The question is: why?

It can’t be because she was a great secretary of State. She did travel more miles (956,733) to more countries (112) than any of her predecessors. She handled herself on public occasions with poise and dignity, speaking almost always in measured tones.

But what did she accomplish? Other than speaking forcefully for the rights of women — who are probably now more endangered than ever in the Muslim world — it’s hard to name a single foreign policy breakthrough that the Obama administration or its chief diplomat has achieved.

Palestinians and Israelis haven’t even been brought to the negotiating table, let alone moved toward peace. Russia and China are at least as hostile toward the United States as they were in 2008, and more assertive. Iran is closer to having a nuclear weapon. North Korea is more belligerent. Iraq is becoming an Iranian ally.

The “Arab Spring” is replacing pro-Western despots with anti-Western despots. We are about to abandon Afghanistan to the Taliban. And in Syria, either the brutal Assad regime will survive, an ally of Iran and Hezbollah, or the resistance, now dominated by Sunni jihadists, will win.

And then there is Benghazi, Libya. Gregory Hicks, the former No. 2 man in the Libyan embassy, testified that he called Clinton at 2 a.m. to report that the U.S. consulate was under terrorist attack and that his “jaw dropped” when Obama, Clinton and U.N. Ambassador Susan E. Rice said that a video caused the riot. Now, he said, he’s been demoted for talking.

In 2016, Clinton will certainly be able to claim that she has more foreign policy experience than any of her Democratic or Republican rivals. But she won’t be able to say she achieved much of anything.

The post Hillary’s Foreign Policy Record Isn’t Much to Crow About appeared first on Pennsylvania Avenue.

Coursera, the university-based distant-learning system, has just announced it’s going to help K-12 schools, too.

There were hundreds of new digital ideas on display at the summit. Also, charter-school operators offering competition to public school systems — which can make them better if they will rise to meet the challenge. There’s even now a New Schools Venture Fund providing money for startup charters in poverty areas.

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush’s Foundation for Excellence in Education, has published a Digital Learning Report Card rating the states on how well they are taking up the new opportunities. The leading state? Utah, reddest of the red.

Meantime, the Common Core standards idea was adopted to correct the problem that, according to the ACT test, only about 25 percent of college seniors applying for admission were actually ready for college work.

The Common Core was a creature of the state governors, later backed by the Obama administration’s Education Department. Both George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind program and Obama’s Race to the Top allowed states to set their own standards for what kids learn.

States often low-balled to look good. The Common Core is designed to have all kids learning a world-class curriculum, starting with reading next year. Of course, high standards are a threat to people mired in mediocrity, so there’s now pushback against them from the left and right.

Twenty-odd years ago, the idea of getting computers in the classroom was deemed the perfect fix for what ailed American education. It wasn’t. But  digital learning, plus charters, plus Common Core really could be the combination that makes us, finally, no longer a nation at risk.

The post Online Learning Ideas Get Needed Boost From State Educators appeared first on Pennsylvania Avenue.

The hope lies in digital learning, in new schools that challenge the old kind and in the adoption by 45 states of a “core curriculum” whereby kids across the country will be taught what they need to succeed in the 21st century.

Last month, I saw some of the bright (potential) future on display in Scottsdale, Ariz., at the Education Innovation Summit, where hundreds of for-profit and nonprofit entrepreneurs displayed dazzling new techniques and devices for bringing K-12 education out of the 19th century.

It’s also encouraging that at least one of the teachers unions, the American Federation of Teachers, is gradually accepting the idea that educators should be judged and at least partly compensated on the basis of their students’ progress.

Alas, American K-12 schools still are miles from where they need to be — as demonstrated in the latest of literally thousands of reports written since “A Nation at Risk” famously asserted that if a foreign nation imposed our school system on us, we would regard it as an act of war.

Ever since 1983, education reformers have been at war with advocates of the status quo — especially the unions, but also public school bureaucracies — over, among other things, whether schools can be expected to overcome the burdens that poverty puts on kids.

Top charter schools such as Kipp Academies long ago showed that good teaching and high expectations could help the poorest kids succeed. There just aren’t enough of them to help all the kids and parents who want them.

