Gambling With The Sopranos

One of the great advantages of doing a TV show for HBO - particularly a long-running, critically-acclaimed, genre-busting TV show - is that you don't have to fall back on the crutches of lesser television programs. For instance, when you need a dramatic device to signal a major character's downward spiral, you can afford to set it up multiple episodes or seasons in advance, and you definitely don't need to pluck a movie-of-the-week problem - like, say, a gambling addiction that's never manifested itself before - out of thin air. And while it's perfectly plausible that a random New Jersey mob boss would have a crippling gambling problem; it's much less plausible that the Tony Soprano we know and love would suddenly go all Marge Simpson and start blowing hundreds of thousands of dollars on "sure thing" football games, after six seasons in which his gambling has been confined, so far as I can remember, to poker games at the Bing and the occasional junket at Foxwoods.

All of which is a roundabout way of saying that I thought last night's Sopranos was weak stuff, and particularly disappointing given that the first three episodes of this final mini-season seemed to have shaken free of last year's wheel-spinning mediocrity.

In the close-knit but violent world of Sopranos blogging, Jeffrey Goldberg agrees with me about the episode, as does Chris Orr; Matt Zoller Seitz is more forgiving.

Update: And Peter Suderman joins the apologists.

Rooting For the Bad Guy

So Russell Crowe and Ridley Scott are apparently re-teaming - after the success of Gladiator and the, er, non-success of A Good Year - to make Nottingham, which Aintitcoolnews describes as "a twist on the Robin Hood character that paints the Sheriff of Nottingham as a noble and just lawman struggling under a corrupt king." It sounds promising enough, but if they're looking for a story in which the Sheriff is a sympathetic character, I wish they'd just adapt Sherwood, Parke Godwin's Robin Hood novel from the early 1990s: It's an entertaining, pulpy read that pulls off the rare trick of making both its Robin and its Sheriff appealing figures. I may be the only person who actually remembers Sherwood, so I suppose it would have been too much to ask - but after Kingdom of Heaven, I'm just a little worried about how Scott picks his screenplays.

The Ghost of Jacob Javits

Ramesh on Brooks:

... I think Brooks is right that a lot of conservatives have a paralyzing misimpression of Ronald Reagan. He's also right, in my view, that organized conservatism, and not just the Republican party, needs some innovation. But not just any old innovation, or innovation for its own sake, which is what Brooks comes close to suggesting. He thinks Rudy Giuliani should be free to "innovate" on social issues, and John McCain on economic ones. He thinks it's terrible that James Dobson criticizes Giuliani's "innovations," and that the Club for Growth criticizes McCain's. If Brooks wants to argue that that the party simply needs to move left on economics and social issues, then I'd be interested in seeing his case—but there wouldn't be anything especially innovative about it. And when the Club for Growth goes after a Lincoln Chafee or an Arlen Specter, which is what it spends much of its time doing, it's not stifling some creative conservative rethinking.

This is a crucial distinction, I agree - there are all sorts of kinds of reformism, conservative and otherwise, and what the Chafees and Specters represent (the long-interred corpse of Rockefeller Republicanism) is deservedly viewed by most people on the Right as a dead end. My erstwhile co-blogger Reihan once made the distinction between upper-middle and lower-middle reformism - that is, reform geared to the interest of the upper-middle class, and reform geared to the interests of the working class. So campaign-finance regulation is classic upper-middle reformism - it's a boutique issue that only the overclass cares about - whereas Mitt Romney's health care plan was an attempt at lower-middle reformism, since its main beneficiaries were supposed to be people teetering on the edge of having affordable health care coverage.

Pace Andrew, this latter kind of reform is very much in keeping with modern American conservatism, given that lower-middle reformism on issues like crime and welfare - and the rejection of Rockefeller Republicanism along the way - helped the GOP rise to power in the first place. (It's worth noting that Kevin Phillips' The Emerging Republican Majority, which limned the Reagan coalition before it existed, was essentially a long, data-rich brief for lower-middle reform as the foundation of a new majority.) "Compassionate conservatism" aimed in this direction and missed the mark, but it's still a promising path for the GOP to take. Republicans aren't going to become the party of the Northeast or the Pacific Northwest any time soon, which is where upper-middle reformism has always found it's natural home, but they can be competitive in the Midwest and the border South - which means more Pawlenty and Huckabee, and less Christine Todd Whitman.

