My article on Senate candidate Pat Toomey appears in the current issue of National Review. Here’s the nut graf:

Although Democrats outnumber Republicans in Pennsylvania by more than a million registered voters — the state hasn’t gone for a GOP presidential candidate since 1988 — Toomey appears to have an edge as his campaign enters the home stretch. In August, polls of likely voters showed him ahead of his rival, Democratic congressman Joe Sestak, by as much as 9 points. Conservatives have a strong interest in the outcome, if only because Republican ambitions for a Senate majority almost certainly require Toomey to prevail. But it’s more than that: Toomey may be one of the two or three most impressive conservatives in this year’s field of senatorial prospects.

I enjoyed reporting the story if only because it allowed me to fly in a light plane for the first time. On the hop from Allentown to Reading, where we picked up Toomey, I got to sit in the co-pilot’s seat. I think I fit right in, with statements such as “Roger that!” and “Let’s get this bird in the air!” Toomey is a licensed pilot and at the end of the day he flew us back to Allentown. The experience forced me to overcome my reluctance to fly with senators (and senatorial candidates). Thankfully, the weather was perfect. I’d do it again.

In researching the article, it dawned on me that I’ve written about several of Pennsylvania’s major politicians: Tom Ridge (2000), Arlen Specter (2003), Bob Casey Jr. (2005), and Rick Santorum (2006). You’d think I was running a bureau for NR.

NATIONAL REVIEW
June 5, 2000

THE TROUBLE WITH RIDGE
It’s not just abortion

JOHN J. MILLER

The worst moment in Tom Ridge’s campaign to become George W. Bush’s running mate may have come in a state where Ridge doesn’t live and at an event he didn’t attend. Bush was sitting in the second row at St. Patrick’s Cathedral during John Cardinal O’Connor’s funeral Mass on May 8 when Bernard Cardinal Law, giving the homily, declared that the Catholic Church “must always be unambiguously pro-life.” If Bush learned anything from listening to the loud applause that lasted for about two minutes following the remark, it’s this: The GOP nominates a pro-choice Catholic for vice president at its peril.

And that’s the conventional rap against Ridge. The 54-year-old Republican governor of Pennsylvania has been unambiguously in favor of abortion rights throughout his political career, despite the fact that he’s Catholic (he attends weekly Mass) and that his views put him out of sync with most of his party, including Bush. He hasn’t always gone overboard to make amends, either. When a group of pro-lifers visited his congressional office in 1984, Ridge asked them starkly, “Does the government have a right to force a woman to be an incubator for nine months for another individual?” More recently, in 1998, the bishop in Ridge’s hometown of Erie, Pa., announced that pro-choice Catholic pols aren’t welcome at church-sponsored events. Bishop Donald Trautman didn’t specifically name Ridge, but everybody knew whom he was talking about. “It pains me to disagree with my faith community,” says the governor, whose kids go to Catholic school. “But it’s a very difficult, personal decision that belongs ultimately to the woman.”

Despite these troubles, the flap over abortion may actually help Ridge’s ambitions in an unexpected way. Because virtually all of the speculation over his nomination has focused on abortion politics, many Republicans are left with a vague impression that Ridge is another one of the GOP’s reform-minded governors–an ideological cousin of Michigan’s John Engler or Wisconsin’s Tommy Thompson. But that’s a mistake. Ridge is not a conservative who happens to be pro-choice; he’s a liberal Republican who happens to have done a handful of conservative things as governor. Putting him on the ticket is a fateful bargain. Perhaps he can overcome pro-life outrage and help Bush get elected this year. But at what cost down the road?

The case for Ridge is fairly straightforward: Two separate polls this spring show Bush slightly ahead of Vice President Gore in Pennsylvania, and increasing his lead by several points if he runs with Ridge. That’s 23 electoral votes in a state Gore can’t well afford to lose. What’s more, Ridge has a personal biography right out of central casting. He grew up in a working-class family, earned a scholarship to Harvard, and later enlisted in the Army and fought in Vietnam. There he won a Bronze Star “for exceptionally valorous actions.”

