewers on Newsday. I think I was Tuesday got out of the hospital and I feel and look like hell.” He and he was Wednesday. The book-page understood and we agreed to aim for anoth- staff took to betting on which of us would er time. “I need somebody to sneer with,” come up with the most devastating com- I wrote, “and they’re so hard to find.” He ment on a bad book. The results were replied: “If you ever feel like collectivizing passed on to us by the book editor, the late the sneers I am within bull’s roar of you Nina King (just about everybody I used to and at your service.” know is now “the late”), while Hitchens The question of meeting never arose again. and I, voicing suitably modest disclaimers, It was up to me to suggest another occasion would tell Nina our favorite lines from each but I never did. I forget what reason I gave other’s reviews, which she would then pass myself, but looking back, I think Fate was at on to us. This strikes me as significant now. it again. If we had met, particularly with That Nina slipped so naturally into the role alcohol in the mix, we would have talked the of go-between seems to hint that even then the fates had hind legs off a mule, but no matter how intellectually satisfy- decided that he and I would never meet. ing it might have been, it would have brought about a change Hitchens went on to bigger and better devastations, that I hated to think about: We could never again write those attacking religion in general and Mother Teresa in particu- terse little notes, never again be ships that pass in the night. lar, while I went on to NATIONAL rEvIEW. It was the least Holding back has become the last remaining art form in likely place to bring us back together but, in a way, that’s 21st-century America and Hitchens and I had perfected somewhere it happened. One of my last “Misanthrope’s Corner” thing that I did not want to give up. To do so would be to join columns before my premature retirement in 2002 was about the marauding armies of equal time; the buzzing swarms of my experiences in blurbing books. I related my best blurb- twitters and tweeters who fill the nation’s computer screens ing stories, then ended with a confession: “The writer I with their acronym droppings and call it “communicating”; would most like to blurb is Christopher Hitchens and I’ve the screenwriters who stuff movies with so much unnecessary already written the blurb: ‘If Christopher Hitchens is a dialogue that it confuses what little plot there is; and the ver- Marxist, I want to be one too.’” bal bricklayers who write 10,000-page congressional bills That broke the ice. He wrote me a thank-you note and our that nobody reads before passing. Brevity used to be regard- occasional correspondence began. We always addressed each ed as the soul of wit, but in America it identifies a rapidly other as Miss King and Mr. Hitchens, our symbolic—but multiplying segment of the population with a three-word never spelled out—loathing for the hang-loose world we vocabulary consisting of “surreal,” “awesome,” and “cool.” both occupied. It was better that way; we said more by saying My last note to Hitchens before he died was about the nothing. royal wedding. “Did you watch Drooping the Colour this I was glad that we always kept things short. If we had writ- weekend?” I asked. He replied: “I did hazard a glimpse of it; ten real letters I would eventually have gone on too long about was there anybody there higher than the rank of Sir Elton my Anglophilia, but one of our brief exchanges brought it out and Beckham? It looked low-rent even by showbiz stan- naturally. I asked him if he knew the words to an old music- dards. In Oliver Cromwell’s funeral cortege there walked hall song my father used to sing, about an undernourished John Milton, John Dryden, and Andrew Marvell.” baby having a bath. He did, and dashed off the Cockney I’m pleased to say that the blurb I wanted to give him— lyrics: “If Christopher Hitchens is a Marxist, I want to be one too”—actually did appear in an ad for one of his books. Your baby ’as gone down the plug ’ole, your baby ’as gone Some people believe he is now in Heaven, others that he is down the plug; now in Hell, but I have the skinny on this controversy: He’s in the sea lane next to mine.

NEWSCOM Florence King can be reached at P.O. Box 7113, Fredericksburg, VA 22404. / ZUMA

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Athwart BY JAMES LILEKS The Gilded Choo-choo

SIDe from the used diaper in the sleeping-car the Diversity Bend. Like many ideas from the first few compartment, it wasn’t a bad train trip. Arrived decades of the previous century, trains are perfectly pro- the day it was supposed to, didn’t derail. If gressive. There’s no individual decision on direction or A you’re wondering how a used diaper could sit in duration, no competition, no penalty for poor performance, a train without being detected by the staff, then you never and the money to run the thing is exacted from the unwill- took Amtrak in the bad old days. either the staff didn’t care, ing by the force of the state. If that’s not enlightenment, what or they believed the diaper was a metaphor for the system, is? or no one could detect its bouquet amongst the other fra- Here’s another thing that’s not enlightened: city streets. grances that wafted through the train. The ghosts of a mil- An article in the New York Times notes that cities are turning lion cigarettes from the smoker’s lounge, the blue perfume off the streetlights to balance the budget—if copper vam- of the diesel engines, the chemical tang of the overtaxed pires haven’t already sucked out the light’s wiring, that is. bathrooms—it was enough to make one act like a nobleman One of the cities cited in the Times piece has a jobs page on during the Black Death, and walk around sniffing a hand- its website, and you’re sure it says “Check back when we’re kerchief soaked with perfume to ward off the vile miasma. not so broke we’re returning our citizens to the 17th centu- On one trip through the plains in the middle of winter, the ry,” but no. They’re hiring a city planner, who will coordi- bathrooms simply froze, and could not nate facilitation of the comprehensive be used. Amend that: They could be strategies—meaning, apply for federal used. You just couldn’t dispose of any- grants for bike trails paved with recy- thing. cled car tires—and a bilingual pre- Amtrak got better—or so I’ve heard. school teacher, who can answer little The last train trip I took was seven kids in their native tongue when they years ago. The food wasn’t inedible, ask why the streets are so dark. the old Carter-era car didn’t sound like Sure, it sounds bad; sure, it feels it would fly apart if we went faster than like the Seventies, when the great cities 45 mph, and the steward was delightful felt like rusted heaps about to devolve and attentive. It still felt like being into dark mazes populated by heroin shipped across the country in a padded addicts. But it’s only a matter of time box. Yes, there’s something civilized before we get the positive side of coal- about experiencing the length of your dark streets. Reporters will find that journey gazing out a window while the neighborhood lady whose number of train calls out its clubfoot cadence—ca-CANK ca-CANK cats is equaled only by the number of bumper stickers on her ca-CANK ca-CANK. But you always enter a town by the car, and she’ll talk about how one can see the constellations back door, bumping and swaying along old tracks like a now. Light pollution, after all, has been a common com- drunk on hands and knees. You leave the train, and head up plaint among those who enjoy the sprawl of the empyrean the dank stairs to a modern Soviet-styled station that lacks beyond: You can’t see the stars if you live in the city. To only a statue of Lenin with his arm up like he’s hailing a which one might reply: True. You can’t see Sirius. You can, taxi. however, see the man breaking into your neighbor’s house. Trains are romantic: We have a vision of sleek stream- It’s one of those trade-offs. The headlines write themselves: lined steel machines slicing through the night, the mournful “As Cities Go Dark, Residents Rediscover an Ancient whistle wafting through the farmer’s dreams. But we do not Vista.” It’s more honest to live in the dark, isn’t it? The in - wear fedoras or listen to Fibber McGee and Molly on the terrogating glare of a streetlight is an imposition on the radio or exhibit other traits of the bygone era. We drive or natural order. Like dams and highways and the other we fly. Nevertheless, California is keen on a hypersonic manifestations of 20th-century hubris, streetlights will be choo-choo, as you’ve no doubt heard—and while locals are seen as an unsustainable indulgence, a waste of carbon in starting to question the wisdom of spending a tenth of a tril- an expense of shine, as Shakespeare might have put it, if lion on the project, it staggers on. The government is behind he wrote for The Nation. it. The unions are behind it. People who believe there is a No money for humble civic amenities, but billions for direct relationship between the number of cars that drive needless trains. Fewer services for citizens, but fast loco- to Sacramento and a polar bear drowning in 2027 A.D. are motives to carry lobbyists to the Capitol to argue for more behind it. The only thing that could stop the train is the dis- trains. It’s like the Romans letting the aqueducts crumble covery that it endangers gay brine shrimp, but even then while spending the loot on gilded chariots. You’re tempted they’d just go 30 miles around the pond and call the route to say that the last person to leave Western civilization as we knew it should turn out the lights, but that’s not a one-man Mr. Lileks blogs at www.lileks.com. job. Union rules require at least a dozen supervisors.

