I only watched half of tonight's Democratic debate before the Lost premiere intervened, but based on what I saw I'd call it a draw for the candidates themselves, and a big win for their party. Here's Daniel Casse:
What a depressing night for Republicans! Whatever the Democratic debate lacked in substance, it made up for in sheer exuberance. With the writers strike sucking the fun out of Hollywood society, the Obama-Clinton debate felt like an opening night gala. And what a show! The rallies outside, the opening photo-op, the cheers, the friendly banter, the applause, the movie stars, the booing of Wolf Blitzer’s editorializing, the glamour of the Kodak Theater. It was an orgy of Democratic chest-pounding and self-congratulation worthy of Oscar night ... Who couldn’t enjoy this after last night’s somber and often angry snipe-fest at the mausoleum that is the Reagan library?
The Republicans last night looked like men competing for a chance to lose an election. Tonight, Hillary and Obama looked like they were competing to be President of the United States.
If he’s the nominee, I actually don’t think repairing relations with conservatives is going to be his biggest problem. His biggest problem is going to be the one that Romney has identified over the last few weeks – he doesn’t seem to care about economics enough to have developed and internalized a compelling message on it, and he isn’t a particularly credible messenger either. He may have a weakness on domestic policy as a whole. He has played a big role on some issues, but typically his interventions have not required a great deal of study. I’m not sure he can pull that off all year.
One irony of the talk-radio right’s antipathy to McCain is that despite all his years of deviationism, if you look at the issues he’s emphasized since comprehensive immigration reform blew up in his face last year, he’s actually hewed as closely as any of his rivals to the “back to basics” line that many movement conservatives have insisted (wrongly, in my view) represents the GOP’s best path forward in the wake of the ’06 debacle. Yes, his heretical views on climate change and sundry other issues have come up here and there, but for the most part, McCain’s been running as the candidate of victory in Iraq, porkbusting at home, and … well, not all that much else.
Last night's debate, I thought, offered strong evidence that (as I suggested yesterday) McCain's persona would not have worn well if he had been the front-runner all year long. At a moment when he's poised to wrap up the nomination, and when he ought to be rising above the fray and trying to bring the party together, he kept on behaving as if Romney were the front-runner, and he was the scrappy underdog who needed to bring his rival down a notch.The distortions about Romney's record on the surge bothered me less than the classless digs he kept taking - the line about "for patriotism and not for profit," the references to Romney having spent his own money on the race, the crack about how "sometimes people get laid off" by successful businessmen, and so forth. Even in his response to the final question of the night, a vapid softball that asked the candidates to explain why Ronald Reagan would endorse them, he couldn't resist getting in a dig at Romney's flip-flopping. I know everybody in the field dislikes Mitt, and not without reason, but if I were Romney I would detest John McCain right about now - and I wouldn't be exactly chomping at the bit to go out and campaign for him come the fall.
January 30, 2008
Missing Mrs. Huckabee
She definitely wouldn't have helped Mike Huckabee with the "go back to Dogpatch" crowd, but based on Melinda Henneberger's fascinating portrait of their marriage, I really wish we'd seen more of her on the campaign trail.
Hope For The Hobbit
I'm still skeptical about the whole thing, but if Peter Jackson isn't directing, the choice of Guillermo Del Toro makes me cautiously optimistic. Not because I've loved everything he's done, but because his best work suggests that like Jackson, he has precisely the sort of flair for the tactile, the organic, and the grotesque that you need to make a fantasy world like Middle-Earth feel physically real. This is a place where a great many recent fantasy films fall short: The magic of the digital age lets filmmakers summon up fantastic landscapes at will, but too often - I'm thinking of The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, The Golden Compass, and the Star Wars prequels, among others - the results have a glossy, unrealistic sheen to them, with too little of the gritty, bloody, fleshly reality that the best supernatural tales have always partaken of, whether on the screen or on the page. This was something that Jackson, with his background in gross-out horror, always seemed to understand, and the LOTR trilogy was vastly better for it; based on Del Toro's work to date - and the fact that he'll be warming up for his foray in Tolkien with an H.P. Lovecraft adaptation - I'd expect The Hobbit to do Jackson one better on this count, at least.
Fortune's Favorite
For the first six months of this presidential campaign, everything went wrong for John McCain, putting him in a position where to win the nomination, he needed just about everything else to go his way. And with the exception of the Michigan primary, that’s exactly what's happened. McCain can claim credit for some of it: He staked his campaign on the surge, for instance, and if Petraeus and Co. hadn’t succeeded in reducing the violence in Iraq, I can’t imagine that the press would have beat the drum for a McCain comeback as shamelessly as they did, or that moderate Republicans who dislike George W. Bush, the key McCain constituency, would have turned out for him in the numbers that they did. (In the counterfactual where the surge failed and the civil war spiraled out of control, it's easy to imagine the campaign turning into a two-man race between Romney and Rudy, with both emphasizing their Mr. Fix-It skills and promising to clean up the mess – Romney with managerial competence and Rudy with brute force – while Huck’s lack of foreign-policy experience and McCain’s association with the disaster left them both out of the money.)
But much of what's happened to make McCain the presumptive nominee has been luck, pure and simple. He was lucky, to begin with, that George W. Bush lacked an heir apparent – no Jeb, no Condi, no Dick Cheney – who could unite the movement establishment against him. He was lucky that Mitt Romney was a Mormon. He was lucky that Fred Thompson, a candidate who might have succeeded in rallying both social and economic conservatives against his various heresies, was out-campaigned by Mike Huckabee, whose appeal was ultimately too sectarian to make him a threat. He was lucky that Rudy Giuliani ran an inutterably lousy campaign. (More on this anon.) He was lucky that Mike Huckabee won Iowa; lucky that the media basically treated that win as a McCain victory (though obviously his skill in cultivating the press made a big difference, in that case and many others); lucky, as David Freddoso suggests, that Huckabee decided to campaign in New Hampshire and (taking my foolish advice) Michigan instead of going straight to South Carolina; lucky that Giuliani decided not to campaign in New Hampshire after Christmas; and lucky, finally, that Fred Thompson decided to go all in against Huckabee in South Carolina, thus delivering McCain the Palmetto State and with it Florida. And he was lucky, above all, that his strongest challenger was a guy that almost nobody liked – not the media, not his fellow candidates, and not enough of the voters, in the end.
Even McCain’s initial collapse, under the weight of the immigration debate and his badly-managed campaign, looks fortunate in hindsight. The failure of comprehensive immigration reform gave him an excuse to tweak his position on the issue and pose as having been chastened by the voters, without saddling him with an actual policy whose implementation he’d have to defend at every turn. Meanwhile, the loss of his front-runner status let him play the scrappy underdog again, a role that suits his personality far better than playing leader of the pack – and a role, as well, that allowed the media an excuse to warm to him again, after having been disappointed and disillusioned by his willingness to stick by George W. Bush in 2004 and after. I wonder, too, if a McCain who kept his front-runner status throughout the race could have withstood nine months of steady criticism, from Romney or Thompson or whomever, aimed at his extensive record as the Democratic Party’s favorite Republican. But as it was, none of his rivals took him all that seriously until late December – and by then it was too late.
Now if Hillary wins the Democratic nomination, then we'll know that Providence wants McCain in the White House.
Photo by Flickr user Wigwam Jones used under a Creative Commons license.
January 29, 2008
A Ray of Hope For Romney
It isn't much of one, but he'll take what he can get tonight. It comes from Tom Bevan at the RCP blog:
Giuliani dropping out helps McCain, right? Well, not so fast. According to the exit polls, 49% of those who voted for Rudy today picked Mitt Romney as their 2nd choice while 44% picked McCain. And, interestingly, those who voted for Huckabee overwhelmingly picked McCain as their top 2nd choice over Mitt Romney, 54% to 32%.
If that pattern holds outside Florida, having Rudy out and Huck still in could actually give Romney an unexpected boost going into February 5th. Just not nearly enough of one, I think, to stave off what looks like an inevitable defeat.
In hindsight, these numbers suggest that the real turning point came last week in South Carolina. If Huckabee had won there, weakening McCain and strengthening himself going into Florida, he might have taken enough votes from McCain today to allow Romney to sneak into first - and a Romney victory tonight would have the stage for a long, drawn-out, three-way race to the convention, in which Mitt's money and organization and the backing of the movement establishment might well have put him over the top. Which means that Fred Thompson, by tearing down Huckabee in South Carolina, probably delivered his old friend John McCain the nomination. I doubt he's sorry to have done it.
Indecision '08
As anyone who reads this blog well knows, I don't much care for Mitt Romney, at least as he's presented himself to the American people in his campaign for President. Unfortunately, now that it's a two-man race, I'm being reminded of all the things I don't like about John McCain: His self-righteousness and stubbornness; his thin grasp of policy detail on a host of issues; his (related) tendency to filter policy debates through a Manichaean worldview, in which politics is the extension of war by other means; and his longstanding tendency to squander his reform-conservative tendencies on precisely the wrong domestic causes (campaign-finance reform, immigration, etc.). So for tonight, at least, I'm pulling for Romney - since the race will be more or less finished if he loses, and I'm not ready for it to be finished yet.
(And while I wallow in uncertainty, you might give Poulos' Romney endorsement a look.)
Annals of American Decline
The Times was all over the American empire's mortal splendor in the last week or so, from the darkening mood at home to our waning influence abroad. I highly recommend Matt Frost's thoughts on the former issue, and Daniel Drezner's on the latter.
I don't at all adhere to the school of thought that says "if Andrew Sullivan and David Brooks like Barack Obama, he must be evil." That said, I do think it's clear reading things like this doozy from Brooks today that one important driving force behind the sophisticated right's praise of Obama is a simple belief that he'll probably lose in the end. Then, when Clinton is nominated, having praised Obama to the skies they can lament that once again -- sigh -- the Democratic Party has let them down and they have no choice but to vote for the Republicans. The effort here is to somehow bracket the Bush years as just some kind of goofy one-off that we can forget about and remember that the real issue -- as it so often seems to be here in Washington -- is Bill Clinton's sex life. Or something.
As an analysis of what "sophisticated conservatives" (and some unsophisticated ones as well) will probably do if and when Hillary Clinton wins the nomination - i.e., contrast her unfavorably with the far more appealing Obama - I suppose this argument makes sense. But as an analysis of what's actually going through the minds of those same sophisticated conservatives as they say nice things about Obama now - and especially of what's going through the mind of David Brooks - this imputation of machiavellian bad faith seems like the purest nonsense.
During the long, longarguments about the implicit pro-life messages, or lack thereof, in films like Knocked Up and Juno, my interlocutors frequently madethe point that even if the movies were mildly pro-life, they weren't effective arguments for an anti-abortion position, because neither film’s storyline actually reflected the experience of most American women who consider terminating their pregnancy. Which is fair enough so far as it goes - but if that’s the case do I really have to endure the suggestion, from J. Hoberman among others, that a film set in Ceauşescu's Romania has more relevance than any of them to the American abortion debate?
Hoberman's piece seems as good a peg as any to hang an argument that I don’t think either side in the abortion debate has contemplated seriously enough – namely, that any successful attempt, in a post-Roe world, to ban or strictly regulate abortion in the United States would amount to an epic social experiment, with no obvious antecedents in our own history or any other country’s. The U.S. isn’t a Communist hellhole or a patriarchal Third World society, and it isn’t at all the same country that it was the last time abortion was widely illegal. It’s a post-feminist, post-sexual revolution society, and any attempt at restricting abortion that hopes to succeed – whether legally, politically or morally – would have to take these realities into account to a far greater degree than, say, the hapless attempt at a blanket ban that South Dakota passed two years ago. Designing abortion restrictions for contemporary America would require compromises on the part of pro-lifers, obviously – not only on rape and incest but also probably on the availability and distribution of the morning-after pill. But more than that, it would almost certainly require large-scale (and expensive) experimentation with the American welfare state, to address the needs of the hundreds of thousands of pregnant women each year who would suddenly no longer have the option of aborting their unborn - and the hundreds of thousands of children who would come into the world as a result.
What exact form this sort of experimentation would take I'm not sure; it's a thorny enough subject to make a topic for a long essay or even a book. But over the short term, there's no question that it would require conservatives to temporarily table many of their longstanding policy goals - from cutting illegitimacy rates to reducing welfare dependency to limiting the size of government – in the name of the pro-life cause. (This goes for me as much as for anyone else: While Grand New Party assumes that the GOP will remain a staunchly pro-life party, the agenda it proposes also assumes that the landscape of abortion politics will remain roughly as it is today for the foreseeable future.) Over the long run, my assumption is that a ban on abortion, by changing the incentives of sexual behavior and family formation, would actually end up reducing out-of-wedlock births, welfare spending, and all the rest of it, and that a short-term investment in a pro-life welfare state (and an acceptance of the short term spike in illegitimacy, dependency and government spending that would presumably accompany it) would prove a boon to conservatism in the end. But that's a long-term hope, not a short-term plan - and even if that assumption weren’t borne out, I still think that a higher illegitimacy rate and a more expensive and intrusive welfare state would be a small price to pay for a country where every human being enjoyed the protection of the laws.
Obviously, not everyone on the Right would agree, which is one reason why the abortion debate ultimately cuts across party lines, if not across party platforms. (As Reihan notes, Will Saletan’s Bearing Right is the book to read on the subject.) And just as obviously, the scenario I just sketched out probably never come to pass; even if Roe disappears, I suspect that the country will settle into an equilibrium more pro-choice than pro-life, with more chances for experimentation with abortion policy but not all that many more. But if real opportunities do arise and the pro-life movement seizes them, I think it's safe to say that the results will look, in policy and practice alike, unlike any abortion regime that now exists, or has ever existed before.
January 28, 2008
Kennedy Versus Nixon
"Nixon in a pantsuit" - that's what Andrew called Hillary a while back. And from the Clintonian embrace of the Southern strategy to the Kennedy comparisons and the Kennedy family endorsements Obama is racking up, the Democratic race looks more and more like a JFK-Nixon contest every day.
Framed in these terms, the choice sounds like a no-brainer. And sure, if we were electing a symbolic Head of State, someone charged with delivering ringing speeches and presiding over ceremonial events and generally embodying the Spirit of America while playing only a modest role in actually governing the country, then it would be easy call. But for the Presidency as it actually exists, I’m not sure. That Kennedy was a far worse than President than his golden legend would lead one to believe is of the few points where I find myself agreeing with Christopher Hitchens, and by the same token I think that while Nixon was ultimately a disaster in the White House, he had real strengths as a chief executive that shouldn’t be too quickly dismissed. So if the choice is between a Tricky Dick without the same degree of paranoia and simmering resentment (and no, I don’t think Hillary approaches Nixonian levels of derangement on either count) and a JFK without the Addison’s Disease, the prostitutes and the Mob connections – well, at the very least it leaves me more ambivalent than the contrast of Camelot and Watergate might lead you to expect.
(And yes, of course, this is somewhat silly and reductionist. And yes, I’m playing devil’s advocate – literally, if you share Andrew’s take on Hillary. But somebody has to do it! Are there any pundits out there who haven’t turned on the Clintons yet?)
Do Or Die
It seems to me increasingly implausible to imagine Mitt Romney winning the Republican nomination if he loses to John McCain in Florida tomorrow. With Rudy and Huckabee fading, the chances of a grinding, three or four-way delegate war that goes all the way to the convention are fading as well, which means that it'll be down to Romney and McCain (with Huckabee playing spoiler in some southern states) as soon as Floridians finish voting. And if you look at the polls in the upcoming states, Romney's trailing McCain all across the map, from California to New Jersey to Pennsylvania to Missouri to Alabama. Some of these deficits are surmountable, but not if McCain heads into February 5th with the wind at his back. Like Obama going into South Carolina, Romney needs a game-changer tomorrow night - and the numbers, for what little they're worth, aren't trending in an encouraging direction.
Photo by Flickr user Why Tuesday used under a Creative Commons license.
