By Artur Davis, on Thu May 9, 2013 at 1:30 PM ET The world is still waiting for an unpredictable take on George W. Bush, whose dedication of his presidential library has spawned mostly commentary that can be pegged from knowing the writer’s pedigree: liberals who downgrade Bush for a war he could have declined and a recession he arguably could have avoided, but cite his relative moderateness as proof that today’s Republican Party is caught in a fever; hard-core conservatives lamenting that Bush spent promiscuously and short-changed social issues, and appointed the Obamacare-saving John Roberts; and center-right conservatives observing that Bush at least understood the value of a conservatism that appealed beyond the Republican base. (a point that I have made in past columns on Karl Rove and Jeb Bush).
I’ll forego those arguments for now to make another observation that Bush’s admirers and detractors gloss over: Bush happens to be the rare president who made a practice of being indifferent to the legacy building implications of his office. He said as much on several occasions (and was ridiculed for it) and his comments reflected a mindset which governed largely in the moment with no pretense of a signature governing vision. Consider the many plays this ad hoc style played out.
Where Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan had specific and in their case diametrically opposed conceptions for the long term relationship between the world’s military superpowers, Bush’s foreign policy was really just a stop-gap. He bought into the intelligence that Iraq was a budding security threat, wiped its leadership out, and spent five years massaging the results with little trace of a broader strategic design (the neo-conservative rhetoric about democratizing the Middle East never got much more than lip service from Bush, who easily accommodated the region’s other autocratic regimes). While Ronald Reagan actively sought to dismantle the framework of liberalism, and Bill Clinton and Barack Obama openly attempted to redefine their party and their opposition, Bush seemed notably uninterested in weaving a long term or even distinct short-term ideological blueprint. His signature domestic victory, No Child Left Behind, was technocratic and did not lean hard to the left or the right; the prescription drug benefit was similarly ambidextrous: insubstantial and loophole filled on one hand, the first expansion of Medicare in forty years on the other. And once the drug benefit passed, he barely mentioned it, much less tried to expand it into a template for how a conservative reformer might tackle health care in its broader dimensions.
 Even when Bush overreached, as I argued then and would still argue now, in the way he waged the war on terror, it should not be forgotten that the bulk of what he sanctioned happened in the shadows, without Bush ever outlining in any concrete way a new formulation of American interrogation or surveillance policies. When “caught”, the Bush team, more often than is remembered, either reined themselves in or minimized the scope of their departure from preexisting laws. And Obama’s wholesale adoption of those same techniques, only substituting drones for torture, makes them already look more like another chief executive pushing for more authority than some uniquely Bush based doctrine.
It’s worth remembering that Bush actually tried to preserve an assault weapons ban, but never spoke of it; tried to roll back farm subsidies while doling out new oil subsidies; pinched pennies in specific agencies without even faking a grand deficit reduction strategy. The absence of any memorable Bush speeches on domestic policy is not entirely a function of his famous inarticulateness, but reflects the fact that so few Bush initiatives kept his own administration’s attention.
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Artur Davis: Yet Another Way of Looking at George Bush
By Artur Davis, on Tue Apr 23, 2013 at 10:00 AM ET Give the New Republic’s Adam Winkler credit for laying some of the blame for the collapse of background checks on gun sales not just on NRA sophistry but on a poorly executed, badly timed, overly polarizing campaign by the Obama Administration. As Winkler points out, the over-reach of going after an assault weapon ban boomeranged badly, serving only to galvanize opposition and define even incremental regulations as a wedge to confiscate guns. And the virtues of a go-for-broke strategy, whatever they were, never compensated for the fact that no assault weapons ban had even a remote chance of passing the House.
I would add an additional point that goes much deeper than tactics and the debate over guns. To a degree that could not have been anticipated, and seems doubly odd for a reelected president, Barack Obama smothers his own initiatives. He has the capacity to lend eloquence to his own followers’ views, but no demonstrated ability to organize them behind any cause other than putting him in office. He moves literally no sector of the electorate that didn’t vote for him. His intervention in a legislative fight seems good primarily for preserving gridlock. Obama wins elections but through pathways that close quickly and elevate few specific policy aims: in 2008, a backlash against George Bush’s unpopularity and an airy promise of a post-racial society, and in 2012, a relentlessly negative siege against Mitt Romney. And the country that has elected Obama twice is still split to the core, more so today than when he was a senator signing book contracts. And the deepest splits are more around the country’s perception of Obama than around any singular issue.
