Tell me about yourself.

I was born and raised in Jacksonville, Florida, but am Latina at heart… I’m a freshman in the College of Arts and Sciences, and my major is far from “decided”, but my academic passions lie in foreign language and culture study, writing, and education. Some of my hobbies are Zumba dancing (I’m an addict!), acrobatics (though I can’t do much more than a handstand!!), and practicing Chinese.

What other political positions have you filled?

In high school I served as the president of my school’s French and Spanish Honor Societies and also presided over a program I founded called ACTION (Active Cross-cultural Training In Our Neighborhood), whose purpose is to bring foreign language and culture classes to disadvantaged neighborhood schools.

What was it like running for President so early on during the year?

Crazy… but a gratifying learning experience. Taking on the challenges inherent in reaching out to over two thousand of my peers was extremely rewarding. I met so many new people and grew to appreciate more and more the large spectrum of different interests and talents that characterizes our class. My platform was one of inclusion, and my campaign was a collaborative effort—a merging of the skills and experiences of several of my peers.

What’s your secret?

At age 9, I changed my name to “Penelope Dreamweaver,” which I went by for years…

Any advice for future student politicians?

Have a platform that you’re excited and passionate about and follow through with energy and commitment while capitalizing on the diverse talents of all members of your team.

Favorite part of the job?

Working as part of a dynamic 12-person board and having the opportunity to reach out to, meet, and bring together so many interesting people.

Favorite political magazine on campus?

Why, PPR, of course! (Shout out to writers Monica Kwok and Greg Segal!)

Yes, my friends, marriage is what brings us together today. You see, that blessed arrangement, that dream within a dream, was denied yesterday to same sex couples in my home state of New Jersey by straight-talking savior of the Republican Party Chris Christie. The man who more-or-less singlehandedly cut so much money from the state budget that it actually violated New Jersey’s constitutional right to education and who is known for his verbal smackdowns of critics (like this and this), is suddenly deferential to a fault. Christie vetoed an extension of the definition of marriage to same-sex couples because “an issue of this magnitude and importance, which requires a constitutional amendment, should be left to the people of New Jersey to decide.”

First of all, why on Earth does this require a constitutional amendment? Marriage isn’t currently mentioned anywhere in the New Jersey Constitution (which you can read here if you’re a masochist), except in one very detailed provision about taxes which is in the document for reasons passing understanding. Secondly, those legislators who tried to make same-sex marriage into law didn’t just show up in Trenton for no reason and start issuing decrees. Believe me, no one goes to Trenton unless they absolutely have to. Rather, they were sent there as representatives of the people of New Jersey whom Christie claims to respect so much. So perhaps it’s the “magnitude and importance” of the issue that means it should be put to a referendum. Of course, that means that the governor doesn’t think his proposal to cap property tax rates or his cuts to pensions were very large or important. So I suspect that Christie’s position has little to do with a principled stand on the issue, and lots to do with something else of magnitude and importance: Chris Christie.

Christie has great political instincts, and he knows that a pro-marriage-equality Republican has about as much chance of becoming the GOP nominee for president as someone who instituted a statewide healthcare plan and supported abortion. And barring any scandals or serious policy surprises, Christie will be interviewing for that job in 4–8 years. But if he’s playing the long game, he’ll also have noticed that a majority of Americans support gay marriage, and that the numbers are heavily weighted towards younger people, who will soon be slightly-older people and will constitute a large chunk of the electorate. Christie’s instincts probably also tell him that it’s hard (but not impossible) to get elected president if a majority of the American people don’t support you. His referendum plan lets him thread this needle. Christie doesn’t support gay marriage — look at how he vetoed that bill in New Jersey. Christie doesn’t oppose gay marriage — he’s just a friend of the people first. As it happens, polls show a majority of New Jerseyans support gay marriage but would like it to be put to a referendum, meaning that Christie may have just outsmarted everyone. Hard to believe that he of all people can be stealthy.

Cover photo credit: Wikimedia Commons; Video Credit: The Princess Bride

This week: Congress and the president have directed the FAA to allow unmanned aerial vehicles — drones — to be used for both private and law enforcement purposes in U.S. airspace. I’m sure this will cause no problems whatsoever.

In the current budget climate, when we’re forced to make tough choices, why do you think Congress should continue to fund OJP and generally why do you think the federal government should be involved in the criminal justice system?

Most criminal justice in the United States, over 90%, is handled at the state and local level, and not at the federal level. So it’s a very good question to ask why Congress should be involved. But federal leadership is actually important. For example, in the area of collecting and disseminating statistics, no one state or local jurisdiction can do that. In the area of research, it’s unlikely that Providence, Rhode Island or Philadelphia, Pennsylvania would conduct a major study and evaluation on prisoner re-entry and disseminate that to every jurisdiction across the United States. And so, development of knowledge and dissemination of knowledge is uniquely a federal function.

