The Crucial Bar-Fight Primary

A new poll finds that most Americans share my feelings about John Edwards:

(hat tip: Continetti)

Follow-Ups on a Friday Afternoon

Jonah Goldberg and Peter Suderman ponder the virtues of No Country For Old Men, technical and otherwise; Daniel Larison and Isaac Chotiner don't think Ramesh and I should worry so much about Rudy Giuliani's prospects; Soren Dayton considers the advantages of a McCain-Huckabee ticket.

McCain-Huckabee '08

Huckabee's semi-deferral to the McCain position on waterboarding offers modest reinforcement for my growing sense that as far as electability goes, the two men would make up the strongest general-election ticket for the '08 GOP. (With McCain at the top, that is.) Their differences - political, temperamental, geographical - balance without obviously contradicting (whereas a a Giuliani-Huckabee ticket might collapse under its blatant contradictions), and as a result they'd have the potential to project a big-tent image without fundamentally overturning the order of the GOP coalition the way having either Rudy or Huckabee at the top of the ticket might. (I also think they'd get the best press coverage of any possible Republican pairing.)

Now obviously this doesn't seem likely to happen. But if American politics were like British politics, one could imagine them hashing out a Blair-Brown style deal, wherein they pool their supporters, McCain takes Ramesh's advice and pledges to serve one term, and Huckabee is promised Cheney-style influence as VP and becomes the presumptive heir to the Oval Office.

It isn't, and they won't - but it's an entertaining thought, at the very least.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Movies

In my film criticism, such as it is, I spend very little time talking about the technical aspects of the movies I'm reviewing. In part, this is because I don't have any formal training in the study of film, and the language of cinematic technique remains somewhat foreign to me. But in part its because it's just damnably hard to describe a particular shot or cut or composition without being able to have the reader actually see it.

This has always been a difficulty for critics of the visual arts, but I'm increasingly struck by how the internet - with its endless space for stills and even embedded video alongside the text of a review - offers at least a partial solution to the dilemma. A case in point is Jim Emerson's analysis of No Country For Old Men, which starts with the critical commonplace that the film is beautiful or technically "perfect," and then tries to tease out what those words actually mean in the context of specific scenes, images, and snatches of dialogue. At each point in his analysis, Emerson doesn't just tell you what he means; he shows you, with eighteen well-chosen shots from the movie. If you liked the film as much as I did (you can find my rave in the forthcoming NR), or if its technical proficiency left you cold, you should check out what he has to say - and show.

How Huckabee Wins

"What we are fast approaching," John McIntyre writes, "is a three-man race between Huckabee, Romney and Giuliani." Meanwhile, Richelieu sketches out a potential Huckabee path to victory:

Huckabee wins the Iowa caucus (which is what would happen if the election were today). Romney is second. Rudy is third and Thompson fourth. Huckabee surges into New Hampshire and his communications skills help him ride the wave perfectly. But Romney has some success in framing the New Hampshire race as a choice between a regular Republican from the Northeast and a southern Christian conservative. He tickles New Hampshire's secret "screw Iowa" appetite and with McCain retaining some strength in New Hampshire Giuliani finds it hard to surge. The results are muddy. Huckabee narrowly wins New Hampshire by fewer than 900 votes over Romney. McCain is third, closely followed by Giuliani. Thompson is fifth and drops out.

The next week Romney narrowly beats Huckabee, now fueled by enough Internet money to run television, in Michigan. McCain runs a distant third. The media labels Huckabee's close second place finish a "win" in a state where he has no organization. Huckabee beats the wounded Romney four days later in South Carolina. McCain drops out after a second disappointing third place finish, narrowly ahead of Giuliani, whose campaign announces they are making a final make or break stand in Florida, as they have always claimed in their brilliant Master Plan. Seeing Romney as his main opponent in Florida for the regular Republican vote, Giuliani uses his final cash on hand to launch a very tough television attack on Romney, featuring former Massachusetts governor and Rudy supporter Paul "DeNiro" Cellucci. McCain endorses Rudy. Romney interjects another $5 million in personal funds into his campaign and launches a blistering TV counterattack on Rudy. Ten days later, Huckabee wins the Florida primary, dominating north Florida and showing surprising strength in Pinellas, Orange, and Broward counties. Romney finishes second. Rudy, now lagging in every February 5 state poll except New York, drops out, refusing to endorse either remaining GOP candidate. On February 5, Huckabee sweeps, losing only Connecticut, Utah, and Delaware to Romney, who then leaves the race.

The general scenario makes sense (in long shot sort of way, obviously), but as to the details, I just can't see Huckabee, momentum or no, scraping out a victory in New Hampshire. That said, I don't think he needs to win in New Hampshire to stay competitive; what he needs, as the Cardinal's broad sketch suggests, is for both Romney and Rudy (or one of the two, plus McCain) to keep whaling on one another, and largely leaving him alone, till Florida and perhaps even beyond. I'm with Ramesh; I think Giuliani beats Huckabee in a two-man race, and I think that Romney does as well. Which means that Huckabee can only hope to win if both the current front-runners stay in and beat each other up in the hopes of being the last man standing - which, fortunately for him, they're both deep-pocketed and ambitious enough to do.

It's interesting that the Huck's rise coincides with Rich Lowry's provocative piece in the latest NR comparing Barack Obama to Jimmy Carter. As far as their skimpy resumes and "too good for politics" political styles go, the Lowry parallel is persuasive. As far as political trajectories, though, it’s Huckabee who has the more obvious Carter Redux thing going on: A pious, folksy, no-name Southern governor who rises steadily in the polls when all the putative front-runners turn out to be much more vulnerable than anyone expected.

Of course, given that Carter was the last and weakest President of the long liberal ascendancy, I don’t expect that this parallel would make anyone on the Right more comfortable with the Huck.

Photo by Flickr user DWQ used under a Creative Commons license.

IQ, G, and Genetics

Do go read Jim Manzi's two posts on the subject, arguing against the hereditarians - or at least for the limits of their evidence.

Also, I'm a big admirer of Will Saletan, and therefore inclined to take his side against critics who charge him with not doing his homework, but this addendum is more than a little surprising:

Many of you have criticized parts of the genetic argument as I related them. Others have pointed to alternative theories I truncated or left out. But the thing that has upset me most concerns a co-author of one of the articles I cited. In researching this subject, I focused on published data and relied on peer review and rebuttals to expose any relevant issue. As a result, I missed something I could have picked up from a simple glance at Wikipedia.

For the past five years, J. Philippe Rushton has been president of the Pioneer Fund, an organization dedicated to "the scientific study of heredity and human differences." During this time, the fund has awarded at least $70,000 to the New Century Foundation. To get a flavor of what New Century stands for, check out its publications on crime ("Everyone knows that blacks are dangerous") and heresy ("Unless whites shake off the teachings of racial orthodoxy they will cease to be a distinct people"). New Century publishes a magazine called American Renaissance, which preaches segregation. Rushton routinely speaks at its conferences.

I was negligent in failing to research and report this. I'm sorry. I owe you better than that.

I am (or at least I hope I am) a much more casual follower of this topic than Saletan, but I'm very familiar with the whole Rushton-and-racism controversy, and it seems implausible - to the point of negligence - for him to have written a three-part series on race and intelligence without running into it somewhere along the way.

Pushing the Envelope

Howard Fineman notes that all the energy and excitement in the GOP field is being generated by the more heterodox candidates – Paul, Huckabee and arguably Giulani – rather than by “Mr. Conservative” candidates like Romney, Thompson and (arguably) McCain, and argues that this is bad news for the GOP, because it makes the race seem "formless and chaotic." He writes: "The nomination is very much worth having. But to grab it, someone is going to have to step forward on the stage to play Ronald Reagan with a script by Karl Rove."

Well, maybe: I suppose it would make Fineman's job easier, at least, if every GOP race followed the same precise and predictable script. But when a party has just endured a crushing rejection at the polls, when its de facto leader has approval ratings in the thirties, and when its brand has never been more unpopular with voters, maybe a little formlessness is preferable to perfect "Ronald Reagan with a script by Karl Rove" order. This is basically why I’ve enjoyed the rise of Huckabee and Paul: Not because I agree with them on an issue-by-issue basis, but because they’re willing to push the envelope a bit, and expand the definition of what a conservative can stand for in ways that I think are ultimately healthy for the party. Paul, for instance, is far too non-interventionist for my taste, but he’s serving a valuable purpose even so, by highlighting – in a field where the front-runners seem to be competing to see who can yell “Islamofascism” the loudest – how cramped the intra-party foreign policy debate has become. Huckabee, similarly, is pushing a variety of bad ideas, but he’s willing to at least address a set of issues – jobs and health care, the environment and inequality – that would otherwise be entirely absent from the debate. Without the two of them, you’d have a field whose ideological spectrum runs from Steven Moore to Grover Norquist on domestic policy, and from Michael Ledeen to Norman Podhoretz on foreign affairs. There would be greater party unity, sure, but sometimes unity’s just another word for self-marginalization. I don’t think Huckabee and Paul are the ideal candidates to jolt the GOP out of its ideological rut, but they’re better than nothing.