This new report, from the reform group America Achieves, now shows that American 15-year-olds, even in the second-highest quarter of family income (average, $90,000 a year), rank 15th in science among 32 industrialized countries, 24th in math and 17th in reading.

But that study also showed that middle-class high schools such as Woodson High School in Fairfax, Va., and poverty schools such as North Star Academy in Newark, N.J., can match the highest-ranked academic performers in the world — Shanghai, China and Finland.

The great news from Scottsdale — you can follow it on edsurge.com — is that digital technology is coming to the rescue with dazzling educational programs such as Dreambox, which tutors kids in math and makes it fun; Teachscape, which helps teachers improve their classroom performance (disclosure: my wife is on its board); and Accelerated Reader, which helps kids learn to read.

More on these in my next post.

The post Digital Learning Offers U.S. a Path Out of Its 19th-Century Mold appeared first on Pennsylvania Avenue.

And it’s being conducted not by an ad-hoc “gang” — useful as those are when responsible leaders won’t act responsibly — but by the two people most in charge of the subject: House Ways and Means Chairman Dave Camp, R-Mich., and Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont.

The two wrote a joint op-ed in The Wall Street Journal on April 8 committing themselves to producing overhaul legislation, which Camp’s office says he hopes will be out of his committee by the end of the year.

They appealed for public input by Tax Day, and Camp’s office said it received 1,300 submissions, the fruits of which are supposed to be analyzed by the Joint Committee on Taxation next month.

Now that Baucus has announced his retirement from Congress, presumably he has motivation to establish as part of his distinctly mixed legacy a wholesale repair of what he and Camp called a “broken” tax code.

As every taxpayer knows, the system is wretchedly complex. The legislators said it requires six billion hours of document work each year and more than $170 billion in expense for accountants and lawyers, or 15 percent of total tax receipts.

Moreover, as most taxpayers suspect, the system is wildly unfair, with some corporations and individuals escaping payment of any tax at all, with more than $400 billion a year less taxes being paid than are owed and with some industries paying a far lower tax rate than others. Mining, for example, averages 18 percent, while wholesale and retail trade pay 31 percent.

The tax system distorts economic decision-making. Instead of openly spending money, Congress has written $1.3 trillion a year of tax breaks into law. In the case of individuals, these breaks are available to those who itemize, but not to those (usually with lower income) who don’t.

Camp and Baucus said they planned to produce a tax overhaul that would put “regular families on a level playing field with those who can pay high-price tax advisers.” That’s good.

They said they’d agreed that a tax overhaul would “result in a system that is as progressive as the current one” and “close special interest loopholes to help lower rates.” That’s good, too.

What they did not say is whether they intend to raise more revenue than the current code does — an estimated 16.7 percent of gross domestic product this year against outlays of 22.7 percent.

They should, but it will be the subject of a huge fight, one of many the project entails.

Where they seem to be heading is a model like the historic 1986 tax overhaul that lowered the top individual rate from 50 percent to (effectively) 33 percent and the corporate rate from 48 percent to 34 percent, closing dozens of loopholes to accomplish the feat.

As Wall Street Journal reporters Jeffrey Birnbaum and Alan Murray recount in the one of the best legislative histories ever written, “Showdown at Gucci Gulch,” a tax overhaul was deemed impossible to achieve when Sen. Bill Bradley, D-N.J., first proposed it in 1982, and it nearly died multiple times before it finally passed, 292-136 in the House and 74-23 in the Senate.

Arrayed against the measure was practically every powerful interest group in Washington, represented by the highest priced lobbyists in town.

Yet the project succeeded because President Ronald Reagan was behind it and the leaders of Congress, dubious though some of them were, thought they could not fail to produce something.

Now, it’s going to be even more difficult than it was then, as scholars John W. Diamond and George Zodrow wrote in a 2011 study for the Baker Public Policy Center at Rice University.

“The political climate seems more polarized than in the earlier era, so that a higher level of leadership, statesmanship and bipartisanship will be required to achieve reform,” they wrote.

Moreover, in 1986 the tax burden on individuals was cut by 8 percent at the expense of corporations, which were given a lower rate but paid roughly $150 billion more in taxes.

Now, it’s widely agreed, the U.S. corporate tax rate is too high — 35 percent, second highest in the world — which suggests that businesses can’t pay the bill for individuals.

