Gene Healy explains the growth of the role of the president, as portrayed in the 1933 film Gabriel Over the White House.
Healy’s book, The Cult of the Presidency examines the dangerous rise of devotion to the nation’s highest political office.
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Gene Healy explains the growth of the role of the president, as portrayed in the 1933 film Gabriel Over the White House.
Healy’s book, The Cult of the Presidency examines the dangerous rise of devotion to the nation’s highest political office.
But I couldn’t help thinking of him when I read this Washington Post headline:
Ex-Sailor Guilty of Pretending to Be an Admiral
Delaware Man Gave Speech to Vietnamese American Group in Va.
And I was transported back to 1987, when Biden withdrew from the presidential race after appropriating the details of British Labor Party leader Neil Kinnock’s life in his speeches, falsely claiming to have three college degrees, and boasting of a much higher rank in his law school class than he actually achieved.
I remembered a purported “Joe Biden resume” that circulated widely back in 1987. Being from prehistoric days, alas, it’s not on the World Wide Web, so I have to recall it from memory. But as I recall, in standard resume fashion it recounted Biden’s achievements in life: NCAA basketball championship, Heisman Trophy, top of his law school class, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Nobel Prize in physics, Pulitzer Price for literature, Oscar, chief justice of the United States, and so on.
Of course, if he actually had all those accomplishments, Sarah Palin would dismiss him as an elitist.
In a recap of the second McCain-Obama debate, Joe Klein offers his thoughts on the role of government generally and in health care in particular. Excerpts and comments follow:
Obama began his response with a simple declarative sentence: “I believe that health care is a right for every American.”
Health care is a bundle of goods and services. Treat health care like a “right,” and watch it disappear.
The rest of his answer could be used as a template for how to deal with a complex issue in a town-hall debate. He began with a personal story: his mother, dying of cancer at age 53, having to fight her insurance company, trying to prove that her disease had not been a pre-existing condition.
Obama has said his mother “had been diagnosed just as she was transitioning between jobs.” Neither candidate can claim that their health plan would have saved her life. But McCain can claim that the federal government created an employer-based health insurance system that routinely strips people of coverage right before and right after they get sick. In its attacks on McCain’s health-insurance tax credit, I haven’t once heard the Obama campaign acknowledge that McCain’s plan would have spared Obama’s mother that deathbed worry.
Read the rest of this post →Lessons from Abroad by Richard W. Rahn
Rails Won’t Save America by Randal O’Toole
Two Kinds of Change: Comparing the Candidates on Foreign Policy by Justin Logan
Does Barack Obama Support Socialized Medicine? by Michael F. Cannon
Cato’s Caleb Brown sat down with John M. McCardell Jr., former president of Middlebury College and director of Choose Responsibility, a non-profit group that supports changes that will allow 18–20 year olds to purchase and consume alcoholic beverages.
After listening to the second McCain-Obama debate the other night, I saw an ad for Progressive.com that promised to reduce your auto insurance premiums by letting you pay for only the features that you need. It was as though the Invisible Hand had just watched the candidates discussing health care, and quickly whipped off an ad to tell Obama how stupid is his plan to force people to buy insurance coverage that they don’t need.
All of which inspired an oped that appears in today’s New York Post. An excerpt:
Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to choose the features of your health policy, just like your auto insurance?
John McCain proposes to let you do just that, simply by letting you choose a plan available in another state. With the power to choose a policy regulated by a state with fewer mandated benefits and no community-rating laws, you could knock $1,000 off the price of a $7,000 plan.
This would boost coverage, too: A recent study by economists at the University of Minnesota suggests that McCain’s proposal could cover an added 12 million Americans.
But Obama sees choice as dangerous. He fears that “where there are no requirements for you to get cancer screenings,” no insurers would offer such coverage. The New Republic’s Jonathan Cohn echoes, “Less cancer screening under McCain’s plan? Actually, yes.”
Nonsense. California doesn’t mandate colon-cancer screening, yet Kaiser Permanente of Northern California is a leader in such research and boasts the most aggressive screening program in the country.
Michigan doesn’t mandate prostate or cervical cancer screening, yet six of the University of Michigan’s seven insurance offerings cover both. That’s where Cohn gets his insurance, so I’ll bet him a fancy dinner that he has coverage for both, even without a mandate.
If anyone from my senior-year calculus class is out there (what were there, six of us?), you may recognize the reference to a horrific chapter from my academic career.
John McCain likes to hold himself out as a fiscal conservative, and compared to Barack Obama there is no comparison. McCain expresses concern over the mountains of debt that George Bush and his willing accomplices in Congress have left for future generations, and has put forward modest plans for reversing these ominous trends. For example, the Republican pledges to freeze some government spending — with the notable exclusion of the military budget, veterans benefits, and entitlements — and perhaps to eliminate certain federal agencies, although in last night’s debate he didn’t stipulate which ones. Obama will not commit to similar steps to halt the runaway train of federal spending, and his tax increases are unlikely to generate nearly enough revenue to offset his proposed spending increases, and may well make the fiscal imbalance worse by stifling entrepreneurship and job creation.
But McCain’s specific proposals don’t add up to considerable savings. For example, last night he cited his opposition to the Boeing tanker deal, which he claimed saved taxpayers $6.8 billion (back in June, McCain put the figure at $6.2 billion). He has mentioned his opposition to earmarks, which total $18 billion. In the previous debate, he suggested that eliminating cost-plus contracts would save money in the Pentagon, but he didn’t venture a guess as to how much. Such modest proposals invited Obama counterattacks: the Democrat noted that the costs from the Iraq War, which McCain has pledged to continue until we achieve “victory,” would erase McCain’s vaunted earmark savings in less than two months.
Beyond sparring over Iraq War costs, however, the two candidates have not been pressed to justify their plans for military spending.
Personnel costs constitute roughly one third of the total defense budget, and are likely to grow in 2009 regardless of who wins next month’s election. Both McCain and Obama support President Bush’s decision to increase the size of our ground forces by 92,000 men and women over a five-year period. It is curious that Obama, a man who wears his opposition to the war in Iraq like a badge of honor, would support such increases. If Obama gets his wish, and removes most U.S. military personnel from Iraq over a 16-month period, he will presumably have more than enough troops to surge some into Afghanistan, while still reducing the burdens on our men and women in uniform, and their families. So, why the need for still more troops? Where else would a President Obama send them? Darfur? Congo? Burma? Georgia? He hasn’t said.
But leaving that aside, the scheduled increases are not nearly enough for John McCain. Writing in Foreign Affairs late last year, McCain pledged, “As president, I will increase the size of the U.S. Army and the Marine Corps from the currently planned level of roughly 750,000 troops to 900,000 troops.” If McCain gets his wish, these two branches will be nearly 40 percent larger than they were prior to 9/11.
And how much will these additional troops cost? By my estimates, nearly 10 times what McCain would save if he eliminated every single earmark.