Admittedly, all of this assumes that Huckabee doesn’t end up delivering the nomination to Rudy Giuliani (a possibility that seems to be keeping Ramesh up at night), whose own unique blend of envelope-pushing and orthodoxy would create a Republican Party that I would have great difficulty supporting. Which is, of course, the great danger with rooting for a GOP shake-up – you never know whether you’ll like how things actually end up shaking out.

How Many Divisions Have the Europeans?

A few days ago, Mark Steyn had this to say about the American military presence in Old Europe:

Absolved of the core responsibility of sovereign jurisdictions - defense of the realm - Europe decayed, almost inevitably, into a kind of semi-non-aligned status, and persuaded itself that it had developed a higher model of nationhood, not realizing that its lavish social programs were, in effect, subsidized by the Pentagon. This has been bad for Europe - and bad for America, too, in that most of the Democratic Party would like to introduce the European model here, apparently unaware that it depends on a strong America to render it viable.

The Continentals are so insulated from reality they don't even value the US presence in strategic terms. German politicians speak of US military bases mainly as an economic issue - all those German supermarkets and German restaurants that depend on American custom. At the risk of igniting old controversies, the Continentals are the defense equivalents of those wealthy S-CHIP families: They would function better as adult nations if they had to accept the responsibilities of adulthood.

This is, I think, a very interesting geopolitical question: To what extent would Europe re-arm if America suddenly stopped garrisoning the continent? I think Steyn is right that the European model - small military, big welfare state - was originally rendered viable by the U.S. military presence. But I'm not sure that's true any more, now that the Cold War is over and the old national rivalries have given way to an end-of-history moment. What "responsibilities of adulthood" would Germany, for instance, suddenly feel compelled to take on if the U.S. closed its bases? A Franco-German arms race seem pretty unlikely; so does a sudden push to re-arm against the Polish menace to the east. Putin's Russia is a slightly-more-plausible catalyst for continental rearmament, but only by comparison with the alternatives. Moreover, if you look at defense spending around the world, countries like Germany and its neighbors are already spending much more on their militaries than many nations that live in rougher neighborhoods and don't have the U.S. to look out for them. (The much-mocked Italians, for instance, spend more on defense than Turkey, Israel and Iran put together.) It's awfully hard to imagine the absence of American troops from European soil would cause those expenditures to rise much higher.

What's more plausible, I think - so plausible that I'm just cribbing the argument from lots of other people - is that the overall rate of U.S. spending on defense (rather than the location of our garrisons) is so high and so unmatchable that it drives defense spending down for everybody else (not just the Western Europeans). If you can't compete with the hyperpower, why bother trying? (Especially when you can count on fear of the hyperpower's military to prevent the kind of large-scale cross-border attacks that used to be common, and have now all but disappeared.) The Pentagon's budget isn't just subsidizing Europe; it's subsidizing the whole world. And this would be true no matter where we stationed our troops.

Photo by Flickr user klika100 used under a Creative Commons license.

The Substance of Gersonism

Josh Patashnik, critiquing my review of Heroic Conservatism:

The problem is that ... like most other conservative responses to Gerson, [Douthat's is] a qualitative assessment of his philosophy, when what's needed is some quantitative sense. Debates about the role of government are fruitless without numbers: what percentage of GDP should we spend on poverty alleviation? What should the foreign aid budget be? To label Gerson a big-government liberal just because he says nice things about government doesn't help very much.

To be fair, Gerson contributes to this problem--his book says very little about what specific policies he favors to try to achieve the goals he lays out. But all indications are that his actual agenda is hardly revolutionary. He likes S-CHIP, but not, in his words, "government-run universal health care"; he wants more racial reconciliation, but eschews grand '70s-era social engineering schemes like forced busing. He has no apparent interest in Nixon-era wage and price controls. His favorite programs are ones like Bush's 2003 AIDS initiative--whose price tag of $3 billion a year isn't exactly busting the budget. (He did support one truly massive endeavor--the Iraq war--but now he's ambivalent about it, and in any case conservatives seem willing to forgive him for that one.)

Gerson doesn't want a massive new federal effort to combat social injustice; he wants a modest effort, but one imbued with an awesome new sense of moral purpose. It's Tommy Thompson's ideology wrapped in RFK's rhetoric. One can question whether this is really a unique political philosophy meriting a big book deal, but Great Society liberalism it ain't.

I see where Josh is coming from in his initial complaint, but I think the rest of his post gets at precisely why conservative reviewers, myself included, are focusing on the philosophy more than the policy - because Gerson's arguments basically demand to be analyzed in those terms. With some significant exceptions, many of the policies he champions do tend toward the small-bore and the relatively inexpensive, and if the entirety of his vision were, say, that the GOP should be less tightfisted when it comes to fighting AIDS and malaria overseas, I'd probably sign up - though like Josh, I'd question whether the argument merited a book. But Gerson doesn't just make the case for a few specific humanitarian policies; he argues that the ideal of humanitarianism, at home and abroad, should become the center of a new conservative governing philosophy. The breadth and potential radicalism of this argument, to my mind at least, makes it appropriate to treat the RFK rhetoric, rather than the more modest policy proposals, as the real substance of Gersonism. This means drawing out implications that aren't explicit in the text of the book: hence my comparison of Gerson's politics to those of LBJ, which he would doubtless consider ridiculous. But given Heroic Conservatism's professed ambitions, I think teasing out the broader implications of Gerson's vision is a fair way to approach the book.

Put another way - to the extent that Gerson's claims are more modest than his book makes them out to be, I think that conservatives should listen to him; to the extent that they're as ambitious as he suggests they are, I think they shouldn't.

The Trouble With Heroic Conservatism, Cont.

I think these remarks from Yuval Levin (in an EPPC discussion of Heroic Conservatism with Michael Gerson and David Brooks) nail the problem as well as anything I said. I'll quote at length:

I think it has to be said that the book is terribly unfair to fiscal conservatives. It treats them as essentially devoid of principle and idealism and lacking concern for the poor. Mike calls them at one point “small minded, cold, and uninspired.” I think ... this dismissive attitude is really a consequence of something more general that’s missing in the vision that’s laid out in Heroic Conservatism ...

For me, this was crystallized most fully in the last chapter of Mike’s book ... where Mike really lays out, more than anywhere else, what he really means by “heroic conservatism.” He begins the chapter…the first sentence of the chapter is, “At various stages in my life, like many idealists of a serious turn of mind, I have dabbled in despair.” And Mike lays out the ways that he’s seen the partial appeal of a kind of conservatism of deep pessimism – of beauty in the twilight. And I think we all have an idea of what he means and of the kind of appeal that [it] sometimes does have. But he writes that in the end, “My skepticism and pessimism have been confounded by my heroes.” And he describes the heroic deeds and the struggles against slavery and tyranny and on behalf of the weak and the needy that make up so much of the rest of this book.

But here I think is the choice that’s presented to us by Mike most clearly: it’s despair or nobility, it’s the lowest or the highest. And I think that this arrangement of the options lays out a profoundly tragic view of life, that even where it’s hopeful, it’s an other-worldly kind of hope, a hope for the suffering and wretched to be redeemed by dramatic acts of heroism. It’s noble and it’s very inspiring, and I think it has to have a place in our politics, but I think that is can’t be the foundation of our politics.

Continue reading "The Trouble With Heroic Conservatism, Cont." »

Chuck Norris and the Culture War

Is there a contradiction between Mike Huckabee's cultural conservatism and his trumpeting of endorsements from icons of, well, trash culture like Chuck Norris, Ric Flair and Ted Nugent? Adam Thierer makes a strong case, but Reihan isn't so sure.

The Case For Religious Discrimination

Where candidates for office are concerned, that is. Jon Chait, responding to my critique of this column, complains that I don't offer much of a response to his original argument, which he summarizes thus:

It's unhealthy to have a politics in which candidates run on the basis of their religion because sectarian differences are irresolvable, and religious-based politics places nonbelievers and members of minority religions (like Romney) at an unfair disadvantage.

I think the original piece made much broader claims than this about the acceptability of mixing religion and politics, but judge for yourself. To the narrower point, I'm not entirely sure what I think. On the one hand, Mike Huckabee's attempt to brand himself as a "Christian leader" instinctively rubs me the wrong way. On the other hand, I have no difficulty with the notion of voters deciding not to vote for a candidate because they're put off by his religion, given how closely faith is usually bound up (and ought to be bound up, if the faith is sincere) with a politician's political worldview. As I said in my previous post, an American might reasonably decline to vote for a candidate because he belongs to a religion that institutionalizes practices alien to republican democracy (like polygamy or racial discrimination), or that opposes the separation of church and state, or that attempts to exert an untoward level of direct control over the everyday lives of its members.

These are somewhat extreme examples, though, so let me go further: All other things being equal, I would probably vote for a candidate who shares my religious beliefs if he were up against a candidate who doesn't, whether Jewish or Muslim or Hindu or agnostic. Now of course all other things aren't equal, and there are plenty of situations where I'd rather be governed by a wise Muslim than a foolish Christian. But religion affects values, values affect politics, and it isn't a coincidence that an awful lot of the people I disagree with politically I also disagree with theologically. And I don't mean this just as it applies to the liberal-conservative divide, since it's true within conservatism as well: I'm more likely to agree with the men (and women) of the Right who come to politics from a Christian perspective than those whose bedrock convictions don't partake of Christian belief, and many of the tendencies I dislike in contemporary conservatism (including, among other things, a disturbing consequentialism where issues of war-making and wartime conduct are concerned) are associated with the less-religious precincts of the Right.

