President Obama, accompanied by Vice President Joe Biden and retired military members, signs a series of executive orders, including closing the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Thursday in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington.

President Obama is learning it is a lot easier to reverse unpopular positions of his predecessor than it is to come up with better ones of his own.

Thursday, he signed executive orders aimed at shutting down the prison at Guantanamo Bay, which houses some of the most dangerous terrorists in the world.

His orders also restricted interrogation methods that can be used by the CIA to elicit information from suspects and eliminated secret overseas detention facilities run by the CIA.

Earlier, he suspended military commission hearings that were established to hear cases against those held at Guantanamo, including Khalid Sheik Mohammed, mastermind of the 9/11 attacks. Now he has to decide what to do with the 245 men held at Guantanamo.

And, if he is lucky enough to see Osama bin Laden or Ayman al-Zawahiri captured on his watch, he’ll have to decide what to do with them. Ensure they’re read their Miranda rights and appointed taxpayer-funded legal counsel, perhaps?

It’s no joke. The philosophical shift between treating accused terrorists captured on foreign soil as enemy combatants or simply heinous criminals is an important distinction.

The Clinton administration dealt with those responsible for the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993 as the latter. (In fairness, no one knew at the time that the perpetrators were involved in more than a criminal conspiracy.)

But Mohammed Atta and his 18 fellow soldiers made sure we understood on Sept. 11, 2001, that their attacks were acts of war against the United States.

It is tempting to believe that the worst is over – that we won’t be hit again, maybe even harder than we were just eight years ago.

Some Democrats are sure that nothing George W. Bush did made us safer, and many of them would argue Bush sacrificed important constitutional guarantees without gaining any measure of security.

But I think it is highly implausible that pure luck has protected us. Waterboarding may be nasty business, but if the technique indeed forced KSM to reveal details in 2003 of planned attacks and thus saved lives – as Bush officials have asserted – is it responsible to say that there are no circumstances, ever, in which it might be used again?

And would the Obama administration go further, as Attorney General-nominee Eric Holder hinted in his confirmation hearings, and seek to prosecute those who ordered or carried out waterboarding?

So what will the Obama administration do with KSM and the others at Guantanamo? If the military commission established to try these men will no longer do so, will they be turned over to criminal courts in the U.S.?

If so, it is likely that many would be acquitted on the basis of “tainted evidence” and lack of due process alone. Then what? Do we put them on airplanes and ship them home?

Or will human rights groups protest that countries such as Saudi Arabia or Egypt might torture these men so we must not send them there?

Spanish Prime Minister Jose Zapatero has offered his support and help in closing Guantanamo to President Obama, but is he willing to take any of those prisoners deemed too dangerous to release and put them in Spanish jails?

In his inaugural address, President Obama promised “for those who seek to advance their aims by inducing terror and slaughtering innocents, we say to you now that our spirit is stronger and cannot be broken; you cannot outlast us, and we will defeat you.”

But actions speak louder than words. We’ll see if he means it. As President Obama no doubt has figured out, closing Guantanamo while preserving national security will take more than a stroke of the pen.

He risks alienating the left-wing base of his party if the barbed wire doesn’t come down immediately. But the stakes are much higher if he lets terrorists loose on the world.

Linda Chavez is chair of the Center for Equal Opportunity and author of “An Unlikely Conservative: The Transformation of an Ex-Liberal.” E-mail: lchavez@ceousa.org

In this Nov. 18, 2008 file photo, reviewed by the U.S. military, guards escort a detainee carrying a book from the detainee library trailer to the detention facility in an open air common area at Camp Delta 4 on the U.S. Military Base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. President Barack Obama began overhauling U.S. treatment of terror suspects, signing orders on Thursday, Jan. 22, 2009, to close the Guantanamo Bay detention center.

When word broke that Treasury Secretary nominee Timothy Geithner had failed to pay employment taxes he owed for several years, the reaction in Washington was gentle.

Politicians on both sides of the aisle defended Geithner as an excellent choice to head the Treasury in these troubled financial times and predicted that the incident would be little more than a hiccup in his confirmation process.

The news media covered the breaking story, but without the hype and round-the-clock stories they’ve run when nominees hit a snag in the past.

Does this mean that Barack Obama’s ascendance to the presidency is ushering in a new era of civility? I hope so.

Previous presidents’ picks haven’t been so lucky. I should know. I was the subject of a media feeding frenzy eight years ago when I was nominated to be George W. Bush’s secretary of Labor.

Within minutes of my introduction by the president-elect, journalists were poring over every word I’d published and every interview I’d given in the previous 20 years.

Two days later, ABC News broke a story accusing me – erroneously – of hiring an illegal nanny. Soon, TV satellite trucks surrounded my house and investigative reporters began scouring my neighborhood.

I decided to step down when it became clear after three days of nonstop coverage that I was becoming a major distraction for the new president.

But I also wanted the opportunity to set the record straight: A decade earlier, at the urging of a friend, I had taken into my home an illegal immigrant who had no other place to live, given her financial and other assistance, and later helped her return to her native country.

I didn’t break any laws, though I did exercise bad judgment in not telling the president-elect’s team in the vetting process what had occurred 10 years earlier.

Geithner has also been accused of employing an illegal immigrant. But the facts suggest he, too, is innocent of wrongdoing on that count.

He hired the woman when she had a valid visa – and, presumably, the requisite status to allow her to work in the U.S. – but her authorization lapsed for a few months before she left his employ.

By law, he was required only to check legal status when he hired the woman, so he should be off the hook on this issue.

Geithner’s tax issue is more serious. For at least four years between 2001 and 2004, he apparently did not pay FICA and Medicare taxes on his earnings while employed at the International Monetary Fund.

A subsequent IRS audit of Geithner’s 2003 and 2004 tax returns exposed the tax liability, which he then paid, with interest. But he chose not to pay two additional years’ taxes and interest for 2001 and 2002. Only when the Obama vetting team discovered the additional missing taxes did Geithner pay up.

In all, Geithner paid more than $43,000 in back taxes and interest on his overdue employment taxes – a sum greater than the yearly wages of the average American.

Geithner will have a chance to explain his actions when he faces the Senate Finance Committee next week for his confirmation hearings. I think it’s worth reserving judgment until we know all the details.

It will be interesting to see, in the meantime, how aggressively the media pursue the story. Reporters should do their job to unearth the facts – they certainly didn’t hold back against previous administrations’ nominees.

But that doesn’t mean they should run to the presses with every wild allegation and uncorroborated accusation they uncover, especially when the nominee is muzzled by the informal rules that dictate he can’t speak for himself prior to the hearings.