And there are a number of other areas, like providing technical assistance and training, and dissemination of knowledge, that I think really require federal leadership. And the providing of seed money for innovation, that’s in addition an area where the federal government has a really important role to play. And I think particularly at a time when states and local municipalities are having to tighten their belts, and they’re facing hardship financially, they’re looking for know-how. They’re looking for ways to reduce costs by adopting evidence-based approaches, and finding the best way to reduce crime. They don’t want to be adopting programs that don’t work. OJP has been deeply involved in prisoner re-entry, especially since DANSAC was signed into law.

Why do you think that work is important, and how would you respond to critics who argue that such programs essentially reward prisoners after they’ve committed a crime?

Historically, the whole prisoner reentry movement started at OJP back in the 1990s when I was here earlier. One of my colleagues, Jeremy Travis, who headed the National Institute of Justice at that time, came up with the term and the concept of prisoner reentry. We started some piloted efforts back then, and then it really took off during the Bush Administration, and with a lot of efforts by Jeremy and others who were outside government at that time. But the Second Chance Act gave enormous impetus to President Obama, and of course he’s really gotten tremendous funding from Congress for that.

It’s a very good question to ask. Should we really be doing this? Is it our job to help ex-offenders? And I think the answer to that question is, that if we care about reducing victimization in communities, then we should care about changing the behavior of people coming out of prison, so that we’re not having to spend money on having them go back to prison and paying for those future prison costs. We want to turn them into good tax payers, people who are taking care of their kids, people who are earning money in the community and contributing to the community, and having law abiding citizens. It’s really for the good of the broader public.

How has the OJP changed or remained constant between administrations, and how have your priorities changed since your predecessors?

I think that one way it’s remained the same is that its connection with state and local criminal justice departments by the career staff has remained consistent over time, and more importantly it’s been responsive to state and local criminal justice and their constituencies. One way that it has changed dramatically from when I was here in the 1990s is the much greater degree to which it uses social media and web for a lot of the connections. We have many fewer print publications than we did in the past. We have a much greater connection with tribal communities than we did in the past. We have also created a greater focus on youth, which has helped tremendously. It is an extremely important issue for us.

When I came in, I announced that we have three priorities. One was to strengthen the connection with the field. I’m not sure that my predecessors were quite as focused on being responsive directly with state and local law enforcement. I invite them in, and do a lot of listening about what their priorities are. After Obama was elected and before he was inaugurated I met with ninety groups from across the different interests in the criminal justice system, hearing what they felt OJP should be doing and what more we could be doing.

How have recent efforts to curtail earmarks affected OJP grant money?

Previously, before Congress acted to curtail earmarks, we had in our appropriations hundreds and hundreds of Congressionally-designated projects, or earmarks. Since the change, now, for the second year in a row, we have none of those. So it’s a substantial difference. Two years ago we had hundreds and now we have zero. From my standpoint it’s a positive change, because there’s an opportunity with the appropriations Congress has given us, to have competitively awarded programs which everyone has an opportunity in the field to submit applications and compete for the funding.

Which OJP initiatives have made the greatest difference in the youth community?

Over time, in the Juvenile Justice Act, that the formula grant program itself, which provides money directly to the states, has different mandates in it. In other words, for the states to receive the funding, they have to comply with mandates that are in the law, which have different requirements. For example, to separate children from adults in jail, to remove kids from adult jails, to remove status offenders from jail, and one that addresses disproportionate minority contact with the juvenile justice system. They’re driving change in the juvenile justice system.

These have made a tremendous difference since the Juvenile Justice Act was passed in 1974, and that has made it more than any of our formula grant programs an instrument of policy change. So that is really the core program in my mind and the one that has driven the mission of our group. It’s something that I really care about a lot.

With these milestones all happening within days of each other, I cannot help but to ask: what’s next? Will the six states (New york, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Washignton, D.C.) that have already legalized gay marriage – in addition to laws from Californian and Washington that will hopefully soon take into affect- cause more states to adopt similar legislature? Will we witness a modern day domino effect, but with a rainbow twist?

Here are my predictions.

In the next three years, approximately five more states are going to adopt measures that recognize same-sex unions. Two of these states are going to go all the way and actually legalize gay marriage and call it such. My reason for saying so is that America is progressing in its views toward homosexuality, but not at a radical pace. To say that the Supreme Court will hear one state’s case on gay marriage and enforce its decision on all 50 states is too idealistic, both for gay activists and the right-wingers. However, slowly but surely, as queer activists pierce the political realm and fight for their right to equality, policies (at least at the level of the state) will change with time.

