Thanks to John Eisenhauer @johneyes for posting this on Twitter:

When some1 talks about job creation under #Bush & #Obama show this graph: pensitoreview.com/2010/10/11/oba… | #tcot #conservative #P2 #P21 #PX #obama #ff

Here is the article and the graph: 

Just … wow:

Stephen Colbert and Herman Cain, together at last:

All was going swimmingly until the former candidate took the stage.

Apparently the only person who missed the joke, Cain segued into a version of his stump speech, itself rehashed on Thursday for the South Carolina Republican leadership convention. The crowd shuffled awkwardly and wondered if it would be OK to leave before the encore. Satire threatened to fall apart in the face of grim reality as a candidate not famed for self-awareness appeared to be under the impression the crowd was there to hear about cainconnections.com

Thankfully, Cain remembered to make a point, perhaps the most genuine of the event, given the audience of the young and largely apolitical. Urging the collected to disobey Colbert and NOT to vote for him, he said, “I am going to ask you NOT to vote for Herman Cain because I don’t want you to waste your vote. Your vote matters.”

!facepalm.

This also shows how silly some suffrage laws are in South Carolina, since some people who have already withdrawn from the race (Bachmann, Cain) will be on the ballot in that state.

Perhaps no figure in American Revolutionary history has been the victim of vilification more than former U.S. vice president and New York senator, Aaron Burr.

And for some, with good reason. He was, after all, the man who shot and killed Alexander Hamilton, the heralded Federalist who was one of the most outspoken backers of the U.S. Constitution, supported the creation of a national bank and served as secretary of the treasury under George Washington. In his time, no one eclipsed Hamilton in economic and political influence in colonial and post-colonial America. And this brilliant thinker and fellow founder fell to Burr’s bullet in the famous duel in Weehawken, New Jersey.

Even to casual readers of American history, to mention the name of Aaron Burr is to conjure words such as “traitor” and “secessionist.” But is this an adequate picture of the man, or has history done Burr’s legacy a disservice?

Nancy Isenberg in “Fallen Founder: The Life of Aaron Burr,” brings this enlightened and progressive man’s life back into view, without — this time — the unsubstantiated claims that have marred nearly every account of Burr up until now. Even modern biographies such as 2005′s “Alexander Hamilton” by Ron Chernow have largely perpetuated the worst view of Burr, that he held no set of political ideas worth pursuing, that he was an opportunist of the highest degree and that he was sexually frivolous.

While the latter charge is most certainly true, the other two are rather spurious. Tracing the steps of Hamilton’s widow from her life some 45 years after Hamilton’s death, Chernow claims in his prologue that Burr had:

… fired a moral shot at her husband, Alexander Hamilton, in a misbegotten effort to remove the man Burr regarded as the main impediment to the advancement of his career.

This is a dubious claim at best. Sure, Burr possessed his own political ambition, and it’s true that Hamilton and Burr were on different political spectra, but the simple reason behind the duel was Hamilton’s refusal to make an apology stemming from a statement, recorded by Charles Cooper, that Hamilton:

…has come out decidedly against Burr; indeed when he was here he spoke of him as a dangerous man, and who ought not to be trusted.

This was not an isolated statement from Hamilton against Burr’s character, but only one of any many denigrations Hamilton had made about Burr in the lead-up to the duel. This one, for Burr however, necessitated that the two settle their differences under the code duello. Had Hamilton apologized or recanted the statement, admitting that he had gone too far in his criticism of Burr, the duel probably never would have happened. Later in life, Burr admitted that

Had I read Sterne more and Voltaire less, I should have known the world was wide enough for Hamilton and me.

In any case, Burr penned an apology dated June 25, 1804 in which he requested Hamilton sign. Hamilton would not, and in a statement written between June 27-July 4, a day before the duel in New Jersey, said:

… it is possible that I may have injured Col Burr, however convinced myself that my opinions and declarations have been well founded, as from my general principles and temper in relation to similar affairs – I have resolved, if our interview is conducted in the usual manner,and it pleases God to give me the opportunity, to reserve and throw away my first fire, and I have thought even of reserving my second fire – and thus giving a double opportunity to Col Burr to pause and reflect.

It is not however my intention to enter into any explanations on the ground. Apology, from principle I hope, rather than Pride, is out of the question.