Bush first met Ridge in 1980, when Ridge was a supporter of Bush’s father during the Republican primaries and George W. was traveling in Pennsylvania. Two years later, Ridge won a House seat by just 729 votes in a district full of union members. He was reelected five times, but the races were never very close–perhaps because Ridge became one of the Reagan administration’s leading Republican adversaries in Congress.

Just as most Pennsylvania Democrats are more conservative than the national party, Pennsylvania Republicans are typically more liberal. Ridge fits the mold. Between 1984 and 1988, for example, he was more likely to oppose President Reagan’s position on a given issue than he was to support it, according to a Congressional Quarterly analysis. In 1987 and ‘88, he aligned himself with the Reagan White House only 40 percent of the time. He supported President Bush somewhat more often, but he still lagged far behind the typical House Republican. Following a minimum-wage vote on which Ridge was one of only 19 Republicans to favor a hike, a reporter asked Pennsylvania congressman Bill Goodling whether Ridge had any friends left in Congress. “On our side of the aisle, he would have none,” replied Goodling.

But, again, it was a tough district. If a Republican must cast union-friendly votes to hold the seat, Republicans argued, then so be it. Better that than a Democrat who won’t stand with the GOP on anything.

Except that Ridge held a number of positions that can’t be explained by devotion to his blue-collar constituents. At a time when Reagan was peeling off Democrats on Cold War issues, Ridge consistently played the dove. He voted to support the nuclear freeze, abolish the MX missile, deny funding to the Nicaraguan contra rebels, and adopt Pat Schroeder’s plan to bar nuclear tests above one kiloton.

On funding for the Strategic Defense Initiative, Ridge wasn’t just a “no” vote, but a leader in the enemy camp. In 1989, he teamed up with representative Charles E. Bennett, Democrat of Florida, in a Christian Science Monitor op-ed that criticized SDI as the sorry result of “a lot of dreaming.” Ridge and Bennett then authored a successful amendment slashing the SDI budget from $ 4.9 billion to $ 3.1 billion. They struck again a year later, leading the charge to reduce SDI’s funding to $ 2.3 billion. “The SDI mission continues to evolve–the leakproof shield is history,” Ridge said afterward. Two years later, he was one of just eleven Republicans to support stripping another $1 billion from the program.

Ridge seemed to go out of his way to tweak Republicans. In 1996, he reminisced in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette about how he “gave all those Republicans heartburn” with his various stances. Four years earlier, while still in Congress, he penned an op-ed for the Philadelphia Inquirer blasting President Bush’s “obsession” with a capital-gains tax cut: “About all it will do will be to churn the stock market and increase the profits of stock brokers and traders.” That’s not exactly the message George W. wants to convey to the investor class this year.

As governor, Ridge has compiled a mixed record. “If you compare him to the alternatives–such as a liberal Democrat–he’s great,” says James Broussard, head of Citizens Against Higher Taxes, the state’s leading taxpayer group. “If you compare him to what conservatives would like, he doesn’t look so good.” Ridge has reformed welfare and worker’s compensation, held out against gun control, and signed more than 200 death warrants. But he also raised the gas tax, presides over a budget that accounts for one-sixth of all state-level economic-development spending in the country, and now stands idly by as one of his departments tries to shut down day-care centers run by churches and synagogues that resist state licensing. Ridge has cut business taxes, but these remain high compared with other states. And only a portion of Pennsylvania’s current $583 million budget surplus will return to the pockets of taxpayers.

School choice is another sore point. The state legislature came close to passing it several times in the 1990s, both before and during Ridge’s time in office. The governor has lobbied for the cause–but many Pennsylvania conservatives wonder if he’s really done enough. Following his big reelection win in 1998, they felt that Ridge had amassed the political capital to make a successful push for vouchers. Instead, the governor devoted himself almost wholly to a controversial debt-financing bill for high-cost sports stadiums in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. He was at the height of his political power, and he chose to build skyboxes. “Why didn’t he go the distance for school choice?” asks Sean Duffy of the Commonwealth Foundation, a think tank in Harrisburg.

