Your 2008 Predictions

Safire? He's lost his mojo. Go with Millman instead.

The Coming Conservative Civil War

Michael Tomasky, on the GOP's future:

Despite Bush's failures and the discrediting of conservative governance, there is every chance that the next Republican president, should the party's nominee prevail next year, will be just as conservative as Bush has been—perhaps even more so.

How could this be? The explanation is fairly simple. It has little to do with the out-of-touch politicians and conservative voters ... and reflects instead the central hard truth about the components of the Republican Party today. That is, the party is still in the hands of three main interests: neoconservatives; theo-conservatives, i.e., the groups of the religious right; and radical anti-taxers, clustered around such organizations as the Club for Growth and Grover Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform. Each of these groups dominates party policy in its area of interest—the neocons in foreign policy, the theocons in social policy, and the anti-taxers on fiscal and regulatory issues. Each has led the Bush administration to undertake a high-profile failure .... And yet, so far as the internal dynamics of the Republican Party are concerned, they have been failures without serious consequence, because there are no strong countervailing Republican forces to present an opposite view or argue a different set of policies and principles.

From this perceptive beginning, Tomasky's essay goes a bit astray, I think, in its analysis of how and from whence reform - or at least ideological division - is likely to come to the Republican Party. He treats the alliance between the three interest groups listed above as a near-immutable fact of conservative politics, and argues that any realignment of the GOP must, perforce, be driven by Republicans who are "outside" the conservative movement. (He offers the names Chuck Hagel and Arnold Schwarzenegger as examples of the sort of politicians he has in mind.) Tomasky acknowledges the unlikelihood of this "revolt of the moderates" scenario; what he doesn't acknowledge, I think, is the growing likelihood of fissures within the conservative movement reshaping the ground of GOP politics.

It's true that the current conservative intelligentsia, forged in the crucible of Ronald Reagan's successes, is heavily invested in keeping the triple alliance intact - hence the Thompson bubble, the anti-Huckabee crusade, and the "rally round Romney" effect. And it's true, as well, that if the Republican Party recovers its majority in the next election the alliance will be considerably strengthened. But such a recovery is unlikely, and already, in the wake of just a single midterm-election debacle, it's obvious that the Norquistians and neocons and social conservatives aren't inevitable allies - that many tax-cutters and foreign-policy hawks, for instance, would happily screw over their Christian-Right allies to nominate Rudy Giuliani; or that many social conservatives don't give a tinker's dam what the Club for Growth thinks about Mike Huckabee's record. (So too with the neocon yearning for a McCain-Lieberman ticket, which would arguably represent a far more radical remaking of the GOP coalition than anything Chuck Hagel has to offer.)

The "movement" institutions, from the think tanks to talk radio, have resisted these fissiparous tendencies, and if Mitt Romney wins the nomination they'll be able to claim a temporary victory. But if the GOP continues to suffer at the polls, in '08 and beyond, the (right-of) center can't be expected to hold, and the result will be a struggle for power that's likely to leave the conservative movement changed, considerably, from the way that Tomasky finds it today. Like most such struggles, this civil war is beginning as a battle of the books - Gerson vs. Frum; Sager vs. Sam's Club, Norquist contra mundum - but it's likely to end with political trench warfare, and the birth of a very different GOP.

The Politics of Juno

Now that I've seen the movie, I can safely agree with Ann Hulbert: Juno is a film about hot-button subjects (abortion, teen pregnancy, adoption, etc.) that succeeds artistically precisely because it complicates, rather than over-simplifies, every one of the thorny issues it raises. The only thing that's remarkable about this cinematic approach to controversy is how rare it is in Hollywood: Juno's shades-of-gray approach the culture wars ought to be required viewing for Brian De Palma, Paul Haggis, Robert Redford, and just about every other Hollywood filmmaker who's turned out a lousy movie about the Iraq War in the last year or so.

In my dual position as a movie obsessive and a pro-life scold, though, I have to take issue with Hulbert's characterization of the film's take on abortion:

The real flashpoint issue in the film, of course, could have been abortion. Here [Diablo] Cody's politics (presumably pro-choice) are at odds with her plot needs (a birth) and, who knows, maybe commercial dictates, too, if studios worry about antagonizing the evangelical audience. It's a tension the screenplay finesses deftly, undercutting both pro-life and pro-choice purism. Pregnant Juno at first reflexively embraces abortion as the obvious option, and her best friend is at the ready with phone numbers; she's helped other classmates through this. But just when pro-lifers might be about to denounce this display of secular humanist decadence, Juno stomps out of the clinic, unable to go through with it.

She isn't moved by thoughts of the embryo's hallowed rights, however, but by a sense of her own autonomy. And for her, that doesn't mean a right to privacy, or to protect her body ("a fat suit I can't take off," she calls it at one point). Juno is driven by the chance to make her own unconventional choice.

Well ... sort of. I would say that Juno goes further than Knocked Up in presenting abortion as a plausible choice for a girl in the heroine's position, and doesn't go nearly so far as Apatow's movie in making the advocates of abortion look like heartless creeps. And Hulburt's right that Juno McGuff's decision to bear her child to term is an act of personal autonomy that's of a piece with her broader nonconformity, and that deliberately sets her apart from the conformist (and judgmental) world of parents and teachers and too-chatty ultrasound technicians.

However, the crucial decision isn't cast as a Dead Poets Society-style validation of nonconformity for nonconformity's sake; it's cast as a case where being a nonconformist happens to be the right thing to be. And while Juno may not be moved by thoughts of her embryo's "hallowed rights," exactly, she certainly seems to be moved by the unremitting grossness of the abortion clinic (complete with a pathetic-seeming girl receptionist who tells her that they need to know about "every sore and every score") - and more importantly, by the declaration, from a pro-life Asian classmate keeping a lonely vigil outside the clinic, that her child-to-be "already has fingernails." (Careful viewers will note that while Juno sits in the clinic, filling out paperwork, the camera zooms in on the fingernails of the other people in the waiting room.) Just as the movie as a whole charms viewers (and particularly critics) with Juno's hyper-articulate tomboy cynicism, but ultimately asks us to admire the idealism at work under the cynical shell, so too does the scene at the abortion clinic invite the audience to giggle at the Asian girl's pro-life idealism ("all babies want to get borned," is her lisping chant), while simultaneously giving her the sincere line that makes all the difference in Juno's decision.

None of this means that movie is a brief for overturning Roe v. Wade; far from it. But like Knocked Up, it's decidedly a brief for not getting an abortion.

Pakistan and the American Presidency

JPod, on Bhutto and the American presidential election:

American politics would dearly love to take a holiday from history, just as it did in the 1990s. But our enemies are not going to allow us to do so. The murder of Bhutto moves foreign policy, the war on terror, and the threat of Islamofascism back into the center of the 2008 campaign. How candidates respond to it, and issues like it that will come up in the next 10 months, will determine whether they are fit for the presidency.

This seems to be the conventional wisdom on the domestic political fallout of Bhutto's assassination, with the obvious corollary being that the turmoil in Pakistan helps those candidates running on foreign-policy experience (i.e. McCain and Hillary, and possibly even Biden) and hurts the candidates running on domestic-policy change (Obama, Huckabee, and arguably Romney). This view of the situation is probably right, but it seems worth airing an alternative possibility: That yesterday's tragedy, which leaves the Bush Administration's delicate plans for stabilizing to Pakistan in fragments, will prompt at least some voters to view America's attempts at managing the affairs of complex, chaotic, and far-off nations - places about which even the McCains and Bidens of the D.C. community presumably know relatively little - not as a hard duty that requires toughness and experience, but as a folly to be avoided.

"How candidates respond" to Bhutto's assassination, JPod suggests, should determine their fitness for the Oval Office. Well, all the leading contenders have responded, and all of them have dodged, in one fashion or another, any strategic question about where U.S. policy should go from here, beyond platitudinous references to supporting democracy and opposing terror. Not that I blame them: Our Pakistan problem is a vexatious question, ill-suited to being addressed in sound bites and press releases. But it's precisely because it's so impossibly vexatious, and likely to remain so no matter who occupies 1600 Pennsylvania, that the news from Rawalpindi fleetingly inspired me to greater sympathy not for "ready to lead" politicians like John McCain or Hillary Clinton, but for the "come home, America" candidacy of one Dr. Ron Paul.

Mid-Century Exceptionalism (II)

Chris Caldwell's latest column takes aim at the same point - about the difference between JFK's era and our own - that I was trying to make earlier:

Many Americans are given to quoting John F. Kennedy’s view that a president’s religious views ought to be “his own private affair”. That was a workable ideal when American laws and institutions – from churches to unions – were stable enough that the private convictions of politicians could not affect them. But it is a different country now ...

Thanks to constitutional limits on government’s right to meddle in religion, churches are the surest refuge from overweening government. Mr Smith’s church is safer from regulation than Mr Smith’s hardware store. Unsurprisingly, many new secular institutions are now organised religiously. “Church” is an inadequate description of some of the all-purpose alternative communities that have cropped up in the American Bible belt, with cinemas, libraries, gyms, coffee shops and so on. What we call “religion” in America can be as much a political secession as a spiritual revival.

It is always legitimate to want information about a candidate’s bedrock beliefs, whether they are religious or not. If Americans are pressing for such information more urgently in recent elections, the reason is not that they are turning into fanatics. It is that, when basic institutions and social rules are in flux, convictions about first principles matter more than they once appeared to.

(hat tip: Continetti)

Merry Christmas

Best wishes for a joyful holiday to all my readers. (Regular posting should resume before the Iowa caucuses.)

Jamie Lynn and Huckabee, Cont.

He's got her back.

The "Myth" of Welfare Queens

In one of his slew of Republicans-are-racist posts earlier in the year, Paul Krugman wrote, sarcastically:

When [Reagan] went on about the welfare queen driving her Cadillac, and kept repeating the story years after it had been debunked, some people thought he was engaging in race-baiting. But it was all just an innocent mistake.

Of course, there couldn't be a third option - like, say, that Reagan was indulging in his typical fondness for using vivid Reader's Digest-style anecdotes to illustrate his arguments, and that the "welfare queen" story drew on real-life incidents to get at the underlying reality of an easily-abused welfare system, even if the Gipper's details were fuzzy. No, it's racism or nothing.