None of this admits that Burr entered upon the duel to protect his own political career. He was doing just fine for himself at that time in his career. He was vice president of the nation and a gifted lawyer, after all. Rather, it was the other way around. Certainly, Hamilton would have liked to have avoided a duel if he could have, but he was outspoken to a fault, as Chernow admits, and would not retract his comments about Burr. More likely is the case that — and Isenberg makes this point concretely — Hamilton, Jefferson and other political adversaries felt threatened by Burr. The only difference is that whereas Chernow links Burr’s challenge of a duel to his ambition, Isenberg does not, and in my opinion, it is the latter that stands on the right side of history in this particular case. Dueling was a common way to settle scores in those days (It was illegal in New York, and that is why the two traveled to New Jersey), and Burr, amid waves upon waves of Hamilton’s slash and burn hack campaign against him, he had had enough. Political ambition had little, if anything, to do with it.

Chernow makes another point about Burr that seems historically dishonest. He attempts to make the case that Burr did not leave behind any substantial documents that relate his political ideas, and Chernow questions why some consider Burr a founder in the first place. He says that while Washington, Hamilton, Jefferson, Adams and other left behind thick and voluminous volumes, “packed with profound ruminations,” only two volumes exist of Burr’s writings. This is certainly true, but unlike some of the other founders, Burr had few living relatives in which to preserve his writings. His intelligent wife, Theodosia, died young; so did his daughter of the same name. Both were women of the enlightenment and carried their studies as far as their sex would take them at the time. Burr was more progressive than any of the founders, and he instilled, with the help of Theodosia the elder, the forward-thinking and high-minded ideals of Mary Wolstencraft and Jean-Jacques Rousseau into the younger Theodosia’s studies. The younger Theodosia, as it happens, disappeared after setting sail on the Patriot ship from Georgetown, S.C. The most common theory is that the schooner was captured by pirates, but in effect, no one knows what happened to Theodosia Burr Alston. The important point is that Burr outlived all of his immediate relatives and few, if any, were left to collect and carry on his legacy. All we are left with, as for Burr’s first-hand writings, are, unfortunately, the dregs, with a few exceptions, as Isenberg highlights.

Isenberg also makes a full account of Burr’s treason trial and his supposed conspiracy to create a new republic, separate from the United States, along with a portion of what was then called the “Southwest.” In reality, however, Burr’s schemes did not include any sort of separatist movement against the U.S., rather, he made plans to expand U.S. territory into Spanish Florida and Mexico (i.e. Manifest Destiny). Probably because he killed Hamilton and because of the political enemies he had made in Washington and elsewhere, many were suspicious of him, and it was actually Jefferson who had Burr arrested and indicted on a charge of treason. Jefferson was so cocksure of Burr’s guilt, and without any apparent reason, other than what he read in the obviously biased newspapers of the day. For all of Jefferson’s acumen in nearly every other subject that matters, I find it hard to rectify his headstrong determination to destroy Burr despite lack of any concrete evidence. Needless to say, no evidence was forthcoming in the actual treason trial because there was no evidence, and Burr was spared his life. But certainly not his political legacy.

Following the trial and still dogged by his detractors, he fled to Europe, suffered some unsuccessful ventures there and eventually returned to the U.S. in 1812 under the name, “Edwards,” which was probably a nod to his grandfather, Jonathan Edwards, and his uncle, Timothy Edwards, the latter of whom helped raise him as a boy.

With Isenberg’s book, readers will get a fuller and more balanced account of Burr’s life than, to my knowledge, has ever been written. Unlike Chernow and many others who have written about Burr, she does not push aside or ignore or fail to investigate the questionable sides of Burr’s character in order to inflate the good. In “Fallen Founder,” readers will be refreshed to read an unfiltered account of the former vice president, with his sexual exploits, filibustering schemes and progressive political ideas about women’s rights and other topics of import intact. One warning here: she is not kind to Hamilton at all. Rightly so? I’m not sure. Of course, we can reward Hamilton with the titles of being a brilliant political thinker and founder. But for whatever reason, he was obsessed with destroying Burr, and seemed to have personal, and more than just political reasons, as his motivation.

In the end and ironically, Burr turned the trump card, not only “winning” the duel against his most fire-penned adversary, but outliving nearly all of his former detractors at the ripe age of 81.
Rating:

Continuing with my study of the Constitution and the debates and writings leading up to its ratification, this month I supplemented my recent reading of “The Federalist Papers” with “The Antifederalists: Critics of the Constitution 1781-1788″ by Jackson Turner Main.

