Sure, Spitzer, Everybody's Been Yearning to See You on the Ballot Again

Morning Jolt
. . . with Jim Geraghty

July 8, 2013

Sure, Spitzer, Everybody's Been Yearning to See You on the Ballot Again

Maybe the Mark Sanford comeback wasn't such a good idea after all.

Eliot Spitzer, who resigned as governor of New York five years ago amid a prostitution scandal, is re-entering political life, with a run for the citywide office of comptroller and a wager that voters are ready to look past his previous misconduct.

In a telephone interview on Sunday night, Mr. Spitzer, 54, sounding restless after an unwelcome hiatus from government, said he had re-envisioned the often-overlooked office and yearned to resurrect the kind of aggressive role he played as New York State's attorney general. He said that after consulting with his family and taking the temperature of the city's electorate, he believed New Yorkers would be open to his candidacy. "I'm hopeful there will be forgiveness, I am asking for it," he said.

It all started when Chris Noth's character made a comeback bid on The Good Wife, didn't it?

I never had a chance to be on Spitzer's television show, but I'd told colleagues at NR that if I ever did appear, I would call the host "John" in every answer until he lost his temper.

Just What Is the President Focused on These Days?

In light of Teresa Heinz Kerry's sudden, apparently serious illness, I'm going to take it easy on John Kerry today. Believe me, I had a good, long, mockery-laden rant stored up about Kerry's excursion on his yacht July 3, as the government of Egypt suddenly convulsed and changed before the eyes of the world (except Americans watching cable news, who were stuck watching live coverage of the George Zimmerman trial). But as Malcolm Reynolds said, "mercy is the mark of a great man."

So instead, we're going upstairs to his boss, left churning out bland, canned, we-stand-proudly-and-strongly-for-our-values on autopilot, utterly contrary to the actual decisions he and his team have made. The Washington Post slaughtered some more trees to hand out even more Pinocchios:

Policy toward the Morsi government may have been a difficult balancing act, but the Obama administration has clearly failed to live up to the criteria outlined by the president, except in a limited, possibly foot-dragging, manner.

Congress handed the administration tools to signal its displeasure about lack of progress on democracy through cuts in aid. But whenever a choice needed to be made, the administration decided to set human rights considerations to the side.

So here's the fun question: when Obama gave that utterly inaccurate statement about his Egypt policy, did he lie — er, did his statement reach an expiration date — or was he really not that up to speed on the details of his own administration's policy towards Morsi?

As I noted in my July 4 op-ed in the New York Daily News, there was almost no statement from the president or his team on the upheaval in Turkey. They mostly sat and watched quietly on Egypt. Brazil just had a giant protest against its own left-wing government for spending oodles on Olympics and World Cup stadiums while other basic services deteriorate — another foreign crisis almost entirely ignored by Washington. They keep telling us that Edward Snowden's globetrotting isn't an issue that the president has to deal with. The negotiations with the Taliban fell apart before they began — remember when all those foreign-policy experts told us Mitt Romney was a fool for pooh-poohing those?

So what's Obama spending all of his time on? Because we know it's not the Obamacare implementation. We know Kerry's spent the past months obsessing about an Israeli-Palestinian peace process that's gone nowhere. (Jab! "Well, maybe I'm just a good man.") Obama's big speech in Berlin was all about global warming, a potential long-term issue, while Syria burns, Russia and China jab us in the eye with Snowden, the EU fumes about the NSA spying, and current real crises stack up.

Ed Rogers argues we're watching a White House adrift:

The White House can't regain momentum unless it can admit there is a problem. But it remains to be seen if this White House is detached and self-aware enough to see itself clearly or if it is so insular and fanatically devoted to President Obama that no one can see that the presidency and the country are drifting.

The main topics this weekend will be Egypt, Edward Snowden and the White House decision to delay the employer mandate in Obamacare. And, to the White Houses' relief, there may be some discussion about the comparatively encouraging jobs report. No one should expect any White House staffers to publicly say the ship is sinking, but it will be interesting to see if anyone says anything that suggests he knows they need to change course.

Maybe in the Sunday papers and on the Sunday shows we'll find out what school of thought has the upper hand in the White House: The group that convinced the president that the implementation of Obamacare was collapsing and that he needed to buy some time to live to fight another day, or the camp that believes in the laughable talking points memo about Valerie Jarrett that was revealed this week in Mark Leibovich's new book, "This Town."

Come on.

A Cheney for Senate Bid Turns the New York Times Green with Enzi

I'm sorry, Senator Mike Enzi, but the thought of Democrats' heads exploding upon hearing the words "Senator Cheney" is spectacularly appealing.

