Makes My Blood Boil

I think I remember something about the Democrats promising to end the "culture of corruption." And the Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi was going to lead the most ethical congress in history. And that President Obama was going to eliminate earmarks from his budgeting process. Oh well...more broken promises.

Earmark Requests Continue Despite Promises to Curb Process

Despite cries for reform, the earmark process is alive and well in Congress.

As lawmakers write the military budget for fiscal-year 2010, every member on the House defense-appropriations subcommittee has requested funds for contractors and other organizations with employees who have donated money to their campaigns.

The 18 members of the subcommittee are seeking a total of about $2 billion on behalf of such companies, universities and nonprofit groups, according to a review of campaign-finance data and nearly 400 earmark requests in the 2010 defense-spending bill by the nonpartisan Taxpayers for Common Sense.

Employees of those entities donated nearly $1 million to the 11 Democrats and seven Republicans since the beginning of 2007.

The defense-spending bill for the fiscal year beginning Oct. 1, which will likely total more than $500 billion, is slated for a final vote in the panel Thursday.

The requests come as the Democratic-led Congress has vowed to curb the earmark process, where members write into the budget a requirement that funds be spent in a specific way, rather than leaving those decisions to the discretion of government officials or competitive bidding. Scandals over earmarks for big donors paved the way for Republicans to lose control of Congress in 2006.

John Mayer Does It Again

I am a little overstimulated and disgusted by the amount of coverage the death of Michael Jackson received by the media. Yes he was a gifted singer, dancer, and artist. Yes he was a great humanitarian and activist. Yes his fettish for cavorting with toddlers and pre-adolescents was, if not criminal, very strange.

But allow to publish the best part of Michael Jackson's memorial service

U.S. Economy....The Long View

From Marginal Revolution:

The Increased Competitiveness of the US Economy

Deloitte has just released The Shift Index, a study of long-term trends in the U.S. economy. Two interesting graphs follow which put some numbers on conventional wisdom. The US economy has become much more competitive over time. We can see this in the economy wide Herfindahl-Hirschman Index, a measure of market concentration, which has halved in the latest forty years (click to enlarge) and also in the topple rate.

The topple rate is a measure of how the rank of large firms on return of assets changes over time. The topple rate has increased by about 60% over the past forty years (ignoring the recent blip up). What this means is that the firms on top are less likely to stay on top today than in the past - the recent blip up indicates the upheaval in firm rankings during the current recession. Notice also that an increased topple rate implies an increase in stock market volatility which we have also seen over the long-run (not just in recent years).

As a result of increased competition and also, I believe, greater wealth and reduced interest rates, the economy wide return on assets has decreased by 75% (see the report).

If the return on assets has decreased but productivity and wealth are up then where has the wealth gone? To consumers and the creative class. Thus, increased competition in the economy has driven down the return to capital and at the same time has increased the return to the complementary input which is in greatest fixed supply, creative labor. More data in the full report.

What's Happening to Obama's Legislative Agenda?

Chaos on Capitol Hill: All Politics Is Loco

A Commentary by Michael Barone
Monday, July 13, 2009

Disarray. That's one word to describe the status of the Obama administration's legislative program as Congress heads into its final four weeks of work before the August recess. A watered-down cap-and-trade bill passed the House narrowly last month, but Sen. Barbara Boxer has decided not to bring up her version in the upper chamber until September.

Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus, who promised a health-care bill last month, still isn't delivering, and neither is the Health Committee's Christopher Dodd. They're both trying to nibble down cost estimates from the Congressional Budget Office, which has put the price tag at a trillion or more. But their latest ploys -- broad-based tax increases, transferring more of the Medicaid burden to the states -- sound like sputtering.

Meanwhile, Majority Leader Harry Reid says he's taken off the table one approach that has potential bipartisan support -- ending the tax preference for employer-provided insurance.

