It’s an election year, so we have months of commentary on the political horse race ahead of us, and most of it will be meaningless chatter. Media talking heads will examine negative ratings, job approval numbers, trust on the economy, and popularity with specific constituencies like women, youth, and Hispanics. They will look at national numbers as well as state polls with a view to the all-important Electoral College. But is there a science of politics that can predict outcomes in these matters?

When I was a freshman at the University of Toronto in the early 1980s, the great political scientist Nelson Polsby gave a guest lecture in which he argued that the election of Ronald Reagan was a fluke, largely a protest vote against an unpopular president. There was no electoral realignment and he had the figures to prove it. But unlike this accomplished scholar, I was not confused by the facts. I sat there thinking this fellow was so lost in his data that he could not see the only thing that mattered. Regardless of why people voted for Reagan, by 1984 he would charm them not only into loving him, but also into thinking they had always loved him. I predicted (take my word for it) that he would win reelection in a landslide, which he did.

In other words, the best view of the race for the White House may not be from the depth of the data mine but in the peripheral vision of the engaged layman who is not too deeply engaged. Ian Leslie reports on research that shows the danger of “choking” when you “overthink” a decision or move, as in sports. Psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer, he tells us, finds that:

“[Y]ou have to be skilled at ignoring information. He found that a portfolio of stocks picked by people he interviewed in the street did better than those chosen by experts. The pedestrians were using the “recognition heuristic”: They picked companies they’d heard of, which was a better guide to future success than any analysis of price-earning ratios.”

Think of Eddie Murphy’s character in Trading Places.

So what does the “pedestrian” see when he applies his “heuristic” to the November presidential election? Again, I go back to 1980. I had heard that Ronald Reagan was a mean, saber-rattling monster. But when I saw him for the first time in his debate with Jimmy Carter, I found a cheerful, soft-spoken grandfather, but one who was sharp and sensible. I was 18, and he won me.

Today, I think when people eyeball the political field they see a blame-shifting president who hasn’t accomplished a lot except a healthcare law that most people don’t like. But his challenger seems like a cheerful guy who knows business when business is our problem in a chronically slow economy. To the average voter, everything else—the dog on the roof, Bain Capital, flip-flops, and gaffes—is just chatter. That’s my pre-Memorial Day call. But anything can happen in politics.

America is in crisis—a debt crisis that threatens to sink the nation. This crisis has not simply befallen us, like a foreign invasion. We brought it upon ourselves by providing ourselves with an array of well-intentioned, deficit-financed goodies like public health insurance programs, old-age income security, and below-market-rate mortgages for the poor. The road to the poorhouse can be paved with good intentions.

So from George Washington until George W. Bush, we accumulated $5 trillion in national debt. In the eight years that W. was president, we added another $5 trillion. In just over three years, Congress under President Obama’s watch has added yet another $5 trillion, and there are no measures in place for blunting this upward curve. The banner word for our times is not “hope” or “change” but “unsustainable.”

As bad as our national balance sheet is, the greater tragedy is the unwillingness of our political leaders to address the crisis. They all know it’s there. Some propose cutting programs and services, and no doubt we are spending money in ways that are either none of the government’s business or counter-productive. But their proposed cuts come from the discretionary spending that is only 18 percent of federal outlays. Good work, but it’s like crossing the street for cheaper gas when your problem is the crippling payments on your SUV.

Others advocate taxing “the rich” at sharply higher rates. No doubt there are at least loopholes we could close to make it harder for obviously wealthy citizens to escape the tax burden that some of the rest of us pay. But even if we confiscate all of our wealthiest neighbors’ income (and assuming they would continue working as hard as they did before—a big “if”), the crisis would remain.

No one wants to touch the real problem: entitlements. They call it the third rail of American politics because if you touch it, you’re political toast. Leaders at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue are unwilling to risk sacrificing their political careers by looking seriously at what it would take to secure the nation’s fiscal future. To his credit, the president commissioned Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles to recommend a solution, but he ignored their report, and the House of Representatives later rejected it. In Congress, House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, R-Wis., has suggested a budget that brings entitlement spending under control for a population that is living much longer than the programs were originally designed to serve. That drew political ads that featured him pushing granny over the cliff in her wheelchair. So much for getting serious in serious times.

We have men dying overseas to preserve the country against terrorist attacks. But our leaders in D.C. won’t risk their political careers (which aren’t even supposed to be careers) to save the nation from impending bankruptcy and ruin.

