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December 2007 Archives
December 31, 2007
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.
December 28, 2007
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.
December 26, 2007
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)
December 24, 2007
Merry Christmas
Best wishes for a joyful holiday to all my readers. (Regular posting should resume before the Iowa caucuses.)
December 21, 2007
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 ...
December 20, 2007
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.
December 19, 2007
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.
December 18, 2007
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.
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.
December 17, 2007
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.
December 16, 2007
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.
December 14, 2007
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.
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.
December 13, 2007
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.
December 12, 2007
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.
December 11, 2007
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.
December 10, 2007
McCain-Huckabee?
Or just universal Romney hatred?
Parody of the Day
Mitt Romney and