From the WSJ Opinion Archives
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Everything
but the Kitchen Cynic
This column has long been skeptical that there is any depth behind Barack Obama's
genial demeanor. Our skepticism is warranted, as The Politico's Ben Smith demonstrates:
"The biggest enemy I think we have in this whole process (and why I'm so glad to see a lot of young people here, young in spirit if not young in age)--the reason I think i'ts [sic] so important, is because one of the enemies we have to fight--it's not just terrorists, it's not just Hezbollah, it's not just Hamas--it's also cynicism," Barack Obama told a reception after the AIPAC [American Israel Public Affairs Committee] policy conference last night. [Video is here.]
He seems to have plugged "terrorists" into his usual stump speech. As he told the DNC Winter Meeting:
"And in this mission, our rivals won't be one another, and I would assert it won't even be the other party. It's going to be cynicism that we're fighting against."
We also found this Obama quote in Monday's Daily Gate City of Keokuk, Iowa: "My main opponent in this race isn't other candidates--it's cynicism."
Now that last comment is at least defensible. It's hard to think of a more cynical pair than John Edwards and Hillary Clinton. But contrary to Obama, Edwards and Mrs. Clinton are not the equivalent of Hezbollah and Hamas, which are fanatical religious organizations with genocidal aims. Obama seems to think that all the problems in the world come down to "cynicism"--an excellent example of the adage that if the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.
Yet before he became a national figure, Obama looked like a nail, too. Consider this excerpt from a speech he gave in October 2002 in which he explained why he was against the liberation of Iraq:
What I am opposed to is the attempt by political hacks like Karl Rove to distract us from a rise in the uninsured, a rise in the poverty rate, a drop in the median income, to distract us from corporate scandals and a stock market that has just gone through the worst month since the Great Depression.
That's pretty damn cynical. Of course it's possible that running statewide and exposing himself to the national spotlight were character-building experiences for Obama, that sometime between 2002 and now he realized that his own cynicism was misguided and developed a more optimistic and trusting outlook.
Or maybe Obama's hopeful mien is just a pose he has adopted for the sake of political expediency. Maybe the self-styled scourge of cynicism is the biggest cynic of all.
'An
Over-Representation of Factual Presentations'
After our item
yesterday on scientists critical of Al Gore's "global warming"
alarmism, a reader called our attention to an interview with Gore that appeared
last May in a publication called Grist:
Q: There's a lot of debate right now over the best way to communicate about global warming and get people motivated. Do you scare people or give them hope? What's the right mix?
Gore: I think the answer to that depends on where your audience's head is. In the United States of America, unfortunately we still live in a bubble of unreality. And the Category 5 denial is an enormous obstacle to any discussion of solutions. Nobody is interested in solutions if they don't think there's a problem. Given that starting point, I believe it is appropriate to have an over-representation of factual presentations on how dangerous it is, as a predicate for opening up the audience to listen to what the solutions are, and how hopeful it is that we are going to solve this crisis.
"An over-representation of factual presentations of how dangerous it is." Isn't that what people accused President Bush of offering vis-à-vis the erstwhile Iraqi regime? Didn't this lead a certain former vice president to thunder, "He betrayed this country! He played on our fears!"?
And it's not as if Gore's "over-representations" don't have harmful effects. They've caused a lot of people to get really sad and stressed out. Consider this report from BusinessWeek:
In recent years, the TED conference has gained a reputation for blissfully big ideas buoyed by unrelenting optimism. So few conference goers were prepared for venture capitalist John Doerr to choke up with emotion as he kicked off the second day of talks on Mar. 9.
"I'm scared," he told the audience, looking down at his 15-year-old daughter in the front row. "I don't think we're going to make it."
Doerr issued a passionate call to action for everyone to make environmental concerns their "next big thing."
And this one from the Post-Chronicle, about someone called Jennifer Garner:
Jennifer has also confessed she cries more now she is a mother. The actress believes the experience has made her more caring.
She said: "Since I became a mother, I cry more because I care about things more.
"I can't watch a movie where something happens to a child. And I've always cared about global warming and breast cancer, but now there seems to be an urgency about them."
GORE LIED, PEOPLE CRIED!!!!