My guesses for those two states that will fully commit to marriage equality are Maryland and Illinois. Illinois because three state Representatives have already filed the Religious Freedom and Marriage Fairness Act, which would amend the Illinois Religious Freedom Protection and Civil Union Act. Though just introduced, the act itself is reflective upon the state’s long-term goals that seem plausible given the political makeup and determination from the openly-gay representatives.

The other is Maryland, as strong democrats occupy both Senate seats and six out of the eight House seats. Though democrats do not necessarily equal pro-gay, the chances of them collectively approving a proposed bill are exceptionally high. Additionally, Democratic Governor of Maryland Martin O’Malley strongly supports gay marriage:

“I think it is the latest evidence this current of our nation’s history always moves forward to greater protection of the freedom of individuals and that was what was stake in that decision. Granted, that was in California, but it interpreted a Constitution that all of us live under. I hope that it will have a persuasive influence on those delegates who are still open-minded and in order to persuade them to vote for our bill. Our bill protects religious freedom and it also protects individual liberty, in this case the right of any individual to marry whomever they choose.”

Fueled by California’s recent court ruling – among other state’s history for pro-gay rights-, minority activists groups from predominantly-conservative states can see progress made from neighboring regions. As the number of states that recognize civil unions and/or gay marriage increase, there is bound to be a tipping point that will cause the one of the biggest revolutions in the history of American Civil Rights.

When that number reaches approximately 30 states (which, given the steady progress, should be in 15-20 years), the federal government will no longer be able to ignore the growing national cry for marriage equality and will be forced to make a decision. The Supreme Court will not overturn the 20-something states’ decision to legalize gay marriage, and consequentially will mandate a federal law recognizing same-sex unions.

This, of course, is not ideal. Waiting 15 years for the United States to see how states are actively discriminating against a minority is obviously not perfect. My predictions also do not encourage stagnant opposition to anti-gay activists because of my expected time allotted for progress. What I am saying is that it will happen – gay marriage, along with other laws regarding LGBT persons’ equality, will be put into law. It probably wont’ be soon and it definitely won’t be easy.

But one of the underrated tactics is a state’s impact on neighboring regions. We need to work from the inside out, and focus on those states that are likely to recognize more LGBT rights.

Or at least, that’s how it feels. The biggest story lately has been the Obama administration requirement per the Affordable Care Act that all institutions, including religiously affiliated hospitals and universities, provide their employees with insurance that covers contraception. The administration provided an exception for actual religious organizations like churches. This seems to be a reasonable rule with a carefully tailored exception. The Catholic Church opposes contraception as a tenet of religious doctrine. Fine (well,it’s not fine, but go with me here). But lots of people work for Catholic organizations who aren’t Catholic, and it makes little sense to restrict their access to valid medical products like birth control pills. Catholic bishops saw the issue differently. As they see it, this forces religious organizations to violate their beliefs by providing contraception. At the height of the furor, an uninformed observer might have thought the government was making priests give out condoms with communion wafers. The situation, by the way, could be more accurately described as priests giving money to a company that gives money to a pharmacist who gives birth control to people (who may or may not be Catholic) who choose to use contraception. But that’s not as punchy.

Of course, Obama responded to charges that he was subsidizing sin with a full-throated defense of women’s rights and responsible health policy. Just kidding. He folded like an employee at Benetton. The administration issued a new rule that insurance companies must pay for birth control when religious or religiously affiliated institutions won’t. This is probably because of all the times compromise with the right has worked before. Remember all the Republicans who voted for the watered down health care bill? Or that time John Boehner agreed to raise taxes in return for reasonable spending cuts? Me neither. So, to absolutely no one’s surprise except the administration’s, the bishops did not change their deeply held conviction that contraception is against God’s laws and called the new rule “unacceptable.” Who would have guessed?

In all the commotion, people totally forgot about Susan G. Komen for the Cure’s own run-in with culture warfare. The breast cancer fighting group announced last week that they would cut off funding to Planned Parenthood for breast examinations (snicker, snicker). They gave various reasons as to why, but just about everyone agrees it was really because Planned Parenthood performs abortions. Inevitably, the backlash came fast and furious. Women’s groups expressed outrage, Facebook statuses were changed and before you could say “Susan G. Komen for the Cure,” Komen had reversed course. It turns out that while abortion is still divisive, easy access to breast cancer screenings is not. Maybe people are mature enough to disagree with some things Planned Parenthood does without dismissing the possibility that the organization can do some good. Or maybe it was mostly liberals who responded to the announcement, and they just happened to be louder this time around. Yeah, my money’s on the second one. But the first one is a nice thought.

