The Last Culture Warrior

Sarah Palin and American politics.

Of all the reactions to Sarah Palin's Friday morning press conference, the most common by far is bafflement followed by gentle and not-so-gentle mockery.

Those who've long since deemed Palin a criminally incompetent Lady Macbeth were delighted to see her crash and burn. Sensing some kind of ulterior motive, one emerging narrative is that she is abandoning ship before some messy ethics violation is revealed in an effort to preserve her 2012 presidential viability. One outlandish theory I've toyed with is that she intends to build a new life as an evangelical super-celebrity, the tough-but-loving mother of a large Christian brood who can step in where Jon and Kate left off. Yet my sense is that Palin's breezily informal remarks were earnest, and that she intends not to run for president but rather to rescue some semblance of a normal family life. But really, it's impossible to tell.

What does seem increasingly clear is that Palin's collapse represents the end of a certain kind of politics. If the culture war really is ending, culture warriors like Palin will fade from the scene.

As a candidate for governor of Alaska, Palin ran as an opponent of the local Republican establishment and a champion of a windfall profits tax on oil companies, in many ways a platform that would more naturally fit a Democratic reformer. Palin's social conservatism was immaterial because it was in the Alaskan context utterly unremarkable. Her outsized approval ratings reflected the fact that she embodied Alaska's idiosyncratic politics, which are simultaneously pro-gun and pro-handout. While Republicans in the lower 48 fret about the economic and cultural threat posed by increasing dependence on government largesse, Palin was celebrated early on for the doubling of disbursements from the Alaska Permanent Fund, which climbed to $3,000 in the early and happy phase of her one and only gubernatorial term. Politically, Palin was many things, but a Goldwaterite conservative intent on slashing spending and encouraging self-reliance was not one of them. To put it a bit more harshly, you could say that Palinism was instead a pale imitation of Peronism.

During the presidential campaign, much was made of Sarah Palin's cultural populism. Largely bereft of substantive policy views on national issues, she was scrutinized on questions of cultural style, not least because of her compelling personal narrative. Millions of conservative voters identified with her deeply held social conservatism. Her sprawling family and infant son Trig captured the aspirations of millions of families who longed for tradition and stability. Many conservatives hoped that as a woman, Palin could recast the abortion debate. The pro-life movement, traditionally seen by those on the left and center as being hostile to working mothers, to an egalitarian understanding of gender roles and as a smokescreen for an agenda designed to hobble the advancement of women, hasn't been helped by the movement's dearth of female leadership.

Palin promised to represent a down-home feminism, one that Red America could embrace, while making the pro-life case through the power of her example, and not a hectoring, sectarian tone. As the country changes--as the number of churchgoers declines, as the white working class shrinks--it has long been clear that social conservatives will have to adapt to win over younger voters who've grown up in a very different cultural environment. And who better than the youthful, appealing governor of Alaska, a frontier state far from the Deep South?

Social conservatism succeeds when it is tied closely to real-world economic concerns. The case for stable families isn't about condemning single mothers or lesbians and gays. Rather, it's about creating the best environment for raising children. Punishing tax burdens and long commutes and failing schools are issues that social conservatives can and do care about more than marriage amendments.

But from the moment Palin made her debut at the Republican National Convention with a powerfully pugilistic speech, she emerged as the second coming of Spiro Agnew, best known for his lacerating attacks against the nattering nabobs of negativity in the national press. Whereas John McCain assiduously avoided discussing social issues, Palin became the campaign's mouthpiece for any number of culture war cliches. It was a sad commentary on the state of the exhausted conservative movement. As Republican support has faded, efforts to energize the conservative base have increasingly taken an Us vs. Them turn, one that pits true believers against the elitist left.

Ronald Reagan ran as the candidate of economic common sense against a Democratic party that seemed excessively ideological and inward-looking. Though he was certainly a social conservative, he framed his positions in the broadest possible language. The end result was that in 1984, the staunch pro-lifer won 49 of 50 states. Twenty years later, George W. Bush was unable to make a similarly appealing economic case and was thus forced to lean more heavily on social issues. The old Reagan majority steadily shrank. Despite the economic turmoil that defined the 2008 campaign, Palin hardly played the economic card at all. What had been one arrow in the conservative quiver--the cutting anti-elitism--became her only weapon.

But the Obama presidency is helping conservatives rediscover their roots as the defenders of an open, dynamic, entrepreneurial economy. Though the GOP will always be the more socially conservative party, one gets the impression that the culture war is fading. Younger voters are by no means monolithically liberal on cultural issues. Yet they don't seem inclined to vote on those issues. And so a figure like Palin, who seemed so promising at first, offers them nothing.

Reihan Salam is a fellow at the New America Foundation. The co-author of Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream, he writes a weekly column for Forbes.