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The Long View BY ROB LONG

Static. Dead air for :02. Static. Dead air for :02. GOV. MITT ROMNEY: Sorry. Over. GOV. MITT ROMNEY: Not smarter than GOV. RICK PERRY: Well sir, you’ve you, of course, but I do have a certain given me a lot to think about. Yessir, a facility with numbers. And we’re both NSA Surveillance lot to think about. And I want you to looking at the same calculation. It just Document Extract know that I respect the heck out of you, doesn’t look great for a Newt Gingrich too, and really admire the fire and pas- nomination. And I want you to know Mobile Communication Project sion you’ve brought to this campaign. that I respect you and welcome your Over. thoughts and input here, and want you Begin extract GOV. MITT ROMNEY: The fire and pas- to be a major part of the future, but it’s 01.15.12 GMT 13:47 sion? hard for me to see how you are going to Static. GOV. RICK PERRY: Yessir, Mr. Speaker, accomplish anything short of making UNIDENTIFIED MALE VOICE: Hello? it’s been a joy to see you work, I’ve got this thing very expensive for both of us, UNIDENTIFIED MALE VOICE 2: Yessir? to tell you. Over. and even in the end, I’m going to win. Over. GOV. MITT ROMNEY: Um, no, Rick, this You can see that, right? You’re smarter UNIDENTIFIED MALE VOICE: Is this Rick isn’t Newt Gingrich, this is— than me, smarter than us all. This must Perry? GOV. RICK PERRY: And I’m going to have been obvious to you weeks ago. UNIDENTIFIED MALE VOICE 2: Yes it is, think it all over, and pray about it, and Due to your smarts. sir. To whom am I communicating? tweet about it, and get back at you SPEAKER NEWT GINGRICH: It occurred Over. tomorrow latest. Is that okay? Over. to me more than weeks ago, Mitt. I UNIDENTIFIED MALE VOICE: Rick, it’s GOV. MITT ROMNEY: No, Rick, this isn’t have flashes of clairvoyance. It’s a gift Mitt Romney. Newt Ging— and a curse. GOV. RICK PERRY: Hello, Mitt! Good to GOV. RICK PERRY: Perry out. GOV. MITT ROMNEY: Right, right. It hear from you. How are things on your Static. Call over. must be. It can’t be easy to be that side of the trail? Over. End extract visionary. GOV. MITT ROMNEY: Um, okay. Hey, lis- SPEAKER NEWT GINGRICH: I get such ten, this is a telephone. You know that, Begin extract headaches. From my brain. right? You don’t have to say “over” 01.15.12 GMT 13:55 GOV. MITT ROMNEY: Dear Lord, I imag- every time. Static. ine you do. So why not let’s say that GOV. RICK PERRY: Understood sir. Over. UNIDENTIFIED MALE VOICE: Hello? you’ll drop out of the race and endorse GOV. MITT ROMNEY: No, it’s not a UNIDENTIFIED MALE VOICE 2: Your me? And then the headaches will stop. walkie-talkie, okay? caller ID gave you away. That’s one of I promise. GOV. RICK PERRY: I know that. I know the features of 21st-century technolo- SPEAKER NEWT GINGRICH: Hold on, that. Roger that. gy breakthroughs that I had a hand Babar. Not you. But what would I do GOV. MITT ROMNEY: So, Rick, what I ushering into being. What can I do for with myself? was calling about was— you, Mitt? Please be brief, if you can, GOV. MITT ROMNEY: Newt, do you GOV. RICK PERRY: Over. as I’m sitting for a portrait right now know what the Romney campaign GOV. MITT ROMNEY: You don’t have and the elephant I’m riding is getting needs more than anything? We need to— restless. a historian. GOV. RICK PERRY: Copy that. UNIDENTIFIED MALE VOICE: Well, first, SPEAKER NEWT GINGRICH: I’m a his - GOV. MITT ROMNEY: Okay, I’m just thank you for making the time to speak torian! going to start and keep talking and hope to me, Mr. Speaker. GOV. MITT ROMNEY: I know! Coinci - that you can get this. Look, let’s look at SPEAKER NEWT GINGRICH: You’re wel- dence, huh? But not just any historian, the numbers. I’m a data guy. And I’m come. Good, Babar. Newt. We need a very very very very looking at the numbers from here on GOV. MITT ROMNEY: Excuse me? very well-paid historian. out, to Florida and Nevada and beyond, SPEAKER NEWT GINGRICH: Not you. I SPEAKER NEWT GINGRICH: I’m a very and Rick, let me say at the outset that was talking to the elephant. Please very very very well-paid historian! you’ve been a heckuva candidate and continue. GOV. MITT ROMNEY: You don’t say. you’ve run a really top-notch campaign, GOV. MITT ROMNEY: Look, Newt, you SPEAKER NEWT GINGRICH: You know, and I respect you enormously, but when and I have gone at it pretty hard these Mitt, I think the two of us should sit you drill down here and get granular past few weeks. And for my part, if I’ve down and— with the data, it really doesn’t look like crossed the line, I apologize. But let’s Elephant noise. Heavy footsteps. More there’s a model here for a Rick Perry look at the numbers. You’re a smart guy. elephant noise. victory. So what I’m asking, and it’s SPEAKER NEWT GINGRICH: This is true. GOV. MITT ROMNEY: Newt? Newt? with huge respect, is that you consider GOV. MITT ROMNEY: And I’m a smart Static. Call disconnected. dropping out and endorsing me. guy. End extract

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apart thesis—namely, that he is merely a single parent. Murray reviews empiri- capitalizing on the well-known problems cal studies showing that children from The Virtue of minority groups. In addition, focusing single-parent homes do much worse in most of his attention on whites minimizes school and in life than children from Deficit the chances that his book will reignite the married-couple families. In this way, race debate that marred discussion of The lower-class parents pass on their prob- RON HASKINS Bell Curve. lems to their children, greatly increasing The heart of the book is Murray’s ana- the chances that the children will grow lysis of changes over the past five decades up to be lower-class as well. Murray’s in the way the upper and lower classes doc umentation of a growing gap between practice the “founding virtues”—mar- the lower and upper classes on the other riage, industriousness, honesty, and reli- founding virtues of industriousness, hon- giousness. Crucially, Murray holds that esty (as measured primarily by im pri - these are the virtues that provide the foun- son ment), and religiousness are also dation for what he calls the “american com pelling. project,” by which he means the creation addressing his readers, Murray says and maintenance of a society in which that he has “devised what I hope you will people “can be left free as individuals and find an intuitively understandable way to families to live their lives as they see fit, think about the trends in the larger classes coming together voluntarily to solve their from which [the upper class and the lower Coming Apart: The State of White America, joint problems.” class] are drawn.” he then creates two 1960–2010, by Charles Murray Murray amasses a mountain of data to hypothetical neighborhoods, which he (Crown Forum, 416 pp., $27) show that a huge and growing gap has calls Belmont and Fishtown. Belmont is opened between the lower class and the made up exclusively of the upper class, harles Murray writes impor- upper class on measures of each of these Fishtown exclusively of the lower class. tant and provocative books. virtues. By every measure of marriage, Murray populates these neighborhoods his latest book, Coming Apart, for example, lower-class americans have with people chosen from the nationally C joins Losing Ground (1984) created an unstable and deficient environ- representative Current Population survey and The Bell Curve (1994) as, in my view, ment for themselves and their children. who (in the case of Belmont) have at least among his most important and most fas - Their marriage rate has declined from a B.a. and work in high-prestige occupa- cinating. Given Murray’s longstanding around 85 percent in 1960 to less than tions (e.g., doctor, lawyer, or senior busi- status as a bête noire of the left, the book 50 percent in 2010, at which point the ness executive) and who (in the case of can be expected to produce lots of con - marriage gap between the classes was an Fishtown) have no more than a high- troversy. amazing 35 percentage points. The gap in school diploma and a blue-collar or ser- What does Murray think is coming divorce rates was even bigger. By 2010, vice occupation. apart? america, along class lines. his more than one-third of lower-class mar- Murray shows that when he defines the approach to persuading us that the class riages in the 30–49 age group had ended upper and lower classes with respect to divide is a present danger is first to de - in divorce, as compared with a little over their education and occupation, residents scribe what he means by the “new lower 5 percent for the upper class. of Belmont score well on all four indica- class” and the “new upper class,” then to It is one thing for adults to create insta- tors of the foundational virtues, while res- describe what he considers “the founding bility and emotional trauma in their own idents of Fishtown score poorly, and the virtues” that used to characterize the lives, but when children are involved, the gap between the two “neighborhoods” classes, and then to show, in grim detail, consequences for everyone are more grows substantially. how the classes moved farther and farther severe. White nonmarital birth rates start- This class separation on the founding apart over the 1960–2010 period on each ed to rise relentlessly in the early 1960s. virtues is the most remarkable finding in of these founding virtues. The book’s con- By 2010, more than a quarter of white the book. On indicator after indicator, the cluding section is devoted to a consider - babies were born outside marriage. For distance between the classes is huge by ation of what this coming apart might mothers with a college degree, the rise 2010—a result that is especially alarming mean for the nation’s future. was slight, their rate remaining under 5 because Murray shows that the size of the Most of Murray’s analyses refer only to percent—but for high-school dropouts, lower class at least doubled between 1960 white americans between the ages of 30 the number of nonmarital births grew to and 2010. as Murray says, the lower class and 49. By focusing on whites, Murray over 60 percent of all births. When the “is changing national life.” removes a major threat to his coming- nonmarital birth rates and divorce rates Probing for weaknesses in Murray’s are combined, around six or seven times analysis, as his critics certainly will, I Mr. Haskins is co-director of the Brookings Center as many lower-class children, as com- think the case for the separation of the on Children and Families. pared with upper-class children, live with classes in the formation of married-