On the western front, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals issued a ruling in Perry v. Brown, the Proposition 8 case. The three-judge panel ruled that because Prop. 8 took away the right to marriage from homosexuals, when previously in California everyone had that right, the proposition denied gays and lesbians equal protection of the laws. The ruling also relied heavily on the fact that California allows civil unions that have the same legal effect as marriages. Prop. 8 only takes away the use of the term marriage to describe gay relationships, a designation that serves, as Judge Stephen Reinhardt wrote, “to lessen the status and human dignity of gays and lesbians in California.” Reinhardt’s ruling was quite narrow; it didn’t recognize a right to marriage broadly, or declare banning gay marriage unconstitutional in all cases. And the opponents of gay marriage responded to this legal finesse with a declaration that the case was “a Hollywood orchestrated attack on marriage.” Interestingly, it is none of those. The lawyers for the plaintiff, Ted Olson and David Boies, practice in Washington and New York respectively — not Hollywood — and the ruling seeks to restore access to marriage for millions, which is rarely considered an attack. But why let the facts get in the way of a good war?

Photo credit: freefoto.org

This week: Appropriately for a week which saw the return of the culture wars, Rick Santorum — the Tim Tebow of politicians — won caucuses in Minnesota and Colorado and a primary in Missouri. Even if you take into account the fact that Missouri’s was non-binding, he’s still won three elections, which is one more than Mitt Romney. Santorum also leads Romney in a national poll out this week.

Virtually every fact to do with Israel is disputed by someone, and I have neither the time nor the server space to debunk every claim made against Israel. I’ll get to a few of the more ridiculous ones later, but we’re going to start with a thought experiment. Let’s name some of the worst human rights violators in the world: Iran has no free press, and assaults and murders political opposition; Syria is killing its civilians daily in an attempt to crush dissent; China is a one-party state with no free press and violent policies towards minorities; Saudi Arabia forbids women from driving and punishes homosexuality with death, even for rape victims; Sudan is actively engaged in genocide. Meanwhile, no one can question that Israel has a burgeoning free press, no suppression of dissent, tolerance of gays, and Arab members of the Knesset. So even if you believe all of BDS’s factual claims (and if you do, I’ve got a bridge you might be interested in buying), you’ve got to question their priorities. By focusing their attention solely on Israel, they’re tacitly saying that countries committing genocide on a daily basis are worse than the place that’s given us instant messaging and Bar Rafaeli.

I think that the BDSers are probably acting in good faith, but their problem (other than being, you know, wrong) is that they are fanatically committed to the dogma that Israel can only do wrong. This commitment often runs up against cases where Israel has clearly done right, and that’s where the absurdity of the anti-Israel agenda is clearest. Israel treats gays with decency and respect? It’s pinkwashing, a clever tactic to distract us from the plight of Palestine. Israel sends relatively massive numbers of aid workers to Haiti after the earthquake, setting up the first and best field hospital there? It’s all for show so we won’t pay attention to a U.N. report on the Gaza war. Are you noticing a trend? This sort of obstinacy in the face of obvious facts is the kind of mindless obsession that characterizes opposition to Israel.

I’m not saying all criticism of Israel is off limits. But I am saying that wrongheaded actions based on misguided principles should be. Penn has reacted admirably to this conference. The whole weekend has been filled with productive events, like a speech by pro-Israel advocate and genius Alan Dershowitz, designed to counter the BDS nonsense. President Amy Gutmann wrote a rather extraordinary letter affirming Penn’s commitment to truth and support for Israel. And Penn students whom I’ve spoken to have generally described the conference with various synonyms for crazy. It’s worth remembering that Israel is the only country that has to constantly argue for its right to exist; there is no pro-France movement or anti-Yemen movement. But with reactions like I’ve seen this last week, and with confidence that the truth is on Israel’s side, I’ve got one thing to say to BDS: bring it on.

Photo credit: Kenneth Allen 

This week: It’s sometimes upsetting thinking about how wrong people can be. Luckily, Mitt Romney recently said “I’m not concerned about the very poor,” so we can cheer ourselves up here and here. Romney isn’t really so good at this politics thing.

The State of the Union itself, of course, was major political news. Obama reminded us that from Pennsylvania to Ohio, from North Carolina to Florida, the state of the swing states is strong. Other than that, as David Brooks points out here, the speech didn’t present much of a vision for the future. Rather, it presented a bunch of moderately popular policy fixes. Now, that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Popular policies are often good ones, and most of the proposals Obama offered seemed to be good (although when he said he was going to increase offshore drilling, some of the liberals watching the speech with me reacted as if he’d just proposed eating the elderly). But this was not a big, transformational State of the Union. It was a well-publicized campaign speech, which is perhaps why the president all but said outright that Mitt Romney is one of the rich people benefitting from tax breaks.