In the House, there is more chaos. Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman has delayed the health-care markup he had planned for this week, giving the Administration and House leaders a chance to win over balky Blue Dog Democrats. Ways and Means Chairman Charles Rangel is also stymied, and says all he knows about agreements that the White House has struck with various health groups (pharmaceutical companies, hospitals, HMOs) is what he reads in the papers.

All this sounds like muddling by incompetents, but in fact these Democratic legislators are (mostly) highly competent, and they are trying to do very hard things: restructure government regulation of -- or establish government control over -- one-sixth (health care) and one-tenth (energy) of the economy. And they're dealing with a president who has shown a striking lack of interest in details and whose signal legislative achievement so far -- the $787 billion stimulus package passed in February -- has visibly failed in its asserted goal of holding unemployment down to 8 percent.

It turns out that details matter, a lot, when you're slinging around great gobs of dollars. Barack Obama let congressional appropriators write the stimulus package. The result, according to the Government Accountability Office, is that only $29 billion had been spent as of June 19, 90 percent of it for Medicaid and "the State Fiscal Stabilization Fund administered by the Department of Education."

Translation: The money has gone to state governments in fiscal trouble because of declining revenues and (in some cases) profligate spending. This insulates public employee union members from the painful effects of recession that are being felt by almost everyone else, with the added political benefit of channeling money to unions, which in turn channel some of it to Democratic politicians.

Obama was also content to let Waxman and Edward Markey write the House cap-and-trade bill. To get needed votes, they gave away carbon credits to politically connected businesses rather than sell them by auctions whose revenues Obama planned to use to finance health care. And they included potentially embarrassing provisions, like one regulating the efficiency of candelabra base lamps. Better be prepared to face the federal candelabra inspectors.

Such are the people whom we are asked to trust to reshape the provision of health care. They are struggling to amass the votes to establish a government health insurance plan whose transparent purpose is to drive private insurers out of business and impose one-size-fits-all health care on the bulk of Americans. They already inserted into the stimulus package a provision funding "comparative effectiveness research," which purports to show what treatments are medically effective and cost-effective.

But comparative effectiveness research is, if not junk science, not a fully developed intellectual enterprise. Medicine is an art as well as a science, and comparative effectiveness research may too often compare apples and oranges. Meanwhile, as Europeans know, the most effective way to squeeze out costs, as Obama promises, is denial of care. Hip replacement at 60? Hey, that's expensive, and you're too old.

Polls show that most voters -- and increasing numbers of independents -- are queasy about vastly increased government spending and more concerned about bolstering the economy than about reshaping health care or addressing projected global warming. They've noticed that the stimulus package hasn't delivered the promised results. Do they want to turn over the health care and energy sectors to a president inattentive to details and congressional leaders in disarray?

Scapegoating the Speculators

Don't Shoot the Speculators

They predict prices, not set them.

Speculators don't get much respect. Short sellers last year were blamed for their trades warning about the credit crisis, and commodities traders are now accused of causing higher oil prices. Even when traders are later proven right -- maybe especially when they're proven right -- we blame them for delivering the bad news.

Maybe it's human nature to reject Shakespeare's warning and shoot the messenger. The good news is that a recent proposal aimed at one group of speculators could prove that speculators of all kinds deserve our thanks -- or if that's too much to ask, at least to be left alone to bring valuable information to markets.

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission is considering requiring more disclosure, intended to ferret out what politicians like to call "excessive speculation." Whatever the intention, enough transparency could instead show that oil speculators are heroes, not villains.

Last week, new CFTC head Gary Gensler said the agency might set new limits on oil speculators now that oil prices have doubled this year from a low of $34 a barrel. This was surprising because just last fall, the agency issued an exhaustive study concluding that speculators were not to blame for the runup in oil prices that reached $145 last summer. It's also telling that no one accused traders of harmful speculation when oil prices tumbled from their earlier highs.

The more interesting part of the CFTC proposal is for new transparency to the positions that different kinds of traders take in futures trading. Under current rules, the CFTC sets limits on trading positions based on Commitment of Traders reports, which date back to the 1920s. These put trading in two key categories, based on the type of user, not the positions they have in various contracts. This anachronism has long led to uncertainty about why prices move, a lack of transparency that also feeds the blaming of speculators.