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BOOKS, ARTS & MANNERS couple families, in work ethic, in adher- ian view that that government is best ence to the law, and in religious observa- which governs least. The case is familiar tion is so striking and so consistent that and is now, more than at any time since The Vice of trying to undermine a statistic here and the Lyndon Johnson era, a vital public there will do little to weaken Murray’s issue. Prompted by the deficit crisis, Moderation argument. However, the case that these Republicans are again calling for smaller are the nation’s founding virtues and that government. They have even embodied HENRY OLSEN they are unique among nations is inher- their call in Paul Ryan’s sweeping “Path ently more difficult to establish, and can to Prosperity” budget, adopted by House be expected to be more controversial Republicans as their official budget for than the case that there is a growing 2012, which would significantly limit the chasm between the classes. Equally open growth of government social programs to dispute is Murray’s analysis of why and transfer more responsibility to indi- the growing class chasm matters to the viduals, especially for their health care. nation. Although Murray gives no indication that Nonetheless, in one analysis Murray he intended his book to offer support for shows that, based on nationally represen- the Republican budget, I cannot imagine a tative survey data, people who are unmar- more compelling case than Coming Apart ried and dissatisfied with their work, for why limited government is best. profess no religion, and have low social The second cause of decline is more Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation trust have only about a 10 percent chance surprising and still more difficult to prove: and the Destruction of the Republican Party, of rating themselves “very happy.” If the Members of the upper class, Mur ray be - from Eisenhower to the Tea Party, person has satisfying work, a happy mar- lieves, are a bunch of cultural wimps. by Geoffrey Kabaservice (Oxford, riage, and strong religious values, happi- They walk the walk, but don’t talk the 504 pp., $29.95) ness explodes to nearly 80 percent. Thus, walk. Rather than stand up for the found- the gaps between classes on all the founding virtues, and for what Murray calls ATIONAL REvIEw’s founding ing virtues matter in part because mem- “seemliness,” they have “lost the self- in 1955 is widely considered the spark that lit the modern N conservative movement. Ac - Charles Murray is the champion of the cording to Geoffrey Kabaservice’s new libertarian view that that government book, that moment was also the beginning of the end for the Republican party, and is best which governs least. The case for America. Conservatives will find this notion laughable, but we ignore the book at is familiar and is now a vital our peril: Kabaservice’s thorough recount- public issue. ing of the intra-GOP war between moderates and conservatives during the 1960s bers of the lower class are deteriorating on confidence in the rightness of [their] own is highly instructive. precisely the factors that make people customs and values,” and they preach a Rule and Ruin has a simple thesis. There happy. wishy-washy doctrine of “nonjudgmental- once was a bipartisan consensus, “the vital In his final chapter, Murray raises the ism” instead. Murray gives many exam- Center,” in which both parties largely stakes to the highest possible level. Citing ples of the “hollow elite” remaining silent agreed on the basic contours of American Arnold Toynbee, Murray argues that his in the face of unseemly conduct: golden political life. This enabled the two parties analysis may well show the decline of the parachutes, outrageous CEO salaries, to debate policies in a civil manner, with values that have sustained the “American plummeting decorum in the language and differences commonly ending in compro- project,” which in turn is leading to the behavior portrayed by the media, the prof- mise. This consensus, at its strongest in the “disintegration” of American civilization. ligate ways of the rich, and corruption and 1950s, was made possible by the fact that Two factors in the unraveling of Amer - influence-peddling in government. both parties “contain[ed] a critical mass of ican civilization come in for especially That American civilization is threat- moderates”; indeed, largely non-ideological caustic treatment at Murray’s hands. The ened by the demise of the founding vir - parties are required for “the proper func- first, Murray’s overriding concern since tues for a large and growing fraction of tioning of American democracy.” This the publication of Losing Ground in 1984, Americans is a view that cannot, as Mur - happy medium was destroyed, according is the role of government in the decline ray admits, be proven, but the case that to Kabaservice, by the rise and ultimate of virtue. The well over $2 trillion that there has been a devastating decline in victory of the conservative movement. government spends on social programs marriage, work, honesty, and religion, In this view, moderate Republicans were “diminish[es] our responsibility” for our so persuasively established by Murray, the ultimate arbiters of this balanced polity. own well-being and “enfeeble[s] the insti- should be enough to scare everyone on Freed from the special interests (read: labor tutions through which people live satisfy- both the left and the right. Unfortunately, ing lives.” the question left hanging is: How do you Mr. Olsen is a vice president of the American Murray is the champion of the libertar- fix a declining culture? Enterprise Institute.