Obama Has Gotten It Wrong for Twenty-Five Years

Jennifer Rubin

Those who suspect the president is engaged in a bit of dangerous self-delusion and denial about certain unpleasant realities regarding the threats from rogue states won’t be heartened to read that his current non-proliferation fetish stems, at least according to the New York Times, from his college infatuation with the nuclear freeze movement. Apparently, youthful Obama did not focus on the results from Ronald Reagan’s refusal to buy into the fantasies of liberals –namely the fall of the Soviet Empire. That lesson has entirely eluded now-president Obama. Is it any wonder his critics find his posture fraught with peril and entirely out-of-touch with the threats we face?

As the Times reports:

“This is dangerous, wishful thinking,” Senator Jon Kyl, Republican of Arizona, and Richard Perle, an architect of the Reagan-era nuclear buildup that appalled Mr. Obama as an undergraduate, wrote last week in The Wall Street Journal. They contend that Mr. Obama is, indeed, a naïf for assuming that “the nuclear ambitions of Kim Jong-il or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would be curtailed or abandoned in response to reductions in the American and Russian deterrent forces.”

In the interview, the president described his agenda as the best way to move forward in a turbulent world.
“It’s naïve for us to think,” he said, “that we can grow our nuclear stockpiles, the Russians continue to grow their nuclear stockpiles, and our allies grow their nuclear stockpiles, and that in that environment we’re going to be able to pressure countries like Iran and North Korea not to pursue nuclear weapons themselves.”

But what is naïve, of course, is to think that Iran and North Korea will be impressed by our disarmament efforts. No consideration is given, just as none was given by the nuclear freeze crowd a generation ago, to the possibility that disarmament will only embolden our adversaries and confuse our allies. But apparently Obama’s worldview has not matured much since his Columbia days:

Mr. Obama’s journalistic voice was edgy with disdain for what he called “the relentless, often silent spread of militarism in the country” amid “the growing threat of war.” The two groups, he wrote, “visualizing the possibilities of destruction and grasping the tendencies of distorted national priorities, are throwing their weight into shifting America off the dead-end track.”

So little has changed. President Obama, like college student Obama, still fails to grasp the moral and political dimensions of the struggle we are involved in, still lacks any appreciation for the nature of totalitarian despots and of the motives compelling them to seek nuclear weapons. He is still fixated on the notion that weakness can resolve international threats. Unfortunately, the consequences for student Obama were not potentially fatal to his country. The reality is different today. As the Times notes:

Critics argue that the North Koreas of the world will simply defy the ban — and that the international community will fail to punish offenders.

“If the implications were not so serious, the discrepancy between Mr. Obama’s plans and real-world conditions would be hilarious,” said Frank J. Gaffney Jr., a Reagan-era Pentagon official who directs the Center for Security Policy, a private group in Washington. “There is only one country on earth that Team Obama can absolutely, positively denuclearize: Ours.”

And really, what excuse is there for Obama’s ludicrous worldview? Unlike student Obama, President Obama knows how the Cold War ended. And it wasn’t by disarming America.

OAS Suspends Honduras; Zelaya's Vow to Return Stirs Controversy

JOSE DE CORDOBA PAUL KIERNAN

Associated Press

The Organization of American States meets in emergency session, in Washington, to consider suspending Honduras' membership because of the coup that ousted Honduran President Manuel Zelaya.

TEGUCIGALPA -- The stage was set on Sunday for a dramatic confrontation in Honduras, with plans by ousted president Manuel Zelaya to return to the country to take up his post despite threats by the provisional government that he will be arrested and jailed upon arrival.

Mr. Zelaya's plans to return, however, could be upended by the new leaders of this small Central American country. On Sunday, the Tegucigalpa airport was closed, according to eyewitnesses.

Journal Community

Discuss: Was it really a coup?

Honduras has continued to defy the international community. Late on Saturday, the Organization of American States voted to suspend the country from the multilateral body, which has 34 active members. Earlier, Honduras' provisional government said it would rather be kicked out of the OAS than allow Mr. Zelaya to return to the presidential seat.

Mr. Zelaya, a Stetson hat-wearing leftist who is close allies to Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, told Venezuela's state-run Telesur TV network that he planned to fly to Honduras on Sunday along with Argentina's President Cristina Kirchner and Ecuador's Rafael Correa, also leftists.

"We will arrive at the international airport in Tegucigalpa, Honduras with several presidents, (and) members of international organizations," Mr. Zelaya told Caracas-based station Telesur, according to the Associated Press.

The country's acting leaders, however, don't appear to be bluffing about arresting the president if he returns. In the days after he was sent packing to Costa Rica by Honduras' military, the provisional government has accused Mr. Zelaya of multiple crimes, from treason to drug trafficking.

If Mr. Zelaya returns, the chances of a violent confrontation appeared high. Responding to a call by the ousted president, thousands of his supporters turned up at the Tegucigalpa airport to show their support.