The idea that political preferences are rooted in aesthetic preferences is ultimately pernicious, I think – but sometimes it’s hard to resist. Here, for instance, we have Will Wilkinson, rebutting a Virtue-boosting, libertarian-hating argument for the candidacy of John McCain:
I am more and more coming to the conclusion that National Greatness Conservatism, like all quasi-fascist movements, is based on a weird romantic teenager’s fantasies about what it means to be a grown up. The fundamental moral decency of liberal individualism seems, to the unserious mind that thinks itself serious, completely insipid next to very exciting big boy ideas about shared struggle, sacrifice, duty, glory, virtue, and (most of all) power. And reading Aristotle in Greek.
I sometimes think that liberal individualism is something like the intellectual and moral equivalent of the best modernist design — spare, elegant, functional — but hard to grasp or truly appreciate without a cultivated sense of style, without a little discerning maturity. National Greatness Conservatism is like a grotesque wood-paneled den stuffed with animal heads, mounted swords, garish carpets, and a giant roaring fire. Only the most vulgar tuck in next to that fire, light a fat cigar, and think they’ve really got it all figured out. But I’m afraid that’s pretty much the kind of thing you get at the Committee for Social Thought. If you declaim the importance of virtue loudly enough, you don’t have to actually think.
Allowing for a certain amount of deck-stacking on Will’s part (I’d prefer that the carpets not be too garish, obviously, and I don’t care much for taxidermy), the den with the roaring fire sounds awfully homey and appealing, while even “the best modernist design” often seems to me essentially chilly and faintly inhuman, and thus better admired from afar than actually inhabited. As Will says, this preference almost certainly reflects my lack of “discerning maturity” and my failure to “cultivate” my sense of style. There is, though, the vanishingly small possibility that certain forms of modernist design, like the stringent libertarianism that Will compares them to, emerge from an impatience with, well, actual human beings – with their abiding messiness and irrationality, with their particularist loyalties and romantic attachments and juvenile yearnings for solidarity, for heroism, for transcendence. Rational, mature beings, after all, would be perfectly happy living in the spare, elegant functionality of, say, an enormous housing project; only reactionaries and adolescents would cling to the clutter and disorder and, yes, the outright tastelessness of the old ethnic neighborhoods, where worse monstrosities than wood-paneled dens abounded.
But perhaps I’m pushing the analogy too far.
To leave aesthetics behind for a moment, the real problem with the “Virtue and national greatness” theory of politics isn’t so much that it’s more impressed by John McCain’s wartime heroism than by Will Wilkinson’s “discerning maturity” about what really matters in life. It's that it frequently seems to confuse the virtues necessary for battlefield valor with those necessary for governance - and worse, that it sometimes seems tempted to make a national policy out of the pursuit of wartime heroism, or at least the contexts (i.e. near-perpetual warfare) in which such heroism can be attained.
January 27, 2008
Paging Michel Houellebecq
Or P.D. James, maybe. Here's the artist John Currin, profiled in the latest New Yorker (it isn't online), on his turn toward pornographic subject matter:
"In art school, there's always a guy doing porno," he told me. "It's such an obvious idea, and that bothered me, but at the same time I kind of liked it, because this picture was going to be good. If there was a way to make good work out of something that's been responsible for a lot of surefire bad art, that was doubly appealing. People came into my studio and said, 'Wow, that's a beautiful painting.' It had a strange life I hadn't gotten before. But at first it didn't have much meaning for me. I liked it a lot, but I didn't know why I was making it."
A reason presented itself soon enough, in the headlines about riots in the Islamic world over twelve Danish newspaper cartoons of the Prophet Muhammed. "The response to that totally shocked me," Currin said at dinner that night. "That the Times decided that it was not going to show the cartoons - O.K., they're terrible-ass cartoons from a quality standpoint, but the idea that these thugs get offended and we just acquiesce, that was the most astonishing display of cowardice. And also the killing of Theo van Gogh, the film director, by some jihadist in Amsterdam - all of a sudden the most liberal societies in the world were having intimidation murders happen. That's when it occurred to me that we might lose this thing - not the Iraq War but the larger struggle." When I asked how this tied into his making pornographic paintings, Currin talked about low birth rates in Europe, and people having sex without having babies, and pornography as a kind of elegy to liberal culture, at which point I lost the thread. "I know how right wing this sounds," I recall him saying, "but I was thinking how pornography could be a superstitious offering to the gods of a dying race."
Nathanael Peters has some comments over at First Things' blog.
January 26, 2008
Race (Still) Matters
A couple of weeks ago, Christopher Hitchens penned a pair of broadsides - first for Slate, then for for the WSJ - attacking the notion that anyone ought to be even the slightest bit excited to see a competitive Presidential campaign being run by someone who fifty years ago could not have shared a water fountain with a white man, and a hundred and fifty years ago could have found himself bought and sold as chattel. "Isn't there something pathetic and embarrassing about this emphasis on shade?" Hitchens wrote, with the air of a supercilious Martian anthropologist unburdening himself about the idiot natives after spending about, oh, ten days or so on Planet Earth.
For those of us not quite so above our history as Hitchens, of course, Obama's race is a topic of great interest precisely because "shade" has mattered far more than it should for a very long time in this country, and the combination of Obama's skin color and his obvious potential as a national politician offered a chance to test the hypothesis that we're nearing a point where, mercifully, it doesn't matter all that much anymore. Tonight's results are encouraging on that count, but impressive as they are for Obama, they're still racially polarized enough to suggest that we're not quite so far along as might have been hoped. But there's no question, the future looks bright for a more color-blind politics (in Democratic primary campaigns, at least). And God willing, this election will be remembered as a milestone on the march to a time when Christopher Hitchens - or whoever succeeds him the role of our political media's house contrarian - can safely accuse his readers of being "pathetic and embarrassing" for taking an interest in a candidate's skin color without sounding spectacularly obtuse.
Matt Zoller Seitz, fantastic as ever, on the politics of the latest Rambo:
Like its three predecessors, Rambo strikes a nerve, and it's not a nerve that America's left-leaning critical establishment wants struck. Cowritten and directed by Stallone, the fourth Rambo movie is a bracingly political picture -- as much an argument in movie form as No End In Sight; a pro-interventionist rebuttal to all the 2007 documentaries and dramas about America losing bits of its soul in Iraq. The I-word is never spoken in Rambo, yet in its coded way, the film makes a case for why we are in Iraq and should stay there until the job is done, whenever that may be.
Read it all. (Seitz's argument certainly puts this exchange in an interesting light.)
The Perils of Obama
"You'd vote for Barack Obama, wouldn't you?" Ambinder demands of me in the latest edition of The Table. The answer is no, but as I've said before, I have the same sentiments about him - respect, admiration, interest in what he has to say - that many conservatives seem to feel, which makes me instinctively prefer the notion of an Obama Presidency to the idea of having Hillary Clinton in the Oval Office. But as I've also said before, these sentiments coexist with an awareness that an Obama Presidency might be much, much worse from a conservative point of view than a Clinton Restoration - not only in the very long term, with Obama playing a liberal Reagan to a larger leftward shift in American politics, but in the world of short-term politics as well.
What do I have in mind? Well, possibilities like this , for instance. I know conservatives weren't great admirers of Bill Clinton's AG choices either, but the prospect of Attorney General John Edwards is exactly the sort of thing that ought to make right-wing Obamaphiles think twice.
The defining portrait of Darman belonged, of course, to the late lamented Marjorie Williams; it's referenced and quoted in Jack Shafer's eulogy for her, and it's included in her posthumous collection, The Woman at the Washington Zoo. Here's how it starts:
Never mind, for the time being, the Freudian slip that brought us to Dick Darman's rec room at 9 on a Wednesday night in June, that's another, more complicated part of the story. At the moment, the man who presides over the world's largest budget is hunting for another set of Ping-Pong paddles - the good paddles.
I'll happily admit that I'm not much of a charitable donor one way or the other. Still, I'm always a bit flabbergasted by the fundraising solicitations I get from Harvard. It seems to me that insofar as I give money away, it should be directed at an institution that actually helps people in need.
What saddens me the most about enormous bequests to organizations like Harvard or Yale is the poverty of the imagination of the givers. The elite university strikes me as precisely the kind of institution that is ripe for radical reinvention. People like Meg Whitman made their fortunes founding or leading companies that radically transformed sectors of the economy, and reaped enormous rewards for doing so. Why on earth wouldn’t they want to tackle philanthropic missions with the same seriousness? Why would they want to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on fancy residences for students, when they could put not only their name but the stamp of their personalities on an institution in a way that really shapes the future?
The trouble is that philanthropy, done seriously, is awfully hard work no matter what sector you're investing in (that's why Warren Buffet outsourced it!), and elite universities, while ripe for reinvention in many ways, are rich enough to make them one of the hardest places for even the richest donor to exert any serious influence. What they do offer to donors, though, is immediate (if superficial) bang for the buck. Or put another way, what they lack in terms of actually, you know, "helping people in need," they make up for in rock-solid tangibility. If Meg Whitman poured tens of millions of dollars fighting AIDS in Africa (and maybe she has, for all I know), she'd probably end up in the same position the U.S. government is in - struggling to figure out what kind of a difference her money is making. Whereas by giving millions to her alma mater, she knows she can end up with a lovely residential college that will bear her name for as long as Princeton is Princeton. And without disputing anything Noah says - if I were graced with enormous wealth, Harvard wouldn't see a dime of it - I can understand the temptation to see one's own name planted forever on an Ivy League campus, alongside all those ancient Brahmins. (Douthat College has a certain ring to it, don't you think ...?)
Then, of course, there's the more obvious and more hardheaded reason why obscenely rich people give so much money to universities that don't need it - namely, to ensure that their kids get in.
Good-Faith Atheism
From an essay by Father Ranier Cantalamessa, preacher to the Papal household; quoted by Richard John Neuhaus:
“The world of today knows a new category of people: the atheists in good faith, those who live painfully the situation of the silence of God, who do not believe in God but do not boast about it; rather they experience the existential anguish and the lack of meaning of everything: They too, in their own way, live in the dark night of the spirit. Albert Camus called them “the saints without God.” The mystics exist above all for them; they are their travel and table companions. Like Jesus, they “sat down at the table of sinners and ate with them” (see Luke 15:2). This explains the passion with which certain atheists, once converted, pore over the writings of the mystics: Claudel, Bernanos, the two Maritains, L. Bloy, the writer J.K. Huysmans and so many others over the writings of Angela of Foligno; T.S. Eliot over those of Julian of Norwich. There they find again the same scenery that they had left, but this time illuminated by the sun. . . . The word “atheist” can have an active and a passive meaning. It can indicate someone who rejects God, but also one who—at least so it seems to him—is rejected by God. In the first case, it is a blameworthy atheism (when it is not in good faith), in the second an atheism of sorrow or of expiation.”
At the risk of being uncharitable, I doubt that Christopher Hitchens belong to this category of unbeliever.
Tony Blair, President of Europe?
So the rumors have it. I defer to my learned co-blogger's old friend William Hague for the last word on the matter:
Lots of people have picked up on the Norman Podhoretz "What's a Kurd, anyway?" line quoted in Jeffrey Goldberg's "After Iraq" feature in the latest Atlantic (now free and open to the public, as you may have heard) but I thought this passage was more telling, and the final quote more, well, quotable:
In December of 2006, I went to the Israeli Embassy in Washington for a ceremony honoring Natan Sharansky, who had just received the Medal of Freedom from President Bush. Sharansky, the former Soviet dissident, had become the president’s tutor on the importance of democratic reform in the Arab world, and during the ceremony, he praised the president for pursuing unpopular policies. As he talked, the man next to me, a senior Israeli security official, whispered, “What a child.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“It’s not smart … He wants Jordan to be more democratic. Do you know what that would mean for Israel and America? If you were me, would you rather have a stable monarch who is secular and who has a good intelligence service on your eastern border, or would you rather have a state run by Hamas? That’s what he would get if there were no more monarchy in Jordan.”
After the ceremony, I spoke with Sharansky about this critique. He acknowledged that he is virtually the lone neoconservative thinker in Israel, and one of the few who still believes that democracy is exportable to the Arab world, by force or otherwise.
“After I came back from Washington once,” he said, “I saw [Prime Minister Ariel] Sharon in the Knesset, and he said, ‘Mazel tov, Natan. You’ve convinced President Bush of something that doesn’t exist.’”
It's the "mazel tov" that makes the line, I think ...
As soon as this evening's Florida debate ended, the MSNBC TV commentators were wondering how it would have looked to "someone who was seeing these candidates for the first time."
Why didn't they just ask me?
This is the first debate among the Republicans that I've seen at full length and in real time. So factoring in all the expectations I'd gathered from coverage (Romney too weaselly, McCain really the strongest one, Huckabee a charmer, etc), how did it look?
Romney by a mile. More precisely, the only candidate you could imagine putting up a plausible general-election fight. Again, I'm not handicapping the GOP race, which I know nothing about. I'm not saying how each candidate did relative to previous appearances. I am telling you how this one debate looked if you had never seen these guys on the same stage before.
Get Smart
Good idea. Great cast. And not a single funny moment in the trailer:
Reconsidering Romney
I'm not there yet, but James Poulos makes the case:
... finally, I think Romney would make a much better President than candidate. When he runs -- and when he's run -- in the mode he was in tonight, he does great. When he runs as he did during the late Iowa-early NH phase, he's a magnet for calumny, mockery, and contempt. Such a wild swing is rather alarming to see in a candidate, but let's not forget this is a heavily contested and very confused primary campaign for the nomination of a party whose President seriously damaged its brand, tradition, trust, and track record. Romney's great advantage from the beginning was as a sober, alert, sharp fellow capable of turning around a party that had lost its way. When trying to run for the base that still loves Bush just cuz, he's a disaster, ineffective and unconvincing. But how could he avoid posturing in that way given the early dynamics of the primary season? Let's all hope those days are over: neither Romney nor his party has any use for the contorted Mitt, and Republicans all have something to appreciate in what seems so obviously to be the Real Romney.
In other news, Poulos, fabled scourge of Gersonism, actually liked a Michael Gerson column. Apparently, shared Hillary-loathing can bring the whole world together. (Or at least that's what Mitt Romney will be hoping in about eight months from now ...)
Like Ross, I think Obama has a bright future. I also think that he will probably be our next Democratic president whether or not he wins he nomination this year.
Mike Huckabee lost South Carolina by just three points. Even after drawing down his presence Florida for lack of funds, he's consistently polling at around 15 percent of the vote, down from a high of 25 percent or so, in a contest where 25-30 percent of the vote will probably be enough to win the whole thing. As Larison notes, even with the press writing him off post-South Carolina (and never taking him all that seriously beforehand), he's easily leading in Georgia, and the February 5th landscape includes Alabama, Missouri, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Arkansas as well, all of which seem like natural Huckabee territory. He's not going to win the nomination, but looking at how the race has turned out I don't think it's all that implausible to suggest that for all his weaknesses - his identity-politics problem, his unseriousness about policy, the hatred he inspires among movement conservatives, and everything else besides - if he had found a way to raise just a little more money, for organization and polling and ads in Michigan and South Carolina and Florida and then Super Tuesday beyond, he might have had a real chance to win this thing.
Photo by Flickr user Yaquina used under a Creative Commons license.
Back To The Table
Man, Yglesias owned this segment. I'd better get my act together.
January 24, 2008
Why Americans Hate the Media (II)
No, wait, one more point. It's Daniel Casse's, not mine:
Tim Russert and Brian Williams don’t have any deep observations on policy or the state of the country. So instead, they pose synthetic questions asking the candidates to respond to polls or primary election results. They think they are asking substantive questions because they ask for “specific” answers.
Exactly. It's what everybody hates about Russert's MTP shtick - the confusion of toughness with substance.
And now to bed.
Why Americans Hate the Media
Having given him a smidgen of credit for pressing Huck on the Fair Tax, let me add that overall the debate was exactly what I would expect from Russert-moderated affair, thick with pointlessly gotcha-ish questions seemingly designed with YouTube in mind. I thought Russert's badgering of Mitt Romney about how much money he's spent on the race was the low point (and no, I didn't care for Huckabee's Russert-like crack about saving Romney's sons inheritance either), but I'm sure everyone else has their favorite examples. (McCain's Mom! The NYTimes hates Rudy! Chuck Norris!)
Overall, I'm with Geraghty - the candidates were too restrained and the questions too lame to pick a winner. And so to bed.
McCain-Huckabee!
McCain's Fair Tax question was the softball of all softballs: "Governor Huckabee, please explain why your tax plan is so frickin' awesome ..."