Continue reading "The Case For Religious Discrimination" »

Fred Thompson, Supply-Side Crackpot?

Yesterday, I suggested he was engaging in magical thinking about tax cuts and revenue increases. Several people who know slightly more about these matters than I do suggest that I might have spoken too soon. Here's Megan for the defense.

Dubai Ports Redux

If Lou Dobbs is winning the free trade debate, as David Brooks says, stories like this one aren't going to help matters.

Libertarians of Arabia

Bryan Caplan wonders why so many libertarians supported the Iraq War, given their typical opposition to militarism and overseas crusades. Megan offers an opinion:

I'd say that the fall of the Soviet Union discredited several ideas on the left and the right: on the left, the idea that the state should own most of the means of production; on the right, the idea of isolationism, or non-interventionism. It is now patently obvious that if the US had not drawn a proverbial line in the sand through Germany, the Soviets would now own large blocks of Western Europe that would be struggling in the same way that Eastern Europe now does.

Larison, of course, has a snappish rejoinder on behalf of non-interventionism. I would only say that even if Megan's right, this would better explain why libertarians backed the broad conception of a War on Terror than why they lined up to support the invasion of Iraq. If the end of the Cold War vindicated anything, surely, it was containment rather than "rollback," which was roughly the policy that the Bush Administration adopted vis-a-vis Saddam.

My own explanation would be that the character of the post-9/11 threat - an anti-modern, anti-liberal religious movement - dovetailed perfectly with the shifting character of American libertarianism, which with the decline of socialism and the rise of lifestyle politics was already increasingly inclined to view a resurgent religious conservatism, rather than Marxist-Leninist statism, as the greater threat to its worldview. This dovetailing, in turn, bred a distinctly un-libertarian zeal for a crusading foreign policy among people who otherwise wouldn't have bought into it. Just as Evelyn Waugh's traditionalist Catholic Guy Crouchback privately rejoiced at the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, because it meant that "the enemy at last was plain in view, huge and hateful, all disguise cast off ... It was the Modern Age in arms," many libertarians instinctly leaped to interpret the 9/11 moment the way Andrew did - as the opening salvo in a grand "religious war," with secular modernity ranged on one side and every kind of "fundamentalism" on the other. Inevitably, it was Christopher Hitchens, a crypto-libertarian of sorts, who captured this spirit best:

... here was a direct, unmistakable confrontation between everything I loved and everything I hated. On one side, the ethics of the multicultural, the secular, the skeptical, and the cosmopolitan ... On the other, the arid monochrome of dull and vicious theocratic fascism. I am prepared for this war to go on for a very long time. I will never become tired of waging it, because it is a fight over essentials.

With such visions in the air, overreach was inevitable.

As Goes the Family ...

Those African-American social mobility numbers I mentioned earlier are depressing enough to deserve to be unpacked a little:

Forty-five percent of black children whose parents were solidly middle class in 1968 -- a stratum with a median income of $55,600 in inflation-adjusted dollars -- grew up to be among the lowest fifth of the nation's earners, with a median family income of $23,100. Only 16 percent of whites experienced similar downward mobility. At the same time, 48 percent of black children whose parents were in an economic bracket with a median family income of $41,700 sank into the lowest income group.

If you're looking for a reason to be pessimistic about the future of the American social fabric - and particularly the fabric of working-class life - in the face of a decade's worth of good news, it's right here. Why are African-Americans more likely to be downwardly-mobile than non-blacks? Probably because of two inter-related factors: The weak cultural capital afforded by the black community's disastrous family structure, which in turn reinforces the black-white wealth gap that's a legacy of slavery and segregation. Now consider that the first factor, the decline of marriage and the rise of illegitimacy, is increasingly visible in white and (especially) Hispanic America as well. This raises the possibility that what's true of African Americans today - that they have a hard time making it to prosperity and a harder time staying there - may be true of the rest of working-class America further down the road. The United States as a whole has a higher same out-of-wedlock birth rate at present - around 37 percent as of 2005 - that black America had in the 1960s, when Daniel Patrick Moynihan first sounded the alarm about family dissolution in the African-American community. If that number inches higher, or even if it stays constant, it's going to be harder and harder for working-class Americans to compete in the global economy, and harder, as a result, for them avoid stagnation and downward mobility at home.

As I said, this is a pessimist's forecast, and the pessimists' forecasts of the early 1990s were proven wrong in spite of the steadily rising white and Latino illegitimacy that has characterized the fifteen years since. But the problem is still there, and still real, even though crime and drug abuse and many other negative social indicators have gone into eclipse of late. The U.S. isn't likely to suddenly morph into Scandinavia, which has managed to maintain impressive family stability - and the social stability and economic competitiveness that comes with it - without high marriage rates. Nor are we likely - though never say never, where the U.S. economy is concerned - to enjoy another period of expansion like the Nineties boom. Enormous wealth-generation can (and seemingly did, in the last decade) cover over a variety of social ills, but it's easy to imagine the reverse happening over the next few decades, with the decline of the American family making any era of diminished expectations self-reinforcing, so that the country, as well as its working class, becomes downwardly-mobile over time. This isn't a future we should expect, by any means - but it's a possibility we should be aware of, and one that we should strive to avoid.

I should note, as well, that Reihan's post today on a politics of "infinite demands" dovetails with this pessimistic vision in interesting and not-so-obvious ways.

Heroic Conservatism

I'm coming late to the pile-on, but you can find my take on Gersonism over at Slate today.

The Republicans and the Black Vote

Stories like this one, about black evangelicals' flirtation with the GOP, are a reminder that the declining salience of racial politics - which Paul Krugman thinks will deliver the country back to the Democrats - could theoretically end up cutting in the GOP's favor in certain respects, as middle-class, socially-conservative African-American voters become more comfortable with the idea of voting for Republicans. So are blog posts like this one, from Fred Siegel, who notes that even at a moment rife with bad news about downward mobility among African-Americans, old-fashioned racial politics are playing almost no role in the Democratic primary campaign. And so are numbers like these, from a Pew survey on African-American public opinion:

A 53% majority of African Americans say that blacks who don't get ahead are mainly responsible for their situation, while just three-in-ten say discrimination is mainly to blame. As recently as the mid-1990s, black opinion on this question tilted in the opposite direction, with a majority of African Americans saying then that discrimination is the main reason for a lack of black progress.

One of these years, these kind of shifts will produce a spike in the Republican Party's miniscule share of the black vote. But I'm pretty sure that 2008 isn't going to be that year.

Ignorance Isn't Strength

Fred Thompson has a tax plan:

Speaking on Fox News Sunday, the presidential candidate recommended extending President Bush's tax cuts, due to expire in 2010, eliminating the estate tax, repealing the alternative minimum tax and lowering the corporate tax rate to no more than 27 percent from the current 35 percent.

Thompson also said that he would adopt the approach of the conservative Republican Study Committee in the House of Representatives that would offer, as an alternative to the current income tax, a two-rate income tax system stripped of deductions and credits.

Here's Ramesh, in response:

I see two possible problems with this plan. The first is that it would have to be coupled with a plan to restrain spending, or even to cut it, to avoid a large expansion of the deficit. The second is that, as presented, it shifts the tax burden onto parents. Indeed, it shifts it from corporations onto parents. If I were Mike Huckabee or Mitt Romney, I might have something to say about that.

Good points both, but Ol' Fred doesn't buy into that whole "expansion of the deficit" business:

Estimates devised earlier this year by the nonpartisan staff of the Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation indicate that major parts of Thompson's plan would lose at least $2.5 trillion over ten years, nearly as much as the entire federal government is expected to spend this fiscal year.

In the interview, Thompson said such official estimates are often wrong and that his tax cuts would stimulate "growth in the economy" and bring in more revenue than expected.

Obviously, affluent business-class types are deserting the GOP primarily because of its stance on social issues. But I can't help thinking that this sort of transparently bogus supply-side dogmatism - which fits into a larger narrative, sometimes fair and sometimes not, of the Republicans as the know-nothing party - has more than a little to do with it as well. Business-class voters want lower corporate tax rates, sure, but they also want a party that acts like it knows how to manage the economy more generally, particularly as the dollar weakens and the country edges toward recession. And sound economic management would seem to require, at the very least, demonstrating an understanding of basic principles like how tax cuts affect revenue.

If I'm right, this raises the possibility that the party's commitment to supply-side orthodoxy is hurting the GOP coming and going: To savvy business-class voters, the Thompson-style magical thinking it requires makes Republicans look ignorant and untrustworthy; to middle-income families, meanwhile, the emphasis on estate taxes, corporate tax rates and upper-bracket cuts makes the party look out-of-touch with kitchen-table concerns.

But hey - at least it keeps the Club for Growth from bolting to the Democrats.

The "No Nepotism" Amendment

I'm not an admirer of Grover Norquist, to put it mildly, and I'm not sure whether I'd side with Krikorian or K-Lo in the event that it came to a vote - but this is definitely an idea worth discussing.

