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Michael Barone

New Census Bureau classification of ‘near poor’ is virtually useless

By Michael Barone

November 21, 2011, 2:07 pm

Mickey Kaus has a blog post up ripping the New York Times’s headline, “Older, Suburban and Struggling, ‘New Poor’ Startle the Census.” As Kaus points out with characteristic snarkiness, the Census Bureau wasn’t startled by its findings that there are a lot of people classified as “near poor” by defining the group as those with incomes under 150 percent of its newly devised Supplemental Poverty Measure. That’s because the SPM defines everyone under the 33rd percentile of income as poor, including government benefits but excluding medical expenses and taxes and taking into account regional cost of living. In other words, one-third of everyone is defined as living in poverty under the SPM, a percentage that is destined never to decline.

Kaus’s skewering of the Times story and the SPM is deft and amusing, starting with the first full sentence: “Let’s just suppose, as a thought experiment, that the New York Times is a liberal conspiracy.” He points out, for example, that 20 percent of the “near poor” own their houses free of mortgage, and argues that taking regional cost of living differences into account ignores the fact that some people (including him) choose to live in expensive places—or, as The Atlantic’s Megan McArdle puts it in a delicious blog post, “Expensive Real Estate is a Consumption Choice.”

But there’s a weakness in Kaus’s argument. He seems unaware of the work of AEI’s Nick Eberstadt, like this AEI paper or his 2008 book The Poverty of the Poverty Rate: Measure and Mismeasure of Material Deprivation in America. One of Nick’s central points is that the poverty definition first developed in the 1960s measures income rather than consumption, and—here Mickey provides some nice examples—low-income people tend to spend more than their dollar income (by drawing on savings, borrowing on credit cards, depending on relatives or charity, etc.). So neither the poverty definition nor the Supplemental Poverty Measure can ever meaningfully measure the actual degree of deprivation. Most people the government classifies as poor have air conditioning, cars, cell phones, color television. As Mickey writes, “the vast diversity of the ‘near poor’ category makes it virtually useless.” Virtually rather than entirely, if you believe that the New York Times is a liberal conspiracy.

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Michael Barone

David Broder: A Man of Integrity and Modesty

By Michael Barone

March 9, 2011, 3:35 pm

David Broder, the longtime Washington Post reporter and columnist, died at age 81 today. The Washington Post, where he worked since 1965, has an obituary that recounts the high points of his long career. He grew up in Chicago Heights, Illinois, and graduated from the University of Chicago in 1947, at 18. He got a master’s degree there and served in the Army, then started his journalist career at that most sober and fact-driven organ, Congressional Quarterly. From 1960 to 1965 he worked at the Washington Star, then went to work at the Washington bureau of the New York Times. Frustrated by the paper’s limits on his coverage and attracted by the Washington Post’s then-new executive editor Ben Bradlee, he joined the Post 18 months later, where he remained for more than 50 years. Broder covered his first national convention in 1956 and remained an active reporter and columnist up through 2004, which means that he covered one-third of the 84 Democratic and Republican national conventions in history. Broder won the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting in 1973, and for most of his long career at the Post he was regarded, correctly, I think, as the nation’s leading political reporter. He had an uncanny ability to recognize the turning points in political campaigns and to identify the presidential candidates who were making breakthroughs in the caucuses and primaries. And he was capable of churning out thousands of words on deadline, revising constantly to meet deadlines of different editions in the evening sessions of national conventions.

Despite all this, he was a man of great modesty. At the end of every year he wrote a column chronicling his mistakes and botched predictions in the previous year’s columns. He was never cowed by celebrities and regularly interviewed presidents and would-be presidents, but he also took pride in interviewing voters on street corners or at their front doors. He was always interested in newcomers in politics, and wrote one of his books on the members of the baby boom generation, Changing of the Guard (1981). My first contact with him was in 1974 when he, already at the top of his profession, spent an hour giving me advice on how to get the next edition of The Almanac of American Politics published. When I was on the editorial page staff at the Post (1982-1989) he was always courteous when I, having finished work on my editorial, walked into the newsroom and bothered him when he was working on deadline. A couple of years ago he asked me to speak to one of his classes at the University of Maryland.