Like a handful of the other short non-fiction works I have read this year, this book, at only 286 pages, is dense with information and has the most impact if it is read slowly and carefully. Having read Hamilton, Jay and Madison’s work and earlier this year, “Ratification” by Pauline Maier, I was fairly familiar with most of the political issues that were important to politicians and their constituents in late 18th century America. As such, I didn’t expect that this short work would take so long to digest. It took a good two weeks longer than expected to finish it up.

Originally written in 1961, Main informs readers in the introduction that up to that point, the story of the Antifederalists, that bloc of American politicians and thinkers in the 1780s that was opposed to the Constitution, had been unwritten. The term “Antifederalists” was one that was placed on them by the Federalists, and the Antifederalists themselves rejected the moniker. Main opens his book by setting up the political and social landscape of 18th century America. Even casual readers of American history probably know this part of the script: the merchant class, lawyers and the commerce sector flourished along in many of the North’s bustling seacoast towns, while in the South, the planter class and merchants held much of the property and wealth along the coasts and small farmers (many of them crippled by personal and business debt) mainly held the interior. There were, of course, exceptions, but that was the general economic layout at the time.

Main then proceeds by presenting the Antifederalists’s major objections to the Constitution and their proposed solutions. The major objections, of course, were that the Constitution would give too much power to the central government and leave too little for the States, prevent the States from making paper money for debt relief, that it lacked a bill of rights assuring certain personal liberties, that it provided Congress with too much power in levying taxes, among other objections. Main outlines the overarching opposition to the proposed Constitution:

The substance of criticism of the Constitution from the democratic point of view is summarized in the argument that the new government would be controlled by the upper class, not the “democracy,” and therefore it would favor the rich, not the common man.

As mentioned earlier, the general dichotomy at the time divided the mercantile classes of the seacoast towns and the small-town farmers further inland, the latter of whom were predominantly Antifederalists, with the exception of Georgia (At the time, its territory stretched into what is now Alabama and Mississippi to the Mississippi River). That state, as Main notes, was heavily Federalist because the people there needed federal protection from the Native Americans who were an ongoing threat to the west. Thus, the Constitution, which granted Congress with the power

to provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions;

was a reasonable document in which to throw behind their support.

In the conclusion, Main articulates the basic premise of the whole book and the central concept that must be understood in any study of the Federalists and Antifederalists:

In all parts of the country, therefore, the commercial interest with its ramifications, including those who depended primarily and directly upon commerce, were Federal, and the “non-navigating” folk were Antifederal.

Next year, I may read the Antfederalist Papers, but for now, I was pleased to be able to study both sides of the debates surrounding the ratification of the Constitution. I would encourage anyone with a cursory interest in American history to take a look at some of these enlightening polemics because it’s critical in understanding just how forward-thinking the framers of the Constitution — and indeed, even their detractors — and also how savvy they were in anticipating future problems that inevitably did arise on the national scale.

If Main’s book suffers from any flaws, it may be that it tends to be repetitious at times. This may benefit readers who are unfamiliar with the most of the issues, but it gets tedious for someone who wants to dig deeper.

Rating:

A few days ago, I wrote about the possible decline or death of the Tea Party movement, in light of Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney’s rise in the polls and the sinking of Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry and others. While I realize that the Tea Party is probably as much about small government and what it deems as “fiscal responsibility” with public money as it is about social issues, it still represents the strongest bloc of evangelical support within the ranks of the GOP. Thus, the New York Times today appropriately asked the question today: “Have Evangelicals Lost Their Sway?”

In response, David P. Gushee, the Distinguished University Professor of Christian Ethics at Mercer University, wrote:

This year, after Mike Huckabee and Sarah Palin decided to sit the election out, two organic evangelical candidates emerged: Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry. (Herman Cain might qualify as a third.) Both Bachmann and Perry are clearly practicing conservative evangelicals. Perry, at least, had a serious chance to become the Republican nominee. But neither he nor Bachmann proved successful in sealing the deal with their own evangelical constituency, and both failed to extend their reach much beyond that constituency.

The emergence of Newt Gingrich, a thrice-married Catholic convert, and Mitt Romney, a committed Mormon, as leaders of the Republican pack does not symbolize a decline in evangelical influence. It more clearly symbolizes the failure of the two organic evangelical candidates. In the case of Gingrich, it also symbolizes the readiness of many conservative evangelicals to trade off their supposedly cherished family values for a candidate they think can win.