Honduras' influential Cardinal Oscar Rodriguez, the highest ranking Catholic Church official in the country, went on national television to urge the exiled president not to come back. "We think that a return to the country at this time could unleash a bloodbath in the country," Cardinal Rodriguez said. "To this day, no Honduran has died. Please meditate because afterwards it would be too late."

The prelate also criticized Mr. Zelaya, suggesting the Church was throwing its weight behind the provisional government. "The day of your swearing in, you clearly quoted the three commandments of the sacred law of God: Not to lie, not to steal, and not to kill," said the Cardinal, who was seen as a leading candidate to succeed the late Pope John Paul II.

Mr. Zelaya, the son of a wealthy farmer who ran for office as a centrist, sharply polarized the country when his politics took a left turn and he aligned his government closely with Venezuela's Hugo Chavez. Honduras joined Mr. Chavez's trade pact, received cut rate oil from Venezuela, and embarked on an attempt to rewrite the constitution that critics say would have let Mr. Zelaya extend his term.

To that end, Mr. Zelaya wanted to hold a referendum on whether voters wanted to change the constitution. The vote was declared illegal by Honduras' Supreme Court, but the president vowed to press on. Last Sunday, the day the referendum was set to take place, soldiers stormed the presidential residence and seized the leader at gunpoint. Congress later swore in Roberto Micheletti, the president of Congress.

So far, attempts at diplomacy have failed. OAS Secretary General Jose Miguel Insulza arrived on Friday for talks with leading politicians and figures like Cardinal Rodriguez. But Mr. Insulza left soon after, saying the interim government didn't want to budge. "The break in the constitutional order persists and those that did this don't seem to have any intention of reversing that situation," he told a news conference late on Friday.

Mr. Insulza said that officials on Friday presented him with a large quantity of charges against the former leader but that the diplomat still wasn't convinced the coup plotters took the right course of action. "If someone has an accusation against a president, they make them," Mr. Insulza said. "There are mechanisms to force him out of office. They have to do it in a legal way."

Some in Honduras, however, criticize Mr. Insulza and the OAS for suspending Honduras from the group while at the same time pushing to allow Cuba back in despite that country's Communist dictatorship.

The provisional government insists there was no coup and that the ouster of the president was legal, saying Mr. Zelaya had ignored court orders to stop the referendum, and that his arrest was ordered by the Supreme Court. But the new leaders have so far been unable to explain several key questions: Why was a court arrest warrant carried out by the military instead of the police? And why was the president exiled instead of jailed? Since Mr. Zelaya's ouster, the army has taken responsibility for exiling him, saying it did so to avoid the bloodshed and instability it thought would take place had Mr. Zelaya been taken to prison to await trial.

Making matters worse, the provisional government has also decreed that individuals can be arrested with no charge for up to 72 hours, extended a nighttime curfew, and cracked down on media outlets that oppose the coup. The army also appears to have limited freedom of movement. According to local media and emails sent to The Wall Street Journal, soldiers have shot out the tires of several buses packed with pro-Zelaya supporters to prevent them from coming to the capital from rural areas, where Mr. Zelaya's support is higher.

Protests Over India's Gay Ruling

North Korean Missiles Defy U.N. Resolution

EVAN RAMSTAD

SEOUL -- North Korea's test-firing of seven mid-range missiles on Saturday, America's birthday, again demonstrated the ability of the country's authoritarian regime to grab headlines and defy penalties imposed on it by the United Nations, the U.S. and other countries for its pursuit of weapons of mass destruction.

North Korea tests short- and mid-range missiles several times a year and signaled last month that it was preparing new tests by issuing warnings to domestic vessels to avoid certain areas in the Sea of Japan, or East Sea, through July 10.

AFP/Getty Images

North Korea test-fired seven missiles off its east coast in what appeared to be a calculated message of defiance timed for the U.S. Independence Day holiday.

But the new test on Saturday of seven mid-range missiles capable of hitting Japan violated a U.N. resolution created last month after North Korea on May 25 tested a nuclear explosive. Among the restraints in that resolution, North Korea was banned from making tests of ballistic missiles that might be capable of carrying a nuclear weapon.

Defense analysts in several countries, including the U.S. and South Korea, will take several weeks to determine whether Saturday's tests showed that North Korea is advancing its ability to carry nuclear warheads on those missiles.

North Korea fired the missiles into the Sea of Japan from military posts along its east coast. Last Thursday, North Korea test-fired four short-range missiles from the same locations.

Saturday's tests brought a new round of verbal condemnation from diplomats and politicians in neighboring countries, the U.S., France, Israel and Australia. China, North Korea's closest ally and chief economic benefactor, urged "calm and restraint," the lesser of the two types of criticisms its foreign ministry usually issues after North Korean provocations. The U.S. State Department urged North Korea to "refrain from actions that aggravate tensions and return to denuclearization talks."