Finally, it’s going to be hard for President Barack Obama to play the leadership role that Reagan did in the 1980s, in as much as Obama is seen by Republicans as having a redistributionist, soak-the-rich tax policy.

So Baucus or Camp is going to have to play the role of Bob Packwood, the Senate Finance chairman, who — at a moment when it seemed that special interests had strangled a tax overhaul — came up with a radical, loophole-closing measure that passed the Senate 97-3.

A radical proposal this year might be the X tax, championed by Alan Viard of the American Enterprise Institute. It’s a progressive consumption tax that businesses would pay on their cash flow and individuals would pay on the difference between their income and their savings.

A tax policy rewrite clearly is one of the most difficult tasks Congress could take up; it’s complicated, contentious and ridden with special-interest influence. But if Camp and Baucus can pull it off, it will go a long way in redeeming the image of Congress.

The post Full Steam Ahead on Tax Overhaul, Thanks to Camp-Baucus Duo appeared first on Pennsylvania Avenue.

Congress, of course, had no role whatsoever to play in Boston, and the Senate’s failure to pass gun legislation favored by almost 90 percent of the population only justifies its low public esteem (maybe the right word is contempt).

The Pew Research Center last week published a poll showing that 62 percent of Americans have a favorable view of their local government and 52 percent of their state government.

In both cases, those numbers are down somewhat from a decade ago, when 67 percent were happy with local government, 62 percent with state government.

But the drop for “the federal government in Washington” was more precipitous — from 64 percent favorable in 2002 to 33 percent.

I doubt the reputation of the FBI, which performed so superbly last week, was ever that low, since the annual Gallup survey of confidence in various national institutions puts the police almost up with the military in national trust (58 percent for the police, 71 percent for the military).

The FBI’s Boston field office, at least, lived up to the national trust bestowed on police. If it develops that FBI headquarters in Washington botched warnings of Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s jihadist connections, it might only deserve the respect accorded the rest of the federal government.

Meantime, the Gallup poll showed that confidence in the presidency is down to 37 percent, but only 13 percent of Americans had “a great deal” (6 percent)  or “quite a lot” (7 percent) of confidence in Congress. Fifty-two percent had “very little” confidence in Congress, or “none.”

The Senate’s failure to pass any gun bill last week — even one of the weaker background check amendments offered — fully justifies that opinion. On top, of course, of its persistent failure to deal with the national debt, pass a budget or improve the jobs picture.

I think Congress has one last chance to redeem itself. There are bipartisan proposals at hand on immigration reform. Sensible Republicans know they are dead demographically if they don’t get good with Latinos. If, under those circumstances, Congress can’t solve this national problem, the “no confidence” index should approach 100.

Could the stunning performances in Boston of local and state governments, and federal law enforcement officials maybe inspire (or embarrass) Congress into doing something right? Alas, probably not.

The post Congress AWOL From Boston Bombing Case — Thankfully appeared first on Pennsylvania Avenue.

Remember all the 2008 Democratic-primary fuss about whether undocumented (or illegal) immigrants should be able to get driver’s licenses? Utah solved the problem by granting them Driver Privilege Cards, which can’t be used as identification at airports but do entitle holders to be able to buy auto insurance.

Republicans in Congress so far have blocked passage of DREAM legislation to give legal status to people brought to the United States illegally as children. And lots of them gripe that President Barack Obama has taken executive action to have immigration enforcers not chase such people unless they have committed crimes.

But Utah has done what it can for its DREAMers, allowing them to pay in-state tuition rates at public colleges. It’s one of just 12 states that do so.

Republicans should note that, among those dozen states, four others are bright red politically — Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma and Texas.

Utah also passed a law in 2011 to create its own guest worker program — allowing undocumented residents to obtain permits to get jobs in the state. According to Utah Speaker Becky Lockhart, implementation of the law awaits the Obama Justice Department’s granting a waiver of federal immigration law. Even if the administration is hoping for passage of nationwide immigration changes, it surely ought to allow Utah to give its undocumented citizens this break.

The state’s policies have been heavily influenced by the Utah Compact, a declaration of principles drawn up in 2010 by the Salt Lake City Chamber of Commerce and blessed by the Mormon church. It declares that “immigrants are integrated into communities across Utah.”