Conservatives also grumble about Ridge’s personnel decisions. “He’s made very liberal appointments in Harris burg,” says Michael Geer of the Pennsylvania Family Institute. Adds Charlie Gerow, a prominent conservative who backed Ridge in the 1994 gubernatorial primary, “I’m hard-pressed to name even a single conservative on his staff.” Ridge’s deputy chief of staff, in fact, has close ties to the Clinton White House; she and her husband, a generous Democratic donor, slept in the Lincoln Bedroom in 1996.

Any vice-presidential pick is important, but particularly for the GOP, which has a tendency to nominate candidates for president when it’s “their turn.” That means there’s a good chance Bush’s running mate this fall will be the Republican presidential nominee the next time Bush doesn’t run, especially if the GOP regains the White House in November. Nailing down Pennsylvania for the Republicans this fall is tempting–but it’s a deal that may have important consequences for conservatives in 2004 or 2008.

In April, Ridge caused a minor stir when he said that he thought the GOP should change its pro-life platform. He hasn’t retreated from that belief, but now he’s careful to moderate it. “I expressed a personal opinion. I’ve never been part of any effort to do that and won’t be this year,” he says. “We should be fighting Al Gore, not each other.”

No matter what the issue–abortion, missile defense, the capital-gains tax–that’s pretty good advice.

My talk on books to read in college, given last month and broadcast on C-SPAN over the weekend, now lives on the interwebs. You can watch it here.

Also, I didn’t realize it but C-SPAN has an archive of my appearances over the years. So cancel your plans for the day and enjoy.

My copies of the new edition of The First Assassin have arrived. The official publication date–when you can get your own copy–is a week from today.

Mullah’s Storm by Thomas W. Young reminded me of Last of the Breed by Louis L’Amour. Both are survival stories that feature military aviators as heroes who must escape enemy territory on their feet. L’Amour’s novel is a Cold War tale that stars Air Force Major Joseph Makatozi. He has to escape from Siberia. Young’s new book is a war on terror thriller that stars Parson and Gold, a navigator and interpreter whose plane goes down in the mountains of Afghanistan. To complicate matters, they’re in charge of a Taliban prisoner.

Growing up, I read a lot of Louis L’Amour. When Last of the Breed came out in 1986, I got a hardcover copy. I think it’s the only hardcover L’Amour I’ve read. It soon became my favorite of his titles, even though it was only one of a handful that weren’t traditional Westerns.

One of the dangers of rereading favorite books from childhood is that you may not like them as well as you remember. I definitely had this experience with Last of the Breed. I don’t think it’s as good as some of L’Amour’s other work, which I have also reread, mostly in preparation for articles in the Wall Street Journal (headline: “The Last of His Breed”) and National Review (which describes Ronald Reagan’s fondness for L’Amour).

I don’t know what I’ll think of The Mullah’s Storm in 25 years, but I like it now. Today, Young is my podcast victim. When we were done recording, I asked Young if he knew of Last of the Breed. He said he didn’t but that he’d look it up.

Next week’s podcast: James Robbins on the Tet offensive.

When I was researching The First Assassin, I read a number of books on slavery and the Underground Railroad. One of them was Bound for Canaan by Fergus M. Bordewich, which I reviewed for the Wall Street Journal:

The network of abolitionists devoted to helping slaves find their freedom wasn’t described as “underground” for nothing. Records of its operations are scarce. Frederick Douglass urged his allies to keep mum. “Let us not hold the light by which [our enemies] can trace the footprints of our flying brother,” he said.

Yet in “Bound for Canaan,” Fergus M. Bordewich illuminates the lives and times of the Underground Railroad’s stationmasters, conductors and passengers. He has written an excellent book that is probably as close to a definitive history as we’re likely to see.

It includes a few pages on the real-life escape story that inspired an episode in my novel.

NATIONAL REVIEW
September 20, 2010

RATIONAL OPTIMIST
It’s hard to keep Pat Toomey down

JOHN J. MILLER

The one thing that most people know about Allentown is that Billy Joel wrote a song about it. The single came out in 1982, during a recession: “Well we’re living here in Allentown / And they’re closing all the factories down.” So when Americans think about this city in eastern Pennsylvania at all, they think about vanishing jobs, industrial blight, and shattered dreams.

