In the U.S. today, only 3 of 5 babies have married parents.

Listen to Cathy Young:

[the] 40% of all babies born in the United States . . .born to single women [is] up from 34% in 2002. Some sociologists believe we have reached a tipping point: the link between marriage and parenthood is no longer the norm. Why is this happening. . .? [A] difficult question. . .we ignore at our peril.

The powerful economic, social and cultural pressures that once pushed . . . people into marriage are gone almost completely. All that remains is romantic love - and refusing to marry your child's other parent is often seen as more honorable than marrying someone you don't love . . .

large numbers of men are alienated from family life and from the next generation.

Listen as well to Ari Armstrong:

the dramatic rise in out-of-wedlock births points to deep cultural problems. . . Out-of-wedlock births are largely a phenomenon of lower-class America. . . "Only 4% of college graduates have children out of wedlock."

The "percent of births to unmarried women" for "all ages" breaks down as follows:

All Races: 38.5
White: 33.3
Black: 70.2
Hispanic: 49.9

And listen to Rob Stein and Donna St. George:

60% of those who had babies between 20 and 24 were single, up from 52% in 2002,

The rate of babies being born to unmarried women in the United States is starting to look more like [Europe]. . . the percentage of babies born to unmarried women is . . . about 55% in Sweden, about 50% in France and about 44% in the United Kingdom.

Stein and St. George do zero in on the major problem with single-parent families:

studies have shown that children generally fare better when they grow up in stable households with two parents. "We know that babies and children do best with committed, stable adult parents — preferably married," said Sarah Brown of the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy.

And Cathy Young as well points out:

there is abundant evidence that children generally fare better with two parents - and many children without fathers keenly feel their absence. . . a visiting dad is usually, even with best intentions, a pale substitute for day-to-day interaction with a father in the home. . .an intact marriage is still the most reliable way to protect the father-child bond. . . Giving up on the two-parent family as an ideal would be a sad defeat.

The Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, a joint project of institutes at Princeton and Columbia, has several authoritative articles and papers documenting the importance of having fathers around, whatever the continuing romantic involvement between parents. Marriage, of course, works best to keep fathers in the home.

There’s one mitigating factor that cuts against the high percentage of out-of-wedlock births: about 40% of those births occur in households where couples are cohabitating. Not marriage, but better by far than true single-parent childrearing.

It’s Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan

Want to simplify American foreign policy? Look at the three-country region above. Muslim. Non-Arab. Home to Islamic extremism. Going nuclear. Do we really worry about North Korea? Except as it may hook up with this region? If these three countries didn’t exist, would the Arab world be a major concern? The Arab region may be a battlefield, Israel may be Islam’s biggest political issue, but an effective strategy for dealing with Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan is our surest path to peace.

Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu certainly believes Iran is his country’s biggest threat. He sought U.S. agreement on the importance of keeping Iran from going nuclear during his Monday visit with President Obama. In exchange for U.S. help with Iran, he’s willing to restart in some form peace talks with Palestinians.

The Washington Post’s David Ignatius has Obama’s take on Netanyahu and Iran. Obama wants the Arab nations working with the U.S. to isolate Iran and pressure it to give up nuclear weapons. But to earn Arab world support, Obama needs progress on Palestine; Arabs expect the U.S. to deliver Israel. So to get Netanyahu to start talking with Palestine, Obama is holding out the promise of recognition of Israel by Arab League nations, or what Jordan's King Abdullah calls the "23-state solution."

American politics is very different, post-Iraq. Republicans stand with Israel against Islamic extremism, including Iran’s version, Hamas, and the Syrian-Iranian backed Hezbollah—the kind of terrorists we defeated in Iraq. Democrats weren’t into that fight, see Israel as somewhat like apartheid South Africa, and Palestinians as freedom fighters in the spirit of the Viet Cong. As a consequence, according to Ignatius,

Netanyahu faces the full force of the Obama political phenomenon—a president who feels politically secure enough to ignore the usual rules of the U.S.-Israel relationship and push hard for what he thinks is right.

And that’s very specifically ending Israel’s policy of expanding West Bank settlements.

Will Netanyahu and his coalition realize progress on Iran depends on Israel’s halting West Bank settlement construction? Netanyahu correctly focuses on Iran. Obama, though, understands that countering Iran and pacifying the Iranian-Afghan-Pakistani region’s 275 million relates to reducing the anger over Palestine that pours from the Arab world’s 350 million.