Russert, to his credit, digs in a little deeper.
The Commuter Vote
In response to Huckabee's call, in tonight's debate, for investing in highway infrastructure (in Florida, of course, among other places), David Freddoso titles a post, "Huckabee Wants To Be FDR," and then writes:
He wants two extra lanes on I-95 from Bangor to Miami.
Although I can completely identify with being stuck in traffic in Florida.
Of course he can - because America's transportation infrastructure simply hasn't kept pace with our population growth, our average commuting time has tripled in the last twenty-five years, and our country needs those extra lanes of traffic. Families need them. Businesses need them. Suburban and exurban voters - the swing vote in elections these days - need them. I understand all the "bridge to nowhere"/Big Dig fears on the porkbusting right, but his is an issue that a sensible pro-business, pro-family Republican Party ought to own - particularly since transportation earmarks, which blossom in the absence of a concerted strategy for improving national infrastructure, are part of the problem, not part of the solution.
With a discussion of Fred Thompson's rise and fall, Patrick Ruffini kicks off what promises to be an interesting series assessing the GOP contenders as they depart the field. As someone who thought the most impressive part of Thompson's campaign was the guerrilla stuff he did before he actually got into the race, I think this bit - what Jim Geraghty described as the "he should have punched more hippies" thesis - is spot-on:
When Thompson first teased us with running, his message was all about channeling conservative grassroots frustration. About listening to the grassroots who had been sold down the river on immigration and other issues, and taking dead aim at the enemies of conservatism, starting with Michael Moore and moving down the line. The great hope was that by deploying his sunny Hollywood persona with a dollop of conservative populism he would transcend the Giuliani/Romney/McCain lesser-of-evils fight. He promised us a different type of campaign that would use the Internet to end-run the liberal media.
This electrified the activist class and earned him virtually instantaneous frontrunner status. So what happens next? Everyone associated with the strategy that made Thompson the frontrunner is either fired or resigns, and is replaced by largely by conventional Washington insiders.
To Ruffini, this suggests that "the central lesson to be gleaned from the Thompson campaign is 'trust your instincts.'" I'd make the same point in a different way, and say that the central lesson to be gleaned from the Thompson campaign is "don't hire MaryMatalin."
Rudy's Granite State Blunder
I should have more to say about what went wrong for the Giuliani campaign once Floridians hit the polls; for now, I think this Rich Lowry post is suggestive of one failure in particular:
It's interesting how Romney and Rudy have swapped strategies recently. Initially, before his ads failed in New Hampshire and he pulled out of the early states entirely, Rudy's strategy was to do respectably in the early states. Not necessarily win them, but do well, and maybe win one, and hope that no overwhelming frontrunner emerged, so he could come back in Florida and have his resources come to bear on Feb. 5. That has turned into Romney's approach almost exactly (although he had a stronger finish in Iowa than Rudy ever could have hoped for). As for Rudy, in Florida he has tried a version of what Romney did in Iowa and New Hampshire—invest time and money in building a lead that you hope holds up when all the other candidates show up in earnest. We'll see how that goes, but we know how it worked out for Romney...
Now obviously there was no way that Rudy could have hoped to do as well in the early states as Romney did. But still, Romney's ability to stay in the game despite losses in Iowa and New Hampshire suggests that Rudy might have helped himself much more in the looming battle for Florida by campaigning harder in the early states and keeping himself relevant with some respectable third-place finishes than he did by abandoning the early field and going all out in the Sunshine State. In this light, the Giuliani campaign's decision to give up on New Hampshire in mid-November, after investing heavily there all year, remains particularly baffling to me. At the time, I suggested that Romney's troubles with Huckabee in Iowa afforded Giuliani an opportunity to take a bite out of a weakened Mitt in New Hampshire; instead, he decided to cede the Granite State even before seeing whether Romney emerged bloodied or strengthened from the Caucuses. This might have been understandable if Giuliani had been stuck in the single digits there, but at the time he pulled out he was still polling in the mid-teens, and McCain had just barely inched ahead of him. Maybe Rudy couldn't have improved on those numbers, but just holding steady would have delivered him a respectable third, which might have translated into a more respectable showing in Michigan and South Carolina as well, instead of the sub-Ron Paul finishes he ended up with. But instead, Rudy's camp threw in the towel - almost as if they were so spooked by the media drumbeat about the inevitability of a McCain surge that they decided to just get out of the way and let it happen
The Future of the Parties
Ruy Texeira and I take up the subject, on the latest Bloggingheads.
Don't Stand So Close To Me
The GOP leadership's disembodied presence at yesterday's March for Life obviously grates a bit, as it always does. On the other hand, it's worth noting that the pro-life movement is arguably more popular than the Republican Party these days. So maybe pro-lifers should be thanking Mitt Romney, George W. Bush, et. al. for staying away.
January 23, 2008
The Oscars
The Good: Three of the Best Picture nominees deserved the nod (There Will Be Blood's disastrous final act notwithstanding), and I could find good things to say about Atonement and Michael Clayton, too, if pressed. It's nice that Viggo Mortensen was recognized for Eastern Promises, and that Keira Knightley wasn't for Atonement. And the presence of the critical fave Persepolis in the Best Animated Film category means there's a chance (okay, not much of one) that the vastly-overrated Ratatouille won't win.
The Bad: Cate Blanchett for Elizabeth: The Golden Age, obviously. Tom Wilkinson for Michael Clayton - another thick slice of ham from a fine actor who's serving too many of them these days. The absence of Josh Brolin from the Best Actor nominees. The absence of Zodiac (good call releasing it in the spring, Warner Brothers) from every category.
The Ugly: The smartmoney says that There Will Be Blood and No Country For Old Men will split the highbrow-Western vote, clearing the way for a dark horse to win Best Picture - maybe Atonement but more likely Michael Clayton, which cleaned up with a surprising seven nominations, and which will benefit from Hollywood's love affair with George Clooney, Conscience of the Nation. For an entertaining but ultimately ridiculous potboiler like Clayton to beat the masterful No Country might not be the biggest travesty in recent Oscar history (cough, Crash, cough), but it would be pretty damn annoying even so.
Obama '12?
While Jason Zengerle wonders what will happen to Barack Obama's supporters if he loses, I'm wondering what happens to Obama himself. Good things, arguably: Given the campaign he's run and the kind of fervor he's generated, I think he's better-positioned for a future run at the Presidency than any failed primary candidate since Ronald Reagan (that name again!) after he lost to Ford 1976.
Think about it this way: If Hillary loses the general election, Obama presumably becomes the media's go-to-Democrat, and thus the face of the party, in a McCain or Romney Administration, and he would be far and away the front-runner, I would imagine, for the nomination in 2012. If Hillary wins, on the other hand, he'll be in a position not unlike John McCain vis-a-vis George W. Bush after 2000, except he'll be younger, more charismatic, and possessed of a much larger and more devoted core of supporters in his own party than McCain has ever enjoyed in the GOP. Which is to say, he'll be able to play the above-the-fray, trans-partisan figure whose support President Hillary needs but can't take for granted - the role McCain played for much of the Bush Administration - without having to do nearly so much of the base-shoring-up spadework McCain's been forced to attempt in his quest to win the '08 nomination. If Hillary's first term is a disaster, one can almost imagine Obama attempting to challenge her for the nomination in 2012; more plausibly, though, if her administration runs for two relatively successful terms, he'll be ideally positioned to run Sarkozy-style in 2016 as the candidate of continuity and change, without any of the baggage that a Vice President Bayh or Webb or Richardson will doubtless pick up over two terms in Clintonland.
All of this assumes that a Clinton-Obama ticket for this fall is out of the question. I tend to think it is, for a variety of reasons; not least among them is the fact that even if Hillary offered him the Veep's slot, Obama might well have a better chance of being President in the long run if he turned it down.
Photo by Flickr user an agent used under a Creative Commons license.
January 22, 2008
Cloverfield as Social Criticism
Tyler Cowen makes the strongest possible case for treating the movie as something more than an interesting gimmick:
I thought this was a remarkable cinematic event. But you need to know that the characters are supposed to be vacuous and annoying, and that the opening scene is supposed to be obnoxious and superficial. The heroism is supposed to be thin. (The whiney NYT review I read is, in retrospect, an embarrassment.) And that the movie is supposed to make you feel physically nauseated. You are in fact witnessing a disaster. Most of all this is a movie about how the young'uns have no tools for moral discourse and that all they can do is utter banalities and take endless pictures of each other and record their lives for no apparent purpose. I can't recall any other movie that so completely devastates its intended demographic.
My review, forthcoming in the next NR, takes a similar tack to that whiney NYT review Cowen mentions. I'd like to think that the filmmakers had the sort of Waugh-esque agenda in mind that he describes, but I don't think the film bears his reading out. (Mild spoilers follow.)
Jim Manzi marvels at Hillary Clinton's "I Will Work Harder" approach to politics, while Matt Continetti takes note of the strategic thinking behind Bill Clinton's "outbursts."
Edwards Today, Huckabee Tomorrow?
Last week, contemplating the possibility of a Huckabee defeat, Rod Dreher wrote:
For us Huckaboosters, it wouldn't be the worst thing in the world for our man to drop out, and spend the next four years doing some hard thinking and networking, getting ready for 2012.
What I mean is that a failed Huckabee run would put him in much the same position that Edwards’ failed ‘04 campaign put him these last several years (and Edwards had the advantage, so to speak, of being the VP nominee, which I doubt Huckabee will receive given the intense hostility to him wthin the party leadership.) Huckabee may spend the next several years doing hard thinking and networking if he drops out, but I doubt he will be preparing for another presidential run. If the example of John Edwards tells us something, it is that repeat candidates for the nomination tend to perform less well in the second attempt (Reagan being a big exception that leaps to mind). Despite his policy and philanthropy work in the last four years, and despite his intensive cultivation of supporters in the netroots and in Iowa, John Edwards has become a has-been and also-ran who does not yet realise that he is either one. Given the incandescent loathing of Huckabee in elite conservative circles and among big-money donors, I don’t know exactly what kind of networking he could build that would make him more successful in four years.
I think it all depends on what sort of impact Huckabee wants to make. Yes, one lesson of the Edwards re-run is that second-time candidates have a difficult time recapturing the magic of their first go-round. Another lesson, though, is that a savvy, charismatic politician can have a big impact on his party’s intellectual landscape even when his campaign for the Presidency ends up sputtering. By identifying himself with the smartest minds on the ideological left and pushing their ideas every chance he got, John Edwards succeeded in driving his rivals for the Democratic nomination to the left as well, on issues ranging from health care to global warming. Similarly, one can imagine Mike Huckabee taking his as-yet-notional critique of the conservative establishment and spending the next few years trying to put some meat on it – by, say, hanging out with everyone from Ramesh Ponnuru to Caleb Stegall – in the hopes of shifting the GOP conversation in his direction come 2012.
Admittedly, there are a host of difficulties with this more positive Huckabee-as-Edwards vision. For one thing, Edwards’ left-populism had pre-existing institutional support: When he moved leftward after ’04, he found a variety of organizations waiting for him – unions, think tanks, activist groups and so forth. Nothing like this exists on the right, where the establishment that doesn’t heart Huckabee is the only establishment there is. There are a variety of critiques of current movement orthodoxy emerging in the wake of the Bush years, associated with a variety of heterodox voices, from David Frum to Rod Dreher to Reihan and myself. What there isn’t is anything approaching an institutional base from which to launch a reform-conservative campaign. If he wanted to play Edwards, Huckabee would essentially be trying to build one from the ground up, and if there’s anything we know about Huck after a year of watching him campaign, it’s that he prefers chasing the TV cameras to organization-building or heavy-duty intellectual spadework. Maybe he'll surprise me, but I think it’s more likely that he’ll end up as a talk-show host or a motivational speaker than that he’ll spend the next four years trying to reshape the ideological landscape of the American Right.
January 21, 2008
Clinton and the Democrats
This Michael Tomasky cri de coeur is getting some attention:
I don't know who on this planet has the stature to go face-to-face with Bill Clinton and look him in the eye and tell him he behaved in a discreditable fashion. His wife? His buddy Vernon Jordan? Whoever it is, someone had better stop him. He campaigned against a fellow Democrat no differently than if Obama had been Newt Gingrich. The Clinton campaign may conclude that, numerically and on balance, Bill helped. But, trust me, to the thousands of committed progressives who supported him when he really needed it, who went to the mat for him at his moment of (largely self-inflicted) crisis but who now happen to be supporting someone other than his wife, he's done himself a tremendous amount of damage.
Tomasky's missing the point: It's in part because "thousands of committed progressives... went to the mat for him" that he's in a position to screw you over ten years later. He decided back then he'd do what was necessary to win. Why would you expect him to behave any differently today?
I have long been of the opinion that the best possible outcome to the Lewinsky affair, both for the country and (especially) for the Democratic Party, would have been for leading Democrats to find a way to pressure Clinton into resigning. I tend to agree with Clinton's defenders, at the time and today, that his conduct didn't rise to the level of an impeachable offense, and that the GOP crusade to force him out of office was ill-considered folly. But something can be a "resignable" offense, if you will, without being an appropriate matter for a Senate trial, and if the Democrats had treated it as such - if one by one they had gone on television and stated that the President had dishonored himself and his office and ought to step down - they would have not only spared the country an enormous amount of acrimony and embarrassment, but avoided their ongoing Bill Clinton problem as well.
Instead, by going to the mat for Clinton in 1998, progressives like Tomasky probably cost themselves the 2000 election (since an Al Gore who could have said what he really thought about his boss's conduct might have been an Al Gore capable of winning 52 percent of the vote), while simultaneously identifying themselves with Clinton to such an extent that now they're effectively at his mercy, stuck appealing to his sense of honor (!) while he plays attack dog against Barack Obama. And while it's unlikely that the Clinton's primary-season conduct - his willingness to go scorched-earth to guarantee Hillary the nomination - will cost the Dems the White House '08 the way his Oval Office conduct may have cost them the election in '00, at the very least he's providing the GOP with a rare ray of hope in a year when everything seems to be going the Dems' way.
I don't say this as a Clinton hater by any stretch: I think there are any number of reasons (from my conservative point of view, but also from a liberal one) to prefer Hillary to Obama, and while Bill's decision to go the mattresses on her behalf isn't exactly admirable, it's certainly understandable. (I'd probably do exactly the same thing if my wife were running for President.) But it seems like it's been an awfully long time since what's good for the Clintons has been good for the health of the Democratic Party - which suggests that American liberals, in their late-Nineties haste to defend one of their own against the depredations of Kenneth Starr, ended up making something of a sucker's bet.
Photo by Flickr user Chuckumentary used under a Creative Commons license.
Despite the different actors and alliances in different states, we are beginning to see the real dividing lines of this campaign. It’s the battle of the moderates (McCain), metro conservatives (Romney), and rural conservatives (Huckabee). Stripped of all other hangers-on (Fred, and increasingly, Rudy), nationwide this divide seems to work out to about 40-40-20, or 35-40-25. Conservatives ought to be winning this battle, but Huckabee’s lock on the rural vote (just 16% of the vote in Charleston County, btw) will prevent any kind of clear two-man race before February 5th. Every day that Huckabee’s nice guy act is allowed to continue is a gift to John McCain — and he knows it.
Mitt Romney is fast becoming the candidate of conservatives in the suburbs and the exurbs. In Michigan, he dominated Oakland and Macomb counties with 46% of the vote in a multi-candidate field. In Nevada, he won most convincingly in Clark County. In Iowa, he did better in Des Moines than elsewhere in the state.
The Romney and McCain coalitions also overlap. They represent two different sides of the establishment coin, with McCain representing an older, mainline establishment — the Republican Party of Gerry Ford, Howard Baker, and Bob Dole — and Romney representing the brasher, post-Reagan establishment that was built on the tax issue and whose alliance with modern-day Huckabee voters allowed them to take control of the party in 1994.