I thought of the Krugman line while reading (via Rod Dreher) the story of protests in New Orleans over a plan to demolish several public housing complexes. Here's a snippet:

Sharon Jasper, a former St. Bernard complex resident presented by activists Tuesday as a victim of changing public housing policies, took a moment before the start of the City Hall protest to complain about her subsidized private apartment, which she called a "slum." A HANO voucher covers her rent on a unit in an old Faubourg St. John home, but she said she faced several hundred dollars in deposit charges and now faces a steep utility bill.

"I'm tired of the slum landlords, and I'm tired of the slum houses," she said.

Pointing across the street to an encampment of homeless people at Duncan Plaza, Jasper said, "I might do better out here with one of these tents."

Jasper, who later allowed a photographer to tour the subsidized apartment, also complained about missing window screens, a slow leak in a sink, a warped back door and a few other details of a residence that otherwise appeared to have been recently renovated.

If you click through to the story, you'll find a photo of Ms. Jasper's digs, paid for out of the public purse, which in addition to having been recently renovated appear to house an absolutely enormous flat screen television. There was, admittedly, no Cadillac in evidence, so calling her a "welfare queen" is a tad unfair. "Welfare duchess," though, seems like a reasonable term of art ...

New Hampshire in Fragments

If our answer to the McLaughlin Group isn't your cup of tea, check out Marc's gonzo vlogging from the campaign trail.

The Table Continues ...

... And I attempt to explain what was wrong with Huckabee's Lucifer-Jesus remark.

You know you can't look away.

Should Jamie Lynn Spears Heart Huckabee?

Andrew writes:

Isn't Huckabee the obvious representative of all the Jamie Lynn Spears' out there? I mean: he's got a following for a reason.

Oh, snap.

Except, of course, that there's actually a serious argument for why Mike Huckabee (or any social conservative) ought to find his strongest constituency among people with the misfortune to grow up in a world where meeting your boyfriend at church and having his baby out of wedlock aren't mutually exclusive propositions.

Take it away, Reihan ...

Like A Stuck Pig

Like most non-New Yorkers, I paid only glancing attention to the saga of Rudy Giuliani's personal life while he was mayor. So it's always interesting to come across new details - like this quote, for instance, which comes up in the context of a back-and-forth between Andy McCarthy and Lawrence Auster over whether Rudy's behavior calls into question his fitness for the Presidency:

Just a few months ago, the mayor would not have won many popularity contests. Estranged from his wife, television personality Donna Hanover, he broke the news to her that he was leaving her for another woman--at a news conference.

On Mother's Day, his celebrity divorce lawyer tried to shame Ms. Hanover into leaving Gracie Mansion, where she was staying with their two children. "She's howling like a stuck pig," Raoul Felder said. "I suppose we're going to have to pry her off the chandelier to get her out of there."

Charming, to the last.

Huckabee's Heresies

The following passage from George Will's anti-Huckabee broadside is less outrageous than his "blood libel" riff, but not all that much more persuasive:

Huckabee's campaign actually is what Rudy Giuliani's candidacy is misdescribed as being -- a comprehensive apostasy against core Republican beliefs. Giuliani departs from recent Republican stances regarding two issues -- abortion and the recognition by the law of same-sex couples.

Huckabee's radical candidacy broadly repudiates core Republican policies such as free trade, low taxes, the essential legitimacy of America's corporate entities and the market system allocating wealth and opportunity.

If Will can point me to examples of Huckabee-the-candidate actually repudiating any of these "core Republican policies," I'd be grateful. As governor of Arkansas, Huckabee raised taxes: This is true. As a candidate for President, however, he has campaigned as a tax cutter, taking Grover Norquist's gimmicky "no new taxes" pledge (which Rudy hasn't, incidentally) and proposing a tax reform that, while deeply foolish, is perfectly consonant with low-tax orthodoxy. His "repudiation" of free trade, so far as I can tell, consists of vague calls for the U.S. to get tougher in trade negotiations and a misguided use of the lefty term-of-art "fair trade". He isn't on the record opposing any free trade deals; in my interview with him, he mentioned the passage of NAFTA as one of Bill Clinton's biggest accomplishments; and even the anti-Huckabee Club for Growth has described his gubernatorial record on trade as "limited, but positive."

As for whether Huckabee has questioned the "essential legitimacy of America's corporate entities" - well, presumably this is the sort of thing Will has in mind:

I can see why Will wouldn't much care for this sort of rhetoric, but note that Huckabee explicitly says, while criticizing outsourcing and skyrocketing CEO pay, that "I'm not expecting government to fix it"; rather, he seems to be making the moral point that America's corporate entities should recognize obligations to their employees and communities as well as to their shareholders and bottom lines. This strikes me as a perfectly reasonable way for conservative politicians to address the thorny issue of corporate excess - by scolding, rather than regulating. Will obviously disagrees, which is fair enough. But to suggest that criticizing specific instances of corporate behavior, while disavowing regulation of corporate conduct, is the same as questioning the legitimacy of America's corporations - or the "market system" as a whole - is just ridiculous, and unworthy of a writer of Will's intelligence.

I have to say, it would be a lot easier for my substantial Huckaskepticism to harden into outright opposition to his candidacy if his critics didn't seem quite so bent on turning their anti-Huckabee sentiments into an ideological witch hunt.

Huckabee's Blood Libel?

George Will needs to simmer down:

On the Republican side, Mike Huckabee's role in the '70s Show involves blending Jimmy Carter's ostentatious piety with Nixon's knack for oblique nastiness. "Despicable" and "appalling" evidence of a "gutter campaign" -- that is how The Eagle-Tribune of Lawrence, Mass., characterized this from Sunday's New York Times Magazine profile of Huckabee: "'Don't Mormons,' he asked in an innocent voice, 'believe that Jesus and the devil are brothers?'"

Imagine someone asking "in an innocent voice" this: "Don't Jews use the blood of gentile children to make matzoth for Passover?" Such a smarmy injection of the "blood libel," an ancient canard of anti-Semitism, into civic discourse would indelibly brand the injector as a bigot with contempt for the public's ability to decode bigotry.

I, too, think the Jesus-Lucifer dig was inappropriate (for reasons that I get into a forthcoming episode of The Table - try to contain your excitement!). But it's the equivalent of the blood libel? Seriously? An abstruse theological point that makes Mormonism seem weird and possibly creepy is the equivalent of saying that Jews like to drink your kids' blood? Moreover, what Huckabee said isn't even technically a libel: The Jews don't actually use the blood of gentile children to make Passover matzoh, so far as I know, whereas Mormons do, in fact, believe that Jesus and Lucifer are brothers - not necessarily in the sense that most people understand the term, but in a sense that goes to the heart of the LDS Church's theological differences with orthodox Christianity. Raising the point in the way Huckabee did may have been disingenuous and deliberately sleazy (though an interview with the Times Magazine seems like an odd venue to embark on a subtle anti-Mormon smear campaign pitched to Iowan evangelicals). But The Protocols of the Elders of Deseret it wasn't.

Update: The "so far as I know" was a (possibly misguided) attempt at sarcasm. To clarify: The Jews don't actually use the blood of Christian children at Passover, full stop, no caveat appended.

The Table

Nothing you've seen on the internet can possible prepare you ... for this.

The McCain Surge

Proof, perhaps, that if the media wants something to happen badly enough, and trumpets it long enough even in the absence of compelling evidence, it will eventually happen.

(This lesson is not applicable if the poll in question turns out to be an outlier.)

Doubts on The Hobbit

Of course it’s good news that Peter Jackson agreed to return to Middle-Earth, thereby ensuring that the story of Bilbo Baggins, Thorin Oakenshield and the dragon Smaug wouldn’t end up in the hands of some studio hack. But I can’t say I’m as wild with geekcitement over the news as you might expect. For one thing, making The Hobbit after making Lord of the Rings is like serving a tasty appetizer after a rich-beyond-belief main course: It’s fine so far as it goes, but it can’t help summon up unflattering comparisons to the dish that preceded it. I love The Hobbit, obviously, and I'll be lining up to see what Jackson makes of it. But it’s a minor work compared with the books that follow, and as such the idea of seeing it adapted for the movies generates interest and curiosity, rather than the wild excitement I felt at having the chance to see The Lord of the Rings brought to life on screen.

Then there’s this:

Word is flying fast & furious: Team Jackson, New Line, and MGM have made nice and are gearing up to launch 2 HOBBIT movies ... One will be an adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien's THE HOBBIT. The second project is believed to be a bridge between THE HOBBIT and THE LORD OF THE RINGS trilogy - culled from the titanic amount of periphery/ ancillary/ notated material found in Tolkien's works.

Hmmm. Well, yes, there are interesting tales to be told in the bridge years between the Battle of Five Armies and the Long-Expected Party. For that matter, there are interesting stories to be told about every epoch of Middle-Earth’s history, and they’re all helpfully written down in Tolkien’s copious appendices and histories and sagas. But none of them comprise readily filmable narratives in the way of Lord of the Rings; all of them would require not only heavy editing and reshaping, but also significant invention on the part of the screenwriter. And while I trust Jackson and Company more than I would trust anyone else in Hollywood where Tolkien is concerned, I can’t say that I was entirely wowed by the portions of Lord of the Rings where they veered dramatically from the original text. Which means the prospect of having them essentially manufacture a prequel – and if it does well at the box office, you know there will be others – leaves me a little cold, and a lot worried. It's not that part of me doesn't want to see a hundred Tolkien adaptations bloom (forget 3:10 to Yuma: how about Russell Crowe as Castamir the Usurper, paired with Christian Bale as Eldacar, in 3:10 to Pelargir?). It's just that I suspect that opening the doors to "prequels" open the door to exploitation and commercialization, and a downward spiral that has the Lord of the Rings: The Phantom Menace and Jar Jar Balrog at the bottom of it. Better, I think, for Jackson to make The Hobbit, and then quit while he's – and we’re – ahead.

Update: Peter Suderman offers a more serious reason to doubt - that Peter Jackson is only signed to produce, rather than direct, the new Tolkien adaptations.

Advice For the GOP Field

Over the weekend, I suggested that Rudy Giuliani needed to make an early-state statement, ideally by finishing ahead of an Iowa-weakened Mitt Romney in New Hampshire, to have any chance of winning the nomination. Naturally, yesterday came news that Team Rudy is scaling down its ad buy in New Hampshire, effectively conceding first and second place to Romney and McCain. With this sterling track record of having GOP candidates follow my advice, I thought I’d offer my counsel to the rest of the field – free of charge.

