No, not the classic book, but rather Jay Cost’s sketch of the arguments the Clintonistas might make if she starts winning again.

He points out that neither Clinton nor Obama can win enough pledged delegates in the remaining contests to secure the nomination. It will come down to superdelegates, who have to be persuaded. I’ve alreadydiscussed the Obama argument. As Jay sketches it, Clinton’s would be roughly the same, with a wrinkle. She can make a potentially plausible claim (if she wins Ohio, Texas, and Pennsylvania) that she has won the majority of the votes (her case is helped if you count Florida as well). So far, that’s no different from the Obama argument. But she can also argue that caucuses (Obama’s strength) are "undemocratic" because they exclude people and because they overweight the influence of the generally elite participants. (Consider the irony of the classic democratic institution--a version of the town meeting--being regarded as "less democratic" than the bare act of voting, which is potentially pretty far from deliberative, as well as being not at all communitarian.)

I’ll end by quoting our friend Jon Schaff:

As an American I have no dog in this fight. But I must say, as a political scientist I am now rooting for Hillary Clinton because it would be lovely to see this argument play out in the public square.

1. Those who want to hear my soul-mending message of hope and change and love this week will have to come to the meeting of THE PRESIDENT’S COUNCIL ON BIOETHICS. It will be from 9-5 on Thursday (the 6th) and Friday morning at the Hotel Palomar in Arlington. There will be some excellent sessions on American health care (and I invite Senator McCain to come and get informed) and the ethics of of newborn screening.

2. On Friday morning at 9:45, they’ll be a fabulous panel featuring Jean Bethke Elshtain, Steven Pinker, and Evan Brann on the just-released HUMAN DIGNITY AND BIOETHICS: ESSAYS COMMISSIONED BY THE PRESIDENT’S COUNCIL ON BIOETHICS.

3. You need to get a copy of HUMAN DIGNITY AND BIOETHICS, which includes contributions by Daniel Dennett, Robert Kraynak (and an argument between Dennett and Kraynak), Patricia S. Churchland, Diana Schaub, Charles Rubin, Richard John Neuhaus, Gil Meilaender, Leon Kass, Susan Shell, Ed Pellegrino, Rebecca Dresser, and many others.

4. No book on dignity would be complete without ME in it. My contributions include "Modern and American Dignity" and "Commentary on Meilaender and Dennett."

5. The new issue of PERSPECTIVES ON POLITICAL SCIENCE is also out, and it includes a symposium on Dr. Pat Deneen’s DEMOCRATIC FAITH, which features our own Joe Knippenberg.

Byron York reports on an campaign stop last week with Michelle Obama at the Zanesville Day Nursery. At this informal gathering, Mrs. Obama chats with some moms and demonstrates her capacity to struggle with the issues that face an economically troubled central Ohio--particularly the tough choices that face hard working women with children. She empathizes with them . . . because, you know, she’s a lot like them. She knows the struggles of a working mother. She mentions feeling guilt. But here she makes no distinction between needing to work and choosing to work. The median annual household income in Zanesville, Ohio is around $37,000. I suspect that Michelle and Barack did better than that--even before they had what she calls the "magic beans" of Barack’s two best-selling books. (York notes the profits they made in the "help" industry, for example). I find Michelle Obama’s guilt over working and being absent from her children somewhat hard to stomach in the face of all that information. Acknowledging the difference between needing a second income and choosing one, I wonder if the guilt she’s feeling isn’t something she might easily address by making different choices. And I also wonder whether the women at the Zanesville Day Nursery wouldn’t be able to make different choices were it not for the confiscatory tax and regulatory structures that have helped to hurt the economy in Zanesville. But apparently the women at the Zanesville Day Nursery were too polite to ask these questions. It’s not every day that a potential First Lady comes for coffee, after all.

This article suggests that Clinton has been outpolling Obama among Catholics who vote in Democratic primaries. There’s no magic bullet explanation. Some point to her lead among Hispanics, others to her support among "traditionally Democratic" urban working class voters, and still others to the fact that he sounds more Protestant, while her religious appeals are less distinctive sounding. Of course, as Obama has gained momentum, Clinton’s Catholic margin has been diminishing somewhat. Except on life issues, where these isn’t much (of substance) to choose between Clinton and Obama, Catholics aren’t all that distinguishable from the American electorate as a whole. (To be sure, that’s potentially a very big "except.")