David Broder had a firm belief in the goodness of this nation and of representative government and the worthiness of our political system. He was less sympathetic with those who bypassed the political process through street demonstrations or by pushing ballot propositions. His own political sympathies were in line with those of the liberal Republicans who were so important a part of the political system in the early years of his career—his first book, coauthored with Stephen Hess—was The Republican Establishment (1967), and he was punctilious in providing Republicans as well as Democrats with fair coverage. I think it’s fair to say that his integrity and imperviousness to fashion, as well as his careful political instincts, provided a salutary discipline to the American political process for half a century.

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Michael Barone

We Are Once Again a Republic of Property Owners

By Michael Barone

August 2, 2010, 8:06 am

suburbIn his New York Times Economix blog, Princeton University economics professor Uwe Reinhardt takes issue with my article “The Return of the Jeffersonian Vision and the Rejection of Progressivism.” Reinhardt disagrees with my conclusion that we are once again “a republic of property owners.”

I think this is something of a glass half full/glass half empty disagreement. I believe most Americans accumulate or have good prospects of accumulating significant wealth over the course of their lifetimes. Reinhardt tends to disagree and cites data on the income sources of Americans 65 and over. Most, as he points out, tend to rely heavily on Social Security and have relatively little investment income.

I would look first at the 55-64 age cohort, the time of wealth maximization in most people’s lives—because after retirement we tend to spend our wealth down. Reinhardt’s 65+ age cohort consists (he’s using 2009 data) of people born in 1944 or before, and it includes some pretty elderly people (including my parents, who were born in 1919 and 1920). Many of these elderly have spent down whatever financial wealth they had. In addition, this age cohort includes many women who never worked 40 quarters and therefore did not qualify for Social Security except for the very low widow’s benefit. There may be a serious argument for raising that benefit, but for younger age cohorts it’s pretty much a moot issue: I don’t think many American women born after 1944 have failed to work 40 quarters, and therefore they qualify for the larger individual Social Security benefit. Younger age cohorts also will have accumulated more wealth than many of the very elderly ever did.

Reinhardt does not look at housing wealth, which accounts for roughly half of household wealth that Americans accumulate. To be sure, housing values have taken a hit in the last three years, and most Americans probably have less housing wealth (and quite possibly less wealth in financial instruments) than they had in 2007. But most still have plenty of time to accumulate wealth until they reach the 55-64 age cohort. An alarming percentage of American homeowners are now under water, i.e., they owe more on their mortgages than their houses are currently worth. But most of those are people who purchased homes in the last few years, when the housing bubble reached its maximum level. The large majority of people who bought their houses before 2004 and have been paying off their mortgages have positive equity—i.e., housing wealth. We don’t know whether or when housing prices will rise again, or whether they’ll rise as much as they did during the 1983-2007 period, but they will probably rise somewhat and equity will rise with each mortgage payment.

So Reinhardt has ignored a major component of ordinary Americans’ wealth. And it’s wealth that older Americans can draw on—by taking out second mortgages or reverse mortgages, or by selling a house to buy in at an assisted living center or to buy an annuity. It’s by no means insignificant.

Finally, Reinhardt is looking at all adults, while I am primarily concerned about voters, as the phrase “a republic of property owners” suggests. Those without any significant wealth in the form of financial or housing assets are significantly less likely to vote than those who have accumulated some wealth. The electorate has a higher percentage of property holders than the population as a whole.

Reinhardt also makes the point that a very large share of total financial assets are owned by a small percentage of the population. To which my response is: so what? The key question for me is not whether Bill Gates or Larry Ellison is too rich, but whether ordinary Americans have a good prospect of accumulating significant wealth in the course of their lifetimes. I think they do. Reinhardt thinks that our current elderly population has not done so, at least in financial assets, and argues, correctly in my view, that Americans do depend significantly on government transfer income.