Mike Huckabee: Pivot, dammit, pivot! You’ve come a long way in a short time, but consolidating the evangelical vote alone isn’t going to get you the nomination, and you’re in danger of being pigeonholed as the candidate of Christian-Right identity politics. You’ve advanced two “Huckabee for President” narratives so far: In one, you’re running for pastor-in-chief; in the other, you’re the populist candidate, the “Main Street” Republican fighting for the interests of the middle class against the Beltway elite and the “Wall Street” conservatives. The first narrative has served its purpose; now you need to pivot toward the second - less "Christian leader," more working-class underdog - and you need to put some meat on its bones. Your turn on immigration, however clumsily executed, was a decent start, but on that topic you’re just me-tooing the other guys; you need to find some issue, besides abortion and gay marriage, where you can draw contrasts with the GOP establishment that you’re taking on, and the Fair Tax isn’t it. Think health care, think family-friendly tax reform, think corporate welfare ... and if you start getting accused of “class warfare,” rather than “religious warfare,” you're probably hitting the sweet spot.

Continue reading "Advice For the GOP Field" »

What Will Ron Paul Do With His Money?

Michael Crowley wonders. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, here's what he should do: Invest heavily in New Hampshire and Iowa, as he's already doing, and see if his support in those states rises high enough to promise him a meaningful role in the GOP nominating process (and some delegates to take to the convention). If it does, great. But if he can't break 7 percent in a libertarian-friendly state like New Hampshire, I think he should strongly consider bowing out of the GOP race early, before too many "sore loser" provisions kick in, and pouring the rest of his money - and all the enthusiasm he's generated - into a third-party run as a Libertarian. The Giuliani-Clinton race that would have provided the ideal ground for such a bid looks less and less likely, but even in an Obama-Romney race (or any of the other permutations) Paul would still have more than enough oxygen for a national campaign. He's not going to have a better chance to take his message to the big stage, and if he isn't going to be a significant force in the GOP primary campaign, there's no good reason to have the Ron Paul Revolution die in mid-summer when it can last deep into the fall.

Update: Speaking of which ...

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

Stuck in a Moment

Via the House Next Door, here's a provocative compendium of memorable "images, lines, gestures and moods" from the year in movies.

Anti-Intellectualism, the Right, and Rudy

David Frum, on populism and anti-intellectualism:

Conservatives have drawn strength from populism. But you can overdo any good thing —and I am beginning to think that on this one, we've zoomed the car into the red zone.

For me, the lights started flashing in 2005, during the battle over the nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court of the United States. Defenders of the president's under-qualified nominee began attacking the concept of qualification. One wrote: "The GOP is not the party which idolizes Ivy League acceptability as the criterion of intellectual and mental fitness. Nor does the Supreme Court ideally consist of the nine greatest legal scholars." Harriet Miers, we were told, had a good Christian heart. That was enough ... In the end, it was not quite enough for Ms. Miers. But it may be enough for many voters in 2008.

The currently front-running candidate in Iowa, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, has built his campaign on a plan to abolish the Internal Revenue Service and replace the federal income tax with a national sales tax ... Economists and tax experts virtually unanimously agree that the plan is beyond unworkable -- that it is downright absurd.

... Just a little lower down in the polls is a libertarian candidate named Ron Paul. Paul is best known for his vehemently isolationist foreign policy views. But his core supporters also thrill to his self-taught monetary views, which amount to a rejection of everything taught by modern economists from Alfred Marshall to Milton Friedman.

Huckabee and Paul have not the faintest idea of what they are talking about. The problem is not that their answers are wrong -- that can happen to anyone. The problem is that they don't understand the questions, and are too lazy or too arrogant to learn.

Fair points all: Huckabee's Fair Tax zeal and Paul's anti-Fed enthusiasm are genuinely foolish; there is a touch of Miers-ish identity politics in the evangelical community's Huckaphilia, and Frum's larger worry about anti-intellectualism in the contemporary Right is one I share in spades. But if you're going to be hard on the current crop of Republican candidates for making bogus claims about public policy, it seems awfully unfair to leave out the candidate given to running ads in which he announces: "I know that reducing taxes produces more revenue. The Democrats don't know that. They don't believe that." (They don't believe it, of course, because in the current fiscal landscape you can't find a serious conservative economist who thinks it's true.) Or penning op-eds in which he explains that "the meaning of fiscal conservatism" includes the principle that "lower taxes can result in higher revenue." Or telling a GOP debate audience, in response to a question about whether we need to raise taxes to fix up our nation's transportation infrastructure, that the way “to do it sometimes is to reduce taxes and raise more money.”

Now it’s true that occasionally Rudy Giuliani hedges his bets (“sometimes,” “can,” and so forth) on this topic, and it’s true as well that he may not actually believe the extreme supply-side talking points he’s spouting, in the way that Huckabee presumably believes in the Fair Tax and Paul in the gold standard. On the other hand, neither of those ideas are likely to serve as the basis for economic policy in the United States any time soon, and both are marginal even within the right-wing coalition; the “tax cuts raise revenue” canard that Giuliani keeps promoting, on the other hand, is a staple of Bush Administration rhetoric and probably the dominant view among movement conservatives. If you’re looking for cases where the Right’s anti-elitism has shaded into outright anti-intellectualism - for cases where, in Frum's words, a GOP politician has deliberately failed to "study the problem, master the evidence, and face criticism" - Giuliani’s frequent channeling of Larry Kudlow seems like at least as telling an example as anything Mike Huckabee and Ron Paul are peddling.

The Talent in the Room

Rich Lowry, on Hillary's slide:

I believed, with a lot of other conservatives, that the Clintons were really good at destroying people. Judging from the last three weeks, they are really bad at destroying people. Maybe all those people they destroyed in the 1990's were just easily destroyed? This is very disorienting...

Without taking anything away from Bill Clinton's considerable prowess as a politician, his Nineties enemes were a pretty lackluster crop; few of them approached even George W. Bush's (none-too-intimidating) mix of charisma and political skill. Clinton's most talented foes, arguably, were Ross Perot and Newt Gingrich, both of whom were quite capable of destroying themselves without much of a push from the Clintonites. As for the rest, well, one could make a strong case that Barack Obama and John Edwards are both more talented politicians than any of the Democratic candidates (Tsongas, Jerry Brown, etc.) Clinton knocked off in '92, and that Mitt Romney, Rudy Giuliani, John McCain and Mike Huckabee are all better-suited to the national campaign trail than George H.W. Bush and Robert Dole - or most of Dole's '96 GOP rivals, for that matter.

Moreover, when "the Clintons" destroyed their political rivals in the Nineties, it was Bill (and his hatchet men) who fought and won most of the battles; if anything, Hillary was a liability in the '92 and '96 races, and to a lesser extent in the struggles with the GOP Congress (until the Lewinsky scandal made her a figure of sympathy, that is). And Bill, as you may have heard, isn't on the ballot this time around.

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

Bring Me The Head of Mitt Romney!

As an early booster of the Huckabee-helps-Rudy meme, it behooves me to note that it really doesn’t seem to be working out that way. Obviously, everything could turn on a dime if Huckabee’s boom turns out to be a bubble, but if Huck wins Iowa and Romney wins New Hampshire, it’s easy to see the race turning very quickly into a classic establishment-insurgent contest, with the rest of the candidates, Rudy included, dwindling into irrelevance. If McCain wins New Hampshire, the race stays a little more fluid, since unlike Romney, McCain probably doesn’t have enough cash or institutional support to consolidate his status as the anti-Huckabee candidate on the basis of a single primary victory. But even that scenario sets up South Carolina and Michigan as three-way races between Romney (assuming he comes in second in Iowa and New Hampshire), McCain and Huckabee, which means that Rudy will get almost no attention at all in the run-up to Florida. And even assuming that the latest Rasmussen is an outlier, his poll numbers aren’t good enough to survive his being frozen out of the horse-race coverage in the weeks leading up to the primary, while coming in third or worse in every pre-Sunshine State vote.

The smart thinking when the Giuliani campaign unveiled its Florida strategy was that Rudy needed a strong-but-sneaky second-place in at least one of the early states, if not more than one, to have any chance at taking the nomination. At this point I’d go further: No matter who wins Iowa, Huck or Romney, Rudy needs to finish ahead of Mitt in New Hampshire – either by coming in second to McCain or winning outright - or else he’s going to drop completely off the map before Florida rolls around. The combination of the Huckabee surge and the “Mormon speech” media blitz has made this feel more and more like a two-man race, and Rudy has to shake up that dynamic somehow. Since he isn’t going to steal many votes from Huckabee, he needs to build himself up as the anti-Huck, the guy the conservative establishment can turn to as a firewall against the Dogpatch hordes – and the only way to pull that off is to tear Mitt Romney down.

(See also Rich and Richelieu on this and related topics.)

The Auld Country

Alex Massie ponders the unusual sympathy among American conservatives for the cause, past and present, of Scottish independence; Larison weighs in here. Between them, I think they cover most of the reasons for this phenonemon. There's the “Cousins' War” dynamic, which both ethnically and ideologically connected the warring sides in Great Britain's 17th and early 18th century intra-island struggles to the combatants in the American Civil War, and thus created a natural affinity between the American Old Right and the Jacobite cause. There's the broader conservative preference for local self-government and traditional ways of life, which militates against the Protestant-liberal ideological project that unified Great Britain and brought the Highlanders to heel. More broadly still, there's the American tendency to romanticize our revolutionary period and look with disfavor on bossy Englishmen (a tendency that's particularly pronounced among conservatives), which breeds an affinity for anti-English revolts of all sorts.

It's the middle explanation, I think, that best tracks with my own philo-Caledonian sentiments. Despite some Southern roots in the family tree I have a Yankee's distaste for the Confederate cause, and I'm actually fairly partial to bossy Englishmen in many (though not all) historical contexts; my Jacobite sympathies, meanwhile, ultimately have more to do with regret over the eclipse of Catholicism in Great Britain than with Scottish liberties as such. To the extent that I find the Scottish National Party interesting, then, it's out of a combination of boyish Bonny Prince Charlie romanticism, instinctive small-is-beautifulism, and affection for, well, Scotland: I find the country intensely attractive in a variety of ways, and when you find a place attractive you naturally sympathize with people who say it ought to be free as well.