Backwards March

Responding to Brooks' column, Jonah writes:

What Brooks sees as a the base's inability to accept change is often, in reality, a burning desire for change. He mocks the clamor for Fred Thompson to run as an "Authentic Conservative" but he fails to see, or at least credit, the degree to which the call for "Authentic Conservatism" is a rebuke of Bush. Compassionate conservatism was the change. And, I would argue, that change has done lasting damage to conservatism and to the GOP. And so now many want something new. The call for authentic conservatism, fairly or not, is not a call for staying the course.

And, one should recall, David's writing contributed a lot of oxygen to the legitimacy of compassionate conservatism. It has now been rejected by substantial quarters of the GOP and the invocations of Reaganism amount to the base's way of saying the experiment failed.

I think this is largely right as analysis, and it's precisely why the Right is in such difficulties. Reaganism ran out of steam in the late 1990s: It had succeeded on many fronts, been co-opted by the Democrats on others, and run up against a wall of pro-welfare state public opinion on still others. "Compassionate conservatism" was an attempt to address the new political landscape by promising to reform government in a conservative direction, rather than simply slashing it to the bone; it was a terrible slogan, to my mind, but the underlying idea was basically a good one. Unfortunately, the Bush Administration was a disaster on a variety of fronts, and even though the substance of compassionate conservatism was arguably the least of the Administration's problems, Bush's deviations from small-government principle have provided a convenient scapegoat for conservatives looking to explain what's gone wrong in the last six years without addressing, say, why the public rejected Social Security reform or why Iraq has been such a disaster.

As a result, conservatives who think the movement needs to adapt to a post-Reaganite landscape, rather than hunkering down and getting back to basics, are deemed to have been discredited by George W. Bush, and the prevailing attitude on the right is that the way out of the current mess is to commit the GOP to a platform of cutting government waste, extending Bush's tax cuts, and talking really, really tough about the war on terror and Iran. The result is that the Right is back where it was in the late 1990s, headed toward what Chris Caldwell has termed "Southern captivity", and convinced that going in this direction constitutes a change for the better.

Maybe it does. As Jonah says, conservatives and Republicans aren't the same thing, the conservative movement doesn't exist just to win elections, and maybe the lesson of the Bush years is that there's no compromise with Reaganite purism - though of course Reagan himself was no purist - that's worth the price, and no conservative reformism that won't shade into corruption and pork. Better to go into the wilderness, in this argument, than even consider trying to build on some of George W. Bush's political successes - they're too tainted to touch.

I have a feeling that eight years of President Obama will change some minds on this count, but I guess we'll find out.

Zero Grazing

Like most conservatives, I'm all for a little hypocrisy now and then - it's the tribute that vice plays to virtue, the glue that holds society together, and all the rest of it. It does seem, though, that the Bush Administration's abstinence advocates have stretched this principle to the breaking point.

I don't really have much to say about the fate of Randall Tobias, the Deputy Secretary of State who seems to have frequented escort services when he wasn't out promoting the ABC method of AIDS prevention ("abstain, be faithful, use a condom"). If you're curious about the question of how best to fight AIDS in Africa, though, I highly recommend this New York Review of Books essay from two years back on Uganda, which has been something of a success story in the effort to drive down HIV rates. The author, Helen Epstein, argues that neither abstinence education nor condom distribution really addresses the root of the problem, which has more to do with the consequences of polygamy, formal and informal, than any other single factor:

Continue reading "Zero Grazing" »

Sleepwalking Toward Disaster

It should go without saying that I like David Brooks' column yesterday about the Republican malaise, but that doesn't change the fact that it's really good. Here's the money quote, which you may have already seen:

The party is blessed with a series of charismatic candidates who are not orthodox Republicans. But the pressures of the campaign are such that these candidates have had to repress anything that might make them interesting. Instead of offering something new, each of them has been going around pretending to be the second coming of George Allen — a bland, orthodox candidate who will not challenge any of the party’s customs or prejudices.