Naturally, the New York Times angle on this — written by Jonathan Martin, formerly of Politico and briefly with NR — is that a Liz Cheney senatorial bid means doom for Republicans:

A young Dick Cheney began his first campaign for the House in this tiny village — population 1,600 — after the state's sole Congressional seat finally opened up. But nowadays, his daughter Liz does not seem inclined to wait patiently for such an opening.

Ms. Cheney, 46, is showing up everywhere in the state, from chicken dinners to cattle growers' meetings, sometimes with her parents in tow. She has made it clear that she wants to run for the Senate seat now held by Michael B. Enzi, a soft-spoken Republican and onetime fly-fishing partner of her father.

But for the state GOP, that means doom! Dooooooooom!

Ms. Cheney's move threatens to start a civil war within the state's Republican establishment, despite the reverence many hold for her family.

Mr. Enzi, 69, says he is not ready to retire, and many Republicans say he has done nothing to deserve being turned out.

It would bring about "the destruction of the Republican Party of Wyoming if she decides to run and he runs, too," Alan K. Simpson, a former Republican senator from the state, said in an interview last week. "It's a disaster — a divisive, ugly situation — and all it does is open the door for the Democrats for 20 years."

Above: The New York Times Graphics Department's depiction of downtown Jackson Hole after the Republican Ragnarok of an Enzi-Cheney primary.

You may be less than stunned to learn that most conservative bloggers believe that the state and national GOP, the nation, conservatism, and the laws of time and space can indeed survive a Cheney senatorial bid. Why, they almost seem to welcome it.

William Jacobson:

I have nothing against Enzi; I know little about him. But I don't like the sense of entitlement being shown by Alan Simpson and others.

If Enzi deserves to be reelected, he should earn it. No free rides from now on.

Maybe the Wyoming Republican Party needs a little shaking up.

Run, Liz, Run.

Doug Brady over at Conservatives4Palin:

First, I'd take anything Alan Simpson says with a large grain of salt, and his warning that a Cheney challenge to Enzi would result in the destruction of the Wyoming Republican Party and open the door to a Democrat Senator from the state is ludicrous. Whoever wins the GOP primary — Cheney or Enzi — would be the overwhelming favorite to win the general election. Simpson, who's most famous for the disastrous Simpson-Mazzoli amnesty bill in 1986, has always been an establishment guy and has always been more interested in getting on the Sunday talk shows than advancing conservatism.

Second, I think Enzi overestimates his conservative support. As you'll recall, he teamed up with Dick Durban to co-sponsor a Senate bill which would impose a massive new internet sales tax just four months ago. Such a cumbersome bureaucratic mess like that would be harmful even in a good economy but, as Stacy noted at the time, it would be particularly disastrous in the Obama economy. There's no way I can square a vote for what amounts to a national sales tax increase with a "reliably conservative record".

Kurt Schlichter: "Liz Cheney has the potential to take the GOP in a new direction. Toward success."

But not quite everyone is on board. At PowerLine, John Hinderaker contends the challenge would be a waste of conservative energy and activism:

I admire Liz Cheney as much as anyone, but I can't claim to be pleased to learn that she has moved from Washington to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and has told Senator Mike Enzi that she may run against him in next year's GOP primary. In my view, Republicans (and conservatives) spend much too much time and energy attacking each other, rather than going after the Democrats. That doesn't mean, of course, that Republicans should never mount primary challenges.

But when do such challenges make sense? If an incumbent Republican is not a conservative (Susan Collins, say) and a more conservative challenger has a good chance of winning the general election, then a primary challenge is in order. But that isn't the case here: Enzi is a solid conservative with a 93% lifetime American Conservative Union rating (92% in 2012). He recently voted against the Gang of Eight's immigration bill. Cheney may well be a little more conservative than Enzi, but going after a 90+% conservative is fratricide.

We have primaries for a reason, don't we? If Cheney's bid is so ill-considered, Wyoming Republicans (also known as most Wyoming voters) will let her know. Hinderaker concludes, "Cheney is neither significantly more conservative than Enzi nor significantly more electable; her real advantage as a primary candidate is that she is significantly more glamorous. That isn't enough."

Yeah, but there's something to be said for glamor.

Flying the Unfriendly Skies

Elsewhere in the New York Times, author James Atlas describes his painful time flying coach and concludes it is a metaphor for national decline and unacceptable inequality in America:

Statusization — to coin a useful term — is ubiquitous, no matter what your altitude. While you're in your hospital bed spooning up red Jell-O, a patient in a private suite is enjoying strawberries and cream. On your way to a Chase A.T.M., you notice a silver plaque declaring the existence within of Private Client Services. This man has a box seat at a Yankees game; that man has a skybox. And the skybox isn't the limit: high overhead, the 1 percent fly first class; the .1 percent fly Netjets; the .01 fly their own planes. Why should it be any different up above from down below?

