I’ve thought for a while that the thing that shipwrecked President Bush’s second term was the decision to kick it off with an attempt to reform Social Security.  It was brave, because this badly needs to be done (I’ve never talked to anyone in my generation or younger who thinks we’re going to get Social Security when we reach retirement—there seems to be widespread agreement that the program’s going to collapse before we get the chance), but it was also politically stupid, because it gave the Democrats all sorts of chances to beat him up.  There simply wasn’t the political will to address the situation, or any sort of constituency already in place for the effort.  If he’d spent a couple years building that constituency and creating a sense of urgency while he worked on other things, it might have gone somewhere; as it was, all it did was burn all his political capital and leave him defenseless when Katrina hit and Iraq went into reverse.In light of that, it was interesting to note last week that the President appears to agree with me, telling Cal Thomas that if he could do one thing over, he would have given up Social Security and gone to work on immigration reform instead.  As he told Thomas, border security is a real and significant issue, as is the fact that “a system that is so broken that humans become contraband is a system that really needs to be re-examined”; while the political will wasn’t there to address the looming issue with Social Security, “because generally legislative bodies don´t react until the crisis is upon us,” even when they know it’s coming.It’s a good interview of the sympathetic sort, and worth your time to read.

Given Barack Obama’s thorough immersion in the Chicago machine, and the number of other simmering issues around Democratic politicians such as Bill Richardson and Charles Rangel, quite possibly.  Of course, since these will be Democratic scandals, the lemming media (aka the Democratic Party PR department) won’t feel the need to shove them down our collective throat as they did with the likes of Mark Foley and Larry Craig; rather, they’ll try to keep these all as quiet as they can and play them down as much as possible.  Democratic scandals are isolated incidents; only Republican scandals reveal a “worrisome pattern of conduct.”  That’s the rule, from the LM’s point of view.  Never mind that the whole Democratic approach to politics is to increase the power of government, which is only going to feed and broaden opportunities for political corruption.  Now, I’m certainly not claiming any kind of moral superiority for the GOP here, merely trying to make the point that one can’t do the same for the Democrats either; if memory serves, the last four presidents have all come in promising a more ethical administration, and while I do think W.’s administration managed a better record that way than his predecessors, that’s not to say they did a good job.  The truth is, whenever money and power are in play, some people are going to bend morally, including a few in truly alarming ways, and some will break off altogether.  The content of your principles will always come in second to the content of your character; if your character is such that you violate your principles, it doesn’t really matter much in the end what those principles were.  That said, I do think the Baseball Crank has a point worth considering about the logical consequences of a big-government philosophy:

Contemporary liberal/progressive ideology stresses, at every turn, that government officials should be given an ever-increasing share of public money to control and disperse, and an ever-increasing role in telling people and businesses how they can use the money and property they are left with. Government officials are, we are to believe, better able to make the ‘right’ decisions about who gets what and how businesses are permitted to operate. . . . In practice, no matter which system is used, it ends up being a short step from believing you have the right and wisdom to direct other people’s property to more deserving recipients and better uses to believing that you are one of the more deserving recipients, and a short trip from telling business how to do its business to telling it who to do business with based on the desire to reward yourself and your friends. The root of money in politics, after all, is politics in money.

In sum, the more you do to increase the amount of money government has to play with, and the degree of power it has over that money, the more you do to provide both opportunity and incentive for corruption.  The apotheosis of this would be the political machine, the entrenched political system based on government money, such as the Democrats in Chicago or Louisiana, or the Republicans in Alaska.  Given that our new president was the political creation of such a machine and has spent his entire political career closely associated with it (and has pulled key staffers from it, including his chief of staff), and given that he and the congressional majority are committed to increasing both the amount of money government has to play with and the degree of power it has over that money, it seems likely that whatever you think of Barack Obama’s personal integrity, there is good reason not to be sanguine about the integrity of his administration.  I suspect that Rod Blagojevich and Bill Richardson will prove to be not isolated incidents, but harbingers of things to come.

This probably shouldn’t have surprised me, but it did, and disappointed me as well:  Nancy Pelosi has proposed rules changes to reverse the House reforms which were put in place as part of the Contract with America, reforms which

were designed to open up to public scrutiny what had become under this decades-long Democrat majority a dangerously secretive House legislative process. The Republican reform of the way the House did business included opening committee meetings to the public and media, making Congress actually subject to federal law, term limits for committee chairmen ending decades-long committee fiefdoms, truth in budgeting, elimination of the committee proxy vote, authorization of a House audit, specific requirements for blanket rules waivers, and guarantees to the then-Democrat minority party to offer amendments to pieces of legislation.

It would seem that Speaker Pelosi doesn’t want the House GOP to be able to hold her caucus accountable for their actions and decisions, and doesn’t want the public to be able to keep track of what they’re doing; and she certainly doesn’t want the House GOP to have any more input into legislation than she absolutely has to allow them.  Sauce for the goose apparently isn’t sauce for the gander, in her book.  Human Events’ Connie Hair may well be right to conclude,

Pelosi’s proposals are so draconian, and will so polarize the Capitol, that any thought President-elect Obama has of bipartisan cooperation will be rendered impossible before he even takes office.

HT:  The Anchoress

Contra the triumphalism of many liberals—for whatever reason, the Democratic Party in the US has much of the same “Natural Governing Party” view of itself as Canada’s Liberal Party, though it’s spent far less of the past century in power than the Grits—and somewhat despite the ways in which the years in the driver’s seat have pulled the GOP away from its conservative principles, the three decades (give or take) since the Reagan Revolution have seen some major substantive conservative successes and achievements which have brought significant benefits to this country.  Matthew Continetti has a useful brief rundown of some accomplishments of which conservatives can be proud, including welfare reform and decreases in drug use and violent crime.There is one accomplishment he lists, though, which strikes me as possibly double-edged:

In 2002, President Bush named Philip Mangano executive director of the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness. Mangano has spent the last six years pointing out that the way to reduce homelessness is to give people homes. Experts call this the “housing first” strategy. It works. The most recent data show that the number of chronically homeless declined by 30 percent between 2005 and 2007.

One has to wonder, how much of that was only possible because of subprime mortgates?