But I also think this line is important:

Conservatives have allowed a simplistic view of Ronald Reagan to define the sacred parameters of thought. Reagan himself was flexible, unorthodox and creative. But conservatives have created a mythical, rigid Reagan, and any deviation from that is considered unholy.

Ramesh Ponnuru makes a similar point in his advice to Fred Thompson, which is worth reading in full (and not just because he quotes me):

... a lot of conservatives have been telling themselves that Republicans lost the election because they were insufficiently committed to conservative orthodoxy: that if they had just eschewed pork and prescription-drug benefits, the voters would have been kinder to them. It is a comforting theory with almost no basis in fact ... Running on a strictly conservative platform has not won Republicans the presidency since at least 1988. Since that campaign was heavy on flag-waving, it might be more accurate to say “since 1980.” Even in 1980, moreover, Reagan made some innovations to conservatism: adding supply-side tax cuts to the mix, and backing away from opposition to entitlement programs. More to the point, Reagan succeeded not because his platform conformed to a philosophy, but because it applied that philosophy, creatively, to the problems of the day.

If the conservative movement's domestic policy vision ran from Ponnuru on the right to Brooks on the left, well ... Andrew might not be happy with the result (though I think his differences with both men are often more a matter of emphases and rhetoric than policy substance), but I'm pretty sure the GOP wouldn't be staring disaster quite so squarely in the face.

The Sam's Club Republican

Now if only Tim Pawlenty were running for President . . .

When Meritocracy Attacks

Now that we're the junior left-right team here at the good ship Atlantic, I'm sure Matt Yglesias and I will be disagreeing an awful lot, so let me take this opportunity to say that I agree with every word in this post.

The GOP and History

Robert Novak explains why it may get worse for the Republicans before it gets better:

Continue reading "The GOP and History" »

The Wrong Pander

I'm not sure it says anything good about Rudy Giuliani, the Republican Party or the country as a whole that he seems more willing to throw his political convictions to the winds on gay marriage than on abortion. I never expected him to leap over to the pro-life side, obviously, but he could have come out as a pro-choice opponent of Roe v. Wade, on the Wittesian grounds that having the Supreme Court make abortion law has been bad for our politics. That would have been a flip-flop, sure, but one that landed him in a principled place and might have made him attractive to a lot of pro-life voters. Instead, he's decided to cast himself as the candidate who's for civil unions but against, well, actual-existing civil unions - presumably with the calculation that pandering to social conservatives on gay marriage is safer for the general election that being on the record as opposing Roe, which even pro-life candidates have been wary of doing. That calculation may be correct, given that Americans tend to describe themselves as pro-Roe even though majorities oppose its substance; on the other hand, civil unions command majority support in many polls too, and I suspect, and hope, that being pro-choice will hurt Rudy more in the primaries than being anti-civil unions will help him.

In the long run - or at least the short long run, since God knows where we'll be in 2250 - the pro-life movement is likely to remain a potent force in American politics, whereas I think it's clear that the crusade against gay marriage and civil unions is already petering out. (It's succeeded in nearly every state where it could plausibly succeed, and it would take an overreaching Supreme Court decision to fan it back to life, which is possible but unlikely.) And it would be nice to see the GOP candidates recognize that fact, instead of tailoring their panders to fit the political landscape of 2004.

Why Americans Have More Children

A fascinating post from Will Wilkinson, riffing on Nicholas Eberstadt's American Interest essay on America's enduring demographic exceptionalism.

(See also Reihan's post on the Eberstadt essay.)

Who's Afraid of Hillary Clinton?

Ramesh Ponnuru writes:

Sen. Clinton said last night that Republicans were afraid to run against her. I don't think that's right: I think that right now the conventional wisdom among Republicans is that Obama would be a stronger candidate. I think that CW is wrong, myself: I think Clinton's relative hawkishness, greater experience with tough elections (albeit at her husband's side rather than running herself), and more practical approach to politics will make her seem more presidential than him. It also makes me prefer her to him in the primary, not that I'll be voting in it.