None of this means, of course, that there are not a variety of other elements that contribute to the hyper-polarization of the past four years, from the internet’s inevitable pipeline for misinformation, to the continued weight of interest groups like the NRA, to a cable culture that dismisses any efforts by politicians to craft a middle ground as expediency. But it would take an element of willful denial to ignore the fact that Obama occupies the single most divisive space in American politics since Nixon, and that one of the costs is a presidency that is frustratingly weak at persuasion.
It is not too early to wonder if Obama a generation from now looks weirdly like, of all people, Margaret Thatcher: a highly effective campaigner whose victories spun off the unintended consequence of an entrenched cultural opposition, and whose “conviction politics” seem like a relic. Twenty plus years after Thatcherism formally ended, it has been supplanted by a run of center-leaning British prime ministers with a penchant for downplaying sharp ideological rifts. It is not hard to imagine that Obama’s successors won’t be similarly preoccupied with navigating away from the intense divisions of the Obama era.
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Artur Davis: Obama the Polarizer
By Artur Davis, on Sat Apr 20, 2013 at 1:53 PM ET
Who knows what this tortured week in Boston means for the future? After all, the hunting down and killing of Osama Bin Laden hardly lifted America out of the morass that has distorted politics for the better part of five years, not even a little bit. There was agony at the shooting and maiming of a congresswoman while she was attending to her constituents, and the misery of knowing that a child died that day while on an outing to see democracy in action. Those tears haven’t washed any of the anger out of our campaigns, and they haven’t slowed down the denigration of public service.
But permit me one burst of wishful thinking. It goes like this. If only the fanaticism of two brothers who twisted themselves into killers would remind us that America faces threats worse than anything our left or right fear of each other. If only the intensity of the Tsarnaev brothers’ hatred makes the values we clash over, from immigration to gun laws to the weight of government, seem not unimportant but not worth surrendering our civility over, either.
If only both sides of the ideological divide will forego the politics this one time: the fact that one killer turned into a radical under the protection of a student visa, and that another plotted how to sever bodies months after becoming a citizen, tells us much about the unpredictable warp in human souls, but next to nothing about the immigration deal Marco Rubio is trying to save. The agents and officers who wove this case together in four days from thin air can’t be lifted up enough, but spare us any side lectures on sequestration or talking points about the limitations of federalism. Save it for a week that doesn’t keep punching our gut.
If only we could savor one moment, let it be the faces in the crowds gathering in Watertown to celebrate a return to the ideal of being safe in one’s own home. I spent enough time as a student in metropolitan Boston to know that the blacks and whites and browns, and Catholics and Arabs and Jews don’t ordinarily mix so easily on those streets after dark. They often clutch their purses and roll up their car windows, and clench when they see each other. What a striking thing to watch them unclench their mutual suspicions for even a little while. It only took two bad seeds to make those gritty, divided neighborhoods re-imagine the meaning of “us” and “them.”
(A version of this essay was cross-published at Ricochet.com)
By Artur Davis, on Tue Apr 16, 2013 at 10:00 AM ET Rand Paul’s speech at Howard University yielded about what would have been expected. The media focused on the crowd’s tepid reactions. Various liberal pundits dwelled on Paul’s awkward moments: the senator unwisely choosing a “did you know” riff that assumed his audience’s ignorance about certain historical points of reference, while he blanked on the name of Edward Brooke, a Republican who happened to be the only black man in the 20th Century who won a Senate election; and Paul’s tortured effort to contextualize his criticism of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
If Paul was simply showing up as a token of “courage”, the kind of symbolism consultants push on candidates, he deserved the dismissive results he received. After all, at the root of such a strategy is not really bravery, but a cold willingness to use the kids who attended as props whose indifference lets him demonstrate resilience.
Assuming that Paul had a nobler goal, that of actually winning converts among Republicans’ single hardest to crack demographic, African Americans under 29, I would still call it a missed chance, from his perspective as well as theirs, and a reminder of why the gap between blacks and the political right is such a chasm.
First, there was Paul’s fixation on historical alignments that predate his audience’s grandparents. The men and women who heard Paul could have used a primer not on 19th century history or even pre-Voting Rights Act Dixiecrats, but on the GOP’s contemporary pattern of electing blacks, Latinos, and East Asian Indians to governorships or Senate seats. It would have been worthwhile to tell the many southern born black kids at Howard that it is Republicans who put a black man in Strom Thurmond’s old seat.
Paul devoted a lot of time to the dirty hands another generation of Democrats brought to the debate over race. But it would have been much more relevant for Paul to push his audience on why poverty and inadequately funded black school districts stayed so persistent during the decades of Democratic legislative rule in the South, a run that in the states many of Howard’s students return home to every summer, just ended in the last six years.