Newsweek cuts circulation by 50%.

Howard Kurtz, in the Washington Post, which owns the magazine, has the details. Newsweek lost $20 million in January-March. Earlier, when Newsweek proclaimed the “fall of Christianity,” I wrote the story behind the story was Newsweek’s own fall. Newsweek plans to imitate the Economist by becoming smaller and more elite, but evidently seeks to pick up Economist readers by challenging the British magazine’s more positive view of religion.

Richard Haass: Misunderstanding Choice

Richard Haass can lay claim to being one of the current foreign policy wisemen. He’s head of the establishment Council on Foreign Relations after having served the last two Republican presidents, leaving in 2003 as Colin Powell’s policy planning chief.

Now he’s attempting to influence Obama’s foreign policy through a new book and a book-based Washington Post op-ed. He believes “We would have been better off without Bush’s war of choice” in Iraq, just as we shouldn’t have followed Gen. Douglas MacArthur into North Korea in 1950, we should avoid further escalation in that “ graveyard of empires” called Afghanistan, and that somehow (how, really?), we should allow Iran to enrich uranium, but not enrich enough to build a bomb (!).

Haass sees the world as “gray and nuanced.” In a recent interview, Haass defended his reasoning.

wars of choice are anything but straightforward - they pose some of the most fateful decisions for any president. [After 9.11,] the threat posed by Iraq and Saddam Hussein had in no way increased, [our] goals [weren’t] specific and limited. . . the idea was to transform Iraqi society, [but] it was never clearly stated how the U.S. would bring democracy to Iraq.

Iran’s strategic gain is . . . the principal strategic result of America’s Iraq policy. Iran is dominating in Lebanon through Hezbollah, they are dominating in Gaza through Hamas, and they are now closer to realizing their nuclear ambitions. . .The U.S. strategic position has worsened: Iran is much stronger, Iraq is weak and divided. . . We’re now in an era where Iran, various militias and terrorists now have a much larger share of power. We’re still the most important external actor in the region, but our position has clearly suffered. . . The [current] era of Middle Eastern history . . . will be worse for the United States. . . I think the prevailing view is that the Bush administration left things worse than they inherited.

(Why didn’t you resign?) I believed Saddam Hussein had chemical and biological weapons. Never once, in all my years in government, did some analyst take me aside and say otherwise.

Haass maintains the first Bush administration pursued a “Goldilocks outcome” in Iraq, wanting a weaker and more pliant Iraq, but not one so weak that it wouldn’t be able to balance Iran. But to me, this seems pretty far from where Bush 41 actually was. More accurately, 41 wanted Saddam out of power, but expected the Gulf War loser to fall of his own weight. Iran was a theocratic, anti-U.S. state in 1991 to be sure, but far from going nuclear and having barely fought Saddam to a standstill in 1980-88, Iran was less the problem than it was part of the anti-Saddam solution of that time. Iraq was the enemy.

Going back over 2002-07, after 9.11 we faced Islamic extremist threats from both al Qaeda and Iran. In Iraq, we took on and beat al Qaeda, leaving Iran the principal Middle East threat today. In my view, in the view of many others, we are safer today because Saddam no longer controls the world’s third-largest source of liquid petroleum, and because al Qaeda chose to take its stand in Iraq and lost.

The debate goes on. But given the danger Saddam posed to the world from 1990 on, including after 9.11, necessity (not choice) dictated we end his rule. Now we at least have the chance a democratic Iraq will help counter Iran’s extremism.

Climate Change as Religion

I’m not the only one who’s spotted the religious- like dogmatism associated with modern-day environmentalism. Here from political guru Michael Barone:

Over the past decade, [Gallup] has been asking Americans whether the seriousness of global warming is generally exaggerated or generally correct. From 1998 to 2007, except for the run-up to the 2004 election, they said it was generally serious by roughly a 2-1 margin -- 66 to 30% in 2006, for example. But in March 2009, that margin slipped to only 57 to 41%. [And] last month, pollster Scott Rasmussen found that only 34% believes that global warming is caused by human activity, while 48% said it is caused by long-term planetary trends. That's almost exactly the opposite of what he found 12 months before -- 47 to 34% the other way around. However, 48% of the . . . elite continues to believe global warming is man-made.