So far, most Republican senators are exercising admirable restraint not to go on the attack. But their desire to forgo gotcha politics shouldn’t be an excuse not to ask legitimate questions when the nominee is before them.

Let Geithner speak for himself. His answers will determine whether he’s fit to serve.

And we’ll all be a lot better off if we allow the confirmation process to work as it’s supposed to rather than derailing it in a search-and-destroy mission.

Linda Chavez is chair of the Center for Equal Opportunity and author of “An Unlikely Conservative: The Transformation of an Ex-Liberal.” E-mail: lchavez@ceousa.org

Embattled Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich may very well be a larcenous creep, but he knows exactly how to yank the chains of his fellow Democrats.

Rod Blagojevich may look like one of the dim bulbs from Tony Soprano’s Bada Bing, but the guy’s a political genius.

Who could imagine that a month after U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald signaled that the Illinois governor was about to be indicted for trying to sell President-elect Barack Obama’s Senate seat, the man would not only remain unindicted and unimpeached, but he’d manage to make the entire Democratic congressional leadership look like chumps?

In naming former Illinois Attorney General Roland Burris to the vacant seat, Blagojevich has hoist the Dems on their own petard.

Blagojevich knew exactly what he was doing by naming Burris. Like any urban Democrat, the governor knew how potent an advantage Burris’ race would be.

Blacks may be only 15 percent of the Illinois population, but they represent about half of the Democratic Party’s base in the state. And nationally, the figures are just as skewed.

By appointing Burris, Blagojevich was daring the Dems to bar the Senate door.

He knew he could count on the likes of Congressman and former Black Panther Bobby Rush to make invidious comparisons between Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s initial opposition to seating Burris with former Alabama Gov. George Wallace’s blocking the schoolhouse door after the Supreme Court ordered public schools desegregated.

With Obama’s elevation to president, Senate Democrat ranks are as white as Republicans’. And no matter how many times Reid et al. say their opposition to Burris has nothing to do with race, the whole issue makes them squirm a bit.

After all, Democrats have been perfectly happy to force police departments, businesses and colleges to select applicants by color, but they seem less happy to apply those same standards to themselves when it comes to joining the most exclusive club in the world.

Of course, it’s absurd to think the Democrats don’t want Burris because he’s black. But then schools that fail to admit less-qualified blacks, or businesses that don’t hire a proportional share of black employees, or police departments that pass over a lower-scoring black applicant to promote a higher-scoring white one aren’t engaging in racial discrimination, either.

Yet Democrats have insisted for decades that racial justice somehow required racial parity in all aspects of life. But they don’t want the same absurd rule applied to them.

Democrats may have no choice in ultimately seating Burris. Just hours after the Senate sergeant-at-arms summarily rejected Burris from taking his seat, Reid and others seemed on the verge of changing their minds.

Leader Reid’s description of Burris had changed from dismissive to complimentary: “He obviously is a very engaging, extremely nice man. He presents himself very well. He’s very proud of his family. He’s got two Ph.D.s and two law degrees, and he talked about how proud he was having those degrees.”

But even if the congressional leadership doesn’t cave, Burris is virtually a sure bet to win a challenge in court.

Like it or not, Rod Blagojevich is still a sitting governor with the power under Illinois law to appoint a replacement to fill President-elect Obama’s now empty seat. The Democrats in the state legislature had their chance to impeach the man – and they chose not to act quickly.

The entire episode is a huge embarrassment to the Democrats, including the incoming Democratic president.

How ironic that Barack Obama is now saddled with party leaders who are accused of acting like racists. Democrats have rarely minded when the R-word was hurled at Republicans, but when the shoe is on the other foot, it hurts.

And that may be Blagojevich’s sweetest revenge. The fellow may be a foul-mouthed, larcenous creep, but he knows exactly how to yank his fellow Democrats’ chains.

Blagojevich may eventually be forced from office – and he may well end up behind bars. But he’s going to inflict maximum pain on his fellow Democrats before he leaves the stage.

Linda Chavez is chair of the Center for Equal Opportunity and author of “An Unlikely Conservative: The Transformation of an Ex-Liberal.” E-mail: lchavez@ceousa.org

President Bush gives the fall commencement speech at Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas, last month.

Karl Rove’s recent revelation of President George W. Bush’s passion for books wasn’t a surprise to me.

In a Wall Street Journal column last week, Rove explained that for the last three years, he and the president have had a friendly rivalry to see who could finish more books during the year.

Rove won each year – but the president was no piker. In the three years of the competition, the president read 186 books to Rove’s 250.

Much of the intelligentsia no doubt will be shocked to learn George W. Bush is an avid reader of serious books, but it simply confirms something I already suspected.

During the first real discussion I ever had with then-Gov. Bush in 1998, he brought up a book written by a former colleague of mine at the Manhattan Institute.

Myron Magnet’s “The Dream and the Nightmare: The Sixties’ Legacy to the Underclass” isn’t the sort of book you come across if your taste goes to light reading.

A scathing dissection of good intentions gone awry, Magnet’s book lays bare the folly of liberal interventions on behalf of the poor and the devastating role of the counterculture in creating the underclass.

But it’s no red-meat screed of the sort that has propelled many well-known pundits to the top of the best-seller list either.

Magnet is not a polemicist, but a serious scholar and elegant writer. Bush’s reference to the book spoke worlds to me.

Liberals always have believed they have a monopoly on intelligence. Of all the Republican presidents in my lifetime, I can only recall one who was given high marks for raw intellect: Richard M. Nixon.

But he was considered by many liberals as a Machiavellian exception that proved the rule that conservatives are dopes.

In liberals’ telling, Eisenhower and Ford were middle-brow Midwesterners who preferred the golf links to books; Reagan was a B-film actor capable of giving a good speech that someone else wrote; and the two Bushes were Yale graduates by way of money and pedigree, not merit.

Of course we now know – thanks to the publication of “Reagan, In His Own Hand,” a reproduction of Reagan’s early handwritten speeches – that Ronald Reagan was often his own best wordsmith and that his ideas were original, not borrowed.

And perhaps liberals will now grudgingly acknowledge that Dwight D. Eisenhower must have had something on the ball. He did play a pretty big role in defeating the über-smart Germans during World War II.

Contrary to the stereotype that all conservatives are narrow-minded dummies, I’ve found that conservatives are far more likely to be familiar with liberal intellectual thought than liberals are with the views of conservative intellectuals.

Bush’s reading list was instructive not just because it was so long but because it included authors whose political orientation was different from the president’s own.