Read the whole thing. Ruffini's analysis implies that in the long run, McCain may need some version of the alliance with Huckabee that keeps being bandiedabout, because "to start racking up victory margins in the 40s ... he'll need to add votes from the Christian conservative base." The difficulty, of course, is that this would create "an alliance of opposites — of pro-life and pro-choice, of liberal and conservative, of secular and evangelical" behind McCain's candidacy. It would be a deeply peculiar state of affairs: You'd essentially have the party's rightward and leftward factions uniting in a joint insurgency against the "movement" establishment. Handled with great finesse, it could work brilliantly, creating an ecumenical reform coalition within the party and delivering a much-needed jolt of creative destruction to the GOP. But John McCain isn't exactly a finesse politician, and it's just as easy to imagine it blowing up in his face.
January 19, 2008
Rudy Is Toast
How's that for a bold prediction? Seriously, I think Mark Steyn had it exactly wrong this afternoon, when he wrote:
A McCain victory in SC has to be good news for Giuliani because the narrative becomes "Stop McCain!" and Rudy's best poised to do that - not just because his numbers in Florida haven't yet collapsed to the same undetectable levels as they have everywhere else, but because Huck and Mitt and Fred will be fairly proven failures at the "Stop McCain" game. So, if stopping him's your priority, then Rudy's the one-stop shop after everyone's stopped shopping around. He'll be the last ABM (Anyone-But-McCain) in with a shot.
A Huck victory in SC, by contrast, keeps the other fellows alive, which makes it more likely that the attrition in Rudy numbers will continue.
If Romney hadn't won Michigan, I could almost imagine something like this happening. (Indeed, I did imagine it, back when it looked like Romney might flame out early.) But with his "three golds and two silvers" and his delegate lead, Romney still looks sufficiently viable that he, not Rudy, is shaping up to be the natural "stop McCain" candidate in Florida for movement conservatives who can't stand the Arizona Senator. Moreover, everything we've seen so far suggests that Giuliani and McCain are competing for a similar demographic within the GOP primary electorate, and I expect that whatever momentum McCain gets from South Carolina will win him more Floridian votes at Rudy's expense than at Romney's or Huckabee's. Which will make the Sunshine State - and the primaries beyond - essentially a two-man McCain-Romney race, with Huck playing spoiler and Giuliani dropping out of sight.
64-26
According to entrance polls, that would be Hillary Clinton's margin of victory among Nevadan Hispanics, and it's one of bigger reasons why I agree with John Podhoretz: Today's win bodes very well for her.
Update: Via Andrew, a fascinatingly fraught focus group moment. ("The maid, the busboy, the waiter ... will not vote for Obama."):
January 18, 2008
Bobby Fischer, RIP
I was never any good at chess, but of all chess manuals I read in my brief, early-adolescence attempt to become a grandmaster, Bobby Fischer Teaches Chess was far and away the best. Presumably the royalties went to fund Fischer's Hungarian-Japanese-Icelandic exile (with stints on Filipino radio thrown in for good measure), where he can't have grown any more comfortable, or less insane, since Rene Chun's fine profile, "Bobby Fischer's Pathetic Endgame," ran in the December 2002 Atlantic.
Whither Conservatism?
The Ponnuru-Frum debate I mentioned earlier continues, somewhat intemperately, here, here and here.
AIDS, Africa, and the National Interest
It seems that nobodymuchcares for Michael Gerson's attack on Fred Thompson for questioning the wisdom of spending U.S. dollars fighting AIDS in Africa. I'm actually with Gerson, roughly speaking, on the substance of the issue, and I'd associate myself with these James Poulos remarks on the subject:
In this case, I have no problem with AIDS aid. I think standing idly by while one of the most damaging diseases in human history grows freely is not a very good idea on its face. I don't like suffering, and I do like charity, but I do not think that the purpose of foreign policy ought to be explained in terms of charitably fighting suffering. This clouds clear thinking, erodes sovereignty, and makes prudent prioritizing needlessly difficult. If their cause is as important as they say, AIDS activists should be able to make the 'hard case' for aid in these terms, and I think they can. Because the AIDS epidemic in Africa also happens to cloud clear thinking, erode sovereignty, and impede prudent prioritizing. Suffering is not a foreign policy problem; order is. And some things that cause significant suffering really do a number on order. An AIDS pandemic is one of those things.
I might even go further than this, though, and suggest that even when these sort of efforts turn out to be ineffective at fostering the sort of order we ought to be concerned with, their effectivness as public diplomacy shouldn't be underestimated. Foreign aid isn't exactly cheap, but compared to some of our other foreign ventures it's a relatively inexpensive way to burnish America's image in the world's more unstable regions, and it's impact on public opinion tends to be considerably larger than all of Karen Hughes's junkets put together.
The problem with Gerson's column, of course, is that it barely attempts to make the case for AIDS aid on anything resembling strategic grounds (apart from a vague and unpersuasive reference to how "radicals and terrorists" will thrive in Africa if we let the continent down), preferring instead to bash Thompson over the head for being too "callous" to understand, as Gerson does, how Jesus's message is supposed to be applied to foreign policy.
The Limits of Huckabee
Rich Lowry's column is tough on him but largely fair, I think. Despite his populist (or pseudo-populist, as Rod Dreher puts it) flourishes, Huckabee has conspicuously failed to break out of his evangelical base, and while I think Rich slightly underestimates the extent to which the media coverage (David Brooks and E.J. Dionne's favorable assessments aside) has helped ensure his marginalization - he got no bounce from Iowa in part because all the press wanted to talk about immediately afterward was McCain - the bulk of the responsibility has to rest with Huck himself, who hasn't found a graceful way to transition away from just being the candidate of evangelical identity-politics. His current wave of unsavory South Carolinian pandering - on illegal immigration, on the Confederate flag - looks like an increasingly-desperate attempt to appeal to a broader Joe-Sixpack constituency, but even if it works in the short term (and it probably won't) it's likely going to ensure his marginalization in the long run, by depriving him of the favorable media coverage that was part of his initial success.
If he does pull out South Carolina, maybe he'll get one last chance to hit the re-set button. But I think it's too late: the narrative of his campaign has been established, in the minds of voters and the press, and once set a narrative is hard to change.
January 17, 2008
Tom Cruise And The Medal of Valor
You are watching alltheseclips, right? Tell me you're watching them ...
Bloomberg's Folly
Hizzoner's Presidential hopes, or lack thereof, are the subject of the final installment in this edition of The Table - which is now available as videoand as audio.
Should Newt Have Run?
The whole Limbaugh-abetted kerfluffle over Newt Gingrich's remark that "we are at the end of the Reagan era" reminds me of how long it seems (though it's only been a few months) since it looked like Gingrich might jump into the GOP race himself. Nothing that's happened since then has made it seem any more likely that Newt would have been able to win the Republican nomination outright had he thrown his hat into the ring; on the other hand, the crazy fragmentation of the GOP field does suggest that Newt-the-candidate would have been a major factor in the race, and thus it's hard to see how a Presidential run wouldn't have benefited the Gingrich brand - and won more attention for the Gingrich platform - than the bookpromotion he's doing instead.
It's true that Gingrich tends to be overrated (by conservatives, that is) as a font of new ideas, but I still would have liked to see him in the race - not only because he'd be vastly entertaining in the debates, but because his standing within the movement positions him to give voice to certain truths without coming in for quite the ritual denunciations that Huckabee and McCain have summoned up.
Photo by Flickr user Matthew Bradley used under a Creative Commons license.
Hating Rightey
Like Daniel Larison I was not entirely persuaded by Arthur Brooks' analysis of liberal hatemongering, which draws on data showing that liberals hate conservatives as much if not more than conservatives hate liberals, and that liberal Bush-hatred is far more intense than right-wing Clinton-hatred was in the late 1990s. Still, the numbers themselves are pretty interesting:
In 2004, the University of Michigan's American National Election Studies (ANES) survey asked about 1,200 American adults to give their thermometer scores of various groups. People in this survey who called themselves "conservative" or "very conservative" did have a fairly low opinion of liberals -- they gave them an average thermometer score of 39. The score that liberals give conservatives: 38. Looking only at people who said they are "extremely conservative" or "extremely liberal," the right gave the left a score of 27; the left gives the right an icy 23. So much for the liberal tolerance edge.
Some might argue that this is simply a reflection of the current political climate, which is influenced by strong feelings about the current occupants of the White House. And sure enough, those on the extreme left give President Bush an average temperature of 15 and Vice President Cheney a 16. Sixty percent of this group gives both men the absolute lowest score: zero.
That's today; now here's similar data from 1998, the height of Clinton Derangement Syndrome on the Right:
... Bill Clinton and Al Gore were hardly popular among conservatives. Still, in the 1998 ANES survey, Messrs. Clinton and Gore both received a perfectly-respectable average temperature of 45 from those who called themselves extremely conservative. While 28% of the far right gave Clinton a temperature of zero, Gore got a zero from just 10%. The bottom line is that there is simply no comparison between the current hatred the extreme left has for Messrs. Bush and Cheney, and the hostility the extreme right had for Messrs. Clinton and Gore in the late 1990s.
In his haste to tar liberals as greater "hatemongers" than conservatives, I think Brooks glides too quickly to the conclusion that intense antipathy of this sort is ipso facto irrational:
Does this refute the stereotype that right-wingers are "haters" while left-wingers are not? Liberals will say that the comparison is unfair, because Mr. Bush is so much worse than Mr. Clinton ever was. Yes, Mr. Clinton may have been imperfect, but Mr. Bush -- whom people on the far left routinely compare to Hitler -- is evil. This of course destroys the liberal stereotype even more eloquently than the data. The very essence of intolerance is to dehumanize the people with whom you disagree by asserting that they are not just wrong, but wicked.
Well, up to a point - but not every liberal (or conservative, for that matter) who thinks that Bush has been vastly worse than Clinton belongs to the "Bushitler" ranks, and there's nothing inherently intolerant about registering intense dislike for a disastrous President. I imagine that I would have spun the dial pretty close to zero for James Buchanan circa 1860, Woodrow Wilson circa 1917, or Lyndon Johnson circa '67 (among others), and I don't think in any of these cases I would have been guilty of "dehumanizing" them.
That said, though, I do think that for smart liberals, the depth of conservative-hatred on the left ought to be at least the cause of some concern, even if they think it's possibly justified in the case of George W. Bush. As I suggested when Jon Chait's big netroots essay came out, there's a risk that the new "movement liberalism," having been forged in the crucible of Bush-hatred, will end up imitating contemporary conservatism's worst habits - which include, among others things, a difficulty engaging with the opposition save through vitriol and stereotype. To see this tendency in action, consider Matt Stoller's response to Barack Obama's expression of (mild, mild) sympathy for Ronald Reagan's 1970s critique of big government.
It is extremely disturbing to hear, not that Obama admires Reagan, but why he does so. Reagan was not a sunny optimist pushing dynamic entrepreneurship, but a savvy politician using a civil rights backlash to catapult conservatives to power. Lots of people don't agree with this, of course, since it doesn't fit a coherent narrative of GOP ascendancy. Masking Reagan's true political underpinning principles is a central goal of the conservative movement ...
if you think, as Obama does, that Reagan's rise to power was premised on a sunny optimism in contrast to an out of control government and a society rife with liberal excess, then you don't understand the conservative movement. Reagan tapped into greed and fear and tribalism, and those are powerful forces. Ignoring that isn't going to make them go away.
I'm on the record expecting an era of liberal dominance in American politics. But there's no surer way to ensure that it's as brief as possible than for liberals to persuade themselves, with Stoller, that Ronald Reagan succeeded because he was e-e-e-vil, and that the entire conservative ascendancy boils down to nothing more that "greed and fear and tribalism" run amok.
Mitt Mondale?
It's too early to take any head-to-head general election polls all that seriously, and this particular survey is too much of an outlier to take it all that seriously - but still, it seems at least worth taking note of any poll that finds Obama beating Mitt Romney by 56 to 26 percent.
January 16, 2008
David Frum And His Critics
Jim Antle reviews Frum's Comebackhere; Ramesh reviews it in the latest NR (not online yet, alas); Frum responds at length here. The whole discussion is well worth your time.
The Bill Clinton Factor
That's the subject of the latest episode of the Table. (And for those who prefer a different format for these sort of things, I'm assured that our crack technical team is hard at work on creating an audio podcast version of the show.)
Yet now the Republican field is exactly where Rudy's people believed (hoped, prayed) it would be at this point: in utter disarray. If he wins in Florida, where he's essentially been living, basking in the warm sunshine and building up his firewall, while his rivals have frozen their asses off in Iowa and New Hampshire, he will be in the catbird seat. Indeed, you could even argue that, despite having won nothing thus far, Giuliani is now the GOP front-runner again, albeit by default.
You could argue that, but you'd be wrong. Yes, Rudy still has an outside chance in Florida, and yes, so long as he has a chance there he has a chance at the nomination, and yes, the divisions in the field are part of what's keeping him alive. But he isn't ahead in Florida, despite having campaigned exclusively there for weeks, and in everysinglestatewhere any non-Rudy candidate has campaigned in any significant way, his support hasn't just fallen off, it's absolutely cratered. Until he demonstrates the ability to break this pattern, and poll above ten percent in a race that's actually contested, his chances at the nomination have to be judged slimmer than any of the three men who've actually won one of those gold medals Mitt Romney's always talking about.
Meanwhile, I agree with Matt: At this point, for all his weaknesses, Romney has to be judged the closest thing to a front-runner in the GOP field.
Mitt Romney and Double Standards
Ramesh writes, in response to my post on Romney's industrial-policy pandering:
Many of Romney’s policy specifics involved removing Washington-imposed burdens on the industry, such as the prospect of new regulations. You can think he exaggerated their impact—I do—but that’s not left-wing. Convening industry reps and government officials to gab about the industry’s problems doesn’t strike me as all that alarming, either: It’s what comes out of the meeting that matters, and Romney didn’t commit to anything statist. Romney’s plan to quintuple research spending was pretty bad, in my view—but plenty of free-market folks are okay with such subsidies. The reason Romney got a “slap on the wrist” is that it’s all he deserved.
I think my tone obscured my meaning. I don't actually think that Mitt Romney's Michigan pander ought to discredit his standing among conservatives, and I think a slap on the wrist from NR is an appropriate response to his proposals for reviving the auto industry. My point was that for weeks and months, conservative pundits - from George Will to the denizens of the Corner - have waxed hysterical about how Mike Huckabee's criticisms of corporate excesses and his discussion of working-class struggles represent, in Will's phrase, a repudiation of "free trade, low taxes, the essential legitimacy of America's corporate entities and the market system allocating wealth and opportunity." Yet now comes Romney, making an actual substantive policy proposal that violates free-market principle, and the response in conservative circles seems, well, muted.
I should note, though, Jed Babbin and Jennifer Rubin, among others, have hit Romney pretty hard on the issue, with Babbin calling his pander "a Khrushchev-style five year plan for Detroit." That's mildly ridiculous, but at least it has the virtue of consistency.
As has been pointed out often today, Michigan faces some of the worst economic troubles in the nation. Romney addressed those problems in a more sustained and detailed way than his main Republican challengers in the state (Huckabee, McCain).
He's absolutely right. But note that in the context of the Michigan primary, the weakness of the Huckabee/McCain economic message seems to have been that it wasn't, well, liberal enough. David Brooks quotes the Mitt Romney line that may have put him over the top in Michigan:
"If I’m president of this country, I will roll up my sleeves in the first 100 days I’m in office, and I will personally bring together industry, labor, Congressional and state leaders and together we will develop a plan to rebuild America’s automotive leadership.”
This is what people like to call "industrial policy," and what Jonah Goldberg likes to call liberal fascism - big business and big government working hand-in-glove for the purposes of economic nationalism. It's "sustained and detailed," all right, just as Frum says - a sustained and detailed infringement on free-market principle, and one that appeals to voters in places like Michigan precisely because it goes much further to the left than Mike Huckabee's substance-free talk about how the current period of economic growth isn't doing all that well by the working class, or John McCain's straight talk about how Michiganders can't expect the federal government to bring back the glory days of Chrysler and GM. But because conservatives spend way, way more time worrying about the spectre of "class warfare" than they do about than the nexus between big business and the Republican Party, Romney gets off with a mild slap on the wrist, while McCain and Huckabee get tarred as liberals.