Military and intelligence analysts in the U.S. and elsewhere several weeks ago tracked movement of long-range missiles to launchpads in North Korea and, for a time, prepared for the prospect that it would launch such a missile on July 4 or 5, as it did in 2006. Over the past two weeks, however, they detected no signs of further preparations for such a launch.

North Korea's leaders are able to push forward their weapons program because they show little regard for the impact of weapons-related economic penalties on the country's people. Moreover, they have South Korea and Japan pinned down militarily by hundreds of missiles and artillery rockets and they have China fearful that their ouster and resulting instability would send many North Koreans into northeastern Chinese provinces.

The weapons program is designed to add to North Korea's military capability and is also used by Pyongyang as a diplomatic tool and means to raise money. North Korea since the early 1990s has offered to negotiate changes or reductions in the program for security and economic concessions, principally from the U.S., South Korea and Japan, the countries it sees as its main enemies.

And North Korea has used the program to sell weapons to other countries, including Iran and Syria. This weekend, Radio Free Asia, a U.S.-supported radio service focused on Asian countries, reported that high-level military officials from Myanmar visited North Korea in November and signed an agreement to cooperate in arms production.

The report comes as the U.S. military continues to track a North Korean ship that some defense officials in Washington and Seoul believe was headed to Myanmar. The ship, called Kang Nam I, turned around last week in the South China Sea and began heading back to North Korea.

Friday, July 3, 2009

Independence and Liberty
By Anthony Gregory

Every Fourth of July we celebrate American independence -- but why, and what does it mean?

The political consequence of the American Revolution was the liberation of the thirteen colonies from British rule. The Continental Congress declared "that these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be, Free and Independent States; that they are absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political Connection between them and the State of Great-Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved."

It was a major defeat for the world’s greatest empire, Great Britain. But the Americans did not revolt over light and transient causes.

The Americans rebelled for freedom from their motherland because they had believed that their liberties had been seriously undermined by the British government.

The government had levied taxes on them without their consent -- on some items, as high as a couple percent.

The government had searched and seized their property on the basis of unreasonably broad warrants called "Writs of Assistance."

The government was elevating the military above the civil law.

The government was forcing the American people to finance its global empire.

The government was sending forth bureaucrats to regulate and tax the American people.

Do you see a trend here?

The British government had acted despotically and tyrannically, expanding its power further into the lives of the colonists, who had been used to living in a condition of benign neglect for decades. During and after the French-Indian War, the British government became much more interested in the financial dealings of the American people, raised taxes, and compelled the colonists to house and support the troops in their communities.

An important point is that the patriots were not protesting taxes for programs like Social Security or Universal health care -- though we can imagine they would, as such monstrous programs would seem perfectly alien to them -- but rather, they were primarily protesting taxes and impositions that were being carried out in the name of empire, war finance, national security and mercantilism.

Today’s conservatives should keep this in mind. For just as war and empire had led to financial ruin and tyranny for the colonies, they have meant the same for us today.

But it is staggering the degree to which the U.S. government has now replicated and even been more rapacious than the British empire, as far as American liberties are concerned.

In recent years, with the war on terror and the war on drugs, we have seen a steady erosion of civil liberties. The Patriot Act essentially brought back Writs of Assistance. Indefinite detentions and military commissions resemble the Crown’s Star Chambers that had been vanquished long before 1776.

The degree to which economic liberty has been destroyed in this country is beyond description. We have completely lost our way. The tax rates that average Americans suffer are ten times as high as the tax burden under Britain. Even Britain’s targeted excise taxes on tea that sparked the Boston Tea Party were low compared to today’s taxes on alcohol, cigarettes, and other items.

The U.S. government intrudes into our financial lives in every conceivable way. Every industry is regulated by thousands of bureaucrats and millions of pages of federal regulations.

We have a welfare state only slightly less socialistic than that of most other Western democracies. We have the largest budget, the largest government program -- Social Security -- the largest military and the largest prison system on the planet.

And now we are facing a welfare-warfare state crisis that boggles the mind. The Obama administration has continued and built upon the foreign interventionism of Bush, expanding the war in Afghanistan and into Pakistan. On civil liberties, he has solidified most of the worst legal positions and policies of the Bush administration.

Meanwhile, in the economy, Obama is waging another war on the private sector. Every week there is something ranging from ridiculous to downright despotic -- tobacco bans, national healthcare plans, the cap-and-trade powergrab. In the name of the environment, he is shrewdly imposing one of the highest tax increases ever, claiming new broad powers over our lives, shoveling billions to connected industry and creating a phony "market" in carbon emissions that will surely benefit a very few at the expense of all of us. On healthcare, he is poised to force the uninsured to buy health insurance, or else be fined a thousand dollars, and begin the construction of a command-control health care system with its philosophical underpinnings lying somewhere between Mussolini and Karl Marx. This abominable program will be invasive in countless ways, giving politicians and bureaucrats and others a peak into our medical lives while usurping control over some of the most intimate decisions a human being can make.