Speaking of Mitt Romney’s taxes, the GOP used-to-be-a-frontrunner released his taxes on Tuesday, mere hours before the State of the Union. These returns shockingly revealed that Mitt Romeny is rich. They then sparked a flurry of stories about exactly how rich, and whether he is now the poster boy for rich people benefiting from the tax system, and how this will affect the campaign. But never fear, Romney gave a speech clearing up all of these issues, by which I mean addressing none of them and instead arguing against Obama’s anticipated points in the State of the Union. That speech has been given the annoying moniker “prebuttal.” I’m not sure why the word is so annoying, but it is and I hate it. The speech itself was a restatement of all of the usual Romney lines: Obama is making America into a European socialist country, Obama policies have extended the recession, Obama is divisive, etc. It was even less transformational than the speech it was anticipating.

But Romney’s speech was a small matter compared to Thursday’s Republican debate, which was called possibly the most important debate of the campaign by Nate Silver himself, who is as close to omniscient as any mortal can be. Perhaps that’s true statistically, but as far as I could tell this debate was exactly the same as every other. Romney was boring, Ron Paul talked about freedom, Rick Santorum said something too, and Newt Gingrich was seemingly unstable. That instability manifested it this time around in a discussion about space, the final frontier. Gingrich promised that we would have a moon colony by 2020, because a massive government project like that makes perfect sense for a man presenting himself as the conservative alternative to Romney. Romney, seeking to somehow capture the impractical nature of this proposal in a way ordinary Americans could relate to, said that if an executive at one of his companies came to him with a plan for to go to the moon, he would fire him. Because if there’s one thing Americans understand today, it’s being fired.

Photo credit: Flickr user wallygrom 

This week: President Obama made waves last year when he called out the Supreme Court for Citizens United. So in my State of the Union (for this week), I too would like to call out the Supreme Court. However, they haven’t upended decades of settled law lately, so I’ll just point you SCOTUSblog’s excellent coverage of U.S. v. Jones, which deals with whether the government can put a GPS on someone’s car. The ruling? Maybe! (Maybe I should call out the Supreme Court for lack of clarity…)

1.  No tax deductions for outsourcing
2. Use that money for moving costs when companies decide to bring jobs back to the U.S.
3. Global minimum tax — if you move jobs and profits to a country with a lower tax rate, then you pay the difference to the Treasury
4. Tax deductions for…insourcing
5. Double tax cuts for high-tech firms!!!
6. Tax incentives to relocate to hard-hit, post-industrial communities
7. Unspecified reforms to rein in the costs of entitlements (i.e., Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security)
8. Global minimum 30% tax rate for anyone making over $1 million
9. Trade enforcement unit to increase safety, authenticity inspections of imported products; and ensure that U.S. manufacturers have equal access to finance and new markets
10. Vocational training for 2 million Americans + a central website to help them
11. Ambiguous commitment to reduce regulations on small businesses and lower their taxes
12. More funding for teachers + incentives for good teachers + more flexibility to replace bad teachers
13. Every state should require students to stay in school until they are 18 or graduate high school
14. Extend tuition tax credit for middle-class families
15. Double the number of work-study jobs
16. Pass the DREAM act
17. Open up over 75% of the U.S.’s offshore oil and gas resources
18. Require all companies that drill for gas on public lands to disclose the chemicals they use
19. End subsidies to oil/gas companies and refocus them on clean energy start-ups
20. Development of clean energy on public land to power 3 million homes
21. Purchase more clean energy for the DOD
22. Tax credits to help manufacturers increase energy efficiency and eliminate waste
23. Executive order to clear red tape delaying government-funded construction projects
24. Use half of the war savings to pay down the debt
25. Use the other half for infrastructure
26. Allow homeowners to refinance their mortgages at historically low rates
27. Fund #26 through a “small fee” on financial institutions
28. Establish Financial Crime Unit in the DOJ to crack down on financial fraud and prosecute white-collar criminals
29. Extend the payroll tax cut for a year
30. End the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest 2% and extend them for everyone else
31. Pass the STOCK Act (i.e., ban members of Congress from trading in industries that they impact and oversee)
32. Stop people who bundle campaign contributions for Congress from lobbying aforementioned Congress
33. Give all presidential nominations an up-or-down vote within 90 days
34. Consolidate the federal bureaucracy (meaning mostly the Department of Commerce)
35. Prevent Iran from gaining a nuclear weapon by any means necessary
36. Cut military costs and spend more strategically
37. Strengthen national cyber-security
38. Reorient our military to focus more strategically on the Pacific theater

So, that’s thirty-eight policies, depending upon how you divide them up. The President can do 11, 17, 18, 23, 28, 35, 36, and 38 on his own (or at least mostly on his own). The rest require some sort of Congressional interaction from a Republican House and lethargic-as-ever Senate. Interestingly, he could probably implement 26 through Fannie and Freddie, as Ezra Klein (and Glen Hubbard of Columbia Business School and the Federal Reserve) argue. He’d just need a friendlier Director of the Federal Housing Finance Authority, who believes that a short-term loss for Fannie and Freddie might engender a quicker and more robust economic recovery. On number 16, the administration has already urged ICE to use greater discretion in prosecuting immigration cases. Consequently, immigration authorities have focused more narrowly on criminal aliens, while giving greater thought (and showing greater leniency) to cases that would be eligible under the DREAM Act, if it ever passes.

