SUNDAY, JULY 18, 2010 DAVID S. BRODER
ways bubbling just beneath the surface. And sure enough, it erupted at a caucus of House Democrats one night last week, triggered by an injudicious comment from White House press secretary Robert Gibbs.
firming what all the Democrats know to be true, namely, that the combination of high unemployment, oil pollution in the Gulf of Mexico and growing casualties in Afghanistan has so aggravated the voters that control of the House is seriously at issue.
Gibbs was denounced for telling televi- sion interviewers that the 39House seats that Republicans would need to take over to become a majority are certainly in play. For his candor, Gibbs was roundly roasted by some of those who could well be the victims of such an upheaval. President Obama himself hied up to Capitol Hill to make amends, but the un- derlying ferment remains. One White
KATHLEEN PARKER
Freedom of sketch, Part 2 W
hen H.L. Mencken said that Puri- tanism was “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may
be happy,” he was barely grazing the ice- berg of the titanic fundamentalism to come. Yes, those pesky, humor-challenged ji- hadists are at it again. A group of radical Muslims, whose promises to sacrifice their souls can’t be kept soon enough, ap- parently won’t be satisfied until happy people everywhere are dead. In yet another sequel in the series, an- other cartoonist fatwa has been issued. Stifling yawns would be a natural re- sponse at this juncture of outrage fatigue, except that an American woman’s life is at stake. Molly Norris doodled, and now she must die, says American-Yemeni Is- lamic cleric Anwar al-Aulaqi, or Wacky- Doodle (WD) for short. You may recall that Norris, once a rela- tively unknown Seattle cartoonist, was first threatened a few months ago by some bloggers on an obscure Web site, Revolution Muslim, for attempting to draw the prophet Muhammad. More re- cently, she has been named to an execu- tion list on Inspire, a new online English- language al-Qaeda magazine, which aims to recruit American Muslims for jihad. Calling Norris a “prime target,” WD also named eight other cartoonists, au- thors and journalists — Swedish, Dutch and British citizens — as targets, all for their “blasphemous caricatures” of the prophet. Drawing or creating any likeness of the
prophet, you may also recall, is against the rules among certain fundamentalists, though not all Muslims agree that such a prohibition exists. But even if it did, there would be no reason for a non-Muslim cartoonist to censor herself. Our laws guarantee the right to free expression, no matter the vehicle. End of story. We may not always like what the First Amend- ment permits, but we’ve agreed as a na- tion that the short-term aggravation of personal offense is the tithe we pay for freedom. The Norris cartoon that drew such fire was a childlike illustration — a poster calling for an “Everybody Draw Moham- med Day” that showed various household contents (a spool of thread, a teacup, a cherry, a domino and a doggie purse), all claiming to be the prophet. At the time, Norris said that she was
only trying to poke fun at Viacom and Comedy Central for their decision to cen-
THE PLUM LINE
Excerpts from Greg Sargent’s blog on domestic politics and debate on the Hill:
voices.washingtonpost.com/plum-line
Only Republicans
like Sarah Palin Okay, that headline is an exagger-
ation, but not by much. A new Gallup poll shows a striking disconnect in public opinion about Sa- rah Palin: While her favorability ratings are significantly higher among Repub- licans than those of all the other 2012 GOP hopefuls, her negative ratings among Americans overall are also sig- nificantly higher than those of her GOP rivals. This is significant, I think, because it underscores the uniqueness of her polit- ical situation and suggests that she will face major challenges if she decides to step outside the role that she’s carved out for herself in American life. Palin has skillfully positioned herself as a kind of celebrity quasi-candidate. It’s a role that allows her to insulate her- self from direct media cross-examina- tion and to communicate directly with her supporters, tightening her emo- tional grip on them even as the rest of the world continues to sour on her. The numbers from Gallup tell the
story. Palin has a whopping 76 percent favorability rating among Republicans; only 20 percent don’t like her. That’s sig- nificantly higher than those of the other GOP 2012 hopefuls.