“The song has it wrong,” says Pat Toomey, a Republican who used to represent the area in Congress. “It has nothing in common with Allentown or the region in 2010. The story of the Lehigh Valley is a story of economic resurgence, with the caveat that we’re going through a bad downturn right now.”

Today, Toomey is running for the Senate — he wants to represent not just his old constituents in Allentown, but the entire Keystone State. And he’s trying to sell a message of hopeful conservatism that’s the reverse of Joel’s despairing ditty. “Americans believe we have a big government that’s out of control,” he says. “But on Election Day, we have an opportunity to restore economic growth and fiscal sanity and bring balance back to Washington.”

Although Democrats outnumber Republicans in Pennsylvania by more than a million registered voters — the state hasn’t gone for a GOP presidential candidate since 1988 — Toomey appears to have an edge as his campaign enters the home stretch. In August, polls of likely voters showed him ahead of his rival, Democratic congressman Joe Sestak, by as much as 9 points. Conservatives have a strong interest in the outcome, if only because Republican ambitions for a Senate majority almost certainly require Toomey to prevail. But it’s more than that: Toomey may be one of the two or three most impressive conservatives in this year’s field of senatorial prospects.

The 48-year-old Toomey is a natural-born optimist. Six years ago, he had the gumption to take on a sitting Republican senator in a GOP primary. He narrowly lost to Arlen Specter but finished as a kind of political folk hero among conservative activists. So Toomey figured he’d try again. At first, when the Age of Obama was young and the tea parties had yet to percolate, he heard from plenty of doubters. But Toomey makes a habit of dismissing defeatists and doomsayers. The success of his current campaign, which has seen him go from a potential also-ran in a bitter primary to the presumptive favorite in a general election, has only encouraged this instinct. On August 20, as we fly to a campaign event in rural Elk County, he points to the green wilderness beneath his airplane window. “Look how vast the forests are — as far as the eye can see,” he says. “If anybody thinks we have an overpopulation problem, they ought to come out here for a while.” It was the answer to a question nobody had asked.

Toomey is originally from Rhode Island and he retains the echo of a New Englander’s accent. His father is a lifelong union man who still votes for Democrats. As a Harvard freshman in 1980, however, Toomey cast his first presidential ballot for Ronald Reagan. “I was pretty apolitical — I wasn’t joining the Republican clubs or anything,” he says. “But I liked that Reagan was bullish on America.” After graduation, Toomey began a career on Wall Street and spent a year in Hong Kong. “Living there taught me how much was possible in the absence of natural resources,” he says. Along the way, he started to read books on libertarian economics by Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, and Henry Hazlitt. “I became convinced that prosperity was a function of economic freedom,” he says.

In the early 1990s, Toomey quit his banking job. “I grew tired of New York City,” he says. “I didn’t want to raise a family there.” He settled in Allentown, where his two brothers were living. They opened a restaurant and made plans for more. When Toomey wasn’t pondering early-bird specials and salad-bar fixings, he engaged in politics. In 1994, he volunteered for the campaign of Republican congressional candidate James Yeager, who lost to Democrat Paul McHale by just 471 votes. “That got my attention,” says Toomey. Another close election followed. In 1998, McHale retired, opening the seat. Toomey ran and won, even though the district counted more Democrats than Republicans — a situation that mirrors the statewide environment this year.

As a member of Congress, Toomey focused mainly on economics, calling for tax cuts and Social Security reform. He also pushed free trade, even if it meant standing against the Bush administration’s steel quotas — a bit of Republican protectionism that was supposed to help the president’s popularity in places like Allentown. Toomey’s free-marketeering set him apart from his old Capitol Hill colleague, Rick Santorum. The former senator from Pennsylvania had developed a reputation as a hard-charging right-winger, but Toomey earned a better rating from the American Conservative Union, which evaluates voting records. Santorum’s ACU lifetime mark was 88 percent compared with Toomey’s score of 97 percent.

