Reflections on primary night: "In the nineteenth century, we were the liberals"

Primary night has come and gone, as has Texas Independence Day, one of my favorite holidays of the year. But before getting to that, I will backtrack a few months to an essay by University of Chicago economist Gary economist Gary Becker on Barry Obama’s crazy job-subsidizing plan. As the Nobel laureate put it,

        The president is aware that efforts will be made to game the proposal, and he proposed various safeguards. However, new ways will be discovered to get around the restrictions that would reduce the net job creating potential. Further efforts to close loopholes would lead the government to become more and more involved in the employment decisions of companies.

Such is entirely what I spent two years in graduate school to learn, but perhaps the most useful line on the page was is in the comments, from one “Jake”:

        Many of Obama's policy proposals (not to mention the very fact that he got elected to the White House) are a testament to the ignorance of the large segment of the electorate who are too young to remember how bad things were under Jimmy Carter. Back in the late 1970s and even into the early 1980s, the government experimented with so-called "targeted job tax credits" for employers who chose to hire unemployed people. For the most part the jobs did not outlast the time period that employers had to keep the new hires on the payroll in order to earn the tax credits.

As I’ve been saying, this guy is Jimmy Carter all over again. The illiberal notions of phony liberals seem sometimes to be intellectual zombies, mindlessly wandering the landscape until we find the presence of mind to drive a stake through their or shoot them in the heads.

So fastforward to this past evening, where I spent the first hour in our precinct convention here in Travis County precinct #273. In this exalted role, I purport to be the leader of all GOP activities in a roughly square mile area. If I had a resolution for 2010, it was to invigorate the neoliberal faithful in Rosedale, and perhaps then in Texas and the world beyond. I say liberal, and that puts off more than a few conservatives, who wonder why I’m such a committed Republican.

I’ll explain. I spent the next several hours at Donna Campbell’s election night party at the Stephen F. Austin Hotel at 7th and Congress, talking to some of our impressive slate of Republican candidates. The only race in which I clearly lamented the outcome was that for the State Board of Education in district 10. We defeated several other paleolithic members of the SBOE, but defeating Ken Mercer proved more difficult that we had hoped. At least, that is, for an opponent—Tim Tuggey—who had recently given money to Democrats. Democrats like Chet Edwards, one of the few in the federal congress to vote against Obamacare. Democrats that we could all use more of, by the way.

The trouble is that the Blue Dogs, those Democrats we respected and wanted to work with, have become few and far between. For as actor John Ratzenberger famously put it while campaigning in Massachusetts for Scott Brown, “this isn't the Democratic party of our fathers and grandfathers. This is the party of Woodstock hippies.”

Our opponents, that is, are no longer the party of Jack Kennedy, who sensibly assailed Ike’s bizarrely progressive, indeed oppressive, income tax regime. Today, our opponents have gotten themselves so far off the rails that they’ve almost ceased to be meaningful opponents. Almost, that is—if we Republicans can recommit to the neoliberal philosophy that defined our party under the leadership of luminaries like Reagan.

“In the nineteenth century,” a candidate told me tonight, “we were the liberals—the people who believed in economic freedom, and not in all this other stuff” that doesn’t play well in Travis County anyway. It plays in certain parts of the Hill Country, or on the plains and in the Pine Country, but that’s not a recipe for building a national movement, whether in Texas or the US at large.

In the long run, the principled moderation of neoliberalism will always outperform the compulsive intervention of nanny-statism. In the long run, Barry Obama will be understood as an embarrassing recycling of Jimmy Carter. In the long run, we can control politics in central Texas. But the long run will come a lot sooner if we’re smart about it. By and large, I’m excited about where the party is going in, and I’m happy to be on board.

Travis is turning Red.

We have word from Travis County GOP headquarters that early voting, here in Travis, is currently running about 40 percent higher in the Republican primary than in the Democratic primary. What's more remarkable is that for years Democrats have outnumbered Republicans in Travis about two-to-one. At least, they did outnumber us. Until now.

