Intelligencer Journal from Lancaster, Pennsylvania • 10

llNTI' LLKiKNCKR JOURNAL Opinion WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 2, 2008, LANCASTER, PA. PAGE A10 No common ground JttttUtacwctr Jotnrnal Founded PobUshednery tnorning except Sundaj aiMWesi King Street. Lancaster l'a. DM8 -bv- LAN CASTER EWSWPERS, INC. I Sleinman Enterprise John M.

Hurkwallrr it; Chairman of the Board Harold E. Miller President Chief Executive Officer Chiirlcs Raymond Shaw Editor Dennis A. Gelz AiTiilive Vice President Chief financial Nicer WE AWAIT YOUR WI5PQM OH rSffEATANDAll OK, I'M HERE ToPICKVWI? PRESIDED iTfll On Sunday, The New York Times published a highly informative chart laying out the positions of the presidential candidates on major issues. It was, I'd argue, a useful reality check for those who believe that the next president can somehow Ft I 1 Paul Kingman Ni'w York Times Co-puhlisher MtU John f. Sleinman l'uhlislici intiti Andrew Stelnman iil.M 1903 Hale Sleinman ))ri 1UU Jiihn I Slriiiman manlier of lac tosocfatfrd Press Pcriudicals pmtafl IBM ai Lancaster.

Pa. USPS 111 lid Si'nd address changes In: 15' l.anraslt'r, PA 17HIIK 1)28 In our view New Year's pork usher in a new era of bipartisan cooperation. For what the chart made clear was the extent to which Democrats and Republicans five in separate moral and intellectual universes. On one side, the Democrats are all promising to get out of Iraq and offering strongly progressive policies on taxes, health care and the environment. That's understandable: The public hates the war, and public opinion seems to be running in a progressive direction.

What seems harder to understand is what's happening on the other side the degree to which almost all the Republicans have chosen to align themselves closely with the unpopular policies of an unpopular president. And I'm not just talking about their continuing enthusiasm for the Iraq war. The GOP candidates are equally supportive of Bush economic policies. Why would politicians support Bushonomics? After all, the public is very unhappy with the state of the economy, for good reason. The "Bush boom," such as it was, bypassed most Americans median family income, adjusted for inflation, has stagnated in the Bush years, and so have the real earnings of the typical worker.

Meanwhile, insecurity has increased, with a declining fraction of Americans receiving health insurance from their employers. And things seem likely to get worse as the election approaches. For a few years, the economy was at least creating jobs at a respectable pace but as the housing slump and the associated credit crunch accelerate and spill over to the rest of the economy, most analysts expect employment to weaken, too. All in all, it's an economic and political environment in which you'd expect Republican politicians, as a sheer matter of calculation, to look for ways to distance themselves from the current administration's economic policies and record say, by expressing some concern about rising income gaps and the fraying social safety net. lion to the National Defense Center for Environmental Excellence in Johnstown since 2001, according to a Washington Post investigation.

The center, which Murtha managed to have Congress place in his district, is supposed to research and develop pollution-abatement technology for the Defense Department. Since its inception, however, only nine systems developed by the center have been put into use. Other earmarks include $126,000 to fund a National First Ladies Library in Canton, Ohio; $8.8 million for a Rural Domestic Preparedness Consortium at Eastern Kentucky University; $2 million for a Library named for New York Rep. Charles Rangel; and $100,000 for streetscaping in the Los Angeles Fashion District. Although the number of earmarks in this budget is 17 percent fewer than that of a year ago, we expected more from the Democrat-controlled Congress.

The conservative Heritage Foundation recently announced three suggestions to curb earmarks. They included canceling nonbinding earmarks by executive order; banning "phone-marking," in which lawmakers pressure agency heads to demand funding for their pet projects; and rejecting vaguely worded earmarks. That's a start. While we would like to see significant earmark cutbacks in 2008, taxpayers might as well whistle in the dark. That's because it's an election year, and lawmakers who bring home federal funds tend to get re-elected.

What a racket. Prior to Christmas, President Bush hinted he might play Scrooge with the $555 billion omnibus spending bill and the $459 billion defense bill sent to him. The bills include an estimated 9,000 earmarks worth $7 billion-plus for pet projects. Had he rejected the legislation, he would have had our support. Instead, the president, eager to have a budget in hand, signed the larded-down spending bills.

Initially, earmarks served as a way to funnel federal funds to projects such as community centers or water-or sewage-treatment facilities. But in recent years, they increasingly have been used for personal and highly questionable projects. Perhaps the best-known example was Sen. Ted Stevens' "Bridge to Nowhere." Stevens, an Alaska Republican, is known as one of the top earmarkers in Congress. He again leads the pack with proposals for a SeaLife Center that includes the $3.5 million purchase of land belonging to a company owned by one of his former aides, and $20 million for an "expeditionary craft" that would link Anchorage, Alaska, with a rural strip of land.

