AMERICAN FUTURE

Thanks to the Supreme Court, their chances have improved.

After noting that just two dozen or so individuals, couples and companies have given more than 80 percent of the money collected by SuperPACs, the New York Times delves into the backgound of three of the biggest contributors:

¶Harold Simmons, a billionaire corporate raider, has given $1 million to Mr. Gingrich’s political action committee, $1.1 million to Rick Perry’s PAC, $100,000 to Mitt Romney’s PAC, and $10 million to American Crossroads, the super PAC advised by Karl Rove that is supporting many Republican candidates. Mr. Simmons’s companies make metals, paints and chemicals, among other things, and have gotten into trouble over lead and uranium emissions from previous decades. He also runs a radioactive waste dump in Texas that has clashed with environmental regulators over its proximity to a nearby aquifer. He controls Waste Control Specialists, which has contracts to clean up federal hazardous waste sites, including emissions from other companies he controls.

¶Peter Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal and an outspoken libertarian, gave $2.6 million to Ron Paul’s PAC. In 2009, he wrote that the 1920s were the last decade when one could be optimistic about American politics, lamenting the subsequent rise of the welfare state that he blamed in part on giving women the right to vote.

¶Foster Friess, who gave $1 million to Rick Santorum’s Red White and Blue PAC, is a mutual fund manager who recently declared that aspirin used to be an effective contraceptive when women put it between their knees. He is a former president of the Council for National Policy, a secretive club of some of the country’s most powerful conservatives, which opposes unions, same-sex marriage and government regulation.

The Wall Street Journal can’t deny the fact that today’s surprisingly good employment report makes for pleasant reading:

After such a long wait for healthy job growth, only a curmudgeon would deny the good news.

The Journal editorial asserts that the “the economy’s natural recuperative powers” and the “the gridlock that arrived a year ago with the Republican House” are responsible for the improvement in the labor market:

Why the better news now? One likely reason is that the U.S. economy is so large and dynamic that left to its own devices it is bound to expand. After such a long trough, the economy’s natural recuperative powers are taking hold.

Washington has also stilled some of its damaging impulses, at least temporarily, thanks to the gridlock that arrived a year ago with the Republican House. Regulators are still doing damage, but less than they would have without new political scrutiny, and Congress has stopped spending more and ceased doing active harm.

In a nutshell, the most powerful voice of American conservatism is saying that the economy is improving in spite of and not because of the Obama Administration’s economic policies and programs.

Talking about role reversal! No longer does Obama have to persuade the people that, had it not been for his policies and programs, the economic recovery would have been even more anemic. Now, his Republican opponent — presumably Romney — has to convince the people that, in the absence of these policies and programs, the economic recovery would have been more robust.

The shoe is on the other foot. The tall order is now faced by the Republicans, not the Democrats. The likelihood of a second term for Mr. Obama has risen. So has the likelihood that the Democrats will retain control of the Senate. Finally, the possibility that the Democrats will regain control of the House is no longer remote.

Well (as Ronald Reagan said on numerous occasions), it’s time for this blog to start focusing on American politics — a subject I’ve come close to ignoring since I started posting last June.

I’ll start with “Incoherent party, incoherent candidates” from the Economist, which hits the mark:

REPUBLICANS are clearly not too enthused about Mitt Romney. Nor are they wild for any of the alternatives . . .

Mitt Romney looks like a weak phony in this election campaign because he has to pretend to believe with all his heart in orthodox tea-party conservative positions that he transparently doesn’t really believe in. We know this because in the past, Mr Romney supported health-care reform including an individual mandate along the lines of the system he instituted in Massachusetts, essentially the same system as Obamacare. And in the past, he supported a cap-and-trade system for limiting greenhouse-gas emissions to address climate change. But at the time, both of those were orthodox Republican Party positions . . . There were very few established Republican politicians who hadn’t taken positions in the George W. Bush era (or the Newt Gingrich era!) that pose ideological problems for them in the tea-party era . . .

Republicans’ disenchantment with their current presidential candidates is not an incidental characteristic of this crop of candidates. It’s a structural feature of a contemporary Republican Party whose pieces don’t hang together. Pro-Iraq-war neoconservative Republicans cannot actually live with Ron Paul Republicans. Wall Street-hating anti-bail-out Republicans cannot actually live with Wall Street-working bail-out-receiving Republicans. Evangelical-conservative Republicans cannot actually live with libertarian, socially liberal Republicans. Deficit-slashing Republicans cannot live with tax-slashing Republicans. Medicare-cutting Republicans cannot live with Medicare-defending Republicans. These factions have been glued together over the past three years by the intensity of their partisan hatred for Barack Obama, and all of the underlying resentments that antipathy masks. Republicans have buried their differences by assaulting everything Mr Obama supports, and because Mr Obama is a pretty middle-of-the-road politician, that includes a whole lot of things that many Republicans used to support. They are disenchanted with their candidates because their candidates are incoherent, but their candidates are incoherent because the base is incoherent. If the GOP wins this election, the party’s leaders are going to be confronted with that incoherence pretty quickly.

“States’ Rights” was a burning issue in the 1950s and 1960s. It was the phrase used by the mostly Southern opponents of federally-mandated desegregation. Now, when it’s no longer socially acceptable to be overtly racist, states’ rights has reappeared under another guise.

Rick Perry, the Texas governor and Republican presidential candidate, is the author of  Fed Up!. Last fall, he was interviewed by Newsweek’s Andrew Romano. The transcript of that interview was published today by the Daily Beast. His views are remarkable, to say the least. Of particular interest is the following:

Romano: The Constitution says that “the Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes… to provide for the… general Welfare of the United States.” But I noticed that when you quoted this section on page 116 [of Fed Up!], you left “general welfare” out and put an ellipsis in its place. Progressives would say that “general welfare” includes things like Social Security or Medicare—that it gives the government the flexibility to tackle more than just the basic responsibilities laid out explicitly in our founding document.  What does “general welfare” mean to you?

Perry: I don’t think our founding fathers when they were putting the term “general welfare” in there were thinking about a federally operated program of pensions nor a federally operated program of health care. What they clearly said was that those were issues that the states need to address. Not the federal government. I stand very clear on that. From my perspective, the states could substantially better operate those programs if that’s what those states decided to do.

Romano: So in your view those things fall outside of general welfare. But what falls inside of it? What did the Founders mean by “general welfare”?

Perry: I don’t know if I’m going to sit here and parse down to what the Founding Fathers thought general welfare meant.

Romano: But you just said what you thought they didn’t mean by general welfare. So isn’t it fair to ask what they did mean? It’s in the Constitution.

Perry:[Silence.]