I'm overstating the case a bit, obviously; there a variety of good reasons, besides their response to Michigan's economic pain, why McCain and Huckabee have come by their crypto-liberal reputations. But the extent to which Romney is getting a free pass for his back-to-the-'70s, "D.C. will save the auto industry" promises , while conservatives are still obsessing over how John McCain's 2000-2001 preference for a more progressive tax code makes him a "class warrior," seems more than a little ridiculous.
January 15, 2008
Romney's Achievement
Yes, he's a native son, for whatever that's worth. But winning Michigan after two consecutive tough defeats, in the teeth of a press corps that adores John McCain and despises him, and in a state that gave McCain an easy win over George W. Bush in 2000, suggests an impressive resilience - both in the man and in his campaign - that will serve him well in what looks like a long hard slog to the convention.
After each GOP primary so far, the winner has faced an immediate test. For Huckabee after Iowa, it was whether his appeal could translate beyond his evangelical base. Two primaries later, the answer seems to be no. For McCain after New Hampshire, it was whether he could use his momentum and what looked liked a favorable schedule to break through his 30-percent ceiling and become the front-runner. After tonight's result, the answer likewise looks like no. Now it's Romney's turn to be tested: Can his Mormon, flip-flopping, starched-shirt northeastern self do well in Dixie? If it can - if he can compete strongly in South Carolina and Florida, and maybe win one of the two - then he'll be off to the races. But the way this campaign has gone so far, I wouldn't bet on it.
Photo by Flickr user Tim Somero used under a Creative Commons license.
Listen and Look
Megan McArdle and Josh Green talk politics, in podcast-format, here and here; meanwhile, here's the latest episode of The Table:
Dreams of a Brokered Convention
Jay Cost breaks down the GOP delegate-choosing process, and spins a scenario:
... if the delegates are split roughly equal among three or more candidates ... It is easy to envision a cycle. The Romney people buy off the Guiliani people by making Guiliani the vice-presidential nominee. That leaves the McCain people out in the cold, so they offer Guliani the presidential nomination if he makes McCain the secretary of state. The Romney people respond by offering McCain the top spot if Romney can have the veep position. And so on.
Read the whole thing, and know this - every political journalist in America would happily give up their firstborn child to cover a brokered convention, moral instincts be damned.
Why Should We Be Moral?
In a seven-thousand word investigation into humanity's moral instincts, Steven Pinker essentially endorses Jonathan Haidt's view that our moral impulses can be grouped into five categories, two "liberal" (harm/care, and fairness/reciprocity) and three "conservative" (ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect, and purity/sanctity). Then, near the close of the essay, he takes up the question of whether any of these impulses ought to be obeyed, and if so, why:
Two features of reality point any rational, self-preserving social agent in a moral direction. And they could provide a benchmark for determining when the judgments of our moral sense are aligned with morality itself.
One is the prevalence of nonzero-sum games. In many arenas of life, two parties are objectively better off if they both act in a nonselfish way than if each of them acts selfishly. You and I are both better off if we share our surpluses, rescue each other’s children in danger and refrain from shooting at each other, compared with hoarding our surpluses while they rot, letting the other’s child drown while we file our nails or feuding like the Hatfields and McCoys. Granted, I might be a bit better off if I acted selfishly at your expense and you played the sucker, but the same is true for you with me, so if each of us tried for these advantages, we’d both end up worse off. Any neutral observer, and you and I if we could talk it over rationally, would have to conclude that the state we should aim for is the one in which we both are unselfish. These spreadsheet projections are not quirks of brain wiring, nor are they dictated by a supernatural power; they are in the nature of things.
The other external support for morality is a feature of rationality itself: that it cannot depend on the egocentric vantage point of the reasoner. If I appeal to you to do anything that affects me — to get off my foot, or tell me the time or not run me over with your car — then I can’t do it in a way that privileges my interests over yours (say, retaining my right to run you over with my car) if I want you to take me seriously. Unless I am Galactic Overlord, I have to state my case in a way that would force me to treat you in kind. I can’t act as if my interests are special just because I’m me and you’re not, any more than I can persuade you that the spot I am standing on is a special place in the universe just because I happen to be standing on it.
So it turns out that the "features of reality" militate in favor of a moral system that emphasizes harm, fairness, and individual rights - which is to say, reality is a liberal! Of course, as Will Wilkinson notes, this argument swipes a few bases. For one thing, the liberal instincts are "rational" only if you assume the liberal premise that the primary goal of human life is material flourishing. (As Will writes: "I simply don’t see how this stands as an adequate reply to someone who says that it is better that millions suffer and/or die for the greater glory of the tribe, or the Prophet, or to prevent the defilement of the blood of the Motherland.") For another, even if you set material flourishing as your highest good, it's still possible to make a case on rational, self-interested grounds for the usefulness of the illiberal impulses, because human nature is such that many people may be happier, longer-lived, more prosperous and so forth in societies shaped at least in part by hierarchy, purity, in-group solidarity, and so forth (what Haidt terms the "beehive" instincts) than in societies that recognize "do as you will, harm no one" as the only moral principle there is. (I make roughly that case here, albeit while repeatedly misspelling Haidt's name.)
Moreover, as a guide to individual moral action - as opposed to a description of the impulses most consonant with the goals of a liberal society - Pinker's argument is incredibly weak stuff. Certainly, in a stable, lawbound society, it’s generally rational to deal fairly with your friends and neighbors and co-workers, because you want them to deal fairly with you. But that "generally" excludes all the hard cases, in which doing the right thing isn’t in a person’s rational self-interest, and those hard cases are the essence of what separates morally-impressive behavior from the reverse. Pinker's "rational actor" calculus makes sense in a landscape of equality, where if your neighbor is going hungry today you could easily be going hungry tomorrow, and in a landscape of transparency, in which your neighbor (or your spouse or friend or business partner) will have perfect knowledge of the wrongs you've done them. But most serious moral dilemmas arrive from power differentials on the one hand - situations in which a stronger person has the opportunity to do something for a weaker person, but at a real cost to themselves and with little chance that they'll suffer if they don't - and secret temptations on the other, where you have a chance to commit a wrong that will be known only to yourself (and God). And Pinker's argument that morality should be based on rational self-interest, and that as a general rule, it's in your rational self-interest to treat people as you'd wish to be treated, tells us nothing about why it's wrong in a particular instance for someone to refrain from cheating on his taxes - or on his wife - if he knows he won't get caught. Or why it's wrong in a particular instance for a Hutu family to deny refuge to their Tutsi neighbors if they know that offering the Tutsis sanctuary will put their own lives at risk.
You can fill in your own example, obviously. The point is that Pinker's argument for why our moral instincts aren't just as arbitrary as, say, the color of the sky or the taste of an apple bails out precisely at the moment when any argument for morality needs to kick in - when doing the "wrong" thing will have no obvious cost, or when doing the "right" thing has the chance to do real, palpable damage to the interests (or life) of the person doing it.
January 14, 2008
Does Hollywood Hate Arabs?
Over at TAPPED, Matthew Duss says yes, and has the video (and the commentary on Back to the Future's egregious Libyan-bashing) to prove it:
To support its claim that Arabs are "the most maligned group in the history of Hollywood," this five-minute film is forced to resort to clips from such blockbuster films as Cannonball Run II, Happy Hooker Goes to Washington, and Hell Squad. So far as I could tell, the most recent clips are from Aladdin and True Lies, both of which are fifteen years old. In the seven years since 9/11, with the nation embroiled in a global struggle in which America's most deadly and dedicated enemies tend to be, well, Arabic, Hollywood has turned out exactly one big-budget film featuring Arab villains: This fall's The Kingdom. If you want to expand the list to include art-house fare, you can throw in United 93, and if you count people trapped in a cycle of violence as "villains" you can tack on Steven Spielberg's Munich, in which audiences were invited to side with Israeli assassins against Palestinian terrorists but feel awfully conflicted about it. Meanwhile, even 24, ostensibly the most right-wing hour on television, features what Martha Bayles, writing in this season's Claremont Review of Books, terms a "timid selection of villains," including "vengeful Serbs, a bitchy German, red-handed Mexican drug lords, a turncoat British spy, a greedy oil executive, power-mad government officials (including one president), and—once in a blue moon, when the Council on American-Islamic Relations is looking the other way—violent jihadists."
But yes, there's no question but that the deeply insensitive portrayal of Libyan terrorists in 1985's Back to the Future - which belongs to an era nearly as distant from our own as the "Enchantment Under the Sea" Fifties were from Marty McFly's Eighties adolescence - continues to be a stumbling block to Arab-American advancement in the United States.
On the night of April 24, 1944, British air force bombers hammered a former Jesuit college here housing the Bavarian Academy of Science. The 16th-century building crumpled in the inferno. Among the treasures lost, later lamented Anton Spitaler, an Arabic scholar at the academy, was a unique photo archive of ancient manuscripts of the Quran.
The 450 rolls of film had been assembled before the war for a bold venture: a study of the evolution of the Quran, the text Muslims view as the verbatim transcript of God's word. The wartime destruction made the project "outright impossible," Mr. Spitaler wrote in the 1970s.
Mr. Spitaler was lying. The cache of photos survived, and he was sitting on it all along. The truth is only now dribbling out to scholars -- and a Quran research project buried for more than 60 years has risen from the grave.
Read the whole thing. Spengler comments here. You can find Toby Lester's fantastic Atlantic piece on the "sensitive business" of Quranic interpretation here.
Each time I am inclined to cheer him on as an anti-establishment candidate, I have to remind myself that he really isn’t any such thing. Despite my willingness to give his statements the benefit of the doubt, I have tried to do this in the interests of accuracy and fairness to what he has actually said, but on no account do I want this man to be President. No doubt, some of his supporters read Crunchy Cons and like what they find, some of them could be part of those Middle American Radicals Sam Francis described long ago, and many of them are probably the people Ross and Reihan are describing in their forthcoming book, but this is exactly what is wrong with Huckabee’s candidacy. He draws in these people from these three very different parts of the population and relies on them for his political success, but I have no confidence that he would govern in their interests or according to their views. It’s the same con that Bush used against evangelicals and social conservatives. Because he could claim plausibly enough that he was “one of them,” he felt that he owed them nothing and could take them for granted, and by and large they allowed this to happen and happily re-elected him anyway. Now there is the hope that Huckabee is really “one of them” and will really govern in their interests, because he once said some mean things about Wall Street, but he won’t. In order for politicians to dupe you, you must be willing to be duped.This is what Huckabee is doing, just as Bush did before, and I’m afraid people are falling for it all over again.
I, too, have my doubts as to whether a President Huckabee would govern in the interests of the working-class constituency Reihan and I have in mind, but I think the comparison to George W. Bush is somewhat dubious. Yes, like Huckabee, Bush has made rhetorical gestures toward a more working-class friendly conservatism, and like Huckabee he has played on identity politics to shore up his support among evangelicals specifically, and "Red America" more broadly. But the differences between the two are enormous. George W. Bush is a preppy blueblood whose candidacy had the blessing of both movement conservatives and the Republican Old Guard; Mike Huckabee is a working-class Arkansan whose primary-season insurgency has exactly zero institutional support. George W. Bush had Dick Cheney and Karl Rove whispering in his ear; Huckabee has, well ... Ed Rollins and Jim Pinkerton. It's next-to-impossible to imagine Bush saying the sort of things Huckabee has said about Wall Street Republicans and the Club for Growth; it's next-to-impossible to imagine him delivering the speech that Huckabee delivered at the Values Voter Summit. And it's absolutely impossible, to take a pair of issues near to Larison's heart, to imagine Bush adopting the Krikorian Plan as his immigration policy, or delivering the following remarks on foreign policy:
Again, none of this means that a Huckabee Presidency wouldn't be an enormous disappointment to any dissident conservatives who rally around him - particularly dissidents of the crunchy and paleo variety. But it would probably disappoint in different ways, and for different reasons, than the presidency of George W. Bush.
Lots of observers, myself included, expected Rudy Giuliani to have considerable difficulty winning the GOP nomination. But it has to be counted as remarkable just how far he’s fallen over the last month, first in early-state polling and voting, and now in national polls. Yes, he’s a social liberal with no political experience outside New York and a host of skeletons in his closet, and yes, it was only a matter of time before all of that caught up with him to some extent. But like most people, I expected that his personal celebrity and (well-earned) reputation as a tough-guy problem solver, when joined to a divided field rife with ideological imperfections, the enthusiastic support of the Manhattan-based slice of the right-wing intelligentsia, and the deep pockets of the remaining Rockefeller Republicans in the party, would more or less guarantee him at least a quarter of the primary vote. Now, though, he can't even manage that level of support in his supposed firewall of Florida.
As unsettled as the GOP race remains, it's way too soon for post-mortems. But it's interesting to contrast the campaign Rudy has run with the one that Reihan and I suggested that he run when he first jumped into the race. Our vision would have taken him in a more populist direction, into territory that Mike Huckabee has owned in this campaign; it would have drawn on the persona Giuliani cultivated, while New York's mayor, as the friend to the city's forgotten middle class. And Rudy wouldn't have had to listen to us: He's got David Frum, who advances a variety of practical ideas for a middle-class-friendly GOP in his new book, as an adviser to his campaign! Yet as Frum himself allows, Giuliani has adopted exactly none of his ideas; instead, on domestic policy he's campaigned as the supply-siders' supply sider. Maybe this was the right choice: Maybe his only chance at the nomination was to lock down the Club-for-Growth vote and build from there. But at the moment, it looks like Rudy should have at least considered a Plan B.
January 13, 2008
Liberal Fascism And Its Critics
Here is some free advice for liberals who don't care much for Jonah Goldberg or his (bestselling) new volume: Either confine yourself to dismissive snark, of thesortperfected by my colleague Matt, or buckle down and actually read the damn thing. The "definitive critiques" by people who admit that they haven't yet cracked the covers are not helpful to your cause.
And yes, I'll have something to say about the book myself, I promise - but only once I've finished reading it.
January 12, 2008
Does McCain Have a Ceiling? (II)
Maybe not. Daniel Larison unpacks that new CNN poll showing McCain bursting out to a national lead:
When asked how they would feel after the nomination of each candidate, 31% said they would be enthusiastic about McCain, 46% would be satisfied, 18% would be dissatisfied and only 5% would be upset. It seems as if that 5% is overwhelmingly concentrated in conservative media outlets and activists in their audiences. For Huckabee, the numbers are revealing: 20/52/20/7. Only 7% would be upset with the huckster, whom we have been assured would rend the coalition to bits. For Giuliani the numbers are similar: 21/49/21/8. Romney understandably generates the least enthusiasm and satisfaction put together (14/50) and the highest dissatisfied + upset number (27/6). The choice of many movement conservatives, the champion of the three-legged stool, Romney apparently rallies the GOP less effectively than any of the others. These numbers have obviously changed since November and could always change back (Romney and Giuliani have lost ground in generating an enthusiastic response), but if you were designing the GOP ticket with party unity and enthusiasm as your only criteria you would, bizarrely, be pushed towards selecting McCain or Huckabee. The last one of the four you would select would be Romney. This intuitively makes sense to me, since I think Romney is awful, but it really calls into question the judgement that he is the most “viable” in the field.
Now, one could argue that many voters in a national poll won't have been paying close attention to the race, so the fact that McCain and Huckabee are both anathema to many people in the conservative movement - and the reasons why they're so hated - haven't registered with most Republican voters. On the other hand, the respondents been playing close enough attention to have turned away from Romney and Rudy, and if these numbers do reflect at least semi-informed judgment on the part of the GOP electorate, it makes the "Romney's Long March" scenario look a lot less plausible. It also makes it seem as though the McCain camp should be rooting for Romney to stay viable and Huckabee to fade, rather than the reverse, since Huck seems to have the broader base of potential national support if the race drags on toward spring.
January 11, 2008
More Juno
Chris Orr offers an interesting addendum to our Juno-and-abortion debate (mild spoilers below):
Michigan pollster Steve Mitchell of Mitchell Research is running tracking polls starting today and has McCain up six points over Romney with Paul/Rudy/Huckabee in a distant tie for third.
Okay, so maybe Michigan isn't such favorable ground for Huckabee after all. (Too many Catholics, perhaps?) And if he fades to a "distant" third, I really don't see how he rebounds to win South Carolina. What's less clear, though, is whether a Huck fade helps Romney or McCain ...