My own sense is that Hillary has a slightly better chance of winning against a strong Republican candidate than Obama does - but that Obama has a much higher potential upside if things go well for him. His lack of experience, both in elective office and in competitive races, could mean that he'd get exposed in the general election and "opened up like a soft peanut" by a savvy GOP campaign, whereas Hillary is battle-hardened enough that there's less of a risk of her falling apart under pressure. But if Clinton wins, it's more likely to be a Bush-style victory - 50-52 percent of the vote in polarized electorate - whereas Obama, if he proves tough enough to take what the GOP throws at him, actually has a chance at the landslide that Karl Rove always dreamed of.

This Rasmussen survey is particularly telling:

Thirty-three percent (33%) of Likely Voters say they’d definitely vote for Illinois Senator Barack Obama (D). That’s the highest total received by any of ten leading Presidential hopefuls included in the poll. Thirty-three percent (33%) also say they’d definitely vote against Obama giving him a net differential of zero . . . Other polling during the past month found Obama’s favorability ratings have increased to the highest level of any 2008 candidate.

As for Hillary . . .

Opinions are most solid concerning the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination, New York Senator Hillary Clinton—78% have an opinion of whether they’ll definitely vote for or against her regardless of who she runs against. That includes 30% who would definitely vote for the former First Lady and 48% who would definitely vote against her.

A third of the electorate is undecided on Obama; less than a quarter is undecided on Hillary. And she's losing the people who are decided by eighteen percentage points. You can win an election with those numbers, but you can’t win it by much.

Why "Fake Populism" Sells

Noam Scheiber makes an interesting argument:

Liberals ... assume that what most Americans want from politics is a modest improvement in their lives: Affordable health care, retirement security, good schools for their children. Under this paradigm, voters should prefer a politician whose life experience has taught him how difficult it can be to get by without such staples. The fake populist is maddening because he professes to understand their concerns but has zero life experience (or at least recent life experience) that would make such understanding possible.

But suppose most working-class voters want something entirely different from what liberals assume. Suppose they don't want to be slightly better off than they are today. Suppose they want to be rich. And the way they evaluate candidates, who are frequently rich themselves, is by wondering: Is this the kind of rich person I'd like to be? Now ask yourself: If you were a working-class voter in Middle America, what kind of rich person would you want to be? Would you want to be the kind of rich person who eats at pricey French restaurants, plays classical guitar, and vacations among the cognescenti in Sun Valley, Idaho? Or would you want to be the kind of rich person who noshes on peanut butter and jelly, reads Sports Illustrated, and kicks back at a ranch in the middle of nowhere? The difference between you and the first kind of rich person is a vast cultural chasm.

... that's more or less what Fred Thompson and George W. Bush are suggesting when they throw on the shit-kickers and turn up the drawl. Sure, they're phonies. But if you were rich, you'd want to be the same kind of phony, not a John Kerry kind of phony. (Though, come to think of it, Kerry's actually pretty authentic as a rich guy.) Liberals see richness and hominess as contradictory. But, for many working-class voters, they're complements. They like their rich people homey, and their homey people rich.

This is a sharp analysis, but I think it overstates the extent to which fake populism's appeal is a matter of Americans wanting to be rich themselves - though of course they do - when it's really just a matter of the enduring American tendency to prize cultural equality far more than economic equality. (Or "civic equality" more than "money equality," to borrow Mickey Kaus's terms.) We like our rich people just fine, in other words, so long as they don't put on airs, summer on Nantucket, or marry Teresa Heinz. This doesn't mean that being from a working-class background doesn't give an American politician a certain edge - Bill Clinton, for instance, used his childhood in Hope, Arkansas to pretty good effect - but in a race between two rich Ivy Leaguers, which is what the last couple Presidential elections have been and the next one may turn out to be, you're much more in tune with the democratic zeitgeist if you're faking populism than if you're being true to your inner millionaire.