Turnout in the primary is also on track to meet or exceed the turnout of the 2008 primary. In Texas, it’s highly unusual for primary turnout in a gubernatorial year to exceed that of a presidential year. It’s a testament, in large part, to how big a tent the Republican Party has become. Just look at our lineup of gubernatorial candidates: there’s considerable difference from Kay to Rick to Debra. I’m a Perry supporter, myself, but I’ll enthusiastically back whoever wins on Tuesday. There are things to like about all of them.

So, things could be a little crazy on Tuesday. I recommend that every vote early—today, the last day of early voting, if that’s at all possible. If I were a Cook County (Illinois) Democrat, I’d recommend voting often too, but we don’t do that sort of thing down here.

In short, folks, Travis is turning Red, or at least purple. The One Party State is coming to an end, competitive politics is returning, and Austin will not be Singapore for long. My work is not done here, but we’re all making great progress.

Leave it to the Democrats to kill the feds' AAA rating.

It’s commonly known by now that Moody’s, the bond rating agency, issued last week a warning regarding the US federal government’s debt. The reports read in part:

        Unless further measures are taken to reduce the budget deficit further or the economy rebounds more vigorously than expected, the federal financial picture as presented in the projections for the next decade will at some point put pressure on the triple A government bond rating.

Or, in plain English, The crazy borrowing of the Obamanistas is unsustainable, and they have their heads in the sand about it. Most deeply buried may be that of Timothy Geithner, the federal treasury secretary. As reported by the Wall Street Journal, when asked on ABC News’s This Week about the prospects of the US losing its AAA rating, he simply said,

        Absolutely not. That will never happen to this country.

How reassuring. At least Mr. Geithner has convincingly Wall Street hair. He further said that the Obama administration was “deeply serious” about deficit reduction. Serious? Really? How about deficit elimination? How about deeply cutting runaway federal spending? How about cutting into income transfer programs? How about slashing away at the intergenerational theft of Social “Security”? If we heard more serious proposals than mere budget freezes, we might be able to take this crowd seriously.

Here in Texas, as some of my more statist friends might point out, we get a lot of our government funding direct from the federal government. Regrettably, we also have to endure mandates from the federal government to spend said money, and our people are still getting taxed for it from far-off Washington, so the effect isn’t as delightful as advertised. It’s part-and-parcel of the obscene largesse foisted upon us by the Washingtonian cabal.

Association with that crowd is offensive not just to Teapartiers and Ronpaulists, but increasingly to a large section of the electorate who doubt that every problem has a federal or international solution. It’s an offense to the basic conservative—and even classically liberal—principle of subsidiarity, and we should take every useful opportunity to tag local Democrats with it. Statism, whether enthused by Democrats or wobbly Republicans, got us into this mess. As we’re cleaning it up, we should be handing them the bill.

Hope and change. Rubbish. Hope is not a strategy. In short, if you supported this crowd, you have some explaining to do.

"With the retraction, the hypothesis that he put forward has been debunked"

I’m writing about vaccines again. Yes, vaccines—for the issue is both newsworthy and important to the party.

Yesterday, the British medical journal The Lancet announced its formal, full retraction of its infamous 1998 article, "Ileal-lymphoid-nodular hyperplasia, non-specific colitis, and pervasive-developmental disorder in children," by Andrew J. Wakefield, S.H. Murch, A. Anthony, et alia. The paper purported to find a link between the measles- mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine and autism in young children; almost immediately, that tenuous finding was criticized in the pages of the same journal. As one correspondent from the County Durham Public Health Department in the UK wrote,

        This anecdotal reporting of a biased sample is poor science and has no place in a peer-reviewed journal... The anger of public health workers at this paper is not due to the challenge of public health dogma, as Wakefield suggests. It is because children are being put at risk from potentially lethal infectious diseases not by new reliable evidence but by media coverage of another badly designed study by this group.

It seems, after all, that Wakefield and his crew cherry-picked a sample of just twelve kids, and then drew blood from them at his son’s birthday party. That’s not exactly high science.

The Wall Street Journal’s story on this today is particularly revealing. In part, it notes that

        "the retraction of this paper doesn't mean that MMR doesn't cause autism and it's all a farce," said Wendy Fournier, president of the National Autism Association. It is "possible" that the MMR vaccine causes autism, she said, but "the science is not there in terms of the mechanism." The concern is that measles virus has been found in children's intestines after vaccination, said Ms. Fournier.