Great crises call for great courage. We honor our war heroes, but we don’t expect to find heroes in politics. We should.

It’s just as well that we dumped Osama bin Laden’s body in the Indian Ocean. If we had kept it on ice in a government warehouse, President Obama would surely be carting it around on the campaign trail.

As Obama kicks his reelection campaign into high gear, the press is lending every hand to help exhume the defeated terrorist icon from the briny depths for a pre-election, extended national pep rally. Time magazine, for example, published a cover story account of how the raid went down.

Granted, it’s the one-year anniversary of the Abbottabad raid and these stories are naturally interesting. But the White House has been wantonly open with access to decision-making and operational details that traditionally have been guarded for national security reasons. The Obama administration gave unprecedented access to journalists for a Discovery Channel documentary. Why? Is history their concern or the president’s near future?

Lief Babin, a highly decorated former Navy SEAL officer, put this openness in perspective in a Wall Street Journal op-ed in January, “Obama Exploits the Navy SEALs.” He explained that operational security, i.e., secrecy regarding how Special Ops do things, is essential to the safety and effectiveness of these brave warriors:

“Yet virtually every detail of the bin Laden raid has appeared in news outlets around the globe—from the name of the highly classified unit to how the United States gathered intelligence, how many raiders were involved, how they entered the grounds, what aircraft they used, and how they moved through the compound. Such details were highly contained within the military and not shared even through classified channels. Yet now they are available to anyone with the click of a mouse.”

Babin argued that the nation’s commander in chief is releasing this sensitive information promiscuously for selfish political gain.

Veterans for a Strong America just released a powerful ad this week (see below) that demonstrates the president’s narcissism and political opportunism in his handling of the successful SEAL mission, from his initial announcement of it to last week’s ad, “One Chance,” featuring former President Bill Clinton.

On top of this unseemly hoisting up the enemy’s head on a spike for campaign advantage, the Obama people went a step beyond the limits of good taste with that ad by suggesting that the president’s 2012 Republican challenger, Mitt Romney, would not have made the same decision to send in the SEALS. Arianna Huffington, publisher of the left-leaning Huffington Post, called the entire ad, including what she said is the utterly speculative charge against Romney, “despicable.” Dana Milbank, liberal columnist at The Washington Post, found the insinuation against Romney “sleazy.”

Political leaders are people of great personal ambition, though often combined to one degree or another with ambition also to serve the people. Our political system turns that vice to the public advantage by rewarding it while also checking it. The president has great power and great ambition, and so, in his use of these national security matters, let’s pray he will begin to restrain himself and that voters will weigh the positives and negatives of his presidency thus far.

Listen to a report on the Obama campaign politicizing the bin Laden mission on WORLD’s radio news magazine The World and Everything in It.

There was a time, long ago, when people played music. Then things changed. We invented records and tapes and compact discs. Then people owned music. Now we have MP3 files, iTunes, and clouds. We listen more than ever, but we don’t own as much. We just license. Do you have a problem with that?

If you own something, you have the right to use it and dispose of it as you please. If I own a CD, I can play it on one device or a hundred devices. I can play it on your device or mine. I can lend it or sell it as I have a mind to do, even give it away. And when I die, my children can go through my collection and fight over who’s going to get Dad’s Scottish folk music.

But if you buy your music from iTunes and keep it on one of the five devices you are allowed to register with Apple at the same time, you are paying merely to license the music. It’s not yours. You’re fooling yourself if you think it is.

This is not just the oddball concern of grumpy, possessive people like me. Now that people with highly digitized lives are dying, it’s becoming an inheritance issue. The Economist reports that people have a lot on money tied up in digital assets, which “may include software, websites, downloaded content, online gaming identities, social-media accounts and even emails,” and that means courts and legislatures are starting to clarify the public interest.

But there is also a personal value to the digital treasures we leave behind. Survivors used to go through their loved one’s books, photos, perhaps even letters, and preserve the family archive and estate for the following generations. But much of these things are now stored in forms that are protected with passwords the deceased took with him to the grave, which are perhaps not even transferable. Photographs were once in a set of albums or at least a shoebox. They are now on websites and in “clouds.” The Economist tells us, “All email and data on [Apple’s] iCloud service is[sic] deleted on the death of the owner.” But if you can’t leave your stuff to others when you die, you are not the owner. Remember that everything you post on Facebook becomes the property of Facebook—every photo, every thought. By contrast, Google seems to be serious about “data liberation.”