Though come to think of it, what's necessarily "authentic" about Kerry's kind of millionaire lifestyle, and what's so "fake" about a rich person who wears cowboy boots, drinks beer and reads SI? It's only "fake" if you're pretending, and while Fred Thompson may be putting on an act, I'm pretty sure that George W. Bush really likes all the accoutrements of Crawford living, and that he'd be wearing cowboy books and talking with a twang even if he'd never run for office. In his famous piece on Bush-hatred, Jon Chait called the President a "pampered frat boy masquerading as [a rough-hewn Texan], with his pickup truck and blue jeans serving as the perfect props to disguise his plutocratic nature." Pampered he certainly is, but I don't think the jeans and truck are really "props" in any meaningful sense. His father faked being jes' folks, but Bush the younger, for all his blue-blood ancestry, isn't putting on an act; he is what he is, a rich guy with democratic tastes. Call him a "fake populist," if you want, but the label only fits because his policies aren't populist; his populist personality is real enough.

My Mike Gravel Problem, and Yours

I didn't watch last night's Democratic debate, but scanning the media coverage this morning left me with one burning question: Who the heck is Mike Gravel? Which only goes to show how ignorant the younger generation is, because of course Mike Gravel (pronounced Gra-VEL, in case you're curious) is a former two-term Senator from Alaska and the man responsible for inserting large chunks of the Pentagon Papers into the Congressional Record. Also, he mounted a five-month filibuster against the renewal of the draft, back in the days when Senators really knew how to filibuster. And now, twenty-five years after he last held elected office, he's running for President - mainly, it seems, as a way to attract attention for his dream of a nationwide sales tax and ballot initiatives as far as the eye can see.

So that answers that. But in a larger sense, the question remains: Who the heck is Mike Gravel, and why was he on stage last night? This is America, of course, where everyone gets to run for President, and I'm all for the people who run primary debates being flexible if there's an interesting candidate with an unorthodox background out there who ought to be included. But I'm not sure I agree with the Times' Mark Leibovich that "every field of candidates needs, for lack of a better term, comic relief — for the sake of keeping things interesting and, if everybody is lucky, for making the other smoothies on stage a little uncomfortable." I didn't find the Dennis Kucinich experience in '04 all that entertaining (or the Al Sharpton "candidacy," for that matter), and Alan Keyes' wild ride in '00 left me cold. And now we have Kucinich and Gravel taking up space?

Look, if the press is bored with the Presidential field, maybe they could pay some more attention to a Mike Huckabee or a Bill Richardson, a Chris Dodd or a Tommy Thompson (well, maybe not Tommy Thompson), all of whom are arguably more qualified to be President than some of the current front-runners. I'm all for watching candidates who are capable of "making the other smoothies on stage a little uncomfortable" - I just want those candidates to also be capable of saying something halfway interesting, and maybe even capable of winning some votes as well.

The Case of Scott Ritter

He makes an appearance in the new Bill Moyers documentary about the press and the war, and Matt flags this quote:

And when I first resigned and spoke out, you know, I was treated as the darling of the right-wing media especially, because it was the time of the Clinton administration. And I was basically Clinton-bashing, or at least that's how they chose to interpret it. When it turned out that I wasn't Clinton-bashing, I was bashing, you know, American policy objectives-- some of which were endorsed by the right wing, the conservative side, I no longer was the darling of the media.

Having been pushed into a corner as a Clinton basher, there are certain elements of the media now that, you know, the analysis put me in another corner, didn't know how to deal with me. So, you're not getting-- the message out. I wrote a book. I made a documentary film. I did everything I could to get the data out there to the public and it wasn't working.

"What can you say?" Matt asks. Well, you can say that Scott Ritter had trouble getting his message out because 1) he took $400,000 from a pro-Saddam Iraqi businessman to fund his documentary film, money that turned out to have been funneled from the Oil-for-Food program, 2) he had been accused of sex crimes about a year before the Iraq War debate started up and 3) the tone of his film, book, articles and testimony tended to be, well, slightly hysterical. (He also insisted repeatedly that he hadn't changed his mind about Iraq when a substantial paper trail suggested that he had, which didn't exactly enhance his credibility on the subject.) Of course Ritter turned out to more right than, well, almost anybody in the world about the state of Saddam's arsenal, but that doesn't change the reality that he was a lousy spokesman for that point of view, especially when he was almost the only person who seemed to hold it. The media didn't marginalize him because he stopped bashing Clinton and started bashing Bush - they marginalized him because everyone who disagreed with him seemed credible, and he didn't. This was a failure on the press's part, sure; as Tim Noah put it once Ritter was vindicated, there's no reason someone couldn't be "wrong on the age of consent" but "right on Iraq." But I'm not sure it's a failure that could have been plausibly avoided.