When he first arrived in Washington, Toomey wasn’t a card-carrying member of the pro-life movement. “In the early stages of pregnancy, I thought the government should stay out of it,” he says. “Then I started to think about the issue a little more deeply.” He also became a father. The experience flipped a switch. “The pro-life movement is great about welcoming converts,” he says. “That’s what we need to do on abortion: win hearts and minds.”

As a third-term congressman in 2003, Toomey considered his next move. He knew it wouldn’t be reelection to the House, because he had promised to serve no more than six years. Yet he believed that he could still do some good in Washington. As it happened, the aging Republican senator Arlen Specter was preparing to run again on a record of waffling moderation that included his hostility to tax cuts. Toomey decided to take him on for the GOP nomination. His spirited effort became a cause for conservatives around the country. The Republican establishment, however, rallied behind the man who had been most responsible for defeating Robert Bork’s Supreme Court nomination during the Reagan years and tried to invoke Scottish law during Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial. President Bush showed up in Pennsylvania to stump for Specter. Santorum also took to the hustings for him. When the votes were finally tallied, the liberal incumbent beat the conservative insurgent by less than two percentage points. “I have no regrets about trying,” says Toomey. “The Republican party had lost its way.”

The decision to challenge Specter showed that Toomey was concerned about the GOP’s ideological drift before it was cool to worry. After his defeat, he became president of the Club for Growth, a political-action committee that funds economic conservatives. Toomey set aside his innate optimism and turned into a prophet of Republican implosion — a Cassandra who issued warnings that party leaders chose to ignore. “Republicans have abandoned the principles of limited government and fiscal discipline that historically have united Republicans and energized the Republican base,” Toomey told the Philadelphia Inquirer in 2006. Six months later, his predictions came true as Democrats whipped the GOP in congressional elections. “Too many Republicans squandered the opportunity to govern,” says Toomey today. “They created a whole new entitlement for prescription drugs, exploded earmarks, and passed bloated appropriations bills. At a certain point, voters stopped believing that Republicans were the party of fiscal discipline and I don’t blame them.”

This willingness to criticize fellow Republicans came with a price. Many saw Toomey as too strident — a bridge-burner rather than a bridge-builder. Under Toomey’s leadership, the Club for Growth’s website mocked the likes of Sen. Susan Collins, a Maine Republican who voted for Obama’s stimulus bill, in its “Comrade of the Month” feature. “I don’t think there is anybody in the world who believes he can get elected senator,” grumbled Sen. Orrin Hatch, a Utah Republican, to Politico.

Early last year, Toomey resigned from the Club and launched a new challenge against Specter. He liked his odds in a second round. So did Specter: Two weeks after Toomey’s announcement, Specter bolted from the GOP. For Toomey, the decision was a boon. It spared him the need to spend cash on a party-splitting primary — his previous campaign had cost about $5 million — and allowed him to tap donors who otherwise would have remained loyal to Specter. Although a few Republicans made efforts to recruit a moderate alternative, such as former Pennsylvania governor Tom Ridge, they eventually realized that Toomey’s failure in 2004 had set the table for victory in 2010. Hatch has now held several fundraisers for Toomey. Even Comrade Collins endorsed him at a Philadelphia event on August 2. “Pat has reached out to people with a variety of views and backgrounds,” she says. “This is a pivotal election and I’m heartened by the polls that show Pat ahead. I don’t know what it would have been like for Arlen.”

For Specter, things didn’t work out very well. Pennsylvania Democrats proved the old adage that once the treason has passed, the traitor is no longer necessary: They sent the GOP turncoat into a forced retirement, giving their party’s nod to Joe Sestak, a retired Navy admiral who was first elected to Congress from suburban Philadelphia in 2006. “We’ve got the starkest contrast between any two candidates in the country,” says Toomey. “It’s hard to get to the left of Joe Sestak.”

That’s true enough. Although Sestak boasts about his political independence, he tends to demonstrate it by saying that Democratic leaders aren’t liberal enough. He voted for the full trifecta of congressional overreach: stimulus spending, cap-and-trade, and Obamacare. In each case, however, he criticized the final legislation as too stingy. Sestak thinks the stimulus should have cost $1 trillion. Cap-and-trade “disappointed” him because he thought it was “eviscerated.” The health-care bill should have carved out an even larger role for government. Sestak also has said he wouldn’t mind seeing terror-master Khalid Shaikh Mohammed put on trial in Pennsylvania.

