Former Reagan Ambassador Kenneth Adelman recently confessed to the New Yorker’s George Packer that he is planning to vote for Obama.

Even normally sober conservative analysts, like my friends at Powerline, have deplored Adelman’s free exercise of his voting rights.

George Packer, himself a great journalist whom I always read and often disagree with, establishes Adelman’s solid conservative credentials:

Ken Adelman is a lifelong conservative Republican. Campaigned for Goldwater, was hired by Rumsfeld at the Office of Economic Opportunity under Nixon, was assistant to Defense Secretary Rumsfeld under Ford, served as Reagan’s director of arms control, and joined the Defense Policy Board for Rumsfeld’s second go-round at the Pentagon, in 2001. Adelman’s friendship with Rumsfeld, Cheney, and their wives goes back to the sixties, and he introduced Cheney to Paul Wolfowitz at a Washington brunch the day Reagan was sworn in.

And so on. This is the full-disclosure paragragh, so you can skip it if you wish. Adelman, who is a friend of mine who I haven’t seen in a few years (I take the boy-definition of friendship: one does not have to see someone recently to consider them a friend), is a solid conservative. During the 2002 Christmas holiday, he invited me to dinner with Paul Wolfowitz. At the dinner, he said he was amazed that the press called him a “neo-con.” “I have always been a conservative,” he said.I traveled with him to Poland, Colorado and dined with him roughly half-a-million times.

Years later, he turned against the war. Much of the press and public shared his view. I think he was wrong, but there has always been a true-blue conservative faction against war. “War is the health of the state,” as one philosopher put it.

Adelman slowly decided that Rumsfeld et al were wrong about the war. It takes a man of principle to decide that his friends of the past four decades are wrong. I strongly disagree with Ken, but I strongly respect him too.

We need a bit more of what Peggy Noonan calls “Patriotric Grace” in this country. I disagree with Noonan on Palin and other things, but I’ve read her book by the same title and think, in its rambling glory, she has a profound point. We need to understand that in America there is a Loyal Opposition, a view with which we are diametically opposed that still loves this land as we do. Indeed, the Left should learn this lesson too.

We need a bit more charity, mercy and love toward those we disagree with, like Adelman. He is raising sensible questions about McCain. He deserves sensible answers. We must not become like the Left, intolerant of even microscopic deviations from the party line. That is Stalinism, not freedom. Let’s listen and debate those we disagree with, especially conservatives like Adelman.

I have known Ken for many years. He has a first-class temperment, which simultaneously can listen to opposing views and hold strong ones of his own. We need more of that in American politics, not less.

Yes, I think he is wrong about Palin. She has many gifts the MSM cannot tolerate and he seems to have been taken in. He may well be right about McCain’s fecklessness during the bailout crisis, but I think, on balance, this failing may not be enough to vote against the Maverick. I plan to (hold my nose) and vote for McCain.

But don’t we want to live in a country in which people of good will are free is disagree? Isn’t the red team-blue team Rollerball mentality part of the problem in American politics?

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This column by Jeffrey Lord is full of shocking revelations.

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In the dark days of 1980, with the hostage crisis and unemployment climbing toward ten percent, Republicans were an enthusiastic bunch led by a charismatic, optimistic former movie actor.

Today, with America prevailing in the War on Terror and a surprisingly strong economy despite the stock-market plunges, Republicans are dour and angry led by a sarcastic, surly professional poltician.

One difference between 1980 and now is that Republicans were not in power then; so what was bad for country was good for them. Now the shoe is on the other foot. Most Americans believe that GOP runs Congress and blame the Republicans for the current economic mess.

But also something has happened to the character of the GOP in the past 30 years. It lost its ideals and ideas.  And it lost its hope.

Politico.com captures a bit of this:
“McCain is behind in the polls, and the Republicans have no chance of regaining control of Congress,” Pitney noted. “Republicans are facing the prospect of unified Democratic control of the government for the first time since the first two Clinton years. And even then, Clinton’s agenda had moderate elements (e.g., [the North American Free Trade Agreement] and deficit reduction). With Obama, [Senate Majority Leader Harry] Reid and [House Speaker Nancy] Pelosi in power, Republicans worry about a hard push for a hard-left agenda.”

