David Boaz

The federal voucher program that enables nearly 2,000 children in the District of Columbia to attend private schools is facing opposition in the Democratic Congress and may be discontinued. Some people just can’t stand to think that kids might get educated outside the grasp of the government. 

The most honest, decent, and thoughtful Democratic president of modern times, Jed Bartlet, was surprised to find himself supporting vouchers on an episode of NBC’s “The West Wing.” Bartlet’s staff summoned the mayor of Washington, D.C., to the White House to plot strategy for his veto of a Republican-backed bill to provide vouchers for a few students in D.C. schools–and was stunned to discover that the mayor and the D.C. school board president both supported the program, as indeed Mayor Anthony Williams and School Board President Peggy Cooper Cafritz did in real life. Why? the president asked the mayor. “After six years of us promising to make schools better next year,” the mayor replied, “we’re ready to give vouchers a try….We spend over $13,000 per student–that’s more than anywhere else in the country-and we don’t have a lot to show for it.” (As Andrew Coulson wrote recently in the Washington Post, the real cost is actually much higher than that.)

Then the president summons his young personal aide to testify to the merits of D.C. public schools and gets another surprise:

Faced with the evidence, President Bartlet decided to do the right thing. Will Congress?

I pulled the September 24, 2007, copy of the New Republic out from a stack on my coffee table last night and happened on a fascinating column about the upcoming primaries. John Judis laid out in convincing detail just why the primary race was likely to go all the way to June and maybe even to the convention. He did acknowledge that people had made such predictions before:

Of course, dire prognostications of brokered conventions are made nearly every election…. But the structure of the election has changed this year. The old schedule of primaries and caucuses was designed to winnow the field. Invariably, only two candidates were left standing by March, one of whom would eventually capture enough delegates through the remaining contests to win the nomination. By contrast, the 2008 schedule concentrates more than half of the primary and caucus votes in the first month, which ends February 5. If there is no clear frontrunner by then, the race will probably continue on into June and perhaps even up until the convention.

And that’s why, he said, the delegates just might find themselves choosing the nominee at their convention in Minneapolis.

Yes, Minneapolis. Not Denver. The Republican convention. Because, Judis said, it was likely that Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney, and Fred Thompson would divide the states on a regional basis and no one would get a majority of the delegates. “So there is a very good chance that, by June, none of the Republican candidates will have secured the nomination.”

And then what would happen? Well, “the struggle for the nomination would probably move to the GOP convention’s rules committee,” which would have to decide, among other things, whether to disqualify delegates from Florida and other states that held their primaries too early.

TNR readers might have been worrying, Could this happen to our party? Not to worry, said Judis:

Democrats seem far less likely to face this sort of challenge next year. Indeed, Hillary Clinton appears to be putting her competition behind her, and none of her challengers has a built-in regional advantage that will ensure a respectable block of delegates….In fact, the compressed primary schedule could make a stalemate less rather than more likely for Democrats….While Republicans become ever more fractious as the general election approaches, Democrats will have already spent months coalescing around a new leader.

In this I think Judis was doubly, or triply, wrong. Not only did he get the primary process completely wrong in each party, I think he was wrong to predict that a drawn-out nominating process would be bad for the party. It seems clear today that Barack Obama has greatly benefited from the long battle with Hillary Clinton: he held the nation’s attention longer, he became a sharper debater, he raised unprecedented sums of money, he built an organization in every state, he faced a lot of the revelations and charges that would otherwise have come up closer to the election.

So . . . what are the pundits predicting about the fall election?

Endorsing Barack Obama, Al Gore proclaims:

After eight years in which our constitution has been dishonored and disrespected, we need change.

He has a point. But he should have said sixteen years.

David Davis, the shadow home secretary in the United Kingdom (that is, the prospective attorney general should the Conservative Party take power), has resigned his seat in the House of Commons to protest Parliament’s approval of a bill that would allow the government to hold terror suspects up to 42 days without charges.

Davis, generally regarded as a Thatcherite, said:

Until yesterday I took a view that what we did in the House of Commons representing our constituents was a noble endeavour because for centuries of forebears we defended the freedom of people. Well, we did, up until yesterday.

This Sunday is the anniversary of Magna Carta, a document that guarantees the fundamental element of British freedom, habeas corpus. The right not to be imprisoned by the state without charge or reason.

But yesterday this house allowed the state to lock up potentially innocent citizens for up to six weeks without charge.

He denounced the bill as “the one most salient example of the insidious, surreptitious and relentless erosion of fundamental British freedom” and went on to cite ID cards, “an assault on jury trials,” and “a DNA database bigger than any dictatorship has” as other elements of that erosion.

Davis said he would run in a special election to reclaim his seat by campaigning “against the slow strangulation of fundamental British freedoms by this government.” Observers expect him to win handily, as the Labour Party has fallen dramatically in the polls. But Conservative leader David Cameron has already appointed a new shadow home secretary, so Davis may have forfeited his leadership role.

I’m reminded of Phil Gramm, a Democratic congressman, who worked with President Reagan and the Republicans to cut taxes and spending in the early 1980s. When the Democratic leadership removed him from the Budget Committee, he switched to the Republican Party. Saying that the voters of his district should have the chance to decide whether they wanted a Republican representative, he resigned, ran in the special election as a Republican, was easily elected on Lincoln’s birthday, and the following year waltzed into the U.S. Senate.

Will Davis find such success by resigning and giving the voters a chance to assess his performance? Only time will tell… In the meantime, you can watch the video of his five-minute speech here.

In an article about the wave of conservative reform under Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal, the New York Times writes:

Meanwhile the House is considering an income tax cut that would cost the state $300 million. 

Another way to say that would be:

Meanwhile the House is considering an income tax cut that would save the taxpayers $300 million.

It all depends on whether you identify with the taxpayers or the tax consumers.