Included on the list provided by Rove were works by authors David Halberstam, Doris Kearns Goodwin and James M. McPherson, all liberals, as well as the novel “The Stranger” by Albert Camus, generally regarded as an existentialist, though he eschewed the label.

It would be a little like learning that Bill Clinton’s reading list in office included works by James Q. Wilson, Stephan Thernstrom and Harvey Klehr, as well as Ayn Rand’s “The Fountainhead.”

But what we know of his reading habits reveal Clinton to be predictable. A list of his 21 favorite books, compiled for his presidential library, included authors Maya Angelou, Ralph Ellison, Taylor Branch, Reinhold Niebuhr, and, naturally, Hillary Clinton – all well to the left on the political spectrum.

Bush’s book list isn’t likely to persuade his critics that the president’s intellect is equal to their exalted own. But perhaps Rove’s article will at least dispel a favorite caricature: Bush the Dummy.

Linda Chavez is chair of the Center for Equal Opportunity. E-mail: lchavez@ceousa.org

For the past dozen years, my family has been constantly growing until we now number 15.

But this year’s addition isn’t a new daughter-in-law or grandchild. At 87, my mother has finally come to live with me.

It wasn’t an easy move for her. And the timing, at the beginning of November, meant integrating her into daily life during the holidays, when most families experience additional stress as well as the joys of the season.

Since my father was killed in an automobile accident in 1978, my mother has lived on her own in a small apartment next to her sister-in-law in Albuquerque.

My dad’s family has treated her as one of their own for 30 years. When she could no longer drive because her eyesight was failing, my Aunt Elsie and Cousin Margaret drove her to buy groceries each week.

My mother’s life has never been an easy one. She was nearly killed in a devastating car crash that broke her back and shoulder and left her with a hole in her skull and pins holding her ankle together.

Three of her children have died: my younger sister of kidney disease when she was just 6 years old, my older half-brother in a car accident when he was barely 15, and another half-brother in his 50s.

She has survived the loneliness of widowhood and the pain of breast cancer.

As independent as she has been, however, I’ve always known that one day she would live with me.

I couldn’t imagine shunting her off to live with strangers, even though I know this has become far more socially acceptable today than in the past when adult children assumed the responsibility of caring for their aged parents.

But even as she began to lose her vision from macular degeneration and became frail with the aches of old age, she’s resisted making the final move.

Finally I quit asking and told her it was time. My aunt was 87 and couldn’t be expected to chauffeur my mother around much longer – and even my cousin was now in retirement, with her own health problems.

Her first week was difficult. She worried about the new doctors I’d line up, fearing I might insist on going into the exam with her (of course, I didn’t) or that they would tell her she needed to eat differently or make friends her own age, advice she’d ignored for years.

But once she realized I’d let her buy her Milky Ways and shortbread cookies and wouldn’t try to interest her in the local senior center, she settled in nicely.

The key has been allowing her the independence she so values. Yes, she is dependent on me for driving her on errands, but she wants to prepare her own meals and set her own schedule.

She’s invited to join us in family events – grandkids’ and great-grandkids’ birthdays, Thanksgiving and Christmas celebrations. But she’s also free to retreat to her apartment or decline the invitation if it involves a long car ride or she’s not feeling up to it.

Most days she spends lying on the couch in her sitting room listening to the Game Show Network or Fox News Channel. She keeps the shades down and the TV volume and heat up.

She eats like a bird, taking only tiny portions of meat or vegetables, but she always has room for dessert. Her main exercise is pushing the cart through the grocery store once a week.

But she remains trim and still beautiful after all these years – and more important, happy.

I can’t possibly know how long we’ll have her with us or what new challenges the years ahead with her will bring. But I do know that bringing her to live with me was the right decision.

In an age when the elderly are often seen more as a burden than a benefit, it is important to remember what our parents have done for us and what we owe them.

Taking care of each other is what family is all about.

Linda Chavez is chair of the Center for Equal Opportunity. E-mail: lchavez@ceousa.org

Bernard Madoff in 1999.

The shocking story of Bernard Madoff and his alleged $50 billion Ponzi scheme have implications that go well beyond the wealthy individuals and charities who were bilked of their money.

As in all such scandals, this one involves a betrayal of trust. And trust ultimately is what allows economies, large and small, to function.

Without it, our entire system of money would collapse.

What Madoff is alleged to have done is to create an upside-down pyramid in which he paid his investors phony “profits” from new investors’ capital, while skimming off most of the money for himself.

The scheme works only so long as new investors can be found to continue making payments to earlier investors, or until someone discovers the chicanery. In Madoff’s case, his own children blew the whistle when they realized what he was doing.

Still, you wonder: How could so many savvy people be duped by the oldest trick in the book?

Madoff’s investors weren’t naifs. They were some of the most astute investors around, including other billionaires who had made their own money largely by being meticulously careful in how they chose to invest.

But they trusted Madoff because many of them knew him personally.

Madoff was no fly-by-night snake oil salesman. He lived and worked in the community. He was involved in the same charities as his investors.

He was a co-religionist who, his investors believed, shared the same values and commitment to a strong code of ethics that would insure against deception and thievery. And so, investors handed over millions of dollars to a man they thought they knew and could trust, without doing due diligence.

“What fools,” you say? “I’d never hand over my money without checking the guy out.”

But in fact, we do hand over our money, figuratively and literally, every day without hesitating. And we do so because we trust individuals, institutions and our government. Trust is what makes the economic world go round.

In an important new book, “The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World,” Niall Ferguson explains it this way:

“When an American exchanges his goods or his labor for a fistful of dollars, he is essentially trusting (Treasury Secretary) Henry Paulson (and by implication the Chairman of the Federal Reserve System, Ben Bernanke) not to . . . manufacture so many of these things that they end up being worth no more than the paper they are printed on. . . .

“(M)oney is a matter of belief, even faith: belief in the person paying us; belief in the person issuing the money he uses or the institution that honors his checks or transfers. Money is . . . trust inscribed.”

And once trust breaks down, the system itself collapses.

What is worrisome in today’s troubled economy is that trust seems to be dissolving before our eyes. Why have banks stopped lending? Why are people pulling their money out of the stock market, driving down the Dow and NASDAQ? Why are people afraid to buy houses?

It all boils down to trust. Banks don’t trust that debtors – companies, individuals, even other banks – will pay back the money they lend, so they stop lending.

Investors don’t trust that companies will be able to earn profits in the near future, so they stop investing.

Ordinary people don’t trust that the home they buy will be worth what they paid for it in a year or even a few months, so they hesitate buying.