At the same time, among all Amer- icans, she’s viewed unfavorably, 47 to 44 percent. That’s also significantly higher
than all the other GOP 2012 hopefuls. Only 9 percent of Americans don’t have an opinion of Palin; that number is in high double digits for all the others. Her situation is different than that of her ri- vals: They have room to expand their ap- peal, and she doesn’t.
Some might be tempted to compare
Palin’s numbers to those of President Obama, pointing out that Obama is a mirror image of Palin. But the compari- son doesn’t wash, according to more Gallup numbers sent my way. As noted above, in this poll the Amer- ican people viewed Palin negatively by three points. But they looked upon Oba- ma favorably, 52 to 44 percent. What’s more, Palin’s fave/unfave numbers are evenly split among independents, 44 to 44 percent, meaning that Republicans are the only group that views her more favorably than not. By contrast, Obama is viewed positively by indies, 50 to 46 percent. Simply put, though some of the spreads are within the margin of error, Palin remains a more polarizing figure than the president. As Politico’s Ben Smith has noted,
Palin’s strategy of going around the lamestream media filter has been a huge success with Palin Nation, but it has failed in that she continues to grow more unpopular with everyone else. As the above numbers demonstrate, this approach works brilliantly in her cur- rent role, but it’s growing increasingly unlikely that she’ll succeed if she ever sets foot outside the bubble she’s created for herself.
Which GOP can Obama run against? W
hen Congress stays in session during the dog days of a Wash- ington summer, rebellion is al-
Gibbs made the terrible mistake of af-
House aide told me, “They [the House members] really hate the Senate, but we made it easy for them to take it out on us.” The fact is that the Democrats are out of sorts — frustrated by the effectiveness of the Republican opposition that makes it so hard to pass bills in the Senate and battered, too, by the inability of Washing- ton to solve any of the big problems fac- ing the country. They were greeted on their return from their Independence Day holiday with a Post-ABC News poll reporting that, by a margin of 51 percent to 43 per- cent, voters think that it is more impor- tant to have a Republican majority in the next Congress to act as a check on Oba- ma’s policies, rather than a Democratic majority to support him. Unless Obama can turn that psychol-
ogy around, the Democrats could well be on their way to another 1994-style defeat. I was sent an advance copy of another poll, this one done for the Third Way, a leading moderate think tank, by the Be- nenson Strategy Group, which has worked for past Obama campaigns. It
KLMNO
R
A19 GEORGE F. WILL
suggests one way of shifting the odds. This rests on reviving, one more time,
the favorite Obama tactic of 2008: Run against George W. Bush, even though he is not on the ballot. Unprompted, only 25 percent of voters in this survey said that they think that if Republicans regain a majority it will sig- nal a return to Bush’s economic policies. By comparison, 65 percent say that a Re- publican Congress would promote “a new economic agenda that is different” from Bush’s. The difference is dramatic when Bush enters the equation. Obama’s economic agenda is preferred over Bush’s by 49 per- cent to 34 percent. But a generic conser- vative approach, pitting a leader “who will start from scratch with new ideas to shrink government, cut taxes and grow the economy” beats one committed to sticking with Obama’s policies, 64 per- cent to 30 percent. In the absence of any clear Republican
platform for the midterm election like the 1994 Contract With America, it is hard to say what Republicans would do
with a congressional majority. We know what they have voted against — all the major bills that Obama has sponsored to cure the Great Recession and regulate Wall Street and rework the health-care system. In a memo accompanying the poll, the
Third Way authors claim that they know that Republicans would echo Bush’s ap- proach of cutting taxes and minimizing government regulation. They argue that by labeling a future Republican Congress as a Bush Congress, Democrats can beat the opposition back. But I am not so certain. One question in the Third Way poll asked which path vot- ers prefer to jump-start private-sector job creation and economic growth — new government investments or cutting taxes on business? Cutting taxes on business won 54 per- cent to 32 percent. This sounds to me like Ronald Reagan returning to whomp Ba- rack Obama. Maybe all the Republicans have to do is to reject the Bush label and bring Reagan back for an encore.