A
Freakonomist's Blind Spot
The other day, former senator Zell Miller offered a practical argument against
legal abortion, which the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported:
Miller . . . declared that abortion has contributed to the military's manpower shortage, the Social Security crisis, and the flow of illegal immigrants into the United States.
"How could this great land of plenty produce too few people in the last 30 years? Here is the brutal truth that no one dares to mention: We're too few because too many of our babies have been killed," Miller said.
"Over 45 million since Roe v. Wade in 1973. If those 45 million children had lived, today they would be defending our country, they would be filling our jobs, they would be paying into Social Security," the former Georgia governor said. "Still, we watch as 3,700 babies are killed every single day in America. It is unbelievable that a nation under God would allow this."
This is related to our own Roe effect hypothesis (abortion makes the population more Republican because Democrats have a greater propensity to abort their babies) and to the claim by economist Steven Levitt, author of "Freakonomics," that abortion reduces crime (because mothers in crime-prone demographics are more apt to abort).
Levitt, however, says on his blog that Miller is wrong:
Miller . . . makes a key mistake in his logic. While it is true there have been many millions of abortions (although according to the official statistics more like 35 million than 45 million), even if those abortions had not occurred, there would not be that many more Americans today. The reason is that the primary impact of an abortion is not to reduce a woman's lifetime number of children born, but rather, to simply shift the timing of a woman's fertility from early in life to later in life.
Based on a paper by John Donohue, Jeff Grogger, and I [sic] which will be out in a few weeks, I would estimate that each teenage abortion reduces lifetime babies born to the mother by maybe one-tenth of a child, or possibly even less. (For a woman who gets an abortion in her forties, the impact is obviously larger, but there are very few of those type of abortions.)
The key to our abortion argument is that women shift their births to a time when they can better care for the children. So even though there is not a big change in the size of the cohort born, the kids still turn out less criminal. Miller's statement, however, is all about the cohort size, not about the unwantedness.
It is no doubt true that the effect of abortion on population is not equal to the number of abortions. But Levitt makes an even worse logical error than Miller does: He fails to account for the fact that population is a function of time as well as number of children.
We addressed this point in our 2005 paper on the Roe effect in the sociological journal Society:
If a woman has a child at, say, age 30 rather than 20, one additional census passes before the child counts toward his state's congressional and electoral college apportionment, and two or three presidential elections pass before he reaches voting age. The compounding element applies here as well; if a woman has a daughter at 30 rather than 20, the daughter reaches childbearing age a decade later than she otherwise would have.
Let's apply this to an area Miller discusses: Social Security. Suppose Sylvia has a daughter at age 20, and her daughter has a daughter at age 20. When Sylvia turns 65, her 45-year-old daughter and 25-year-old granddaughter will both be of working age, probably contributing to Social Security.
Now suppose Roberta waits till age 30 to bear a daughter, and her daughter does the same thing. When Roberta turns 65, her daughter will be 35 and her granddaughter will be 5. The working-age population among Roberta's descendants is 50% lower than among Sylvia's.
Delayed childbearing slows population growth, which means that the population at any given time will be lower, even if every woman eventually has exactly the same number of children. It's surprising that Levitt would miss this point.
Maybe Because
a Lot of Them Don't Have Jobs?
"An economic mystery: Why do the poor seem to have more free time than
the rich?"--subheadline, Slate, March 9
All
Iraq All the Time
From an Associated Press dispatch on yesterday's decline in the Dow Jones Industrial
Average:
The Dow fell 242.66, or 1.97 percent, to 12,075.96. On March 24, 2003 the index dropped 307 points when U.S. casualties began mounting in Iraq.
If casualties in Iraq go up when the Dow Jones Industrial Average goes down, it follows that it is every American's patriotic duty to support the troops by buying blue-chip stocks.
Life
in the Vast Lane
Yesterday we
noted that Sen. Hillary Clinton had reprised her 1998 claim that there is
a "vast right-wing conspiracy." As evidence, she cited the convictions
of three New Hampshire Republicans on charges of "phone jamming" during
the 2002 election campaign. But consider this story, which appeared in the Milwaukee
Journal Sentinel:
Tossing aside a plea agreement that called for probation, Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Michael B. Brennan sentenced four Democratic Party workers to jail Wednesday for slashing tires on 25 vans rented by Republicans to take voters to polls for the 2004 presidential election.