The compact also reads: “We must adopt a humane approach to this reality, reflecting our unique culture, history and spirit of inclusion. The way we treat immigrants will say more about us as a free society and less about our immigrant neighbors.”

It’s too bad 2012 GOP nominee Mitt Romney didn’t heed his church’s view instead of advocating “self-deportation” of the undocumented and opposing DREAM as a “magnet” for illegal immigration. He might have done better than 27 percent support among Latino voters.

Republicans in Congress could do worse than to follow the lead of one of their most conservative states.

The post Red-State Utah Offers an Object Lesson on Immigration appeared first on Pennsylvania Avenue.

That’s because a comprehensive bill granting a path to citizenship for the 11 million undocumented residents of the United States is likely to be weighed down with so many conditions and complexities — waiting periods, proofs of taxes paid and years worked, denials of public benefits, border security certifications — that it may not do much for most of the people it’s designed to help.

And it will be the target of so much flak that it may bring down other reform provisions with it.

By all means, the Senate and House gangs of eight trying to come up with a comprehensive bill should see how far they can get.

The good news is that, for many reasons, comprehensive reform has its best chance of passage in years. Polls indicate that 70 percent of all voters favor legal status — even eventual citizenship — for the undocumented, including more than 60 percent of Republicans, according to the Pew Research Center and Fox News.

After the 2012 elections, Republicans — at least the rational ones — are concerned that their party will never again win a presidential election if they don’t “get good” with Latino voters.

And President Barack Obama presumably would rather have immigration reform as part of his legacy rather than see Republicans commit demographic suicide, tempting as though that might be.

On the other hand, there are already signs of trouble. Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., who briefly looked like the champion of reform, is showing signs of cold feet. Six GOP senators on the Judiciary Committee want to slow-walk immigration legislation even as Obama says he wants to speed it through.

And while the National Rifle Association came out guns blazing (as it were) on day one against new firearms legislation, the nativist lobby on immigration — FAIR, Numbers USA, the Center for Immigration Studies and the Colcom Foundation — has only begun to whip up a frenzy against “amnesty” for “lawbreakers.”

And then there’s the House Republican Conference, which likely will yield to the basest elements of its base and block any comprehensive bill.

So as a precaution, members of Congress who want to improve the immigration system ought to think about an alternative agenda — a combination of measures more likely to pass than comprehensive immigration reform. Such as the DREAM Act for people brought to this country illegally as children, expansion of H1B visas for highly skilled foreigners, green cards for those earning science and engineering degrees from U.S. universities, temporary visas for low-skilled and agricultural workers, and expedited processing for those applying for legal entry.

House Judiciary Chairman Robert W. Goodlatte, R-Va., has suggested that immigration should be handled piecemeal. Democrats should have a quiet talk with him.

The post Where’s Plan B on Immigration? Better Have One Soon appeared first on Pennsylvania Avenue.

On the other hand, LaPierre has these points in his favor: enforcement of existing gun laws is not consistent, as Syracuse University TRAC reports show. And every jurisdiction ought to adopt the NRA’s Project Exile, whereby a criminal using a gun gets automatic extra jail time.

But as David Brooks opined in The New York Times this week, the response to gun violence has been excessively focused on banning guns, not on policing. As he said, “the sad fact is that gun acquisition is probably the link on the killing chain least amenable to influence.”

“Past efforts to control guns have not dramatically reduced violence,” he added. “The Gun Control Act of 1968 and the Brady Act of 1993 and the Assault Weapons Ban of 1994 all failed to reduce homicides significantly.” He cited studies from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Arizona State University and the University of Cincinnati.

Better is what’s going on in Bloomberg’s own New York City.

As Heather Mac Donald wrote in The Wall Street Journal last year, New York’s pro-active policing policies probably have saved the lives of 10,000 black and Hispanic men since 1993 — a number based on the fact that blacks and Hispanics made up 79 percent of the decline in homicide victims since 1993.

“Blacks were 62% of the city’s murder victims in 2011,” she wrote, “even though they are only 23% of the population. They also made up a disproportionate share of criminals, committing 80% of all shootings, nearly 70% of all robberies and 66% of all violent crime, according to crime reports filed with the NYPD by victims and witnesses, usually minorities themselves.