I think my point still stands. In the early republic a majority of Americans then considered relevant (white males) tended to be property holders; in the early 20th century, the time of the Progressives and the New Dealers, a majority of Americans tended not to accumulate significant wealth; in the last decades of the 20th century and, despite the housing bust and current recession, most Americans do have the prospect of accumulating significant wealth.

Image by joiseyshowaa

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Michael Barone

Privileged to be Citizens

By Michael Barone

July 2, 2010, 5:35 am

we-the-peopleOn the Monday before this Fourth of July, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas issued a concurring opinion in McDonald v. Chicago, the case ruling that the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms applies to the states. Unlike his four concurring colleagues, Justice Thomas based his decision not on the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment but on its privileges and immunities clause, a provision that had been rendered largely inoperative by the Supreme Court in the Slaughterhouse Cases in 1873.

“No state,” reads the Fourteenth Amendment, “shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States.” It is interesting to think of the rights proclaimed self-evident by the Declaration of Independence and set out in the Constitution in those terms. I believe we ordinarily think of those rights as immunities. We are free to speak and write, to keep and bear arms, to be immune from unreasonable searches and seizures, to be safeguarded against deprivation of life, liberty, and property without due process of law. Government’s power is limited and we are immune from interference in those particular respects.

But I believe that it is even more fitting and proper to think of citizenship in terms of privileges. Those of us born as United States citizens or naturalized as such are privileged to partake of a heritage which not only gives us rights but responsibilities. We are part of a nation of mass prosperity and economic creativity, a nation that has led the world (despite current problems) into the broad sunlit uplands in which hundreds of millions have been able to lift themselves from poverty into independence and affluence. As American citizens, we have a responsibility to build on the work done by those before us to ensure that this heritage is forwarded, not forfeited.

We also live in a nation that has important responsibilities in the world. The Constitution was written by representatives of the Atlantic seaboard states for a nation of 3 million people; we are a continental nation of 310 million now, a nation with the greatest military might ever assembled. George Washington hoped that we would be an example to the world, and we have been. But in time we have become something very much more: a liberator of millions, a source of hope for the persecuted, and a focus of fear for their oppressors. Again, we have a responsibility to further the work of the giants on whose shoulders we are lucky enough to stand.

Justice Thomas’s decision may in time revive the long-dormant privileges and immunities clause. In the meantime, we need to appreciate not only our immunities but our privileges as citizens of the United States.

Image by Thorne Enterprises.

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Michael Barone

Britain’s Political Structure Enhances Party Rule

By Michael Barone

January 7, 2010, 2:42 pm

Walter Slocombe writes the following about my piece on differences between political parties in Britain and the United States:

No doubt these big policy issues have an effect, but the analysis ignores an important practical difference between the formal structure of British and US politics: The UK PM controls when to call elections, there is no equivalent to the two-term limit, and the government can change leaders without an election to drop an unpopular incumbent (Eden to MacMillan; Wilson to Callahan; even ultimately Thatcher to Major). If Eisenhower, Reagan, and Clinton had been able to run a third time, or the parties had been able to dump Carter or (in, say 2006) GWBush before an election, there might well have been much longer “runs” in the US. Of course, a British government can run out of time (as Labor has) and a switch can fizzle (as Blair-to-Brown has), but the tactical advantages are substantial.

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Michael Barone

Abortion Rates and Voting Behavior

By Michael Barone

November 16, 2009, 1:32 pm

One of the consequences of the deep recession of 2007–2009, and of the high unemployment rate which threatens to become semi-permanent, is the eclipse of abortion as a political issue. Over a period of three decades abortion was a staple of political discourse, often to the discomfort of politicians. The irony is that it need not have been a national political issue at all. When the Supreme Court issued its decision in Roe v. Wade in January 1973, 16 states with 41 percent of the nation’s population had in the previous five years liberalized their abortion laws, including California (where the legislation was signed by Governor Ronald Reagan) and New York. Three-quarters of Americans lived within 100 miles of a state where abortion was generally available. At that moment in 1973, legislatures in almost every state were beginning their sessions; some of them in other states would surely have liberalized their abortion laws. We would have ended up with an abortion regime like that in Europe, where abortion is widely available but subject to certain restrictions of the sort that the U.S. Supreme Court has declared unconstitutional.