In a nutshell, I think Clinton’s margins among Catholic Democrats were the product of her early status as the presumptive nominee. As people have come around to Obama, so have Catholics, with one possible caveat or qualification: older folks are probably somewhat more likely to identify as Catholic and somewhat less likely to change their minds.

Bottom line: if he wins the nomination, he’ll get the kind of Democrat-leaning Catholics who vote in primaries. And I’m not confident that the McCain campaign will have the stomach to draw the difference on life issues with sufficient vigor and starkness. The Obamanauts will surely use McCain’s admirably consistent support of the Iraq war to muddy the waters for Catholic voters.

And if the waters aren’t already muddy enough, here’s a story about Obama’s bible-based support for civil unions. Turns out that the Sermon on the Mount "is, in my mind, for my faith, more central than an obscure passage in Romans." So the former passage supports treating everyone with equal dignity, which to Obama implies support for civil unions, but Paul’s Letter to the Romans, which contains the most sustained New Testament treatment of the relationship between religion and politics, is "obscure."

There’s lots to say here, some of it well said by people to whom the Baptist Press reporter spoke. But I can’t resist adding my two cents. First, of course Obama makes the typical liberal theological move, finding proof texts that support his preferences while dismissing passages whose import he doesn’t like. This won’t win him friends among those who have a "high" view of Scripture (see, for example, 2 Tim 3:16).

Second, the context of the "obscure" passage from Romans (1:26-32) is telling. Let’s begin with 1:19:

For what can be known about God is plain to [men], because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. For althought they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles.

Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator....

Paul’s challenge here is based upon natural theology, and extends to all those who willfully deny the evidence of--dare I say it?--an intelligent design in the world around them. Rather than respond with gratitude to a beneficently designed creation and its Creator, men worship themselves and pursue their own pleasure. You might say that the context of the passage Obama dismisses condemns the all-too-human cleverness that leads him to dismiss it.

Update: More here, including a link to this transcript. Hat tip: The Friar.

Update #2: Ben Boychuk gets a discussion going at RedBlueAmerica, and calls our attention to John Mark Reynolds’s commentary on Obama, of which I’ll quote a snippet:

Paul points there to the existence of a common natural philosophy available to Christians and non-Christians. This allows for a civil society that need not be based on revelation available only to believers.

Obama should return to the passage he has called obscure to learn how to argue a tough case well. All lawyers used to read Romans as a model for persuasive rhetoric, but younger attorneys like Obama have missed out. The argument Obama uses is not persuasive, but Paul’s has persuaded billions over centuries. Perhaps, the argument that sexuality is naturally between a man and a woman is odd to a culture out of touch with the natural world, but it is not hard to recover the intuition that sexually men are designed for women and women for men.

Since it is impossible to think a church going man like Obama is as ignorant of Romans as he sounds, it is more charitable to assume that Obama is simply a conventional theological liberal who reads the Bible the way he reads the Constitution.

1. Well, I’m back from Alaska. Here’s what I learned: As far as I could see with my own eyes, there are no moose in Alaska, and I did get around. Anchorage is a very sophisticated city with plenty of amenities, but there’s no effective way to drive from there to another such city. Anchorage is not as cold as even Chicago or Detroit. When I left Atlanta last Wednesday afternoon, it was 25 degrees. It was 28 when I landed in Anchorage at midnight. The rest of Alaska is marked by incredible natural beauty and almost uniformly ugly or merely functional human additions. People in Alaska--unlike, say, people in Akron--mostly love it there and think in term of their state’s and their own bright future.

2. It’s possible that Obama has peaked in the lower 48 states, but not in Alaska. I had lunch with an excellent "postmodernism rightly understood"-type philosophy professor and a very erudite history professor. The philosophy guy said that he almost always votes for Republican, but he’s for Obama this time, although he can’t quite explain why. His hope is that Obama will govern like a Republican. The history guy originally hoped to be a Hillary delegate to the national convention, but decided to vote for Obama at the last minute. He was inspired by the all of Barack’s young people and went with his heart, not his head. I will go as far as to speculate that McCain’s moralism about oil drilling has made him unpopular enough in Alaska that Obama might even have a shot there, if the election were tomorrow.

3. I still think Obama will win the two big primaries tomorrow, but I will add that all the excitment over the alleged close races is fake. Hillary would have to win them big to have a chance. Of course, I really do hope she does win them big, and I’m happy to keep hope alive.

4. Economic pessismism is rapidly becoming more pervasive, and people want to believe it when Obama says that the recession is due to bad policies that he can readily fix. Anyone who can save the planet and repair souls should find economic growth and jobs easy. Again, McCain needs to become credible on domestic policies.