And Lara M. Brown, an assistant professor of political science at Villanova University, had this to say:

Stalwart support among white evangelical Protestants constitutes the Republican long game. Not only do these voters provide the critical momentum lifts during the nomination contest, but their enthusiastic backing could well be the key to winning the general election.

Republican presidential aspirants have gleaned this lesson over the past decade. That’s why there are three serious candidates – Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann and Rick Santorum – vying for evangelical support and two imperfect social conservatives – Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich – trying to play the part. Earlier in the race, there were two others – Tim Pawlenty and Herman Cain – claiming to represent these voters.

This many candidates in the Republican field suggests that evangelicals possess formidable power, not waning influence. Their only problem is their lack of consensus.

But is that really what’s going on? Does the sheer number of evangelical candidates say something about vitality of that wing of the GOP. Quantity, after all, doesn’t at all mean quality.

The striking element in this primary – Huckabee and Palin certainly got this slow roll going back in 2008 – is the unequivocal anti-intellectualism that candidates like Perry and Bachmann represent (and Cain before he dropped out). Earlier in the primary election season, one of my first thoughts was that the Republican Party had set the bar so low that, again in the wake of Huckabee and Palin, that anyone who said mentioned “God,” “Christianity” or “wholesome American values” enough times had a legitimate chance of gaining clout in the Republican Party. Perry and Bachmann, then, were in my mind, current manifestations of Huckabee and Palin from 2008, with two noted difference: that Perry isn’t an ordained minister and that Huckabee would have actually made a more competent leader. Not that I have a dog in the hunt, but my hope in all this, given the recent successes of Romney and Gingrich, is that GOP’s ideologies are in the process of sliding more toward the center after Palin and the gang helped to nearly tip it over the edge.

That said, I don’t think the evangelical bloc of the GOP is going away any time soon since abortion, gay rights and stem cell research concerns are still very much a part of the public conversation. I would be very surprised, however, if Romney wins the nomination. His is Mormon, after all, so unless some new candidate(s) surface, Gingrich will most likely win by default as what I have been calling the “establishment” candidate.

Already nearly dead last in per capita spending on transportation and abysmal in public education, Georgia may be facing more tax cuts at a time when its various agencies are already cut to the bone. Politicians in my home state are, indeed, presenting a pretty strong test case in precisely how not to manage a state’s tax policy.

Larry O’Neal, the Republican House majority leader, is proposing a $220 million tax cut that would ostensibly cut revenue in a state that is already stripped bare. Jay Bookman, with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, has some sound advice:

As O’Neal acknowledges, his approach is “not without risk.” Before undertaking that risk, it sure would be great if we could study the experience of a state that had already slashed its taxes to the bone in an effort to make itself more attractive to business. By studying what happened there, we could get a pretty good idea of what to expect from this latest plan.

The good news is, such a state exists. The bad news is, that state is Georgia.

He then presented evidence that Georgia has been, perennially, very low in state-generated tax revenue over the last 10 years, even lower than surrounding states in the Southeast:

Our neighbor to the west, Alabama, collected $617 more in state revenue per capita than Georgia. Mississippi collected $565 more per capita. South Carolina collected $566 more per capita than Georgia. In fact, as the GSU study notes, “if Georgia were to raise state and local … revenues to the Southeastern average, this would be equivalent to $2.7 billion in additional revenues.”

Given that data, if O’Neal’s theory held any water whatsoever Georgia ought to be swimming in jobs and growth. So how are we doing?

Well, our unemployment rate is 10.2 percent, well above the national average. In 1999, we ranked 21st in the country in per capita income, and were rising fast, up from 35th in 1979. Ten years later, in 2009, we had fallen back to 39th, which is worse than we ranked 30 years earlier.

For the past decade, Georgia has been losing the type of high-paying jobs attracted by good infrastructure, quality schools and an attractive quality of life, perhaps because it hasn’t been investing in good infrastructure, quality schools and an attractive quality of life.

And until 2008, the jobs we had been adding were increasingly low-wage, low-skill jobs of the sort that are most vulnerable in a recession. Once the economy tanked, those jobs disappeared as well.

What a surprise, then, that the roads are crumbling and the educational system in this state is among the worst in the nation. Cut-taxes-at-all-costs politicians and the voters who support them get the state and the educational system they deserve.

