The public reaction to the Transportation Security Administration’s (TSA) overreach and lack of even minimal sensitivity should stand as a lesson to those who believe the government always knows best and think Americans are a malleable bunch who will ultimately do as they are told.

George Will, echoing the late William F. Buckley Jr., got it right. We do live in a society in which too many of us are willing to accept just about any indignity without protest. But as the boys and girls at TSA are learning, our acquiescence in the outrageous has its limits.

At one level, the argument being made by TSA in favor of increasingly intrusive searches at our airports is the same we’ve heard every time anyone has dared since 9/11 to suggest that our protectors ought to be sensitive to constitutional rights and the differences in the way free and totalitarian states go about the task of protecting themselves. We are told that since we are in the midst of a war with an enemy that has little respect for human life, we must do everything we can to protect ourselves and the American homeland; that security must of necessity trump traditionally guaranteed rights and that those who disagree simply don’t understand the dangers we face.

Former Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld has been much maligned, but put the challenge we face in better perspective than anyone since when he observed just a few days after braving the fire and smoke enveloping the Pentagon on 9/11 that if, in response to the attacks of our enemies, we give up those freedoms that are uniquely American, we will have lost. Since then we have been gradually doing just that, and justifying every alteration in the way we live our lives in the name of “national security.”

The “enhanced” pat-downs being visited on those who refuse to go through the new scanners are clearly designed to intimidate and make such refuseniks pay for their reluctance to do as they’re told. Some are afraid of the radiation, but more object to bureaucrats sitting around a screen to observe them virtually naked. The TSA response: Get over it.

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As Rep. John Boehner (R-Ohio) and his team prepare for the next Congress, they are wrestling with a number of leadership and committee leadership contests that create a minefield for all involved.

Any House Speaker hopes his committee chairmen and leadership team will be made up exclusively of hardworking, competent colleagues who share one additional attribute that trumps all others: loyalty. They rarely manage to put together such a team, however, for a variety of reasons. Politicians being what they are, allies are prone to putting their own interests first when the chips are down. In leadership elections, winners are chosen not because they are the Speaker’s favorites but because of personal popularity, competing interests within the party caucus, or because of pressure from outside interests.

Boehner’s challenges are complicated. The Republican majority he leads was elected by voters who really do want change in Washington and tend not to trust “establishment” Republicans, nor anyone with whom they are less than familiar.

In addition, Mr. Boehner famously said after the election that he and his team heard what the voters were saying and would act on the message being sent. That means House Republicans have to try to “repeal and replace” ObamaCare and really try to tackle the out-of-control spending that scared so many Americans into their first political activism. Granting an earmark lover and big spender like California’s Rep. Jerry Lewis a waiver so he can chair the Appropriations Committee would be seen by many as selling out the principal message of the election — regardless of how loyal to Boehner he might prove to be.

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In a perfect world, candidates vying for public office would debate issues and contrasting philosophical approaches to the problems confronting the nation and her citizens. Historians like to point to the Lincoln/Douglas debates as an example of how campaigns ought to be run. But that was then, and this is now.

We live in an impatient and superficial world. Few voters bother to watch what passes for “debates” between candidates, and fewer still have the patience to actually listen to serious men discussing serious issues at length and in detail.

Candidates say they want to discuss the issues and avoid the name calling that has given the profession a bad name, but what they really mean is that they’d be happy to focus on their positions that most voters favor. Unfortunately, sometimes politicians discover their positions … or their performance in office … isn’t viewed with the adulation they believe they deserve. When this happens, all bets are off.

When a candidate discovers his or her approach to governing is in disfavor or when the public has turned on the candidate’s programs and policies, things can get very ugly, very fast. This fall, Democratic candidates are ripping and tearing at their opponents in an attempt to avoid talking about the record and to instead convince voters those conservative candidates are sleazy, crazy, incompetent or simply unqualified for the offices they seek.

A year ago, Democrats actually thought they would be able to focus on issues and on the successes they’d won in Congress. They pumped each other up saying the healthcare bill would prove popular once passed and the economy would recover as a result of their policies.

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It’s déjà vu all over again.