Sen. Thad Cochran, has earmarked $10 million for airport and highway projects in his state. Although those projects may be worthy of federal funding, critics argue they should compete for funds with all other transportation projects. Of course, neither party is clean when it comes to earmarks. U.S.

Rep. John Murtha, has channeled more than $671 mil Aside from the logical problem here if tax cuts increase revenue, why do they need to be of set? even a cursory look at what McCain said at the time shows that he's trying to rewrite history: He actually attacked the Bush tax cuts from the left, not the right. But he has clearly decided that it's better to fib about his record than admit that he wasn't always a rock-solid economic conservative. So what does the conversion of McCain into an avowed believer in voodoo economics and the comparable conversions of Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani tell us? That bitter partisanship and political polarization aren't going away anytime soon. There's a fantasy, widely held inside the Beltway, that men and women of good will from both parties can be brought together to hammer out bipartisan solutions to the nation's problems.

If such a thing were possible, McCain, Romney and Giuliani a self-proclaimed maverick, the former governor of a liberal state and the former mayor of an equally liberal city would seem like the kind of men Democrats could deal with. (OK, maybe not Giuliani.) In fact, however, it's not possible, not given the nature of today's Republican Party, which has turned men like McCain and Romney into hard-line ideologues. On economics, and on much else, there is no common ground between the parties. In fact, however, except for Mike Huckabee a peculiar case who'll deserve more discussion if he stays in contention the leading Republican contenders have gone out of their way to assure voters that they will not deviate an inch from the Bush path. Why? Because the GOP is still controlled by a conservative movement that does not tolerate deviations from tax-cutting, free-market, greed-is-good orthodoxy.

To see the extent to which Republican politicians still cower before the power of movement conservatism, consider the sad case of John McCain. McCain's lingering reputation as a maverick straight talker comes largely from his opposition to the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003, which he said at the time were too big and too skewed to the rich. Those objections would seem to have even more force now, with America facing the costs of an expensive war which McCain fervently supports and with income inequality reaching new heights. But McCain now says that he supports making the Bush tax cuts permanent. Not only that: he's become a convert to crude supply-side economics, claiming that cutting taxes actually increases revenues.

That's an assertion even Bush administration officials concede is false. Oh, and what about his earlier opposition to tax cuts? McCain now says that he opposed the Bush tax cuts only because they weren't offset by spending cuts. End the war on drugs If Romney wins, so will Democrats You don't hear much about the nation's "war on drugs" these days. It's a has-been, a glamourless geezer, a holdover from bygone days. Its glitz has been stolen by the "war on terror," which gets the news media hype and campaign trail rhetoric.

Rail The most impressive thing about Mitt Romney is his clarity of mind. When he set out to pursue his party's nomination, he studied the contours of the Republican coalition and molded himself to its forms. Earnestly and Cynthia Tucker Atlanta Journal Constitution David Brooks York Times Instead, they are usually penny-ante dealers addicted to their product. As violent crime dropped in the '90s, some law-and-order types argued that harsh penalties meted out under punitive drug laws were responsible for safer streets. But that argument is seriously undermined by a resurgence in violent crime.

There is no justification for lengthy sentences for nonviolent drug offenders. Recently, criminal justice officials have begun to tacitly acknowledge the racism embedded in the drug war. Earlier this month, the U.S. Sentencing Commission, which sets federal sentencing guidelines, retroactively reduced the penalties for some crimes related to crack cocaine, reducing the stark disparity between sentences for crack cocaine, used more frequently by black Americans, and powder cocaine, more often used by whites. A day earlier, the U.S.

Supreme Court had ruled that judges could deviate from harsh guidelines in sentencing drug offenders. But the ravages of the drug war are too many to be eased by those narrow changes in policy. They won't help victims such as Kathryn Johnston, an elderly Atlanta woman killed by local police in a hail of gunfire a year ago. Under pressure to make drug arrests, they said, members of an Atlanta narcotics squad bed to a judge to obtain a "no knock" warrant for Johnston's house, where they believed they would find illegal substances. But the elderly woman, who lived behind barred windows, thought she was the victim of a robbery an i fired on the officers.

They returnei fire. No drugs were found on her emises. The nation's so-called war on drugs recalls that old Vietnam War phrase a xxit "burning the village" in order to save it. It also brings to mind Albert nstein's famous definition of insanity Doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. Our war on drugs really is a war on people.

That'srue insanity. Romney's biggest problem is a failure of imagination. With his data-set mentality, Romney has ehosen to model himself on a version of Republicanism that is receding into memory. GOP has been hemorrhaging support among independent voters. Surveys from the Pew Research Center and The Washington Post, Kaiser Foundation and Harvard University show that independents are moving away from the GOP on social issues, globalization and the roles of religion and government.