For liberal elites, belief in . . . global warming has taken on the character of religious faith [emphasis added]. We have sinned (by . . . driving SUVs); we must atone (by . . . recycling); we must repent (by supporting . . . cap and trade schemes). You may notice that the "we" in question is usually . . . ordinary American citizens. The liberal elite is less interested in giving up its luxuries (Al Gore purchases carbon offsets to compensate for his huge mansion and private jet travel) than in changing the lifestyle of the masses, who selfishly insist on living in suburbs . . . Ordinary Americans are seen not as responsible fellow citizens building stable communities but as greedy masses, who must be disciplined to live according to the elite's religious dogmas.

Obama’s Job Gap

President Obama promised his stimulus plan would create or retain 3-4 million jobs by 2010 (averages out to 3.5 million). Thus far, employment has dropped 1.1 million since Obama entered the White House. The resulting Obama job gap stands at 4.6 million jobs [chart]. We will follow the Obama job gap in the same spirit as former “Meet the Press” host Tim Russert followed Bush’s job count throughout Bush 43’s first term, or at least until Bush’s numbers turned positive (the term ended with Bush up 4.2 million jobs; Obama too is likely to be in positive territory by 2012). Credit to Karl Rove for inventing the “job gap” methodology.

No Longer Golden?

George Will predicts California voters May 19 will reject several California propositions designed to raise revenue by upping taxes, extending tax increases, and raiding the lottery fund. We’ll see. But Will seems right about how things have gone wrong in the Golden State:

➢ Since 2004, more Americans have moved out of California than have moved in. In the last decade, net out-migration of Americans—as opposed to immigrants—has been 1.4 million.

➢ California's business costs are over 20% higher than the average state's. California's business conditions among the worst, as measured by 16 variables directly influenced by the Legislature. California's income and sales taxes are among the nation's highest; in 2006, the top 1% of earners paid 48% of the income taxes. Unemployment, the nation's fourth highest, is 11.2%.

➢ If, since 1990, state spending increases had been held to the inflation rate plus population growth, the state would have a $15 billion surplus instead of a $42 billion budget deficit. Since 1990, the number of state employees has increased by more than a third. Under Schwarzenegger—since 2003—per capita government spending, adjusted for inflation, has increased nearly 20%.

➢ California teachers -- the nation's highest paid, with salaries about 25% above the national average -- are emblematic of the grip government employees unions have on the state, where 57% of government workers are unionized (the national average is 37%).

To Will, “California's perennial boast -- that it is the incubator of America's future -- now has an increasingly dark urgency.” He ironically concludes, “California has become liberalism's laboratory, in which the case for fiscal conservatism is being confirmed.”

A (not so) remarkable video.

Take a look here:

One word.

“I have a dream.”

--Martin Luther King, Jr.

“I have a gift.”

--Barack Obama

Blair Warns, Do We Listen?

"there can never be a friendship between the British democracy and the Nazi Power. We have sustained a defeat without a war. . . and do not suppose that this is the end. This is only of beginning of the reckoning. This is only the first sip, the first foretaste of a bitter cup . . . "
--Winston Churchill,
October 1938 Parliamentary Speech on Munich Agreement

Before he became Britain’s wartime prime minister, Churchill was making a name for himself prodding his country to rearm against Hitler’s rise. At 64, Churchill was so right. Now Tony Blair, a British senior statesman after having served as prime minister for a decade but who celebrates only his 56th birthday tomorrow, is warning the world about extremists within Islam.

Blair laid out his warning in a recent speech before the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. Blair said the extremist ideology, as a movement within Islam, “has to be defeated,” and is so deeply rooted, that “our strategy for victory has to be broader, more comprehensive but also more sharply defined. . . it is not going to be won except over a prolonged period. . . akin to fighting revolutionary Communism. . .”

How many people within the Obama administration, those who buried the words “war on terror,” preferring instead “man-caused disasters,” well, how many of these folks are focused on a “prolonged” struggle akin to that which we waged against Communism? Blair may be as much in the wilderness today as was Churchill in 1938.

Here’s more from Blair:

”Look there are people in this world who are crazy,” a friend said to me the other day, “leave them to be crazy.” Except the problem is that they won't leave us in the comfort of our lives. That's not the way the world works today.