Why propose all of these pie-in-the-sky policies? What’s the importance of this speech, which registered a Nielsen rating of only 0.24? And does anyone actually remember anything that came out of last year’s speech, with a slightly higher 0.27 rating?

The president proposed a few measures with bipartisan support. Many of these were already in the works or require little Congressional input. Further, to balance out his spending increases and tax cuts, he’s proposed tax increases and pay-fors elsewhere. But even if the President had proposed only the halves of these ideas that Republicans like, it would not have made enactment or negotiation easier. Given the divided political atmosphere, any attempt at bipartisanship is doomed to be competitive and fragile. In noncompetitive bipartisanship, the two sides work together on legislation that is not controversial or does not clearly fall to one side of the aisle or the other. When bipartisanship becomes competitive, each side competes to have the most influence over the final document. It’s hard to imagine either form in the current atmosphere, and any attempt at competitive bipartisanship could unravel in an instant. Result: stagnation.

In the current session of Congress, members of the House have sponsored 3818 bills, while members of the Senate have sponsored 2033. Of these, 90 have become law. A number of those name post offices and federal buildings, others simply reauthorize older bills, and still others are short-term continuing resolutions – which are similar to pay-day loans for the federal government. In other words, fat chance for the President’s proposals….

But that might be exactly what the President wants. He’s already started running against the do-nothing Congress. The do-nothing Congress that completely ignored his Jobs Speech in September. The do-nothing Congress that has blamed him for the protracted aftershocks of the economic disaster that happened under President Bush, even as there are signs that the economy is actually improving, if only a little. The do-nothing Congress that insists that the stimulus did nothing, but won’t do anything itself, insisting that it’s really regulations that are preventing firms from hiring and not money-hoarding behavior resulting from a credit bubble. If Obama begins taking bold action on the substantial number of proposals that are largely under his control, and Congress does nothing — well, point Obama.

Notably absent from the speech was the healthcare law. Presumably, everything to say about the law has already been said, no one’s budging, and no one’s gasping when each side states its views. Further, the State of the Union may not have been the place to defend the healthcare law. Perhaps more partisan, more heated, more punchy attacks on the campaign trail are a better strategy. This also allows Obama to make a clear contrast between the 111th and 112th Congresses. Obama accomplished a great deal in the first Congress. In all likelihood, he will make the case for his reelection much as Andrew Sullivan did on his behalf. But, at the same time, he can argue that he took bold action to pump money back into the economy, jump-start public works projects, invest in clean energy and education, and begin to alleviate the crushing burden of healthcare costs. But once voters took a chance on Republicans, everything stopped. He’ll argue that the stimulus worked — and, depending upon the economic indicators, many might be predisposed to believe him — and that Republicans essentially cut off life support to a fragile and recovering economy. This would make the case not only for his reelection, but also for returning the House and Senate to Democratic control. But, given the recent trend in redistricting to draw ideologically homogeneous districts, the chances are slim, even if Obama does win the reelection by a wide margin.

Further, by highlighting tax and immigration issues, he is positioning himself strategically to run against Romney, whose obscenely high income combined with his obscenely low tax-rate created a controversy, and whose posturing on immigration drew the ire of Jeb Bush and will likely prove problematic both in Florida and during the general election. It will be the Common Man vs. the Oligarchs, the Progressive vs. the Reactionary. Who knows if anyone will remember this speech or what effect it will have, who knows how the Obama team plans to incorporate this speech into a larger reelection strategy. But there are hints of a strategy. Obama beat Republicans to the punch on shrinking the federal government. He gained the high-ground during the payroll tax debate. He’s pulled the rug out from under his opponents frequently in the past few months. He’s turned their own tactics against them and outmaneuvered them. And there’s plenty of evidence in this speech that he’ll continue to do so, right through the election.

Big deal, you might say. Newt Gingrich won a primary in a small, highly conservative state that still flies the confederate flag at its statehouse. That’s true, but not for nothing has South Carolina correctly predicted the Republican nominee in every race since its inception in 1980. It’s an early state, the first in the all-important South, and its population size ranks in the top half of states in the country, unlike New Hampshire or Iowa.