If any Republican candidate is going to win this year, he will have to offer a new brand of Republicanism. But Romney has tied himself to the old brand. He is unresponsive to the middle-class anxiety that Huckabee is tapping into. He has forsaken the transpartisan candor that McCain represents. Romney, the cautious consultant, is pivoting to stress his corporate competence, and is re-branding himself as an Obama-esque change agent, but he will never make the sort of daring break that independent voters will demand if they are going to give the GOP another look.

The leaders of the Republican coalition know Romney will lose. But some would rather remain in control of a party that loses than lose control of a party that wins. Others haven't yet suffered the agony of defeat and so are not yet emotionally ready for the trauma of transformation. Others still simply don't know which way to turn. And so the burden of change will be thrust on primary voters over the next few weeks.

Romney is a decent man with some good fiscal and economic policies. But in this race, he has run like a manager, not an entrepreneur. His triumph this month would mean a Democratic victory in November. an old-fashioned, orthodox Republican, he has made himself unelectable in the fall. When you look inside his numbers, you see tremendous weaknesses.

For example, Romney is astound-ingly unpopular among young voters. Last month, the Harris Poll asked Republicans under 30 whom they supported. Romney came in fifth, behind Rudy Giuliani, Mike Huckabee, John McCain and Ron Paul. Romney had 7 percent support, a virtual tie with Tancredo. He does only a bit better among those ages 30 to 42.

Romney is also quite unpopular among middle- and lower-middle class voters. In poll after poll, he leads among Republicans making more than $75,000 a year. He does poorly among those who make less. If Romney is the general election candidate, he will face hostility from independent voters, who value authenticity. He will face hostility from Hispanic voters, who detest his new immigration positions.

He will face great hostility in the media. Even conservative editorialists at places like the Union Leader in New Hampshire and The Boston Herald find his flip-flopping offensive. But his biggest problem is a failure of imagination. Market research is a snapshot of the past. With his data-set mentality, Romney has chosen to model himself on a version of Republicanism that is receding into memory.

As Walter Mondale was the last gasp of the fading New Deal coalition, Romney has turned himself into the last gasp of the Reagan coalition. That coalition had its day, but it is shrinking now. The Republican Party is more unpopular than at any point in the past 40 years. Democrats have a 50 to 36 party identification advantage, the widest in a generation. The genera public prefers Democratic approaches on health care, corruption, the economy and Iraq by double-digit margins.

Republicans' losses have-come across the board, but the ing against recreational drug use and demanding that offenders be locked away is so '90s. But the drug war proceeds, mostly away from news cameras and photo-ops, still chewing up federal and state resources and casting criminal sanctions over entire neighborhoods. Some four or so decades into an intensive effort to stamp out recreational drug use, billions of dollars have been spent; thousands of criminals, many of them foreigners, have been enriched; and hundreds of thousands of Americans have been imprisoned. And the use of illegal substances continues unabated. With the nation poised on the brink of a new political era, isn't it time to abandon the wrongheaded war on drugs? Every war has its collateral damage, and the war on drugs is no different.

As it happens, its unintended victims have been disproportionately black. The stunning rise in incarceration rates for black men began after the nation became serious about stamping out recreational drug use. In 1954, black inmates accounted for 30 percent of the nation's prison population, according to Marc Mau-er, assistant director of The Sentencing Project, a Washington, D.C.-based group that advocates alternative sentencing. Fifty years later, he wrote, blacks account for almost half of all prison admissions. Much of that increase has come from arrests for drug crimes.

Very few of those black men are wildly successful drug lords like the Harlem kingpiijj Frank Lucas. methodically, he has appealed to each of the major constituency groups. For national security conservatives, he vowed to double the size of the prison at Guantanamo Bay. For social conservatives, he embraced a culture war against the faithless. For immigration skeptics, he swung so far right he earned the endorsement of Tom Tancredo.

He has spent roughly $80 million, including an estimated $17 million of his own money, hiring consultants, blanketing the airwaves and building an organization that is unmatched on the Republican side. And he has turned himself into the party's fusion candidate. Some of his rivals are stronger among social conservatives. Others are stronger among security conservatives, but no candidate has a foot in all camps the way Romney does. No candidate offends so few, or is the acceptable choice of so many.

And that is why Romney is at the fulcrum of the Republican race. He's looking strong in Iowa and is the only candidate who can afford to lose an important state and still win the nomination. And yet as any true conservative can tell you, the sort of rational planning Mitt Romney embodies never works. The world is too complicated and human reason too limited. The PowerPoint mentality always fails to anticipate something.

It always yields unintended consequences. And what Romney failed to anticipate is tht In turning himself into.