Just as in 2000, McCain won decisively among moderate and independent voters in New Hampshire. But the final results in the New Hampshire exit poll conducted by Edison/Mitofsky showed that very conservative voters preferred Romney over McCain by more than 2-to-1 ... those results echoed McCain's performance in 2000, when he ran just even with Bush among New Hampshire Republicans and conservatives. McCain then failed to win the 2000 nomination because he ultimately could not attract enough core Republicans in other states. In states with Republican electorates that were more conservative than New Hampshire's -- such as South Carolina, California, Florida, Georgia, and Missouri -- Bush routinely beat McCain among both Republicans and conservatives by at least 2-to-1.
Once again, McCain's most urgent challenge is to expand his appeal among those core Republican constituencies, because few other states are tailored as precisely to his strengths as is New Hampshire. Conservatives represented just 55 percent of New Hampshire Republican voters on Tuesday, according to exit polls. That's lower than in almost any state outside the Northeast.
Likewise, voters who identified themselves as independents (as opposed to those legally registered as independents) cast nearly four in 10 of the Republican ballots in New Hampshire, according to the exit poll. That's a higher percentage than independents contributed in 2000, the last contested GOP presidential race, in almost any other key state -- from South Carolina and Florida to New York and California.
As Brownstein goes on to note, of course, the great advantage that McCain '08 enjoys over McCain in 2000 is the fact that everybody else in the race seems to have a ceiling too. So even if self-described conservatives never start breaking McCain's way, the weakness of his opponents will probably prevent any of them from playing the George W. Bush role from 2000 and sweeping him aside. But at the very least, if McCain keeps stalling out around 35 percent of the vote, he's going to start losing some primaries, and even when they lose his rivals can keep racking up substantial numbers of delegates in the states that aren't winner-take-all. Which begins to makes a brokered convention scenario - which is bandied about every election cycle and never materializes - seem shockingly plausible.
The Huckabee Strategy
So far as I can tell, his campaign is calculating that it needs to do well (second place, ideally) in Michigan, and that South Carolina is a must-win; thus they’re competing in both states, but betting more heavily on the second one. You can see why they’re thinking that way, but after watching last night’s debate it occurred to me that South Carolina might actually be tougher ground for Huckabee to fight on. Already, McCain’s New Hampshire momentum has carried him out to a lead in S.C., and this time around he’s got the state’s GOP establishment in his corner; moreover, if Huckabee more or less concedes first place in Michigan to the Senator, a win up north will give McCain yet another momentum boost going into South Carolina, with only a few days between the two primaries for Huckabee to make up the lost ground. And in Michigan, Huckabee has Romney as his foil, which is more or less ideal for his purposes; in the Palmetto State, as we saw last night, he’ll have another good ol’ southern boy, Fred Dalton Thompson, trying to tear pieces out of his hide. When you consider Michigan’s economic woes, McCain’s support for cap-and-trade, the state’s considerable evangelical population, and the current polls – which place Huck as close to first there as he is in South Carolina – you could make a case that the Huckabee campaign should be going all out up north, both because an outright win might be attainable and because only with an outright win can they hope to hold off Thompson and leapfrog past McCain down south.
The counter-argument, I suppose, is that Michigan’s open primary, will all those independents crossing over, more or less guarantees McCain a win there however Huck decides to play it. But one of the premises of Huckabee’s campaign is that his message can bring independents to the polls as well - the socially-conservative, economically-anxious, Sam's Club sort of swing voters, that is. It seems like Michigan would be as good a place as any to put that theory to the test.
Bloggingheads At The Movies
I think Chris Orr and I may have rattled on about Juno and abortion a tad too long, but if that isn't your cup of tea maybe you'll enjoy our discussion of the dark, sexual magic of Michael Cera.
He's up in Michigan, up in South Carolina. In neither case, though, is he over thirty percent. And I continue to think, despite all the talk about Romney being toast if he loses Michigan (which he probably will), that until McCain proves he can break through his current 35 percent ceiling, the Romney campaign ought to assume that the race will be a marathon rather than a sprint, and that even a slew of early-state silver medals (and the media derision that comes with them) could still translate into gold at the end.
Recall that in 2004, John Kerry quickly cemented his status as the Democratic favorite by breaking into the forties and even the fifties in the post-New Hampshire primaries. Similarly, if McCain wins Michigan with a Kerry-style 40 or 45 percent of the vote, then the Romney "Long March" scenario (and the longer-shot Giuliani scenario) start looking like pure fantasy. But so long as he stays within the ceiling he bumped up against in 2000, the race is a long way from over.
(All of this assumes, of course, that Huckabee doesn't break through his current ceiling, but at present that seems even less likely than a McCain breakout.)
Photo by Flickr user Mr. Wright used under a Creative Commons license.
Two Houses Divided
Piggybacking on columns by Harold Meyerson and Karl Rove that discuss the intra-party fault lines that the Obama-Clinton race has opened, or re-opened, among the Dems, Matt Continetti writes:
... both Meyerson and Rove are on to something. Leave aside, for a moment, the Democratic gender gap, which simply may be a function of Clinton's candidacy. Status and education divided the Democratic primary electorate in 2004 (Kerry vs. Dean) and in Connecticut in 2006 (Lieberman vs. Lamont). You hear a lot about the divisions in the contemporary Republican party, and how the "Reagan coalition" is breaking down, a thing of the past, dead, yadda, yadda, yadda. What you don't hear a lot about are the divisions among the Democrats. And as the number of upscale, highly educated professionals in the Democratic party increases, those divisions are sure to become more pronounced - just as they are more pronounced in 2008 than they were in 2004. This year might be the start of the Republican Reformation. But the Democratic Destabilization may not be far behind.
At the moment, though, there's a big difference between the two parties' divisions: The Democrats' fault lines are primarily demographic (upscale vs. downscale, professional vs. working class, women vs. men), whereas the GOP's fault lines are demographic and ideological. The Iowan evangelicals who voted for Huckabee, the hawkish supply-siders who favor Rudy, the upscale "enterprisers" backing Romney - all of these groups, and the candidates they support, represent not only different slices of the party but different ideological visions for where the GOP should go from here. Whereas the Obama-Clinton contest, and the splits it's opened up, have less to do with policy substance than with issues of style and rhetoric, experience and electability, and straightforward identity politics. As TNR's editors among many others have pointed out, from health care to the environment to taxes to foreign policy, the Democratic contenders have all been singing remarkably similar tunes. They've spent so much time debating meta-issues like how to deliver change (through hard work? confrontation? audacious post-partisanship?) precisely because they basically all agree on which changes they want to actually deliver.
Now it's easy to imagine the Dems' demographic fissures turning into ideological fissures, as they did when Bush and the GOP were riding high. And a great deal of this year's un-liberal-like ideological unity is made possible by the fact that the party's on the upswing but not yet responsible for governing - it's on the verge of retaking power, but hasn't done so yet, so all the hard debates over compromises and trade-offs are still in the future. But in the primary campaign, at least, however nasty the Clinton-Obama spat becomes, the GOP's divisions are like to remain more substantive, and thus more fundamental.
Over the holidays, an interview Will Smith gave to a Scottish newspaper became the scandal of the week - specifically, this passage:
Remarkably, Will believes everyone is basically good.
"Even Hitler didn't wake up going, 'let me do the most evil thing I can do today'," said Will. "I think he woke up in the morning and using a twisted, backwards logic, he set out to do what he thought was 'good'. Stuff like that just needs reprogramming."
You'll note that Smith didn't actually say that everyone (Hitler included) is "basically good"; the reporter interpolated it. But even that interpolation was enough to bring the Jewish Defense League down around his head, complete with a ridiculous statement that Smith had "spit on the memory of every person murdered by the Nazis. His disgusting words stick a knife in the backs of every veteran who fought (and sometimes died) to save the world from the intentions of Adolf Hitler."
Seriously: They really said this.
Still, I remember thinking at the time that there was something creepy about Smith's comments - not the totally banal speculation about Hitler's psychology, but the line about how "stuff like that just needs reprogramming." And now comes news that Smith may be a recent convert to his great pal Tom Cruise's Church of Scientology. So it all makes sense. (Though of course, as Noah Feldman would no doubt be quick to point out, I only find Scientology so creepy because it was founded relatively recently.)
Meanwhile, in related news, I'm really looking forward to that new unauthorized Cruise biography, assuming Scientology's legal team lets it see the light of day ...
January 9, 2008
Religion, Reason and Relativism
Daniel Larison weighs in on Noah Feldman's "all religions are equally implausible" line of argument.
... you're engaging precisely in the same mechanism that pushes Paul to the fringe by defending him, here. When you hold him to a lower standard because he is a member of a fringe group, you are further marginalizing that group and contributing to the sense in which they are a permanent "other"; you're highlighting the sense in which they are removed from contemporary politics. If the ideas of Paul's that you (and I) admire are to be given traction in the national debate, he and they have to be held to the same standard, or a higher standard, than others. The marginalization that inoculates him to charges of racism or anti-Semitism, etc., also disenfranchises the people and ideas that he represents.
It's a fair point. You could argue, too, that this dynamic was at work in the whole controversy over the Paul campaign and the neo-Nazi donations. Many of Paul's fans and supporters insisted at the time that since the good doctor obviously isn't anything close to a Nazi himself, there was no good reason to demand that his campaign return the donations it was receiving from groups like Stormfront. As Paul's campaign manager put it, "if people hold views that the candidate doesn't agree with, and they give to us, that's their loss." This isn't a completely unreasonable view, but it holds Paul to a vastly different standard than a more mainstream conservative candidate would be held to; if the media found out that John McCain, say, were getting cash from the Aryan Nation, it would take about ten minutes for his staff to figure out a way to hand that money back. Paul could keep the money, in other words, only because everyone understands his campaign to be a fringe affair. Call it the soft marginalization of low expectations.
Ron Paul's Friends
You know, I half-believe Ron Paul when he says that he is not a bigot or a racist or an anti-Semite. I half-believe him in when he says the inflammatory material that James Kirchick has uncovered in years and years of newsletters and pamphlets with his name on them was written by others without his supervision or direct permission. But what I'm nearly sure of is that he doesn't really care that much if some of the people around him are racists - not because he shares their opinions, but because he thinks those opinions aren't all that important in the grand scheme of things.
This doesn't make Ron Paul a terrible person; it just makes him human. He believes in a constellation of ideas - some of them nutty, but some of them not - that have been shunted to the fringe of American political life. And people who find themselves in that position tend to be far, far more forgiving of their allies' various tics and idiosyncracies and yes, bigotries than would otherwise be the case. It's unfortunate, but it's also human nature: If someone agrees with you and supports you when the whole world seems to be against you, of course you'll be more likely to look past their tendency to suggest that Mossad was behind the 1993 WTC bombing, or their fondness for pre-apartheid South Africa. When you're way out there on the fringe, without any obvious way to reach the mainstream, it's very easy to tell yourself that your dubious friends aren't really all that bad - and that besides, if you ever start finding your way back to the mainstream, it won't be all that hard to jettison them along the way. It's easy, as well, to start making excuses for them: If the mainstream accuses you of anti-Semitism, unfairly, because you're a principled non-interventionist who wants the U.S. to pull out of the Middle East, it's easy to find yourself making excuses for other people who get tarred (more justly) with the label. And then time goes by, the mainstream never gets any closer, you're spending all your time in a cramped and crankish and resentful world, and you hear yourself thinking hey, if these neo-Confederate guys are right about states' rights and the Constitution, then maybe they're right about race too ...
It's the most natural thing in the world. Just ask Sam Francis.
Thus it's to Ron Paul's credit, in a certain way, that he never went as far down this road as Francis and Joe Sobran and others like them did. But it's a shame that some of Paul's ideas have only Paul - with all his baggage, all his own weird and baseless notions, and all his unfortunate friends - as their champion. Even if you believe, as I do, that the American empire and the administrative state aren't going anywhere and ought to be taken as the givens of our politics, there's still a constructive role for non-interventionists and constitutionalists to play in our politics (and especially in conservative politics!), whether we're debating the invasion of Iraq or the latest appropriations bill. But because those ideas are currently way out on the fringe - and associated with the sort of people who wrote for the Ron Paul Political Report back in the day - there are enormous incentives for most politicians and writers to give them a wide berth, precisely because anyone who does embrace them will find himself, like Paul, sharing a very small boat with a lot of very dubious friends.
With apologies to Jim Antle's fine piece, this is the real "paleocon dilemma": That once a set of ideas reaches the fringes of political discussion, it tends to stay there.
After tonight, McCain will be coronated by the mainstream media. He is sure to hold his lead as the betting favorite. But watch Giuliani. Here’s a bet I will make with anyone: The two top-rated conservative radio talk hosts, Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, will more or less back Giuliani, as Dennis Miller does--explicitly--now. That support will be as key to Giuliani as Oprah Winfrey’s support has been to Obama.
Which is to say, the mainstream media and conventional analysis will be blind to the value of such support--and so, you'll never read about it. But in a tight primary, the Limbaugh-Hannity-Miller factor could make a difference.
In my post yesterday on Mitt Romney's prospects if he loses New Hampshire and Michigan, I envisioned talk radio getting behind him in a big way - as the only alternative to the two heretics, McCain and Huckabee - if he stays viable long enough to make the race a three-man tug-of-war in Florida and beyond. But if Romney collapses instead - if he gets beaten soundly in Michigan (where I had forgotten that Democrats can vote in the GOP primary) and then hammered by both McCain and Huckabee in South Carolina - well, my "Romney's Long March" scenario was predicated on the anti-McCain, anti-Huck voices in the GOP refusing to go gently into the good night, and if Mitt's flatlining by South Carolina it isn't all that implausible to imagine Rush and Hannity trying desperately to perform CPR on Rudy's candidacy. It would be the crowning irony of irony-rich primary season - the "Reagan conservatives" making their last stand around a man whose record is arguably more liberal than anyone else's in the race.
Photo by Flickr user Joe Crimmings used under a Creative Commons license.
January 8, 2008
Obama Pivots?
Watching his concession speech, Daniel Casse comments:
All that talk about Democrats and Republicans coming together was, tonight, overshadowed by whatever wonkery he could throw out: caring for veterans, tax cuts, health care policy, nuclear weapons. He has been forced back onto Hillary’s turf of policy plans. Going forward, this Democratic campaign will be about who will promise to do what exactly for which Democratic constituent groups. And this has always been Obama’s weakest hand. The Florida primary fight on January 29th will be about Medicare purchasing power and cap and trade energy programs. The days of “hope” and “change” may just have come to an end.
Update: Andrew Cline has related thoughts, on Obama's "where's the beef?" problem.
Hillary Isn't Toast ...
... and the deeply principled folks at the dominant-in-Nevada Culinary Workers Union are, naturally, reconsidering that Obama endorsement they had planned.
Huckabee's Choice
Rich Lowry raises a good question - how hard will Huckabee fight, if he and McCain end up in a two-man race for South Carolina? Does he go all-out for the nomination, devil take the consequences? Or does he play it the way John Edwards did in 2004, going easy on the front-runner in an effort to maneuver himself into the VP's slot?
On the one hand, as Rich says, "there are worse things than being in the second slot on a ticket where the top guy is 71-years old." On the other hand, look how the plan workedout for Edwards.
Nobody Knows Nothing
I don't believe we're seeing a "Wilder Effect," for the reasons Matt outlines and some others. But Geraghty's right - it's crazy how off-the-mark every single poll turned out to be.
Exorcising Ed Muskie
Does anyone have any doubt that if Hillary goes on to win the Democratic nomination, we'll be hearing about her "anti-Muskie moment" for as long as there's a New Hampshire primary?
Hillary Isn't Toast?
At the very least, based on the exit polls, Patrick Ruffini's argument to that effect feels a lot more plausible than it did when I first read it a few hours ago.
In part, I was inclined to discount Ruffini's scenario because depended on a Hillary victory in Nevada to kick off her comeback, when this morning the Journal (via Continetti) reported the following:
The all-important Culinary Workers union in Nevada, the next state to vote on Jan. 19, is considering backing Sen. Obama a day after a New Hampshire win, say some high-ranking Democrats. The support of the state's largest union by far would virtually hand him a victory in the labor-dominated caucuses there, Democrats say.
But will they be so quick to jump on the Obama bandwagon if he wins New Hampshire by only a few points?