Toomey tries to impress upon his audiences that Sestak is a “San Francisco liberal” — a term that is meant to link him to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who literally is a San Francisco liberal. Some voters may have trouble squaring this brand of politics with Sestak’s 31 years in the military. As the New York Times recently observed, “The phrase ‘L.G.B.T.’ — lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender — rolls off his tongue, which is not something you really expect from a 58-year-old career Navy man.” Anyone who bothers to look behind his admiral’s stars, however, quickly sees that Sestak plays against type. The National Rifle Association gave him a grade of F. Sestak is so proud of this accomplishment that he has handed out NRA report cards on the campaign trail. “He’s way outside the mainstream — he’s kind of a Netroots or Daily Kos guy,” says Santorum. “I would love to run against his record.”

Running against Sestak’s record is an important part of Toomey’s strategy, but the Republican hasn’t neglected to lay out his own vision. He wants to extend the Bush tax cuts, with two exceptions: He would lower the taxes on capital gains and corporations. On education, he talks up school choice for low-income families in the District of Columbia, even when he’s meeting rural voters in Potter County. On energy, he emphasizes the potential of the Marcellus Shale — a large deposit of natural gas, buried deep inside Pennsylvania’s bedrock, that many environmentalists oppose extracting. On health care, he acknowledges that even a Republican majority in Congress will lack the strength to repeal Obamacare, but he also insists that other options are available. “If we don’t fund the implementation of this bill, it doesn’t happen,” he says. He refuses to endorse Wisconsin Republican Paul Ryan’s “roadmap” for confronting the federal government’s looming entitlement crisis, but points out that he and Ryan are former D.C. roommates. It’s easy to imagine them as allies.

When Pennsylvanians cast their ballots on November 2, perhaps the man from Allentown should hope that they remember one of the lines from Billy Joel’s classic song: “It’s hard to keep a good man down.”

I’ll be on C-SPAN2’s Book TV over the weekend, as the channel broadcasts my recent panel discussion on books that college students should read. Most people are going to want to watch it four times, so that’s the number of slots it will occupy over the next three days. Here’s when you should be in front of the television:

• Saturday, September 4th at 7pm (ET)
• Sunday, September 5th at 3:45am (ET)
• Monday, September 6th at 10am (ET)
• Monday, September 6th at 10pm (ET)

In preparing my remarks, I canvassed readers for their own book suggestions. Read the results here. Also, I previewed my comments here and here.

Over on The Corner, I’ve posted a plea for help from a parent whose high-school daughter faces political indoctrination at the hands of a history teacher. He doesn’t care for the three books on a required-reading list (On the Road by Kerouac, The Feminine Mystique by Friedan, and Silent Spring by Carson) and would like to propose three alternatives. I suggested Witness by Whittaker Chambers, The Road to Serfdom by Hayek, and a book on the American founding.

What would you recommend?

I haven’t read beyond than the first couple of chapters of Stephen Lawhead’s new novel, The Skin Map, but I did interview him about it–he’s my latest podcast victim.

This isn’t my only experience with his work. His novel Hood, the first in a trilogy, is a clever reworking of the Robin Hood legend. Lawhead sets the story in 11th-century Wales. The Hood character is transformed into a kind of nationalist freedom fighter. It’s also a traditional coming-of-age story.

Lawhead is sometimes described as a “Christian” writer. A better description might be that Lawhead is a Christian who writes. He doesn’t proselytize in his books (at least not that I’ve noticed) but neither is he afraid to have his characters believe in God or pray. It says something about the place of faith in our culture when simple features such as these can force a writer into a religious pigeonhole.

On this recording, my voice occasionally has a weird echo. We couldn’t get rid of it. Thankfully, Lawhead comes through clearly, even though he joined us by calling in from England.

Next week’s podcast: Thomas W. Young on his Afghanistan war thriller.