This is about as far as a serious weighting of the costs and benefits of disunion as you can get, and of course the SNP's historic commitment to socialism and the European Union is some distance from E.F. Schumacher and even further from His Most Catholic Majesty Charles Stuart, long may he reign. But then I don't pretend to be an authority on Scottish politics in any real sense; I just strike silly poses and leave the analysis to actual Scotsmen like Massie.

Photo by Flickr user Peter Macdonald used under a Creative Commons license.

Huckenfreude

Huckenfreude (n): Pleasure derived from the outrage of prominent conservative pundits over the rising poll numbers of Mike Huckabee. Particularly sharp when the pundits in question are partisans of Rudy Giuliani, but extends to supporters of Mitt Romney as well. Usually experienced by evangelicals, crunchy cons, populists, and other un-airbrushed elements of the conservative coalition. Tends to coexist with an awareness that Huckabee isn't actually ready for prime time, and that his ascendancy may ultimately do their various causes more harm than good.

NB: Not to be confused with the more obscure phenomenon Huckengersonfreude - the pleasure derived from the outrage of columnists who liked Huckabee so long as he sounded like George W. Bush on immigration, instead of like his natural constituents.

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

The God Market

Apropos of Romney's talk about Europe's empty cathedrals, Matt writes:

... whatever you may say about Europe's relative lack of religiosity, it's not a lack of entanglement of religion in public life that led to it ... In the United Kingdom ... there is, after all, an established church. And so it goes across northern Europe where each country traditionally had its own established Protestant church. And then across southern Europe, the Catholic Church always had official or quasi-official status. There was no question of pushing the church out of the public square. It's just that many people (the image of Europe as an all-atheist land tends to be overblown, there are churchgoers there, just not as many as in the US) wound up turning their backs on the church. This development most likely seems specifically related to the undue public-ification of religion in Europe. American religious groups, by contrast, have traditionally had to compete in a market of sorts for congregants. A church nobody wants to attend winds up shutting down, a popular church grows. Consequently, people have found ways to keep bringing people into the pews.

This point of view - that market competition is good for religious faith - has become the conventional wisdom nowadays. That doesn't make it wrong: America's most successful churches do behave a lot like successful corporations, and its most successful pastors like successful CEOs and pitchmen. I'm more convinced, though, that our free market in religion explains faith's success in America than that its supposed absence explains faith's eclipse in Europe. America, after all, doesn't just have a free market; it has a free-market culture, where people are used to be treated like consumers and thinking like consumers in almost every walk of life. The social geography of American life, in particular - car culture, suburbanization, and big-box stores - habituates people to constant mobility and competition, and thus makes the idea of church-shopping a natural fit in a way that isn't necessarily the case in Europe.

So it probably isn’t a coincidence that New England, arguably the most "Euro-American" part of the country, has the fewest megachurches of any American region; as Frances Fitzgerald noted in a recent New Yorker:

In Maurilio Amorim's opinion, New England is still the hardest place in the country to work as a church-growth consultant. Local television, he says, doesn't bring very many people to church there, and direct mail isn't as effective as it is elsewhere. Amorim believes that the main problem lies in the "bigger disconnect between the culture and the church." What he means is that church is not a pervasive way of life, as it is in the South. But there are other reasons. In Thumma's view, the strength and independence of the New England towns has militated against the development of regional churches. People just don't like to leave town in order to go to church. Also, in these towns, the civic culture has been shaped by the Protestant churches on the town greens, and the Catholics have fully participated in it. In New Milford, the clergy-mainline Protestants, Catholics, and Jews-long ago reached an unwritten agreement to respect one another's boundaries and to coöperate in community-service programs. (As a part of this agreement, they don't send mailings to members of other churches; Faith Church, of course, does.) In the urban and suburbanized parts of southern Connecticut, the towns may be losing their coherence, for regional churches have begun to spring up. All the same, New England remains a hard place to build a megachurch.

It isn’t that there isn’t the possibility of religious competition in a small New England town, or that the Establishment Clause somehow doesn’t apply; it’s just that the fabric of everyday life is woven in such a way as to discourage it. Which makes me skeptical that all the Continent’s churches need is disestablishment of religion, followed by an infusion of pastorpreneurs. It isn’t enough to have churches that behave like Wal-Mart; you need a culture and a social order that conditions would-be parishioners to think that shopping for a church is a normal thing to do.

Continue reading "The God Market" »

iVictorian

The technical term is "steampunk," and there's much more here, via David Frum.

Huckabee vs. the Establishment

Larison makes a good point:

Were [Huckabee] somehow nominated and elected, this would not ultimately herald the movement of the GOP in a more populist direction, but would set the stage for internecine GOP warfare as conservatives would turn against him quickly and seek to oust him as progressives tried to do with Carter. The Carter parallels are already overused, I know, but they seem eerily appropriate.

A case in point: This morning's Lisa Schiffren post on Huckabee, which might as well have been titled "Go Back to Dogpatch, You Stupid Hillbilly!"

It's interesting, in this vein, to compare Huckabee's '08 insurgency with McCain's '00 outsider campaign for the GOP nomination. There are parallels: Both men made enemies of the supply-side wing of the party, and both found one of their strongest constituencies in the liberal media (though in Huck's case, the honeymoon may be coming to an end). And then there are differences: McCain's anti-establishment run had a large cheering section among the right-wing pundit class, whereas Huckabee's emphatically does not; McCain found votes among old-fashioned fiscal conservatives, moderates and independents while making an enemy of the Christian Right, whereas Huckabee's base is the Christian Right; and McCain was facing an establishment unified around a single candidate, whereas Huckabee's attempting an insurgency in a fractured party. Essentially, the McCain strategy was to leverage an ad hoc coalition of moderates and neoconservatives to take down the candidate favored by all the party's interest groups; whereas Huckabee is trying to exploit divisions between the party's interest groups, and ride one of those groups - the social conservatives - to victory.

Overall, I would say that McCain circa 2000 was a stronger (and better prepared) insurgent candidate in a host of ways than Huckabee circa 2008 - but Huckabee is running through a broken field, which makes a big difference.

Huckabee's Amateur Hour

When I interviewed Mike Huckabee last month, the most amusing detail of the whole experience came when his (lone) aide murmured to me, apologetically, that the governor was running late to the interview because he needed to iron his own suit for a speech that afternoon. Everything in Zev Chafets’ profile of the governor for the Times Magazine confirms the importance of that detail, and the larger truth it represents – that Huckabee has come this far despite being woefully unprepared, whether organizationally or financially or policy-wise, for “what it takes” to win the Presidency. The Times piece has been getting scads of attention for Huckabee's comment about Mormonism's teaching that Jesus and Lucifer are spirit brothers, and understandably so. But I think he's actually getting off easy if that's what people remember about the profile, instead of, say, this:

At lunch, when I asked him who influences his thinking on foreign affairs, he mentioned Thomas Friedman, the New York Times columnist, and Frank Gaffney, a neoconservative and the founder of a research group called the Center for Security Policy. This is like taking travel advice from Little Red Riding Hood and the Wolf, but the governor seemed unaware of the incongruity. When I pressed him, he mentioned he had once ‘‘visited’’ with Richard Haass, the middle-of-the-road president of the Council on Foreign Relations. Huckabee has no military experience beyond commanding the Arkansas National Guard, but he doesn’t see this as an insuperable problem. ‘‘What you do,’’ he explained, ‘‘is surround yourself with the best possible advice.’’ The only name he mentioned was Representative Duncan Hunter of California. ‘‘Duncan is extraordinarily well qualified to be secretary of Defense,’’ he said.

Or this:

Huckabee’s answer to his opponents on the fiscal right has been his Fair Tax proposal. The idea calls for abolishing the I.R.S. and all current federal taxes, including Social Security, Medicare and corporate and personal income taxes, and replacing them with an across-the-board 23 percent consumption tax ... Governor Huckabee promises that this plan would be ‘‘like waving a magic wand, releasing us from pain and unfairness.’’ Some reputable economists think the scheme is practicable. Many others regard it as fanciful. (For starters, it would require repealing the 16th Amendment to the Constitution.) In any case, the Fair Tax proposal is based on extremely complex projections ... Huckabee does not have an impressive grasp of its details. When I suggested, for example, that consumers might evade the tax simply by acquiring goods and services for cash on the black market, he seemed genuinely surprised.

In considering Huckabee's run for the Presidency, it's worth making a distinction between being qualified and being prepared. The obvious rap on Huckabee is that he doesn't have the qualifications necessary to occupy the Oval Office, and that it's absurd to imagine someone with his resume taking over 1600 Pennsylvania. I tend to think that's wrong, and that Huck is just as qualified for high office as most of the primary contenders in both parties. Serving two terms as a successful and popular governor in a state like Arkansas tells us at least as much about a candidate's mix of political skill and policy savvy, I would submit, as being a one or two-term Senator with a negligible list of accomplishments, and it isn't clear to me why Huckabee's lack of foreign-policy credentials are supposed to put him at such a disadvantage when contrasted with say, Barack "I was a child in Southeast Asia" Obama.

But when it comes to preparedness, to the hard work of scaling up one's understanding from state-level challenges to national issues that any aspiring candidate needs to do, Huckabee is way out of his depth. This was my sense talking to him, certainly. Set him off on health care or education or what-have-you in the context of Arkansas politics, and he's got enough juice to make you think: Here's a guy who might make a good President. But widen the focus to the nation as a whole, and you're left thinking: Here's a smart guy who hasn't come close to doing his homework. For a charming also-ran with a chance at the Vice-Presidency, that wasn't a problem. For someone leading in Iowa, it is.

Update: I see Lisa Schiffren beat me to my initial point about the Chafets piece. Jason Zengerle plucks out another choice quote here.

Photo by Flickr user Joe Crimmings used under a Creative Commons license.

The Chattering Class

Matt and I discuss the great issues of the day, as well as Joe Biden's chances of winning the Democratic nomination.

The Lessons of 2006?

Fred Siegel on Mike Huckabee:

Who could be more authentically representative of Rove-era Republicanism than Mike Huckabee, a pioneer-stock evangelical Baptist who wants to reclaim Americans for Christ? In Huckabee’s words: “I didn’t get into politics because I thought government had a better answer. I got into politics because I knew government didn’t have the real answers, that the real answers lie in accepting Jesus Christ into our lives.”