This breakdown in trust feeds on itself. Distrust becomes self-perpetuating and contagious.

The challenge will be how best to restore trust – and to do so in ways that do not jeopardize freedom or the efficiencies of the market.

As Ferguson’s book illustrates, larcenies such as the Madoff scheme or stock and real estate bubbles such as the ones we’ve experienced over the last decade are nothing new and will, no doubt, occur again.

But if we are to live and prosper in communities that extend beyond our immediate family members, we must fall back on mutual trust, even when it sometimes fails us.

Linda Chavez is chair of the Center for Equal Opportunity and author of “An Unlikely Conservative: The Transformation of an Ex-Liberal.” E-mail: lchavez@ceousa.org

A corruption scandal in President-elect Obama’s backyard is the last thing this country needs. But like it or not, that’s exactly what we have in the unfolding drama of Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich’s arrest earlier this week for trying to sell Barack Obama’s Senate seat.

The federal prosecutor in the case – Patrick Fitzgerald, the man whose investigation of the Valerie Plame leak case nearly paralyzed the Bush White House for a time – has made it clear that nothing ties Obama directly to the Blagojevich scheme. But the timing of Fitzgerald’s announcement raises some serious questions.

Apparently, Fitzgerald knew that Blagojevich was trolling for bidders for the Obama seat in the waning days of the general election.

Before the first votes were counted to elect Obama president, Blagojevich was so confident in Obama’s victory he was already soliciting bids for the seat. And Fitzgerald already had substantial evidence that Blagojevich was engaged in major corruption before the governor put a “for sale” sign on the Senate seat.

So why didn’t the federal prosecutor act prior to the election? Had he done so, of course, it could have damaged Obama.

Many would argue that bringing down another Illinois Democrat before the election would have smelled like a dirty trick. The federal prosecutor, after all, was a Republican appointee, and the McCain campaign had already run ads trying to tie Obama to political corruption in Chicago.

One of Obama’s early financial supporters, land developer Tony Rezko, was convicted on corruption charges earlier this year, and Rezko figures prominently in the Blagojevich scandal.

Had Blagojevich been forced to do a perp walk before Election Day, voters might have asked why Obama had endorsed Blagojevich just two years earlier, considering the governor was at that time under investigation for taking bribes. The endorsement would have been yet another example of Obama’s bad judgment in his associations from Rezko to the Rev. Wright to Bill Ayers.

But even if Fitzgerald acted fairly and prudently by not moving against Blagojevich in the heat of a political campaign, why did he decide to act this week? His explanation was that he was trying to stop “a political corruption crime spree.”

Under existing Illinois law, the governor has final authority to appoint someone to fill a vacant U.S. Senate seat and wiretaps suggest Blagojevich was about to do just that. According to the criminal complaint, Blagojevich had found at least one bidder – identified only as Senate Candidate 5 – who offered to raise the governor $500,000 and another $1 million if he got the appointment. Perhaps Fitzgerald simply wanted to go public before Blagojevich sealed the deal.

But there are other possible explanations. Fitzgerald’s hand may have been forced by the Chicago Tribune, which reported Dec. 5 that Blagojevich’s phone lines were being tapped. This information signaled everyone – the governor and anyone talking to the governor or his aides – that they could become ensnared in a huge criminal investigation leading to indictments.

President-elect Obama has emphatically denied that he ever talked to Blagojevich about his Senate replacement. And certainly Fitzgerald has done everything he can to confirm that Obama is not implicated in any way.

But there are a number of unanswered questions about what contact members of the president-elect’s team might have had with the governor or his aides, directly or through intermediaries.

A number of aides, including the incoming White House Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel, and former campaign leader David Axelrod, have long-standing ties to Blagojevich. And Axelrod has already had to revise his earlier assertion that Obama had spoken with Blagojevich about candidates to replace him in the Senate.

The president-elect has said “I want to gather all the facts about any staff contact that may have taken place. We’ll have those in the next few days and we’ll present them.”

The president-elect’s credibility is on the line. For the good of the country, we must all hope this scandal doesn’t infect anyone in the new administration. The best way to ensure that is for the president-elect and his aides to be forthcoming quickly.

Linda Chavez is chairwoman of the Center for Equal Opportunity. E-mail: lchavez@ceousa.org

A foreclosure sign stands on top of a sale sign outside an existing home for sale in the west Denver suburb of Lakewood, Colo., in September.

It’s time we ‘fess up: Nobody has any idea how to get us out of the economic mess we’re in.

The Big Three automakers were on Capitol Hill again this week begging for a bailout. Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson is considering direct federal intervention into the mortgage market by subsidizing new loans at very low interest rates. The stock market continues its roller coaster ride, down hundreds of points one day, up hundreds the next.

President-elect Obama waits on the sideline with a financial team made up mostly of old Clinton hands, well respected but with only the traditional federal spending stimulus solution in their bag of fixes.

No wonder most Americans are holding onto their wallets.

I’ve long been an advocate that Americans should save more and spend less on stuff they don’t need, especially when it’s paid for on high-interest credit cards. And a Christmas shopping trip this week to my local mall suggests a lot of people are doing just that.

Spending on Black Friday was up – 7 percent, according to early estimates – but by the following Tuesday, the Northern Virginia mall I visited was nearly empty.

In past years, I’ve found plenty of company, but this time the stores were nearly deserted. Clerks stood around talking to each other, and there seemed to be fewer salespeople even in the high-end stores.

The guy playing the piano in Nordstrom looked lonely; the barista at Starbucks seemed bored with no customers waiting to pay several bucks for a caffeine concoction. Sure, there were big sales signs and lots of tinsel decorations, but it hardly seemed like the holiday season.

Conventional wisdom says this is a bad thing. America’s economy, after all, runs on consumer spending. If people aren’t buying cars and washing machines, or even new cell phones and Blu-Ray players, workers will lose jobs; we’ll suffer a longer recession; and life will be more difficult for everyone.

But what if this short-term medicine, bitter though it may be, actually makes people behave more responsibly? Maybe those missing shoppers will pay down their credit card or home equity debt if they spend less on gifts this year. Maybe parents will decide that putting away money for college is better than buying their children that Wii set they’ve been begging for.

Maybe kids will discover that the newest electronic gadget isn’t half as much fun as the real thing. Maybe they’ll even decide that throwing a real football in the park is better than watching some digitized Tony Romo complete a pass on their game screen.

Who knows, a little financial belt-tightening could result in real-life belt-tightening as kids get off the couch and play off those extra pounds they’ve put on in the digital age.