Fair enough, but as the WSJ quotes Greg Poland, professor of medicine and infectious diseases, and director of the vaccine research group at the Mayo Clinic,

        "With the retraction, the hypothesis that he put forward has been debunked"

That is, we also haven’t proven whether donuts and coffee might or might not cause autism either, but that doesn’t mean that one should avoid breakfast at Krispy Kreme. (Well, at least not for that reason.) In short, what Andrew Wakefield and his colleagues produced was over a decade of hysteria about a mythical danger, and that has endangered lives.

So, what does this have to do with the GOP in Travis County, Texas? As I’ve written before, there’s a dangerously anti-intellectual streak in the GOP today, and particularly in some factions that hang about the GOP here in Travis County. Whether it’s axe-grinding about the gold standard or something they call “world-class science standards,” the crankiness is particularly noisy. That’s bad for the unwanted attraction brought upon us by our vague and distant association with the weirder fringes of the movement, such as it is.

What’s particularly bad for us on this count is that Wakefield actually lives and works here in Austin. Proximity may account for the intensity of feeling locally about such a thoroughly debunked idea. His minions and strap-hangers may be whispering this stuff in the aisles at Whole Foods, but that doesn’t mean that we should continue to accord this viewpoint any prominence in our platforms or policies. The Lancet has moved on from this brief-but-inglorious episode in its history. The Travis County GOP needs to do so as well.

"A libel-slinging cheap-shot protectionist prevaricator": on running anti-intellectualism out of the GOP

As I mentioned to a number of people this week in a widely distributed e-mail message, I’ve really done it now. I’ve been mentioned in the American Spectator.

Not, of course, for any of my frequent anti-Obamanista tirades that you’ll find here, but for a relatively dispassionate economic analysis in my day job—my small advisory firm that works largely in the arms industry. If you don’t read the American Spectator, rest assured that there’s nothing dispassionate about it. The article by Quin Hillyer starts with the sentence

        U.S. Representative Todd Tiahrt is a libel-slinging cheap-shot protectionist prevaricator.

I called myself had already called him a protectionist, which from a present-day Chicago Boy like me is pretty damning, but I laid off anything nastier. Hillyer cites Tiahrt’s article in Human Events (another publication accustomed to the hyperbolic) by the title

        “EADS = Corruption”

Charming character he. For those not deeply involved with the federal military budget, the whole matter centers on the fight between Northrop Grumman and EADS (the parent organization of Airbus) on the one hand, and Boeing on the other, over the KC-X competition, the US Air Force’s effort to replace its rather aged KC-135 Stratotanker refueling aircraft. Tiahrt makes some charges about EADS’s business practices that are borderline libelous, and in any case, unworthy of a federal congressman; Hillyer, for his part, pays me this compliment:

        Do read this analyst, James Hasik: After what is manifestly a thoughtful, full, independent analysis, he concludes that “There may be better strategies for tanker replacement than split procurement, but there are clearly worse ones as well.” (Read his footnotes, too, for guidance to other articles on this issue that reach the same conclusion.)

This gets me to another conclusion, one to which my periodic mentions-in-dispatches have led me. Quite contrary to what some have repeatedly tried to tell me over ten years of managerial advisory work, people like those footnotes. They like the detail. They like the full, dispassionate analysis. How do I know this? The frequency with which I get quoted in the press varies almost directly with the academic intensity, even the length, of what I write.

This column, of course, is not about scaring up clients (though any reading this are encouraged to write), but about scaring up support for reform and energy within the GOP. What’s so annoying to me is about Tiahrt is that he’s a Republican—a libel-slinging, cheap-shot, protectionist Republican from Kansas, where so much is wrong, of course—but he’s still part of our party. Repeating lines like these—

        In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, former CIA Director James Woolsey stated that bribery is an established part of European corporate and government culture

indicates how little homework he is bothering to do. European corporate culture? Everywhere? To be sure, there are a few countries in Europe lacking in transparency, but just for example, little is rotten in Denmark these days. Please.