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unions and southern segregationists) that largely Republican (and Protestant) busi- dominated the Democratic party, moderate ness owners. Tribal politics froze people Republicans could run a more efficient and of different ideologies into political amber; honest welfare state that achieved New so long as tribal loyalties remained para- Deal ends with greater respect for private mount, both parties would have diverse enterprise and local government. “Modern ideological constituencies. Republicans” thus avoided the excesses This system came under attack in the of both liberals and conservatives and gave 1950s from conservatives, but also from I M P O R T A N T the country the balance of security and liberals. For the new liberals and conserva- growth, order and freedom, that modern tives, politics was about ideas, not tribes. N O T I C E America craved. Both sets of Americans believed our This should sound familiar to conser- nation’s founding ideals of liberty and to all National Review vatives who fought those wars, as Kaba- equality were threatened by the biparti - service’s thesis is an uncritical restatement san consensus. Conservatives believed subscribers! of what moderate Republicans said at the growing bureaucratic government threat- time. Such one-sidedness is characteristic ened liberty; liberals believed the busi- throughout: The conservative argument is ness/union co-dominium kept too many never presented in its own terms. Instead, people in poverty. Each side then set out to the reader is treated to copious examina- recapture its natural party from the institu- We are moving our tion of fringe elements of the nascent tions and leaders who enforced the “Vital movement, frequent descriptions of con- Center.” subscription-fulfillment servatives as “kooks” and “insane,” and a The ideologization of American politics office from clear insinuation that conservatives were Kabaservice deplores had its roots in the (at worst) racists and (at best) fellow trav- rise in college education. Put into contact Mount Morris, Ill. elers with racists. with serious ideas for the first time, mil- to Palm Coast, Fla. It is true that many conservatives at that lions of young people were motivated to Please continue time had at best a blind eye for the plight of bring their ideals into politics. It is no co - blacks. Extremism in the pursuit of liberty incidence that campus organization and to be vigilant: may be no vice, but moderation in the pur- action were essential to both movements, There are fraudulent suit of justice is certainly no virtue. Failing through the Young Americans for Freedom to recognize that pervasive private discrim- on the right and the civil-rights and anti- agencies soliciting ination, backed by public law in the South, war movements on the left. your National Review deprived blacks of any real citizenship has One would never know about these cost conservatives dearly for decades. It developments from Rule and Ruin. Ka - subscription ! renewal remains our movement’s original sin, for ba service details every minuscule Re - without our authorization. which we constantly atone. pub lican battle, but glosses over titanic Please reply only to The fact that those conservatives were en gagements among Democrats. College- wrong on race in 1964 does not, however, educated liberals battled Tammany Hall National Review mean the moderates were right on other in the 1950s and battled the leadership of renewal notices or issues or on political strategy. Moderate- the Democratic party on race and poverty Republican thinking in the 1960s itself in the 1960s. Gene McCarthy’s audacious bills—make sure the suffered from massive blind spots; and, unseating of Pres. Lyndon Johnson rates a return address is contra Kabaservice, these ultimately led to paragraph; the riots at the 1968 Democratic the moderates’ demise. convention in Chicago rate a sentence. The Palm Coast, Fla. The particular party system Kabaservice McGovern candidacy threw the Demo - Ignore all requests for extols was itself the byproduct of another cratic party into chaos that took over a renewal that are not battle about race, the Civil War. After decade to fully recover from; of this, the directly payable the Civil War, supporters of the Union reader will hear nary a peep. voted Republican and supporters of and If Kabaservice and moderate Repub - to National Review. sym pathizers with the Confederacy voted licans were right about the 1950s consen- Dem ocratic. These political tribes ef - sus, none of this untold story would matter. If you receive any mail or fectively refought the Civil War in each Conservatives would have driven moder- telephone offer that makes succeeding election for nearly a hundred ates away into the Democratic party, and you suspicious contact years. Immigrants who arrived after the there would today be a natural governing war generally voted Republican from 1896 party that represented that consensus much [email protected]@nationalreview.com.. until the Great Depression, when they in the way of the Italian Christian Dem - Your cooperation became the linchpin of FDR’s New Deal ocrats after World War II. The fact that coalition. Bonded together in labor unions, we have two sharply ideological parties is greatly appreciated. these voters (largely Catholic) formed their locked in mortal combat is stark proof that own political tribe in opposition to the the 1950s consensus was a product of its

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BOOKS, ARTS & MANNERS time, a time when politics was primarily focused on the suburban Catholic vote for party. We need to listen to the concerns of tribal and the mass of voters were not moti- much of his brief term. Asian and Hispanic immigrants and find a vated by abstract ideas. Kabaservice’s moderates, in contrast, shared set of values that can convince large Kabaservice contends that the moderate never talk about the suburbanization of numbers of them to support conservative failure was ultimately one of will. Time the country or the decline in Catholic policies. In short, we need to emulate Rea - and time again, he says that moderates Democratic loyalty. Occasionally they gan and the early conservatives who made are temperamentally unsuited to continual notice, as former RNC chairman Leonard common cause with suburban Catholics political warfare. He shows that moderate Hall once did, that their gatherings look and conservative southerners to create, leaders were unwilling to bankroll exten- like they are peopled by “descendants of in Reagan’s terms, “a new Republican sive organizing efforts. Noble young mod- the people who came over on the May - party.” erates such as Ripon Society president Lee flower,” but they always think in terms of We also need to emulate Reagan by Auspitz were continually rebuffed by “outreach” to non-northern WASPs, rather being inclusive in both word and deed. Nelson Rockefeller and other moderate than a concerted effort to make them gen- Kabaservice quotes Reagan as saying, in Republican tycoons in their requests for uinely part of the GOP. Their political Holy 1966, that conservatives “must recognize money to form magazines to counteract Grail was to bring blacks, Jews, and pro- we have to convert those people of a more NATIONAL RevIeW and youth groups to fessionals together in a coalition led by liberal view. We don’t win elections by combat YAF, and marshal efforts to retake descendants of the northeastern WASP destroying them or making them disap- the Young Republicans from Goldwater elite to fix America’s cities—the part of pear.” Because of changes in the electorate political guru F. Clifton White’s Syndi - America that was declining the fastest. As since 2004, the 2012 Republican nominee cate. The unstated assumption is that had Kabaservice dryly notes, “the theory that can win only with votes from people who these leaders called, the people would have voters would line up behind the ‘natural supported John Kerry and Barack Obama. come. leaders’ of the community no longer held The GOP won their votes with an anti- But the history of the 1960s and 1970s in the increasingly anti-establishment liberal message in 2010; to win in 2012 and belies that assumption. Kabaservice notes climate of the 1960s.” beyond, it will have to persuade them that such conservative entrepreneurs as This strategy was also uncongenial to to support a pro-conservative message. Richard viguerie raised millions through conservatives, and not very attractive to To do that, it will have to have a mes- direct mail for their causes, but fails to blacks themselves. Time and time again sage that’s relevant to their concerns. examine why “the Ripon Society lost Kabaservice touts moderate GOP candi- Moderate Republicans ignored the grow- money on its direct-mail campaigns.” dates’ getting 30 or 40 percent of the black ing resistance to government after the Moderate Democrats did fight back, to or Jewish vote as victories. This is the poli - enactment of the Great Society, insisting no avail: They lost control of the national tical equivalent of losing money on each that the old post–New Deal approach was party in 1972, and the 1974 election pro- sale but making it up on volume: Parties still viable. They ignored the dramatic rise duced a horde of liberal-reformer “Water - need to get majorities from somebody, and in crime and in the welfare rolls, believing gate babies” who quickly eliminated the in the 1960s conservatives provided even much concern about these trends was seniority system and began to systemati- moderate Republicans with the bulk of racist in origin. Liberal Democrats made cally dominate the Democratic House cau- their support. As any businessman knows, the same mistakes, and thereby gave cus. Moderates did flee the party of their the majority stockowner ultimately calls conservatives potent issues to run on for youth in the face of an ideological on - the shots. nearly 20 years. slaught, but it was largely moderate Conservatives don’t mourn the moder- Today’s swing voter is pro–free market Democrats who fled, to Ronald Reagan’s ates’ passing, but we should learn from it. but genuinely concerned about income conservative Republicans. The blue-collar Just as the America of 1960 was different inequality. Many people have kept up their southerners and Catholics who voted for from that of 1860 or 1910, the America of living standards only by borrowing more Reagan were the people moderate Repub - 2012 is much different from that of 1980. or working more. They feel the gains of the licans did not want to ally with in the When Reagan was elected, whites without last two decades have been concentrated 1960s, believing them to be compromised a college degree were a clear majority of mainly among the rich, a concern that by their opposition to or lack of passion for the electorate, as they had been since the predates the Great Recession. Pew polls the civil-rights crusade. nation’s founding. Practicing Protestants throughout the 2000s showed that only the Moderate Republicans were blissfully formed a majority of the electorate, as they richest 20 percent felt their financial situa- ignorant of the country’s changing demo- had since 1776. Neither of these statements tion was improving; everyone else thought graphics, just as many Republicans are is still true. In a party and a movement that it was declining. The economic tsunami today. Theodore H. White, in his highly still draws its largest margins among these that washed away many people’s homes, influential book The Making of the Pres - groups, their shrinking size is a cause for savings, and jobs has only exacerbated ident 1960, wrote that suburbanization was alarm. these feelings. Conservatives ought not to changing the face of American politics: Conservatives should not make the ignore this sentiment. Connecticut Democratic boss John Bailey moderates’ mistake of holding fast to a We owe Kabaservice our gratitude for had noticed that suburban Catholic voters shrinking share of the electorate. We need recounting the moderate Republican tale had provided the margin for Dwight eisen - to persuade the working-class voters who so comprehensively. He reminds us that hower in 1956, and reasoned that Dem - supported Republicans for the House in great entities can collapse virtually over - ocrats would need to nominate a Catholic 2010 but normally vote Democratic that night, even when they appear to be at the in 1960 to win them back. Kennedy their natural home is in the conservative pinnacle of their strength.