It is time to hope that the election is not lost and to trust in the ordinary voter, who, if given reasonable and understandable information, will not vote for Obama.

Here are a few ideas;

The average portfolio has dropped some 20%. The capital-gains-tax rate is 15%. Why not suspend the tax for two years (or abolish it) and give the average investor a shot at breaking even this year?

As an added benefit, money from all over the world would flood into American markets, shrinking the liquidity crisis.

Why not demand that counties and cities roll back their property-tax assessments to reflect current market values? After all, most property taxes are paid as part of an escrow to a mortgage (i.e. part of mortgage payement). Reducing the tax assesment will reduce the size of escrowed mortgage payments–keeping more people in their homes.

The government created the mortgage bailout mess and it, not you, should sacrifice to pay for it. Why does the governing class think of the rest of us as patient cows, to be milked or fed on as they see fit?

Tune in to the Michael Reagan radio show tonight, where I expand on these themes.

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After the last debate, Senator McCain deserves to lose. The Wall Street bailout is massively unpopular and he proposed, apparently on the spur of the moment, to expand it by having the federal government spend billions to buy up every “bad” mortgage in the nation.

If McCain had opposed the bailout, he would be ahead right now. Ordinary people take their lumps when the act foolishly (even in response to bad incentives) and believe that Wall Street fatcats should take their lumps too. This has long been an American view. Doesn’t anyone remember the famous letter received by Congressman Daniel Boone castigating him for voting for federal aid to rebuild buildings in Georgetown after a fire? And Boone’s apologetic response?

Second, McCain doesn’t seem to believe what he is pushing, outside of his perfectly sincere support for the bailout. Down to the marrow of his bones, Obama believes in the big-government approach he is selling. And a sale is a transfer of enthusiasm from seller to buyer. McCain, when he says free-market things, acts like he is selling snake oil. Just a little redmeat for the base. If McCain doesn’t believe in what he says, why should we?

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Latin, written off as a dead language by trendy teachers in the 1970s, is staging a quiet comeback, according to the New York Times.

Apparently a new generation is learning what the pre-Boomer set already knew: Latin is a great way to build an English-language vocabulary and to teach grammar. One might know the parts of speech in English intuitively, because one speaks English all of the time, but learn a bit of Latin and you end up knowing a lot more about how English works. That is valuable for any one reads and writes.

Plus, learning about the ancient culture of Rome leads students into an understanding of one of the three main pillars of Western Civilization. (The other two being the cultures of the Jews and the Greeks).

Interestingly, the quiet Latin rennaisance is happening is remote rural areas, up-and-coming suburbs and inner-city charter schools, accoding to the New York Times. It is not happening in Berkeley or Manhattan’s tony Upper West Side. There is a story there too, I’d bet.

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Insisting that they have broken with al Qaeda, the Taliban are seeking a separate peace with the elected Afghan government, according to CNN.

The peace discussions, which are still in their early stages despite two years of work, where begun by Saudi Arabia. In the 1990s, Saudi Arabia was one of only three nations on Earth to recognize the Taliban government.

While it is too soon to tell what that means, it suggests two things: The Saudis do not see America’s defeat in Afghanistan as inevitable and want to play a constructive role and, two, Iranian influence in Afghanistan worries the Saudis more than American influence.

It also suggests that the Taliban wonder how much longer their Pakistani and Iranian friends will support them in the field and to ensure that they have a seat when the music stops.

As Americans, we should see this as a hopeful sign. Our forces are making a difference on the ground–compelling our enemies to search out countermoves.

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The American Prospect has just published a fascinating piece called “the Coming Conservative Crack Up.”  It is simultaneously un-original and wrong-headed, a bizarre kind of journalistic achievement.

I have been reading articles and books predicting the imminent death of the conservative movement since 1989.Remember when the death of communism was supposed to foreshadow the end of the greatest nemesis as we moved into a “post-ideological world”?