In terms of the political meaning of the Declaration, we have come a long way. Our current government is far more tyrannical toward the American people than Britain’s was before the Revolution.

Independence from Britain did not guarantee the American states would be free forever, of course. And from the beginning, American politicians began reversing some of the victories of the Revolution. Taxes and tariffs and Constitutional violations got worse. The principle of secession and political self-determination was violently defeated in the Civil War. The entire 20th century presented a nearly undisturbed growth of the leviathan in Washington, DC. The U.S. soon became a world empire, as Britain was.

But there was another victory of the American Revolution, a victory of ideas. As Bernard Bailyn argues in The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, the Revolution gave birth to a "contagion of liberty." The ideas of freedom began to catch on, not just the principle of political self-determination, but the generally connected ideas of personal, individual liberty. The first anti-slavery societies were formed. People began demanding more religious freedom, and voices began demanding equality for women under the law.

Even in our own time, we can see many reasons for hope. The ideas of liberty have never had more champions, from more walks of life. The economic thinking most needed to combat the status quo has never been more refined with as many articulate defenders. Total war, wartime censorship and conscription are not as popular as they were in earlier eras. The courts are more resistant to executive wartime power grabs than they were in the past. Ron Paul has succeeded in making monetary policy and concerns about the unleashed Federal Reserve serious, mainstream issues, for the first time in nearly a century. States are resisting federal impositions left and right, American tax protests and resentment are growing, Obamanomics is meeting public disapproval, and the president’s betrayal of civil liberties and the cause of peace have turned some of the left against him. And now we have the internet on our side.

And thanks to the long-term consequences of ideals, the traditions we hold dear, there are many freedoms we still have, but they are sometimes easy to take for granted. Freedom from chattel slavery, women’s rights, religious freedom, the freedom of speech, freedom from conscription -- in many of these areas, we are freer than Americans were under Britain, and in all these areas, we are freer than many of our forefathers living in the United States.

If these ideas of liberty can win out, then others can too. And only when the ideas win will we get our freedom.

Independence from out-of-control government might seem like a dream now. But the ideas of liberty can be the most powerful thing on earth. To do your part, declare your own independence from the dominant statist zeitgeist, and spread the message of freedom to people you care about today.

Happy Fourth of July.

Happy Fourth of July!

Quick Hits: Obama’s Forbidden Question, Rand Paul, Cap and Trade, Guns, and Random Thoughts

It’s Friday and that means it’s time for another installment of “Quick Hits”.

Helen Thomas and Chip Reid berated White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs the other day for pre-selecting questions for Obama’s “town hall” and “controlling” the press. It appears that the honeymoon (I call it the “Obamagasm”) is coming to an end. Gibbs seems to be out of his league as Obama’s Press Secretary. I’ll be surprised if he makes it through Obama’s first and hopefully only term.

There is one particular forbidden health care question for Obama. I would love to hear his answer to the following question:

“Mr. President, you are considered a Constitutional scholar. Could you educate the American people a bit and tell them what section, article, or amendment permits the federal government to provide health care?”

Sure, he would dodge the question, but it is one dodge that I long to hear.

On Monday, Ron Paul’s son Rand Paul held another money bomb campaign fund raiser. The goal was to break $100k. The goal was met. This is huge news and a great sign that the Ron Paul wing of the Republican Party is not going anywhere. Rand Paul raised over $100,000 in about a month without an official fund raiser. Senator Rand Paul has a nice ring to it.

There was high drama last Friday afternoon on the House floor during the debate on the narrowly passed Cap and Trade bill. The Republicans kept pointing out that the legislation will lose more jobs and put a higher tax burden on the American people.

Prior to the Cap and Trade debate members of the Congressional Black Caucus requested a moment of silence for Michael Jackson, who died the day before (as we all know). The request was granted. Later, during the Cap and Trade debate Tom Price (R-GA) requested a moment of silence for all of the people who will lose their jobs due to the bill. The Democrats objected. No moment of silence was held. This was a genius move by Price to demonstrate that the Democrats seem to care more about a dead pop star than thousands of American jobs. Unfortunately and unsurprisingly, most of the news outlets didn’t make the connection.

In more local personal news I purchased my first handgun for my birthday (yesterday). I took an NRA class a few months ago in preparation for owning a firearm. It feels damn good to rack the slide on that 2nd Amendment. Now I join millions of other gun owners searching for scarce ammo at reasonable prices.

I don’t believe we’ll see any fundamental action from Obama on gun control for awhile (if ever). The path he must travel toward gun control is littered with political land mines, some of them placed there by his own party. Then again so is immigration reform and he is starting to kick up the dust on that again.

