Earlier this month, Nancy Rosenblum, the Senator Joseph S. Clark Professor of Ethics in Government and Chair of the Department of Government at Harvard, visited the Rockefeller Center and delivered a public lecture on the moral distinctiveness of political party identity.  She is both contrarian and clever in the way she takes apart self-styled "independents," who let their self-styled independence of thought remove any consequence they might have in electoral politics if they remain independent from their fellow voters.  She makes the affirmative case for ambitious political parties as sources of morality in politics.

The video is definitely worth your time.  For more, see her full explanation in On the Side of the Angels: An Appreciation of Parties and Partisanship.

A friend pointed me to this column by Peggy Noonan in last week's WSJ, "We're Governed by Callous Children." I think she is right in her main point about a disheartened leadership class in business and a mindless leadership class in government. 

But she makes the same mistake that other Republican commentators make when they criticize our current leadership.  Specifically, she does not come out forthrightly to identify the one characteristic that separates adults from children: children don't have to balance their budgets, but adults do.  As much as she may admire Reagan, it was his administration that began our 30-year fascination with outsized deficits.  (The deficit mentality nearly went away with Clinton but came back with a vengeance with his successor.)

After the election, I wondered what the strategy of the Political Right/Conservative Movement/Republican Party would be to recover from sound defeats in 2006 and 2008.  The recent loss of Jim Tedisco in the NY-20 special election confirms that the momentum is still in favor of the Democrats.  Senator Arlen Specter's defection today makes recovery even more remote.  A number of blogs have appeared to collect ideas for how the Right will rebuild itself.  Two of the ones I've been checking on occasion are The Next Right and The New Majority.

I'd like to add to the conversation that the Political Right has a problem in addressing policy issues in which people are fundamentally connected to each other.  Leaving aside the recent challenges of the financial crisis, the big issues in domestic public policy are health care, education, and the environment.  In each one, the choices that one group of people make affect the opportunities available to other people in a fundamental way -- beyond simply changing relative prices as people interact in free markets.  The connections come in different ways for each of the issues, but they are always related to basic notions of fairness. 

A new standard has been set in political advertisements.  Here is Charlie Wheelan as, "The Bright Knight:"

At 12:06 p.m. Tuesday, I was shocked to hear Chief Justice John Roberts bungle the oath of office of President-elect Barack Obama.  The circulation in my toes was just about gone after standing by the Washington Monument for four hours, and Mr. Obama had not properly uttered the 35 words required by the Constitution.  I exclaimed to my wife and friends, "He may not be president.  He's got to say those exact 35 words [in the right order as in the Constitution]."

See for yourself:

From Scrappleface:

House Republicans plan to introduce a conservative alternative to the Rangel alternative to the Alternative Minimum Tax.

Never mind the polls; sometimes you just have to read the tea leaves.

The LA Times reported this week that the effort in California to change the way that state's electoral votes are distributed has collapsed because of a lack of money. Later reports indicated that there had been only one primary funder and the organization had been in turmoil.

This is a big deal.

Nebraska Senator Chuck Hagel (R-NE) will announce tomorrow that he will not run for reelection.

 
The retirement of a senator from a small state who is a member of the minority party and isn't the ranking member of a committee isn't generally nationally important news. But Hagel:

My day job is managing director in a communications agency. That means I spend a great deal of time thinking about what someone should say, how they should say it, and what will actually be heard by those who hear it.

I also just as frequently wonder why someone hasn't said something.

This must be the political equivalent of The Perfect Storm for House and Senate Republicans.