Then came the first two Clinton years and a spate of “conservatism is dead” articles. Remember: Reaganism was dead and Bush killed it?

The Gingrich triumph, seizing Congress for the GOP for the first time in 40 years, put an end to this profitable line of pessismism.

But the conservative-movement-is-dead meme came back like Lazurus. R.Emmett Tyrell published a book called The Conservative Crack-Up in 1997. Death notices for conservatism continued to appear until Bush was narrowly elected in 2000.

As soon as the Iraq war seemed more quagmire than triumph, conservatism-is-dead returned with a vengeance.

Howard Fineman foresaw the end of the conservative movement in Newsweek in 2005: The “movement” – that began 50 years ago with the founding of Bill Buckley’s National Review; that had its coming of age in the Reagan Years; that reached its zenith with Bush’s victory in 2000 — is falling apart at the seams.

So the Prospect gets no credit for oringinality. But what about the thesis? The author confuses the conservative movement with the Republican party. In American history, political parties do die–remember the Whigs–but it happens rarely. Political movements also die (Free Silver, No-Nothingism), but ones that create institutions last for a long, long time. The labor movement created unions and other insitutions. The civil-rights movement created the NAACP and many other institutions. So movements can last for decades after they have accomplished their goals, if they build institutions or take over existing ones. Conservatives have built an impressive array of institutions: think tanks, foundations, magazines, even schools and art centers. No election will take away those things.

Finally, the Prospect author refuses to admit the popular appeal of conservative ideas. More than one-third of the country accepts all of the conservative agenda as its own and a majority have adopted large parts of it (balanced budgets, low taxes, strong foreign policy, tougher policing, welfare reform).

In 2050, we will be reading predictions of Conservatism’s death. And worried conservatives, under the pressure domes on Mars and in the floating sea-cities in the Pacific, will hold conferences and meetings and coffee klatches, wondering what to do.

UPDATE: Tim Noah, over Slate, has posted a piece entitled “GOP,RIP.” It is more of the same. Here’s his conclusion:

This is not, I’ll confess, the first time I’ve believed that the Republican ascendancy has ended. In 1994, I felt sure that the warmed-over Reaganite nostrums of Newt Gingrich’s “Contract With America” spelled defeat in the midterm elections. Instead, the Republicans gained control of both houses of Congress for the first time in four decades. I also thought the GOP was cracking up in 2000, when, desperate to find fault with every last aspect of the Clinton administration, it started bad-mouthing prosperity. I got that wrong, too. So maybe the GOP isn’t really dead.

It sure looks dead, though.

Isn’t this liberal triumphalism starting a little soon? I mean, measuring the White House drapes before the election and all…

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With the House of Representatives voting down the bailout package and the Dow plunging some 700 points yesterday, it is time to rethink things. Here are some ideas to add to the next bailout package.

Capital gains. Most people have seen their portfolios decline ten to 15% over the past month, if not by much more. Why not suspend (or eliminate) the capital-gains tax rate, currently at 15%, until the crisis passes? It would inject billions of capital into the markets but would not require the U.S. Treasury to write any checks. It would erase billions in losses, as people recalculate their portfolios based on the tax cut. What about Uncle Sam’s lost revenue? The revenue loss would be minor (capital-gains tax generates little). Besides, if we are debating the most effective means for government to put money into the markets, letting investors keep more of their money rather than giving it to executives at failing banks, is more efficient. Also, the tax cut eliminates the “moral hazard” of bailing out bad behavior.

Ditch “Mark to Market” accounting rules. Artificially reducing the value of bank assets (bundles of securitized mortgages) simply because the market prices of those bundles has fallen doesn’t make sense in the current market environment. Indeed, these rules seem to accelerate and spread panic. Sober officials should remember that the vast majority of mortgages–even subprime ones–are actually performing. People are paying as agreed. And, secondly, marking down mortgages 90%  when the underlying value (the land and the home) have declined in the real-estate market less than 15% makes no sense.