In short, we need to run this cheap-shot, sound-biting horse hockey out of the party, because too many voters are too smart for that. Apart from the CAPS LOCK crowd, serious discussion counts for more than one thinks. Voters may not have a lot of time, but the time they have had better not be wasted. Having been burned on the cheap “hope and change” lines of the Obamanistas, a large tranche of the electrorate is now looking for someone who can seriously propose how to radically restructure government without tossing out the pursuit of useful outcomes. Formulating the policy requires serious thinking, and selling the policy on requires serious talking.

So, to make that happen, here’s my advice to GOP candidates, particularly in central Texas, about how not to perpetuate this dangerously boneheaded appearance that some wings of the party have developed over the past few years:

Try not to use the word conservative three times in every paragraph. It’s all well-and-good to identify one’s self ideologically, for a lack of ideology leaves one in the position of Captain Louis Renault, blowing with the wind, even when the prevailing wind happens to be from Vichy. That sort of pragmatic weaseldom is what leads legislators to vote year-after-year for fabulous unbalanced budgets, because their lack of imagination and conviction precludes serious action. As a matter of marketing, it’s not helpful to advertise one’s candidacy solely with a slogan, particularly to the point of Capitalizing it mid-sentence. Tell the voters—even in the GOP primary—something useful on which they can make a decision.

Don’t yammer on about tax cuts without identifying offsetting spending cuts. This was tolerable under Reagan, when the real threat of the Soviets made a little crazy borrowing tolerable—the resulting military build-up convinced Gorby that he couldn’t compete, and his half-way attempt at reform brought down the whole Evil Empire. Under the Bushes (H.W. and just-W) it was pointless and craven. Under Obama, it has gotten so out of control that the whole edifice is about to come crashing down. If we’re to be to pick up the pieces, and in the process assume control of government, we need to have practical plans for making way. Tell voters what you really mean to do, and punish your opponents when they try to dodge the issue. If we can’t get this one right, we’d all be better off living on the Moon.

Don’t pander to the nut-jobs. Keep a good distance from the anti-NAFTA crowd and its incoherent babbling about a North American Union, Freemasons, and those black helicopters (I know—that’s SO 1993). And, if you are off the reservation, just let us know. For example, try not to obfuscate your intent with lines like world class science standards. If you’re enough of a crank to want to teach creationism in the classroom, just say so. We’d at least respect your honesty, and then we could distance ourselves from you so that our friends don’t laugh at us. Seriously.

Put some serious discussion of policy on your website. Even if the fairly useless television news staffs don’t have time to read and report, broadcast is oh-so 20th century. If you’re a serious candidate, have something serious to say for serious people who have time to think. If you want them to go out and influence others, give them the ammunition they need for the fight.

Is Howard Dean just plain insane? Some further thoughts about the Audacity of Elitism

Continuing my point from a few days ago about how Barry Obama’s comments about the special election in Massachusetts are either loopy or profoundly arrogant, I must say that this particular Vertmonter is sadly off the rails. If you haven’t seen the interview with Chris Matthews, watch it now. Howard Dean thinks that Massachusetts citizens voted to put Scott Brown in the federal senate because they wanted to “send a signal to Washington”. Sure—but the tortured logic of how Dean thinks that’s good for his crypto-socialist wing of the Democratic Party is an impressively self-delusional feat of mental gymnastics.

Indeed, it’s hard to imagine a politician sounding sillier on MSNBC—unless that’s our own Kirk Watson here in Texas. What’s the link between these events? Kirk Watson had nothing to say on MSNBC two years ago because Barry Obama had nothing to offer but arrogance—the arrogance that eventually produced a sharp backlash against his 2000-page bomb of a healthcare regulation bill. Today, he’s making the same mistake in thinking that he can plow through his troubles with more of his trademark hot air.

Barry, like his nudgy Chicago friends Cass Sunstein and Dick Thaler, make their elitist livings presuming that the average person is too stupid to make his own decisions, short of occasionally sending nonsensical signals. Ah—they might say, that’s why we need to provide paternalistic guidance to the masses. From a party with up-is-down, down-is-up, Keynesian instincts, that’s almost to be expected.