The abortion issue was nettlesome to many politicians in the 1970s because it split both party’s coalitions. In my home state of Michigan, the leading proponent of abortion rights was Governor William Milliken, a Republican of considerable personal wealth and a graduate of Yale. The leading opponent of abortion rights was state House Speaker William Ryan, a Catholic and supporter of labor unions whose home in Detroit was next door to a nunnery. In a state like Iowa, where Catholics were a major source of Democratic support, the abortion issue caused many of them to vote Republican, which led to the defeat of Democratic Senator Dick Clark in 1978 and his Democratic colleague John Culver in 1980.

In time the two parties adapted. By the late 1980s there were few abortion rights supporters among active Republican politicians and few abortion rights opponents among active Democratic politicians. Among voters, too, pro-life men and women moved toward Republicans and pro-choice men and women toward Democrats. By the beginning of this decade there was a very high correlation between stands on abortion and party identification.

This continued to be the case up through and including the 2008 election. The Alan Guttmacher Institute, a pro-abortion rights organization, collects statistics that are widely accepted by advocates on all sides of the abortion issue. The institute provide a fascinating look at American society and American politics. If I am correct in supposing that in a time of economic distress abortion is likely to become a less salient issue, their latest compilation provides a look back at the way Americans live and the way they vote.

Two findings stand out.

The first is that Americans have been, as it were, voting with their feet against abortion. The abortion rate—the number of abortions per 1,000 women aged 15 to 44—has slowly but significantly fallen during the three-plus decades since Roe v. Wade. That rate rose sharply from 16.3 in 1973 to 19.3 in 1974, 21.7 in 1975, 24.2 in 1976, and 27.7 in 1977. It remained between 25.0 and 29.3 from 1978 to 1993, then began falling sharply, to 19.7 in 2004 and 19.4 in 2005, the latest figures in the Guttmacher Institute’s report.

The New York-based Guttmacher Institute notes also that the number of abortion providers has dropped precipitously, from 2,380 in 1992 to 1,787 in 2005. It makes much of the fact that 87 percent of America’s 3.141 counties have no abortion provider. Some advocates of abortion rights see this as a dire trend, preventing women in need of an abortion from being able to obtain one. That may come naturally to Manhattanites accustomed to walking not more than a block to take their clothes to the cleaners. But the fact that there is only one abortion provider in North Dakota and only two in Wyoming is, in my view, less of a problem for those seeking abortions. People in North Dakota are used to driving 200 miles to go to a shopping mall and high school football teams are commonly driven 150 miles in Wyoming to play weekly games. Abortion remains available in all 50 states and the District of Columbia for those who really want one, and the median cost of $523 is within reach of just about all of them.

But, and here is the second finding that stands out from the Guttmacher Institute’s statistics, the abortion rate varies widely among the states, and there is a high correlation between the abortion rate and voting behavior. Only 11 states and Washington, D.C. have abortion rates above the national average of 19.4. They include Hawaii, California, and Nevada in the West, Florida in the South, and seven of the eight states through which the Acela trains run in the Northeast—Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Delaware, and Maryland plus D.C. All of these voted for Barack Obama in 2008; all but Nevada and Florida voted for John Kerry in 2004 and Al Gore in 2000.

The correlation between abortion rates and voting behavior is shown in the following table in which the states are ranked by the percentage of the vote going to Obama, and in which higher-than-average Obama percentages and abortion rates are printed in boldface type.