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Artur Davis: Rand Paul’s Wasted Day at Howard
By Artur Davis, on Thu Apr 11, 2013 at 10:00 AM ET It would not surprise me if there were six votes on the Supreme Court for getting and keeping the federal government out of the business of recognizing marriages. That would mean that when federal benefits and tax treatment turn on what is or isn’t a valid domestic union, that Washington has to defer to the state where a couple resides, and that state’s definition of what constitutes matrimony. It would also mean that the Court refused to put the evolving conversation over same sex marriage beyond the reach of actual voters and state legislatures.
That mixed bag, repealing the Defense of Marriage Act but declining to recognize that same sex marriages are a fundamental national right, would be roughly consistent with how the Roberts Court has navigated politically charged battles: upholding the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate under Congress’ taxing power instead of the more sweeping commerce clause; wiping out the most punitive provisions of Arizona’s immigration law but rebuking the Obama Administration for trying to thwart local law enforcement from sorting out whether criminal suspects even have a legal right to be in the country. To be sure, the high court can look suspiciously like politicians searching for a compromise, but their approach has virtues conservatives relish: appropriate skepticism about Washington’s tendencies to grow by swallowing major chunks of state authority, and deference to a public that still prefers the ballot box and the legislative chamber as the deciding grounds for disputes.
The more unpredictable question is how the left, which has been so ascendant on gay marriage, would react to being invited into a state by state contest that, based on the reactions to last week’s arguments, it is hoping to avoid. I will venture two predictions: first, liberals have probably passed through the easiest part of the fight. To date, their strategy has been one of stigmatizing opposition to gay marriage, and guaranteeing a social and professional price in establishment circles to any contrary point of view. It is a course that has built a narrative in the media and run up a string of victories in heavily Democratic states where social conservatives are suspect. National Republicans, who depend on that same media for oxygen and who have to raise cash in New York, Chicago, and Washington boardrooms as much as Democrats do, have been thrown on the defensive.
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Artur Davis: The Next Round on Gay Marriage
By Artur Davis, on Tue Apr 9, 2013 at 10:00 AM ET Sometimes, a hackneyed, unoriginal argument still has a virtue: in this case, capturing the left’s laziness and mendacity in such an unabashed manner that it provides the perfect occasion for rebuttal. So, consider Ta-Nehisi Coates’ take-down of Ben Carson in the New York Times.
Coates’ theory is that Carson is the latest phase of an eight year initiative, “a Republican plan”, to locate a black conservative to counter Barack Obama. As evidence, the existence of four black men who have flickered in and out of the spotlight during Obama’s ascension: Alan Keyes, Michael Steele, Allen West, and Herman Cain. In pulling together these loose strands, Coates overlooks an array of inconvenient facts—that only one of them, Steele, emerged as the product of any sort of party-wide process; that West openly complains that national Republicans ignored him during his failed congressional reelection; that Cain was about as much a product of a grand Republican strategy as Michelle Bachman, who surged for about as long as Cain did; and that Keyes was not so much hand-picked, more a self anointed sacrifice with a history of parachuting into quixotic races.
The only vague line connecting all four, much less all four and Carson, is their sharing of the same skin color. Coates takes that and runs with it, with the very same snide cynicism that he charges conservatives have practiced in elevating these “Black Hopes of the moment.” It is the left’s usual penchant for dismissing conservatives, with the underlying innuendo that a black conservative’s advancement is a fraud that could never transpire without conspiracy or the hand-out of affirmative action. In other words, the same poison that Coates’ writings routinely suggest is at the root of any right-winger’s skepticism of black accomplishment, from Obama all the way down to the corner office.
I have no doubt that a part of Carson’s appeal is that he is vivid proof that not every black embraces an activist, expanding government. But at the risk of upsetting both Coates’ and Sean Hannity’s narratives, I see Carson more in the vein of, say, a Bill Gates or a Mark Zuckerberg, spectacularly successful achievers whose run of success earns them a public policy stage. That makes Carson not a race pawn, but the beneficiary of a common American archetype of making all purpose experts and role models out of gifted people.
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Artur Davis: Taking Ben Carson Seriously
By Artur Davis, on Tue Mar 26, 2013 at 10:00 AM ET You know, something kept occurring to me as I saw some of the, shall we say, unpleasant commentary about this conference and about this movement.
Isn’t it interesting that the same establishment that claims so piously that it wants more civility and tolerance in our politics has no problem degrading and demonizing Americans who just happen to be conservative?
They want desperately to put this cause in some graveyard; I’m told the president’s inaugural speech had the working title “the country I would build if half of America would just disappear”. They try so hard to paint the beliefs in this room as some quaint, outmoded brand of ignorance.