In the early fall of 1992, George H.W. Bush was running for reelection, the economy was in recession and the Democrats had the incumbent president on the ropes. Bush was, they said, out of touch and perhaps incapable of understanding the challenges facing middle-class Americans grappling with real-world problems.

He was an elitist who played golf and ran around the world while the men and women who had put him in office were struggling just to survive. By way of contrast, his ultimately successful Democratic opponent assured people that, unlike Bush, he could “feel their pain.”

The president and his advisers argued that the recession was over. It had, according to most economists, ended that spring, and the nation was on its way to recovery. More evidence, the Democrats cried, that Bush didn’t get it.

This year, a Democratic president and his globetrotting spouse appear as divorced from the reality of today as then-President Bush seemed nearly two decades ago. Like Bush, Barack Obama comes across as a nice enough fellow who talks about things that just don’t matter to most Americans and insists on fixing things they aren’t sure are broken rather than tackling jobs they know need to be done.

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In the lead-up to the 1972 elections, then-Vice President Spiro Agnew headed up something called “Operation Switch” at President Nixon’s request. His mission was to help get Southern Democratic elected officials more comfortable with Republican conservative values than their own party to switch and urge their supporters to follow.

Most Southern elected officials at the time were Democrats, and the Republican parties in the region tended to be small, elitist groups that couldn’t win elections that were often referred to by cynics as “Post Office Parties.” They were comfortable little groups of elitists eligible for patronage jobs when Republican presidents occupied the White House. Most Southern GOP leaders were quite comfortable as big fish in very small ponds and felt personally threatened at the prospect of admitting new members to their small and exclusive club.

I served as Agnew’s chief political assistant back then, and shortly after Operation Switch launched, then-Rep. Lou Frey of Florida came to see me. He was furious. “We don’t want these people in our party,” he (literally) yelled, “because if we let ’em in, the next thing you know, they’ll be primarying us and taking over.”

That White House scene has often come to mind as newly energized voters with new concerns have, in the process of moving to the GOP, threatened the comfort level of the establishment in charge.

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In early October 2006, as it was becoming more obvious by the day that Republicans were going to lose big in November, I was approached by a nervous young presidential aide at a White House meeting. He reminded me that I had been around in 1974 when the GOP took a post-Watergate pasting that those who lived through will never forget.

Wondering what it was like back then, he asked, “Did it feel like this?”

“Worse,” I said, “much worse.” Back then, Republicans knew there was no way out, and the apprehension by October was probably greater than among 1994 Democrats, who managed to remain in denial almost until the votes were counted.

This time, though, Democrats know what’s coming and, like their Republican counterparts back in 1974, they don’t know what to do about it. As a result, they’re rushing around the deck of the sinking ship blaming each other, the media and, in some case, the “stupidity” of an ungrateful electorate.

With limited funds and a need to focus on incumbents they might actually be able to save, today’s fights among the Democrats are over who ought to be allowed into the lifeboats and who ought to stoically accept their fate. Democratic leaders have triaged candidates they believe are drowning anyway in an understandable effort to save those they can.

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One of the promises every president since Richard Nixon has failed to deliver on is the recurring pledge to somehow free the nation from its ever-growing “dependence on foreign oil.”

Until fairly recently, the need to find other ways to meet our growing energy needs was driven primarily by national security rather than economic or environmental concerns; both are often in conflict with worries about instability or outright hostility in those nations on which we have depended for so long.

In the early ’70s there was a belief that nuclear power might replace oil as a source of energy. Later in the decade, the spike in oil prices following the Arab oil embargo convinced the Carter administration to waste billions in an attempt to develop new unconventional domestic sources that made little sense even at the time.

Since then, politicians have tried to “wean” us from our dependence on oil by artificially raising prices, using regulations to hamstring oil and coal producers, subsidizing or even mandating more fuel-efficient technologies and trying to persuade voters that wind, solar and alternative sources of fuel are the answer.

Most energy experts believe that regardless of our ability to replace oil in the longer term, in our lifetimes we will continue to need oil to fuel our economy and to maintain a 21st-century lifestyle. The question is not whether America needs oil, but where we get it. There are really three main sources: We can buy it from our enemies; find and develop reserves within the confines of our own borders or in the waters off our shores; or buy it from stable, friendly nations.