We Republicans can naturally and effortlessly do better. It’s in our nature to presume that Joe the Plumbers, Ranchers, or Interior Designers can be expected to act decently and in their own interests, and that any failure to do is a useful factor in the discipline of the market. Repeatedly, if implicitly, denying that is what has now gotten the Democratic Party in serious trouble, and driven its centrists running for cover, and a sensible compromise on regulatory reform in healthcare. And we plan to capitalize on that.

Extending a personal invitation to any Oregonian business that wants to come to Texas

And why would they want to come? It’s simple. As the Wall Street Journal reports this morning,

        Oregon voters approved two special tax measures Tuesday designed to close a $733 million state budget gap. With 91% of the vote counted, Measure 66 garnered 54% of ballots and Measure 67 received 53%, the Associated Press reported...

        Measure 66 increases Oregon's personal-income-tax rate by two percentage points for households earning over $250,000 a year. Measure 67 calls for an increase in the state's minimum corporate income tax, currently $10 a year, and imposes a tax on gross revenues for corporations that don't report a profit.

As one of the folks offering comments below the article put it, “Oregon has chosen to follow the California model,” and in a few years, the economy there “will be bleaker than the weather. Consider this the institutional state version of aggressive panhandling.” Over the next few years, the net effect will be further emigration out of Oregon, and to next-door Washington State in particular, which has neither a personal nor a corporate income tax.

So, as the leader of all GOP activities in the my roughly square mile area, I’m extending a personal invitation to any Oregonian business to consider coming to Texas. Our weather and our economic outlook are a heck of a lot better, and it’s just a much more affordable place to live. For excepting that awkward business margins tax, we don’t tax by capitation either.

How do we manage that? Well, contrary to what Barton Smith of the University of Houston’s Institute for Regional Forecasting told USA Today last month, Texans really are smarter than people elsewhere—or at least than Oregonians who vote for higher marginal taxes. Similarly, we’re not so brainless as to think that anyone can spend his way out of a recession. I’ve repeated this elsewhere, and I’ll say it again. Anyone cranky enough to still believe in unreconstructed Keynesianism is liable, as Luigi Zingales of the University of Chicago put it last year, to tell a recovering alcoholic to drink a few glasses of red wine per day, because it’s said to be good for long-term health.

Barry Obama, of course, follows that advice. Of course, after his loopy comments the other day about how Scott Brown got himself elected to Ted Kennedy’s old senate seat because people in Massachusetts were angry at George W. Bush, we have reason to question whether he’s all there. If the US had a westminster system of government, ambitious Democrats in the federal congress would have good reason to think about a no-confidence motion. Moving now might just save them a few seats. In Oregon, they may have a ways to go before they turn their heads around. As we just saw in Massachusetts, though, we in the GOP can now get solid candidates elected almost anywhere.

For all I know, Cindy Sheehan probably doesn't like toll roads either.

It’s what a GOP friend of mine in Missouri calls “the moronic ravings of an obvious lunatic”—Cindy Sheehan’s attempt to lead a protest the other day over the current war in Afghanistan and Pakistan outside Dick Cheney’s house in Fairfax County, Virginia.

That’s right: Dick Cheney’s house. Anyone sense that Cindy’s not all there? Someone in the Democratic Party might grab Cindy by the shoulders, look straight into her glazed-over eyes, and tell her that Dick Cheney isn’t still the Veep. That’s Joe Biden, at least for about the past year. So, if she thinks that using remotely-controlled aircraft to kill bomb-chucking misogynist whackjobs is somehow “cowardly” and “immoral”—her words—then she should lead her protest outside Number One Observatory Circle.

Naturally, I’m not suggesting that she lead her protest outside Barry Obama’s abode at 1600 Pennsylvania. He’s the guy actually leading the war, telling the Air Force’s generals to dispatch its drones to dispatch those scum. He’s the guy calling those lethal shots, right? So, if she really had a problem with it, she could directly her opprobrium there, no? Oh, definitely not—for to do so would be to criticize the Great One, her Chavez, the savior of her would-be movement, who has turned out to be many things, but not the pacifist that she and her kind had hoped.