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tia for a couple of weeks and lit out for the territories, headed for greatness but never Acid to write anything of significance about his country’s epic struggle. Lew Wallace, a Test Union general, put out Ben-Hur, but it didn’t recount the war either. (It also We have remained profoundly JOHN J. MILLER belongs to that rare category of achieve- influential for over five decades. ment: the novel that was made into a bet- Why? Because of the greatness ter movie.) It took Stephen Crane, born of our founder? Because of the six years after Robert E. Lee’s surrender talent of our exceptional writers? at Appomattox, to write The Red Badge of Courage, the most acclaimed fictional Because of our determination to rendering of the conflict. articulate conservative principles Yet there was Bierce, standing by him- and expose liberal platitudes? self, producing a string of short stories on the Civil War that anticipate the artis- ‘Yes’ to all. But also true is this: tic disillusionment of 20th-century mod- Our historic influence is due in ernism. They are all included in the large part to the many good Library of America’s new compilation subscribers and friends who Ambrose Bierce: The Devil’s Dictionary, Tales, of Bierce’s work, edited by S. T. Joshi, & Memoirs, edited by S. T. Joshi along with the complete Devil’s Dic - have generously and freely (Library of America, 880 pp., $35) tionary and other pieces. Several of these contributed to National Review entries rise to the level of masterpiece, annually to support and sustain vERYTHING changed for Am- such as “Chickamauga,” the tale of a our operations, and to those brose Bierce the day he was young boy who wanders onto a grisly thoughtful few who have shot in the head. At least that’s battlefield, failing to understand what the remembered National Review in E one theory about how a bright reader knows that he sees. A soldier with their wills, estates, and trusts. young man from Horse Cave Creek in a bloody face reminds him of a “painted Ohio went on to become his generation’s clown.” A crawling casualty looks like leading cynic. This was the guy, after all, one of his father’s slaves, offering a Please consider this: When you who gave us The Devil’s Dictionary, game of horsey: He collapses as the are gone, will National Review which defined “PEACE” as “a period of child tries to hop on, throws the boy from . . . remain? If not, then who will cheating between two periods of fight- his back, and turns to reveal that he’s fight for those principles that you ing” and “WAR” as “a by-product of the missing his lower jaw. At the end of the wished dearly to bequeath to arts of peace.” People still snicker over story, the child makes for a “guiding your country, your family, and “MARRIAGE, n.: The state or condition light—a pillar of fire,” where he en - future generations? of a community consisting of a master, a counters a terrible surprise about war’s mistress, and two slaves, making in all, devastation. two.” By all accounts, Bierce was a capable Can you trust National Review? The head wound came a day before his soldier. His early enlistment suggests Yes. Please so when planning 22nd birthday, at Georgia’s Kennesaw manly idealism—but the reality of com- your estate. Keep us standing Mountain in 1864, when Bierce was a bat would alter any illusions he ever held athwart history, yelling Stop. soldier in the Union Army. He had about glory and honor. Twice in battle, volunteered to fight immediately after he dodged Confederate bullets to help By remembering National Review Fort Sumter’s fall and lived through the injured comrades. One man died, a fate awfulness of Shiloh and Chickamauga. that possibly confirmed in Bierce’s mind in your will, estate, or trust, you His skull, he said, had “broken like a “the intrinsic absurdity of valorous will leave a legacy of continued walnut.” He went home to recuperate, deeds,” as Roy Morris Jr. puts it in support for those conservative split with his fiancée, and returned to his excellent 1995 biography, Ambrose causes and beliefs that will be as active duty within three months. For Bierce: Alone in Bad Company. (The vital to future generations as they most of the rest of his life, which ended amusing subtitle comes from another are to ours. Please contact: mysteriously, he was a professional of Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary quips: writer. “ALONE, adj. In bad company.”) At Jim Kilbridge The Civil War era is known for its re - other moments, Bierce witnessed scenes markable literature, from the speeches evoking profound disgust—such as one National Review and letters of Abraham Lincoln to the of hogs feasting on the faces of the dead, 215 Lexington Avenue poems of Walt Whitman. Yet the war’s which he worked into his story “The New York, NY 10016 veterans, for all of their accomplishments, Coup de Grâce.” He also may have 212-679-7330 ext. 2826 wrote little fiction about battles or leaders. watched a cannonball decapitate a Mark Twain served in a Confederate mili- mounted colonel, whose headless body

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BOOKS, ARTS & MANNERS continued to ride on horseback, like a certain kind of reader to keep going. Contemporaries thought of Bierce Sleepy Hollow nightmare, before even- Clifton Fadiman once said that death primarily as a journalist. Today, he’s tually tipping off. was Bierce’s favorite character. Edmund remembered as a writer of fiction—and After the war, Bierce moved to San Wilson refined the claim, saying that that’s how the Library of America vol- Francisco and became a journalist, soon death was his only character. ume has chosen to treat him, excluding earning a reputation for slashing sar- Bierce’s signal achievement was “An the newspaper columns that made him casm. Gloom may have been a natural Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” one famous in his day. It’s hardly the first part of his temperament, but his personal of the world’s best-known short stories. such omission: Bierce himself kept this life aggravated the condition. His mar- A condemned man stands on a bridge, content from the Collected Works that riage was unhappy even before a teenage ready to be hanged by his captors—but came out near the end of his life. son committed suicide. Another son died unready for the cosmic joke that’s about Journalism is of course ephemeral, but of pneumonia. Bierce himself suffered to be played on him. (It became a cele- Bierce did some of his best work in San from chronic asthma. Small wonder that brated episode of The Twilight Zone.) It’s Francisco papers. To a crook who tried to this line appears in The Devil’s Diction - the sort of story that demands a second rob a safe in a city office, Bierce offered ary: “MISFORTUNE, n. The kind of for- reading immediately following the first memorable advice: “This is rushing mat- tune that never misses.” because only then can the full richness ters; the impatient scoundrel ought to try In the 1880s, Civil War veterans began of Bierce’s narrative, which brims with his hand at being a Supervisor first. From to write of their experiences, producing a double meanings, become perceptible. Supervisor to Thief the transition is nat- flood of memoirs and magazine articles. Stephen Crane admired the tale: “No - ural and easy.” A modern anthology of Bierce contributed to this effusion of thing better exists,” he once said. Bierce this material would make for good enter- autobiography—see his essay “What I refused to return the compliment, heap- tainment. Saw of Shiloh”—but made his lasting ing scorn on the young whippersnap- Late in his career, Bierce even took a mark around the same time with his per—a case in which jealousy may have turn at muckraking. In 1896, his em - weird fiction. Bierce ranks with Edgar warped judgment. ployer of many years, William Randolph Allan Poe and H. P. Lovecraft as one of Bierce befriended Percival Pollard, a Hearst, dispatched Bierce to Wash- America’s three finest writers of horror, critic who rated Crane’s career-making ington, D.C., to cover Collis P. Hun - with tales of ghostly hauntings, invisible novel as merely “an imitation of Bierce.” tington, a railroad tycoon who had given monsters, and resurrection men. This When Pollard died in 1911, Bierce was his name to a city in West Virginia. genre holds wide but not universal ap- one of just five people to attend the Huntington was lobbying Congress for a peal, and Bierce always found ways to funeral. (Memo to critics: Don’t expect law to delay or cancel the repayment of a generate discomfort. In a collection large crowds at your burial.) There, he $75 million federal loan. Bierce’s hard- called The Parenticide Club, one story met H. L. Mencken, in what was appar- hitting reports compelled Huntington to starts this way: “Having murdered my ently their sole encounter. Although approach his nemesis on the steps of the mother under circumstances of singular Mencken didn’t write horror fiction, he Capitol. “Every man has his price,” said atrocity . . .” Here’s another: “Early one would become Bierce’s journalistic suc- Huntington, suggestively. “My price is June morning in 1872 I murdered my cessor. Both men displayed savage wit $75 million,” replied Bierce. “If, when father—an act which made a deep im - and shared a loathing for religion, cor- you are ready to pay, I happen to be out pression on me at the time.” It takes a ruption, and the political class. of town, you may hand it over to my friend, the Treasurer of the United States.” The date of Bierce’s birth is known but CENTURION not the date of his death. Shortly after (Matthew 2:16) Christmas in 1913, he famously vanished, possibly in Mexico. Death has I’ve slaughtered babies all day long, been a pretty good career move for a lot near Bethlehem. But why? If the wizards are right, of 27-year-old rock stars, and it worked nothing can alter the Fates, and, if they’re wrong, out well for this 71-year-old writer: Ever we’re killing without a reason. So now, at night, since, the question of what happened to I wash the dry and splattered blood away, him has been a literary parlor game. Was then fall to sleep, into a feverish hell, Bierce shot by Pancho Villa? Was he hearing the wails of the mothers as they pray killed at the Battle of Ojinga? Did he for retribution and vengeance, hearing, as well, sneak into a cave near the Grand Can - my mother’s voice—who nursed me through the sweats yon, put a gun to his head, and deliver the when I was born—whose melodious words now sing, fatal blow that had eluded a Confederate above the whirl of curses and alien threats: gunman so many years earlier? No - “Whoever injures a child is a fiendish thing,” body ever discovered a body. The only whispering, like Rachel, not so long ago, certainty is the uncertainty—and the “and lower than the lowest of the low.” sense that Bierce had managed to write a fitting conclusion to his own life’s —WILLIAM BAER story.