States Ranked by Percent Voting for Obama and by Abortion Rate (abortions per 1,000 women aged 15-44, 2005)

baroneblog111609

Eight of the top ten Obama states plus D.C. have above-average abortion rates; the only exceptions are tiny Vermont and Illinois, where the abortion rate is only slightly below the national average. The only other states with above-average abortion rates are New Jersey, Nevada, and Florida. The state with by far the lowest abortion rate, Wyoming, also had the lowest Obama percentage. The highest abortion rate states are clustered at the geographic edges, the northeast, southeast, and southwest of America; in the vast geographic heartland the abortion rates are relatively low.

Roe v. Wade imposed the same legal abortion regime on the entire nation and made abortion a national political issue. Yet Americans in different regions and states have in effect established very different behavioral abortion regimes. Abortion is very common in New York (abortion rate of 38.2) and New Jersey (34.3), only about half as common in Illinois (18.9) and Texas (17.3), and lower in South Carolina (7.9) and Utah (6.4). Cultural liberals have noted that divorce rates are relatively low in some politically liberal states like Massachusetts and relatively high in some politically conservative states like Oklahoma. But abortion rates seem highly correlated with cultural attitudes and with, at least during the time that abortion has been a major political issue, voting behavior.

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Michael Barone

The Government and the Foreclosure Crisis

By Michael Barone

October 26, 2009, 11:53 am

The latest figures for foreclosures for the third quarter of the year and for September are in on the RealtyTrac website. Foreclosures were up 5 percent in the third quarter, and the figures indicate that the proportion of foreclosures resulting from recessionary stress is up and the proportion caused by the government’s inflating of the housing bubble and encouragement of subprime and Alt-A mortgages in fast-growing parts of the country is down. Specifically, in the third quarter 54 percent of the foreclosures were in the four “sand states,” California, Nevada, Arizona, and Florida, and 4 percent in Michigan (which, with its 15 percent–plus unemployment rate, is a good proxy for recessionary distress). The corresponding figures for September are 48 percent and 5 percent.

The rates of foreclosure are still far higher in the sand states than elsewhere, however. In the third quarter the percentage of houses in foreclosure were highest in Nevada (4.3 percent), California (1.9 percent), Arizona (1.9 percent), and Florida (1.8 percent). The only other states above the national average of 0.7 percent were Utah (1.0 percent), Idaho (1.0 percent), Georgia (0.8 percent), Michigan (0.8 percent), and Colorado (0.8 percent). Note that all of these except Michigan have been high-growth states, thus vulnerable to the same government-induced boom-and-bust experience so visible in the sand states.

Here’s an interactive blog post from the Associated Press that shows you where the foreclosures have been concentrated between January 2004 and September 2009. It highlights the states where the foreclosure rate hit 0.4 percent a month, a troublingly high percentage. (The percentages in the preceding paragraph are for a three-month period and so not commensurate.) No state hit that troubled percentage until March 2007, when Nevada did. In August 2007 California was in the trouble zone, then snapped out of it only to reappear in December 2007, after which it has remained in that territory. In April 2008 Florida and Arizona appeared in the troubled zone and have stayed there ever since. A few other states have popped into the troubled zone more recently, Virginia for one month in May 2009, Utah for one month in July 2009, Michigan for one month in August 2009, and Idaho in August and September 2009.

In the absence of those government policies that encouraged and subsidized subpar mortgage lending, there would be many, many fewer foreclosures nationally. And of course in the absence of those policies, the banks and other financial institutions would not have filled their portfolios with mortgage-backed securities and other financial assets that turned out to be worth far, far less than the ratings agencies and others projected. And what were those government policies? A good place to start would be the work of my American Enterprise Institute colleague Peter Wallison, who has been warning us about these policies for years.

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Michael Barone

Giving Thanks for Eunice Shriver

By Michael Barone

August 11, 2009, 2:26 pm

Eunice Shriver has died at age 88; her husband Sargent Shriver, 93, survives but seems to have withdrawn from public view. We all owe these two wonderful people thanks for creating and shaping two great American institutions, Special Olympics (this obituary provides a good account) and the Peace Corps (consult Scott Stossel’s biography on Sargent Shriver for an account of how his enthusiasm, energy and shrewdness took a government agency that could have been a mess and made it into an enduring and useful institution).