A simple step in the direction of owner control (i.e., real ownership of digital assets that we store on websites) would be survivor control information on one’s settings page. I could indicate my wife with her email address, and she could be emailed for confirmation and a password. One could list four contingency heirs in case of an especially terrible tragedy.

Before you opt for the convenience of leaning on clouds and websites for their storage and chronicling capacities, ask yourself, “Whose life is it anyway?”

There was news this week of yet another angry citizen pushing back against airport security measures. Protesting the Transportation Security Administration’s violation of his privacy during the security screening, John E. Brennan abandoned all privacy and stripped himself naked in preparation for his pat down at Portland International Airport. The man was mad as all get out, and he wasn’t going to take it anymore. He was jailed for indecent exposure and disorderly conduct.

Political anger seems to be on the rise these days, whether it is Tea Party rallies, Occupy squattings, this naked traveler, or the campaign rhetoric we can expect from now until November. It’s like we have a collective bee in the mouth. But we should not let it discourage us. As Finley Peter Dunne put it, “Politics ain’t beanbag.”

In politics, the stakes are high. While there is a common good we all share, there is also my good, or what I think is my good, that needs defending against my neighbors. People steal from each other not only with guns and crowbars and with shady business practices, but also with political power. They can take your property as well as what you treasure about our life together. Maybe it’s a development project that’s robbing you, or same-sex marriage. That’s when what Merle Haggard calls “the fightin’ side of me” comes out, and angry citizens get political. Harvey Mansfield, in his brilliant article about politics and political passions, said, “Politics is about what makes you angry. … People go into politics to pick a fight, not to avoid one.”

The Greeks had a name for this political anger: thumos! It is the most characteristically political passion, the spirited defense of one’s own, but intimately connected with a claim to what one believes is right. It joins what is most particular (“me”) with what is most universal (“right”). It’s what gives engagement to the citizen, courage to the soldier, and ambition to the statesman. It’s what fires up the patriot to cling to his liberties, and bark warnings about his cold, dead hands. The spirit of liberty and thus the defense of one’s dignity is that thumotic spirit that bristles under the banner, “Don’t Tread On Me.” C.S. Lewis said that thumos, the seat of moral seriousness, is what makes us human.

So, in the months leading up to the election, if you find yourself shocked that political debate is not like a living room conversation or an academic discussion, remember that these political combatants are taking themselves and justice seriously, even if they’re not always right. That’s politics.

Just days after Resurrection Sunday, we are all no doubt occupied in our thoughts with the risen Savior. The resurrection of Christ changed everything. The pagan world passed from tragedy to hope, while the Jewish hope found its fulfillment. The Spirit of Christ spread love across the Roman world, and the concepts “human” and “society” acquired new significance and depth.

If Christ’s resurrection was the ultimate game changer, then politics should look different this side of the empty tomb. With the advance of the gospel, Christians should see the possibilities for political life the same way we see the new possibilities for personal, family, and community life. God’s redemptive plans for our shared civic life should instruct us in how we shape our world in the confidence of those plans. You might call this “post-resurrection politics.”

In a post-resurrection world, rule can become public service as it ought to be. With the cross in mind, Jesus contrasted His own lordship with the lords of the world:

“You know that those who are considered rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones exercise authority over them. But it shall not be so among you. But whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be slave of all. For even the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many” (Mark 10:42-45).

On the cross, He served and sacrificed, and He showed us what it means to “govern” and what politics can be under the gospel governance of redeemed people.

Post-resurrection government should help people govern themselves. God says that under the New Covenant He will move His people from within by His Spirit to keep His laws (Ezekiel 36:27). That vision is not fully realized until Christ’s return, but after the resurrection every eschatological picture has some present reality. Because Christ is changing people from the inside out, government should secure and cultivate people’s ability to govern themselves, i.e., conduct themselves with restraint, industry, and charity (cf. 1 Peter 2:14).

Post-resurrection public service leaves room for the mutual service of a post-resurrection people. Insofar as Christian people are growing into the image of Christ, they will so overflow with charity for one another that any government tempted to overreach in its activity will be hard pressed to find anything left to do. A government that is conscious of Christ’s victory will rather stir up that Christian capacity in its people for mutual service.

It is true that many citizens aren’t alive in Christ, and some are not even Christians. But wise leaders govern not only in the confidence of gospel life but also in the awareness of the cultural power of gospel influence. God’s post-resurrection people are salt and light (Matthew 5:13-16).

In post-resurrection political life, government should help people do what Christ redeemed them to do: Govern themselves in holiness and serve one another in love.