I've followed with interest Andrew's explanations for how a libertarian conservative like himself can get behind Obama, and I think they make a good deal of sense: Given the issues that Andrew prioritizes, I think he ought to be supporting Obama in this race. (Though I also think he ought to support Hillary against a Republican, if it came to that, which I suspect he'd blanch at.) I do wish, though, that he'd acknowledge the sort of trade-offs he's accepting by backing a liberal Democrat, instead of letting his enthusiasm for Obama persuade him that all good things (from his libertarian point of view, at least) might go together. For instance, to a Bill Kristol remark about the liberal "nanny-state impulse," Andrew retorts:
From a conservative perspective, on spending, debt, big government, regulation, which Democrat could be worse [than Bush]?
As Reihan notes in response, it's very easy to imagine a "liberal Reagan," which is what Andrew has (not-unreasonably) argued Obama might turn out to be, being much "worse than Bush" - again, from a libertarian point of view - on most if not all of these fronts. Particularly given the kind of super-majorities that the Democrats might enjoy after an Obama landslide, and the party's leftward turn over the last few years. Nanny-state conservative though Bush may have been, there's still an enormous amount of space to his left on size-of-government issues - just ask the Europeans.
Similarly, I'm growing a little tired of the whole Obama-as-Burkean meme (which, to be fair, originated not with Andrew but with Larissa MacFarquhar). The fact that Obama is thoughtful enough to admit nuances and acknowledge trade-offs is a credit to him, but if being thoughtful and hardheaded is enough to make him a "conservative of doubt" then the word conservative has no meaning whatsoever. The brothers Kennedy, to whom Obama is frequently compared, had a similar capacity to sound more thoughtful and nuanced than the average politician; this does not make them anything other than the liberal Democrats that they were. Obama might turn out to be a liberal Reagan, who moves American politics leftward in a profound and enduring way, or he might be another JFK, better-remembered for his capacity to inspire (and his cult of personality) than for his actual accomplishments. Either way, he's very unlikely to be remembered as a Burkean.
Photo by Flickr user Allison Harger used under a Creative Commons license.
Get ready for the Jim Lehrer-moderated debates between Obama, the Republican nominee, Michael Bloomberg, and Ron Paul.
It'll be a lot more interesting than Bush-Kerry ...
Mitt Romney's Long March
The conventional wisdom, encapsulated here by Jason Zengerle and here by the gang at Fox News, is that if Mitt Romney loses New Hampshire to McCain he'll lose Michigan as well, and then his campaign will be finished. I suppose that’s the most likely scenario, but this is a weird enough year that it's worth at least considering the possibility that Romney could lose New Hampshire and Michigan and South Carolina and still have a chance at winning the nomination.
Consider this scenario: McCain wins tonight by a narrow margin – say, 3 points – and then goes to Michigan, where independents buoy him to a five point win, with Romney in second and Huck in third. Then Huckabee wins South Carolina, with McCain and Romney bunched just below him; Thompson finishes fourth, drops out, and endorses McCain. At this point the media will be counting Romney out, no question. But heading into Florida and Super Tuesday he’ll still have plenty of money to spend - as much if not more than his rivals - and with Thompson gone he'll be the only “Reagan conservative” in the race. Neither the Huckabee nor the McCain campaigns are exactly organizational juggernauts, even if the money spigot opens for McCain after New Hampshire, and both candidates have what in a different year would be disqualifying weaknesses. Why shouldn’t Romney stay in the race? If McCain stalls out around 30-35 percent in New Hampshire, arguably the best of all political environments for his candidacy, why shouldn't the Romney campaign assume that he can be beaten further down the road, in the same way that Bush outlasted him in 2000?
True, this sort of trench warfare would be bad for GOP unity, and might even result in a brokered convention. But why should Romney care about uniting the party behind McCain or Huckabee? They both hate him like poison, and he presumably returns the sentiment: Why shouldn't he make life as difficult for them as he possibly can?
And true, in this scenario Romney would be essentially adopting Rudy Giuliani’s much-derided “long march” strategy - but perhaps with a better chance of success. Giuliani is trying to mount a big-state comeback after disappearing from the media narrative for a month (and getting beaten by, ahem, Ron Paul), whereas Romney’s fight with McCain and Huckabee will be front-page news from here till February; Giuliani doesn’t have much institutional support within the conservative movement, whereas Romney does; and Giuliani and McCain are competing for the same pool of national-security-oriented moderate Republicans, whereas once Thompson drops out Romney will be the only candidate of right-wing orthodoxy left in the race. He’ll still have the NR endorsement. If he seems viable, he’ll have Rush Limbaugh, Hugh Hewitt, and the rest of talk radio in his corner. And he'll be up against one candidate who - so far - only does well in GOP primaries when independents are allowed to vote, and another guy whose appeal still looks awfully sectarian. In a race where nobody seems capable of breaking 35 percent in the national polls, why shouldn't the campaign go all the way to the convention?
Maybe it couldn’t happen this way. Maybe if and when McCain starts winning primaries, an Obamaphobic GOP will unite around him; maybe if Mitt stays in after a slew of second-place finishes he’ll start looking like a joke. But no matter what happens tonight, I think the Romney campaign ought to keep hope alive.
January 7, 2008
What Is It About Mormonism?
Writing on Mormonism in this Sunday's Times Magazine, Noah Feldman becomes about the eighteen thousandth writer to explain that non-Mormon Christians only find the LDS faith weird and implausible because its revelation is so recent. Even though "there is nothing inherently less plausible about God’s revealing himself to an upstate New York farmer in the early years of the Republic than to the pharaoh’s changeling grandson in ancient Egypt," Feldman writes, for most people "antiquity breeds authenticity," because "events in the distant past, we tend to think, occurred in sacred, mythic time."
But this only makes sense under the assumption that the only reason people disbelieve Mormonism is its recency. It seems not to occur to Feldman to ask whether all propositions of all religions are equally plausible or implausible. Is “antiquity” really the only factor at work here? If only a handful were attracted to the teachings of David Koresh, is the recency of those teachings a sufficient explanation? Such an assumption is simplistic at best. Let me be clear: I do not mean to say that Mormon beliefs are anything like the crackpot tenets of Koresh; I am just claiming that if you want to understand why certain beliefs are not widely respected or admired, you might want to know something besides how old they are. You might want to inquire into the actual content of those beliefs.
Moreover, if the Average Joe takes Judaism seriously than Mormonism — a proposition that may or may not be true — “antiquity” isn’t the reason. If that were the case, then the Average Joe would find the worship of Ashteroth, Baal, and Isis and Osiris as plausible as that of Yahweh. Insofar as people-in-general concede respect to Judaism, that’s not because of Judaism’s “antiquity” but because of its continuity. If we ever have Mormons who have been saying the same prayers to the same God for three thousand years or so, then those Mormons will almost certainly get a hell of a lot more respect than today’s Latter-Day Saints do.
Well said. I don't want to dismiss the "antiquity equals plausibility" argument, since it obviously contains an element of truth, but it tends to function as a conversation-stopper in intellectual discourse these days - as an easy out for secular writers who assume that all religions are equally implausible, or at least equally beyond rational examination, and who don't want to wade into the weeds of history, archaeology and comparative theology to see whether it might be otherwise. In reality, though, the major plausibility issue facing Mormonism isn't when and where and how long ago the events crucial to the religion are supposed to have taken place, but whether the Mormon account of those events feels persuasive as a historical narrative. This is an issue that faces every major religion that claims God intervenes in history; Mormonism's problem - and a major reason why its tenets are often "dismissed as ridiculous" (as Feldman puts it) by mainstream Christians - is that the Book of Mormon doesn't seem to stack up nearly as well in this regard as, say, the Gospel According to Saint Matthew.
Obviously, this historical-plausibility question doesn't matter to every believer, but it does matter (as it should) to an awful lot of people, which is why so much ink has been spilled by foes of Christian orthodoxy, from Elaine Pagels to Dan Brown, arguing from the historical record (as they see it) that the events of the Gospels didn't happen the way the Gospels said they did. The idea that it should be otherwise - that it's "indefensible," as Feldman puts it, to suggest that Roman Catholicism is more likely to be true than Mormonism because Saint Peter really existed whereas the Nephites probably didn't - only makes sense if you assume the premises of a materialistic (or fideistic) worldview. Which seems like a bad way to set about analyzing the beliefs of people who don't assume that worldview, which is what Feldman's essay is supposed to be doing.
For years the Republicans have depended on evangelical voters ... Sooner or later their most reliable, most motivated constituency would want more than just verbal assurances of support or even votes on issues of importance—abortion, gays in the military, and so forth. Eventually evangelicals would want a president of their own.
The best metaphor is that of the blacks in the Democratic party. For years, nay, for decades, they have been its most reliable constituency, essential to winning states rich in electoral votes in presidential races. Of course the Democrats haven’t always won these elections … But they wouldn’t have come as close as did, particularly in 2000 and 2004, if it weren’t for that reliable Afro-American vote.
This was precisely what led Jesse Jackson to seek the Democratic nomination in 1984. Given the peculiarities of our primary politics, this wasn’t as outlandish a proposition as it might seem in retrospect … In the runup to [the New York primary] great was the panic in establishment Democratic ranks. What if Jackson won New York? Could they deny him the nomination?
You can see where this is going – Jackson then, Huckabee now:
If Huckabee goes on to win more primaries he will have a reasonable claim to the nomination … In spite of itself, the party might end up with him as its nominee, and with it, heading down the shortest road to disaster since the Goldwater debacle of 1964.
Make no mistake about it: an electoral defeat of these dimensions would represent a major watershed in the history of the Republican party. It would be faced with only two possible roads forward. One is to become the party of the religious right, a sectarian agglomeration somewhat like the small ethnic parties in inter-war Europe, perhaps capable of holding some governorships and seats in Congress but never again competitive in a presidential election. The other would be to cut itself free from the religious right and seek to appeal to the wide and growing tranche of independent voters who are socially liberal but economically conservative. In that case the Republican party would gradually resemble some of the “liberal” (that is, conservative) parties who periodically win national elections in Western Europe or Canada. These parties are friendly to market-based solutions to economic problems—that is, they are broadly libertarian.
Really? Those are the only two roads forward? Even if we operate in the peculiar universe Falcoff inhabits, where there are no “independent voters” who are socially conservative but economically liberal, rather than the reverse, isn't at least possible that the existing GOP coalition would simply reconstitute itself in the wake of a Huckabee defeat, with social conservatives chastened by their loss and economic conservatives singing a smug “I told you so” tune? That is, of course, precisely what happened in the aftermath of the ’64 race, which Falcoff holds up as a parallel situation: Instead of flying apart, Goldwater conservatives and Rockefeller Republicans made common cause in the next three elections, uniting behind Nixon and then Gerald Ford, and only parting ways gradually over the ensuing decades. Similarly, had a Jackson nomination in ’84 resulted in an even bigger landslide for Reagan than he enjoyed over Mondale, I sincerely doubt that the Democrats, however traumatizing their defeat, would have either become the party of black identity politics or jettisoned the African-American vote entirely.
Maybe not. Here's Joe Klein, on the weekend's GOP action:
I watched tonight's debate with the Frank Luntz focus group at the famed Merrimack Diner, while about 50 Ron Paul supporters--angry that their guy hadn't been included--ranted and raved outside. I"m not sure this was a representative group of Republicans. They seemed pretty conservative. And they...Just. Loved. Romney. Most of those who came in undecided had switched to Mitt by the end of the show. They just adored his position on illegal immigration (their dials plummeted when McCain said we had to be "humane.") They loved his explanation of why he had switched his position on abortion. They loved it when he nailed Huckabee as a tax raiser...in fact, Huckabee's failure to acknowledge that he was a net raiser of taxes ended his credibility with the audience (which, since this is New Hampshire, had been wary of his flagrant religiosity from the start).
Meanwhile, McCain was nowhere. His answers lacked zing. He seemed tired. He was unable to make a vigorous case for himself as a leader--even his references back to his days in the military didn't cut it with this Republican audience. McCain won here in 2000 because independent voters found him far more compelling than the independent alternative on the Democratic side, Bill Bradley. This time, he's competing with Barack Obama for independents in a state decidedly more blue than it was in 2000...He may still have enough heft to win this thing. But I wouldn't be surprised to see the race tighten or swing toward Romney over the next few days.
I still expect McCain to win New Hampshire; I can't imagine that four days of campaigning, even with two debates crammed in, will be enough time for Romney to shift the polls back into his favor. But I think McCain had an opportunity, with Romney hurt by Iowa, Huckabee hurt by being Huckabee, and Thompson and Rudy seemingly out of the running, to seize the mantle of GOP frontrunner this week, and consign Romney's campaign to near-oblivion. After watching the debates, which highlighted McCain's weaknesses as a candidate for the Republican nomination rather than his strengths, I don't think that's going to happen. Even if McCain takes New Hampshire, I don't think this race will be any less wide-open going into Michigan and South Carolina than it is today.
January 6, 2008
Primary Provocations
From Noah Millman. Neither seems plausible; both are interesting even so.
Comeback
Kicking off our "Party of Sam's Club" piece for the Standard way back when, Reihan and I wrote, of our slightly-dubious hodgepodge of ideas: "The proposals that follow are neither perfect nor exhaustive, but they offer a starting place for a discussion that the Republican party desperately needs to have." I'm pleased to report that David Frum's new book, Comeback, is the smartest long-form entrant into that discussion to date, and whether you're a conservative interested in what ought to come after Reaganism for the GOP, or a liberal interested in how a revived Right might set about beating your side silly, I highly recommend it. It's more focused, less idiosyncratic and less historically-sweeping than our own book (which is due out in June), but there's significant overlap between Frum's domestic-policy vision and ours; where we differ, I would say that his emphases tend to be slightly more centrist and technocratic - save on immigration, significantly - whereas ours are more populist (in the short run) and libertarian (in the long run). (Though Reihan might have a different take.) His book also deals much more with foreign policy than ours does, where obviously he and I have our share of disagreements, but you don't have to be a neoconservative (or believe in, ahem, "an end to evil") to find much of what he says worth taking seriously.
You can turn up a quick rundown of the Frum domestic-policy agenda here, but really you should go out and buy the book; after all, you'll need something to fill the gaping void in your library between now and Grand New Party's release date.
I was surprised by all the talk in the debate spin room about Hillary's angry little speech after Edwards took Obama's side in the great "change" debate. The talkers assumed it was a potential Rick Lazio election-losing moment, an audience turnoff--a judgment echoed here and here ("dogmatic ... angry ... vicious"). ... I was surprised because when it happened, I thought to myself, "pretty good response." I've seen it again--here--and I still don't get what's wrong with it. Unconvincing, maybe. Heated, yes. But not overheated or uncontrolled or unhinged. This isn't the sort of thing I usually say--but isn't Hillary's outburst exactly the sort of forceful putdown male candidates not only get away with, but are expected to come up with? ...
I think if John McCain had said the same sort of thing - especially in an exchange with Mitt Romney - the post-debate spin would be entirely in his favor. But judge for yourself:
January 5, 2008
Romney's Night
Or rather, a night that made me want to vote for him, however temporarily - which, as you can probably tell if you read this blog frequently, was a high bar for him to clear. Whether anyone in the voting public saw it that way I have no idea; he took a drubbing all night from the rest of the field, and I agree with Rich that he probably would have done better to show a little more emotion about it. But all the piling-on from his rivals felt content-free and obnoxious (I thought McCain, especially, seemed irascible and downright unpleasant in his interactions with Romney, and too confident that his role as media darling makes him untouchable), whereas even when I didn't agree with him Mitt sounded serious and persuasive and even wonky - like the thinking conservative's candidate that I once hoped he would be.
That's Mitt Romney, waxing wonkish on health policy tonight, and sounding like the guy I liked an awful lot before he started, you know, running for President.
He could really use turning his inspiration on, but on the merits, Romney should feel good and not like a loser coming out of Iowa. One hour and a half or so event in a liberal state does not make or break a Republican race (liberal Republicans more tolerant of Huckabee’s nanny-state tendencies) for a guy whose covered a lot of ground in a year.