Business users such as airlines and oil companies are considered in the "commercial" category, with hedge funds and other financial traders in the other, more regulated "noncommercial" category. But many commercial users have active trading desks. Likewise, financial firms need to hedge against movements in commodities such as oil because they have trading contracts that leave them as exposed to price risks as the companies that actually use the physical product.

More-detailed reporting on who has which kinds of positions in oil would make the market more understandable. It would show that so-called financial speculators are trying to predict price movements, but also trying to hedge risk. Likewise, commercial traders that take delivery of oil are hedging risks, while also predicting future prices. As oil expert Daniel Yergin points out, more visibility "will give a better sense of how much is the market responding to supply and demand in physical oil and how much is it responding to the supply and demand of money on the part of investors."

It doesn't make sense to shoot either kind of messenger. Markets are collections of information, translated through trading into prices. These prices, unless there is manipulation, are the best estimate of future supply and demand. Such price discovery should not be controversial, though it too often has been.

"Oil market speculation is back in the news," Bob McTeer, a former Dallas Federal Reserve president, wrote on his blog. "I'm afraid I don't have much to contribute since Milton Friedman convinced me long ago that profitable speculation is stabilizing and destabilizing speculation is unprofitable. Speculation is profitable if the speculator buys lower than he sells; it's unprofitable if he sells lower than he buys. Even if they don't make a profit, they are trying."

Or, as the sign in the 19th century saloon put it, "Don't shoot the piano player; he's doing the best he can." Oil industry experts, whether "speculators" or not, do their best to predict price movements. Some focus on uncertainty about Iran. Others point to demand trends from China and India. There's the inherent volatility in this market due to the OPEC cartel having a firm grip on the supply spigot.

Finally, there's the growing role that commodities are again playing as a hedge against inflation and a weak dollar. Increased trading in commodities is a danger-ahead warning about U.S. fiscal and monetary policies. While Washington might like to stifle these particular messengers for the warning they're sending, the rest of us should welcome information about troubles to come.

Congress has succeeded in rattling regulators at the CFTC into doing something about speculators. They have more regulation in mind, but if the CFTC can bring more transparency to oil trading, the result will be excellent even if unintended: We can focus our attention on the real pressures on oil prices instead of wallowing in searches for scapegoats. Better disclosure can reduce the human tendency to blame traders for rising prices when the responsibility lies elsewhere.

Good News for the G.O.P.

It's a little too early to tell. Polls are really "snapshots" of opinion and not longitudinal interpretations of the national mood. Still, 3 polls out this week should make Obama and the Democrats nervous:

• The Gallup poll finds that Americans describe themselves as having gotten more conservative in recent years:

Americans, by a 2-to-1 margin, say their political views in recent years have become more conservative rather than more liberal, 39% to 18%, with 42% saying they have not changed. While independents and Democrats most often say their views haven't changed, more members of all three major partisan groups indicate that their views have shifted to the right rather than to the left.

Independents, notably, say their views have grown more conservative, rather than more liberal, by a two to one margin.

So far in 2009, 40% of Americans describe themselves as conservative; conservatives outnumber liberals by more than two to one. So how does one explain the Democrats' gains in the last two election cycles? I'm tempted to say that the definitions of "liberal" and "conservative" are moving to the left as fast as people's self-descriptions are moving to the right. But Gallup also tested views on specific issues, and found that, with some exceptions, Americans have been moving to the right on an issue by issue basis, too. For example, the percentages saying we should favor the economy over the environment and that health care is not the government's responsibility have grown since 2004.

As we've written more than once, voters tend to turn to the "outs" when they become fed up with the "ins." It appears that not too many voters were fed up with the Republicans because the party was too conservative. Nevertheless, there was enough dissatisfaction with Republican governance that the other guys got a shot. It seems reasonable to expect that the Democrats might wear out their welcome sooner than the Republicans did, since, in addition to the usual grievances that accumulate and erode support for the party in power, the Democrats are taking the country in a direction where the voters don't particularly want it to go.