I think New York Times’ Nate Silver may be onto something when he writes that the next GOP presidential candidate may not actually be Newt Gingrich, Mitt Romney or any of the Tea Party or lesser known candidates:

Republicans are dangerously close to having none of their candidates be acceptable to rank-and-file voters and the party establishment. It’s not clear what happens when this is the case; there is no good precedent for it. But since finding a nominee who is broadly acceptable to different party constituencies is the foremost goal of any party during its nomination process, it seems possible that Republicans might begin to look elsewhere.

A recent Gallup poll asked Republican voters directly about which candidates they’d consider acceptable nominees. Only two, Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney, were deemed acceptable by a majority of Republican voters. The other six candidates (including Herman Cain, who has since dropped out) were considered unacceptable by a majority of the party’s voters.

In fact, of the eight candidates listed in this graphic,

Credit: Gallup

six have at one time or another been associated with the Tea Party, and they are all are unacceptable candidates for 50 percent or more of those who were polled. Ron Paul and Michele Bachmann have been among the Tea Party’s most ardent flagship candidates. Bachmann formed and is the chairwoman of the Tea Party Caucus, and Paul has been called the “intellectual godfather of the Tea Party.” It is possible that the tide may be turning against the Tea Party, since the two “establishment” candidates hold the top two positions in this poll and are at the top of most other polls. Cain was third for a time until he dropped out of the race — or, “suspended his campaign” as he phrased it — after one allegation of promiscuity after another smashed his candidacy to bits.

As I have said before, I think Romney’s Mormonism will keep him out of the running, as well as his more moderate stances on gay rights and abortion. It doesn’t help, of course, that he was governor of Massachusetts when that state passed a health care bill similar to the one Barack Obama signed into law in March 2010. Romney’s faith will not win him many votes from evangelical Christians, although to his credit — and equal discredit — he has sometimes either downplayed or spoken around some of the more bizarre tenants of his religion. For instance, as in this passage from the above-linked NPR article:

Mitt Romney has a well-earned reputation as a flip-flopper. But it’s one thing to flip-flop on your politics, and quite another to flip-flop on your faith. So it came as something of a surprise when, during an interview earlier this year with George Stephanopoulos, the presidential candidate disputed the suggestion that Christ would someday return to the United States rather than the Middle East. Mormons, he said, believe “that the Messiah will come to Jerusalem. … It’s the same as the other Christian tradition.”

This was both technically correct and completely misleading: The church’s position is that, while Christ will indeed appear at the Mount of Olives, he will also build a new Jerusalem in Jackson County, Missouri, which will serve as the seat of his 1,000-year reign on Earth. Romney had conveniently neglected to mention this part of his church’s doctrine.

Yes, NPR is not making that up. Jackson County, Missouri. That said, Gingrich is, at present, the only viable GOP candidate in my mind. But even he has “personal baggage,” as Silver calls it and isn’t exactly known as a devout churchgoer either. Time will tell whether a third “establishment” candidate will emerge (Silver mentions Jeb Bush, Paul Ryan, Mitch Daniels, Tim Pawlenty or Chris Christie as possibilities), but if the election were to take place right now, Gingrich would most likely be the guy. Meanwhile, the Tea Party, having failed to move the center permanently to the far right, is in serious jeopardy of becoming completely irrelevant.

The former governor of Illinois Rod Blagojevich has been sentenced to 14 years in jail for corruption. Most notably, he was charged for trying to sell an appointment to Barack Obama’s old seat in the Senate.

In a statement today, he said that his

kids have to face the fact that their father is a convicted felon. And it’s not like their name is Smith. They can’t hide.

True that.

As you can read here, columnist Kathleen Parker wastes way too much ink in supplying us with the answer. She claims Republicans like New Gingrich because he represents someone who has risen from the proverbial ashes of sin to redemption. Or, in her words:

To many Republican voters, Gingrich is “one of us,” a familiar face, a known quantity. Most important, he has done the single thing that transcends sin. He has confessed and repented. …

Bottom line: Most Americans would rather embrace a man who has fallen and climbed back to his feet than one who has never stubbed his toe on temptation. The successful protagonist is always flawed. In Romney breaking news: He removes the cheese from his pizza but has a weakness for chocolate milk. Mr. Squeaky not only has no skeletons in the closet; he has no closets.

I think I have a better answer. Brace yourselves:

Republicans like Gingrich because A) he’s not Mormon, and B) he’s less incompetent, bumbling and crazy than the rest of the candidates.