The future direction of the Supreme Court is very much at stake in this November’s presidential election. The two or three justices most likely to depart the Court over the next four years -- Justice Stevens, Justice Ginsburg, and possibly Justice Souter -- are liberal judicial activists who routinely read their own policy preferences into the Constitution and who selectively regard their own favored precedents as sacrosanct. If a President Obama or a President Clinton names their successors, the slender operating majority on the Court for liberal activist results on most contentious political issues is likely to be preserved for at least another generation. By contrast, a president committed to nominate, and fight for, justices who will practice judicial restraint offers real hope that the Court may soon be restored to its proper role in our constitutional system. In his speech today, John McCain has provided encouraging evidence that he would be that president. One speech, of course, does not a campaign -- or a Supreme Court appointment -- make. John McCain needs to continue to make the case for judicial restraint and to draw the stark contrast between his views and his Democratic opponent’s on the proper role of the judiciary. If elected, he will need to populate key judge-picking positions -- including the White House counsel and the attorney general -- with experienced advisers committed to his stated goals. (We would rest easier if he threw out a few names now.) And he will need to be ready to devote a lot of political capital to defeat intransigent Democratic opposition in the Senate. Conservatives, for their part, need to do what we can to help McCain live up to his promises.

Snobbery and the resentment of snobbery (and it is really snobbery, and not elitism as such, that we have all been discussing) are always going to exist in societies with significant upward social mobility.  The more opportunities available to people through merit (or at least largely through merit), the more pretensions the arrivistes will put on to demonstrate that they do, in fact, belong in their new status group.  Snobbery may not be limited to arrivistes, which is to say those who have succeeded in making their own way, but I suspect it is most obvious among these people, because they are the ones who most have to prove that they have adopted the mentality associated with their new status and their new peers.  

Evidently, there are a lot of people on the left who find the controversy over Obama’s San Francisco remarks absolutely infuriating because he ”told the truth” and is being punished for it, but for everyone else the remarks were not just condescending–they were insulting because they were false.  More than that, a politician presumed to know why people did or believed certain things, when he probably cannot know their motives and, more importantly, shouldn’t care.  In an election, it is the politician’s motives, his beliefs, that are at issue.  The pol is the one who is supposed to be scrutinised by the voters, not vice versa.

Although you might not guess it from McCain's gloss, the "tax benefit" in question goes to employees, not employers. Companies can deduct money spent on employee compensation as a business expense whether it takes the form of wages or health benefits. But since the government does not treat employer-provided health insurance as taxable income, there's an artificial incentive for employees to prefer compensation in that form, rather than the cash equivalent. If both kinds of compensation were treated the same, most employees presumably would prefer the money; employers would respond by ditching health benefits and offering higher wages instead. Equal tax treatment could be accomplished either by taxing the health benefits as income or, as McCain seems to be proposing, making the money an employee independently spends on health insurance tax-free as well.

McCain himself says "employer-provided health plans would be largely untouched and unchanged" for the "many workers" who "are perfectly content" with the status quo. Maybe this is just his way of reassuring people that changes in the compensation mix would be driven by employee preferences. But the main economic rationale for eliminating the health-benefit tax preference is to make employer-provided medical coverage the exception rather than the rule; otherwise we would still have a system in which medical coverage is both artificially expensive, since patients have little opportunity or incentive to economize, and insecure, since losing a job often means losing health insurance.

Haven't we been listening to talk of "100 years" of war in Iraq for 100 years now? It certainly feels that way. But this favorite talking point of the two Democrats presidential candidates is bogus.

"Instead of offering an exit strategy for Iraq, (Sen. John McCain is) offering us a 100-year occupation," Sen. Barack Obama said on the fifth anniversary of the coalition’s move on the then-oppressed Iraq. But it could have been any day; Obama uses the sound bite often enough.

What the "100 years" talk refers to is something McCain rightly said in response to a question during a New Hampshire townhall meeting in January. The question regarded Bush’s statement that we could be in Iraq for 50 more years. McCain sensibly responded: "Make it 100. We’ve . . . been in Japan for 60 years. We’ve been in South Korea for 50 years or so. That would be fine with me. As long as Americans are not being injured or harmed or wounded or killed, that’s fine with me. I hope that would be fine with you, if we maintain a presence in a very volatile part of the world where al Qaeda is training, recruiting and equipping and motivating people every single day."

When asked to clarify, he would go on to say that it could be 1,000 years, or even a million years. These are the lines that try Democrats’ souls. But McCain was right about the long war. It was a sensible answer. And though it doesn’t sound like the most attractive answer -- who wants 100 years in Iraq? -- it was straight talk from a senator who has a better track record on Iraq than most. And it may not hurt his campaign, either.  

Can anyone seriously doubt that a man who spent 5-1/2 years being tortured by the Viet Cong hates war? But one can simultaneously hate war and think it preferable to allowing despots to gain nuclear weapons.

I’m not sure undermining the United Nations, which has been virtually useless at preventing wars or enforcing its own Security Council mandates, is necessarily inconsistent with hating war. Regardless, McCain isn’t seeking to undermine it but rather augment it with a “League of Democracies,” which he has described as a “SEATO-type” ad hoc coalition of states with similar values. Indeed, pressed by this author on the question, he specifically said that he did not envision this as a military alliance ala NATO. Whose existence, oddly enough, hasn’t undermined the UN.

Nor has McCain advocated “new cold wars with Russia and China.” Rather, his critics, like Fareed Zakaria, have posited that as a likely outcome of the League of Democracies.