Looks like my previous post on the Mondale campaign’s "red phone" caught up with the Hillary campaign, which has now released its own version of the ad. Somehow the endlessly ringing phone (is anyone going to answer it already?) puts me in the frame of mind of the old Little Feat tune, "Apolitical Blues":

Well my telephone was ringing And they told me it was Chairman Mao. . . I’ve got the apolitical blues And that’s the meanest blues of all. . .,

Seriously, though, there is something odd about the ending of the Hillary ad, at least when you watch it on the YouTube small screen, and that is the studied androgyny of the parent figure who looks in on the sleeping children. Is it a man or a woman? Is this a reprise of the old SNL "It’s Pat!" sketch? Looks like it could be Tom Cruise, whose gender identity is open to question if you believe the tabloids (and who doesn’t?). Is this some kind of deliberate but subtle PC conformity on the part of Hillary’s ad people? I guess I’ll have to go back an reread It Takes a Village for clues.

My wife sent me a link to this post about a California homeschooling decision, described in this World Net Daily article.

Here’s what I can figure out on the basis of a quick reading of the materials. First, California law doesn’t make it easy to homeschool. There are four ways to accomplish this: qualifying your home as a private school, hiring a qualified (appropriately credentialed) tutor, or pursuing an "independent study program," using a public school curriculum (and subject to public school supervision) or using a private school curriculum (and subject to its supervision). Without knowing any better, I’d bet the fourth has been the option of choice, enabling families to homeschool by affiliating with an umbrella program that provides some curricular support, some (probably minimal) supervision, and testing facilities.

Second, in this case, a complaint was filed on behalf of the three youngest children in a family of eight (the oldest is 29), alleging "physical and emotional mistreatment" by the father. Upon investigation, the L.A. County Department of Children and Family Services discovered that the kids were being homeschooled. An attorney for the two youngest sought a court order requiring them to be enrolled in and actually attend a public or private school (that is, spend time in an educational setting outside the home). Despite the fact that the juvenile court judge regarded the education provided at home was "lousy," "meager," and "bad" (which might also describe some public school experiences), he found that there was a "constitutional right" to homeschool.

The appellate court rejected this right, upholding California’s compulsory schooling laws and interpreting them in such a way as essentially to invalidate the private school independent study programs that most families probably follow (asserting that they don’t provide adequate supervision of the parent educators).

The appellate panel also made short work of the parent’s assertion of a First Amendment right to homeschool their children, following from “sincerely held religious beliefs...based on Biblical teachings and principles.” Anyone could make such an assertion and escape state supervision. What’s needed is something more like a deep-seated and organized religious tradition, such as that found among the Old Order Amish in Yoder.

Now, this line of argument raises three sorts of interesting issues. First, there’s the complex of questions that arise out of attempts to accommodate relgious freedom in the face of generally applicable laws. Some justices we tend to like (e.g., Scalia) are very suspicious of free exercise exemptions. But I wonder whether free exercise means anything if it doesn’t permit some assertion of a right to be exempt from an otherwise generally applicable law. (And yes, I know that if I were a truly strict constructionist, I wouldn’t apply the First Amendment to the states. Fair enough; as I’ll argue in a little while, I think the best remedy for California’s law is to persuade the legislature to make it more accommodating to homeschoolers.)

Second, there’s the contrast between this court’s approach to homeschoolers and the Supreme Court’s approach to conscientious objector cases (like Seeger). In the latter, the Supremes broadened the letter of the law to include exemptions for those whose objections didn’t flow out of religion, let alone out of a traditional peace church. I recognize that the Court in this case was construing a statute and trying to avoid supposed problems of establishment: a law that granted c.o. status only to "religious" believers or peace church adherents might be regarded offering the religious a privilege that others aren’t offered. (Of course, some might argue that that’s the purpose of the First Amendment free exercise clause.) But my point here is simply that the California court here seems to read any free exercise exemption very narrowly. If a law were drafted so as to embody this narrow construction, it would likely be subject establishment objections under Seeger.

Third, in considering the possibility of a free exercise exemption, the California court treads on dangerous ground, putting itself in the position of deciding what counts as a genuinely religious ground of a duty to homeschool. If I were inclined to be generous, I’d say that they were erring on the side of extreme caution in permitting exemptions, so that only members of churches or denominations that positively ordered their adherents to homeschool their children would have access to a free exercise exemption. But don’t free exercise rights belong to individuals, who have to consult their consciences? How can a judge tell me what my genuinely conscientious duties are? In other words, the court’s caution here--if indeed that’s what it is--compels it to run the risk of deciding what counts as a religion or a religious/conscientious scruple.