This clearly has a considerable appeal in the Iowa caucuses, where upwards of 40 percent of the participants are themselves Evangelicals. As of now Huckabee, whose affability and quick wit make him an appealing figure, has a two-to-one lead over his nearest rival, Mitt Romney. (Huckabee took a jab at Romney’s inauthenticity on cultural issues when he insisted that social conservatives need a candidate who speaks “the language of Zion as a mother tongue.”) But as the 2006 elections made clear, this is not the kind of platform likely to be able to create the broad coalition necessary to win a presidential majority.

This last bit of analysis is a particularly egregious illustration of Dougherty's Law - which holds that every right-wing pundit must, irrespective of the evidence, assert that “if it were more like me, the Republican Party would be better off. It’s failing because it’s like you." I quite agree with Siegel that Mike Huckabee would struggle, as the GOP nominee, to “create the broad coalition necessary to win a presidential majority.” I am however, mystified as to how this is taken to be the main lesson of the 2006 elections, in which most of the exit polls indicated that voters were chiefly concerned about the war in Iraq, followed by the economy, followed (at a distance) by inside-the-Beltway corruption. If I were to risk a Dougherty’s Law violation myself, I would submit that if one rewrote Siegel’s post with his own favored candidate in mind – to wit, “who could be more authentically representative of Rove-era Republicanism than Rudy Giuliani, an uber-hawk with an abiding penchant for cronyism” – his concluding line about the lessons of ’06 would have at least a slightly greater ring of truth to it. But at the very least he ought to offer some defense of the by-no-means self-evident proposition that the last election was a repudiation, first and foremost, of what Mike Huckabee represents about contemporary conservatism.

Jeffrey Rosen Versus Clarence Thomas

What Alan Jacobs said. I am by no means in the "Clarence Thomas, Real American Hero" camp, and much of Rosen's analysis seems to me astute. But I am persistently puzzled by the unwillingness of white male journalists, in particular - for whom a meritocracy-plus-affirmation action system of advancement provides constant validation, and constant confirmation that they're getting ahead on innate talent and hard work alone - to generate sympathy for a figure like Thomas, who feels, for not-incomprehensible reasons, that his successes have been won (as Jacobs puts it, quoting, Stanley Fish) "in such a way as to render them bitter to the taste." You don't have to like him or agree with him to understand, better than Rosen seems to, where his anger might be coming from.

I would also add, to Rosen's remark that "it is no more possible to feel pity for [Thomas] than for Britney Spears," that the comparison is ridiculous (persecution by the paparazzi is by no means comparable to the combination of segregationist racism, affirmative-action condescension and Uncle-Tom vitriol that has made Thomas the angry man he is today) and that even if it weren't I do feel pity for Britney Spears, and I'm a little puzzled by anyone who doesn't.

Edwards the Electable?

Byron York puzzles over the latest national poll numbers, which show Edwards wiping the floor with every Republican comer, while both Obama and Hillary run closer to their possible GOP foes. My impression is that this has been the case for a while, and I'd posit three possible (and by no means mutually-exclusive) explanations. First of all, most voters' image of Edwards was formed in the '04 race, when he ran as a more centrist candidate than he's become this time around; thus despite having move steadily leftward over the last three years, he's still perceived as the least liberal of the Democratic front-runners by the general public. (Democratic primary voters, who are presumably paying closer attention, have a more accurate assessment.) Second, he's a Southern white male, and even if the percentage of swing voters who would rule out voting for a woman or a black man is relatively small (and it might be large-ish), his race and sex alone would still presumably give him a slight boost. Third, he's received considerably less press attention than Hillary and Obama over the last six months, and in a year when a generic Democrat would presumably trounce a generic Republican, he's presumably still a more "generic" figure than either of his better-publicized opponents, and thus a better vessel for undecided voters to pour their anti-GOP animus into.

The other possibility, of course, is that most people just really like the guy, but as a confirmed Edwards-hater I'm loathe to even consider it.

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

Who Needs Marriage?

A couple weeks ago, remarking on the coexistence of steadily rising illegitimacy with relative social peace over the last decade, Andrew wrote:

... social conservatives have long argued that the breakdown in traditional family structure is the core reason behind other social ills, such as crime. Perhaps it isn't in all social settings. Perhaps living in sin for a while before marriage is actually a social good for some; perhaps lower rates of marriage are not the end of the world - as many victims of awful marriages can attest. Perhaps child-birth outside marriage is not necessarily a bad thing if the relationship is solid and care for the child is secure. Perhaps, in other words, holding the family of the 1950s up as the standard by which all family structure should be measured is not, in fact, very helpful. I don't know, but it seems one obvious inference from the data worth exploring further.

It seems clear from looking at Europe that Andrew's right, up to a point: Child-birth outside marriage doesn't necessarily lead to negative social outcomes "if the relationship is solid and care for the child is secure," which it usually is in countries like Sweden where most children born out of wedlock are still raised in two-parent households. Unfortunately Americans aren't Swedes, and marriage qua marriage tends to be a much more important indicator of well-being, both for children and for parents, in the United States than it does in Europe. Perhaps this will not always be so; perhaps the coexistence, in the 1990s and early Oughts, of falling crime and higher rates of out-of-wedlock births are a leading indicator of the Swedenization of American social norms. But I doubt it, not least because the secondary consequences of family breakdown, persistent inequality and social immobility chief among them, appear to have worsened over the last decade, while support for an expanded welfare state - Swedenization of a different sort! - has risen over the same stretch. It seems more likely that the lesson of the Nineties is that a long economic boom and the end of willfully counterproductive poverty policies can make up for growing social disarray in other areas. And counting on another tech boom or another poverty-fighting reform as successful as the shift from AFDC to TANIF seems like a poor guide to social policy.

All of this is a long way around to noting that the latest numbers on out-of-wedlock births have been released (though they're only receiving attention from immigration opponents, so far as I can tell), and the news is, well, not good: Up among blacks, up among whites, way up among Hispanics. Here's hoping Andrew's right about what this portends, or what it doesn't. But here's betting that he isn't.

McCain-Huckabee?

Or just universal Romney hatred?

Parody of the Day

Mitt Romney and the rainbow of faith - the rough draft.

Mitt Romney and Al Smith

With all the attention given to the similarities and dissimilarities between Romney's speech on religion and politics and the famous JFK address, it's interesting to note the parallels between what Romney had to say and how the first Catholic nominee for the Presidency, Al Smith, rebutted a critic as part of a back-and-forth published in (where else?) the Atlantic in 1927. Like Romney, Smith first sounded a strict-separationist note, writing that:

I should be a poor American and a poor Catholic alike if I injected religious discussion into a political campaign. Therefore I would ask you to accept this answer from me not as a candidate for any public office but as an American citizen, honored with high elective office, meeting a challenge to his patriotism and his intellectual integrity.

But speaking "as an American citizen," he went on to say this:

... I am unable to understand how anything that I was taught to believe as a Catholic could possibly be in conflict with what is good citizenship. The essence of my faith is built upon the Commandments of God. The law of the land is built upon the Commandments of God. There can be no conflict between them. Instead of quarreling among ourselves over dogmatic principles, it would be infinitely better if we joined together in inculcating obedience to these Commandments in the hearts and minds of the youth of the country as the surest and best road to happiness on this earth and to peace in the world to come. This is the common ideal of all religions. What we need is more religion for our young people, not less; and the way to get more religion is to stop the bickering among our sects which can only have for its effect the creation of doubt in the minds of our youth as to whether or not it is necessary to pay attention to religion at all.

This sentiment goes a bit further even than Evangelicals and Catholics Together, I'd say. But it's certainly consonant with the theme of an ecumenical religious politics that Romney gestured at in his address.

These sorts of general arguments about religion and politics, interestingly, take up only the first third of Smith's essay; the rest is an attempt, dense with quotations from theologians and archbishops, to challenge head-on the notion that Roman Catholicism might be incongruous with American democracy. Obviously, the Republican electorate's doubts about Mormonism are much more nebulous than the fears Protestants had about Catholics and the separation of church and state, and thus less amenable to a frontal assault of this sort. But it's still interesting to see how comfortable Smith (or his ghostwriter) was delving into the finer points of Catholic teaching. (Today's candidates, by contrast, seem to be the heirs of his suggestion that we stop fretting so much about "dogmatic principles" and other details of religious faith.)

Pullman Versus Tolkien

From an interview with the Dark Materials author:

His story is a rival to the narratives put forward by two earlier Oxford writers, J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings" and C.S. Lewis's "The Chronicles of Narnia". Pullman loathes the way the children in Narnia are killed in a car-crash. "I dislike his Narnia books because of the solution he offers to the great questions of human life: is there a God, what is the purpose, all that stuff, which he really does engage with pretty deeply, unlike Tolkien who doesn't touch it at all. ‘The Lord of the Rings' is essentially trivial. Narnia is essentially serious, though I don't like the answer Lewis comes up with. If I was doing it at all, I was arguing with Narnia. Tolkien is not worth arguing with."

It’s true that Lewis and Tolkien are engaged in very different projects, and the former is more didactic than the latter; that Pullman would see this as a reason to dismiss the Rings saga as “trivial” tells you a great deal about where his own fantasy saga went wrong. Being a Christian, I’m favorably inclined to Lewis’ polemical intentions, but even I can see that they sometimes step on the toes of his storytelling. Which is to say that I can see why Pullman-the-atheist would find them deeply irritating. But an appropriate response to this irritation would have been to write an “atheist’s Narnia” in which the polemic is less abrasive – and therefore more effective, perhaps – than Lewis’s Christian sallies sometimes are. More myth, in other words, and less message; more Middle-Earth, perhaps, and less Narnia. Instead, Pullman seems to have set out to take the things he hated about Lewis’ writing and recreate them, but at a heightened, more hectoring pitch. The world-building that makes The Golden Compass so compelling and fun – the panzerbjorn and the witches, the Jules Verne-meets-Tolkien landscape – is thus gradually abandoned as His Dark Materials progresses, no doubt on the grounds of its inherent “triviality,” in favor of a thudding polemic that passes well beyond Lewis and approaches the didacticism of Ayn Rand.