I know elected officials – especially the new Democratic crew about to flood Washington – want Americans to get out there and spend. But we may be smarter than our politicians.

It is not such a bad thing that everyone is looking to pare back their lifestyles. The path we were on was simply unsustainable in the long run.

Those bigger houses most of us couldn’t really afford required more energy to heat and cool, and many of the lots they were built on were farther away from where we worked, requiring longer commutes and more gasoline.

We had fewer hours to enjoy our homes because we worked and commuted more hours to pay for them. Worse, we spent less time with our kids and spouses.

Do we really want to continue this vicious cycle, buying more but having less time to enjoy what we have?

I don’t claim to know what will happen to the economy over the next year – and surely the news right now doesn’t look promising. But I do think that if we take better control of our own lives and redirect our individual priorities, we’ll be better off in the future.

Who knows, scaled-back holiday spending could remind us what the season is all about. Giving of ourselves is more important than handing out store-bought goodies. Time spent with loved ones may be the best gift of all.

Linda Chavez is chair of the Center for Equal Opportunity and author of “An Unlikely Conservative: The Transformation of an Ex-Liberal.” E-mail: lchavez@ceousa.org

Abigail Arredondo of the Border Network for Human Rights works to remove a memorial cross from the fence which runs along the U.S.-Mexico border his month in El Paso, Texas.

Republicans are finally worried that their failure to attract Hispanic voters in this year’s election spells trouble – perhaps for decades.

But they’re not sure what to do about it.

Moderates in the party are pushing for more efforts at “inclusion,” which usually means elevating a few Hispanics to symbolic positions in national, state, and local politics.

But with no Cabinet positions to hand out and so few prominent Hispanic elected officials to promote within their ranks, Republicans won’t gain much leverage with this strategy.

Some conservative Republicans, on the other hand, are either in denial or think they can control the problem by limiting the growth in the Hispanic immigrant population. (Just ask the 14 out of 16 hard-line, anti-immigration Republicans who lost their seats this time around to pro-comprehensive reform Democrats how well this worked at the polls.)

But even if hard-liners were successful at stopping illegal immigration and reducing the number of Hispanic immigrants admitted legally, it wouldn’t solve the simple demographic fact that U.S.-born Hispanics have higher fertility rates than whites or blacks.

Hispanics will become a larger share of the population for the foreseeable future, though intermarriage rates will likely diminish their ethnic identification over time.

Still other Republicans hope that the party’s message of self-reliance, low taxes, defense of life and support for traditional marriage will win over entrepreneurial and religious Hispanics.

But while I think these positions have tremendous appeal and are the bedrock on which to build support in the Hispanic community, they’re not enough.

The first thing Republicans have to overcome is a growing belief among Hispanics that they aren’t welcome in the party – or in America for that matter.

According to a recent survey by America’s Voice – a liberal, pro-immigrant group – two-thirds of Hispanics think that discrimination against them has increased in the last two years because of the tone of the immigration debate.

Republicans have to deal with the consequences.

Here’s a radical suggestion – but one that wouldn’t compromise Republican or conservative principles. Why doesn’t the Republican Party launch a Welcome to America campaign?

The idea would be to set up a network of volunteers to reach out to Hispanic immigrants, and especially their American-born children, to teach English, American history and civics.

Estimates are that four in 10 Hispanic voters in this year’s election were naturalized citizens – and 75 percent of them cast their votes for President-elect Barack Obama.

What if those new Americans had been helped to become U.S. citizens by local volunteers from the Federation of Republican Women, the Republican Men’s Club or the local Republican central committee?

This volunteerism has been ceded to Democrat-leaning groups over the years. Is it any wonder that when these new citizens register to vote, their instinct is to support the party that they know firsthand?

I can already hear objections from immigrant advocates and critics. The hard-liners will complain that any such efforts might end up helping people who are illegally in the U.S., while immigrant advocates will warn that Republican volunteers could become a Trojan Horse to turn in those same illegal migrants.

To the hard-liners I would say that unless you’re part of the tiny minority that is willing to round up and deport every single illegal immigrant, along with their U.S. citizen offspring, wouldn’t it be better for everyone if these people at least spoke English?

What’s more, we’re not talking about government dollars going to this effort, but individual volunteerism.

To the advocates, I’d argue that getting to know individuals who are members of groups you think you despise is often the best antidote to prejudice. Besides which it’s unlikely that the men and women who volunteer for this effort will be members of the Minutemen.

Republicans have nothing to lose by taking this approach – and much to gain including the goodwill of those they’ve helped.

But, it’s not just the GOP that would become winners. Assimilating America’s new immigrants is a challenge – and all of us must be part of the effort if the U.S. is to thrive.

Linda Chavez is author of “An Unlikely Conservative: The Transformation of an Ex-Liberal.” E-mail: lchavez@ceousa.org

The Obamas

Democratic politicians like to see themselves as champions of public education. But when it comes to picking schools for their own children to attend, their support disappears.

President-elect Barack Obama is no different than hundreds of other Democratic elected officials across the nation – from members of Congress to big-city mayors and city council members.

The president-elect’s daughters have been in private schools in Chicago – and all indications are that they will enroll in one of Washington’s elite private schools when the family makes its big move to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

That’s too bad because it insulates the Obamas from what other families must deal with: a failing public school system that resists genuine reform. And in Washington’s case, it deprives a courageous new school chancellor of what would be her most powerful constituents, the first family.

D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee could use the Obamas’ help – especially in taking on the teachers union. Rhee has proposed a dramatic reform package aimed at removing incompetent teachers and rewarding excellence.

She wants to get rid of tenure – a job protection that is no benefit to students and helps keep some of the worst performing teachers in the classroom. And she is willing to pay top dollar to teachers whose students make real progress.

What’s more, she will use private dollars to fund the increases. The extra money for Rhee’s proposal would come from private foundations, which have already pledged an additional $75 million a year for five years, much of which would go to raise teacher pay.

Rhee’s bold plan encompasses a voluntary, two-tier track for teachers. Each teacher could choose whether to enroll in the green plan or the red one, both of which would increase pay but with strings attached.

Teachers who choose the green plan could potentially double the pay they could earn, but they would have to give up tenure for a year and would then need a principal’s recommendation to keep their job or face dismissal.

Those who choose the red plan would get smaller pay increases but would lose their seniority rights so that they could not bump more-junior teachers for school assignments if their own school closed or was reorganized.

The idea behind the plan would be to weed out the poor performers from those who were doing a good job, and reward merit rather than longevity.