Blair identifies six elements to a successful strategy against Islamic extremism:

1. Understand we have not caused this phenomenon but we can help beat it. Terror is the enemy of progress. The responsibility for terrorism lies with the terrorist and no-one else.

2. This battle can only be won within Islam itself and the fact is we have allies. The world of Islam includes large parts of Asia including Indonesia, the world’s largest predominantly Muslim country.

3. We need hard and soft power. We have to persuade where the battle is for hearts and minds. We have to fight where we are being fought against.

4. Where we are called upon to fight, we have to do it. If we are defeated anywhere, we are at risk of being defeated everywhere.

5. Reject the view that democracy is unattainable or unaccepted in the Islamic world. It will be hard to accomplish. But it is only by the embrace of greater democracy that this battle will be won.

6. Re-discover confidence and conviction in who we are, how far we've come and what we believe in. We are standing up for what is right. The body of ideas that allows us to vote in and vote out our rulers, that provides a rule of law on which we can rely, and a political space “more transparent than anything that went before isn't decaying. It is in the prime of life.”

Blair indirectly rejects the foreign policy “realists”--the Henry Kissinger school enjoying a post-Bush comeback under Obama--when he attacks the foreign policy

of the world weary, the supposedly sensible practitioners of caution and expediency, who think they see the world for what it is, without the illusions of the idealist who sees what it could be; those who regarded politics as a Bismarck or Machiavelli regarded it. . . all a power play; a matter, not of right or wrong, but of who's on our side, and our side defined by our interests, not our values. We should remember what such expediency led us to, what such caution produced.

The former Labour Party chief also cautions us against “abandoning the market or open economic system,” saying instead we should adjust the system that “has delivered amazing leaps forward in prosperity for our citizens and we shouldn't, amongst the gloom, forget it.”

Because Islamic extremism is cloaked in religion, Blair believes part of defeating it lies also in religion, “in a consistent and clear critique of its religious error by religious leaders within Islam; and in the burgeoning initiative for dialogue, understanding and action between the different faiths of the world.” He adds, “The more we reach out across the world of faith, the more the extremists and reactionaries within all faiths can be challenged.”

To Blair,

This war needs to be at the centre of policy, properly resourced, properly serviced. It needs to go down into the education systems, ours as well as theirs, into collaboration between institutions of learning, into arts and culture. Foreign policy needs to be completely re-shaped around such a strategy. And, of course, the Israel-Palestine question must be resolved.

Richard Rorty

The Hoover Institution’s Peter Berkowitz believes he has found the philosophical underpinning for Obama’s pragmatism. It’s based on the 1990s work of Richard Rorty (1931-2007)[picture], an Ivy League philosopher who revived the early 20th century school of thought launched by Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey. Pragmatism stands for flexibility in solving problems as opposed to solutions based on religious dogma or rigid moral and political agendas. At its extreme, pragmatism denies the existence of objective truth, arguing that opinions we declare true are merely those that have proved useful to one interest or another.

Rorty’s work gives pragmatism a partisan meaning, earning him a place in philosophy departments, among political theorists, in law schools, and in the university world Obama inhabited. Rorty subordinated philosophical questions to political questions, and posited that the proper political question in America is how to promote progressive ends.

In Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America, Rorty maintained that "nobody knows what it would be like to try to be objective when attempting to decide what one's country really is, what its history really means." Nevertheless, Rorty seemed to believe the right in America is the party of the status quo, fighting to preserve inherited privilege. By contrast, the left that takes its cue from Walt Whitman and John Dewey--"prophets" of a "civic religion"--is the party of hope working to bring America into harmony with democracy's progressive promise.

Flatly rejecting biblical faith as childish nonsense, Rorty celebrated democracy's progressive promise as an alternative faith. Rorty wanted the pragmatist to make "shared utopian dreams" his guide to politics. Yet while purporting to focus on practical consequences and dismissing the distinction between true and false as a delusion, Rorty equated what works with actions that increase government's role in promoting social justice, and treated the progressive interpretation of America as, in effect, good and true. Thus under the guise of inclusiveness, Rorty denigrated and excluded rival moral and political opinions.

Pragmatism as a religion, the only true faith. Ironic, no?

Specter delivers filibuster-proof majority.

Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter is now a Democrat. Democrats are as firmly in control of the Senate as they are of the House and the White House. The courts are next. America is a democracy, and now a democracy fully controlled by liberals. It hasn’t been this way since Vietnam quickly destroyed the liberal majority consensus that ruled my country in 1965. Obama only needs to work his personal charm on fellow Democrats. Republicans don't matter. My gosh.

Republicans thinking there is some silver lining ought to sober up by reading the analysis of Sean Trende, in “RealClearPolitics.”

Dog Bites Man: Media Loves Obama

Actually, the degree of bias is newsworthy. According to the Center for Media and Public Affairs, the nightly newscasts devoted nearly 28 hours to Obama's presidency in the first 50 days, versus 8 hours for Bush in his first 50. And 58% of the NBC, ABC, and CBS evaluations of Obama were positive, compared with just 33% for Bush. That means of the nearly 19 total positive hours of coverage given to either Obama or Bush, a whopping 86% covered Obama positively, with Bush getting just 14% of the combined total [chart]. And while network positives hit 58%, at the New York Times an even more one-sided 73% of the front-page assessments were positive.

“The Beijing Consensus”

Ariana Eunjung Cha, writing in the Washington Post, reports on economic policy’s emerging “Beijing Consensus.” British economist John Williamson 20 years ago coined the term "Washington Consensus": a standard set of policies including privatization of state enterprises, free trade, deregulation and restraint in public spending . The International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the U.S. Treasury pushed the “Washington Consensus” on debt-ridden nations, espeicially in Latin America.

The current U.S.-origin economic disaster brings the “Washington Consensus” into question. With the help of Chinese academics such as Tsinghua University’s Cui Zhiyuan, who recently published a book on the “Beijing Consensus,” China’s leading economic role is now drawing increased attention. South Korea’s Ministry of Strategy and Finance, for example, just published a report warning of the dangers of Beijing’s “Consensus.”

Cheng Enfu, an economics researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, defines the “Beijing Consensus” as promotion of economies in which public ownership remains dominant; preferring gradual reform over "shock therapy"; being open to foreign trade but largely self-reliant; and pushing large-scale market reform first, political and cultural change later.

In other words, the “Washington Consensus” enforces a free market agenda on developing countries, while the “Beijing Consensus” leaves more power in the hands of the recipient nations, with China standing by as their champion.

In Cheng’s view, the global economic crisis "displays the advantages of the Chinese model" and has already expanded China's influence. "Some mainstream economists are saying that India should learn from China; Latin American countries are trying to learn from China. When foreign countries send delegations to China, they show interest in the Chinese way of developing.”

Barry Sautman of Hong Kong’s University of Science and Technology argues the “Beijing Consensus” takes seriously developing states’ aspirations “often ignored” by the West, such as "a more equitable international distribution of wealth and power."

The "Beijing Consensus"--another sign the current economic crisis will shift the global economic center from North America to Asia.

The Value of Celebrity

Obama is purposely using his celebrity status to maintain high approval ratings that will help him push his legislative program through congress. So says political guru Stu Rothenberg in his “Political Report.” As Rothenberg writes,

In encouraging all of the celebrity coverage (journalists don't need much encouragement given the public's apparent unquenchable need for gossip), the White House surely is trying to keep Obama's appeal high among those Americans who really don't care a great deal about politics.

Being celebrities gives the Obamas a bigger audience, and probably deeper emotional commitments, than many politicians receive. Even if the economy doesn't recover completely and Obama's policy proposals stir up opposition, he could retain his popularity - and, with it, political clout on Capitol Hill - because of his (and his family's) celebrity coverage and appeal.

Education: Merit Pay for Teacher Teams

As I have written, D.C. school chief Michelle Rhee’s effort to reform the capital’s poor, largely black system is a real litmus test of Obama’s commitment to improving education. And we now know the Obama administration is letting D.C.’s successful school voucher program die, and also seems ready, in spite of campaign promises to the contrary, to weaken support for charter schools.

There are, however, other paths to education reform, including merit pay for teachers—something to which Rhee gives her highest priority, and something else during the campaign Obama promised to support. Merit pay bothers me, because it does set one group of teachers against the probable majority, with the majority likely to prevail [cartoon]. Better, I think, to handle teacher bonuses in the manner the Washington Post’s Steven Pearlstein recommends for the financial industry:

[Goldman Sachs Chairman Lloyd Blankfein] laid out a spot-on set of guidelines for industry bonuses that would give greater weight to the performance of the entire firm than just individual performance and reflect long-term risks as well as the short-term gains.