Speaking of Iowa, it was announced yesterday that Rick Santorum actually won the Iowa caucuses by 34 votes, instead of the original results that had Mitt Romney winning by 8 (seriously, I’ve seen bake-offs with wider margins of victory). So, for those of you keeping score, the oh-so-presumptive Romney has won exactly one of the first three nominating contests — in New Hampshire, where he has his lake house.

Where did the towering Republican juggernaut that was Mitt Romney go? He never really existed on the one hand, and still isn’t gone on the other. Let me explain that cryptic bit of fortune cookie wisdom. Romney was never the kind of candidate who inspired millions and lit a fire under the base. He was the candidate who wasn’t sane or unelectable or incompetent. Simply being sane, electable, and competent does not a presumptive nominee make.

But he is still all of those things, and his opponents are arguably not. Ron Paul is essentially a protest candidate despite his minor upwelling of support, Rick Santorum is far to the right of most Americans on social issues — he’s spoken about “the dangers of contraception in this country“ — and Newt Gingrich carries decades of baggage including shutting down the government twice, leaving both of his wives as they suffered from chronic diseases, and saying that President Obama exhibits “Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior” (by the way, isn’t anti-colonial behavior a good thing?). Mitt Romney is still an island of boring in a sea of crazy, and at the end of the day the Republicans will probably end up on dry land. But first, we’re going to have Newt Gingrich hanging around for months, doing a great service to me and anyone else who needs to write a column every week.

Photo credit: Flickr user Gage Skidmore

This week: Since the primaries are going to be continuing for a lot longer than most people thought, Republicans are going to need more information to make decisions. With that in mind, I humbly submit the candidates’ high school yearbook photos for consideration, courtesy of the Atlantic.

A series of intolerant newsletters have been plaguing Ron Paul’s campaign for most of his recent political career. The publications, with names like The Ron Paul Survival Report and The Ron Paul Investment Letter, first came to public attention during Paul’s 1996 Congressional campaign. His opponent Charles “Lefty” Morris divulged newsletters containing statements like “if you have ever been robbed by a black teen-aged male, you know how unbelievably fleet-footed they can be” and supposed “opinion polls [that] consistently show only about 5% of blacks have sensible political opinions.” Paul won that race and for some time the controversy died down. However, during the 2008 Presidential primaries, James Kirchik from The New Republic unearthed a whole new set of these newsletters in the archives of the University of Kansas and the Wisconsin Historical Society. These publications contain even more explosive material such as assertions that after the L.A. riots “order was only restored […] when it came time for blacks to pick up their welfare checks” or that though “we are constantly told that it is evil to be afraid of black men, it is hardly irrational.”

The articles in these newsletters are unsigned, although often they are written in the first person to give the idea that Paul himself wrote them. Any casual follower of Paul, however, will notice that the incendiary language of the letter in no way resembles Paul’s avuncular campaign tone. Following the New Republic article, Julian Sanchez and David Weigel of the libertarian magazine Reason, wrote an in-depth expose about the authorship of these newsletters and they found that “a half-dozen longtime libertarian activists—including some still close to Paul—all named the same man as Paul’s chief ghostwriter: Ludwig von Mises Institute founder Llewellyn Rockwell, Jr.” Rockwell has confusedly denied the authorship and Paul has consistently refused to name him or anyone else as the author; however, understanding who Lew Rockwell is proves fundamental to gain a strong understanding of the real Ron Paul.

Rockwell first worked for Paul as his Congressional Chief of Staff from 1978 to 1982. That year, he left Washington to found the Ludwig von Mises Institute, the main proponent in the United States of Austrian economics. This school of thought falls outside the mainstream because of its rejection of both empirical evidence—Austrian economists do not use any econometric data—and of all government intervention in the economy. Ron Paul has consistently espoused this approach to the discipline; most recently, after his third-place finish in the Iowa primaries, Paul proclaimed that “We are all Austrians now.” Austrian economics also provide most of Paul’s intellectual firepower. All but a few of the books quoted in his best-selling End the Fed were published by the Mises Institute, which has also printed a few of his more academic books like The Case for Gold. Rockwell served as president of the institute until 2009, when he stepped down and became Chairman of the Board. Paul remains on board as a special counselor to the institute.

In addition to Mises himself, the other main influence on the Institute, on Paul and on Rockwell, has been that of economist Murray N. Rothbard, whom Rockwell brought in as academic vice chairman. In addition to writing Man, Economy and the State, a seminal work in Austrian thought, the late thinker was also the most prominent proponent of anarcho-capitalism, a philosophy that holds all governments to be inherently tyrannical and expects markets to administer everything from security to justice. Rothbard, in his long involvement in libertarian causes, began his career by forming a Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond group at Columbia University in 1948 admiring of the segregationist senator’s support for states’ rights and decentralized government. Then Rothbard joined the Republican Party, followed by the Libertarian Party, a miniscule movement which reached its apex of success when it won 1.06% of the vote in the 1980 elections.