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Presidents tend to get upset when they discover that their agenda isn’t a carbon copy of the agenda of the voters who put them in office.

Some presidents adjust to reality; others seem willing to resort to almost any means to get what they want. When the public rejected his early big-government schemes, Clinton simply announced that “the era of big government is over” and went on. Nixon, on the other hand, decided that if he couldn’t accomplish what he wanted with public support, he’d work in the dark.

It is becoming clearer by the day that President Obama and his team are more attracted to the Nixon model. Maybe it’s his Chicago background or the fact that, unlike Bill Clinton, the man’s a true believer who meant it when he said he’d rather have a “successful” one-term presidency than be reelected.

The significance of that statement hinges heavily on how the president defines “success.” If one identifies success with popularity, it would follow that if his first term could be counted as “successful,” a president would be rewarded with a second. If he were using “success” in that way, the statement makes little sense; it only makes sense, in fact, if he equates the word with “consequential” and was saying that he would be willing to risk the voters’ wrath to advance his agenda rather than theirs.

Most presidents want it both ways. They want to advance their own agenda without risking personal popularity or the future of their party, but each has to weigh whether to follow the polls or risk everything for policies he truly believes to be in the best interests of the country. This led President George W. Bush, who was (rightly or wrongly) convinced that confronting a terrorist enemy in Iraq and Afghanistan was essential, to pursue the war on terror aggressively even in the face of developing public opposition.

Democrats trashed Bush and his allies in Congress for their bullheadedness and failure to bend to growing public opposition. The 2006 and 2008 elections turned in part on this developing opposition to his policies, but even more importantly on the public’s growing sense that its president was out of touch with Americans and unwilling to listen seriously to a concerned public.

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Greece, Portugal and President Barack Obama have at long last combined to turn the common Washington wisdom about government spending on its head.

Washington insiders insisted for decades that those who say they favor fiscal restraint in the abstract really want more government benefits – regardless of cost. As a result, neither Republicans nor Democrats have made serious attempts to restrain spending.

Republicans usually promise to cut spending but have instead concentrated on keeping taxes low and arguing, not entirely incorrectly, that lower taxes stimulate economic growth and produce more revenue. The problem is that this argument has given Republicans an excuse to talk tough while doing little to fight spending.

Democrats have been even worse. They have simply tended to argue that deficits and debt don’t matter. In the sixties and early seventies the late Hubert Humphrey derided fiscal conservative concerns about growing deficits and debts as irrelevant since “we only owe the money to ourselves.” That was before the Chinese bought up our debt and before interest on the debt threatened to eat up more tax revenues than the Cold War.

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As incumbent Utah Sen. Bob Bennett (R) was losing the right even to run in the primary for the seat he’s held for 18 years, word from California was coming in that Meg Whitman, long considered a shoo-in in the Golden State’s gubernatorial primary, might be in trouble.

Whitman has invested close to $60 million of her own money for the right to lead a state careening toward bankruptcy and at one point enjoyed a seemingly insurmountable lead over Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner reminiscent of, say, the lead Florida Gov. Charlie Crist once enjoyed over Marco Rubio in that state.

In recent days Poizner has closed the gap considerably and is within eight to 10 points of Whitman in a race already far closer than anyone would have predicted possible six months ago. Poizner has thrown a good bit of the money he’s made since serving in the Bush administration into his campaign, but while his pockets are deeper than most, there’s no way he’s going to outspend former eBay CEO Whitman. If he wins the primary, it will have to be because he strikes California voters as better able to deal with the continuing crisis in which the state finds itself or because they reject Whitman as too much of an establishment candidate. Either could happen in today’s political world.

It’s difficult for one who doesn’t spend an inordinate amount of time immersed in the peculiarly unique political world Californians inhabit to understand what goes on out there, so while I won’t pretend to predict who will win the June 8 GOP primary, the contest itself is interesting and instructive.

