January 2003 Archives

I might as well weigh in on how I feel about this so-called affirmative action case. (In the spirit of full disclosure I should point out that I am a graduate of the University of Michigan, although it was during the Pleistocene Era when points were not awarded according to race.)

Much has been said about the desirability of achieving "diversity" on campus. President Bush has himself, I think, expressed that desire. However, much has also been said about the point system that U of M uses in achieving that "desired result." Critics have said that if you award 20 points (out of the necessary 100) to someone merely for being born with black skin, that is racial discrimination against someone born with white skin. In other words, it is unconstitutional.

Never mind for now that legacy students get 4 points for their being born into a family of alumni.

And, although it isn't quite the same thing, talented athletes are (in effect) awarded the entire 100 points if they are All-State high school stars in basketball or football.

That's another discussion for another time.

For now, the discussion seems to be focusing on "race-neutral" solutions to the problem of achieving more diversity on campus.

For example, the President points to the California, Texas and Florida solutions are "race neutral" solutions (take the top X% of students from ALL high schools and guarantee them a place in college).

It would seem to be the next best thing to the present system at U-M. Perhaps you even favor it. I don't know.

But who are we kidding? It is still a system that founders on the issue of race. Therefore, some would say it, too, is a flawed system.

Why?

It is still a quota system.

In other words...

...A certain number of qualified students at a better school will be displaced by that number of less qualified students from a worse school.

And the unavoidable implication is that the more qualified students were white and the less qualified students were black.

So we're back to where we were before.

The plan is race-neutral. Yes. But it isn't any more fair than the other plans we've discussed, in my opinion.

It is an unavoidable fact: you can't discuss this issue of college admissions without dealing with the history of race in this country.

You can call it diversity or anything else you want; but when the concept is to increase the representation of "under-represented minorities" ,i.e., blacks and Native Americans, it ends up being a discussion about race.

Here's the thing: Most thinking people, if they considered the question carefully, would probably agree that 350 years of "racial discrimination" isn't going to be erased by 40 years of civil rights legislation and affirmative action.

The odd thing is, many of those people would argue for MORE intervention, and many would argue for LESS intervention. Or more to the point, they would argue for the ending of ALL intervention NOW.

The latter group throws up their hands and says "No matter how hard we tried, government edicts can't change people's minds. In fact, it is unconstitutional! Therefore, Government has failed. Toss out the rascals."

No. I think that is a flawed observation.

To me, the crux of the debate is two-fold:

1. How to best finish the job of righting the historical wrongs and

2. How to craft an exit strategy that allows us to say finally "We have done the right thing and now it's time to close the book on the effort."

We do both in a spirit of fairness to all parties involved, so we can have justice and then move on with our lives and move on as a nation together into the future.

As always, that's just my opinion, I could be wrong.

Linda McDougal was told she had breast cancer, so she underwent a double mastectomy, and then the news got worse. Doctors admitted it was all a mistake -- she never had cancer, and the surgery was completely unnecessary.

After we kill all the trial lawyers and cap damages at $250 thousand (paid out over time) who will take care of Linda McDougal?

Here's an interesting exchange between the reporter Carol Costello and McDougal's attorney Chris Meserly:

COSTELLO: Before I talk to hospital officials -- do you plan to sue?

MESSERLY: Absolutely. However, President Bush intends to add additional harm to Linda and other victims. I mean, 98,000 people per year die of medical malpractice, not to mention the hundreds of thousands that are injured, and the president wants to tell them, I don't care what you've been through, we're going to put a cap on your damages of $250,000.

COSTELLO: And of course, the reason he's doing that is because there are many frivolous lawsuits filed, and doctor's bills are getting ever more expensive.

[So much for liberal bias in the media.]

MESSERLY: But putting a cap on that will do nothing at all to reduce that, and California has proved that. They put a cap on years ago, and malpractice premiums have gone up and up and up until insurance reform came through.

See here's the thing that I don't get: I can barely afford health insurance for myself and my kids. And at the same time doctors can barely afford malpractice insurance to cover their practices.

What's wrong with this picture?

Josh Marshall of TalkingPointsMemo.com points out that Dick Cheney's reputation as Superman might be a bit, er, overblown. Consider the record:

• Cheny was sent not long ago to fire Treasury Sec Paul O'Neill. This might have been fitting because it was Cheney who had picked O'Neill two years earlier.

• Of the three new members of the president's economic team nominated in early December, Snow was the only one to get almost universally poor reviews. He was also Dick Cheney's pick.

• In a July speech, the vice president had argued that weapons inspections in Iraq were useless and shouldn't even be tried. That speech nearly upended the administration's careful late-summer repositioning in favor of a new United Nations-backed inspections program.
  Condi Rice had to take the vice president aside and walk him through how to repair the damage he'd done, with a new statement implicitly retracting his earlier gaffe.

• Last year, Cheney's White House energy task force produced an all-drilling-and-no-conservation plan that failed not just on policy grounds but as a political matter as well, saddling the administration with a year-long public relations headache after Cheney insisted on running his outfit with a near-Nixonian level of secrecy.

• Last March, VPOTUS went on a tour of Middle Eastern capitals to line up America's allies for our war against Saddam. He returned a week later with the Arabs lining up behind Saddam and against us--a major embarrassment for the White House.

• And remember those corporate scandals that came close to crippling Bush? Last summer, White House advisers were pondering whether to back the sort of tough corporate accountability measures that Democrats and the press were demanding.

  The president was scheduled to deliver a big speech on Wall Street in early July. His advisers were divided. Some argued that strong reforms were at the least a political necessity.

  But Cheney, along with National Economic Council chair Larry Lindsey, opposed the idea, arguing that new restrictions on corporations would further weaken the economy. The president took Cheney's advice, and gave a speech on Wall Street that recommended only mild and unspecific reforms.

  "He mentioned a lot of things in the speech that the Securities and Exchange Commission already does," one non-plussed Wall Streeter told The Washington Post with a yawn. The day after the president's speech, the Dow shed 282 points, the biggest single-day drop since the post-terrorist tailspin of Sept. 20.

• The policy of confrontation on the Korean Peninsula, which the administration is now running away from and which has gotten the US into such a jam, was most forcefully backed by Cheney.

• There is also a growing consensus that the president's new stimulus/tax cut plan is a loser both politically and in policy terms. Not surprisingly, the prime mover, as Major Garrett reports in the current issue of the Weekly Standard, was none other than Dick Cheney.

Cheney's reputation as the steady hand at the helm of the Bush administration--the CEO to Bush's chairman--is so potent as to blind Beltway commentators to the examples of vice presidential incompetence accumulating, literally, under their noses. Though far less egregious, Cheney's bad judgment is akin to Trent Lott's ugly history on race: Everyone sort of knew it was there, only no one ever really took notice until it was pointed out in a way that was difficult to ignore. Cheney is lucky; as vice president, he can't be fired. But his terrible judgment will, at some point, become impossible even for the Beltway crowd not to see.

"In a system of majoritarian rule with no protected rights, democracy is just two wolves and a sheep deciding what is for lunch."

----- Gerald P. O’Driscoll Jr., writing in the Wall Street Journal