It’s easy to feel bad for Cindy: she lost a son to the noble cause of ridding Iraq of Saddam and the murderous cabal around him. Coming to terms with that could be difficult for just about anyone. What’s harder is to imagine what’s going through her mind these days—what must be an the intense sense of betrayal over a pair of wars that she has built a career, such as it is, opposing. But from this confusion a lesson can be drawn: The most loyal Obamanistas, the ones who beat the bushes and flogged the Bushies to get out the vote in 2008, are feeling profoundly left out in the cold.

Across the states, that’s pointedly noticeable this month in health care. The more successful trade unionists are torqued that their “Cadillac” insurance plans might get taxed to pay for benefits for their less successful brethren (and so much for solidarity). Here in Texas, there’s a fascinating quandary shaping up for the leftists. How will populist agitators deal with Bill White, the likely Democratic gubernatorial nominee, as comfortable as he seems to be with toll roads? As many conspiracy theories as they’ve hatched over Governor Perry’s interest in tolling Texan roads, how will they react to this former federal deputy energy secretary who’s bound-and-determined to solve greater Houston’s air quality and congestion problems with a little sensible demand management? It will be fun to watch the teeth-gnashing.

As a current GOP campaign manager put it to me a few months ago, there’s no reason to cede issues to the Democrats. Theirs is not the party of education; that’s the GOP. The Dems, rather, are the party of the teachers’ unions. We’re the only hope for injecting enough freedom into the publicly-funded system to make a difference. Ours is not the party of business;, theirs, however, appears after bailout after bailout to be the party of well-connected, rent-seeking business. Ours is the party of the market, the very basis of economic freedom—it is they who are happy to cajole and nudge people into all sorts of officially blessed behavior, regardless of preferences or efficiency.

In short, people in Travis County have a serious independent streak; fortunately for us, a lot of the Democratic Party doesn’t.

Smug love or tough love—what future for rail transit in Travis County?

Melanie Trottman and Josh Mitchell’s article in this morning’s Wall Street Journal has, at first glance, a sufficiently innocuous title: “New Transit-Funding Rules Make Streetcars More Desirable”. Streetcars—what’s not to like, eh? We here in Travis County might not get worked up about those poor commuters from Williamson who think that it’s reasonable to drive an hour down IH-35 from their Round Rock McMansions to downtown Austin, so we can feel free to concentrate on facilitating transportation crosstown, rather than from out-of-town. Streetcars can run off windmills and solar cells and biomass, right? (Punch me, I feel so green.) Frankly, I’d rather ride my bicycle to work (as I’ve done many times in my career), but hopping on a well-scheduled, clean, quiet train with my coffee and the paper is theoretically a pretty compelling alternative to handling a car through traffic.

If only the analysis could stop there. Leave aside for the moment the relative wisdom of building a still-to-enter-service light rail system for a city of just 600,000 people where no one rides the buses, and assigning its management to a quango as badly run as Capital Metro, an organization that covers not ten percent of its operating costs from fares. Fares! You know, those payments from customers that indicate the actual economic value of a service? Instead, simply consider how the rules are being changed, from bad to possibly equally bad.

As Trottman and Mitchell put it, the Bushies had required that local governments “evaluate projects based largely on reducing commuting times at the lowest possible expense”. The Obamanistas, however, will be leading them towards “evaluating projects based on the environmental, community and economic-development benefits, as well as on congestion relief.” That sounds good, and arguably, the old rules were pretty narrowly written. The trouble is that the new ones could be hopeless vaguely, and thus easily politicized. That gets to the problem of far-off DC’s involvement in local anything: when bureaucrats start putting their thumbs on the scales, all sorts of crazy decisions get made. Monies get taken through taxation from rural and small-town residents, and funneled to urban dwellers for transit projects, whether anyone is going to ride the rails or not. That’s an embarrassingly direct transfer of wealth from the many to the few, and often, the politically well-connected and rent-seeking few. Worse, if your local government doesn’t apply for the funds, because it doesn’t like the rules (witness the three-way concurrence in last night’s GOP gubernatorial debate) it’s not as though you get a refund on your taxes. Taxation is supposed to deliver a public good, but that’s just uncompensated coercion, plain and simple.