“Whites, by contrast, committed a little over 1% of all shootings, less than 5% of all robberies, and 5% of all violent crime in 2011, even though they are 35% of New York City’s population. Given where crime is happening, the police cannot target their resources where they’re needed without producing racially disparate stops and arrests.”

In New York, police commanders are held responsible for changes in the murder rate in their areas and homicide has dropped 80 percent there, as Brooks observed.

What works in New York would work in, say, Chicago, now the nation’s murder capital. But the NYPD’s tactic — 684,000 cases last year of stopping people, questioning them and sometimes patting them down — is being challenged in court as racially discriminatory. Stop and frisk might be more diplomatically conducted, but because blacks and Hispanics are the most frequent victims of crime, it’s also in their communities’ advantage.

The bottom line is: Universal background checks are good. So, probably, is limiting magazines. These aren’t violations of the Second Amendment; not even the NRA objects to outlawing machine guns and bombs.

But if we really want to stop gun violence, the one proven answer is more and better policing. Bloomberg and LaPierre may detest each other, but they’re both right on that score.

The post Why Bloomberg Is Right and LaPierre Is Wrong (Part II) appeared first on Pennsylvania Avenue.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York, who’s under fierce liberal attack for his city’s aggressive and effective “stop and frisk” policy, could make common cause with the NRA on some of its ideas. LaPierre should give Bloomberg credit for some of his.

Specifically, LaPierre was right to say that the best response to horrors like the Newtown school massacre would be to increase the presence of armed guards at schools. There already are armed guards and metal detectors at many inner-city schools prone to violence — not to mention, at airports, the U.S. Capitol and every other federal building in Washington. Why not at schools?

President Obama actually has proposed — and the NRA should support — spending $4 billion to keep 15,000 local police employed, $14 million to train police to respond to active-shooter situations and $150 million to hire 10,000 “school resource officers” — probably mostly counselors and social workers, but also police.

I’d go even further in LaPierre’s direction: Encourage every school to have at least one staff member (teacher, assistant principal or cop) who’s armed and trained to use a gun to respond to an attack. The guns should be well-secured, for sure, but it certainly would be a deterrent to a would-be killer to know he’s not hitting a completely “soft” target.

The post Why Wayne LaPierre Is Right and Bloomberg Is Wrong (Part I) appeared first on Pennsylvania Avenue.

So, can the GOP find a way to play Santa again? It’s hard to do on the tax side because Obama has kept rates low for everybody but the top 1 percent and the GOP, fighting fiercely for the 1 percent, only magnifies its Scroogish image.

Actually, some bright conservative writers have proposed good ideas recently. Rich Lowry of National Review, writing in Politico last week, suggested that, in the politically entrepreneurial spirit of Kemp, the party come up with 10 ideas for promoting work in America, advancing welfare reform, replacing (not just obliterating) “Obamacare” and making college affordable.

AEI’s Ramesh Ponnuru, in The New York Times, suggested reducing payroll taxes on ordinary workers, expanding the child care tax credit and lowering health care costs by altering the tax break for health insurance by letting people pocket the money they save buying cheaper plans.

Ponnuru also suggested that there’s no reason the GOP has to insist on a balanced budget in 10 years — which involves slashing domestic spending — when just getting spending on a downward glide path will suffice.

I think the GOP needs to do more: stand for providing all kids with the best education and job training possible, investing efficiently in infrastructure and expanding research. Also, it should be cutting away business tax loopholes to lower the corporate rate and figuring out what to do about global warming instead of denying it’s happening.

The GOP needs more than “rebranding.” It needs to figure out what to say “yes” to.

The post GOP Needs to Say ‘Yes’ More (Part II) appeared first on Pennsylvania Avenue.

George W. Bush played Santa on two fronts, cutting taxes and increasing spending. (Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call File Photo)

Among the Republican Party’s many problems, perhaps the biggest is: what should it be for? Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush correctly pegged the issue in his Conservative Political Action Conference speech — “stop being the anti-everything party” — but didn’t have much to offer as an alternative.

The party has confronted this problem before and met it. It was encapsulated in 1976 by the brilliant, erratic journalist-activist Jude Wanniski in an essay, “Taxes and a Two-Santa Theory,” published in the long-defunct Dow Jones newspaper, National Observer, but available here thanks to historian-economist Bruce Bartlett.