Rhee should provide bonuses to entire teacher teams in schools that work.

Education: Obama's First Crashing Pillar

Obama’s agenda is now labeled the “New Foundation.” "New" Deal, "New" Frontier, "New" Foundation, get it? Upon a new, rock foundation, Obama says he’ll build his economic house with “five pillars”, one of which is education. (Obama loves pillars; see here, and recall the columns that last summer festooned his Denver acceptance speech stage [picture].) But Obama’s education “pillar” increasingly looks anything but “new,” more like some cardboard prop left over from a teachers’ union convention. This is tragedy.

The Denver Post’s David Harsanyi is following the story. He writes that while Obama’s Education secretary Arne Duncan argues we have an obligation to disregard politics to do whatever is "good for the kids," his department has buried “a politically inconvenient study” that showed “unquestionable and pervasive improvement” among District of Columbia students who won vouchers, compared with the kids who didn't. The department not only disregarded the report but also “issued a gag order on any discussion about it.”

According to Harsanyi, Duncan's “feeble argument” against the D.C. voucher program he and congressional Democrats killed is that

because only 1% of children were able to "escape" (and boy, that's some admission) from D.C. public schools through this program, it was not worth saving. So, you may ask, why not allow the 1% to turn into 2% or 10% instead of scrapping the program? . . . Duncan can't be honest, of course. Not when it's about politics and payback to unions who are about as interested in reforming education as teenagers are in calculus. . . Democrats who killed this scholarship program, specifically designed for disadvantaged kids, are . . . deeply hypocritical and dishonest.

Now that the unions have killed D.C.’s voucher program, their next stop, according to University of Arkansas education professor Jay Greene, is charter schools. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Green notes

Many proponents of school choice, especially Democrats, have tried to appease teachers unions by limiting their support to charter schools while opposing private school vouchers. They hope that by sacrificing vouchers, the unions will spare charter schools from political destruction.

But these reformers are starting to learn that appeasement on vouchers only whets unions appetites for eliminating all meaningful types of choice. . . In New York, for example, the unions have backed a new budget that effectively cuts $51.5 million from charter-school funding, even as district-school spending can continue to increase . . .

New York charters already receive less money per pupil than [regular schools, and u]nions are also seeking to strangle charter schools with red tape. . .Eva Moskowitz, former chair of the New York City Council education committee and now a charter school operator, has characterized this new push against charters as a "backlash" led by "a union-political-educational complex that is trying to halt progress and put the interests of adults above the interests of children." She is right.

As with vouchers, the studies of charter schools, according to Greene, “have consistently shown that students learn more in charter schools.” In New York City, students accepted by lottery to charter schools were significantly outpacing the academic progress of their peers who lost the lottery and had to return to regular schools. And middle-school students at charters in Florida and Chicago who continued into charter high schools were significantly more likely to graduate and go on to college than those forced to return to regular high schools because charter high schools were unavailable.

Greene fears that “vouchers made the world safe for charters by drawing union fire. But now that the unions have the voucher threat under control, charters are in trouble.”

Fox First

The “RealClearPolitics” sweep of April 16 political news carries Brent Bozell of “Townhall”’s posting, of the same date, decrying Newsweek’s Holy Week pronouncement that America is in a “post-Christian” era. Bozell counters that the real story is Newsweek’s own decline as a mass media publication. I took a similar approach, and made the same point last week, on April 10.

The same “RealClearPolitics” sweep picked up Atlantic’s Ross Douthat commentary on yesterday’s nationwide tea party protests against raising taxes [picture]. Douthat’s article in turn links to one by ex-Clinton White House official Matt Miller that flatly says Obama and his advisors plan broad tax increases, “presumably in a second term.” According to Miller, “The math simply doesn’t work at current levels of taxation. . . But the one hard truth Barack Obama won’t utter is that all Americans will have to pay higher taxes before long.”

A day earlier, Canadian journalist John Ibbitson made the same point, writing “tax hikes are coming.” But in this blog, nearly three weeks before Miller or Ibbitson, I said on March 27 Obama is “just holding back part of the truth. . . We need higher taxes.”

On two separate issues, you saw it first here.