Now, there are those who will argue—doubtlessly like Barry Obama, his transportation secretary Ray LaHood, and much of the Travis Country Democratic Party—that only the federal government today has the financial capacity to fund projects like this. If so, that’s just further indication of how ill-advised the process really is. By endlessly shoving its bills into the future, Mr. Obama is, to a degree even worse than that of George W. Bush, setting the federal government up for either a serious constriction of its ability to fund anything, or an eventual default on its loans. Gordon Brown has led the United Kingdom further along this path, and the results are already not pretty. In the long run, the folks in Washington might find themselves running just a big version of Ecuador. Booyah to them—and least then they’ll finally have to stop spending like sailors on shore leave.

Back here in Texas, it’s a fine thing to patronize public transportation, and by either meaning of that phrase. If you really think it’s a good idea, then get on, pay your fare, use that wifi, and head to work. In Travis County, though, the low rate of actual bus ridership suggests that most of transit’s supporters prefer the other meaning: that green sense of smugness that higher sales taxes bring them. If that’s the real objective, then at least keep it local, folks. This cognitive dissonance of car-driving transit advocates makes high political involvement even less helpful, as its renders impossible sensible formulation of useful federal policy across the eighty metropolitan areas (and yet more municipalities) in the US that might want to share in this largesse. As a matter of economic efficiency, it’s thus impossible to justify the very existence of the Federal Transit Administration.

That is, rather than another heat sink for so-called stimulus, intracity transportation is primarily a local issue, and metropolitan transportation is at most a statewide issue. For Texans, and pointedly for Texans in Travis, this principle is a matter of both sovereignty and efficiency. If we are to benefit from being one of the United States, then we’d better start insisting that federal funds not be used for state purposes. That was the whole point of the 10th amendment to the US constitution, even if it’s clear that no one in DC —least of all on its high court—has cared about that in at least seventy years. If we really want rails in Texas, then we ought to have the decency and intelligence to insist that each state manage its problems for itself, and seek solutions appropriate to its situation without federal funding or rule-making. The Obamanistas would like to nudge us into better behavior from on high, but as someone should tell Cass Sunstein, as a noun pronounced slightly differently, that word is a rather unflattering moniker.

Who the heck is David Barton?

A few weeks ago, I wrote about my lack of enthusiasm for Ken Mercer, our Republican incumbent in seat #5 on the State Board of Education (SBOE), and how I planned to speak up for his challenger, Tim Tuggey. I should point out that my precinct doesn’t even sit in district #5, but that Ken’s ideological bent on the SBOE has been sufficiently annoying to me that I’m willing to cross a few geographical boundaries to make some impact.

It turns out this week that Ken’s enthusiasm for creationism in the classroom wasn’t the end of my trouble with his agenda. Yesterday evening, his campaign sent around the announcement that

        For the record, I appointed Historian David Barton as my expert reviewer of the History standards.

        Mr. Barton is perhaps the most recognized and requested speaker and author on history in America. He spent eight years as an educator and school administrator and has received many awards including Who's Who honors, two Angel Awards for excellence in media, and the [Daughters of the American Revolution’s] George Washington Honor Medal.

        David Barton has spoken to numerous state legislatures, consulted with both state and federal legislators on various bills, and has written amicus briefs in cases at the U.S. Supreme Court.

        His collection of over 1,000 documents that came from before 1812 is one of the best historical collections in the world. Barton also served on the Texas Social Studies TEKS writing team eleven years ago.

        The fact that my lawyer-lobbyist opponent, Tim Tuggey, is attacking me for appointing David Barton reflects my opponent's own liberal bias.

Ah, that lawyer-lobbyist rub again. Ken seems to have a problem with lawyers—or is it lobbyists? And as I mentioned last time, someone needs to talk to Ken about grammatical and stylistic standards in English: historian isn’t exactly a professional title, like professor, so it shouldn’t be capitalized before a person’s name. (He’s a member of the board of education, after all.) But more on that later.