I also liked this bit:

Pullman says that people who are tempted to take offence should first see the film or read the books. "They'll find a story that attacks such things as cruelty, oppression, intolerance, unkindness, narrow-mindedness, and celebrates love, kindness, open-mindedness, tolerance, curiosity, human intelligence. It's very hard to disagree with those. But people will.”

Indeed. This is Atlas Shrugged in a nutshell: A style of literature-as-polemic that seeks to persuade the reader of its argument by associating those characters who share the author’s point of view with every possible virtue, and those who don’t with every possible vice. The result is a self-contained world – where Christians are all Nazis, say, or successful capitalists are all saints and geniuses – that’s persuasive so long as the reader stays immersed in it, but that can’t survive any contact or contrast with reality.

A Race Someone Will Win

So says Noah Millman, in a well-worth-your-time response to my earlier post on the weaknesses of the GOP field. But David Freddoso isn't so sure.

Mid-Century Exceptionalism

You'll often hear that when George Romney, Mitt's father, was contemplating a presidential run, almost nobody cared about his Mormonism - which shows how far we've fallen from the ideal of church-state separation. Except that public opinion hasn't really changed between then and now:

As far back as 1967, only three-quarters of Americans said they would vote for an otherwise well qualified person who was a Mormon. This year – some 40 years later -- the results to this question are almost exactly the same.

Larison writes:

[George Romney] did face this problem, but failed to gain any ground as a presidential candidate before there was that much time for the issue to become a prominent one. We may forget, as we now enter the eleventh month of this election campaign (11 down, 11 to go!), that Romney started his campaign for the Republican nomination in November 1967 and by the end of February he was out. He was a declared candidate for a little over four months. He had made his famous “brainwashed” remark earlier in 1967 before becoming an avowedly antiwar candidate (an example his son has definitely not followed). His son started organising the preliminary elements of his presidential campaign in 2005, and there has been active speculation about his presidential run since mid-2006 at least. There has been much more time to ponder the implications of this factor, much more time to do a lot of polling on it, and much more time for pundits and bloggers to write endless commentaries on the topic.

The issue has taken on added significance in the nominating contest because evangelicals, many of whom would have been Democratic voters in 1967-68, have since started voting Republican much more frequently. As a Republican candidate before the 1968 realignment, Romney would have been more insulated from the early pressures his son is now experiencing. Had he been a Democrat, the issue might have become more significant in the nominating contest.

I would only add that a lot of people are confused about why religious issues appeared to be less salient in the politics of 1950s and 1960s.

Continue reading "Mid-Century Exceptionalism" »

Theocracy Versus Totalitarianism

What Megan and Daniel said. I would only add that there's an apples and oranges element involved in this comparison: The term "theocracy" describes who rules (the ecclesiastical authorities, standing in for God), whereas the term "totalitarianism" describes how the state rules (by seeking "to subordinate all aspects of the individual's life to the authority of the government," to borrow Britannica's phrasing). Thus one can imagine both totalitarian and non-totalitarian theocracies; the latter have been the historical rule, though as Larison notes, "historically theocratic governments ruled states that were not especially administratively effective, nor were they powerful enough to enforce their restrictions with the kind of thoroughgoing interference of the modern totalitarian state." Which is to say that given power enough and time, the Taliban might have established a tyranny as dreadfully pervasive as Kim Jong Il's. Still, at the very least one might suggest that anyone who would prefer Nazi Germany or contemporary North Korea to, say, the 18th-century Papal States or Puritan Massachusetts on the grounds that the latter would be more likely to insist that "it’s not enough to obey the rules, you have to believe in them, too," should perhaps consult a history book or two and reconsider.

The Golden Compass

You should read Hanna Rosin's piece on the making of the movie, and her review of the finished product; you can find my own (none-too-favorable) review in the next National Review. But to understand what went wrong with Chris Weitz' adaptation, look no further than this:

Mr. Weitz says that if he gets to film the rest of the trilogy, he will begin right where the current movie leaves off. “I mean to protect the integrity of those remaining chapters,” he explained. “The aim is to put in the elements we need to make this movie a hit, so that we can be much less compromising in how the second and third books are shot.”

Translation: "I know I made a mediocre movie, but hopefully people will go see it anyway and the studio will give me a chance to make the sequels the way I want to make them." Sadly, with a $26 million opening weekend, The Golden Compass has a long way to go to make that bet pay off. (And Compass was the best of the books anyway ...)

More in this vein here.

A Race Nobody Can Win

So the latest polls have Mike Huckabee up an implausible nineteen points in Iowa and four points nationally. But he can't win, right? I mean, he's vulnerable on practically every non-social issue, he has a variety of skeletons in his closet, his policy team seems more or less nonexistent, he still doesn't have any money, and he has most of the GOP establishment united against him. He doesn't have a prayer - or maybe that's all he has.

Except, of course, that none of his rivals can win either. If you look at the field, every candidate seems to have near-disqualifying weaknesses (a point Larison has been making for months, I believe), which helps explain why nobody seems capable of getting above 30-35 percent in any national or state-level poll. McCain is still poison to a large chunk of the base and probably doesn't have enough money to capitalize even if he wins New Hampshire - and if he loses there, he's cooked. Mitt Romney is running on a record that would have made him a moderate Democrat in any state except hyper-liberal Massachussetts. Rudy Giuliani is running on a record that would have made him a moderate Democrat in any place except hyper-liberal New York City. Fred Thompson is more ideologically appropriate, but he's lived down to his lackluster record as a politician by running a remarkably lousy and (perhaps unremarkably) lazy campaign. Ron Paul is, well, Ron Paul.

Note that I'm not saying the Republican field is weak, exactly. In a certain sense, it's the most accomplished primary field of any major party in a long time; indeed, you could argue that almost all the GOP candidates (including Huckabee) have more impressive resumes than the three leading Democrats, who between them can boast about ten years in the Senate and the weird quasi-accomplishment of being First Lady. It's just that ideologically-speaking, none of the Republican contenders make nearly as much sense as candidates for the nomination of the present-day GOP as Obama, Clinton and Edwards do as candidates for the nomination of the present-day Democratic Party.

This probably explains why Democratic voters are happier with their candidates than Republicans; it also may help explain why the leading Republicans poll better in general-election matchups than you'd expect, given that 2008 looks poised to be a Democratic year. Say what you will about Mitt Romney, Rudy Giuliani, and John McCain, but judged purely on their accomplishments in life, they're much more impressive figures than, say, a Barack Obama. (And I find Obama's accomplishments impressive!) I don't expect that general-election voters will judge on resumes alone, which is why I expect the Democrats to take the White House. But it's worth keeping this discrepancy in mind once one of the candidates who can't possibly win the GOP nomination actually does.

Before the Devil Knows You're Dead

I finally saw it last weekend, and it’s easy to see why it has the critics in raptures. There's the great cast, dominated but never overshadowed by Philip Seymour Hoffman's riveting scenery-chewing: Ethan Hawke continues to demonstrate that nothing becomes a too-handsome actor like the gradual loss of his looks, and Marisa Tomei continues to prove (in small, little-seen films, alas) that the Academy didn't actually make a mistake back in 1993. There's a rancidly-clever script, complete with a rare screwing-with-the-timeline gimmick that doesn't feel like warmed-over Tarantino. And there's the added frisson of knowing that the whole thing was put together by an aging lion of American cinema, rounding into form for his twilight years.

Yet something about it left me cold. Recently, Jonah Goldberg wondered why no one was drawing comparisons between No Country For Old Men and Sam Raimi’s A Simple Plan, a snowbound noir that was unjustly neglected, I think, because it came out just two years after everyone went gaga for the similarly-snowbound, similarly noir-ish Fargo. I see what he’s getting at: Both are about working-class guys who stumble on bags of money deep in the American hinterland, and both follow their protagonists down to their inevitable undoing. But I think the better comparison is actually between Raimi's movie and Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead - the two films could have swapped titles pretty easily - and I don’t think the comparison redounds to the latter’s benefit.

No Country For Old Men opens outward from its money-swiping hero into a broader canvas; it’s a sociological and metaphysical tragedy as well as a personal one. Sidney Lumet’s film, by contrast, is a constricted story, an essentially domestic tragedy that’s concerned with the damnation individuals visit on themselves, rather than the suffering that change and fate and God visit on society as a whole. And in this regard, I found its doomed characters far less persuasive, and thus far less interesting, than the unhappy Midwesterners conjured up by Bill Paxton, Billy Bob Thornton and Bridget Fonda and Brent Briscoe in A Simple Plan. In Raimi’s movie, I believed that the characters existed apart from the plot, that they had lives before the money came into their world, trailing destruction in its wake. Whereas as fine as Lumet’s cast was, I didn’t believe that their characters existed except in the context of the film: I didn’t believe that Hoffman’s character was married to Tomei’s character, or that she was having an affair with Hawke’s character, and so on and so forth, except insofar as I needed to believe it for the (very clever) schematics of the plot to make sense. The players felt more like pieces in a clockwork system than human beings trapped in a web of their own making, and as a result the movie was thrilling without being wrenching. I cared about what happened, but I didn’t care about the people it was happening to.

Romney's Speech

Both Marc and David Frum note that for Romney to say that candidates shouldn't have to answer theological questions just moments before declaring "I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and the Savior of mankind" seems like something of a contradiction. I agree. I also agree with Bill Kristol's friend's point (echoed by Mickey Kaus) about the off-keyness of Romney's statement that "in every faith I have come to know, there are features I wish were in my own," which was followed by a faintly-condescending laundry list of those features ("the profound ceremony of the Catholic Mass ... the tenderness of spirit among the Pentecostals ... the ancient traditions of the Jews ... the commitment to frequent prayer of the Muslims"). And as I suggested earlier, I agree with JPod that the mere existence of the speech probably moves the political conversation in the wrong direction for Romney.

Allowing those significant caveats, If Romney was going to give a speech about faith and politics, this wasn't a bad one to give - superficially anodyne and pro-separation of church and state enough to earn praise from the mainstream press, but also carefully calibrated to make the crucial "our common enemies are more important than our theological differences" point to evangelical culture warriors, complete with references to Godless Europe and the Islamist Menace. (And whether the absence of a shout-out to agnostics and atheists was intentional or not, I can't imagine that his campaign is all that sorry that "Mitt Romney wants to marginalize nonbelievers" is one of the insta-stories coming out of the speech.)