Ethical Concerns And Church-State Violations

I was thinking about saying something about this Richard Cohen column while I was ranting at Jon Chait about religion and democracy, but decided to let it slide. In the aftermath of the stem-cell news, though, it seems worth bringing up again. Cohen writes:

Back before Bush, it was considered narrow-minded and, worst of all, elitist, to judge a person by the intensity of his religious convictions. Belief was not supposed to matter, and so it was impermissible to conclude anything about a person even if he thought Darwin was wrong or, more recently, that homosexuals chose their sexual orientation, presumably just to irritate the Christian right. Religion was irrelevant. Everyone said so -- and I agreed.

Bush changed that. He infused government with religion, everything from ineffective programs that promote sexual abstinence to an adamant refusal to authorize federal spending for most embryonic stem-cell research. The administration even erected barriers to the marketing of the Plan B morning-after pill. All these measures ran up against obstacles that were essentially religious, not strictly scientific, in nature.

Richard Cohen, meet James A. Thomson:

Dr. Thomson’s laboratory at the University of Wisconsin was one of two that in 1998 plucked stem cells from human embryos for the first time, destroying the embryos in the process and touching off a divisive national debate.

And on Tuesday, his laboratory was one of two that reported a new way to turn ordinary human skin cells into what appear to be embryonic stem cells without ever using a human embryo.

The fact is, Dr. Thomson said in an interview, he had ethical concerns about embryonic research from the outset, even though he knew that such research offered insights into human development and the potential for powerful new treatments for disease.

“If human embryonic stem cell research does not make you at least a little bit uncomfortable, you have not thought about it enough,” he said. “I thought long and hard about whether I would do it.”

He decided in the end to go ahead, reasoning that the work was important and that he was using embryos from fertility clinics that would have been destroyed otherwise. The couples whose sperm and eggs were used to create the embryos had said they no longer wanted them. Nonetheless, Dr. Thomson said, announcing that he had obtained human embryonic stem cells was “scary,” adding, “It was not known how it would be received.”

Hmmm. So he found the work ethically troubling, but decided to go ahead, on the justification that the embryos he would use were slated for destruction anyway. This is, of course, distinct from George W. Bush's more conservative position, which was that we should provide federal funds only for research on stem cells from embryos that had already been killed - albeit while making no attempt, one might add, to impede private research like Dr. Thomson's. But just how distinct are they, and what's the nature of the distinction? Well, that's a good question ... and hey, maybe Richard Cohen can answer it. He seems pretty sure of himself, after all. So my challenge to Cohen is this: Please explain why the Bush position is so distinct from Dr. Thomson's as to make the latter a responsible scientist, and the former a dangerously-religious zealot who elevated faith over "science," and permanently effaced the bright line between church and state. I'll give you, say, nine hundred words or so to do so.

Meanwhile, I'd saying something snide about this passage ...

If anything, Romney is the anti-Huckabee. There is not the slightest hint that his religion has constrained his politics in any way. You name the issue and he's been for it and against it -- gun control, abortion, gay rights. Call this what you may, it is proof that Romney is not enslaved by any dogma. His religion, to which he is committed, is distinctly his business and would not, as far I can tell, have any bearing on his presidency.

... but it would be tough to top Larison.

More Bold Truthsaying

Noah Millman has all kinds of interesting thoughts on the Saletan argument, one of which merits a quick response. He writes:

I do think Ross is wrong to refer to an “emerging scientific consensus” about these matters; what would be more correct is that there is a burgeoning scientific debate, a debate that our political and social taboos have tried mightily to stifle, or at least hide from public view.

I think I was wrong, too; that was a stupid and lazy way to characterize the debate, and it seems to have fed a misapprehension that I intended to cast myself as a "bold truthsayer ... fearlessly committed to challenging commonly accepted falsehoods." Which wasn't really what that post was about; I was more interested in talking about Saletan's "what is to be done" response to his thesis than in making a grand statement about the thesis itself. So consider it retracted.

More thoughts on this topic after the holiday. Happy Thanksgiving to all.

Who's Afraid of Ron Paul?

"There's something weird going on," Jonah Goldberg writes, "when [Ron] Paul, the small-government constitutionalist, is considered the extremist in the Republican Party while [Mike] Huckabee, the statist, is the lovable underdog. It's even weirder because it's probably true: Huckabee is much closer to the mainstream. And that's what scares me about Huckabee and the mainstream alike."

I take Jonah's point, but I feel like there's a pretty big piece missing from the story he tells. It's true that Huckabee has risen in the polls by tapping into concerns that are probably more "mainstream" among GOP voters (and certainly among the electorate as a whole) than Ron Paul's angst about the decline of the American Republic. As NR's own (anti-Huckabee) editorial on his campaign noted, the former Arkansas governor "more than the other Republican candidates, understands that even in a time of economic growth Americans are worried about their health care, their wages, and their country’s future." But the reason the Huck isn't being vilified by conservatives the way Paul has been isn't because the GOP as a whole is suddenly going populist and statist; if anything, Huckabee's campaign has capitalized on the reverse phenomenon, the cautious small-government orthodoxy that the front-runners have adopted to cover over their heresies on other fronts. No, the reason Paul has been treated differently than Huckabee by the right-wing media is very, very simple, and it has nothing to do with size-of-government issues: Paul opposes the Iraq War (and war with Iran, waterboarding, and all the rest of what's increasingly defined as the right-wing foreign policy package) and Huckabee doesn't. Full stop, end of story.

Now I know that Paul is a less-than-ideal standard bearer for the "conservatives against the Iraq War" cause; for pragmatic reasons alone, I would prefer to have a realist candidate in the field making a Dick Cheney circa 1994 case that the invasion was a mistake, rather than someone so easily dismissed by his opponents as an oddball and a crank. But even allowing all that, I'd like to see Jonah - who's called the Iraq War a mistake (albeit a worthy one) himself on some occasions - take more seriously the possibility that the current right-wing foreign-policy lockstep, and the anti-Ron Paul hatefest it's summoned up, might be a more serious problem for conservatism going forward than the (very modest) love being shown to a compassionate conservative like Mike Huckabee.

Something To Give Thanks For

Jim Manzi, professional smartypants, has just joined Reihan's ever-expanding stable of writers over at The American Scene. Here's his first post, riffing on something Jonah wrote on scientific progress and moral progress. And here's a longer taste of Manzi, writing on evolution (and against both the "evolution requires embracing atheism" and "religion requires embracing intelligent design" sets) for NR.

A Pro-Choice GOP?

Hadley Arkes, on the prospect of a Giuliani nomination:

... there is in his campaign a sobering truth that cannot be evaded: The nomination and election of Rudy Giuliani would mark the end of the Republican party as the pro-life party in our politics. And that would be the case regardless of whether pro-lifers respond to his nomination by refusing to vote for Giuliani, forming a third party, or folding themselves into a coalition that succeeds in electing Giuliani.

... What is engaged here is a truth about the nature of political parties that has gone remarkably unappreciated: Parties have the means of changing their own constituencies or their composition. By altering their appeals, they drive some groups out and bring others in. If a Republican party, reconstituted in this way, manages to win, the Republican establishment will readily draw the lesson that they can win convincingly without pro-lifers and their bundle of causes: the destruction of embryos in research, assisted suicide, the resistance to same-sex marriage. Indeed, a Republican party shorn of those people and their baggage may seem to offer a stronger, more durable majority than the party that eked out victories by narrow margins in 2000 and 2004.

Pro-life voters may subordinate their concerns and join the new coalition, but the lesson extracted will be the same … for all practical purposes, nearly any interest will trump the interests of the pro-life community.

Arkes' mordant analysis calls to mind the WSJ article that prompted my back-and-forth with Larison over the GOP and Roe. To highlight the shifting demographics of the two parties, the Journal featured Angela Williams, a Hispanic union member who makes $39,000 a year and votes Republican because she's pro-life, alongside Jim Kelley, a private-equity big shot who leans Democratic in part because he doesn't like the GOP's focus on the social issues. This juxtaposition prompted Matt Continetti to write: "So far the GOP hasn't come up with a reformist agenda to cater to voters like Williams. They may want to do so before Election Day 2008." Which of course is one of my hobby horses - but let's play devil's advocate for a moment, and imagine a Republican that takes regaining the Jack Kelleys of the world as its principle goal, rather than expanding its support among the Angela Williamses. Is such a GOP imaginable? More importantly, would such a GOP, to borrow Arkes’ words, “offer a stronger, more durable majority” than the current Republican incarnation?

Continue reading "A Pro-Choice GOP?" »

Stem Cells, Race, and the Future of the Science Wars

On what looks like a great day for scientists and for opponents of embryo-destructive stem cell research (by no means mutually-exclusive categories, believe it or not), Jody Bottum writes:

Abortion skewed the political discussion of [stem cells], pinning the left to a defense of science it doesn’t actually hold. The more natural line is agitation against Frankenfoods and all genetic modification, particularly given the environmentalism to which the campaign against global warming is tying the left.

Narratives about positions on public policy are like enormous steamships: It takes a long time to turn them around. But if the news of stem-cell breakthroughs prove accurate, we may well see over the next few years a gradual reversal in news stories and editorials. Watch for it, now that abortion is out of the equation: Much less hype about all the miracle cures that stem cells will bring us, more suspicion about the cancers and genetic pollution that may result, and just about the same amount of bashing of religious believers—this time for their ignorant support of science.