I first ran across Sargent Shriver in 1972 as a volunteer in the McGovern campaign, driving in with him from the Detroit airport for a campaign appearance. With him was Michael Novak, now a colleague at American Enterprise Institute, who was a top campaign aide to Shriver (who like Michael is a serious Catholic). Shriver kept telling the driver, good-naturedly, that the police shouldn’t block traffic for him, saying that these people would be angry with that gosh-darned Shriver and he would just lose votes. He knew, obviously, that the McGovern-Shriver ticket was doomed to defeat, but he was hugely ebullient and upbeat anyway.

Detroit was in the middle of a controversy over a federal court order requiring cross-district busing of children throughout Wayne, Oakland and Macomb Counties to promote integration. Fearing white backlash, the McGovern campaign wanted an event featuring white people. I was put in charge of advancing an event in which a group of mostly white citizens would describe to Shriver a neighborhood improvement project. It seemed sure to produce good footage on the local news.

But I failed to check on one thing. The local school was not in session because of some teacher training boondoggle. The kids were out on the street to greet Shriver—and all of them were black and in the school band (or some such uniforms). Our event would look entirely different on TV from what we had planned. Shriver was totally unfazed. He took a baton and marched the band (or whatever it was) down the block for the cameras. He talked with the kids and their parents. He had a great time.

I never met Eunice Shriver, but I have been a big fan of the Shrivers ever since. They took the advantages they had in life, and their disappointments as well, and created two great institutions which will live on and serve people and enrich America for many, many years to come. The Peace Corps and Special Olympics share an important characteristic: they encourage and enable people to do things that they and those around them might have thought impossible. Peace Corps volunteers are empowered to spend two years living and working in a foreign country. Special Olympics participants are empowered to achieve measurable goals. Both teach the lesson that we can exceed limits that seem imposed on us.

All of us should shed a tear for Eunice Shriver, and for Sargent Shriver too, a tear of happiness and gratitude for what they have given their country and the world.

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Michael Barone

The Cause of the Financial Crisis in One Picture and 222 Words

By Michael Barone

June 1, 2009, 5:37 am

Take a look at this graph showing the sharp rise in the number of Alt-A and subprime mortgages from 2004 to 2006, and scroll back and forth on the other graphs in the Clusterstock.com presentation. Then read this article by my colleague Peter Wallison. Concentrate particularly on the following passage about the role of the GSEs, the government-sponsored enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac:

The GSEs’ purchases of all mortgages slowed in 2004, as they worked to overcome their accounting scandals, but in late 2004 they returned to the market with a vengeance. Late that year, their chairmen were telling meetings of mortgage originators that the GSEs were eager to purchase subprime and other nonprime loans.

This set off a frenzy of subprime and Alt-A mortgage origination, in which—as incredible as it seems—Fannie and Freddie were competing with Wall Street and one another for low-quality loans. Even when they were not the purchasers, the GSEs were Wall Street’s biggest customers, often buying the AAA tranches of subprime and Alt-A pools that Wall Street put together. By 2007 they held $227 billion (one in six loans) in these nonprime pools, and approximately $1.6 trillion in low-quality loans altogether.

From 2005 through 2007, the GSEs purchased over $1 trillion in subprime and Alt-A loans, driving up the housing bubble and driving down mortgage quality. During these years, HUD’s regulations required that 55 percent of all GSE purchases be affordable, including 25 percent made to low- and very low-income borrowers. Housing bubbles are nothing new. We and other countries have had them before. The reason that the most recent bubble created a worldwide financial crisis is that it was inflated with low-quality loans required by government mandate [emphasis added].

There it is in a few sentences. The proximate cause of the financial crisis was not deregulation but bad government regulation. Blame belongs to both political parties, but especially to Democrats who in 2005 blocked in the Congress a Republican measure to limit the GSEs’ speculation in mortgage-backed securities. Had that passed, the GSEs would not have been able to purchase anything like the $1 trillion in nonprime loans they purchased from 2005 to 2007 and not nearly so many of those mortgages would have been originated.