And now a few random thoughts and quotes for the week:

When it comes to paying attention to the unraveling of America, ignorance is not bliss, it is willful neglect.

If I turn on the news tomorrow and hear anything about Michael Jackson I’m going to moonwalk off a cliff!

Will it take 99 more Al Frankens winning for Americans to wake up and realize their govmt is a joke?

Our task of creating a socialist America can only succeed when those who would resist us have been totally disarmed. – Sarah Brady

“A woman who demands further gun control legislation is like a chicken who roots for Colonel Sanders.” – Larry Elder

“I ask you sir, who are the militia? They consist now of the whole people.” – George Mason

One of my favorite gun rights bumper stickers: Guns only have two enemies: rust and politicians.

White House to offer new breakfast cereal: Obamaganda. Ad slogan: “Obamagasms for Obamaganda: A free carbon credit in every box!”

Senate version of Cap and Trade will probably have a provision forcing everyone to hold their breath for 60 min/day.

Have a great Independence Day weekend!

May the number of fingers on your hand today equal the number of fingers on your hand on Sunday!

Palin to Quit as Alaska Governor, Won't Seek Re-Election

Source Says Palin Was Bogged Down by Opposition by Democrats and Fellow Republicans

JIM CARLTON YUKARI IWATANI KANE

Sarah Palin said on Friday that she will not run for a second term as governor of Alaska and will transfer her responsibilities to the state's lieutenant governor.

In a statement, Ms. Palin, who is in her final year in office as governor, said, "I am determined to take the right path for Alaska even though it is not the easiest path." She added, "I also felt that to embrace the conventional 'Lame Duck' status in this particular climate would just be another dose of 'politics as usual.'"

Ms. Palin said she would transfer power to Lieutenant Governor Sean Parnell on July 26.

Ms. Palin's decision not to run for a second term may fuel speculation about whether she may make a presidential bid in the 2012 elections. But many political pundits agreed this probably spells the end of her political career. "No matter what level of politics you're at, when you quit one office halfway through, it damages your prospects of higher office," said Ivan Moore, a pollster in Anchorage. "People are always going to wonder if the going gets tough, is she going to quit that."

Ms. Palin was the vice presidential nominee for the Republican party in the 2008 election. At the time, her selection by Republican presidential candidate John McCain drew controversy because she was a relative neophyte on the political scene.

Speculation swirled on what drove Ms. Palin's departure. Her return to Alaska after the 2008 presidential campaign had been marked by almost nonstop controversies. The Republican-led legislature in April rejected her appointment of a lawyer for attorney general who was controversial, in part, for his outspokenness. She tangled with lawmakers over other issues, including her decision to reject some federal stimulus money. And she brawled repeatedly with the media and others over what she called attacks on her and her family. A blow-up with late night host David Letterman -- which happened when she called out the CBS host for making sexual innuendos about one of her daughters -- was particularly well publicized.

Through it all, her once stratospheric popularity in Alaska began chipping away. As of early 2007, Ms. Palin's approval rating among Alaskans stood at an unprecedented 92%, according to pollster Mr. Moore, but it fell to as low as in the low 60s as of early this year. Had she chosen to seek re-election, most pundits believe she probably would have emerged victorious, despite her weakened standing. Now that she is out of the picture, the governor's race in Alaska is considered wide open.

'She Was Tired of Being Boxed In'

A source close to Ms. Palin said her decision appears to have been driven in part by a desire to escape the increasingly difficult state politics of Alaska. Returning to Juneau after her national run, she has been bogged down by opposition from Democrats seeking to undermine a possible national leader of the opposition, and by fellow Republicans irked by her attacks across the country against the state's political establishment -- a staple of her attempts to portray herself as a maverick.

"She was tired of being boxed in, of not being able to push her agenda forward," the person said. "It was clear her agenda could not move forward."

The person said Ms. Palin's camp has insisted they were aware of no imminent scandal about to break.

While acknowledging that the governor may be hurting her chances at the presidential nomination, the source said that Ms. Palin was now more free to focus on rallying Republicans around the country -- and to make money focusing on writing and speaking.

"If you throw caution to the wind as it relates to the 2012 nomination and put yourself in her shoes, ironically this makes a lot of sense as it relates to her finances, her ability to campaign and rally Republicans around the country, and especially as it relates to her family."

Washington Reacts

Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele said in a statement that he plans to talk to Gov. Palin "very soon" and suggested she will help campaign this year in two gubernatorial races. "She is an important and galvanizing voice in the Republican Party," he said. "I believe she will be very helpful to the Party this year as we wage critical campaigns in Virginia and New Jersey."

Willam Kristol, editor of the conservative political magazine The Weekly Standard, is taking what he calls a "contrarian" view on Ms. Palin's announcement. Through a blog posting Friday, Mr. Kristol, an influential Palin supporter, said that, "If Palin wants to run in 2012, why not do exactly what she announced today? It's an enormous gamble -- but it could be a shrewd one."