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missioning he was assigned to intelli- “i was never able to rid myself of the gence at British General Headquarters feeling that [Woodward and Bernstein] The Writer’s in Cairo, with frequent secondments were the most overrated hacks in Amer- to the Palestine Mandate, where the ica . . . just happening to be in the right Life Zionist underground was already mak- place at the right time—and above all, ing things hot for the occupying author- with the right source.” on two occasions MARK FALCOFF ity. he has met privately with Pres. George W. this experience was Horne’s first Bush, whom he describes as “remark- opportunity to experience the sectarian ably relaxed . . . sharply tuned in, well conflicts of what was to become the read . . . and a most attentive listener.” third World, and to witness firsthand the the compliment is all the more convinc- violence that attended (and continues ing since Horne profoundly disagrees to attend) the birth of post-colonialism. with that president’s policies, particular- From the army, he went directly into ly in the Middle east. journalism, ending up as both a reporter and a covert Mi6 agent in Bonn, the new capital of the Federal republic. “one of the first things i learned about But What Do You Actually Do?: the Germans,” he writes, was that “they A Literary Vagabondage, by Alistair Horne were absolutely not the stolid, disci- (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, plined, and phlegmatic people i had 416 pp., ₤25) always somehow imagined; they were profoundly prey to the deepest emo- ir AliStAir Horne is a British tion.” After he returned to england in journalist and historian who 1954, with no job, no prospects, and no will be familiar to longtime home, he and his new wife set off on a S nr readers, since he has con- four-month trip across the U.S. and tributed to this magazine almost from Canada. this was followed by a year in its inception. He is known mainly as israel, and then time spent in both Chile a historian of France (The Price of (where Allende’s Marxist project was Glory: Verdun 1916, Seven Ages of already running off the rails) and post- Paris, The Age of Napoleon, The colonial Algeria, still bleeding from French Army and Politics), but he has the wounds of its war of independence also produced compellingly readable, against France. the last two countries superbly informed books on several inspired Small Earthquake in Chile other countries. He has also written the (1972) and A Savage War of Peace official biography of Prime Minister (1977), respectively. Harold Macmillan and a recent semi- Because of the particular topics upon official biography of Henry Kissinger. which he chose to write, as well as his As he remarks at one point in this mem- willingness to pull up stakes and travel oir, “You name it, i’ve been there and the world, Sir Alistair has known a great written about it.” many famous and interesting people, Horne was born some 80 years ago, many of them observed in unguarded Alistair Horne and his first great experience—like that moments. Perhaps the most important of a number of British children—was of these was Harold Macmillan, who People who wonder how books get being shipped to the United States for insisted that Horne’s book (it eventu - written—or young people who aspire to safety during the Blitz, a story he later ally stretched out to two volumes) be write them—will find this volume a told in A Bundle from Britain (1992). embargoed until his demise. (“if you delightful treat. the scene keeps shifting He was enrolled at Millbrook School in hear a big bang, that’ll mean you can from place to place, country to country, new York, where (providentially) his then publish your book, dear boy.”) with constant walk-ons from personali- classmate and best friend was William Supermac, as he was known, told Horne ties drawn from different social classes F. Buckley Jr. By the time he graduated that he found the Cuban missile crisis and cultures. the main point of writing in 1943, he was old enough to enlist in “a bit of a bore,” but that running the books, he tells us, is to learn a lot. He is the British forces, so he made his way country was “fun.” too modest to mention that it also re- home determined to become a Spitfire later, in Washington, he found him- quires a lot of hard work and risk-taking, pilot in the rAF. instead, he ended up self at lunch with the legendary Wood - and an endless historical curiosity. it is . INC

in the Coldstream Guards, and from ward and Bernstein of Watergate fame, to be hoped that an American edition , there went to Sandhurst. Upon com- while eager acolytes around the table of this book will find its way to our begged them to point the way to bring- shelves (and our electronic readers)

Mr. Falcoff contributes to NR from Munich. ing down the reagan administration. before too long. RANDOM HOUSE

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BOOKS, ARTS & MANNERS more likely Oscar dark horse has a more bination of pride, anxiety, and principle, Film unusual pedigree, and a more eager-to- the star refuses: “if that’s the future,” the please style. The only things it doesn’t intertitle quotes him telling his patron, have are sound and color. “you can have it.” Mute Actually, that’s not quite right. The it’s Peppy who ends up having it, em - movie in question, Michel hazanavicius’s bracing a career as a flapper-era Meg Ryan Point The Artist, has a galloping, percussive while Valentin undertakes a doomed, self- score and one surreal burst of everyday financed silent project that plays to vacant ROSS DOUTHAT noise. What it doesn’t have is any dia- theaters and empties out his bank account. logue, except for the lines that flash occa- Then comes the Depression, and it’s down his promises to be a challenging sionally on intertitles, as they might in a to skid row for him, with his only compan- year for Oscar voters. The old re - Buster Keaton vehicle. The Artist is an ions a loyal chauffeur (James Cromwell) liables—steven spielberg with homage to hollywood’s silent era that and a still more loyal Jack Russell terrier. T War Horse, Martin scorsese treats imitation as the sincerest form of Down, but not forgotten: Even as she with Hugo, Clint Eastwood with J. reverence. Not content to celebrate the climbs the hollywood staircase, the sparks Edgar—haven’t set the world on fire, and pre-talkie age of filmmaking, it remains from that first encounter stay with Peppy, seeming shoo-ins like The Iron Lady and resolutely talk-free itself. and she emerges as a kind of guardian The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo have in this, it follows the example of its angel for the self-destructive Valentin—if, been greeted with as much disappoint- hero, a fictional 1920s screen legend that is, the prideful fallen star will consent ment as delight. The hands-down best named George Valentin (Jean Dujardin). to let her save him. movie of 2011 was Terrence Malick’s Broad of shoulders and wide of smile, This entire story is conveyed by actors Tree of Life, but the Academy Awards do Valentin bestrides silent-era hollywood who express more emotion with their not exist to reward artistic quality alone, like a colossus, supplying Douglas Fair - bodies and their faces than many movie stars manage with a script’s worth of dialogue, and by a director who’s clearly absolutely besotted with his medium, its history, and its endless possibilities. i would have to know the silent era better, i’m sure, to catch all the references and shout-outs and clever reimaginings that hazanavicius (a Frenchman, like his co- stars) weaves into The Artist. But i know enough to recognize true devotion when i see it. Which is why criticizing the movie feels akin to shattering a child’s diorama, or drawing a mustache on a proud parent’s baby picture. still, a joyful stunt is not quite the same thing as a great film, and in a sense The Artist’s stunt succeeds a little bit too well: By its third act, i had Jean Dujardin and Bérénice Béjo in The Artist grown sufficiently accustomed to the and Malick’s luminous commentary on banks–style derring-do to an eager audi- brazenness of its conceit to grow bored Genesis and Job no doubt left many ence and coming home every night to a with the tissue-thin melodrama of its plot- Academy members bored rather than lavish mansion hung with life-size por- ting. bedazzled. The year’s more accessible traits of its owner. The only person who Perhaps this is a sign of my own phili - hits, on the other hand—The Help, Money - doesn’t seem completely besotted with stinism, my addiction to the cheap thrills ball, even Brides maids—may feel a bit him is his wife (Penelope Ann Miller), of dialogue. it might well be, as The New too middlebrow and unpretentious to and when he gives a professional break Yorker’s Anthony Lane wrote in an enrap- carry home the trophy. and then a kiss to a young ingénue named tured review, that “silent cinema really in the past, wide-open Oscar races have Peppy Miller (Bérénice Béjo) we get an was the purest and most binding incarna- often ended with a rush to an appealing inkling why. tion of the medium, one from which we dark horse—a Chariots of Fire, say, or a Valentin’s encounter with Peppy turns have torn ourselves, to our detriment, ever Slumdog Millionaire. This year, that im - out to be a hinge moment in both of their since.” pulse could benefit Woody Allen’s Mid - careers. in the tradition of A Star Is But for all its charms, The Artist trades night in Paris or Alexander Payne’s The Born, his light soon diminishes while hers on that nostalgia without ever entirely Descendants. But Allen and Payne are glows ever brighter. The age of dialogue vindicating it. hazanavicius sends audi- insiders, known quantities, big names, is dawning, and Valentin’s director (a ences home happy, but if his movie takes and their movies are meditative and in - boisterous John Goodman) tries to induce Best Picture, it will be one of those win-