• If the Rasmussen survey is correct, Barack Obama's standing with voters is tanking. (Rasmussen's presidential tracking survey is a "likely voter" poll.) Today, for the first time, Obama's "approval index" stands at -5, as 37% of voters express strong disapproval of his performance, while 32% strongly approve. Of the four categories--somewhat approve, strongly approve, somewhat disapprove, strongly disapprove--"strongly disapprove" now represents a plurality. Obama's downward trajectory seems sure to continue as long as the Democrats push more unpopular legislation in Congress. From Obama's political standpoint, perhaps the best thing that could happen is for Congressional Democrats to fail to enact cap-and-tax, government medicine, further "stimulus" or anything else of more than symbolic significance. Then, when the economy recovers in due course, Obama could take credit and his approval with voters presumably would rebound. But Obama, Pelosi and Reid still seem determined not to let the opportunity offered by an economic crisis "go to waste," no matter how much it hurts them with voters.

• From Michael Barone: The latest Quinnipiac poll from Ohio shows Barack Obama's job rating at just 49%-44% positive, down sharply from 62%-31% in early May. That's a sharp and surprising drop. In the race for the Senate seat left open by Republican George Voinovich, Republican Rob Portman is running better than in previous Quinnipiac polls. He now trails Lieutenant Governor Lee Fisher 37%-33% and Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner 35%-34%. In three previous Quinnipiac polls this year Portman trailed both of them by an average of 39%-31%, so this is also a significant change. Other previous polls showed similar results. What to make of this? This is just one poll, and thus a possible outlier. But if the trend it suggests is in fact real, this suggests trouble for Obama and the Democrats in the industrial heartland.
  

An Administration That Values Science....

except when it interferes with an agenda

EPA Closed-Minded on Global Warming? No Way!

EPA has been under fire over revelations that the agency buried an internal study poking holes in its proposed finding that greenhouse emissions are a danger to health. Emails unearthed by the Competitive Enterprise Institute show that agency staffer Alan Carlin was told his report should be shelved because it did "not help the legal or policy case for this decision." He was also instructed by his EPA boss not to discuss his views.

None of this was sitting well with Wyoming Republican John Barrasso when EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson appeared at a Senate hearing yesterday to promote Democratic climate change legislation. Sen. Barrasso not only grilled Mrs. Jackson on the Carlin affair, but complained that the Obama administration was making a habit of cracking down on those who disagree on global warming. He cited a Small Business Administration attorney who authored a memo highlighting the economic downsides of the EPA plan to regulate emissions. Unnamed Obama administration officials smeared the attorney in the media as a "Bush appointee" -- despite the fact that she had been hired during the Clinton Administration.

Mrs. Jackson's main defense was to claim she had no hand in suppressing the Carlin report, adding: "I immediately instructed my staff that he should feel free to circulate it to whomever he wished." Republicans say the suppression undermines the integrity of the EPA's entire rulemaking process on "endangerment," and are calling for an investigation. The Carlin affair, meanwhile, comes in the wake of a U.S Chamber of Commerce demand that the EPA hold a hearing before an administrative judge to allow for a review of the science on which its "endangerment" proposal is based. The administration may yet have to provide some of its vaunted "transparency" on the science of global warming, whether it wants to or not.

-- Kim Strassel

UPDATE: Kim Strassel writes more here.

Racial Preferences

in Malaysia, where my most of my paternal family resides.

Affirmative Action Spurs Asian Debate

By JAMES HOOKWAY

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia -- Tony Fernandes, the chief executive of Malaysia's upstart AirAsia airline, seldom shies away from a fight.

A former executive at Time Warner Inc.'s music division, Mr. Fernandes bought the debt-laden carrier in 2001 for 27 cents and turned it into Asia's biggest budget airline with $754 million in annual revenues. It hasn't been easy. To expand AirAsia Bhd., he's battled reluctant governments for landing rights and routes and has endured price wars with regional competitors.