He said Ms. Palin is "freeing herself from the duties of the governorship. Now she can do her book, give speeches, travel the country and the world, campaign for others, meet people, get more educated on the issues -- and without being criticized for neglecting her duties in Alaska. I suppose she'll take a hit for leaving the governorship early -- but how much of one? She's probably accomplished most of what she was going to get done as governor, and is leaving a simpatico lieutenant governor in charge."He suggested it wouldn't all be fun -- "She'll be under intense and hostile scrutiny, and she'll have to perform well" -- as she tries to become the national leader conservatives are seeking. "The odds are against her pulling it off," he said. "But I wouldn't bet against it."

At the Democratic National Committee, Communications Director Brad Woodhouse called the decision "bizarre."

"Either Sarah Palin is leaving the people of Alaska high and dry to pursue her long shot national political ambitions or she's unwilling to do the job now that her popularity has dimmed," he said. "Either way -- her decision to abandon her post and the people of Alaska who elected her continues a pattern of bizarre behavior that more than anything else may explain the decision she made today."

Ms. Palin's announcement came as a bombshell to many Alaskans. "Holy smokes, we are shocked," said Mike Porcaro, a radio talk-show host in Anchorage.

U.S. Sen. Mark Begich, a Democrat who last year took over the seat long held by Republican Ted Stevens, said Ms. Palin gave no hint she would be leaving when he met with her in her downtown Anchorage office for 45 minutes two days ago.

"I'm as surprised as all Alaskans by Gov. Palin's decision...," Sen. Begich said in a statement. "There was speculation she would not seek re-election, but she gave no indication of a resignation."

Mr. Parnell, a fellow Republican and close political ally who is taking Ms. Palin's place, congratulated her on her accomplishments. "It is with a heavy heart that I hear these words," Mr. Parnell said in a statement. "You have been a strong leader for our state, you've inspired a nation, and you've ignited the fire of real hope around the world."

Romney Moves Back Into Spotlight

Flag Burning and Free Speech

The Founding Fathers agreed that the First Amendment protected 'symbolic expression.'

EUGENE VOLOKH

Congress is once again considering a constitutional amendment to ban the desecration of the American flag. The proposal, introduced this spring in the Senate by David Vitter (R., La.), and cosponsored by 20 other Republicans and Democrat Debbie Stabenow of Michigan, probably won't get enough votes. Yet even if it doesn't, one longstanding misunderstanding about the First Amendment is likely to live on.

Advocates for flag amendments argue that activist Supreme Court Justices have twisted the original meaning of the First Amendment to protect symbolic acts such as flag burning. As Sen. Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa) said in supporting the Vitter proposal, "if you read the debate in 1790 -- the First Amendment was not written to protect nonverbal speech . . . . [W]e want to make sure we get the Constitution back to its original intent before the Supreme Court screwed it up." Or, as Judge Robert Bork argued in his book "Slouching Towards Gomorrah," flag burning "is not speech," and the court shouldn't have held "that an amendment protecting only the freedom of 'speech' somehow protects conduct if it is 'expressive.'"

Yet the best historical evidence suggests Messrs. Bork and Grassley are mistaken. The Framers fully understood "freedom of speech, or of the press" to include symbolic expression as well as verbal expression.

The Framers were working within a late 18th century common-law legal system that generally treated symbolic expression and verbal expression the same. Speech restrictions -- such as libel, slander, sedition, obscenity and blasphemy -- covered symbolic expression on the same terms as verbal expression.

Many cases and treatises, including Blackstone's "Commentaries" published in 1765 and often cited by the Framers' generation in America, said this about libel law. And early American court cases soon held the same about obscenity and blasphemy. Late 18th and early 19th century libel law cases and treatises gave many colorful examples: It could be libelous to burn a person in effigy, send him a wooden gun (implying cowardice), light a lantern outside his house (implying the house was a brothel), and engage in processions mocking him for his supposed misbehavior.

This equality of symbolic expression and verbal expression was also applied to constitutional speech protection as well as to common-law speech restrictions. For instance, the first American court decision setting aside a government action on constitutional free speech or free press grounds (Brandreth v. Lance in 1839) treated the liberty of the press as covering paintings -- not just words.

Likewise, in a 1795 Pennsylvania case, the prosecution and defense agreed that erecting a liberty pole was the sort of thing to which constitutional free speech principles might apply. These tall poles, usually surmounted with a flag or a liberty cap, were originally a symbol of opposition to English government, but by the 1790s they had became a symbol expressing opposition to perceived domestic tyranny as well.

Protection of symbolic speech would have fit well with James Madison's initial draft of the First Amendment, which spoke of the people's "right to speak, to write, or to publish their sentiments." Courts and commentators (including early Supreme Court Justice James Wilson) routinely used "publish" to refer to publicly displaying pictures and symbols, as well as printing books. When Congress recast Madison's phrasing to the shorter "freedom of speech, or of the press" it was not seen as a substantive change.