Anyway, judge for yourself:

What's Wrong With His Dark Materials

It isn't that Philip Pullman's trilogy is anti-Christian (though obviously that doesn't make me favorably disposed to it). Nor is it that the saga is badly-written; Pullman is, of course, an immensely talented writer, as anyone who read The Ruby in the Smoke could have told you even before The Golden Compass made him world-famous. No, the problem is that the wheels come rattling off the storytelling wagon in the third volume (The Amber Spyglass, that is), thanks to a combination of preachiness and terrible, terrible plotting. In his great essay on the series, Alan Jacobs blames this squarely on Pullman’s atheism, suggesting that "powerful alternative versions of the biblical narrative can only be told by people who are themselves passionately theological." I was persuaded by this argument, but I didn’t realize how persuasive it really is until I read this critique (via Jeffrey Overstreet) by the fantasy writer John C. Wright, which lays out, piece by piece, how the story Pullman should have been telling, and seemingly set out to tell, was undone by the message he was trying to push. An excerpt follows below the fold:

Continue reading "What's Wrong With His Dark Materials" »

Face of the Day

More here, all via Rod and Brad Plumer.

Mormonism And Its Enemies (III)

Nate Oman responds to my comments on his earlier post:

I would be the last to deny that there are real and important theological differences between Mormonism and Protestantism or Catholicism. However, it is not simply these theological differences that account for the strange political salience of Mormonism as an issue for some non-trivial segment of the Republican base. Rather, I think that the fact that the details of Mormon theology matter so intensely as a political issue for some voters comes from their need to assert -- if only to themselves -- their theological integrity in the face of political compromises. It is not Mormon theology but the strange series of historical accidents that pushed conservative evangelical protestants and conservative catholics into alliance that is causing most of Romney's "Mormon problem," a development that Mormonism had very little to do with. Furthermore, the fact that this same non-trivial chunk of the Republican base believes that the theological marker for ecumenism is also a valid reason in principle for rejecting a Mormon candidate is simply a graphic illustration of the problems of conflating ecumenism and political coalition building. It also illustrates that at least for some, Mormonism's status as a religious outsider is sufficient reason to relegate Mormons to the status of outsiders within the political community as well. Supporter of a basically liberal political order (and member of the Mormon tribe) that I am, I find that a bit disquieting.

Point taken. I've spent a perhaps-inordinate amount of time defending the idea that it's reasonable to vote against a candidate because of his religious beliefs, and with that in mind I think it’s perfectly understandable that evangelical Christians would feel more comfortable voting for Huckabee than for Romney because they share a theological bedrock with the one and not the other. (In this vein, I like Matt's comments about how he wouldn't vote for a Jew for Jesus if there were other candidates on offer.) But these sort of choices, however understandable on an individual level, are problematic when they start defining a political coalition: The more religious conservatives appear to be treating theological issues, rather than the political issues they inform, as crucial election-season litmus tests, the more they’ll shrink their tent (there are a lot more Mormons than Jews for Jesus in the United States), alienate potential friends, and provide ammunition to the theocracy-shouters. If social conservatism is going to matter in American politics over the long run, then evangelicals would probably do well not to disqualify a Mormon from high office in advance, even if they choose not to vote for him when other alternatives are available. I’m not brave enough to venture into amateur speechwriting, but in an ideal world this is a point that Mitt Romney would strive – subtly, subtly – to get across on Thursday night.

What Romney Should Say

Noah Millman and Russell Arben Fox play speechwriter.

Huckabee And The Mormon Question

Another week, another terrible Richard Cohen column about religion and politics:

What could be called "The Huckabee Moment" occurred Sunday morning when ABC's George Stephanopoulos asked the former Arkansas governor, suddenly and ominously the front-runner in Iowa's GOP contest, whether Mitt Romney is a Christian. Mike Huckabee knew precisely what was being asked of him, and he also knew, because he is a preacher, what the right -- not the clever, mind you -- answer should be. But Huckabee merely smiled that wonderful smile of his and punted. This, with apologies to George W. Bush, is the soft demagoguery of low expectations.

Wait ... so "because he is a preacher," Mike Huckabee knows that the "right answer" to the question is - what? That Mitt Romney is a Christian, in the sense that a former Baptist minister like Huckabee would define the word? Here's what Stephanopoulos asked him:

The President of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary Al Moulder - and you're a Southern Baptist - has written that we have to clarify, he said that Mormonism is in no way consistent with orthodox Christianity. It borrows Christian themes and texts but its most basic beliefs directly contradict the central teachings of Christianity. Do you believe that the basic beliefs of Mormonism contradict the central teachings of Christianity?

Now, Huckabee ducked the question, saying that "I'm not going to get into that argument because my goal in life is not to evaluate what's wrong with your faith or somebody else's, but it's to be able to live mine," and yada yada yada. This wasn't enough for Cohen, who called the question an opportunity for "a ringing statement in support of religious tolerance." But just a few paragraphs later, he allows that, well, "Mormonism is a significant departure from conventional Christianity. The Book of Mormon, like the Bible itself, is scripture to members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints -- downright heresy to some conservative Christians." Yet Huckabee, one of those conservative Christians himself, was supposed to go on national television and pretend that none of this is so, that Mormonism isn't a bordering-on-heresy departure from Christianity, because anything else would be "demagoguery"? Deflecting the question wasn't sufficient - he was supposed to tell what he would presumably consider an outright lie, in the name of Richard Cohen's ideal of tolerance?

More Cohen:

It is absurd that Romney feels compelled to deliver a speech defending his beliefs and that Huckabee does not have to explain how, in this day and age, he does not believe in evolution.

Um ... how many times has Huckabee been asked about evolution in this race? A few hundred times? Maybe more? (Often enough that he's begun bristling at the question, at the very least.) I don't mean this as a defense of his position by any means, and given the campaign he's running, it's completely legitimate for journalists to pester him about it. But they are pestering him: The notion that Huckabee's beliefs are getting a free pass in this race is just silly. And not just where evolution is concerned - you can watch none other than Bill O'Reilly grill him about whether he thinks non-Christians go to hell right here:

Richard Cohen wants to live in a world where these topics never get discussed. Fair enough. But asking candidates for public office to flat-out lie about their theological differences doesn't seem like a great way to get there.

Mormonism And Its Enemies (II)

Russell Arben Fox points me to this provocative meditation on anti-Mormonism, from Nate Oman:

... I think that Romney's speech will serve at least in part as an anvil on which one of the more surprising alliances in American politics will be hammered out: the one between conservative Catholics and Protestants. It wasn't so long ago that the idea of an Evangelical-Catholic alliance would have been anathema to both sides ... That changed beginning in the 1970s, when conservatives from both traditions decided that the forces of secularism were a greater threat than either Rome or heresy. The alliance, however, is not an entirely easy one. (Witness for example, the furor caused by Francis Beckwith's conversion from Evangelicalism to Catholicism.) I suspect that not too far below the surface of the Religious Right one will find a deep-seated theological ambivalence: Did the religious conservatives sell-out theologically by clasping hands across what had been the ultimate divide in American religious politics?

Part of this tension has been managed by the promotion of "The Great Tradition," a somewhat fictitious creation, that like 'Judeo-Christian culture," provides a coping mechanism for the cognitive dissonance created by the contradictory pulls of politics and theology. In effect, it allows Protestant and Catholic intellectuals to tell themselves, "I didn't sell out my beliefs for control of Congress; after all we both believe in Nicea and Chalcedon." In a world of un-conflicted sectarian competition, I suspect that the Mormon rejection of the creeds didn't matter all that much. Sure, it meant that Mormon theology was wrong, but everyone else's theology was wrong too, so there was no special Mormon problem. Likewise, Mormon rejection of the creeds didn't matter all that much when Ike presided over a culturally self-confident and complacent Protestantism. "Letting Mormons sit at the table," the Protestants in effect told themselves, "doesn't say anything about Protestantism because everyone understands that we wield ultimate control." (Hence, for example, Mormon apostle Ezra Taft Benson -- pictured at his swearing in left -- could serve in Ike's cabinet without the sky falling for Evangelicals.) Not so in a world where Protestant hegemony is challenged by the forces of godlessness.

Hence, I suspect that the reason why many within the Religious Right want to deny Romney (or any other Mormon) the Presidency is because Mormonism is an important theological marker that legitimizes the other theological compromises that have made the coalition possible. "Sure, we'll work with the Papists," the conservative Evangelical subconscious can say to itself, "but the Mormons are one theological compromise too far. I am not a theological sell-out because while I will accept Mormon votes, I will not accept a Mormon leader." Soft-bigotry against Mormons facilitates broader theological cooperation.

As a Mormon, I have to say that living on the anvil where the concerns of others get hammered out can be a bit uncomfortable. On the other hand, I take solace in the fact that much of the time it probably really isn't about my religion.

This analysis makes a lot of sense; I only object to note of self-pity at the end. Just because evangelicals (and Catholics, to a lesser extent) are using Mormonism as a marker to legitimize their own theological compromises doesn't mean it isn't a reasonable marker to use. It isn't only about Oman's religion, but it is about it to a great extent: Mormonism is a useful marker of how far ecumenism can go (and how far it can't) precisely because there are much, much deeper theological commonalities between, say, the Vatican and the Southern Baptist Convention than between either body and the the LDS Church. And while it's true that Mormons get more attention, and hostility, than other similarly-heterodox strands of American religion, they're at least partially victims of their own success. If the Jehovah's Witnesses, say, were doing as well as the Mormons are at winning converts, their tenets might be playing the same sort of "here's where the Great Tradition stops" role in debates over ecumenical cooperation. But they aren't, so they don't.

As an outside observer, it seems to me that Mormonism has a divided soul - there's a yearning for acceptance within the firmament of Christianity (and a hint of self-pity concerning other Christians' unwillingness to welcome them with open arms), combined with a pride in everything that makes the Latter-Day Saints unique. I'm inclined to think the latter is the healthier sentiment for members of a young and rising faith. Attention, and the hostility that comes with it, is the price of being a successful religion, as the larger history of Christianity's rise attests: You don't see Christopher Hitchens writing polemics against the Mithraists or the cult of Isis, after all.

Meritocracy vs. Democracy

David Brooks on China:

Imagine the Ivy League taking over the shell of the Communist Party and deciding not to change the name. Imagine the Harvard Alumni Association with an army.