The stem cell news comes, interestingly, just as Will Saletan bravely attempts a summary of the emerging scientific consensus on racial differences in intelligence, another issue where the left doesn't much care for science has to say. You could see this dovetailing with Jody's point, and presaging a realignment in the Science Wars, away from the Bush-era debates and toward a landscape in which the mass media becomes consistently skeptical about scientific research on issues related to race and genetic engineering. But I'm not so sure. Among real lefties, maybe so, but the people who really pushed the "killing embryos will save your grandparents" narrative forward weren't the types who usually crusade against frankenfood; they were moderate liberals, politicians and pundits alike, who saw an opportunity to tap into the talismanic power of "Science" to drive a wedge into the GOP coalition. And no matter what comes of the stem-cell debate, that talismanic power isn't going anywhere - not in Western modernity, not by a long shot. If you want to see the shape of things to come, look at Saletan's conclusion:

Hereditarians point to phenylketunuria as an example of a genetic but treatable cognitive defect. Change the baby's diet, and you protect its brain. They also tout breast-feeding as an environmental intervention. White women are three times more likely than black women to breast-feed their babies, they observe, so if more black women did it, IQs might go up. But now it turns out that breast-feeding, too, is a genetically regulated factor. As my colleague Emily Bazelon explains, a new study shows that while most babies gain an average of seven IQ points from breast-feeding, some babies gain nothing from it and end up at a four-point disadvantage because they lack a crucial gene.

The study's authors claim it "shows that genes may work via the environment to shape the IQ, helping to close the nature versus nurture debate." That's true if you have the gene. But if you don't, nurture can't help you. And guess what? According to the International Hapmap Project, 2.2 percent of the project's Chinese-Japanese population samples, 5 percent of its European-American samples, and 10 percent of its Nigerian samples lack the gene. The Africans are twice as likely as the Americans, and four times as likely as the Asians, to start life with a four-point IQ deficit out of sheer genetic misfortune.

Don't tell me those Nigerian babies aren't cognitively disadvantaged. Don't tell me it isn't genetic. Don't tell me it's God's will. And in the age of genetic modification, don't tell me we can't do anything about it.

No, we are not created equal. But we are endowed by our Creator with the ideal of equality, and the intelligence to finish the job.

Some people, right and left, look at science that doesn't dovetail with their philosophical preconceptions and deny the science. (Sometimes they're right to do so, one might add, since scientists have been known to get things wrong from time to time.) But in a society built on the dream of progress, most people, liberals and conservatives alike, look at things Saletan's way: If we don't like what science tells us, well, then science can find a way to fix it.

Mitt Romney and Faith-Based Politics

Jon Chait refers to me as "brilliant" in his latest TRB, no doubt in an attempt to defang my inevitable rejoinder to his critique of "faith-based politics" - but no such luck, Chait! He begins by complaining about evangelical Christians who might not vote for Mitt Romney because he's a Mormon:

If it were possible for a politician to sue voters for religious discrimination, Mitt Romney would have an open-and-shut case against the Republican electorate. Here is a man possessing all the known qualifications for the job of GOP presidential nominee--strong communications skills, a successful governorship, total agreement on every issue, Reaganesque hair--and yet he may well be denied it on account of his faith. In a poll released in June, 30 percent of Republicans said they'd be less likely to vote for a Mormon. One conservative televangelist dispensed with the subtlety and warned his flock,"If you vote for Mitt Romney, you are voting for Satan!" These attacks have nothing to do with how Romney would conduct himself as president. They're purely theological. Romney's critics are declaring they couldn't support Romney on the sole basis that they consider Mormonism un-Christian.

Well, first of all, polls like this one (see Table 4) suggest that Democrats are more likely than Republicans to rule out voting for a candidate on the basis of his Mormon faith. Now maybe all those anti-Mormon Democrats are African-American Baptists or working-class Catholics, but Dems with a post-grad education are more anti-Latter Day Saint than Dems with just a high school degree, which at the very least suggests that there are plenty of secular voters who wouldn't pull the lever for a Mormon. Not, presumably, because they want to establish an "only Trinitarians need apply" standard for public office in the U.S., but because they consider Mormonism weird and cultish, and they don't want a President who buys into its tenets.

Continue reading "Mitt Romney and Faith-Based Politics" »

Race, the GOP, and Paul Krugman

His latest column is yet another broadside in the whole "does race explain the Republican realignment" argument, and as you might expect, it combines convincing specific examples of Republicans playing the race card in the South with totally unconvincing macro-level analysis. For instance, there's this:

... everyone knows that white men have turned away from the Democrats over God, guns, national security and so on. But what everyone knows isn’t true once you exclude the South from the picture. As the political scientist Larry Bartels points out, in the 1952 presidential election 40 percent of non-Southern white men voted Democratic; in 2004, that figure was virtually unchanged, at 39 percent.

First, as Matt has pointed out, the fact that the bulk of the white-male shift occurred in the South doesn't mean that white males were simply changing their party allegiance in response to GOP race-baiting. Most white Southerners were conservatives - on God, gays and guns, among many other issues - who happened to vote for the more liberal party in the '30s and '40s because it was the segregationist party, and once that issue receded, and the Republicans moved rightward, you would have expected them to shift to the more conservative party even in the absence of dog-whistle politics.

More importantly for the sake of this example, 1952 is a really poor baseline to use for comparisons to present-day politics, since it was an exceptional year - a Republican landslide in a Democratic era, created by Eisenhower's celebrity and ostentatious moderation, Truman's unpopularity and Stevenson's mediocrity as a candidate. Ike took 55 percent of the vote to Stevenson's 44 percent, meaning that the GOP vote was much higher than the FDR-to-LBJ norm in almost every demographic category - and for Bush to match Eisenhower's share of the non-Southern white-male vote fifty years later while winning only 51 percent of the vote to Kerry's 48 suggests that conservative have made gains between then and now in that demographic, rather than just treading water as Krugman suggests.

Moreover, even if the Republicans had merely tread water it would still be an impressive achievement, given that a rightward shift - all other things being equal, which they weren't - would have been expected to produce a 1964-style result, in which the GOP consolidated the South and lost ground everywhere else. Arthur Schlesinger famously announced that the results of '64 proved that "if the parties were realigned on an ideological basis ... the Democrats would win every election and the Republicans would lose every election." It was an entirely plausible contention at the time, and Krugman's "race explains everything" narrative doesn't explain why he was proven wrong.

Continue reading "Race, the GOP, and Paul Krugman" »

Bimbo Eruptions

Andrew speculates about what we should make of the weird back-and-forth over whether the Clintons have dirt on Obama that they aren't using:

Here's a more paranoid explanation: at some point in this campaign, if you believe the Washington rumor mill, there may well be some Clinton bimbo eruption stories, i.e. Bill's post-presidential extracurricular activities will come under discussion again. This Novak flap therefore may be a dummy-run for the various responses if such alleged doodoo eventually hits the campaign fan.

I've heard what I suspect are some of the same rumors Andrew has, and obviously it's perfectly credible, given what we know about his character and history, that Clinton would still be tomcatting around. But my question is this: Is it credible that if there were sex scandals lurking out there, waiting to explode on the Clinton campaign, we wouldn't know about them yet? I don't care if Drudge is cozy with the Clintons now, or if Clinton-pal Ron Burkle gets control of every single supermarket tabloid in God's creation - this is the age of TMZ and Gawker Stalker, and I find it hard to believe that someone like Clinton would be able to get away with his old tricks without some alternative, internet-age media outlet getting hold of the dirt. Mainstream outlets (like, say, the LA Times) might have qualms about running with a "Clinton commits adultery - again" story that doesn't have a direct legal or political angle, but there are too many outlets devoted to full-time gossip now for journalistic high-mindedness to keep something like that out of the news. Aren't there? Or am I being naive about the ability of someone as mobbed-up as Clinton to do what he pleases without it leaking online?

Sesame Street, Adults Only

Virginia Heffernan reports:

Sunny days! The earliest episodes of “Sesame Street” are available on digital video! Break out some Keebler products, fire up the DVD player and prepare for the exquisite pleasure-pain of top-shelf nostalgia.

Just don’t bring the children. According to an earnest warning on Volumes 1 and 2, “Sesame Street: Old School” is adults-only: “These early ‘Sesame Street’ episodes are intended for grown-ups, and may not suit the needs of today’s preschool child.”

Heffernan has some fun with what the warning might be referring to - "Cookie Monster was on a fast track to diabetes. Oscar’s depression was untreated. Prozacky Elmo didn’t exist" - but it turns out that her jokes are pretty close to the truth:

I asked Carol-Lynn Parente, the executive producer of “Sesame Street,” how exactly the first episodes were unsuitable for toddlers in 2007. She told me about Alistair Cookie and the parody “Monsterpiece Theater.” Alistair Cookie, played by Cookie Monster, used to appear with a pipe, which he later gobbled. According to Parente, “That modeled the wrong behavior” — smoking, eating pipes — “so we reshot those scenes without the pipe, and then we dropped the parody altogether.”

Which brought Parente to a feature of “Sesame Street” that had not been reconstructed: the chronically mood-disordered Oscar the Grouch. On the first episode, Oscar seems irredeemably miserable — hypersensitive, sarcastic, misanthropic. (Bert, too, is described as grouchy; none of the characters, in fact, is especially sunshiney except maybe Ernie, who also seems slow.) “We might not be able to create a character like Oscar now,” she said.