Stated another way, in its efforts to protect the children in this case (I have no idea what the dad was doing or how the mom was teaching) and to promote some goods that public schools are said to accomplish (as do many families that homeschool) the court has potentially made it nearly impossible to homeschool in California. The many who are decent and scrupulous about caring for the good of their children and of their country are sacrificed because a few might not do well by their children. We might as well take all children out of their parental homes because some parents are abusive behind closed doors.

My conclusion from all this is that the court was probably too zealous in narrowly reading California’s law, but also that the law is unduly restrictive of homeschooling. The remedy I’d propose, however, is new legislation, making state law more accommodating to homeschoolers. Else we necessarily enter the thicket of judicially carved (and hence necessarily arbitrary) exemptions and restrictions. I can play that game with the best of them, but would prefer to use cases like this to make law the old-fashioned way, by legislators responding to the appeals of concerned citizens and deliberating about how most effectively to improve matters.

Update: Thanks to a commenter for noting both that the likely option of choice for California homeschoolers has been setting up your home as a private school and that it’s possible to read the appellate court decision as not permitting this option either.

According to the court, the intent of the California law is to protect the rights of children by seeing to it that their teachers are competent. Parents can "protect" the "rights" of their children by acquiring the appropriate teaching credentials themselves, hiring appropriately credentialed tutors, or enrolling their kids in a school that engages in quality control. Public schools do so by enforcing credentialling requirements. Private schools don’t have to hire credentialed teachers, but their administrators have an incentive to assure that their employees are "capable of teaching" and it’s relatively easy for the state to engage in quality control here.

In other words, it’s possible to read the state’s requirement that home tutors have appropriate teaching credentials to mean that no one can educate at home without such a credential. On this reading of the law, the private school affadavit is merely a dodge not in keeping with the intent of the law.

The recent appellate opinion relies on this old California ruling on charges filed against the proverbial great grandparents of today’s homeschoolers. All the reasoning found in the current decision is in place here.

Also worth noting that Pierce v. Society of Sisters, the great parental rights decision, contains the following two statements (I’ve reversed the order):

The fundamental theory of liberty upon which all governments in this Union repose excludes any general power of the state to standardize its children by forcing them to accept instruction from public teachers only. The child is not the mere creature of the state; those who nurture him and direct his destiny have the right, coupled with the high duty, to recognize and prepare him for additional obligations.

***

No question is raised concerning the power of the state reasonably to regulate all schools, to inspect, supervise and examine them, their teachers and pupils; to require that all children of proper age attend some school, that teachers shall be of good moral character and patriotic disposition, that certain studies plainly essential to good citizenship must be taught, and that nothing be taught which is manifestly inimical to the public welfare.

While the first statement is a ringing endorsement of "the liberty of parents and guardians to direct the upbringing and education of children," the second indicates that this liberty is not absolute, that the state may reasonably regulate how parents exercise their liberty (and responsibility).

Joseph’s post below raises some interesting questions about the "traditionalist" stool in America’s conservative coalition. In particular, it is interesting to note how he goes back and forth between "virtue conservatism" and "traditionalists."

There’s an interesting tension there. Any given tradition may or may not be supportive of virtue. Men being creatures of habit, prudent statesmen must respect tradition. But seventy-five years after FDR’s election, the American tradition ain’t what it used to be.

In short, are our "traditionalists" truly traditionalists? Or might there be a better label for them.

To push this line of thought a bit further, or perhaps in a slightly different direction, might there be a difference, perhaps only of focus, between the conservatism of Edmund Burke, and that of my namesake--John Adams.

As a new blogger here at NLT, I should thank Peter for inviting me to join. It’s good to be here, and to join the conversation. I hope to contribute to our discussion, and perhas amuse every now and then.

At the Wall Street Journal, Allan Meltzer suggests that Ben Bernanke is taking the country down the road it was on in the 1970s:

A country that will not accept the possibility of a small recession will end up having a big one when the politicians at last respond to the public’s complaints about inflation. Instead of paying the relatively small cost of a possible recession, the public pays the much larger cost of sustained inflation and a deeper recession. And enduring the deeper recession is the only way to convince the public that the Fed has at last decided to slow inflation.