So this needs to be said: there are about 43 million of us who answer to the name “conservative”; we don’t own any Hollywood studios, the mainstream media may think we are out of fashion, but this is the single biggest voting bloc, this is our America too and we are not going anywhere.
Deriding conservatives may be the last acceptable prejudice, but sneers can’t erase the truth: first, you don’t lift up people at the bottom by pulling other people down, and every place that has tried that path has turned out its own moral lights and gone down into the darkness.
We cannot own our future when we live off the credit of countries who want to dominate us; and freedom is neither tired nor exhausted: it is just tired of not being defended.
So, can we bring to a close this season of pundits who don’t want Republicans to win telling Republicans how to fix this party?
Now that does not mean that we don’t need to be frank with each other. So, I want to be blunt about what we did and did not do in this last race: first, for voters who look at the world the way we do, we made an impeccable argument.
For most people who have had the blessing of building a business from nothing, or who have found a way to punch through Washington’s obstacles to make their companies work, we made an effective case that no government in the modern era has ever fought harder to put a penalty on success.
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Artur Davis: CPAC 2013 Speech
By Artur Davis, on Thu Mar 14, 2013 at 10:00 AM ET “When freedom does not have a purpose, when it does not wish to know anything about the rule of law engraved in the hearts of men and women, when it does not listen to the voice of conscience, it turns against humanity and society.”
It is unlikely that any major American political figure would say anything like the statement above: to be sure, its terms would seem much too opaque to trust to the dissection of the press or the blogosphere. But its skepticism about liberty for its own sake would be even more disturbing than its loftiness. For example, a Democrat would find the implications dangerously ambiguous for the socially libertarian philosophy that flourishes on the left. A Republican would see any caveat about the value of freedom as potentially at odds with the right’s propensity for describing freedom as the commodity most at risk from Barack Obama’s brand of liberalism.
Then, for good measure, consider these two quotations:
“Faced with the tragic situation of persistent poverty which afflicts so many people in our world, how can we fail to see that the quest for profit at any cost and the lack of effective responsible concern for the common good have concentrated immense resources in the hands of a few while the rest of humanity suffers in poverty and neglect. Our goal should not be the benefit of a privileged few, but rather the improvement of the living conditions of all.”
“The promotion of the culture of life should be the highest priority in our societies…If the right to life is not defended decisively as a condition for all other rights of the person, all other references to human rights remain deceitful and illusory.”
If the initial quotation seems unusual terrain for an American candidate, it is literally impossible to imagine in our political culture that the last two quotations could come from the same source. A wrenching description of economic inequality would be the province of an Obama style liberal who would never venture into the sensibilities of the pro-life movement, while it would be just as implausible that a social conservative would spend time blasting the wealth gap.
All three of these quotations happen to be words uttered, and echoed constantly, by Pope John Paul II, the pontiff whom a substantial number of Catholics would be happy to recreate in the form of Benedict’s successor. Of course, they (combined with the equally unlikely blend in our campaigns of entrenched opposition to both gay unions and militarism) are also the established positions of every single contender for the papacy in the coming weeks.
This amalgamation of viewpoints that American politics renders incompatible calls to mind a recent column by the New York Times’ Ross Douthat. He argues that the decline in the ranks of American Catholics prefigured the disappearance of Catholicism as a domestic electoral force. It’s an indisputable point that can be enlarged into a broader set of observations: first, rather than being just a symptom of that decline, the fact that the elements of Catholic orthodoxy are such an imponderable mix to American voters has contributed to its weakening.
 Arguably, today’s versions of the left and right tend to be organized around mutually reinforcing bogeymen. Liberals regard social conservatism as a species of the exclusionary policies that they associate with Republican free market rhetoric. The right links the dependency that it fears from big government liberalism with the permissiveness of a rights-based culture. Viewed from either lens, the Vatican mix of Tony Perkins and Elizabeth Warren sounds weird and contradictory, and American Catholics steeped in the ecosphere of the modern left and right must see Catholicism as just as irrelevant to politics as church doctrine against divorce and contraception is to their sex lives.
Second, I generally agree with Douthat’s point (and Rick Santorum’s intuition) that a socially conservative, populist toned coalition, what he calls the “Catholic synthesis”, would actually resonate with a considerable swath of the electorate. It’s a conclusion worth pondering for liberals whose presidential victories in recent years haven’t lifted the ranks of self identified liberals much beyond 25 percent, and who have written off appealing to downscale white southerners who lean populist on economics but right on social issues. The same goes for social conservatives who are unable to make inroads in territory that ought to be friendlier, like the Hispanic parishes and black churches where Bible based social policy and economic redistribution are typical sermon material.
