The convention is on track; hot in LA

View 739 Wednesday, August 29, 2012

It has been oppressively hot in Los Angeles the past few days, and even trivial errands eat up a lot of time. We went to the Hollywood Bowl last night for Carina Burana, which was energetically done by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, The Chorale, and the Children’s Chorale. Well done, and they had some English subtitles to go with much of it. Of course if you’ve read the libretto you pretty well know what words go with what music, but this was the first time I’ve seen it all in context. The baritone Hugh Russell had a great time with the lament of the roasting swan in the tavern section, and soprano Laura Claycomb was charmingly flirtatious in her sections. Nicholas Phan did the tenor parts with considerable gusto.

I can also understand why a few decades ago a prosecuting attorney might think that having a children’s chorus even hear this, much less perform in it, might be an indictable offense. Probably not in Hollywood, though.

Last night’s Republican Convention was snuffed out by Hurricane Isaac, and we have this amusing headline. Apparently there are limits to mainstream media bias. Not many, but apparently there are some.

Yahoo fires bureau chief for Romney/blacks remark

Yahoo News fired its Washington bureau chief on Wednesday, less than 24 hours after he was caught on an open microphone saying that Mitt Romney and his wife, at the Republican convention in Florida while a hurricane was approaching Louisiana, were "happy to have a party with black people drowning." http://seattletimes.com/html/entertainment/2019017552_apuscvnyahooromney.html

Tonight, Condoleezza Rice ‘brought down the house’ according to the Washington Post, with a policy lecture delivered from notes – no teleprompter – that demonstrated that she understands what she is saying. She’s a bit more hawkish and somewhat more inclined to interventionism than I am, but she’s also fairly cautious, as befits a realist. And of course it is important that the United States remain militarily powerful in a dangerous world. As Walter Lippmann used to say, diplomacy for Great Powers is a bit like writing checks – there has to be power in the bank to back up policy.

Foreign policy," wrote Walter Lippmann in 1943 in an oft-quoted phrase, "consists in bringing into balance, with a comfortable surplus of power in reserve, the nation’s commitments and the nation’s power." If this balance exists, the foreign policy will command domestic support. If commitments exceed power, insolvency results which generates deep political dissension. http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/42795/samuel-p-huntington/coping-with-the-lippmann-gap

Santorum and Huckabee made good presentation endorsements, and provided a Catholic and an Evangelical ‘nihil obstat’ to the Romney Ryan ticket. Quite well and subtly done.

The star of the show was of course Paul Ryan. His main task was to make this election turn on economic policy while retaining the image of being nice guy presidential, that the ticket is likable, but they also know how to solve the economic problems. He invoked Jack Kemp and supply side economics as the basis for the Republican program. Ryan was a speech writer for Kemp. I noted that Newt Gingrich was in the audience as Ryan spoke, and seemed quite pleased with what he was hearing, which isn’t surprising since Gingrich began as a Kemp colleague and has always referred to Kemp as a mentor.

We have had this debate before, back in the 1980 election, with Reagan espousing the need for “supply side” economics – lower taxes, more incentives to create wealth – vs. Keynsian ‘stimulus’ economic policies. We will have it again. I need to dig out some of the essays I wrote for that election – many of them are relevant to this day. The notion that you can increase government revenue through lower taxes has been demonstrated several times, but it is usually at first rejected as defying common sense. In fact, though, raising taxes seldom produces the revenue increases expected, while the right tax cuts can often produce an actual revenue increase. They did for Reagan. More on that another time.

So far the Republican convention has done what it was intended to do: show that Romney and Ryan are presidential as well as nice guys, and refocus the election issue on economic progress. Romney has to nail it with his acceptance speech.

I am working on an essay on mercenaries and politics in a republic. Machiavelli pointed out that republics which hire their defense so that the citizens need not serve in the military take great chances, for hired soldiers can ruin you, either by losing a battle, or, perhaps more likely, holding out for higher and higher pay.  The Framers understood that in a republic citizens must take their turns in government office; hiring professionals can be dangerous. And it has become true of electoral politics. If the citizens don’t take part in electoral politics, and leave it to professional consultants, they will find that their political choices are often subject to the Iron Law. This explains some of the rule change fights in the Republican Convention. The Democrats have long handed over control of much of the political process to professionals (I consider union leaders professionals as are political consultants). The Republicans have also done so but to a somewhat lesser extent, but as fewer and fewer citizens insist on taking part, and the work needs to be done – well, that’s the starting point of what I am working on. Taking back your government requires taking back some control of party activities as well. That’s one of the Tea Party functions, and one reason the professional consultants dislike the Tea Party.

Freedom is not free. Freemen are not equal. Equal men are not free.

And you did build that…