In 1988, Paul ran as the Party’s presidential candidate and worked closely with Rockwell again bringing him in as a consultant for the campaign. Paul’s run, compared by Texas Monthly to “something out of Robert Altman’s movie ‘Nashville,’” failed to equal the “triumphs” of 1980 but allowed his name to spread beyond his district in Texas. However, after the defeat, the consistently heterogeneous party split along two very different lines. Libertarianism, the dedication to complete freedom, had always grouped together two different constituencies, the free-marketers concerned with limiting government regulation and intervention, and the civil rights libertarians concerned with fighting government control  of issues such as marriage, reproduction and drug use. Ron Paul had always been closer to the former side, protecting the free market while opposing abortion. When, after his campaign, this tension boiled over, the “purist” wing of free-marketers led by Rothbard, Rockwell and Paul split from the Party, and began to search for a new political vehicle.

Rockwell envisioned this vehicle in his 1990 article in Liberty magazine, “The Case for Paleo-Libertarianism.” Rejecting the “Woodstockian flavor” of the Libertarian Party, Rockwell argued that freedom was not enough and that paleolibertarians had to reach out to Christians and social conservatives. Rothbard built on this vision and argued that the new paleolibertarians should adopt a policy of “reaching out to rednecks.” This strategy led to some of the gravest missteps of the Rothbard/Rockwell/Paul libertarian faction. Their glee over former KKK Grand Wizard David Duke’s electoral success—who scared the nation by gaining 44% of the vote in a Senate primary campaign—was one of the most depressing results. While the approving statement in the Ron Paul Survival Report (possibly written by Rockwell himself) that Duke “scared the blazes out of the Establishment” and its understatement in noting that “Duke carried some baggage” may seem out of step with Paul’s new tone, it was completely attuned to other paleolibertarian statements. Rothbard, for example, noted that that while the Establishment “finally got David Duke […] he sure scared the bejesus out of them.” Both sources praised Duke’s advocacy of “tax cuts, no quotas, no affirmative action, no welfare, and no busing” without considering any of this taints. This attitude, while not per se racist, suggests at least a startling degree of moral blindness.

In 1990 Rothbard and Rockwell also began to publish their Rothbard-Rockwell Report (RRR), a monthly paleolibertarian newsletter. The publication’s tone strongly mimics that of Ron Paul’s newsletters. Both publications walk the fine line between disapproval of Israel’s policies and blatant anti-semitism. Both straddle the line between opposition to tyrannical political correctness and outright racism. Most questionable was the section at the end of RRR called P.C. Watch authored by Rockwell himself. Although it was meant to highlight bias in the mainstream media, the part of the newsletter showed a strange fascination with interracial relationships and the Old South plus an odd visceral hatred toward Maya Angelou.

The formation of the paleolibertarian faction coincided with the rise of the broader paleoconservative movement led by Pat Buchanan. Spurred by the fall of a Soviet Union, disaffected conservatives rose up in opposition to George H.W. Bush, to internationalism, to the perceived enslavement to Israeli interests and to the increasing multiculturalism and secularism of the United States. In 1992, Paul was considering a Republican primary challenge to Bush and appointed Rockwell as a vice-chair to the exploratory committee. Eventually he decided not to run and to support Buchanan in an effort to mold a new paleo-paleo coalition. While Buchanan did not unseat Bush, he was both responsible for introducing nasty elements of anti-semitism and racism in American political discourse and for popularizing the term “culture wars.”

After the failure of Buchanan’s second run in 1996 and his increasing support for protectionism, the paleo-paleo coalition fell apart. Rothbard had died back in 1995 and Gingrich’s Contract with American had reinvigorated more mainstream conservatism. Rockwell abandoned the plan, and formed a new website lewrockwell.com to promote his ideas. Paul writes for the website from time to time, as does Pat Buchanan, as do many Austrian economists and anarcho-capitalists. The project has slowly drifted away from the mainstream although Paul’s success on college campuses has attracted a new generation of voters to the site. The website’s tone is not as openly incendiary as the old newsletter but often maintains some of the same positions. For example, it published Paul’s dissent in Congress on a bill commemorating the 1964 Civil Rights Act. While Paul framed the stance as a principled opposition to governmental intervention, the baggage associated with the paleolibertarian phase makes this position much murkier.

In light of Paul’s newfound mainstream appeal, especially his second-place finish in New Hampshire, understanding his tortuous political path is fundamental and understanding Lew Rockwell—a man who has always travelled by his side—is one of the most important pieces in this puzzle.

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