davidbroder@washpost.com
Puerto Rico calls to Republicans
sor a “South Park” episode showing the prophet in a bear suit. (We are indeed liv- ing in “Toon Town” when a bear suit- wearing cartoon figure can get you killed in the name of Allah. Shouldn’t Porky Pig be making his entrance about now, say- ing “Th-th-th-that’s ALL folks?” Or would that be blasphemous, too?) Although Norris quickly removed the
cartoon from her Web site, sympathizers created a site inviting any and all to draw the prophet. At this point, things really did become childish as Islamophobes could legitimize their own radical ten- dencies under the guise of humor and the umbrella of constitutional protection. Nobody ever said that free speech isn’t
messy. I take a back seat to no one in defend- ing our right to free expression and have written often in defense of cartoonists, specifically. Cartoons may be the ultimate test of our tolerance because they so easi- ly slip beneath the skin and because they are, in fact, so hard to defend. We even ex- tend freedom of expression to the evil and stupid, figuring it is better that hate and ignorance be exposed in the light of day than that they go underground to fes- ter and breed. For this reason, I don’t share others’ concerns that al-Qaeda now has an Eng- lish-language magazine. Isn’t it better to read the thoughts of WD & Co. than to wonder what they’re up to? Besides, who can resist a magazine that publishes: “Make a Bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom”? These people are comedy writers and don’t know it. As weary as we may be of “Jihadist vs.
Cartoonist” reruns, we simply can’t sur- render the principle. There may be a strong argument for avoiding Muham- mad cartoons in the interest of denying al-Qaeda a propaganda tool, but let’s be clear about our purposes. Taking a higher road is not to capitulate to the enemy but to seek a better vantage point. Irreverence is a tough sell in a culture steeped in reverence, but perhaps we can advance the case for nonviolent protest through example. To that end, and in sup- port of Norris and others, 19 Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonists have signed a petition condemning threats and attacks against cartoonists. The petition is post- ed on the Cartoonists Rights Network International Web site (cartoonist
rights.com). It hasn’t nearly enough signatures.
kathleenparker@washpost.com
conundrums. The party should listen to Luis Fortuno, the Reaganite who resides in Puerto Rico’s executive mansion. Conservatives need a strategy for addressing the immigration issue without alienating America’s largest and most rapidly growing minority. Conservatives believe the southern border must be secured before there can be “comprehensive” immigration reform that resolves the status of the 11 million illegal immigrants. But this policy risks making Republicans seem hostile to Hispanics. Fortuno wants Republicans to cou- ple insistence on border enforcement with support for Puerto Rican state- hood. This, he says, would resonate deeply among Hispanics nationwide. His premise is that many factors — particularly, the Telemundo and Univi- sion television channels — have creat- ed a common consciousness among Hispanics in America. How many know that Puerto Ricans are American citizens? That every president since Truman has affirmed Puerto Rico’s right to opt for independ- ence or statehood? That every Repub- lican platform since 1968 has endorsed Puerto Rico’s right to choose state- hood? That Ronald Reagan, announc- ing his candidacy in 1979, said, “I favor statehood for Puerto Rico”? Fortuno supports H.R. 2499 (also
A PATRICK SEMANSKY/ASSOCIATED PRESS BP chief Tony Hayward meets the press in Port Fourchon, La., in May.