When the ship’s captain shows signs that he doesn’t understand the basics of seamanship, such as the difference between heeling and capsizing, you know that something is terribly wrong. Many people got that half-embarrassed/half-frightened feeling when President Obama issued a public warning to the high court in anticipation of its ruling on the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act of 2010 (aka Obamacare), as WORLD reported:

“Ultimately, I’m confident that the Supreme Court will not take what would be an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress. And I’d just remind conservative commentators that for years what we’ve heard is, the biggest problem on the bench was judicial activism or a lack of judicial restraint—that an unelected group of people would somehow overturn a duly constituted and passed law.”

People across the political spectrum were stunned. President Obama, who solemnly swore to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States,” knows constitutional law, so he is without excuse for not knowing or for knowingly misrepresenting the basics of the subject. He has a law degree from Harvard and taught constitutional law (well, sort of) at the University of Chicago from 1991 to 2004. So he’s familiar with the courts’ power of judicial review, i.e., to declare acts of other branches of government or of the states null and void when measured against the fundamental law, the Constitution.

While all three branches must interpret and apply the Constitution, the judicial branch has a unique responsibility for that and has the final say. As every student in a sophomore American government survey course should know, Chief Justice John Marshall said in Marbury v. Madison (1803) that the job of the court is to “say what the law is” and to decide between the Constitution and a particular law when the two are judged to be in conflict. “This,” he wrote, “is of the very essence of judicial duty.” In The Federalist Papers No. 78 (1788), another canonical text of undergraduate political studies, Alexander Hamilton affirms the same point.

That’s what living together as a free people under law requires. So it is jaw-dropping that the president warned the Supreme Court that it would be acting illegitimately if it were to strike down this law. The reason he gave was that the Supreme Court is “an unelected group of people” and the law in question is “a duly constituted and passed law,” even “passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress.” President Obama later backtracked, but the Harvard-trained lawyer seemed to be choosing his words very carefully the day before at that Rose Garden press conference.

In a constitutional democracy, judicial review is a judicial activity essential to the judicial branch. Judicial activism, by contrast, is a form of overreach, the court speaking in its own voice and from its own wisdom instead of giving voice to the Constitution and thus to the people’s most considered will. This activity of the courts is how we maintain equal liberty under law. Judicial activism is tyranny. When the president publicly denies this distinction we are right to view him with strict scrutiny.

The Supreme Court heard arguments this week for and against the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act of 2010 (aka “Obamacare”), specifically its chief funding mechanism, the individual mandate that requires everyone either to purchase health insurance or pay a substantial fine. To make the system economically feasible, the pool of insured must include lots of young, healthy people who pay into the system but require few if any of its services. That’s how insurance works. It’s a risk-management system. It depends on the willingness of people who fear disaster but never end up suffering it paying for the comparatively few people who end up needing help. But free people are free to judge their own risk and free to buy into an insurance pool if they wish.

Obamacare is a government-controlled healthcare system, though not a government-funded one. Congress and the Obama administration could have provided universal healthcare as a tax-funded government service, but there was no majority support for it by lawmakers. So instead they went the individual mandate route. The problem is that in this free republic the federal government has no authority to make people buy things unless as a condition of something they choose to do, e.g., the way state governments require people to buy auto insurance if they choose to drive. The administration argues that buying health insurance is a condition of using the healthcare system that everyone eventually uses. The issue for proponents is not people’s freedom to judge their risk, but who will pay the inevitable hospital bills. For them it is not a question of liberty but of responsibility.

But hospital bills are not inevitable. I knew a farm wife in Iowa named Norma. She was in her 80s and had never been to the doctor because she had never been sick a day in her life. Eventually something put her in the hospital, where she soon died. Her modest estate was more than sufficient to pay for any bills she left behind.

Norma was an American citizen with the right to security in her property. Our system of government is called “liberal constitutionalism.” It is constitutionalist because the government that governs us is itself governed by a fundamental law, the Constitution. It may do only what the Constitution says it can do. It is liberal in that its purpose is to preserve everyone, not just most people, in his or her individual liberty. Government is not free to violate even one person’s rights, not even for what it considers the greater good. In these ways it is “limited government.” When government exceeds those limits, it’s called tyranny. When the court invalidates an unconstitutional act, it’s not being an activist court; it’s just doing its job.

In June, the Supreme Court will announce its decision on whether the individual mandate violates the Constitution, i.e., whether it’s tyrannical. I hope the court considers that if it is tyrannical to one person, someone like Norma, then it is simply tyrannical and cannot legitimately govern a free people.