Wanniski argued that Republicans had embraced the role of Scrooge while Democrats had the pleasure (and political benefit) of playing Santa Claus, using government to dispense goodies and redistribute income. Republicans, fixated on balanced budgets, either constantly just said “no” or, in those days, insisted on raising taxes to pay for the Democrats’ spending. In a battle between Santa Claus and Scrooge, Santa wins, he wrote.

Wanniski, the chief popularizer of supply-side economics, advised that the GOP become the “Santa of tax-rate reduction” and economic growth. He served as guru to then-Rep. Jack F. Kemp, R-N.Y., who fought courageously with conventional “root canal” Republicans and finally triumphed when President Ronald Reagan adopted and then passed Kemp’s proposal to bring the top individual tax rate down from (can you believe it?) 70 percent to 50 and then (in the Tax Reform Act of 1986) 28 percent.

What ensued was a burst of prosperity that lasted from 1983 to 1992, got Reagan re-elected and President George Bush elected and, arguably, benefited even President Bill Clinton, who raised the top rate to 39.6 percent but did not challenge other aspects of supply side economics, notably a reduced tax rate for capital gains to inspire investment.

Then George W. Bush played both Santas at once, cutting tax rates twice, waging two unpaid-for wars, expanding Medicare and vetoing not a single appropriations bill for six years. He, too, got re-elected, but he doubled the national debt.

Republicans in Congress went along with the game — until, of course, President Barack Obama got elected and out-Santa-ed Bush on the spending side, redoubling the debt. The GOP rediscovered fiscal responsibility in a big way, but the party is sounding like Scrooge again, forever saying “no” or “cut.” (And, on social issues, Republicans often sound like the grand inquisitor.)

Check back Tuesday for part II of this post: Can the GOP find a way to play Santa again?

The post GOP Must Transform From Scrooge to Santa (Part I) appeared first on Pennsylvania Avenue.

But, if the high court decides to strike down laws against same-sex marriage — including California’s Proposition 8 and the federal Defense of Marriage Act — no church will be forced to perform such marriages. This will be a civil matter that religious institutions will be free to bless or not, as they choose.

And, theologically, as Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, put it so well, “ultimately, for me, it came down to the Bible’s overarching themes of love and compassion and my belief that we are all children of God.”

The fact is, Jesus had nothing whatever to say about the subject. Biblical condemnations of homosexuality are contained in the Old Testament, especially Leviticus, and in various letters of St. Paul, who listed it with numerous other sins — adultery, fornication, etc. — that conservatives have long since given up trying to control by law.

To be biblically faithful, they’d have to advocate putting gays to death (Leviticus 20:13). Then, again, they’d be obligated to offer them Christian forgiveness, too. (Hebrews 12:7).

The next conservative objection is that a decision legalizing gay marriage would be an act of judicial overreach and a breach of the principle of federalism.

This isn’t a trivial case — though I can’t see how the court, on equal-protection grounds, could possibly sustain Article 3 of DOMA, which denies federal benefits to legally married gay partners that are available to heterosexuals.

Personally, I think marriage equality is a constitutional right. But I could see the court refusing to strike down the results of California’s 2008 popular referendum — especially since it passed then by just 52 percent and would undoubtedly be reversed in a new referendum today.

I could also see — though not agree with — a conservative majority sustaining DOMA’s grant of authority to the states not to recognize other states’ legalization of gay marriage.

That would perpetuate a crazy-quilt system across the country — only nine states plus D.C. recognize gay marriage; the rest don’t — but the clear drift of public opinion is toward tolerance. So, over time, only fewer and fewer states would be left not permitting gays to marry.

Which brings us to the major reason Republicans don’t want to do the right thing — the fact that 69 percent of Republican voters oppose gay marriage. GOP politicians either are representing the views of their base — or are afraid of its retribution.

But, Republican leaders really ought to be afraid of other numbers. According to a Quinnipiac University poll, all groups destined to dominate the political future are pro-gay marriage: Hispanics, 63 percent to 32 percent; young voters, 62 percent to 30 percent; college-educated whites, 59 percent to 32 percent; and white women, 50 percent to 40 percent. The GOP will have to take action on immigration to erase its suicidal standing with Hispanics, but perhaps its leaders should hope that the Supreme Court gets it out of trouble on gay marriage.