The three most influential early writers on American law -- St. George Tucker, Chancellor James Kent and Justice Joseph Story -- all expressly characterized the First Amendment as protecting a right to speak, to write, and to publish.

To be sure, some in the Founding era took a narrow view of free speech. They would have allowed the punishment -- probably as "sedition" -- of stridently antigovernment sentiments, likely including those conveyed by burning the flag. But they would not have denied that the First Amendment protects symbolic expression generally. They would have just argued that both harshly antigovernment symbols and harshly antigovernment words were punishable.

The Supreme Court has long treated symbolic expression -- such as burning flags, waving flags, wearing armbands, and the like -- as tantamount to verbal expression. In fact, the first Supreme Court case (Stromberg v. California) to strike down government action on free speech grounds involved symbolic expression (the display of a red flag). That was in 1931, hardly the heyday of liberal judging.

In Stromberg, the justices didn't discuss the history to which I point here; they viewed the matter as one of logic. But on this issue history and logic point in the same direction: From the late 1700s on, American law has recognized symbolic expression and verbal expression as legally and constitutionally equivalent. "Speech" and "press" in the First Amendment don't just apply to words or printed materials. The First Amendment protects symbols, paintings, handwriting and, yes, flag burning.

Mr. Volokh is professor of law at UCLA. This op-ed is adapted from "Symbolic Expression and the Original Meaning of the First Amendment," published in the April 2009 issue of the Georgetown Law Journal.

Conn. Firefighter Case Could Haunt Sotomayor

The Last Best Hope of Earth

July Fourth is much more than just an American holiday.

WILLIAM J. BENNETT JOHN CRIBB

'I have never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence." This statement from Abraham Lincoln in Philadelphia in 1861 was no staff-manufactured line. It was an expression from a man filled with deep emotion at finding himself standing in the hall where a courageous band of rebels pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor to a high and dangerous purpose -- American independence. We celebrate them on July Fourth.

Lincoln revered the Declaration and its ideals of liberty and equality. In an 1858 speech in Chicago, he said it was "the father of all moral principle" in the American republic, and its spirit "the electric cord . . . that links the hearts of patriotic and liberty-loving men together."

He spent much time pondering the hardships endured by those who had fought for independence. In that speech he called them "iron men." As a boy, he read accounts of the patriots' battlefield struggles in Parson Weems's "Life of Washington" and thought, as he told the New Jersey state Senate in 1861, that "there must have been something more than common that those men struggled for."

Yet in Lincoln's time, the Declaration and its spirit was under attack. Proponents of slavery insisted that the Founders did not intend for the God-given right to liberty in the Declaration to apply to all people. The notion that "all men are created equal" was belittled by John C. Calhoun in 1848 as "the most false and dangerous of all political error."

The Declaration had its detractors abroad as well. Across Europe, members of privileged classes sneered at the thought of people ruling themselves. Many a nobleman viewed the Civil War as proof that the American democratic experiment would fail.

British statesman John Bright took them to task: "Privilege thinks it has a great interest in this contest, and every morning, with blatant voice, it . . . curses the American Republic. Privilege has beheld an afflicting spectacle for many years past. It has beheld thirty millions of men, happy and prosperous, without emperor, without king . . . Privilege has shuddered at what might happen to old Europe if this grand experiment should succeed."

Lincoln understood that if the American experiment of self-government were to succeed, the country must be saved on the basis of the Declaration of Independence. It was no accident that in the first sentence of the Gettysburg Address, he quoted the Declaration, reminding Americans that from the beginning the nation had been dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Lincoln also understood that the struggle over the Declaration was part of an eternal struggle between two principles at the basis of all government. "They are the two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of time, and will ever continue to struggle," as he put it in one of his famous debates with Stephen A. Douglas. "The one is the common right of humanity and the other the divine right of kings."

The struggle continues today. Terrorists and dictators hate the United States for its founding principles. They prefer to rob people of liberty, subjugate women, and spread their power by the sword. Yet America still has iron men and women who stand up to such tyrants. These iron men are now fighting on battlefields in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The Declaration of Independence is not a legal document in the same sense as the Constitution. No one talks about a law being "undeclarational," or opines about their "declarational rights." Yet it remains the first and in some ways most universal of our great founding documents. As Lincoln said in Philadelphia in February 1861, there is "something in that Declaration giving liberty, not alone to the people of this country, but hope to the world for all future time."

As long as the United States stands fast for the moral principles of July 4, 1776, we will continue to be the bulwark of freedom, the last best hope of earth.

Messrs. Bennett and Cribb are the authors of the "American Patriot's Almanac" (Thomas Nelson, 2008).

THE LIBERTARIAN

Sunday, July 5, 2009