In other words, public schools would begin to operate like most other segments of our society: Those who failed would feel it in their paychecks and those who succeeded would be rewarded there. But unions don’t cotton to merit-based pay, insisting that seniority is what really matters.

The unions’ interest is solely in filling their own coffers with dues and maintaining their political power. An incompetent teacher who pays dues is just as valuable to the union as an excellent teacher, and the bad teacher may be more beholden to the union to protect his or her job.

No wonder, then, the Washington Teachers Union, an affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers, is resisting Rhee’s plan.

The union is refusing even to put Rhee’s proposal to a vote of its membership, reportedly because of pressure from the AFT’s new president, Randi Weingarten.

Rhee and Weingarten have locked horns before when Rhee worked for a nonprofit education group in New York City, where Weingarten also leads the local United Federation of Teachers.

Weingarten won her battle against reforms Rhee proposed for the New York schools – but Rhee has a powerful ally in Washington’s mayor Adrian Fenty. Now if only the Obamas could be enlisted to her side, Rhee might actually prevail in D.C.

President-elect Obama wants the best education for his girls – what parent doesn’t? But as someone whose own children attended D.C. public schools, I know what it means to push for reform of public education from within.

The Obamas could send a powerful message if they were to enroll their daughters in the D.C. system, either in a regular or a charter school. And it would certainly give them a window into the problems those schools face.

But I won’t hold my breath. Democratic politicians’ support for public education usually amounts to spending other people’s money and keeping their own kids out.

Obama kids should be in public school

E-mail: lchavez@ceousa.org

A launcher of short-range Iskander missile is in a column of Russian military vehicles, during a rehearsal for a military parade in downtown Moscow in April. President Dmitry Medvedev said Wednesday that Russia will deploy the short-range Iskander missiles in response to U.S. missile defense plans.

Vice President-elect Joe Biden issued a prescient warning in the last days of the presidential campaign:

If Barack Obama were elected president, he would be tested by a major international crisis soon after taking office.

Biden was wrong about one thing: The test has come even before Obama is sworn in.

Within hours of Obama’s impressive victory, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev warned that Russia will deploy short-range missiles capable of hitting NATO territory if the new American president builds a missile defense system to protect Europe.

It’s unclear where Obama will come down on this issue. He’s been on both sides during the campaign.

The idea of an anti-missile defense system, of course, is not new. The United States has been working on an anti-missile system to protect our territory since the Reagan administration.

The Strategic Defense Initiative – often derisively dismissed as “Star Wars” by its critics – fundamentally changed the way the U.S. approached the idea of nuclear war.

Through much of the Cold War, the United States based its defense almost entirely on a good offense: mutually assured destruction.

We would have so many weapons that the Soviets would realize an attack on us would be suicidal. If they launched a surprise nuclear attack, enough of our missiles would survive to retaliate and annihilation would be the fate of both sides.

But Reagan changed the equation. Essentially abandoning the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which allowed the Soviets and U.S. to set up anti-missile systems to protect only their two capitals, Reagan announced he would explore building a defense shield to protect the entire country.

Some 20 years later, U.S. technology has advanced to the point that we are capable of deploying a limited system to protect our allies.

Last year, the U.S. announced negotiations with some of our friends in Europe to deploy anti-missile systems on their territory. For some of those allies, the primary threat they fear is a nuclear-armed Iran. Poland, with whom we’ve now signed an agreement, also fears a newly belligerent Russia.

But the Bush administration has been at pains to reassure an insecure Russia that any American-deployed system would be purely defensive – a so-called “hit-to-kill” strategy in which a missile’s technology would not include explosives but would rely on intercepting a nuclear missile before it hit its target.

Russia has now made it clear to the incoming president: Move ahead with deploying 10 interceptor missiles in Poland and a radar system in the Czech Republic, and we will deploy short-range missiles near Poland.

So what will our new president do? The last time Russia flexed its considerable muscle, by invading Georgia, candidate Obama at first acted as if both sides were equally to blame. He later righted himself, condemning Russia as the aggressor.

But those were just words – the only thing a candidate has at his disposal. On Jan. 20, President Obama will have to take action.

As fellow blogger Abe Greenwald wryly noted, “In Russia, we now witness ice-cold realism at its most intractable. This is an enemy that advances when we blink.”

President-elect Obama is busy preparing for the transition to his new office. But the Russians won’t wait – and neither will our enemies. Obama must signal that there will be no major shifts in American foreign or defense policy, irrespective of campaign rhetoric about change.

He could do so by quickly announcing his picks for secretaries of state and defense. I doubt Colin Powell wants another term at state, but perhaps he would view defense as a new challenge.

At the very least, such a choice would inform Russia that despite partisan wrangling in election years, the United States remains committed to protecting our allies and ourselves, and a President Obama has no plans to change that.

Obama’s first international test

Linda Chavez is chairwoman of the Center for Equal Opportunity. E-mail: lchavez@ceousa.org

All fair-minded Americans understand that race should not be a factor in choosing our next president.

So why should race continue to play a role in deciding who gets into college or receives a government contract or is hired or promoted in a government job? It makes no sense to argue that we’re supposed to be colorblind in the polling booth but color-conscious in so many other areas.

On Election Day, voters in Colorado and Nebraska will have the opportunity to end this racial double standard by approving amendments to their state constitutions that will outlaw racial preferences in state education, contracting and employment. Polls suggest that these ballot initiatives will pass easily. It’s about time.

For 40 years, we’ve maintained a kind of cognitive dissonance in our public policies when it comes to race.

On the one hand, we have condemned – and made illegal – racial discrimination. On the other, we’ve condoned – even actively encouraged – racial preferences for favored minority groups.

If it is wrong for an employer to refuse to hire someone because of skin color or ancestry, why is it right to require that same employer to achieve and maintain a certain racial and ethnic balance in the work force?

How can race and ethnicity be impermissible bases on which to deny admission to students but be perfectly acceptable factors in deciding which students to admit?

Welcome to the Alice-in-Wonderland world of affirmative action.

Proponents used to argue that such programs were necessary to overcome the effects of historical discrimination. Now, they claim affirmative action isn’t about remedying past discrimination, it’s about promoting diversity. Whatever.

No matter how you try to rationalize it, picking winners and losers based on skin color is ugly. And it’s especially pernicious when government itself is the culprit, which is why the ballot initiatives in Nebraska and Colorado specifically restrict government-sponsored racial preferences.

Race is frequently the deciding factor in determining who gets into the University of Nebraska law school, for example.

This month, the Center for Equal Opportunity, a public policy research organization that I chair, released a study (http://www.ceousa.org/content/ view/628/100) of admission practices at the state’s College of Law.