Read the whole thing, and prepare to be depressed. (But also informed: I had no idea that Sesame Street was designed specifically for the “4-year-old inner-city black youngster," or that "in East Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant in 1978, 95 percent of households with kids ages 2 to 5 watched “Sesame Street.”)

The GOP, Pro-Lifers and Roe

Larison waxes indignant:

I understand why pro-life voters typically align with the Republicans. In theory, it makes sense: we pro-lifers vote for you Republicans, and you work to overturn Roe and generally oppose abortion itself (and, by extension, euthanasia and ESCR and so on). It sounds like a fair deal, until you, the pro-lifers, realise that you never really get very much out of it in all these years. But what about getting a majority on the Court, someone will ask. Well, pro-lifers have helped put Republicans in executive power for what will soon be twenty of the last twenty-eight years, during which time these Presidents have nominated seven Supreme Court justices, five of whom are still on the Court today. There has been a Republican-appointed majority on the Court for most of my lifetime, and most of the Republican appointees came in during the Reagan years or later, and yet Roe is realistically farther away than ever from being overturned than it was fifteen years ago. The latest two justices made it clear in their confirmation hearings that they accepted Roe as established precedent–and their nominations are supposed to represent the great clout and triumph of pro-life voters! Someone might point to the various bad choices and disappointments among the nominees in the past (Souter, O’Connor, etc.) and claim that pro-lifers just need to remain patient and gradually build up that anti-Roe majority they have imagined for such a long time.

Given the record of the last three decades, what makes them think that anything will change in the next administration or the one after that? The trouble with pro-life voters is that most routinely vote for the GOP, so the latter have no real incentive to keep them interested or give them anything more than symbolism or limited measures designed to keep them just attached enough to retain their loyalty for another cycle. Someone will say, “Well, that’s politics for you,” but my point would be that pro-life voters need to be much more shrewd in their willingness to withhold support and extract concessions. Yes, this is politics we’re talking about, which is why pro-lifers should play the game a lot better than they have been doing. Those who follow the path of Pat Robertson to pay obeisance to Giuliani are declaring to the party, “Please, exploit us for your own advantage!”

I agree about Robertson and Rudy, but otherwise I think this assessment is far too harsh. Consider what the pro-life movement has been up against over the last thirty years. First, Roe was decided with a 7-2 majority, meaning that opponents needed to flip three justices to overturn it, not just one or two. Second, it took the better part of a decade for the pro-life movement to even get off the ground in any substantial way, and for the evangelical-Catholic alliance on the issue to take shape. Third, elite culture in the United States - the culture of the media, of Manhattan and Washington D.C., and of the law schools that produce most future SCOTUS judges - is unremittingly hostile to pro-lifers. Fourth, Roe has the weight of both stare decisis and public opinion (however misinformed) on its side, which tends to give its defenders the political and legal high ground.

Yet in spite of all these handicaps (and I can think of several others), the alliance between pro-lifers and the GOP pushed Roe to the brink of extinction in the late 1980s. Obviously, the Souter pick was unforgivable, but even so, it took the combination of a shameful-but-effective Democratic smear campaign against Robert Bork and Anthony Kennedy's last-minute change of heart to save Roe from being overturned in 1992. Near-misses aren't the same thing as victories, but it's worth pointing out that from the vantage point of the early 1970s, when the Times famously declared that the Court had "settled" the abortion issue, this was closer to success than anyone would have expected a rag-tag band of religious conservatives to come. And the next Republican President - Bush, that is - looks to have improved on the Reagan-Bush record: This administration has had two SCOTUS vacancies, and filled both with judges who I would deem very likely to overturn Roe, or at least drastically reduce its scope, should the opportunity arise. It's true that if you think, as Larison does, that "Roe is realistically farther away than ever from being overturned," then yes, pro-life support for the GOP has been nothing short of folly. But I think he misjudges Alito and Roberts, and that Roe is closer than ever to being overturned - one vote away to be precise.

(Of course - returning to Daniel's final point, with which I agree - this makes it all the more baffling that the Pat Robertsons of the world have decided that now, of all times, is the moment to decide that abortion should take a back seat not only to fighting Islamists, but to "the control of massive government waste and crushing federal deficits," in Robertson's less-than-immortal words. Or that the National Right to Life Committee, in an effort to stop Robertson's preferred candidate, would decide to throw its weight behind a guy who's running fourth or worse in the early primary states, when there are several candidates with comparable anti-Roe bona fides and better poll numbers.)

The Moral Vision of the Coen Brothers

Matt Zoller Seitz, on No Country For Old Men:

Though they are habitually described as snotty formalists with nothing on their minds but cinematic gamesmanship, the Coens' body of work is one of the most sneakily moralistic in recent American cinema.

This is very smart, and very true. The Coen brothers have made their share of duds, but the people who accuse them of being winking, technically proficient nihilists have it exactly backward, I think. If you don't mind spoilers, read the whole thing.

Lou Dobbs For President

John Fund, in the WSJ:

Friends of Mr. Dobbs say he is seriously contemplating a race for the first time, although it's still unlikely. They spin a scenario under which the acerbic commentator would parachute into the race if Michael Bloomberg, the New York billionaire and favorite of East Coast elites, enters the field as an independent. With Hillary Clinton continuing to score badly in polls in the categories of honesty and integrity, and with the public's many doubts about Rudy Giuliani and other GOP contenders, Mr. Bloomberg may well see an opportunity to roil the political waters by entering the race late. If so, Mr. Dobbs then sees a niche for a "fourth-party" candidate who could paint the three other contenders as completely out of touch.

The idea of a Bloomberg candidacy in a Rudy-Hillary race has always baffled me (as opposed to, say, a Huckabee-Edwards race, where it would make a certain sense), since the Mayor's ideological niche would already be more or less filled by the major-party candidates; he'd have his billions, sure, but no compelling justification for his candidacy. But a Lou Dobbs candidacy, particularly in a four-way race, makes a lot more sense. And it's worth noting that Ben Smith, who wrote the best piece on why Bloomberg would be a lousy third-party candidate for TNR (it's vanished into their renovated archives, so far as I can tell), got there first:

The people who study third parties, however, are skeptical that Bloomberg would resonate with the typical third-party voter--not a New Yorker who likes his mayor but a voter in Utah or Maine (the two states where Perot finished second) who is suspicious of her government. According to Ronald Rapoport and Walter Stone, authors of a new study of Perot's politics, Three's a Crowd, Perot's appeal came as much from his specific positions that had been abandoned by both parties--he was for a nationalistic cocktail of isolationism, libertarianism, budget-balancing, and rolling back free trade--as it did from his outsider, reformist stance. But the kind of third-party discussion that animates Manhattan dinner parties has, oddly, ignored the one issue that candidates actually have failed to address. "The issue of immigration is the issue on which a third party could form," Rapoport says. "The third party on immigration is the party which says, 'Send them back.'"

..."If you were going to ask me who represents the Perot voter," he says, "Lou Dobbs comes a lot closer than Bloomberg."

Now it seems like Dobbs might be thinking the same way.

Do the Republican Need Iraq?

Ezra gets provocative:

I genuinely hope Joe Klein is right and Iraq's improvements are durable. And contrary to Joe's implication, I don't think, politically, this is something for Democrats to fear. The better Iraq is doing, the less of an issue it will be in the election. The less of an issue it is in the election, the more issues like the health care crisis, the mortgage meltdown, inequality, and global warming will come to the fore. Indeed, the less Iraq dominates the agenda, the more alternative foreign policy visions can emerge, and be tested, and become the new context for the discussion All that is good for the Left.

Indeed, I occasionally believe that Republicans know that once American troops leave Iraq, the country's need for the Republican Party, at least temporarily, will cease. The Iraq War has increasingly come to define the Republican party. They've sacrificed almot everything else for it, from fiscal discipline to social conservatism (see the Giuliani campaign). So long as troops remain in Iraq, the Republicans can at least argue that they need to finish the job they've begun, and that the Democrats lack sufficient commitment to victory. End it, and you end their relevance, at least until they can reinvent themselves as the party of closed borders. My sense is that, consciously or unconsciously, some of the GOP knows this, and it underpins their unwillingness to even begin drawing the conflict to a close. At this point, the end of the war would be existentially unmooring for the Party.

I think this is right on a philosophical level: Shared support for the war papers over all sorts of messy internal divisions within American conservatism; it isn't the unifying force that the Cold War was, since there are more right-wingers off the reservation on Iraq than there were on the Red Menace, but it's close. But politically, the Republicans need Iraq like they need a hole in the head. The Cold War was a unifying force for the Right and a political winner; the Iraq War is a unifying force that prevents the party for engaging with swing voters on foreign policy, which is supposed to be the party's bread and butter, let alone on domestic issues. It's true that if Iraq recedes in '08, issues like health care and the environment that increasingly favor the Democrats will come to the fore, but that's still better for the GOP than having those domestic issues floating around plus a disastrous occupation to contend with, which is the combination that gave us the '06 sweep. Yes, the end of the war would be existentially unmooring for the Republicans, but when your party's in serious trouble, sometimes an unmooring is exactly what you need.