The point is not that either camp might plausibly trade its economic and social guideposts, much less that a candidate could ever fund or organize a race that adopted wholesale the Catholic vision: but in the persistent gridlock that is contemporary politics, Democrats and Republicans missed chances to consolidate their victories with overt movement toward the traditions they currently ignore. I’m considerably more skeptical than Douthat about a comprehensive worldview emerging but there is ample space for both camps to expand by assuming more modesty about their ideological certainties.
Democrats need not become official skeptics of gay equality or abortion to acknowledge the legitimacy and the continuing public appeal of notions of morality that conflict with their own views; or to admit that personal freedom detached from responsibility is corrosive; or to show much greater tolerance for the proposition that, say, abortions based on gender or occurring in the third trimester are morally indefensible.
Republicans need not morph into class warriors to show greater sensitivity to the fact that free markets do sometimes leave behind human wreckage, and that some of the losers are morally upright people whose responsibility still hasn’t kept them afloat.
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Artur Davis: Catholicism and the American Middle
By Artur Davis, on Tue Mar 12, 2013 at 10:00 AM ET Chris Christie has conservative admirers left, and I’m hardly the only one. The Christie following on the right includes much of the audience that heard him at the Reagan Library in 2011, delivering what stands then and now as the sharpest, best rhetorical critique of Barack Obama’s contribution to Washington’s divided ways.
It takes in social conservatives who know the isolation of living inside hostile lines in the Northeast, and who have relished a voice that defends unborn life and opposes same sex marriage and can do so without resorting to condescension or seeming stuck in a time warp.
The camp also includes critics of what public sector unions have done to bloat state budgets, and what teachers unions have done to make teaching the least accountable public service, and who recognize that Christie has tamed both forces in a state where they traditionally make politicians cower.
I will claim conflict of interest on the question of whether Christie ought to speak at the upcoming CPAC event (full disclosure, I am one of what an MSNBC reporter called the developmental league of lesser talents who will speak at the convention: it’s a chance to hone our meager skills before a small intimate gathering!) But the broader question of whether Christie helps strengthen the Republican coalition is not really close. While lacking Mitt Romney’s capacity to write a $3800 check, I’ll cast the same vote in favor of Christie’s relevance and his potential.
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Artur Davis: Defending Christie
By Artur Davis, on Mon Mar 4, 2013 at 1:30 PM ET The Supreme Court may be on the verge of striking down Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, which mandates federal approval, or “pre-clearance”, of any changes to election procedures in states under the Act’s jurisdiction (mostly Southern, but some scattered northern jurisdictions, primarily in New York). It could be a mixed triumph for conservatives—a blow against a regionally discriminatory rule of law that limits Virginia and South Carolina from passing statutes that are perfectly legal in Kansas and Indiana—but a victory that will only fuel the impression that the political right is bent on suppressing minority voters.
Conservative legal activists would have been better advised to concentrate on doing away with or revamping the other elements of the Act that actually do much more damage to the proposition of a color-blind politics. Ending Section 5 would be explosive, and still won’t alter the Act’s evolution from an instrument of black voter participation in the South to a prescription for rigged districts that look exactly like spoils and quotas.
The VRA is a textbook of generally worded terms that subsequent courts and career bureaucrats have reshaped. It’s entirely appropriate command that covered states refrain from passing election laws that discriminate against their minority citizens has been swollen into a requirement that minorities be aggregated into legislative and congressional districts that are overwhelmingly dominated by their race. Even a slight rollback of the percentages, say, from 65 percent to 58 percent is prohibited on the theory that such a contraction “dilutes” the minority vote.
The effect is that in the Deep South, black voters influence politics solely inside their centers of gerrymandered influence: the numbers that remain elsewhere are not substantial enough to create authentic swing districts where Republicans might have to seek black support to win. In the same vein, the nature of nearly seventy percent black districts is that their elected officials are just as un-tethered from the need to build coalitions with conservative white voters.
Not surprisingly, black Democrats and southern Republicans have not complained. The South that results is the single most racially polarized electorate in the country and its African American politicians are hemmed into a race-conscious liberalism that marginalizes them statewide. In addition, more conservative black Democrats and Black Republicans are rendered unelectable in minority districts that leave no room for a non-liberal brand of candidate.
Conservatives ought to recoil from an anti-discrimination principle shifting into a mini political apartheid. Rather than condone a de facto spoils system, they should be trying to undo an arrangement that is more bent on electing a certain kind of black politician than on empowering blacks to engage the democratic process.
This article originally appeared on ricochet.com on February 27, 2013.
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