The hardships of economy don't seem to deter us from air travel. There were close to a billion domestic passenger trips last year.

But moving up feels harder than it used to — or it does from where I sit (27F). We're all going everywhere and nowhere at the same time. In his new book, "The Great Degeneration," the historian Niall Ferguson confirms my intuition. His argument is that we've seen a precipitous decline in social mobility over the last 30 years: "Once the United States was famed as a land of opportunity, where a family could leap from 'rags to riches' in a generation." Now it can't even leap from economy to business. You can make some progress in small ways: the gold club members get to board before the silver club members. The passenger who earns a certain number of miles is rewarded with a complimentary drink. But those in the back of the plane can fight all they want over their status. They're still not getting any more legroom.

The comments section underneath the article raises the fairly glaring point that Atlas's rose-colored memories of flying before these harsh Darwinist times (probably to be blamed on Republicans) ignore the fact that once you adjust for inflation, air travel is a lot more accessible to a lot more people today. In the "golden age" of attractive stewardesses that he romanticizes, flying was too expensive for most of middle-class America.

Come on. Look at the prices (adjusted for inflation) of air travel back in the 60s that you so glorify. In 1972 it cost me about $350 round-trip to fly from Atlanta to Chicago to go to college (so usually I took Greyhound). According to online inflation calculators, that's the equivalent of $1950 today. If we want the same level of service we got in the 60s and 70s, we'd need to pay equivalent prices. Airline travel in "economy" today is pretty much analogous to what bus travel was in the 70s; cheap enough that many people can afford it but dirty, uncomfortable, crowded, and miserable. Comfortable travel is available now, as it was then, to the more well-to-do -- if you can afford to pay for first class, then your flight is far more tolerable than if you're in economy. In 1972, the one time I flew, it was a lot more enjoyable than taking the bus. But then, as now, one got what one paid for. We expect airfares to be rock-bottom low and accessible to all--but we can't then expect service levels to match what they would be if the airlines still charged the prices they used to charge.

I would note that higher-end air travel is one of those rare products where a large portion of the consumer base isn't spending their own money. (How many business class or first-class passengers bought those tickets with personal funds, as opposed to having their employer pay for it?) When it's somebody else's money, hey, anything goes, or at least as much as you can get away with. (Of course, that's at other employers. For the transatlantic flights for the Norway cruise, Jack Fowler has booked me a space in an overhead luggage rack.)

If everyone paid out of his own pocket, those passengers willing to pay $659 to $2,337 for a one-way first-class ticket from D.C. to Los Angeles nonstop would largely disappear. But those folks willing to pay those exorbitant costs — really, those companies willing to pay those costs for their employees — are what make the (relatively) cheap price of $234 for the same flight in coach possible. (I got those figures from plugging in a flight from D.C. to LA with one week's notice into Expedia.)

Also . . . did no editor at the Times think it was bad timing to run a column complaining about insufficient legroom and stale ham sandwiches right after the crash at San Francisco airport?

ADDENDUM: This is the first Morning Jolt I've written entirely on an Apple system; I'm growing Mac-limated.

NRO Digest — July 8, 2013

Today on National Review Online . . .

JOHN FUND: Obama's delay of the employer mandate is just another example of his disregard for the rule of law — making it another blow for the Gang of Eight. Why Obamacare Threatens Immigration Reform.

ANDREW STILES: The GOP's voting for immigration reform won't stop the Left from smearing them as racist. In fact, it'll provide even opportunities to do so. Walking into the Gang of Eight Trap.

JONATHAN STRONG: How environmentalists' favorite legal tool could add teeth to the enforcement provisions of the immigration bill, but does Congress fear significantly empowering enforcement hawks? Citizen Suits for Immigration Reform.

FRED BAUER: In their debate this week, House Republicans should bear in mind conservative principles and beware Gang proponents and their dubious arguments. How the House Should Handle Immigration Reform.

MARK KRIKORIAN: A new report reveals that almost all of the employment growth in the past decade has gone to immigrants, while Americans have lost ground. A Nation of Immigrants — the Rest of Us Just Live Here.

JILLIAN KAY MELCHIOR: A disability lawyer is profiting spectacularly off of his radical political ideas. Binder on Binder & Binder.

ROBERT BRYCE: Obama aims to decrease "carbon pollution" in the U.S., but the Third World needs coal, so his international agenda looks a lot different. Green Dreams in America, Coal in Africa.

DAVID PRYCE-JONES: The unrest in Egypt is the inevitable result of the country's being left to Islamism, an ideology with predictable, deadly results. Confrontation, Coups, and Bloodshed.

To read more, visit www.nationalreview.com

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