The post Gay Marriage (Part 2): A Different Kind of Blowback Awaits GOP appeared first on Pennsylvania Avenue.

The Supreme Court may take the issue out of politics if it decides that marriage equality is a constitutional right. Portman said he hopes it won’t, apparently fearing a repeat of the decades of tumult that followed the court’s Roe v. Wade decision on abortion in 1973.

My guess, though, is that this is different. If you believe that life begins at conception, then every abortion is, at best, a case of manslaughter. You can’t not fight it.

When gays are allowed to marry, however, no one gets hurt. Quite the contrary —people who love each other are allowed to make a life’s commitment and to receive the legal protections that accrue to married persons.

And, despite the claims of conservatives (and asserted in the 2012 Republican platform), the institution of marriage is not undermined, either.

Gays represent just 4 percent of the U.S. population. How can their joining an institution possibly undermine it, especially when heterosexuals have done so much to damage it already?

Apparently, it is not true that 50 percent of all marriages end in divorce. The best estimate I can find is 41 percent, but that’s bad enough. And then there is the even more disturbing fact, explored at length this weekend in The Wall Street Journal  that 41 percent of U.S. births occur out of wedlock — just 12 percent among college graduates, but 83 percent among high school dropouts.

Now that is something for people concerned about the institution of marriage to worry about, and to start figuring out how to reverse. (I don’t think that dismantling the U.S. Department of Education, an idea cheered at the Conservative Political Action Conference last weekend, is a move in the right direction.)

To be continued…

The post Gay Marriage (Part 1): Conservatives Have More Important Things to Worry About appeared first on Pennsylvania Avenue.

But I was struck by some of the contents of his 1977 pre-presidential speech at that venue — words current attendees might well heed if they want the movement and the Republican party to prosper in the future, not fall off the right edge of the earth.

The speech was delivered with the GOP at one of its lowest points ever — with the presidency just lost and Democrats holding 60 Senate seats and a two-thirds majority in the House. Typically for Reagan, it was an upbeat declaration that there was really a conservative majority in the country and that a “New Republican Party” could consolidate it and win elections. Which, of course, happened just three years later with Reagan’s landslide victory, bringing in a Republican majority in the Senate.

Contemporary conservatives will have their hearts warmed anew by much of the speech — an eloquent ode to limited government, low taxes and family-oriented social conservatism. But Reagan also called for outreach and inclusion of a type that most tea party/Club for Growth/Jim DeMint conservatives — even Mitt Romney — now don’t accept, to the party’s long-term political peril.

As for Romney’s belief that the GOP couldn’t reach 47 percent of Americans — the “takers” — Reagan said:

“The New Republican Party I envision will not be, and cannot be, one limited to the country club, big business image that, for reasons both fair and unfair, it is burdened with today. The New Republican Party I am speaking about is going to have room for the man and woman in the factories, for the farmer, for the cop on the beat and the millions of Americans who may never have thought of joining our party before, but whose interests coincide with those represented by principled Republicanism.”

Reagan didn’t urge just “making room” for them. The GOP, he said, should “welcome them, seek them out, enlist them, not only as rank-and-file members, but as leaders and candidates.” Now, it’s true, he then wanted to attract them based on their conservative social views. And, today, it might be said, tea party populists are well represented among the demographic he was talking about.

In February 1977, Reagan was still pretty much a conventional conservative on economics — deficit-minded, not a supply-sider. What really won over working-class voters (also young people) to the GOP was his adoption in 1979 of the tax cut policies of Rep. Jack Kemp, R-N.Y., the ultimate outreach conservative. “Reaganomics” ended hyperinflation and restored prosperity. The top tax rate dropped from 70 percent to 28 percent and the result was 18.5 million new jobs created over an eight-year period.

Reagan told CPAC that “when a conservative states that the free market is the best mechanism ever devised by the mind of man to meet material needs, he is merely stating what a careful examination of the real world has told him is the truth.” CPAC attendees ought to spend serious time figuring out how to fashion a message (and policies) that will make people believe it again. After the Crash of 2008, presided over by George W. Bush, they don’t believe it.