Now that more than 84 million people have viewed Invisible Children’s Kony 2012 video, attention has turned once gain to Africa’s plight in general. The terrible suffering of that continent presents itself from time to time in the form of disease (AIDS, malaria), starvation (Sudan, Horn of Africa), and bloodshed (Rwandan genocide, inter-tribal slaughter in Kenya). To some extent the disease and famine are climate-related. But stable and public-spirited political leadership would go a long way to remedying these problems. But the consequences of bad politics go beyond this. Political evil accounts for most of the human suffering in Africa.

The form of government in too many African countries may be accurately described as kleptocracy, government by stealing. The state is merely a tool for rulers and their partners in crime (family, party members, the army) to pillage the country. After the transitions to independence in the early 1960s, many of the new African governments were Marxist, justifying concentration of power in a one-party state on moral and philosophic grounds. But it was always just as power grab, followed by grabbing everything else. Tribalism is also a source of much strife, but it is also a tool for governments to exploit, and a temptation for oppression. Rulers prefer their own tribe over others, intensifying the divisions that can burst open in merciless violence, as in Kenya in 2008, or governments can play one tribe against another.

We Americans often think that every problem can be solved and that we can and ought solve it, even within a generation. And we think that we can do this either by spending enough money or by invading the country and booting out the bad people. But William Easterly makes a compelling case in The White Man’s Burden that the trillions of dollars we have spent on foreign aid have been largely counter-productive. As for the military option, though we feel good about our benevolent conquests, for some reason the beneficiaries of our good will never seem to recognize their blessings … at least not for long.

But one needn’t resign oneself to the inhumanity, saying “This is Africa,” as Leonardo DiCaprio’s character does in Blood Diamond (2006). But whatever the solution, it must move the governments involved in a way that is permanent and self-enforcing. (Consider Paul Collier, The Bottom Billion [2007], and Martin Meredith, The Fate of Africa [2006].) The words preached by Benjamin Colman in a 1730 Boston sermon are aptly noted here:

“God hath set the world upon the governments and rulers, whom He has made the pillars of it. … [T]he peace, tranquility, and flourishing of places are made to depend on the wisdom and fidelity of their rulers, in the good administration of the government. While the utmost misery and confusion befalls those places where the government is ill administered. … The virtue and religion of a people, their riches and trade, their power, honour, and reputation; and the favour of God toward them, with his blessing on them; do greatly depend on the pious, righteous, and faithful government which they are under” (Political Sermons of the American Founding Era, Ellis Sandoz ed., LibertyPress, 1991).

In October 2011, President Obama sent 100 Special Forces advisers to Uganda to help the Ugandan army capture Joseph Kony, leader of the marauding Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). Invisible Children’s Jason Russell, in the viral video (80 million views) Kony 2012, said, “It was the first time in history that the United States took that kind of action because the people demanded it, not for self-defense but because it was right.”

The Kony 2012 campaign has brought Obama’s quiet deployment to prominent public attention. The campaign’s goal is to make this monstrous criminal famous, and to pressure governments, especially the U.S. government, to increase efforts to bring Kony to justice and end the inhumanity of the LRA in Central Africa.

Joseph Kony is certainly an evil man who has perpetrated unimaginable suffering on hundreds of thousands of people, from displacement of villages to the brutalization of abducted children who have been turned into uniformed killers. But is he the business of the U.S. government?

I believe that humanitarian military intervention can be justified. Neighbor-love applies to nations as well as to individuals. “Righteousness exalts a nation” (Proverbs 14:34). But the United States must be cautious about swooping in with our overwhelming military superiority wherever startling injustice comes to our attention. Is America the world’s policeman? Are we the de facto world government?

Our government is responsible for protecting our people, and the Ugandan government for theirs. National neighbor-responsibility diminishes with distance and with diminishing feasibility of intervention, e.g., because of distance, terrain (dense jungle, open desert, tightly packed cities?), scale (small population—Libya 6.5 million—or large—Syria 22.5 million?), politics (is the country a superpower? Is there international co-operation?), and military considerations (are the bad guys well armed?). So we have no responsibility to invade China, no matter what the Chinese are doing, and Syria’s neighbors have greater responsibility to stop the butchery there than we do.

“That’s terrible; let’s do something” is not a foreign policy and will ruin the nation that adopts it as one. But is the hunt for Joseph Kony a case of international neighbor-love or interventionist overreach? That’s the Kony question.