A Delicate Equation

See a timeline of AirAsia expansion and Malaysian affirmative action policies.

Now, as Mr. Fernandes pushes to build a new low-cost global hub and expand into Europe, Australia and the U.S., he is running into a tenet of modern Malaysia: affirmative action. Malaysia's political leaders prefer to see big business such as airports in the hands of the ethnic-Malay majority, and often that means government control.

"A lot of Malaysians are proud of what AirAsia has achieved," says Mr. Fernandes, a 45-year-old Malaysian of Indian descent. But successes such as his, he believes, are outnumbered by the economic problems created by the affirmative action system. "It's a very Jekyll-and-Hyde situation here."

This fertile, tropical nation in the heart of Southeast Asia prides itself on showing that Islam and business are compatible. The country is a significant supplier of palm oil and computer components to the world economy, and it harbors substantial oil and gas reserves. The iconic twin towers which dominate downtown Kuala Lumpur were once the world's tallest buildings and today are the headquarters of state-owned oil company Petroliam Nasional Bhd.

The gleam and glitter are partly built on a race-based system of quotas and government ownership of key businesses, however, which many economists say now risks retarding the country's growth. In 1969, race riots between Malays and ethnic-Chinese Malaysians prompted the country's predominantly Malay leaders to introduce affirmative-action-style policies to give a leg up to the Malay population.

The original goal was to help Malays catch up economically with ethnic-Chinese Malaysians, who comprise around a fourth of the country's 27 million people but who control a disproportionately large share of businesses and trade. To do so, the government created a series of state investment vehicles to buy into key parts of the Malaysian economy. Officials hoped that private Malay entrepreneurs would eventually emerge to take control.

Forty years on, the policy continues to have an impact in that much of the Malaysian economy remains under government direction. The state investment funds still own controlling stakes in large corporations such as Telekom Malaysia Bhd. and power generator Tenaga Nasional Bhd., as well as aviation companies Malaysia Airports Holdings Bhd. and Malaysian Airline System Bhd. Some of the state-backed companies have proved successful, others less so. Malaysian Airline System is losing money while national car producer Proton Holdings Bhd. is largely kept going by special tax rules, equity analysts say. The two companies didn't return requests seeking comment.

Thus far, however, relatively few Malay entrepreneurs have capitalized on the race-based initiatives. In the meantime, some economists here say those same programs now threaten to undermine Malaysia's fortunes by making it tough for some non-Malay entrepreneurs -- like Mr. Fernandes -- to go up against competitors in countries such as China, Vietnam and Singapore.

The predicament of AirAsia, and whether it should be allowed to develop its own low-cost terminal, is a case in point. Obstacles to the carrier's growth could jeopardize Malaysia's status as an international travel hub -- and damage the country's best-known global brand in the process.

All this is distressing to many Malaysians who believe their country, like many other developing nations, needs to do far more to encourage home-grown entrepreneurs.

Since taking office in April, Prime Minister Najib Razak, a Malay, has rolled back some aspects of the race-based program -- known here as the New Economic Policy -- to lure more foreign investors. He recently issued new rules allowing foreign investors to enter selected service, financial and legal businesses without having to give up equity to local ethnic-Malay partners. Companies listing on the local stock market, meanwhile, will be required to allocate 12.5% of their shares to Malay investors, compared with 30% before. Mr. Najib also urged a level playing field between state-owned business and privately-owned competitors.

"The world is changing quickly and we must be ready to change with it or risk being left behind," Mr. Najib told an investment conference June 30. But he stressed in an interview that "we mustn't lose sight of the overall objective of a more equitable and just society."

Some Malay hard-liners warn that the government has gone too far. Ma'amor Osman, leader of a local activist group of Muslim Malays, describes Mr. Najib as "a dangerous liberal" who could destabilize Malaysia's fragile ethnic balance, while some protesters have recently marched in support of Malay rights. The country's Malays comprise just over half its population, and many can't remember a time when they weren't entitled to any special privileges.