THE WEINSTEIN COMPANY timate rather than crowd-pleasing. The him to do a sound test. Out of some com- ners that nobody watches twice.

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sculptures that reveal contradictions at school, the domain of art master David The Straggler the core of today’s society.” how, exact- Gomman, an actual exhibited painter, ly, does a stuffed horse in a sling do that? though of no lasting fame the Internet can Or a 21.4-foot-long foosball table (title: detect. The Higher “Stadium”)? Or a child-sized polyester Gomman’s teaching style was severely figure of hitler, kneeling (“him”)? Or a minimalist. Art materials were scattered fiberglass dinosaur skeleton (“Felix”)? on tables for us to do as we pleased with, Silliness The catalogue did not offer much or not. Gomman would stroll round the enlightenment. It did yield a few laughs, room making mild criticisms and sugges- though. I had forgotten how heroically tions. No teacher’s style suits every pupil, silly the world of art and art commentary but I found Gomman’s inspirational, and has become. These parody-defying exhi- produced several paintings that enjoyed bition catalogues belong to a literary the honor of being hung in the school genre of their own, deserving of a name: hall. The head of the modern-languages the higher Silliness, perhaps. Cattelan’s department actually bought one—an frequent resort to taxidermy, I learned abstract done with thick braids of poster JOHN DERBYSHIRE from this one, “presents a state of appar- paint on a black background, dried with ent life premised on actual death.” Ah. utmost care to avoid cracking. he first thing I saw on entering And then: Gomman’s classroom also had a rich the atrium of the Guggenheim collection of art books. I browsed in them was a horse suspended in a Perhaps the most poignant of his an - for hours, and from them acquired a T sling ten feet above the ground. thropomorphic animal scenes is Bidibi - good outline understanding of art history. The sling went under the belly of the dobidiboo (1996), in which a despairing (A subject reputed to be the epitome beast (as it were), leaving its head, legs, squirrel has committed suicide in his of rich-kid college majors in today’s and tail drooping down dolefully. A great grimy kitchen. U.S.A., leading to no employment op- many other things were also suspended portuni ties at all. Miss Straggler, now a from the atrium’s skylight 96 feet above. had the poor creature just arrived college freshman, and long afflicted Consulting the catalogue, I learned the home from a trip to the Guggenheim? with Foundling Complex, is naturally precise number of things: 128. I learned A quarter of the way up the ramp I was keen to pursue it.) Gomman supplement- too that the horse had been produced by regretting my visit already. I had an ed the accompanying texts with his own taxidermy, and that with its sling, rope, irrecoverable $15 admission fee invest- pungent opinions. he bore a particular and pulley it formed a work of art with ed, though, so I pressed on. animus against Picasso, then still vigor- the title “Novecento” (“Twentieth Cen - The catalogue promised “ironic hu - ously active: “A great showman, a medi - tury”). I further learned that I was in a mor,” but I couldn’t detect any. Was it ocre artist.” rotunda, not an atrium; and that the point there in that fantastically elongated After Gomman, my enthusiasm for art of suspension was not a skylight but an supermarket shopping cart (“Less than lapsed. I did notice with mild interest the oculus. ten items”—presumably a commentary coming and going of pop art, though, and There was no strong reason for my on consumerism)? Oh, here at least was a was reminded of it in another side gallery being in the Guggenheim, only a bunch human figure I recognized: Pope John at the Guggenheim, which has some fine of weak ones. I was on the Upper east Paul II, couchant but clutching his cro - Lichtensteins. T-t-talkin’ ’bout my g-g- Side with a couple of hours to kill. It was zier, his legs pinned down by a big ugly generation. a cold day. After having lived in and rock. “La None Ora” (“The Ninth Pop art was at least fun to look at. After around New York City for 30 years, I had hour”), this was titled. A little higher that came what I believe is called “instal- never been inside this famous building. was another horse, this one with a crude lation art”: a pile of bricks, an unmade And there had been something in the wooden sign attached bearing the bed, a bisected cow, numbered cans of news about a major art theft from a scrawled letters INRI (“Untitled, 2009”). poop—irony squared and cubed, picking gallery in Greece, stirring in me the very Cattelan’s source materials, explained the up the torch dropped by the Dadaists 90 faint desire—the velleity, I think Bill catalogue, include organized religion. years ago. (Those cans collectively form Buckley would have called it—to make a Well, they include one organized reli- Merda d’Artista—I’ll spare you a trans- gesture in favor of civilization (art gal- gion. I bet I can name another one that is lation—by another Italian, the late Piero leries) over barbarism (stealing things perfectly absent from Signor Cattelan’s Manzoni.) And now, Maurizio Cattelan, you want but can’t afford). So there I was oeuvre. foosball, and dead squirrels. in the Guggenheim. Weary now of Cattelan’s unfunny jokes On the way out of the Guggenheim I The inside of the place consists of a and juvenile symbolism, I peeled off into visited the store, where I purchased a $2 spiral ramp rising up around the . . . one of the side galleries where the per- postcard print of Pissarro’s Hermitage at rotunda. This allowed inspection of the manent collection is displayed. To my Pontoise, the least modern-looking, least 128 suspended art objects. All of them delight, I was among real art: Cézanne, ironic thing I could find. It is pinned now are the work of Italian artist Mauri - Pissarro, Manet . . . water in the desert! to the cork-boarded wall behind my desk. zio Cattelan. To the catalogue again. Browsing here, I was transported back a That’s enough: I have made a gesture for “Cattelan creates unsettlingly veristic half century to the studio at my high civilization, fulfilled my velleity.