The Case for Obama

If you're a liberal Democrat, that is. George Will makes it:

Large undertakings in domestic policy -- e.g., the enactments of Social Security in 1935 and of Medicare in 1965 -- often follow landslide elections. In the 15 presidential elections since the Second World War, only twice has the Democratic candidate won 50 percent of the popular vote -- Lyndon Johnson emphatically in 1964 and Jimmy Carter narrowly in 1976. In 2008, Obama is more likely than Clinton to win an impressive electoral vote total that will look like a mandate. Conservatives should think: Although Republicans have much to fear in 2008, they might have less to fear from her as a candidate and, if she wins, as a president, than they would from Obama.

Without mentioning Obama by name, I made a similar argument in the Atlantic a couple months ago. After pointing out all the trends going the Democrats' way, I added:

... even slow-motion realignments require architects, and the memory of Ronald Reagan’s role in the Republican revolution, in particular, is a reminder that having a message isn’t enough; you need a messenger as well.

Twice in the past 25 years—in 1986 for the Democrats, in 1994 for the Republicans—an opposition party retook one or both houses of Congress, as the Democrats just did. Each party thought it had a governing majority within reach, but each lost the subsequent presidential election, riding a weak horse to defeat. Long-term trends make new majorities possible, and traumatic events (such as 9/11 and the Iraq War) can help catalyze their formation, but without effective leadership, the opportunities are easily squandered, whether on the campaign trail or in the White House. Just ask Karl Rove and George W. Bush.

I still think this is right, though I'm have to say I'm a little less confident - or worried, more aptly - about Obama's ability to play the Reagan role after watching him campaign for six months.

Collateral Damage

My mother (yes, even I have a mother) has a web essay over at First Things on the impact of the Catholic sex abuse scandal on the laity, and the creeping tyranny of the insurance industry over the life of the Church. Here's how it starts:

Eight years ago in our urban Catholic parish in Connecticut, a teenager I’ll call Elizabeth started a club for girls ... In the beginning, the club met in the Parish Hall. Anywhere from six to twelve girls, aged ten to eighteen, would sit around a small table, reading the Bible together or making cards for the residents of a nursing home they visited monthly. They would share snacks and devise skits, pray the rosary, and celebrate one another’s birthdays. The older girls mentored the younger girls, modeling for them the endangered truth that a girl can be both sophisticated and innocent, devout and fun. On Holy Days, they attended Mass together. They studied the saints, went on field trips, dedicated themselves to Mary.

Eventually, there was a conflict. The Catechesis of the Good Shepherd, a religious education program for three- to six-year-olds, needed the hall on the same afternoon, and our girls asked for and received from our pastor permission to meet on an enclosed stage in the same hall, far enough from the younger children that noise wasn’t a problem. This stage area turned out to be a kind of teenage heaven, with comfortable sofas, a kitchen in the rear, and its own bathroom. In the wake of the sexual-abuse scandals in the Church, one or more mothers, our backgrounds checked and cleared by the relevant authorities, would sit outside an open door, keeping an eye on the club but also trying to preserve its charism, which was about peer formation, taking responsibility, and making the life of the Church their own.

Summer came, and the club didn’t meet. In August, referred by our pastor to a lay brother I’ll call Giles, I asked if the same arrangement would obtain in the fall. Not meeting my eyes, he said briefly that the girls could continue to meet but not on the stage. They could meet in the library next door, a dark masculine room whose dimensions are almost entirely taken up by a table.

A day later, gathering my courage, I telephoned Brother Giles, explained my concerns, and asked why the girls couldn’t meet on the stage. An abstract, evasive explanation followed, tinged with bitterness, in which the word “bifurcation” figured prominently. No two groups could meet in the same space at the same time, he said. An adult male organization, for example, couldn’t meet in the hall at the same time as the catechesis.

I was still confused, so finally he said what he meant: Our girls couldn’t meet on the stage on Wednesday afternoons because of the possibility that they might molest the younger children.

I was too stunned to make the obvious objections—the physical distance between the two groups; their entirely separate facilities; the intermediary presence of watchful adults. I simply blurted, “But Brother, some of those children are our girls’ younger brothers and sisters!”

“Oh,” he said grimly, “that’s no objection unfortunately.”

The GOP and the Race Issue

Publius at Obsidian Wings asks, "why defend Reagan on race?" He writes:

Reagan’s race-baiting is beyond dispute. It happened too often, for too long, and too systematically. The more interesting question is why modern-day defenders of the Order of St. Reagan (like David Brooks) continue to whitewash it. Why not just say, “Yes, that part was shameful, but that’s not the complete picture.” Let’s just be honest about it.

The answer, I think, hits upon a much larger and more interesting theme. Modern conservatives – the majority of which are certainly not racist – have successfully ignored the racist foundations of much of modern conservative political power and even thought. It’s not so much that the doctrines remain racist today – or that they lack non-racist interpretations. It’s that they are historically rooted in racist backlash. In this respect, Reagan’s dark side is simply one part of a much larger pattern.

Okay, I'll say it, and I'm sure Brooks would as well: Yes, that part was shameful, but that's not the complete picture. But the second half of the sentence matters more than Publius allows. One reason conservatives are defensive about the race issue is that any concession on the subject is immediately seized on by liberals as proof that conservative policy on any issue related to race (which is more or less the whole run of domestic issues) is so irredeemably tainted that it need not even be argued against. It's true of contemporary controversies over affirmative action and immigration; it's particularly true of historical debates over what caused the collapse of the Roosevelt-LBJ majority, and the conservative realignment that followed. That's what the argument over Nashoba and other moments of possible Republican race-baiting is really about, in many cases: The extent to which we understand "the complete picture" of the Republican realignment as a story of racist backlash, full stop, end of story (which is how Paul Krugman understands it), rather than a story of liberal misgovernment on an epic scale, in which race played an important but ultimately subsidiary role (which is how I understand it).

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Give The People What They Want

Alex Massie has provocative thoughts on how being able to track reader interest on a story-by-story basis will change the newspaper business:

I know of at least one (non-US) paper where real-time web traffic figures play a role in shaping editorial decisions - at least in terms of prominence issues. That will only continue and more and more print editions will be influenced by web traffic as stories are published on the web hours before they become available in print (at least for as long as print editions continue to exist). So the boffins will analyse traffic data and note that past stories about Issue X have brought in 7% more traffic than ones about Issue Y; therefore we're going with Issue Y. Editing by numbers, quite literally.

There are upsides to this, of course: you can provide stuff you know readers actually want to read. On the other hand, it's likely to limit creative thinking and it will take strong - and unusually gifted and perceptive - editors to resist the sirens of the web traffic stats. Or rather, those that can marry the data analysis with original thinking that breaks out of a formula will be the most impressive (from a journalistic point of view at least - though possibly also commercially speaking). They'll also be the ones whose hunches - or luck - get them ahead of the market in terms of perceiving what the coming stories are likely to be.

Read the whole thing. What Massie's talking about dovetails with Michael Hirschorn's piece in the latest Atlantic, which argues that newspapers' most-emailed lists would make better guides to what should go on the front page than the usual "this is what we think is important today" calculation. But Hirschorn is rather more sanguine about what this will mean for the quality, if not the capital-I Importance, of what newspapers decide to cover and/or highlight. I've excerpted his argument below the fold:

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American Conservatism: An Encyclopedia

I'm not sure whether it's possible to say something intelligent about a thousand-page book in less than two thousand words, but I make the attempt in the latest Intercollegiate Review.

Mike Huckabee Will Win Iowa ...

... unless Mitt Romney can find a way to do something about numbers like these:

Among Republican caucusgoers, 27 percent said they would support Mr. Romney, while 21 percent said they would support Mr. Huckabee and 15 percent said they would support Mr. Giuliani. But two-thirds of Mr. Romney’s backers said they could change their mind, a strikingly large number; by contrast, half of Mr. Huckabee’s supporters said they could change their mind. And nearly every one of Mr. Huckabee’s poll measures in Iowa, where he has focused most of his resources, was encouraging: 50 percent of respondents had a favorable view of him, compared with 7 percent who said they viewed him unfavorably.

Meanwhile, go read Richelieu (he's a smart guy - he should be a campaign consultant or something) on the Giuliani campaign and the expectations game in Iowa and NH.

Like Sheep Among the Wolves (And Not In A Good Way)

As one might have expected, the National Right to Life Committee's explanation for why it endorsed Fred Thompson doesn't make a lick of sense. As Larison writes:

The NRLC claims that “he is best positioned to top pro-abortion candidate Rudy Giuliani for the Republican nomination,” which I would like to believe (since I stupidly predicted that Thompson would win) but which I also know at this moment to be utter nonsense. Clearly, from a purely “he can beat Giuliani” perspective you would have to go with Romney, which is horrific but nonetheless it is the reality at the present time.

It would be one thing to endorse Thompson on the grounds that he has a solid voting record (and they did cite this at the announcement), or that he is more reliable and trustworthy than the other leading candidates. But this appeal to his potential as the Bane of Giuliani seems as wrong as it gets.

Coincidentally, Marc has the latest CBS-NYTimes polls from New Hampshire and Iowa. If you run your eyes down the list of GOP candidates, you'll find Fred Thompson running fourth in the caucuses, with nine percent of the vote; in New Hampshire, he's sixth, at six percent. But I guess he's got Rudy right where he wants him.

I don't always buy into the notion, advanced by Jon Chait among others, that the economic right calls all the shots in the GOP. I do, however, think that the folks at, say, the Club for Growth are a lot better at the hard business of intra-party infighting than some of their friends and rivals on the religious right.

