EDITOR’S NOTE: “Window on The Week” acts as our weekly, quick-and-punchy, “between-the-issues” survey of some of the hot topics of the day. “Window on The Week” gives you a sense of what “The Week” — a popular feature that appears fortnightly in National Review — looks like.
‐A silver lining on Tuesday was the 58–42 passage of the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative, banning racial preferences in the state’s universities and government agencies. The victory is especially heartening considering the uphill fight the ballot measure faced: MCRI’s advocates, led by Ward Connerly and Jennifer Gratz, were outspent by a two-to-one margin in advertising dollars. Their opponents included the state’s political, educational, and business establishments. On the left, the radical group “By Any Means Necessary” led a consortium of passionate activists and lawyers who tried every trick in the book to keep racial preferences alive. Even Michigan’s Republican party, either seduced or cowed by political correctness, joined the anti-MCRI alliance. In the face of all this, voters sent a simple message: People should not be treated differently on the basis of their skin color. Nothing could be clearer, or more distressing to the “social justice” crowd.
‐In a ballot initiative, South Dakotans voted against banning abortion with an exception to save a woman’s life. If the ban had also included exceptions for rape and incest, it probably would have passed easily. But it still would have been a pointless gesture. The Supreme Court has five votes to sustain Roe, thus blocking restrictions on abortion far more modest than those South Dakota legislators contemplated. Overturning Roe should be the principal medium-term political goal of the pro-life movement. The Senate elections on Tuesday set back that goal, but the South Dakota proposal was always a distraction from it.
‐Pennsylvania’s junior senator, Republican Rick Santorum, lost his bid for reelection. In his concession, he graciously stepped aside, making no apologies for running a campaign focusing on the War on Terror — or the fight against Islamic Fascism, as he consistently calls it. He said, “People have asked . . . why didn’t you just talk about the projects you delivered or the things that you accomplished? My answer is that those are the things in the past, and what leaders are supposed to do is to talk about things that our country confronts in the future.” His campaign might not have been smart politics, but this is to the discredit of politics, not Santorum. We wish him well, and hope that those who serve after him heed his words.
‐Missouri can now be called the Clone Me State. Voters took one giant leap into a Brave New World on Tuesday when they amended the state constitution to allow human cloning. It’s unclear how many of those voting for Amendment 2 actually understood what it did — which was exactly what cloning supporters, whose financial resources and celebrity endorsements dwarfed those of their opponents, were banking on. Opponents of Amendment 2 rightly focused on the deceptiveness of the initiative. Their efforts earned unprecedented attention, but, in the end, manipulation won the day. It’s vital that defenders of a culture of life reflect on what went wrong — if recent years are any indication, this will happen again soon, and more dramatically. With no federal ban on such research and a new majority in Washington that is even less friendly to a culture of life, things can only get worse.
‐North Korea has agreed to return to the six-party talks over its nuclear program. Well, that’s a relief. We can expect Kim Jong Il to beat his sword into a ploughshare any day now . . . The risk of the talks is that they will create a façade of diplomatic progress when in fact there is none, and that the U.S. will offer concessions it should not make. Unfortunately, this outcome is not unlikely. A senior administration official tells us that the U.S. has agreed to put its financial sanctions against North Korea on the negotiating table. Condoleezza Rice’s State Department apparently thinks they are hurting the North’s “legitimate” business interests. President Bush, to his demerit, supports this outlook. That might make sense if the Kim regime weren’t fundamentally a criminal enterprise, and if we had any reason at all to think it could be reformed. But it is, and we don’t, and our goal ought to be to undermine it, not enrich it. What happened, Mr. President, to the Axis of Evil?
‐John Bolton still has not been confirmed as America’s U.N. ambassador — and he probably never will be. This is the fault of Democrats, of course, but it is also the fault of two Republicans: Sens. Lincoln Chafee and Chuck Hagel. Hagel is the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (at least for another few weeks). Guided by an epicene concern for the feelings of committee Democrats, he held unnecessary new hearings on the nomination that, in practice, became an opportunity for liberals to recycle their spurious attacks on Bolton. Chafee, a liberal in Republican clothing, joined them, and became the critical vote. He backed Bolton’s nomination a year ago, but refused to do so this time, and announced on Friday that he has no intention of changing his mind. In blocking the nomination, he has empowered the Bush-hating Democratic mainstream to hinder the administration’s implementation of its foreign policy. That is neither check nor balance, but hubris.
‐Speaking of U.N.-related shenanigans, Panama has just won a temporary seat on the Security Council. That isn’t the shenanigan; it is, rather, that Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela came so close to winning the seat instead. Apparently it does marvels for your popularity at Turtle Bay to denounce the U.S. president as Satan and cozy up to Kim Jong Il and the Iranian mullahs. Guatemala was also seeking the seat, and had been in a deadlock with Venezuela. In the end, both countries bowed out to make room for Panama. That result is satisfactory; the U.N. as a whole remains anything but.
‐Truth, justice, and the American way — saved Tuesday night from a premature death at the hands of greedy capitalists. Or so some would have it. According to Paul Blank, campaign director for WakeUpWalMart.com, the election was a referendum on that evil purveyor of everyday low prices. Many Democrats seem to agree, and during the months running up to the elections, anti-Wal-Mart rallies became prime stumping grounds for lefty politicians. Even Joe Lieberman and Ned Lamont, otherwise enemies to the marrow, attended the same rally against the retail giant. But the Democrats’ fury against the Waltons betrays how far they have strayed from being “the party of the people.” “The people” do not rail against a company that sells prescription drugs for $4 a month; snobs do. Snobs, and labor unions that wish to win from Wal-Mart the extortive compensation they receive from so many other businesses. Democrats would well do well to realize that these unions do far less for America than a company that saves the average household $2,300 a year.
‐Shortly after being born, citizens of the United States are issued birth certificates, which designate, among other things, their sex, whether male or female. Thus the insidious oppression of social constructs begins. Joann Prinzivalli, a lawyer for the New York Transgender Rights Organization who has reconstructed himself as a woman, lamented, “It’s based on an arbitrary distinction that says there are two and only two sexes. In reality the diversity of nature is such that there are more than just two, and people who seem to belong to one of the designated sexes may really belong to the other.” (Or to one of the many other varieties, one assumes.) New York City has proposed a policy more reflective of such diversity: A person born in the city will be able to have the sex that is designated on his birth certificate altered so long as he has the support of a doctor and a mental-health professional. Alas, the options are still only two. We anxiously await the day when such black and white distinctions are replaced with a thousand shades of gray.