Following Paul Gigot’s thoughts in this post from yesterday, Peggy Noonan writes this Opinion Journal op-ed today regarding President Bush’s Inaugural speech, in which she observes the following:

There were moments of eloquence: “America will not pretend that jailed dissidents prefer their chains, or that women welcome humiliation and servitude, or that any human being aspires to live at the mercy of bullies.” “We do not accept the existence of permanent tyranny because we do not accept the possibility of permanent slavery.” And, to the young people of our country, “You have seen that life is fragile, and evil is real, and courage triumphs.” They have, since 9/11, seen exactly that.
And yet such promising moments were followed by this, the ending of the speech. “Renewed in our strength — tested, but not weary — we are ready for the greatest achievements in the history of freedom.”
This is — how else to put it? — over the top. It is the kind of sentence that makes you wonder if this White House did not, in the preparation period, have a case of what I have called in the past “mission inebriation.” A sense that there are few legitimate boundaries to the desires born in the goodness of their good hearts.
One wonders if they shouldn’t ease up, calm down, breathe deep, get more securely grounded. The most moving speeches summon us to the cause of what is actually possible. Perfection in the life of man on earth is not.

Along the same lines, David Ignatius of the Washington Post observes in this op-ed:

The late congressman Phil Burton of California used to say that government officials got in trouble when they began to believe that all the show and pomp of Washington was “for real.” By that, he meant that officials were led astray when they began to think it was about themselves and their party rather than the nation. That delusion is especially easy in a second term, after four years in the adulatory echo chamber of the capital. Just ask survivors of the Nixon administration.

In this brilliant op-ed today, Wall Street Journal ($) editorial page editor Paul Gigot throws down the gauntlet and challenges the Republican Party to elevate substance over form and show that the party can lead America. In a stinging rebuke of the party’s leadership over the past generation, Mr. Gigot lays it on the line for the Republicans:

Whatever one thinks of its policies, the Democratic Party surely made a difference during its 20th-century heyday. Set aside its last, corrupted years in power. When liberalism was ascendant, from the 1930s through the 1970s, Democrats permanently altered the face of government.
They ended poverty for the elderly with cross-generational entitlement programs, broke Jim Crow’s hold in the South with civil-rights laws, built the alphabet soup of regulatory agencies that bedevil American business every day, turned our courts into quasi-legislative bodies, and planted the seeds of government-run health care that continue to grow today. As the party of government, they built institutions and processes that have consistently expanded its scope.
What, in the decade since they’ve retaken the House, have Republicans done that is consequential in the same way? If the GOP majorities vanished tomorrow, what couldn’t Democrats easily repeal? I’ve asked the latter question of numerous Republicans in recent days, and the only confident answer I get is “welfare reform.” By requiring in 1996 that the poor enter the world of work, Republicans stopped the development of a permanent American underclass. Yet despite that historic success, it is striking that they still haven’t had the nerve or clout to pass an extension of even that reform through the Senate. . .
In fact, it is depressing to consider how much of what Republicans wanted to do under a Democratic president in the ’90s they have abandoned now that they control both sides of Pennsylvania Avenue. The regulatory reform requiring “cost-benefit” analysis that came within a vote of passing the Senate in 1995 has never returned. The excellent Medicaid reform vetoed by Bill Clinton has also gone nowhere, despite pleas from many governors to revive it. The Freedom to Farm Act was gutted.
Even the congressional budget process that Democrats designed to make spending easier remains entirely unchanged. Fourteen years ago, Congressman Chris Cox was able to win upward of 180 votes for such budget changes; last year he got 88, and he had to buck the rest of the GOP leadership to get even those.
Some of this can be blamed, first, on having a Democrat in the White House, and later having only small majorities on Capitol Hill, especially in the Senate. But not anymore. After November’s victory, Republicans don’t have any more excuses.

Read the entire piece. Mr. Gigot’s point is a variation on the theme that Milton Friedman touched on awhile back:

To summarize: After World War II, opinion was socialist while practice was free market; currently, opinion is free market while practice is heavily socialist. We have largely won the battle of ideas (though no such battle is ever won permanently); we have succeeded in stalling the progress of socialism, but we have not succeeded in reversing its course. We are still far from bringing practice into conformity with opinion.

With a Republican president and solid majorities in both houses of Congress, the Republicans no longer have any excuses for failing to address America’s pressing problems in such areas as health care finance, tax policy, and intelligence reform, to name just three.
The Republicans have exploited the Democratic Party’s obsolescence in these areas to seize the reins of leadership. Now, it is time for the Republicans to lead or risk, as Mr. Gigot puts it, becoming “as evanescent as the Whigs.”

The Wall Street Journal ($) is continuing its interesting Econoblog series, in which the WSJ hosts two experts in economics debating hot issues of the day. In this most recent segment, bloggers Arnold Kling and Max Zwicky debate the merits of Social Security reform. This is a first rate discussion of the issue, and includes further reading materials on the Social Security system. Don’t miss it.

This Economist article does an excellent good job of summarizing and analyzing the Bush Administration’s second term agenda.

Former Bush Administration Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill criticized the Bush Administration for a lack of meaningful policy analysis in his book, The Price of Loyalty. Mr. O’Neill is a bright and independent thinker about matters of financing governmental policy, so it’s prudent to consider his ideas carefully.
In this NY Sunday Times op-ed, Mr. O’Neill proposes a debt-financed transition of the current Social Security system under which those younger than their mid-thirties would save in broad-based, low-cost index funds, on a trajectory that would return to them a $1 million annuity at retirement. Mr. O’Neill calculates that this would would require about $1 trillion in temporary financing. In short, stop the existing system for new entrants, phase out the existing system as older citizens die, and cover the transition costs with debt to be repaid out of the absence of traditional benefits to the younger entrants in future years. This is a similar plan to the one that Arizona State economics professor and Nobel Prize winner Ed Prescott proposed in this earlier post.
The most interesting observation in the op-ed is Mr. O’Neill’s blunt and disdainful analysis of the politics of Social Security reform:

As I write this I can imagine the chorus of pundits saying, “This isn’t politically possible.” Why not? Because it is too complicated for people to understand? Or because the only way to approach change in our society is through small incremental steps, like the president’s tepid notion of a limited, voluntary diversion of Social Security taxes into small private accounts?
Baloney, I say. What stands between a truly worthy aspiration for our society and its realization is political leadership with the courage to dream big.

Earlier this week, House Republicans reversed course and rejected dubious Ethics rules changes that were proposed late last year that would have allowed members indicted by state grand juries to remain in a leadership post. Earlier posts on the rules changes are here and here.
The rule changes were transparently proposed to benefit Houston congressman and House Majority “Leader” Tom DeLay in the event a Travis County grand jury indicts him in connection with an investigation of campaign financing that has already resulted in the indictment of three of his political political associates.
In today’s Washington Post, David Ignatius provides this interesting profile of the Colorado representative — Joel Hefley — who decided to take on Mr. DeLay over the change in the ethics rule and, in so doing, pulled out an unlikely victory for Congressional ethics. Read the entire informative piece, which concludes with an astute observation about Mr. Hefley and Congress:

He will pay the price, but he doesn’t seem to mind. He knows he did the right thing. May his number increase.