Analyzing admissions data from 2006 and 2007, the study shows that a black nonresident applicant is 20 times more likely to be admitted to the law school than a Nebraska resident who happens to be white.

Overall, the odds favoring the admission of a black applicant with the same grades and test scores as a white applicant were an astonishing 442-to-1.

In defending the practice, the dean of the law school said that it was necessary “to admit a class with a diversity of experiences and viewpoints to ensure vigorous and enlightening classroom discussions,” arguing, “we can better discuss alleged race-based police practices if African-Americans are in the room.”

But what lessons do students learn when they discover the LSAT scores of the top 25 percent of black students at the law school are actually lower than the scores of the bottom 25 percent of their fellow white students?

And Nebraska isn’t alone in admitting less-qualified black and Latino applicants over whites.

Center for Equal Opportunity has studied racial preferences in admissions at dozens of colleges, law schools and medical schools across the country, including a study that looked at undergraduate admissions at all state schools in Colorado a decade ago. (Unfortunately, Colorado’s higher education commission would not provide admissions data to update the study this year.)

The pattern was the same virtually everywhere: To achieve “diversity,” colleges and universities routinely admit black and Latino students with lower grades and test scores than their white and Asian peers.

In a few cases, the differences were small. But at many more schools the disparities were huge. At Arizona State University law school, the center found the odds favoring admission for black applicants over whites were 1,115-to-1 – the worst for any school we have studied.

Approval of the Colorado and Nebraska civil rights initiatives on Tuesday would bring to five the number of states that have banned racial preferences in state programs.

Discriminating against or granting preference to anyone because of skin color has no place in America – and the polling booth is the perfect place to demonstrate it.

Linda Chavez is chair of the Center for Equal Opportunity and author of “An Unlikely Conservative: The Transformation of an Ex-Liberal.” E-mail: lchavez@ceousa.org

What are the pillars of conservatism today? Clearly, a commitment to individual rights, limited government, and free enterprise has historically had the broadest appeal within the conservative movement.

Many on the left are hopeful that this election will drive the nail in the coffin of the conservative movement.

There is some cause for legitimate concern among conservatives. No matter who wins the election, conservatives will have a more difficult time making our influence felt than at any time in recent memory.

For all his many admirable qualities, John McCain has never been a movement conservative. If he’s elected he will be just as interested in forging bipartisan compromise as he will be in standing on conservative principle.

If Barack Obama becomes president, conservatives will have a convenient foil. But the weakness of our movement now makes it less likely that conservatives will be effective in stopping the worst excesses of an Obama administration.

The Obama-Reid-Pelosi juggernaut will likely roll over any conservative opposition, unless conservatives come together and bring the American people with them.

But conservatives have been down before – and it is too early to count us out. Conservatives watched their hero, Barry Goldwater, lose the presidency in 1964, but we found a more appealing and effective standard-bearer in Ronald Reagan. A decade and a half later, Reagan was in the White House and the conservative movement was ascendant.

If conservatism is to rise again, however, it must offer a coherent and compelling alternative, both to the politics that have dominated this election cycle and to the past eight years of GOP leadership.

With no obvious successor to Reagan waiting in the wings to reinvigorate, much less reinvent, 21st-century conservatism, we will not be rescued by the charisma of a single individual.

The first task is to define what conservatism stands for today. In the Reagan era, it was lower taxes, smaller government, a strong national defense, and resistance to the culture of permissiveness that was the byproduct of the ’60s and ’70s.

Fiscal conservatives, defense hawks, and social conservatives worked side by side contentedly in the Reagan coalition. But that coalition has been badly frayed during the past eight years.

Conservatives have watched as a Republican White House and GOP-controlled Congress enlarged government, expanded domestic programs, and raised a mountain of debt.

The collapse of credit markets in the past few weeks has also occasioned the greatest government intervention in the free market since the New Deal – but this time led by a putatively conservative and Republican administration.

Since Reagan, conservatives also have been impotent to prevent the counterculture from becoming the mainstream culture. And with the fall of the Soviet Union, conservatives even began to split over national defense.

Islamic fundamentalism poses a grave threat to the West; I would argue, as great a threat as communism. But conservatives differ not only over how best to counter it but also over whether Islamism can or should be defeated.

So what are the pillars of conservatism today? Clearly, a commitment to individual rights, limited government, and free enterprise has historically had the broadest appeal within the conservative movement.

But where does that leave social and religious conservatives? Will the new conservatism provide a place at the table to those who are more motivated by moral than by economic issues?

And while all conservatives would say they believe in a strong national defense, there remain irreconcilable disagreements among the different factions of the conservative movement on how to keep America strong.

Perhaps adversity will prove to unite conservatives. If, as many of us fear, an Obama administration and an expanded Democratic congressional majority move the United States closer to European-style social democracy, conservatives will coalesce to resist it.

But, to be successful, we must offer an alternative vision – one that appeals beyond movement circles to the general public.

Americans intuitively know that free market capitalism creates wealth that benefits more people than does government redistribution, but their faith has been tested in recent weeks.

And with an Obama administration promising an ever-expanding welfare state – and more importantly, one that provides benefits to the middle class, much as European social democracies have for decades – Americans will be tempted to think they will be better off if government decides to “spread the wealth around.”

Conservatism rose phoenixlike out of the ashes of the Goldwater defeat. It will take a similar feat to rescue the movement now. No less than the future of the United States depends on it.

Linda Chavez is chair of the Center for Equal Opportunity and author of “An Unlikely Conservative: The Transformation of an Ex-Liberal.” E-mail: lchavez@ceousa.org

By growing his business, Joe Wurzelbacher is creating wealth. And by "redistributing wealth," as Obama wants the government to do, he's actually reducing overall wealth in the economy.

‘When you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody,” Barack Obama explained to Joe Wurzelbacher in Ohio earlier this week.

But Joe the Plumber, as he has become known thanks to Wednesday night’s presidential debate where his name was invoked no fewer than a dozen times by both candidates, isn’t buying it. And Wurzelbacher is right to be skeptical.

In an interview with CBS’ Katie Couric after the debate, Wurzelbacher said he’s worried that Obama would be the one deciding who is wealthy and, therefore, should be taxed more.

Obama says only those earning more than $250,000 will see their taxes go up. But Wurzelbacher worries, “When’s he going to decide that $100,000 is too much, you know? I mean, you’re on a slippery slope here.”

Wurzelbacher’s fears are well founded. When debate moderator Bob Schieffer asked Obama which program he would scale back, the Democratic nominee could not name a single significant one.