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Happy Warrior BY MARK STEYN Paul the Parochial

NCLE SAM has now spent a decade running Does that sound like a president who’d drop the big one around the Hindu Kush building grade schools on Kandahar, never mind Beijing? Surely nuking the and shoveling taxpayer-funded Viagra to every ChiComs would fall afoul of those “proper procedures”? As U elderly village headman with one too many child for all the savings from those $600 toilet seats, some 80 per- brides. According to the World Bank, the Western mili- cent of the military budget goes to the training and salaries tary/aid presence accounts for 97 percent of Afghanistan’s of the soldiery, and, as Doctor Paul was at pains to assure his GDP. And, within a week of the West’s departure, it will be audience, he has no plans to demob any of our boys in uni- as if that 97 percent had never been there, and all that form. All he wants to do is eliminate their travel budget. If remains will be the same old 3 percent tribal dump of mul- you want a massive military that stays in its barracks, you’re lahs, warlords, poppy barons, and pederasts, all as charm- surely going to need more Osama-like missions—small, ingly unspoiled as if the U.S. and its allies had quit 48 hours focused raids of elite commandos rappelling into com- after toppling the Taliban in 2001. pounds hither and yon. So, if the rubble- It is two-thirds of a century since the doesn’t-cause-trouble crowd are betting alleged hyperpower last unambiguously on Ron, they’ve got the wrong guy. won a war, and that ought to prompt a lit- I was surprised in New Hampshire and tle serious consideration of the matter. South Carolina that the alleged “non- Instead, we have Ron Paul, who says all interventionist” didn’t have a more would be well if we stopped “endlessly coherent answer to hand. But saying bombing” “these countries.” To which endlessly that we “endlessly bomb” penetrating insight his fans respond with: “these countries” is about as specific as “Bring them home! Bring them home!” he wants to get, and all his fans need. For some reason, I attract a lot of corre- Paul is offering Americans a libertarian spondence from Paulites arguing that, version of the same pitch as Obama four if I truly mean what I wrote in the para- years ago: End Bush’s wars, and we graph above, then Ron’s my man. A retired U.S. Army offi- can get the good times back, with no pain. Once we slough cer writes from South Carolina: off that pesky part of the map marked “Rest of the World,” we can live the socialist/libertarian dream (delete according The US Military is a Peace-Making force, not a Peace-keep- to taste). ing Nation Building one. I am sure Dr. Paul would cut out the His fans dislike the designation “isolationist,” so how district military pork of Congress (whom 80% have NEVER about parochial? Greta Garbo can say “I vont to be alone”; served unlike him!), the $600 toilet seats, and $80 hammers, great powers don’t get the option. Even in steep, irreversible etc ad infinitum, ad nauseam. . . . Quit playing whack a mole and other stupid social games, either utterly vanquish like global retreat, America would remain for the rest of our lives against Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan or DO NOT GO the biggest, fattest, most inviting target on the planet. Ask IN! They are for MacArthur: nuke the Chicoms if needed. . . . the British: Speaking at Friday prayers during the 2009 Send in Seal Team 6 to take out Bin Ladens, etc. None of this uprising in Iran, Ayatollah Khamenei blamed it on foreign PC stuff, otherwise we would not have won WW1 and WW2! interference fomented by “bad British radio”: “The most evil of them all is the British government.” Her Majesty’s A Ron Paul man in Indianapolis agrees: “Playing Global Government hasn’t meddled in Iran for half a century, but Cop for the UN has done nothing for the US or creating it’s still their fault. Likewise, Osama blamed Britain for allies. . . . We attack when attacked and we attack with ven- the deaths of “two million Muslims” in Bosnia, from which gence [sic], I mean nuclear vengence.” cheerless hellhole London had kept its distance and been Ron Paul supporters may support such appealingly impeccable Ron Paul non-interventionists. Luxembourg muscular policies, but Ron Paul doesn’t. “Nuclear ven - can vote for a quiet life, but not a nation of 300 million peo- geance”? Include Ron out. He opposed Seal Team Six tak- ple whose cultural influence, for good or ill, is everywhere. ing out bin Laden. Or as he put it in the Myrtle Beach To modify Trotsky, you may not be interested in the world, debate: “I’m just trying to suggest that respect for other but the world is interested in you. And “America: Love us or nations’ sovereignty—and look at the chaos in Pakistan leave us be” is especially unpersuasive when your future’s now. We are at war in Pakistan, but to say that I didn’t want mortgaged to foreigners, and everything in your house is him killed. . . . I’m just suggesting that there are processes made overseas. that if you could follow and that you should do it. There is I wish I could like Ron Paul more, really I do. But liber- [sic] proper procedures rather than digging bigger holes tarian narcissism is as banal as any other strain. Ten years of NEWSCOM / for ourselves.” desultory, inconclusive, transnationally constrained war- ZUMA / mongering is certainly a problem. But know-nothing paro - Mr. Steyn blogs at SteynOnline (www.steynonline.com). chial delusion is not the solution. MARK MAKELA

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EXERCISE IN ONLY 4 MINUTEShigh $14,615 PER price, is the DAYleast expensive The ROM is very expensive but at the method to do exercise and why you burn same time it is the cheapest exercise a more calories as a result of the 4 minute person can do. How can that be? More ROM exercise than from 60 minutes on that later. walking on a treadmill. Short duration interval training, the exercise the ROM FIRST DISBELIEF, THEN UNDERSTANDING gives, has been discovered to be the most People cannot believe that our 4 minute effective for burning fat. cardio exercise is possible. The “experts” ORDER FREE DVD ONLINE have that same (wrong) opinion. After OR CALL 818-787-6460 UNIVERSITY TESTED watching our video, many people order a The ROM has been tested for over 8 weeks 30 day no obligation trial rental and 97% of at USC’s Department of Exercise Sciences. them buy the ROM (stands for range of IN BUSINESS FOR OVER 20 YEARS Conclusion: it gives the same or better motion) machine at the end of the 30 day We have been manufacturing our ROM cardiovascular benefit as does 20 to 45 trial period. It sells itself. machine since 1990. Although the ROM won minutes aerobic exercise. Another 8 week the Popular Science Magazine’s Prize for test was published in the Journal of the ADAPTS TO USER’S PHYSICAL ABILITY “The Best of What’s New” in 1991, the American College of Sports Medicine. The The ROM is used by young and old machine still sounds just too good to be results speak for themselves. (oldest owner is 99 yrs), by weak and true. That has been the main marketing SHIPPING AND INSTALLATION This is what you will accomplish with the ROM in exactly 4 minutes per day: You will The machine is manufactured in get the combined results that you get from all three of the following exercises: Southern California with great attention to detail and quality. The machine is shipped • 20 to 45 minutes of aerobic exercise (jogging, running) plus in a custom wooden crate and comes fully • 45 minutes weight training, plus assembled. A local delivery company will • 15 to 20 minutes stretching exercises. install the machine in the location of your choice. When they leave it is immediately The purchase of a ROM machine goes through several stages: ready for use. 1. Total disbelief that the ROM can do all this in only 4 minutes a day. 2. Rhetorical (and sometimes hostile) questioning and ridicule. GIVE IT A REAL WORKOUT 3. Reading the ROM literature and reluctantly understanding it. Rent it for 30 days to experience the 4. Taking a leap of faith and renting a ROM for a 30 day trial test in the home. results in your own home or office. The 5. Being highly impressed by the health results and purchasing the ROM. rental deposit applies to the purchase price. 6. Becoming a ROM enthusiast and trying to persuade friends to buy one. Based on the improvement experienced 7. Being ignored and ridiculed by the friends who think you have lost your mind. during those 30 days, 97% of the rented 8. After a year of using the ROM your friends admiring your good shape. machines are purchased at the end of the 9. You telling them (again) that you only exercise those 4 minutes per day. 30 day no obligation trial period. The ROM 10. Those friends reluctantly renting the ROM for a 30 day test trial in their home. proves itself. Then the above cycle repeats from point 5 on down. Order free DVD from: strong, by Special Forces (military), by problem. People just cannot believe it. The www.RestartFitness.com physical therapists, chiropractors, medical incomparable ROM is for those who first or call 818-787-6460 doctors, trained athletes. And 90% of our ridicule this fantastic machine and later machines go to private homes (including love and praise it. 320 homes of MDs), and 7% to businesses for employee wellness. People with high WHAT’S DIFFERENT ABOUT THE ROM cholesterol and people with diabetes use You’ll learn why 92% of people who own Factory showroom the ROM to get into perfect cholesterol exercise equipment do not use it. You will 8137 Lankershim Blvd. ranges and diabetes control. also learn why the ROM, despite its very North Hollywood, CA 91605 base_milliken-mar 22.qxd 1/17/2012 2:26 PM Page 1