Affirmative action programs provoke controversy wherever they appear. In the U.S., President Barack Obama's election victory has injected some fresh life into a debate over whether race-based preferences for university places or government jobs are still needed or desirable. India's efforts to improve the lot of people born on the lower rungs of that country's caste system were a major factor in elections there this year.

Proponents of the NEP say the measures helped create a stable country attractive to foreign investors who built electronics factories, chip plants and other businesses here. This foreign investment, along with the discovery of oil in Malaysian waters, helped drive the country's economic growth from the 1970s to the 1990s.

"The idea was to grow the pie so everybody could have a larger share," says Razaleigh Hamzah, an aristocrat picked by the government in the 1960s and 1970s to set up banks and run other state-controlled businesses.

Nonetheless, some non-Malay businesses had to hand over 30% of their equity to ethnic-Malay partners. The government also introduced quotas reserving 55% of the places at Malaysia's state universities to Malay students, forcing others to educate their children at expensive private colleges or overseas.

Last year, AirAsia's Mr. Fernandes issued a challenge to this status quo. Instead of paying landing fees, passenger-service charges and other dues set by Malaysia's state-owned airport company, he proposed that AirAsia build its own airport facilities, including the construction of a Disneyland-style resort, and set its own, lower rates.

Behind the expansion plans are several other practical concerns. AirAsia's current terminal at the main Kuala Lumpur International Airport complex is little more than a glorified cargo hanger. Passengers await boarding calls huddled in groups, like at a bus or railway station, and walk across the tarmac to their planes. Other international airlines, by contrast, operate from an ultramodern terminal nearby where passengers are whisked to their departure gates on a sleek monorail train.

When the global economic crunch hit, Mr. Fernandes expanded through the slump, launching several new routes and increasing AirAsia's capacity by nearly a fifth in a bid to lure customers from traditional airlines. Net profit in the first quarter hit 203.2 million ringgit, or $57 million, up 26% from the same period last year. Still, AirAsia is $2 billion in debt -- partly the result of its rapid expansion. To keep the business aloft and healthy, Mr. Fernandes argues that AirAsia needs cheap, but effective airport facilities.

AirAsia also plans to use its base in Kuala Lumpur as a hub for a new long-haul service called AirAsia X, which counts Sir Richard Branson's Virgin Group among its major shareholders. AirAsia X currently flies to Australia and Britain, but Mr. Fernandes hopes the airline will soon serve the U.S., too.

The Malaysian government initially agreed with AirAsia's plans and consented to the $460 million airport project. Then, in January of this year, local bureaucrats began pushing back. State investment fund Khazanah Nasional Bhd. objected to Mr. Fernandes's plans. It insisted that if a new facility was to be built, it should be erected and managed by one of its closely held assets, Malaysia Airports, at the existing airport complex.

Another of Khazanah's assets, Malaysia Airlines, also stood to lose from AirAsia's expansion. That spurred concerns in the industry that Khazanah was attempting to protect its own investments rather than help fuel the growth of AirAsia, which last year accounted for 40% of all passengers coming through Kuala Lumpur International Airport.

Khazanah officials didn't respond to requests for comment. A representative of the state investment fund said it objected to the AirAsia plan because there was an existing airport complex and building another one was an unnecessary expense.

Still, Malaysia's government quickly reversed course after Khazanah flagged its objections. Mr. Najib, deputy prime minister and finance minister at the time, instructed state-run Malaysia Airports Holdings and AirAsia to work out a possible compromise: Malaysia Airports could build and run the new terminal, but to AirAsia's specifications. It seemed like a win-win solution at the time, AirAsia officials said.

But after five months of talks, Mr. Fernandes and other AirAsia executives say they still have no idea kind of fees they'll have to pay. They've suggested passenger service charges of 10 ringgit ($2.82) for international flights and six ringgit ($1.69) for domestic flights, a discount from the 25 ringgit AirAsia and other airlines usually pay because of the limited budget services AirAsia offers. Malaysia Airports officials didn't respond to requests for comment.