Revoke Sarbanes-Oxley. This showy over-reaction to the Enron mess has saddled public companies in the U.S. market with a welter of unnecessary regulations–and driven a lot of new offerings to London and Hong Kong. The New York Stock Exchange is no longer the world’s leading exchange and is now also one of the least innovative. To bring money back into the U.S. markets, from which it has fled since 2001, we need to return to pre-2001 rules.

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You must be as tired of hearing it as I am. Somehow, we are all at fault for Wall Street’s meltdown. We demanded cheap loans for houses we couldn’t afford and voted in corrupt dolts, who took from Fannie Mae and told us what we wanted to hear. Now, we are getting what we deserve.

Take Rod Dreher’s otherwise excellent column in the Dallas Morning News:

After all, these scoundrels did not elect themselves, nor was there an outcry heard in the land against Wall Street rapacity and recklessness when our 401(k)s were rising, and all but the lowliest plebeian was moving into his very own McMansion.

Along those lines, there’s one proverb that we will all become painfully acquainted with in the years to come: You reap what you sow.

There are two essential problems with this analysis: it is factually false and morally unwise.

Rep. Barney Frank was elected by a majority of the people of  his district in Massachusetts. Senator Chris Dodd is brought to us by many but not all of the voters of Connecticut. And so on. Most of us never had the chance to vote for or against these solons. So why should we be blamed?

The regulatory changes that led us to this point were the work of lobbyists, bureaucrats and lawmakers including Dodd and Frank and corrupt executives, like Raines and Johnson. We know or can know their names.

The idea of blaming “all of us” is a way to avoid blaming those who did the deeds and reaped their ill-gotten gains.

What about cheap mortgages? Sure, some of us took them when they were offered. But who offered them and why? Yes, it is the Clinton-era changes to the Community Reinvestment Act that forced banks to lend more for “affordable housing.” Law firms, including ones connected to Obama, sued banks that failed to meet their low-income quotas for mortgages. Bankers were not driven by greed, as everyone says, but by fear. Fear of the baying hounds of regulators and lawyers would call them racist and ruin their careers. But who unleashed the hounds on the bankers?

Particular policies and people made this mess. The public’s only role will be to pay the tab, a cruel addition that will equal more than $2,500 per person. Can’t the talking class at least have the decency to stop blaming the one group generous enough to pay for the party they didn’t attend?

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In a shrewd move, Senator McCain has just proposed delaying Friday’s first presidential debate–in order to convene a meeting with Obama, President Bush and other decision-makers from both parties to sort out the financial mess.

It makes McCain look engaged in solving the number one issue on the minds of Americans, right now. It gives him a bigger bully pulpit to fight the Christmas tree of legislation that is winding its way through Congress now (even student and car loans have been added to the bailout).

It minimizes the power of Rep. Barney Frank, who has rolled his Senate counterpart, Chris Dodd, and is leading the congressional effort. Rep. Frank is a key Obama ally.

It also presents a strategic problem for Obama. Until now, the Illinois freshman has been able to coast, saying he supports what Rep. Frank and other Democrats are doing. If Obama and McCain attend a White House summit, each will have to lay out detailed proposals for reform. Obama would have to lock himself in–and take criticism for his ties to Fannie and Freddie.

And if Obama refuses to attend the summit, he effectively announces that he is unready to lead in a crisis.

While this may be a shrewd move for the McCain campaign, it is not an example of “country first,” his campaign theme. The Dow may tumble on the news that all of the discussions of the past two weeks will be thrown up in the air, pending a White House summit with two presidential candidates who are 40 days away from an election. The street doesn’t like wild cards.

And the summit means more cooks in the kitchen. It will no longer just be Treasury Secretary Paulson, Rep. Frank and Federal Reserve Chairman Bernanke.  Having two presidential campaigns in the room sounds like a recipe for Yalta.

The best outcome for the country is to settle the financial crisis as soon as possible, for as little as possible.

But if Obama chooses “country first,” he may lose the election. Either one of Obama’s choices will be revealing–as is McCain’s move.

UPDATE: Obama is insisting the debate is still on. That position may change, as preliminary polls seem to see McCain’s bet as statesmanlike.

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