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Michael Barone

Charlie Crist, Party Lines, and Campaign Finance Reform

By Michael Barone

May 13, 2009, 6:50 am

A lot of nonsense has been written about campaign finance regulation over the years. Now comes a small book with a lot of good sense on the subject, Better Parties, Better Government: A Realistic Program for Campaign Finance Reform, by AEI’s Peter J. Wallison and Brooklyn Law Professor Joel M. Gora. Wallison and Gora take aim at a particularly pernicious feature of the existing scheme of campaign finance law, the prohibition of cooperation between candidates and parties. As they point out, this, like so many other provisions of campaign finance law (including some of the too few that have been thrown out as infringements on free speech by the Supreme Court), is an incumbent protection device. A set of laws that are defended as protection against special interests gives a disfavored position to the one institution that is most impervious to special interests, the political parties. And the political parties, as Wallison and Gora note, are the one institution with incentives to challenge incumbents. If we want a campaign finance system that encourages robust competition and holds incumbents accountable, we want the political parties to have a major role in collecting and distributing money, instead of the subordinate role they now have.

As it happens, in the political news this week there is an item validating one of the authors’ arguments, below:

The new role we predict for parties of course raises the question of whether the parties will begin to dictate officeholders’ positions—that is, whether parties, using their new-found clout with candidates, will impose a draconian requirement for party loyalty on all votes in Congress. We believe this is highly unlikely. The first interest of parties is in gaining control and keeping control of government through electing legislative majorities. Under these circumstances, they are not going to commit political suicide by insisting on party loyalty on every vote, especially where that vote might cost the party a seat in the next election.

cristAs I note on my Washington Examiner blog, Florida Governor Charlie Crist has announced he is running for the Senate seat being vacated by his fellow Republican Mel Martinez next year, and Senator John Cornyn, Chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, has promptly endorsed Crist. It’s unusual but not unheard of for a party’s Senate (or House) campaign committee to endorse a candidate in a primary, but Cornyn evidently decided that Crist’s high poll numbers, among Democrats and Independents as well as Republicans, justified this endorsement—despite the fact that Crist has at least one declared primary opponent, former state House Speaker Marco Rubio, and despite the fact that Crist was a vocal supporter of the Democrats’ stimulus package supported by only three Senate Republicans (one of whom, Arlen Specter, has since switched parties). Cornyn is clearly acting as Wallison and Gora predict party leaders will act, if the national parties had generally the limited ability their Senate and House campaigns have to aid party candidates: he’s trying to maximize the number of Republicans in the Senate, even to the point of endorsing a candidate in the primary who has opposed the party’s position on a major recent issue. I plan to participate in a panel called “Better Parties, Better Government” at AEI on June 4.

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Michael Barone

Detroit Votes for Change

By Michael Barone

May 6, 2009, 4:31 pm

Detroit voters—or at least some 93,000 of them in a city that the Census Bureau estimates has 916,000 people—have elected former Detroit Pistons star Dave Bing as mayor over City Council President Ken Cockrel Jr. This was a special election made necessary by the resignation of disgraced Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, who has gone to jail for various offenses connected with his lies about a sexual affair with a top staffer. detroit2

Detroit will also vote again, in a September primary and November election, to elect a mayor and nine council members for a four-year term. Presumably Bing’s victory makes him the favorite in that contest.

There’s a clear contrast between the candidates. Bing owns an auto supply business and has talked about how Detroit needs to attract more businesses. Cockrel’s father was, when I was involved in Detroit city politics in the late 1960s, an agitator against supposed police brutality, and a fomenter of the anti-anti-crime philosophy espoused by Detroit’s ruinous 20-year (1973–1993) Mayor Coleman Young. High crime, more than anything else, caused the ruin of so much of Detroit, as you can see in these blogs.

When I was in kindergarten in Detroit public schools, the city had 1,849,568 people. Now it’s less than half that. Can Dave Bing turn Detroit around? One can hope, but he’ll face great difficulties.

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