In a May 26 letter to the chairman of Malaysia Airports, AirAsia Chairman Aziz Bakar warned that high airport charges would "delay the launch of new routes," discourage tourists and "place in jeopardy this economic boon for the nation." AirAsia may also slow down its fleet expansion, at least for its shorter-haul sector, said the letter, which was reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

Some airline analysts say AirAsia may be able to adopt a hard-line stance in its negotiations because of the sheer quantity of passengers it channels through the Kuala Lumpur International complex. "The airport had been languishing somewhat before AirAsia came along," says Peter Harbison, director of the Centre for Asia Pacific Aviation, a Sydney, Australia, consulting firm.

Already, the carrier is bringing people through Malaysia who might not have otherwise come. One such tourist, Domingo Buenaseda, from the Philippines, recently strolled a Kuala Lumpur mall. "A friend was getting married in Bali, Indonesia, and flying on AirAsia was the cheapest way of getting there," he said. "Stopping off in Kuala Lumpur for a few days for the connection seemed like a good idea."

No one knows when, if ever, AirAsia and Malaysia Airports will be able to thrash out a deal. Singapore this year allowed AirAsia to fly from the city-state to other countries for the first time, after rebuffing Mr. Fernandes's overtures for seven years. That means AirAsia could potentially use Singapore as a hub instead of Kuala Lumpur.

A spokeswoman for the Civil Aviation Authority of Singapore says the city's airport is offering incentives to all airlines to fly from Singapore -- AirAsia included.

Bad News for Dems?

From Michael Barone.

Some surprising numbers from Ohio

By: Michael Barone
Senior Political Analyst

The latest Quinnipiac poll from Ohio shows Barack Obama’s job rating at just 49%-44% positive, down sharply from 62%-31% in early May. That’s a sharp and surprising drop. In the race for the Senate seat left open by Republican George Voinovich, Republican Rob Portman is running better than in previous Quinnipiac polls. He now trails Lieutenant Governor Lee Fisher 37%-33% and Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner 35%-34%. In three previous Quinnipiac polls this year Portman trailed both of them by an average of 39%-31%, so this is also a significant change. Other previous polls showed similar results.

What to make of this? This is just one poll, and thus a possible outlier. But if the trend it suggests is in fact real, this suggests trouble for Obama and the Democrats in the industrial heartland. Ohio is a high unemployment state (10.8% in May) and a very slow population growth state (population up only 1.2% in 2000-08, the lowest of any state but Michigan, West Virginia, Rhode Island and population-losing North Dakota and Louisiana). Ohio was a target state in the 2000, 2004 and 2008 presidential elections, arguably the prime target state in all three; voter turnout rose only 1.7% between 2004 and 2008, an indication that both Democrats and Republicans have turned out just about every vote they can. In other words, this is a pretty stable electorate. In that context the shift shown in this Quinnipiac poll could be very significant. Let’s see if we see similar results in Ohio and other demographically and politically similar states.

Art? Science? Maybe Both!

In Search of the Science Behind the Healing Powers of Art

By RON WINSLOW

Julia Strecher was 9 years old when she had her second heart transplant. Her body had rejected the first heart she received with particular vehemence: She went into cardiac arrest six times in two hours. As doctors struggled to revive her, she recalls, she could hear them debating whether to give up.

“I was trapped in my body,” says Ms. Strecher, now 18. “I was trying to tell people I was alive and not to pull the plug.” A few months after she went home with her second new heart, she began having nightmares in which she watched herself suffering cardiac arrest.

But then, she began writing down her thoughts about being helpless. Eventually she turned the details into poems and stories. “It was extremely emotionally healing and freeing,” she said. “It helped me relieve a lot of stress and provided a distraction from pain and depression.” The nightmares went away.