Obama will have to come up with the money to pay for some trillion dollars in new spending in his first term – including what he calls a “tax cut.” But what it really will be is a check, from taxpayers, to low-income Americans who already don’t pay any federal income taxes.

The wealthy already pay a hugely disproportionate share of all federal income taxes. An analysis by the nonpartisan Tax Foundation said taxpayers with an adjusted gross income of $153,542 and above made up the nation’s top 5 percent of earners in 2006 (the latest year for which IRS figures are available).

But this top 5 percent paid nearly 60 percent of all the income taxes collected in 2006, while earning about 37 percent of AGI.

For all the talk of middle-income earners paying most of the taxes, the facts suggest otherwise. Those in the 26 to 50 percentiles of AGI pay about 11 percent of taxes and earn 19 percent of income.

So when Barack Obama says he wants to “spread the wealth around,” what he’s really talking about is redistributing wealth through the tax system by forcing higher income earners not only to pay a disproportionate share of taxes but to fund cash transfers to those earning less.

Obama’s proposed tax plan includes provisions for what he calls refundable “tax credits” for low-income Americans, many of whom don’t pay any federal income taxes.

In other words, those who already pay no taxes would be sent a government check equal to the “credits” in Obama’s plan, including 6.2 percent of income of those earning up to $8,100 and a refundable “credit” of 10 percent of mortgage interest paid by those who don’t itemize.

Obviously, some people think this is “fair.” Obama told John McCain in Wednesday’s debate, “Well, I don’t mind paying a little more.”

But Joe the Plumber might not feel quite the same way. As a small-business man, Wurzelbacher will likely take those earnings to invest in a bigger company – that’s what he told Obama he wanted to do when he asked his original question on the campaign trail.

By growing his business, Wurzelbacher is creating wealth. And by “redistributing wealth,” as Obama wants the government to do, he’s actually reducing overall wealth in the economy by taking away capital from those who can invest it efficiently in direct job creation.

And the real irony is that if Obama is elected and succeeds in raising taxes on the top 5 percent, he’s likely to collect less tax, not more, if history is a guide.

Obama says he wants to return roughly to the tax system in place during the Clinton years. But in 1994 (after Clinton raised the top tax rate in what was the largest tax increase in history), the top 5 percent of earners paid only 48 percent of all taxes, not today’s 60 percent.

Even after the boom years of the late 1990s, the wealthiest 5 percent were shouldering less of the tax burden than today’s wealthy, about 55 percent. And the total revenues collected from them were less than today as well.

One of the great successes of America has been the realization of such people as Joe the Plumber that one day they, too, could be “rich” if they worked hard, invested and grew their own businesses.

Now Obama and the Democrats want to replace that American Dream with a fantasy that wealth is static and must be redistributed to ensure fairness.

If Obama’s plan becomes reality, it could well turn into an economic nightmare by punishing the most productive to reward the least productive in our society.

Spreading the wealth doesn’t sound all that different from Karl Marx’s famous dictum: From each according to his ability to each according to his need.

Linda Chavez is chair of the Center for Equal Opportunity and author of “An Unlikely Conservative: The Transformation of an Ex-Liberal.” E-mail: lchavez@ceousa.org

Barack Obama and John McCain at this week's debate: There are some real racial double standards in this campaign, but they seem to favor Obama, not McCain.

Was John McCain playing the race card when he referred to Barack Obama as “that one” in Tuesday’s presidential debate?

Obama’s campaign and its echo chamber in the media surely want us to think so. Within seconds, the campaign was sending out e-mails to reporters drawing attention to the phrase, and the media were quick to take up the charge.

The New York Times’ Maureen Dowd somehow claimed that the phrase is “a cross between ‘The One’ and ‘That Woman,’ ” and meant as a subtle warning to whites that they “should not open the door to the dangerous Other,” namely a black man.

CBS’ Jeff Greenfield said, “Those two words are going to be what the water cooler conversation is tomorrow.” Calling race “a particularly toxic issue in this country,” NPR’s Michel Martin asked a guest, “Do you think that race is becoming part of this campaign?”

This faux racism charge is as offensive as it is off base. McCain’s somewhat unartful reference was born of frustration that Obama has managed to avoid criticism for his pork-barrel spending, even when it benefits the superrich.

McCain was referring to a 2005 energy bill that included huge breaks for the oil companies, which Obama supported and McCain did not.

If race played any role in this calculus, it is the unspoken assumption that because Obama is both black and a liberal, he is immune from suspicion that he would ever do anything to benefit rich white guys.

Throughout the campaign, Barack Obama has tried to have it both ways on the race issue. As long as he thinks he’s safely ahead and no one has the temerity to criticize him, he’s the post-racial candidate who refuses to be defined or constrained by race.

But when he’s being challenged in any way – say, by bringing up his 20-year relationship with Rev. Jeremiah Wright or his troubling association with Weather Underground terrorist William Ayers – his supporters, if not Obama himself, are quick to claim racism must be the motive.

The Associated Press claimed Oct. 5 that vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s reference to the Obama-Ayers connection “carried a racially tinged subtext that John McCain himself may come to regret.”

Racially tinged? The Weather Underground were mostly over-privileged, white radicals from the ’60s who tried to blow up buildings, including the Capitol and the Pentagon, and killed one policeman and maimed another in San Francisco.

Obama has some explaining to do about his relationship with Ayers, and crying “racist” won’t stop legitimate inquiries into whether Obama has been honest about how closely they worked together over the years or what Ayers’ role was in launching Obama’s political career.

There are some real racial double standards in this campaign, but they seem to favor Obama, not McCain.

If Obama were a white candidate who attended a church whose pastor regularly inveighed against blacks and accused them of plotting to kill whites, would he have become the Democratic nominee for president?

Would he have been able to get away with a speech in which he said he could no more disown his pastor than he could the white community or his own grandmother? And how would it look if he abandoned this association only after the pastor began attacking him?

If Obama were white, would he have won more than 90 percent of the black vote in the Democratic primaries? And without that overwhelming support from black voters, could he have secured the nomination?

That is not to say that Obama is not talented and appealing on his own. But his race has been more a plus factor than a negative one to date.

It remains to be seen what, if any, role race will play come Election Day. But crying racism over every perceived slight or personal criticism is more likely to cause a backlash than it is to win a single extra vote for Obama.

Linda Chavez is chair of the Center for Equal Opportunity and author of “An Unlikely Conservative: The Transformation of an Ex-Liberal.” E-mail: lchavez@ceousa.org