Partisan Road to Power

America, as I have said for some time, is deeply divided politically because the two parties have become so efficient at gathering up their supporters.

"RealClearPolitics’" Jay Cost has assembled strong evidence of this trend, including the increased gap (now at an all-time high) between Democratic and GOP support for presidents early in their (first) term, the rising number of states that voted strongly for one party over the other in presidential elections, the shrinking number of members of one party voting for the other party’s presidential candidate, growing negative feelings of members of one party for the other party, and the increasing ideology displayed by U.S. House members in their voting—Democrats voting liberal, Republicans voting conservative.

Former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson, after noting this trend, takes on Obama for advancing a heavily liberal agenda that forces Republicans into strident opposition (his debt-exploding budget bill passed both houses of congress without a single Republican supporter). Hadn't Obama run a campaign to end partisan divisions? The problem is, as Gerson himself says,

Roosevelt and Reagan, in their time, were polarizing presidents precisely because they were ambitious presidents. They believed that some national goals were worth the sacrifice of amity. A decisive leader is sometimes a divisive leader.

Obama is happy to be in the Roosevelt-Reagan mold—personally affable and disarming as he pushes his partisan agenda. Campaign promises of something different? So yesterday.

Post-Christian America

“One of the great strengths of the United States is . . . we do not consider ourselves a Christian nation. . .”

--Barack Obama, 4.6.09

It is common for the media to use Christmas or Easter to run attacks on religion (examples from TIME: “Is God Dead?,” Easter 1966, “Is the Bible Fiction?,” Christmas 1995, “Does Heaven Exist?,” Easter 1997). Newsweek editor Jon Meacham is in that same tradition with his current cover article, “The End of Christian America.” (Judging from Obama's April 6 statement, he must have at least looked at Newsweek’s cover.) “Christian America” is finished, Meacham says, because according to the American Religious Identification Survey, the percentage of self-identified Christians has fallen since 1990 from 86 to 76%. Oh.

Meacham’s article is confused. In one place he writes, “while the percentage of Christians may be shrinking, [b]eing less Christian does not necessarily mean that America is post-Christian." Yet he’s writing in an issue whose cover proclaims, “The Decline and Fall [emphasis added] of Christian America” that carries another article entitled, “A Post-Christian Nation,” and with Meacham’s own piece saying, two paragraphs later, “Many conservative Christians believe they have lost the battles over issues such as abortion, school prayer and even same-sex marriage, and that the country has now entered a post-Christian [emphasis added] phase.”

For sure, Meacham believes in and is delighted with “post-Christian” America. But there is something else going on. The Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism’s annual report on the state of the media found American weekly newsmagazines, including Newsweek, are the “bleakest” part of media’s declining audience, with their advertising and readership falling even faster than newspapers, as circulation dropped 4.8% last year alone. U.S. News has now ceased to be a weekly, and Newsweek, in a move to staunch losses, is giving up the mass market and trying to emulate the niche, elite model of the Economist.

So Meacham, who calls himself “an observant (if deeply flawed) Episcopalian,” therefore needs to set Newsweek apart from the Economist. And we now see he is doing so by having Newsweek take issue with the views of the Economist on religion's current strength. If you believe religion, including Christianity, is surprisingly healthy, think Economist. And Meacham, looking for circulation and advertising from the American elite, is saying, if you think Christianity is dying in America, think Newsweek.

John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, editor in chief and Washington bureau chief respectively of the Economist, have a new book out entitiled, God is Back: How the Global Revival of Faith is Changing the World. In the Wall Street Journal, they “pick up the gauntlet” and directly challenge Meacham’s perspective, adding that anyway, Meacham’s unbelieving friends on the left “are less worried about religion per se as about the fusion of religion and political power in the form of the new right.”

And in fact, that’s the truth. Meacham himself quotes the Bible in his wishful effort to march conservative Christians out of American politics:

there is much New Testament evidence to support a vision of faith and politics in which the church is truest to its core mission when it is the farthest from the entanglements of power.

But wishing won’t make it so. The sharp, partisan battle for control of America goes on. Millions of believers, in large part nonwhite, voted for Obama. Meacham and his elite friends know that if Republicans can rid themselves of their party’s racist past and successfully cobble together a coalition of all races that believes the fight for God over Mammon must begin on Sunday and continue throughout the week, Obama’s majority disappears.