The real corporate responsibility
by Chrystia Freeland F
or weeks people on both sides of the Atlantic have been speculat- ing over who would lose his job
first because of the BP spill — Ken Sala- zar, the interior secretary, or Tony Hay- ward, the oil company’s chief executive. Given last week’s initial progress in capping the well, I won’t try to name a favorite in that race. But I would like to suggest a third, inanimate culprit: the cult of corporate social responsibility. As crude poured into the Gulf of
Mexico and the world economy strug- gled to recover from the financial crisis, corporate social responsibility might seem a perverse target. Surely we need more corporate responsibility, not less. But many of the business disasters of the past 24 months have been facilitat- ed by the mini-industry of corporate so- cial responsibility — known as CSR by those in the trade — a fetish encour- aged by the philanthropies that feed off it and funded by the corporate exec- utives who have found that it serves their bottom line. Consider BP’s “Beyond Petroleum” campaign. Before the spill transformed that slogan into a punch line for late- night comedians, Madison Avenue had lauded BP’s effort to position itself as the greenest fossil fuel producer: “Be- yond Petroleum” won two PRWeek “campaign of the year” awards and a gold “Effie” from the American Market- ing Association. Ogilvy, the firm that in- vented the slogan, still boasts of “Be- yond Petroleum” as a successful “case study” on its Web site. Or how about Goldman Sachs’s “10,000 Women” project? This initia- tive to organize and fund business edu- cation for 10,000 “underserved” wom- en around the world is the limousine of CSR drives: smart, innovative and ab- solutely in tune with Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn’s “Half the Sky” zeitgeist.
But the gulf oil spill and the financial crisis have taught us, rather brutally, that the heart of the relationship be- tween business and society doesn’t lie with the charitable deeds that compa- nies do in their off-hours but whether they are doing their day jobs in ways that help — or hurt — the rest of us. While BP was winning plaudits for be- ing the first oil company to accept glob- al warming as a scientific fact, the old- school Texas oilmen at ExxonMobil were unfashionably unapologetic about their core mission: to produce oil. Chastened by the Exxon Valdez dis- aster, however, they also became reli- gious about safety standards. With hindsight, that attention to safety turns
out to have had much greater social val- ue than any number of creative CSR drives. The same story played out on Wall
Street. So much of the wealth of the gilded early “naughties” trickled down into 10,000-women-style clever chari- table initiatives that my friends Mat- thew Bishop and Michael Green were inspired to coin a term to describe the phenomenon: “philanthro-capitalism.” Yet the considerable social good done by those projects pales in comparison with the destruction wreaked by the made-on-Wall Street financial crisis of 2007-08. The problem with CSR is that it mud- dies the waters. Goldman’s purpose isn’t to educate women; BP’s isn’t to lead the green revolution. The job of business is to make money — in BP’s case by producing energy, particularly fossil fuels; in Goldman’s case through finance. Even the most cuddly, caring chief executive is ultimately charged with a selfish central mission: to gener- ate profit for her shareholders. Forgetting that core goal — which the CSR culture can tempt us to do — is bad news for business leaders. It was a sad day for American capitalism this spring when Goldman Sachs chief Lloyd Blankfein decided that it was po- litically unsafe to admit to Congress that he is very good at his job: in this in- stance, making the right bet on sub- prime mortgages. Even more deplor- able was the moment a year earlier when President Obama used his bully pulpit to bully business — in this in- stance, the Chrysler bondholders, whose only sin was to stand up for eco- nomic self-interest and that of their investors. But getting confused about the prin-
cipal job of business is even more dan- gerous for the state. CSR, and the com- munitarian philosophy behind it, asks us to believe that the interests of an in- dividual company and those of the wid- er community are fully aligned. They aren’t — a truth too many regulators forgot in recent years. Corporate social responsibility sounds as unobjectionable as mother- hood and apple pie — and it would be crazy to object to rich companies writ- ing big checks for good causes. But we shouldn’t let that distract us from the fact that the chief social responsibility of business is to make a buck — and the social responsibility of government is to be sure that perfectly proper corpo- rate greed is channeled and con- strained for the greater good of us all.