Whitman apparently decided early on to position herself as the “establishment” candidate in the race. Her campaign chairman is former Gov. Pete Wilson, and she has sought and advertised the endorsements of every Republican with a recognizable name, from Mitt Romney to Eric Cantor. In some years, this would have been a great strategy, but this year, voters are leery of such endorsements and seek  candidates who will look at problems anew. As a result, Whitman allowed Poizner to position himself as an outsider in the year of the outsider.

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Mexican President Felipe Calderon asked for it when he attacked Arizona’s new immigration law as a “violation of human rights.”

Arizona Sen. Jon Kyl (R) and others responded to Calderon’s attacks by pointing out the hypocrisy. Anyone who has compared Mexico’s laws on immigration with ours would dismiss ours as simply weak-kneed.

The Washington Times and other publications reported over the weekend that entering Mexico illegally is a felony carrying a two-year prison sentence. If one can survive a term in a Mexican prison, expulsion is next. If caught trying to re-enter, one can get yet another 10 years, and anyone caught with an expired visa can get six years.

Whether these penalties have prevented a flood of illegal immigrants from the north or whether they just seem to be working because no one really wants to break in to Mexico is a question for another day.

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When I came to town in the early seventies “transparency” was a photographic rather than a political term. Legislation was written in back rooms by Congressional grandees, votes were traded for bridges, highways and no one outside Washington was much the wiser.

In those days, more than a few Congressional and Senate offices had three basic “robotyped” letters to send to constituents concerning pending legislation. The first went to those who supported it and assured the writer that the Congressman or Senator shared their views and supported them. The second said virtually the same thing to those who opposed the bill except that it assured them that the signer shared their objections and was opposed as well. The third sympathized with those who had questions and were undecided on the wisdom of the pending legislation and assured them that their elected representative too was agonizing over how to best represent them when the legislation came up for a vote.

Since there were multiple votes before final passage, these letters often cited votes reflecting the member’s basic agreement with the constituent and allowed him to vote pretty much as he wanted without fear that anyone would skewer him for the hypocrisy that allowed him to be for or against pending legislation before he finally voted the other way on final passage.

Those letters don’t work any more.

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With this vote, the U.S. House has chosen big government over freedom; bureaucracy over people.

The American Conservative Union has opposed this bill from the start because of its massive cost and red tape. The more we learn and Americans learn about the devil in the details of this bill the more disgust among Americans will grow. Empowering IRS agents to determine if Americans have proper health care coverage is not health care reform. Raising taxes is not health care reform. Massive increases in government spending is not health care reform. Imposing fines on Americans who don’t toe the line with what the liberals want in their personal health care plans is not real health care reform.

History will indeed mark this moment – as some Americans become more dependent on government and government becomes more intrusive in the personal lives and financial decisions of its citizens. This is a moment when government growth took a giant leap toward swallowing up more and more of the hard earn money of Americans. This is a moment when common sense reform took a back seat to liberalism run amuck.

In responding to the Democrat’s claims that spending massive amounts of new money on a new government program would actually lower the deficit, the ACU notes that the Ways and Means Committee estimated Medicare would cost only $9 billion each year after 25 years but that on its 25th birthday Medicare spent $67 billion, or seven times the initial cost estimate. The pattern is consistent in federal spending and the massive health care bill’s cost will likely follow suit.

The American people are not stupid or naive.

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David Brooks is the very embodiment of a New York Times editor’s picture of a “responsible” conservative.

He supported Obama in 2008 and dismisses Sarah Palin as an ignoramus without table manners. He considers Glenn Beck a clown and disdains the traditional conservative desire for limited government, lower taxes and fiscal responsibilities.  Perhaps most outrageously, however, Brooks last week managed to equate the tea party movement with the Weather Underground, SDS and the radicals who crawled out of leftist fever swamps in the sixties dedicated to destroying the America the tea partiers profess to love.

After the GOP electoral losses in 2006 and 2008, Brooks dismissed the notion that Republicans lost mainly because they had performed poorly in office and instead warned that the basic values of conservatives had destroyed the Republican brand. In BrooksWorld, Republicans lost because conservatives just hadn’t come to grips with modernity. Goldwater and Reagan, he hinted, spoke for a different time, to a different electorate in a different voice. The country and politics had changed and the time had come for conservatives to grow up.

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