I must note that I’m not an expert myself on educational standards in history. That said, I do know a little bit about history in general. History was one of my two majors in my bachelor’s work (Duke University, 1989, by the way), and I’ve even co-authored a book on one narrow subject in history and current affairs (The Precision Revolution: GPS and the Future of Aerial Warfighting, Naval Institute Press, 2002). So, I was a little taken aback when this guy was described as “perhaps the most recognized and requested speaker and author on history in America.” I had never heard of David Barton.

A quick check of Google Scholar strongly suggests that he’s not a leading light in peer-reviewed historical or educational research—some of the things that might confer upon him the moniker historian or expert. OK, I thought, maybe he’s a widely read popular historian. But folks like Arthur Schlesinger and Stephen Ambrose show up in Google Scholar, and it’s not as though the Angel Award or the George Washington Honor Medal is the Pulitzer Prize.

David Barton does have an author’s page at Amazon, which conveniently lists fourteen books that he has written:

• Original Intent: the Courts, the Constitution, and Religion, Wall Builders Press, 2008
• Separation of Church and State: What the Founders Meant, Wall Builders Press, 2007
• The Question of Freemasonry and the Founding Fathers, Wall Builders Press, 2005
• Four Centuries of American Education, Wall Builders Press, 2004
• A Spiritual Heritage Tour of the U.S. Capitol, Wall Builders Press, 2000
• The Second Amendment: Preserving the Inalienable Right to Individual Self-Protection, Wall Builders Press, 2000
• Benjamin Rush: Signer of the Declaration of Independence, Wall Builders Press, 1999
• Impeachment: Restraining an Overactive Judiciary, Wall Builders Press, 1996
• A Guide to School Prayer and the Religious Liberty Debate, Wall Builders Press, 1995
• America: To Pray or Not to Pray, Wall Builders Press, 1994
• Setting the Record Straight: American History in Black and White, Wall Builders Press, 1994
• America’s Godly Heritage, Wall Builders Press, 1993
• The Myth of Separation: What is the Correct Relationship between Church and State?, Wall Builders Press, 1992
• What Happened to Education, Wall Builders Press, 1989

Notice a pattern here? I might be all in favor of impeaching more judges and walking the landscape heavily armed, but that doesn’t have much to do with educational standards in high school history. The problem is that David Barton clearly has an axe to grind. Even if one likes his particular bent (and I don’t), he is very focused on a single subject: the role of religion in American life before 1812. If he is to be put forward as an expert on educational standards, then can it be said that he has a well-informed view on what Texan students should learn about history in the world outside the United States? How about what they should learn about Texas history? Or fields of history that don’t necessarily center on the religious principles of American statesmen in the 1770s—or what David Barton thinks those were?

As I noted above, I’m not the expert. What’s very clear from an hour of digging is that David Barton isn’t either. For that matter, I might not know much, but I’d probably do a far better job reviewing curricular standards than he simply because I’d take the trouble to call the people who might know something about the subject. It’s not as though we’re lacking that expertise in Texas: the College of Education at the University of Texas at Austin is said to be one of the best anywhere, and it’s a PhD-granting institution. Certainly one of its many graduates could be described as an expert on education. David Barton is just a guy who has self-published fourteen apparent polemics without wide peer review. Surely Ken could have found someone with an actual background in history or education to fill the role of “expert reviewer”—if he had but bothered.

A little more probing around the Internet also indicates that there are people who have considerably nastier things to say about David Barton than I do. But staying quite apart from that, we can simply focus on the question of how to formulate and pass good public policy under our distributed system of government-by-commission here in Texas. I’m a big fan of that approach, but it does require attention to the business of the commission. My problem with Ken is that he’s pursuing narrow ideological objectives at the expense of the both education in Texas and the continued political success of the Texas Republican Party. And for those two reasons, he needs to go.

Oh, and could we use a highly experienced classroom teacher with a PhD in education from UT on the SBOE? Sure we could. So check out Rebecca Osborne, a GOP candidate for seat #10. From what I can tell, she has kids’ success firmly in mind.