Read the whole column. It's catnip for my own prejudices, since I've long thought that insofar as there's likely to be a serious ideological challenger to the liberal-democratic order going forward, meritocracy - rather than, say, Qutbism - is most the likely candidate for the job.

Mormonism And Its Enemies

In a month-old column on Romney's Latter-Day dilemma, E.J. Dionne put his finger on one under-discussed reason for evangelical hostility toward Mormonism:

Mormons now face criticism as a non-Christian "cult" from some wings of Protestantism. The hostility is aggravated by intense competition between Mormonism and evangelical Protestantism for converts.

It's this factor - that Mormon wards and evangelical churches, despite their vast theological differences, tend to offer a similar sociological appeal to religious seekers, and thus are in direct competition for converts - that undergirds the emails that Jonah's been getting from Christians explaning why they wouldn't vote for a Latter-Day Saint. It isn't about politics; it's about souls. As one of his emailers puts it:

I will not vote for a Mormon because they claim to be Christian, when they are not Christians. Electing, or even nominating, a Mormon continues to send the message to Americans that Mormons are fine and dandy, Christians like everyone else. Thousands of Christians are converted to Mormonism each year, and it is done under false pretenses. From what I have read, Mormons are very good at appearing to be orthodox Christians with new recruits. It's only later that the blatantly non-orthodox views come out. So, I rule out voting for a Mormon not because of actual policies they might pursue, but because of the message their election would send to Americans.

This may be fallacious reasoning: JFK's election, for instance, didn't exactly kick off an era of ever-increasing influence for Roman Catholicism, and you could argue that there's no better way to weaken a faith's appeal to converts than to welcome it into the bland and uncontroversial American mainstream. I don't, however, think that it counts as bigotry. And at the very least, it suggests that Ed Kilgore has it exactly wrong when he writes:

If I were Romney, I'd go right at the conservative evangelical Protestant suspicions about Mormonism by stressing and restressing its culturally conservative teachings and practices, ignoring the Book of Mormon and Joseph Smith and formal theological issues altogether. Theology aside, Mormons could be perceived as evangelicals with a much better track record of worldly accomplishments and moral fidelity. And in many respects, the LDS church has built the sort of conservative commonwealth in Utah that many evangelicals dream of for the whole country. I happen to have a family member, a longtime Southern Baptist Deacon, who's travelled to almost every corner of the world. The only place I ever heard him wax rhapsodic about was Salt Lake City. "It's so clean!" he kept saying, reflecting a tanglble envy for what Mormons have wrought in comparison to the messy and hypocritical cultural milieus in which most evangelicals live.

The problem is that it's only a short leap from this "tangible envy" to the "tangible fear" that Jonah's emailers seem to feel - and to the extent that evangelical Protestants see Mormons as their major competitor for the lost sheep of the American religious landscape, I don't think suggesting that the Latter-Day Saints have "a much better track record of worldly accomplishments and moral fidelity" than they do is the way to win their votes.

The NIE and the Election

Peter Beinart's argument about Iraq and '08 seemed very telling before the National Intelligence Estimate came out; applied to Iran and '08, I'd say it seems more telling still.

Romney's Mormon Speech

Marc has a good rundown of the pros and cons. Jay Cost, in a characteristically sharp piece, notes that this sort of reactive turn-on-a-dime is par for the course for the Romney campaign:

His candidacy has been the most transparently strategic this cycle. McCain is up? Go after McCain. McCain is down? Leave McCain alone. Thompson enters the race and seems a threat? Take a cheap shot about Law and Order. Thompson fades? Ignore him. Rudy is up? Go after Rudy. Huckabee is up? Go after Huck. You need to win a Republican primary? Make yourself the most socially conservative candidate in the race. And on and on and on.

If somebody asked me which candidate on the Republican side has won just a single election (in a year that his party did very well nationwide) -- I would answer Mitt Romney, even knowing nothing about anybody's biography. This kind of transparency is, to me, a sign of political inexperience. He's only won one election, and it shows.

Meanwhile, Larison explains what makes the speech so hard:

The impossible balancing act is stressing the political irrelevance of the theological differences Mormonism really does have with Christianity while simultaneously claiming that this very same religion, whose distinctive substance is supposed to be irrelevant, informs and shapes his “values” that he will rely on to make judgements about policy. Another part of the balancing act (which is where it becomes really dangerous politically) is to declare that it is “un-American” to judge a candidate based on his religion without insulting the millions of voters who consider a candidate’s religion an important part of selecting their preferred candidate, while also paying homage to the “separation of church and state” without actually endorsing the idea that the separation of church and state has any constitutional basis (which a fairly large number of religious conservatives doesn’t accept). His speech will have to go something like this: “My faith, which is very important to me and has made me who I am, should not be important to you, but it is important that we have a person of faith leading this country, and that person happens to be me.”

Put me down in the "it's a big mistake" camp. The speech should have been given at the very beginning of the primary season, or after Romney won the nomination; it doesn't make sense to give it in response to Mike Huckabee's rise in the polls. Huckabee is vulnerable on all sorts of issues, and Romney has the money and the infrastructure to make sure that every GOP primary voter in America - let alone Iowa and South Carolina - knows all about the tax increases and the ethics complaints and the softness on illegal immigration and all the rest of it. Going after Huckabee on these issues probably wouldn't prevent the Arkansas governor from consolidating his current level of support, but the right line of attack should be able to stall his momentum in states like New Hampshire and Michigan and South Carolina, where Romney is well-positioned even if he loses Iowa.

But instead of making the conversation about issues where Huckabee is vulnerable and Romney isn't, the Romney campaign has guaranteed that for the next two weeks at least and probably beyond, the media conversation will be about, well, Mormonism. If there were more time before the actual voting begins, that might not be the worst thing in the world; they could get the wave of coverage out of the way, inoculate themselves to some extent, and then shift gears and start hammering Huckabee on taxes and immigration and so forth. But there isn't time: Christmas is coming, there's a very narrow window in which to define Mike Huckabee as a Mexican-loving crypto-liberal, and the Romney campaign has just ensured that everyone will be talking about the Urim and the Thummim instead of the Arkansas gas tax. Unless Romney gives the best speech in the history of speeches, I just don't see how that helps him win - in Iowa, New Hampshire, or anywhere.

Photo by Flickr user NJRon using a Creative Commons license.

You Can't Fight YouTube Politics

Two weeks ago, Richelieu wrote:

Ol' Huck deserves credit for getting this far, but success brings much higher stakes. The Goober act will have to go back to Mayberry. If Mike Huckabee is serious about winning, he must begin running a serious-minded campaign. He should lose the stupid Chuck Norris cartoons and start acting like a president. Or at least a vice president.

Two days ago, after the whole debate over the YouTube debate, Peter Suderman wrote:

I have to say, this seemed the most lively debate of the last few months, as, after the first few, they’ve all tended to blur together. But some of that, I think, is that, as an event, it was just… bizarre. American politics has always been something of a wacky traveling circus. But this was just a full-blown freakshow.

That’s not, however, to say that Republicans should resist it. Politics is becoming more of a sport, an entertainment event, and to resist that, I think, inevitable trend, will only hurt more in the end. Like it not, the GOP’s just going to have to learn to play along.

Reluctantly, I think I'm with Peter. Huckabee should keep the Chuck Norris ads, and the GOP should keep doing YouTube debates. Immediately after watching the, ah, freakshow I briefly felt as if the people who'd insisted that the GOP candidates absolutely had to do it (myself included) might have been wrong, and the people who worried about debasing the Presidency and all the rest of it had been right. But that feeling passed, and I came back to Peter's position. I think the bulk of the conservative response to the debate has thus been exactly right: The thing to do isn't to withdraw from the arena, but to make sure that 1) you know how to play the game (as Huckabee clearly does) and 2) the people managing the arena are playing fair, and inflicting the same "gotcha moments" on both sides. On this latter subject, Peggy Noonan's column seems to me to be the last word.

The Gospel According to ... Ialdabaoth?

I am shocked, shocked, that the much-hyped "Gospel of Judas," a dull third century Gnostic text that purports to tell the Passion story from the Iscariot's point of view, would turn out, upon more careful examination, to be something other than the cross between "Gregory Maguire Does the New Testament" and The Da Vinci Code that everyone made it out to be. I mean, really - how could Elaine Pagels possibly lead us astray?

Needless to say, while the new translation alters Judas's role in the story - he's a an agent of the wicked demiurge the Gnostics blamed for sin and suffering and the whole of creation, not a tragic hero - it doesn't sound as though it much alters the substance of the text, which like most of the "lost gospels" is at once historically bogus and theologically unappetizing (with a Jesus who tends to sound, in Adam Gopnik's priceless phrase, like "the ruler of a dubious planet on Star Trek"). But of course the lost gospels' quality and historical credibility - or lack thereof, in both cases - have never had much to do with their appeal.

The Douthat-Broder Mindmeld

McCain-Huckabee: From this blog to conventional wisdom in less than 24 hours. (Which more or less guarantees that it's a bad idea.)

No Oscar For Old Tom

Of No Country, Jonathan Last writes:

Tommy Lee Jones deserves an Oscar for his performance. Or maybe a Grammy for "spoken word," because what he does in No Country he does almost entirely with his voice. That may not sound like much, but he's given terse, old-timey Texas words and he delivers them like poetry, only believably. It's kind of amazing. (In particular, Jones is saddled with the movie's opening voice-over narration. It's so hard to keep this device from looking like a device, and the script he's working off of here would sound really precious coming out of anyone else's mouth. He delivers it perfectly.

Give him a Grammy, but don't give him the Oscar. He'll get it, I'm sure: He's earning all kinds of Oscar buzz, and he'll probably get votes from people who want to reward him for In the Valley of Elah, too. But it'll be unfair - as such things always are - if he takes home a statue, given that his performance is only the third-best (or fourth of fifth-best, if you count some of the fantastic supporting roles) in his own movie, let alone in the year as a whole. Not that Jones' work isn't impressive; it is. But he took the character who was there on the printed page and brought him to life almost exactly the way I anticipated he would, whereas Josh Brolin and Javier Bardem both showed me something I didn't expect to see. And yes, monologues and voice-overs can be hard, but I think what Brolin, in particular, had to do - conjuring a character out of a few words and a lot of physical movement - was harder still, and therefore more impressive.