What was even more stunning for a CPAC audience in 1977 was this from Reagan: “The time has come to say to black voters, ‘Look, we offer principles that black Americans can, and do, support. We believe in jobs, real jobs. We believe in education that is really education; we believe in treating all Americans as individuals and not as stereotypes or voting blocs…’ ” Of course, Reagan never received more than 14 percent of the African American vote, but the idea of a conservative (other than Kemp) urging Republicans to include blacks in the party was a breakthrough.

Latinos weren’t a factor in 1977 like they are today, but the fact is, Reagan carried 37 percent of their vote in 1980 and 34 percent in 1984. If today’s CPAC attendees observe the Reagan spirit, they’ll make the party as inviting to Hispanics as Reagan suggested doing for blacks.

And the third big Reagan message that ought to echo in today’s GOP is this: “Just to set the record straight, let me say this about our friends who are now Republicans but do not identify themselves as conservatives: I do not view the new revitalized Republican party as one based on a principle of exclusion.

“After all, you do not get to be a majority party by searching for groups you won’t associate or work with. If we truly believe in our principles, we should sit down and talk. Talk with anyone, anywhere at any time if it means talking about the principles for the Republican Party. Conservatism is not a narrow ideology, nor is it the exclusive property of conservative activists.”

Reagan, after all, was the great exponent of the 11^th Commandment: “Thou shalt not speak ill of another Republican.” He’s not likely to have smiled on the idea of branding someone a RINO. The present GOP, if it doesn’t want to tear itself apart, should heed — not just extol — its great departed leader.

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By big, of course, I mean serious efforts to reach a grand bargain on the national debt — followed, maybe, by further bargains on immigration and steps needed to get the economy working for people besides big bankers and investors in the stock market.

Big moves would give Obama a chance to achieve a legacy of positive achievement — maybe, even, of his original stated purpose of closing the partisan chasm dividing Americans.

If this is what he had in mind by going to dinner with 12 GOP senators, having lunch with House Budget Chairman Paul D. Ryan and scheduling visits to Capitol Hill next week, it would be a total reversal of his past pattern of aloofness richly mixed with hostility.

For months, he’s been vilifying Republicans as uncaring about disabled children and the aged, interested only in protecting tax breaks for oil companies and private jet owners and willing to force schoolteachers, Border Patrol agents and first responders out of their jobs.

He waited until the Friday before the sequester took effect to meet with Speaker John A. Boehner and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, when it was a foregone conclusion that $85 billion in what he later called “dumb, arbitrary cuts” would take effect.

At a news conference just five days before the dinner, he repeated estimates that the sequester might cost 750,000 jobs and said: “None of this is necessary. It’s happening because of a choice that Republicans in Congress have made. They’ve allowed the cuts to happen because they refuse to budge on closing a single wasteful loophole … for the well-off and well-connected.”

So, the first test of whether Obama has really changed strategies (not tactics) will be: Does he stop the attacks? Does his super PAC, Organizing for America, promote his agenda positively or spend its millions of dollars demonizing opponents?

The second test is: Does the outreach continue or — at the first sign of a roadblock — does he say, “See, I tried to work with those people. It’s useless.”

If that happens, it’ll be a sign that Obama’s real strategy — as Republicans suspect — is to further divide them in hopes of capturing the House in 2014 and pushing his liberal agenda through in the last two years of his presidency.

That’s another way to achieve a legacy, but it’s a big gamble, given the GOP advantage in gerrymandered House districts.

The third and biggest test will be on substance: Does he produce proposals to revise both entitlements and the tax system?

Does he, as one of his dinner companions said, “stand at the podium and tell the country that Medicare recipients pay in only a third of what they take out and that structural reforms are necessary, not just tinkering?”

He gave the GOP senators the impression that he understands the need. “The question is, will he lead?” one of them asked.

Of course, it takes two sides to have a grand bargain. “We know he wants more revenue,” one senator told me. “There are a lot of us ready to give it to him through a tax reform that also lowers rates, if we get entitlement reform, too. We said so.”

“From a dinner to a deal is a long and winding path,” this senator said. “The next five months give us the best chance we’ll have. But he’s got to lead.”

It’s not at all clear why Obama changed strategies. Maybe his polls showed that sequester scare tactics were not working. But I’d  hope it was recognition that there always has been a “caucus of common sense” and that he ought to mobilize it.

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