So the left-wing conspiracy is a third vaster than the right-wing one.
An
Anxious Nation Holds Its Breath--Day 3
When we were preparing our item yesterday about Chuck Hagel, we forgot that
2008 is a leap year and thus miscalculated the number of days remaining until
St. Patrick's Day of next year, by which time Hagel has promised to decide whether
to run for president. The correct number was 370, not 369. The good news is
that today it's back down to 369, and we don't anticipate it rising again (unless
Hagel pushes his deadline back some more).
Still
Dead
"Despite reports, Fidel Castro did not sign the five humidors that were
auctioned on March 2 at the 2007 Habanos Festival," according to the Cigar
Insider newsletter (PDF, see page 4).
He must've been resting.
In
the Harshest Place on Earth, Love Finds a Way
"Penguins Not Coming to Las Vegas"--headline, Associated Press, March 13
What
a Schmaltzy Story
"Chicken Fat Spill Leaves Louisiana Highway Slick"--headline, Jerusalem
Post, March 13
Sounds
Painful
"Mexican President Presses Bush on Border Fence"--headline, New York
Times, March 13
News
You Can Use
"Money Counts in Access to Health Care"--headline, HealthDay.com,
March 13
Bottom Stories of the Day
- "Irish Organization Names Hillary Clinton 'Person of the Year' "--headline,
Star-Gazette
(Elmira, N.Y.), March 13
- "Pygmy Rabbits Raised in Captivity Freed"--headline, Associated
Press, March 13
- "Democrats Plan More Money for Agencies"--headline, Associated
Press, March 13
- "Rep. Stark Says God Not Among His Beliefs"--headline, San
Francisco Chronicle, March 14
- "Canada Falls to No. 103 in FIFA Rankings"--headline, CBC.ca, March 14
Scenes
From a Mugging
The Associated Press reports on the mugging of a centenarian in New York:
The heartlessness of the March 4 attack is clearly conveyed on the grainy, black-and-white videotape, which has now been broadcast well beyond New York.
In it, 101-year-old Rose Morat is trying to leave her apartment building to go to church. The mugger, a man who looms over the senior citizen and is holding onto a bicycle, pretends to help her get through the vestibule.
Then, he turns to grab Morat's head and delivers three hard punches to her face, and swipes her purse. The dazed victim tries to reach for her purse when the mugger hits her again, pushing her and her walker to the ground.
He got away with $33 and Morat's house keys. She suffered a fractured cheekbone and spent time in the hospital. The attack didn't break Morat's spirit, though: She has said in the days since that if she had been just a bit younger, she would have gone after the guy.
"I'm a very strong woman," she said. "I've been that way my whole life."
New York's Daily News reports that another "strong woman" quickly politicized the attack:
The vicious mugging caught the attention of Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.), who made it a part of her presidential campaign yesterday, blaming President Bush's cuts to community policing programs for recent spikes in crime and rising fear.
"We had a horrible mugging the other day in New York City. A 101-year-old woman in her walker was attacked," Clinton told the National League of Cities conference in Washington. "That was on the front page of our papers. Imagine how that makes every widow living alone, every older person, everybody [feel]."
"We've got to get back to making crime reduction a No. 1 objective in our country," she said.
Hey, where's Barack Obama when you need him? It wasn't a mugger that ripped off Rose Morat's purse and broke her cheekbone. It was cynicism!
(Carol Muller helps compile Best of the Web Today. Thanks to Heather Robinson, John Hekman, Anne McCaughey, Al Dubinsky, Robert Patten, William Larson, Keryn Ross, Steve Rehciwein, Richard Belzer, Stephen Liberatore, Ed Thomson, Todd Crampton, Scott Wright, Stuart Creque, Monty Krieger, Kathleen Sullivan, Marc Tarrasch, Keith Burgess-Jackson, Steve Karass, John Neal, Alan Utter, Daniel Foty and Jack Barnett. If you have a tip, write us at opinionjournal@wsj.com, and please include the URL.)
Today on OpinionJournal:
- Review & Outlook: Hillary Clinton knows all about sacking U.S. attorneys.
- Michael Novak (from First Things): The case for George W. Bush.
- Ada Louise Huxtable: Meet the man who remade New York.