A Fine Whine

I'm glad to see both Isaac Chotiner and Kevin Drum griping about the Democrats' whiney, "stop questioning our patriotism" reaction to Rudy Giuliani's "America would be safer with the GOP in charge" speech from earlier this week. There's an almost infinite litany of justifiable complaints you could make about the era of George W. Bush, but the notion that Republicans are somehow engaging in dirty pool by repeatedly insisting that the country would be safer with them in charge is one of the lamest arrows in the liberal quiver. Has the GOP politicized foreign policy in the Bush years? Of course it has - because foreign policy is a political issue, and a terrain in which politicians have every right to draw sharp distinctions with their opponents, and argue about which party will do more to keep the country safe. And with the country knee-deep in a disastrous war, an opposition party should have no trouble making that case on the merits, instead of whining endlessly about how the GOP needs to play fair and stop questioning their patriotism.

If the Democrats had spent half as much time hammering George W. Bush for failing to catch Osama Bin Laden as they did kvetching about, say, how awful it was that the GOP put Bin Laden's face in an anti-Max Cleland ad in 2002, John Kerry might be in the White House today, instead of trying to rehabilitate himself with a mediocre Al Gore impersonation.

All Creatures Great And Small

I got most of the way through Manohla Dargis' review of Zoo, the new, Extremely Serious look at bestiality - it's the tragic tale of a man who died after sexual congress with a horse - and I actually thought she was making fun of the idea that we should admit the poor, misunderstood zoophiliacs (or is it zoophiles?) into the charmed circle of modern tolerance. But not to worry - she doesn't much care for the self-serious movie, but she's down with its message:

After all, Bible-believers notwithstanding, if you eat and wear animals and agree that it’s O.K. to torture them in the name of science and beauty, what’s the big deal? Human beings subject animals penned in factory farms to far more grievous abuse than anything apparently done to the horses in “Zoo,” and on a daily basis human beings also subject themselves to greater risk. One zoophile’s fond memories of cooking up ham for his brethren indicate that theirs was not a PETA-approved animal love, true. But, as Mr. Devor makes clear, again and again, these were men who truly loved their animals in sickness and in health and, at least in the case of one unfortunate soul, till death finally did part them.

So, just to be clear, the only reasons that someone who isn't a Biblical literalist could think that bestiality is immoral are 1) that it causes physically pain to the animals involved and 2) that it's physically risky for the zoophile. Which implies that it's impossible, in the land of Dargis (and many of her readers, presumably), for an activity to be morally degrading unless it risks physical harm - and even then, humans "subject themselves to greater risk" when they're rock-climbing, say, or going through childbirth, so what's the big deal if sex with horses is a little bit risky, too? Danger is the spice of life, right?

This is one of those divides, I suppose, across which there's almost no point arguing, because the usual way to argue against the madness of Darghis-style "tolerance" is by reductio ad absurdum, and I don't think you can get that more absurd than waxing eloquent about zoophiles as "men who truly loved their animals." Not that they didn't love them, in some sense; I'm sure they did, just as Timothy Treadwell, the doomed protagonist in Werner Herzog's Grizzly Man, loved his bears until they killed him, too. Indeed, I suspect that both Treadwell and the zoophiles fit the profile I sketched out here, of people seeking to transcend the difficulties of being human by going downward, toward the animal world we've half-left behind, rather than up toward God as most contemporary religions seek to do.

But Treadwell's inappropriate intimacies with animals involved a video camera and foolishly-close proximity, not a stallion's member - and Herzog, to his everlasting credit, didn't make a movie pretending that Treadwell' insanity was in the intolerant eye of the beholder. "While I find [the zoophiles] view problematic, I don't see the point of making an anti-horse-fucking film," David Edelstein writes in his review of Zoo. "By all means, let them make their case." But if you let them make their case without a frame of sanity around it - the kind of frame that Herzog's Grizzly Man provided, and that it sounds like Zoo does not - then you aren't just letting them explain what they did; you're endorsing it. And so are the critics who praise this movie.