The writer is global editor at large for Thomson Reuters. She is writing a book about the global super-elite.
supported by such House conserva- tives as Minority Whip Eric Cantor, Republican Conference Chairman Mike Pence and former Republican Study Committee chairman Jeb Hen- sarling), which would provide for a plebiscite on the island’s current sta- tus. If a majority favor this status, the question could be asked again in eight years. If a majority vote for change, a second plebiscite would offer a choice among the current status, independ- ence, “sovereignty in association with the United States” and statehood. Puerto Rico, which is only half as far from Florida as Hawaii is from Califor- nia, is about the size of Connecticut. Its population is larger than the popula- tions of 24 states. There are, however, problems. Puerto Rico’s per capita income
($14,905) is only 50 percent of that of the poorest state (Mississippi, $30,103) and 27 percent of the richest (Connect- icut, $54,397). The fact that Puerto Ri- cans are at home in American society does not entail the conclusion that the commonwealth, a distinct cultural and linguistic entity (most on the island do not speak English), belongs in the fed- eral union. Currently, Puerto Ricans pay federal income taxes only on in- come from off the island. Fortuno says the present system has failed to prevent the income disparity with the mainland from widening. But America does not want lukewarm citi- zens. In three referendums (1967, 1993, 1998), Puerto Ricans favored the status quo — an unincorporated territory — over statehood. In 1998, the vote was 50.4 percent to 46.5 percent. In the 1950s, the last time the federal union was enlarged, Hawaiians and Alaskans overwhelmingly supported statehood. Many Republicans suspect that con- gressional Democrats support state- hood for the same reason they want to pretend that the District of Columbia is a state — to get two more senators (and in Puerto Rico’s case, perhaps six members of the House). Such Repub- licans mistakenly assume that the is- land’s population of 4 million has the same Democratic disposition as the 4.2 million Puerto Ricans in the Bronx and elsewhere on the mainland. Fortuno disagrees, noting that while Republicans on the mainland were losing in 2008, he was elected in the is- land’s biggest landslide in 44 years. The party he leads won more than two- thirds of the seats in both houses of the legislature and three-fifths of the may- oralties, including that of San Juan. Fortuno, who calls himself a “values candidate” and goes to Catholic ser- vices almost every day, says that Puer- to Ricans are culturally conservative— 78 percent are pro-life, 91 percent op- pose same-sex marriage and 30 per- cent of the 85 percent who are Chris- tian are evangelicals. A majority sup- ports his agenda, which includes tax and spending cuts, trimming 16,000 from public payrolls to begin eliminat- ing the deficit that was 45 percent of the size of the budget. Fortuno, 49, who has degrees from
Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service and the University of Virginia’s law school, looks half his age. “Republicans,” he says, “cannot continue to oppose every Hispanic is- sue.” If he is correct that Puerto Rican statehood is, or can become, such an issue, Republicans should hear him out. The United States acquired Puerto Rico 112 years ago in the testosterone spill called the Spanish-American War. Before another century passes, per- haps Puerto Ricans’ ambivalence about their somewhat ambiguous sta- tus can be rectified to the advantage of Republicans.
georgewill@washpost.com
Republican governor — a very Republican governor — has an idea for solving one of his party’s
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100 |
Page 101 |
Page 102 |
Page 103 |
Page 104 |
Page 105 |
Page 106 |
Page 107 |
Page 108 |
Page 109 |
Page 110 |
Page 111 |
Page 112 |
Page 113 |
Page 114 |
Page 115 |
Page 116 |
Page 117 |
Page 118 |
Page 119 |
Page 120 |
Page 121 |
Page 122 |
Page 123 |
Page 124 |
Page 125 |
Page 126 |
Page 127 |
Page 128 |
Page 129 |
Page 130 |
Page 131 |
Page 132 |
Page 133 |
Page 134 |
Page 135 |
Page 136 |
Page 137 |
Page 138 |
Page 139 |
Page 140 |
Page 141 |
Page 142 |
Page 143 |
Page 144 |
Page 145 |
Page 146 |
Page 147 |
Page 148 |
Page 149 |
Page 150 |
Page 151 |
Page 152 |
Page 153 |
Page 154 |
Page 155 |
Page 156