Ms. Strecher’s case seems a striking illustration of the healing potential of creative expression. But is it science? Can the power of the arts to soothe, transform and inspire be enlisted to treat—and perhaps even prevent—heart disease?

These are the questions driving a fledgling organization called the Foundation for Art & Healing. With the help of an eclectic group of researchers, artists and health-care providers, the Brookline, Mass., foundation is mapping out a research agenda intended to determine whether artistic expression could be a valid clinical intervention—along with exercise, healthy diets and medicines—for reducing the burden of cardiovascular disease.

“We expect doctors to ask us if we smoke,” says Jeremy Nobel, a lecturer at Harvard School of Public Health and founder of the organization. “Should we expect them to ask us, ‘Do you have a creative outlet?’ ”

The idea has already attracted notable supporters. Johnson & Johnson, the health-care giant that markets health and wellness programs, and the U.S. unit of Philips Electronics NV are early corporate sponsors for the foundation. Laurel Pickering, executive director of the New York Business Group on Health, is an adviser.

“It could be an additional tool in our pocket to improve health outcomes,” Ms. Pickering says. But “the business community, in order to support this, is going to have to have some evidence that it does work.”

There’s no lack of evidence linking emotions and heart health. A 2004 study known as Interheart that involved nearly 30,000 patients in 52 countries is just one example. It found that “psychosocial factors,” including depression and stress, were as strong a risk factor for heart attack as high blood pressure and nearly as important as diabetes.

Yet there are few remedies proven to reduce heart attack and related risks by alleviating emotional maladies.

Enter the arts. “By engaging in dance, poetry or music, people are likely to initiate processes that help them manage stress, reduce negative mood states and perhaps change behavior that we know impacts cardiovascular risk and recovery,” says Joshua Smyth, a psychologist at Syracuse University who is another adviser to Dr. Nobel’s project. That’s the theory, but hard evidence is lacking.

Some studies are intriguing. New Zealand researchers asked patients with congestive heart failure to draw pictures showing what they thought their hearts looked like. Those who portrayed their hearts with the most damage turned out to have worse outcomes. That raised the possibility that doctors could use drawings to help change patients’ views of their disease and perhaps alter their course for the better.

Just last week, Italian researchers reported in the journal Circulation that blood pressure and respiratory rates can synchronize with music—increasing, for instance, during crescendos and coming down during pauses or decrescendos. The finding could help guide the use of music as therapy for heart and stroke patients. Other research has shown that music helps prolong exercise by distracting participants from pain.

Even before she began writing about her experience, Ms. Strecher, who told her story to a group of artists and health-care providers Dr. Nobel convened in New York last week, played music on a keyboard in her hospital bed and drew pictures to distract her from her fear and post-surgical pain. About five years after her transplant, she wrote a 2,250-word essay called Winner’s Choice that she says helped put her ordeal into perspective.

In one passage describing her feelings of loss of control, she wrote: “She never saw anyone but her family and she never had a good dream. Every night she died. Every night she fought. Every night she was helpless.”

In another place, she wrote: “She had waited so long to know what she fought for. She had fought so hard and it was worth every drop of blood. ...There would always be blood and pain but she had won.”

The essay enabled her to turn her experience “into something that would later drive me to make the most of my life,” she says. Ms. Strecher just graduated from high school in Ann Arbor, Mich., and plans to enter nursing school in the fall.

Though she makes a strong case, Ms. Strecher also reflects a bias that Dr. Nobel and his colleagues worry about as they seek to establish the science behind art’s healing impact: Examples like Ms. Strecher, whose mother is an art teacher, typically are about people already comfortable and skilled in the arts. One hurdle is determining how to make artistic expression work for people who have little experience painting or listening to poetry or who are intimidated by the process, Dr. Smyth says.

Another, bigger challenge is to extend art’s potential beyond helping individuals and make it a resource that reduces the cardiovascular-disease burden on society. “This isn’t a new cardiac-imaging technology,” Dr. Nobel says. “Many of the things we’re talking about are free or close to free.” All the more reason to understand their impact, he says.