Brooks vs. Krugman, Round Two

Via Esquire and Peter Suderman, I've found video of that Krugman-Brooks showdown everyone wants to see:

I assume the red-haired woman who shows up at the end is Maureen Dowd ...

Ron Paul Rising

He's beating Fred Thompson in the last two polls out of New Hampshire. He's getting the Beatlemania treatment at his rallies. And he's even got the New York Sun saying nice things about him.

Can't They Revoke His License?

Returning to one of my pet peeves: Forget term limits for columnists - how about term limits for no-talent directors? More specifically, how the hell does Edward Burns, whose hackishness as a screenwriter-director is exceeded only by his smug incompetence as a thespian, get to keep making movies with real actors? His films tend to either vanish at the box office or go straight to video, and what's more, they're basically all the same movie. Yet they keep coming - stocked with B-List talent, sure, but with talent all the same. What's his secret? Do all these actors really just love to work with him? Or is there some idiot agent in Hollywood who keeps telling Selma Blair - or Debra Messing or Patrick Wilson or Brittany Murphy or whomever - that what they really need, to showcase their acting chops and take their career to the next level, is a part in the next Edward Burns movie?

Bob Herbert and the Tenure Problem

Brad DeLong wonders how the Times has managed to pick Bob Herbert of all people to write an op-ed column, "out of the 75 million liberal adults in America?" Andrew, with Herbert's race in mind, snarks that DeLong has posed "a question only a left-liberal could ask." I'm not so sure: Yes, the affirmative-action argument explains Herbert's existence as a columnist, but not his longevity; once it became clear that he was a lousy pundit (and no, I don't buy T.A. Frank's counterintuitive case for why we should all be reading him more often), the Times shouldn't have had any trouble finding a more capable writer (to start with, either of these two guys) to fill the de facto African-American slot in the page. Affirmative action isn't the problem; tenure is.

And not just for Bob Herbert. It's really, really hard to write an 800-word column twice a week; as Jack Shafer notes while eviscerating Herbert's colleague Roger Cohen, "the job cores the skulls of all but the stoutest, most resourceful writers." Yet writers who land a gig on one of the big op-ed pages tend to last for decades, gamely churning out columns long after their powers have begun to wane - if, that is, they had any powers to begin with. There are columnists who stay persistently interesting even after decades on the job, but they're few and far between, and even the best of them might profit from five-year sabbaticals here and there. The rest should be hired in very early middle age (yes, there's wisdom that comes with age and experience, but being opinionated twice a week or more strikes me as more of a fortysomething than a sixtysomething's game) and then strictly term-limited, at five or ten or fifteen years. It would be good for us, the readers, and good for them as well. (There has to be something more productive David Broder could be doing with his twilight years.)

Of course, I'm on the record suggesting that blogs will crowd out the traditional twice-a-week op-ed column over the next couple decades anyway, which if it happens promises to eliminate, or at least mitigate, the tenure problem and create a whole host of new ones in its place. (Goodbye Bob Herbert, hello ... Jane Hamsher? Oy.)

Fred Thompson and Pro-Life Folly

I don't see how anyone can read the transcript of Fred Thompson's Meet the Press appearance - not just the portions where he discusses Roe v. Wade and federalism, but his inarticulate attempts to talk around the question of whether first-term abortion should be illegal - and think that in a field that includes several other pro-life candidates (Romney, McCain, Huckabee), it's Thompson who most deserves the endorsement of the country's leading pro-life advocacy group . Yes, McCain and Romney have their problems as well, from the perspective of a pro-life purist; yes, Huckabee is a long shot. But particularly given what a lousy campaign Thompson has run - it's not as if the NRLC is guaranteeing itself a place at the front-runner's table with this endorsement - one of those three has to be the better choice.

The Secret Hatreds of Presidential Candidates

Good stuff, from Richelieu.

McCain vs. Rudy

Maybe the whole "ding Rudy over Bernie Kerik" gambit really was unplanned, and just a case of McCain being McCain and running off at the mouth, but I think it's a good play. McCain's mini-revival in the national polls seems to have come primarily from disillusioned Thompson backers, but I think there's a limit to how much support he can peel off the fading Thompson campaign; the movement conservatives who gravitated toward Fred as a non-Rudy alternative are more likely to break for Romney or even Huckabee, I suspect, than for the Senator from Arizona. Ultimately, McCain and Rudy appeal to similar constituencies within the party, and (Ramesh's best efforts notwithstanding) both are regarded with suspicion by similar constituencies. This means that McCain will always be the last choice for an anti-Rudy voter, which in turn means that to win New Hampshire, he'll need to persuade some Giuliani voters to switch over (back over, perhaps) to him. The other candidates can persuade themselves that they can win without going after Giuliani directly, by simply consolidating the anti-Rudy vote and going from there, but McCain doesn't have that luxury. To build himself up to a point where Romney, Thompson and Huckabee supporters feel like they have to rally around him, he needs to tear Rudy down a bit. And the Kerik story is as good a place as any to start trying.

Mailer, RIP

I'm with Rick Brookhiser more than Roger Kimball. From what I've read of him, Mailer seems to belong - despite their wildly divergent styles and personae - to the same class of writers as Tom Wolfe: Immensely talented and creative wordsmiths who wasted far too much time (Wolfe, late in his career; Mailer, throughout) trying to be Great American Novelists, a task neither was really up to, instead of conducting the experiments in essays and narrative nonfiction that both will be remembered for.

However, I haven't made my way through Harlot's Ghost, which many people whose literary judgment I trust (including Christopher Hitchens) have suggested is the place where Mailer came closet to achieve his GAN ambition, and I should probably reserve judgment until I've blocked out a few weeks to read it.

The Derision It Deserves

It's rare that you encounter a bad movie whose badness deserves no analysis, no interpretation, no exculpatory comments - nothing but pure, unadulterated derision. Lions for Lambs, however, is such a movie. Indeed, I fear that mere words can't begin to convey its unmitigated awfulness. I give it my best shot in the next NR, and I've been impressed by the efforts turned in by Chris Orr, Dana Stevens, and the Onion A/V Club. But I think John Podhoretz has really hit the sweet spot. I tried quoting the movie's dialogue in an effort to establish the film's utter risibility, but I think he's hit on a better method: Deadpan plot summary. Consider the following passage (spoilers below):

Continue reading "The Derision It Deserves" »

Electability and the Pro-Life Vote

Matt writes:

It's interesting to see the non-Robertson (less crazy?) elements of the religious right trying to take [the "Rudy is more electable"] argument by the horns. Almost all the Democrats I know think these people are wrong and Giuliani would be the strongest GOP nominee. It still seems to me, though, that Giuliani is pretty likely to prompt a spoiler candidacy, especially if he somehow manages to win with the 30-35 percent he's currently pulling in the polls.

I'm often inclined to think that Giuliani would be the strongest GOP nominee - because he's a celebrity, a national hero, and a very capable politician. I'm skeptical that he'd be the strongest GOP nominee because he's pro-choice, which is something that his supporters often suggest, and that elite-level Democrats and Republicans alike seem to believe. Not just because of the possibility of a spoiler candidate (though that certainly factors in), but because there's at least as much reason to think that Giuliani's abortion views would hurt the GOP with socially-conservative, economically moderate voters (with the middle-class white Catholics, for instance, who broke for Bush heavily in '04) as there is reason to think that they would help the GOP with socially-liberal fiscal conservatives. And the election map is simply too complicated to say how these effects would balance out.

More generally, I'm on the record as thinking that Rudy's ability to reshape the map is overrated, and that if he is the strongest candidate, his strength will manifest itself in the existing swing states, not in New Jersey or New York or where-have-you.

David Brooks vs. His Colleagues

David Brooks, today, on the "Reagan kicked off his 1980 presidential campaign with a states’ rights speech in Philadelphia to send a signal to white racists that he was on their side" slur:

... the agitprop version ... that Reagan opened his campaign with an appeal to racism — is a distortion, as honest investigators ranging from Bruce Bartlett, who worked for the Reagan administration and is the author of “Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy,” to Kevin Drum, who writes for Washington Monthly, have concluded.

But still the slur spreads. It’s spread by people who, before making one of the most heinous charges imaginable, couldn’t even take 10 minutes to look at the evidence. It posits that there was a master conspiracy to play on the alleged Klan-like prejudices of American voters, when there is no evidence of that conspiracy. And, of course, in a partisan age there are always people eager to believe this stuff.

I wonder which people he could have in mind?

The Tragedy of Tom Cruise

Just before watching Tom Cruise play a hotshot GOP senator in Lions for Lambs last night (my review will be in the next NR; it will not be favorable), I caught the trailer for Valkyrie, in which Tom Cruise plays Claus von Stauffenberg, the leader of the famous plot to kill Hitler. I would say that it looks a lot like Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, with Cruise taking over the Kevin Costner, "woefully miscast American" role, except that Prince of Thieves was a dreadful movie in myriad other ways as well, whereas Valkyrie looks like it could have been pretty awesome ... if they'd found somebody else to play the lead, that is. To be fair, Cruise does look a little bit like the heroic colonel. But if the trailer is any guide, he'll be about as convincing in the role as - well, as you'd expect:

November 8, 2007

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