Iowa is such a "liberal state" that it went for Bush in 2004. It went for Gore in 2000, but only by .31% of the vote; Bush arguably did better there that year, in real as opposed to butterfly-ballot terms, than in the ur-swing (i.e, not "liberal") state of Florida. If Iowa is a liberal state, then so is New Hampshire (which went for Bush by a similar margin in '00, and for Kerry in '04); so, arguably, are New Mexico and Nevada, Colorado and Ohio. Put another way, if Iowa is a liberal state, then there's no way a conservative party should have any chance in an American general election.
John Ellis is a smart political observer who argues, as many others do, that Romney should have run as a candidate of “new ideas” rather than a “700 Club” Republican. Well, first off, these things aren’t mutually exclusive (or Republicans would be not just in bad but hopeless shape). But second, there was no way that a pro-choice Mitt Romney could have beaten Rudy Giuliani in the primaries. And once he flipped on that issue, all of the attacks on him as plastic, etc., were baked in the cake.
I agree with everything here except the last sentence. Of course Romney needed to flip-flop on the life issues to have a chance at the nomination, and no doubt he would have taken considerable heat over this switch no matter what. But – to piggyback on Ramesh’s first point – there’s no reason he couldn’t have run as a born-again social conservative and a Gary Hart-style new-ideas man, and if he’d found something interesting and unorthodox to say about health care or taxes or the environment, I think it would have gone a long way to softening his image as a plastic man who'll say anything to get elected. It wasn’t abortion alone that created that image – it was his constant attempt to sell himself as more-hawkish-than-thou on Iran, more-restrictionist-than-thou on immigration, and so forth, to the point where it seemed that the only issues he cared about were ones he’d flip-flopped on. I suspect that if Romney had talked about tax reform for the middle class or a new conservative approach to the environment – or some other issue where his native wonkiness could shine through – half as much as he talked about how his opponents weren’t sufficiently conservative on issues where he himself had only just found right-wing religion, he might have generated more enthusiasm for his candidacy. (And at the very least, he would have given a hostile press corps something else to talk about besides his inauthenticity.)
But who knows – maybe there’s still time for him to find a better justification for his candidacy than this:
January 4, 2008
Friday Afternoon Reading
Joe Carter, who was temporarily Huckabee's rapid-response man (and turned out the best mass emails of any campaign's communications shop), on his campaign-trail experiences, and what conservative elites don't get about "Reagan conservatives."
Matt Zoller Seitz on There Will Be Blood - but only after you've seen it. And Tim Noah and Armond White, as well. (I'm still sorting through my own thoughts on the film, but you can find them in the next NR.)
Ezra's got a fever, and the only prescription is more Obama ... :
I've been blessed to hear many great orations. I was in the audience when Howard Dean gave his famous address challenging the Democratic Party to rediscover courage and return to principle. I have heard Bill Clinton speak of a place called Hope, and listened to John Edwards bravely channel the populism that American politics so often suppresses. Some of those politicians mirrored my beliefs better than Obama does. Some of their speeches were more declarative and immediate in their passion. But none achieve quite what Obama, at his best, creates.
Obama's finest speeches do not excite. They do not inform. They don't even really inspire. They elevate. They enmesh you in a grander moment, as if history has stopped flowing passively by, and, just for an instant, contracted around you, made you aware of its presence, and your role in it. He is not the Word made flesh, but the triumph of word over flesh, over color, over despair. The other great leaders I've heard guide us towards a better politics, but Obama is, at his best, able to call us back to our highest selves, to the place where America exists as a glittering ideal, and where we, its honored inhabitants, seem capable of achieving it, and thus of sharing in its meaning and transcendence.
I, too, am favorably disposed toward Barack Obama, and enjoy listening to his speeches; he's the finest rhetorician in the current Presidential field, no question. I cannot honestly say that he makes me feel as though history has contracted around me, or that I'm being called back to my highest self, but maybe I'm just not listening hard enough. Or maybe my highest self just isn't sufficiently resolute in its opposition to D.C. special interests to hear on the Isaiah-esque frequency he's hitting.
I should also note that when I do listen hard, like Reihan I sometimes find myself thinking, man, this guy's full of himself.
A large part of politics is framing the context in which one's candidacy is understood. Romney was never going to be a base candidate. He's a Mormon and the base is not. Romney was never going to be the "conservative" candidate, he was the former governor of Massachusetts, perhaps the most liberal state in the country, and campaigned there for the US Senate (in 1994) and for governor (in 2002) as a moderate.
Romney's only real choice was to run as a Republican Gary Hart, the candidate of "new ideas" for a party in desperate need of same. That would have at least given him the flexibility to play to his strengths; his intellectual prowess, his business acumen, his demonstrable executive skills and his admirable personal qualities. And it would have enabled him to attract a wide array of advisors and intellectuals to help him think through innovative policy positions on what appear to be intractable issues.
Had Romney campaigned as the GOP Gary Hart, he would have emerged as an agent of change, regardless of caucus and primary outcomes. Long-term, that would have given him leverage within the Republican Party and with voters generally. If you're the "new idea" guy, almost by definition people want to hear what you have to say.
Having been pretty hard on Romney yesterday, let me say something in his defense. Like Ellis, I think he should have run as the candidate of new ideas, as a Republican Gary Hart, and in a different field - one with, say, a George Allen as the frontrunner - I think he would have. But in this field, this year, I can see why he didn't. In a race where his main rivals seemed to be John McCain and Rudy Giulani, the absence of a natural "base candidate" probably looked so glaring, and the benefits of filling that void so potentially enormous, that it's easy to understand what drove the Romney campaign to run things the way they did. Seizing the opportunity that presented itself, and assuming that they'd be able to pivot back to their candidate's real strengths once the nomination was sealed up, looks like a big mistake right now, but if Mike Huckabee had never caught fire everybody might have woken up this morning talking about what a great campaign Mitt Romney had run. And Gary Hart, you may recall, never won the Democratic nomination, let alone the Presidency.
Photo by Flickr user Why Tuesday used under a Creative Commons license.
How can you mock a man for calling the lower classes “spoiled” because they have a couple cars and several televisions — how can you laugh at his argument that this means their “grievance-mongering” politics are illegitimate — when you yourself are just another stupid white boy who bought the cadillac-driving flatscreen TV-watching welfare queen hype?
It’s almost as if you automatically assume the problems of black people are fake, purely invented to scam white people out of their hard-earned cash, while the problems of white people are legitimate. It’s almost like you think that.
Almost, but not quite. I think it's legitimate to use the term "spoiled" to describe someone who lives in a recently-renovated apartment with a flatscreen TV, has her rent paid in full by a government housing voucher, and then calls her home a "slum" and tells a reporter, gesturing to a homeless encampment, that "I might do better out here with one of these tents." I don't think it's fair to do the same for someone who feels economically strapped while going to work every day and making $40,000 a year to support a family of four - even if their life is pretty sweet by the standards of, say, 1875. And I don't think Sharon Jasper's race has anything to do with this distinction.
Huckabee won women 40-26% (and men just 29-26%). He won voters under $30,000 by about 2 to 1. Cross those two, take away the Republican filter, and you’re talking about a general election constituency that is at least 2-to-1 Democratic. These are not people that conventional primary campaigns are designed to reach. These are the Republican voters the furthest away from National Review, other elite conservative media, and websites like this one. It’s easy to see just how the analysts missed the boat on this one.
But not to worry, Quinn Hillyer has this constituency's number:
[The Iowa result] also shows that the American people have no idea how good their lives are. The strong response to economic grievance-mongering shows that people who are incredibly wealthy by every historical standard are somehow convinced they are barely making ends meet -- barely making ends meet while their families have two cars, three TVs, four cell phones, and untold numbers of other gadgets in homes they themselves own. There is a word for this: spoiled. Huckabee and Obama are smart enough to appeal to the spoiled Americans who have no idea what real hardship is.
I believe I'll let Mr. Hillyer's remarks stand without comment.
Hillary's Choice
Also looking prescient today, along with yours truly, is my Atlantic colleague Josh Green, who more than a year ago concluded a profile of Hillary Clinton's Senate career thusly:
... it is fair to wonder if Clinton learned the lesson of the health-care disaster too well, whether she has so embraced caution and compromise that she can no longer judge what merits taking political risks. It is hard to square the brashly confident leader of health-care reform—willing to act on her deepest beliefs, intent on changing the political climate and not merely exploiting it—with the senator who recently went along with the vote to make flag-burning a crime. Today Clinton offers no big ideas, no crusading causes—by her own tacit admission, no evidence of bravery in the service of a larger ideal. Instead, her Senate record is an assemblage of many, many small gains. Her real accomplishment in the Senate has been to rehabilitate the image and political career of Hillary Rodham Clinton. Impressive though that has been in its particulars, it makes for a rather thin claim on the presidency. Senator Clinton has plenty to talk about, but she doesn’t have much to say.
At the time, this struck me as a little unfair: After two terms of George W. Bush and his various "crusading causes," Hillary's Senate record - her incrementalism, her sense of compromise, her politics of cautious hard work - felt like an advertisement for a Clinton presidency, rather than a "thin claim" on it. But so far in '08, it seems clear that an awful lot of voters (in both parties) are more inclined to Josh's take on things. They want to feeled called; they want to be inspired; they want to be asked to make history. The Clinton campaign offered them that chance, in a sense: Electing the first female President would be nearly as much of a history-making event as electing the first black President. But Clinton didn't offer voters the atmospherics of a history-making campaign, or the rhetoric, or the attitude. And the record that she crafted and the persona she adopted over six years in the Senate - as the safe choice, the responsible choice, the moderate and pragmatic and experienced choice - may turn out to be no match for this:
Yes, it's early, yes, a lot could happen. But a man who could not have used certain restrooms forty years ago is in the center ring, not as a freak in the manner of Alberto Fujimori or Sonia Gandhi, nor even as a faction fighter in the style of Jesse Jackson, but as a real player. One of our great national sins is being obliterated, as the years pass, by the virtues of our national system. I don't agree with Obama and I don't particularly like him, but I am proud of this moment.
Also, in the interest of intellectual vanity, it behooves me to point out that the WSJ op-ed I wrote way back in June of '06 saying that Barack Obama should throw his hat in the ring, inexperience be damned, looks pretty prescient right about now.
January 3, 2008
Huckabee's Next Pivot
Two weeks ago, I advised Mike Huckabee to pivot away from the pitfalls of Christian identity politics and toward a more ecumenical populism if he wanted to be a player in the race past Iowa. I think I detected some pivoting along those lines going on in the run-up to the Caucuses, but now that he's beaten Mitt Romney (and yes, I've experienced a fair amount of Huckenfreude tonight) and established himself as more than just a flash in the pan, he needs to pivot further still, and start acting less like an underdog bent on tearing down his own party's establishment and more like a plausible GOP nominee. This was a trick that John McCain, the last Republican insurgent, didn't manage to pull off in '00, and it cost him the nomination; for Huckabee, who's gone further down the path to heresy and incurred more animosity than McCain ever did, it'll be harder still. But he ought to try: Now is the time for his campaign to talk less about the death of the Reagan coalition (I enjoy Ed Rollins, but God the man talks too much) and more about how Mike Huckabee is really a lot more conservative than most conservatives have been led to believe. Make nice, build bridges, find a way to go on Rush Limbaugh's show as well as Leno's, etc. It's probably too late for this kind of pivoting to have the desired effect: The conservative establishment's loathing for Huck is awfully potent at this point, and like McCain before him the Arkansas governor seems to have fallen too much in love with his David-vs.-Goliath narrative. But if he wants to from being a good story to something more serious, he needs to at least make the attempt.
An interesting question, while I'm on the subject, is what Huckabee should hope and aim for in New Hampshire and Michigan - assuming that South Carolina, where at the moment he's leading in the polls, is the next do-or-die for him. He's positioned well enough in Michigan to hope for a strong showing there, but he needs to exceed expectations in New Hampshire, I think, or risk losing his momentum - which means, assuming McCain continues his move to the poll position, beating Giuliani and rising high enough to make Romney feel the heat. Right now, he's running even with Rudy at around ten percent, 15-20 points back of Romney and McCain. A lot will hinge on whether he gets a bounce from Iowa, and whether Mitt takes a hit. If that's how it plays out, Huck's goal should be to get within five points of Romney when the dust settles, spin it as a huge triumph (which it would be), and then gun for outright victory in Michigan and an easy win against a still-divided field in South Carolina.
Is that scenario likely? Not really, no - but then this scenario didn't seem terribly likely either, once upon a time.
Photo by Flickr user Joe Crimmings used under a Creative Commons license.
My Plans For Tonight
While a very small percentage of the Iowan people exercise their disproportionate influence over the American presidency this evening, I will be attending a screening of There Will Be Blood. (It seemed an appropriate choice.) If you're looking for more up-to-the-minute reaction than I can provide, you know wheretofind it.
Writing to affirm what people are saying about my faith in individuals to rebel against rigged systems and exert for dignity, while at the same time doubtful that the institutions of a capital-obsessed oligarchy will reform themselves short of outright economic depression (New Deal, the rise of collective bargaining) or systemic moral failure that actually threatens middle-class lives (Vietnam and the resulting, though brief commitment to rethinking our brutal foreign-policy footprints around the world). The Wire is dissent; it argues that our systems are no longer viable for the greater good of the most, that America is no longer operating as a utilitarian and democratic experiment. If you are not comfortable with that notion, you won't agree with some of the tonalities of the show. I would argue that people comfortable with the economic and political trends in the United States right now -- and thinking that the nation and its institutions are equipped to respond meaningfully to the problems depicted with some care and accuracy on The Wire (we reported each season fresh, we did not write solely from memory) -- well, perhaps they're playing with the tuning knobs when the back of the appliance is in flames.
Does that mean The Wire is without humanist affection for its characters? Or that it doesn't admire characters who act in a selfless or benign fashion? Camus rightly argues that to commit to a just cause against overwhelming odds is absurd. He further argues that not to commit is equally absurd. Only one choice, however, offers the slightest chance for dignity. And dignity matters.
... If The Wire is too pessimistic about the future of the American empire -- and I've read my Toynbee and Chomsky, so I actually think a darker vision could be credibly argued -- no one will be more pleased than me as I am, well, American. Right now, though, I'm just proud to see serious people arguing about a television drama; there's some pride in that. Thanks.
I think this jibes pretty well with what's been said inandaround the Bowden essay. If you think that American society no longer works "for the greater good" of most of its inhabitants, and that our existing institutions are incapable of addressing the challenges we face, then The Wire will strike you as a masterpiece of true-to-life social realism. If you think, like me, that this assessment is too bleak by half, then The Wire will still strike you as a masterpiece - but one whose political message, as is often the case with great works of art, warrants being taken with a grain of salt.
My Mitt Romney Problem (And Yours?)
Watch this ad:
"In the next ten years, we'll see more progress, more change, than the world has seen in the last ten centuries."
Mitt Romney is an immensely talented and accomplished figure. In many ways, he looks like an ideal antidote to George W. Bush – an “MBA President” who actually knows how to run a business, a Republican politician who’s smooth and articulate rather than self-conscious and tongue-tied, a conservative who’s more comfortable with meritocracy than cronyism, a would-be reformer who actually cares about policy detail. Eighteen months ago, Romney stood out as the thinking conservative’s candidate, and it seemed like every smart young right-winger I talked to was leaning his way, or even planning on going to work for him.
That was then; this is now. With five or so hours to go till the Iowa Caucuses, Mitt Romney has to be judged the frontrunner for the GOP nomination, but it's awfully hard to find anyone not named Hugh Hewitt who seems excited about the prospect. More than enough ink has been spilled on how his political inauthenticity, his consultant-ish pursuit of ideological correctness, has undermined any excitement surrounding his candidacy, replacing it with the resigned, "he's the best we can do" thinking that undergirds the NRendorsement and others like it. (David Brooks' column this weekend offers, I think, the last word on the subject.) For my part, though, the most alienating and off-putting quality of the Romney campaign hasn't been what's he’s said, but how he’s said it - the words he's chosen and the tone he's employed, which have made following the Romney campaign the equivalent of listening to nails drawn across a chalkboard.
I'm talking like ads like the above, where Romney comes across as Ray Kurzweil crossed with Joel Osteen. I'm talking about the way he sounded when he burst out with his famous "we ought to double Guantanamo" line - like an ad man proposing a brilliant new sales pitch, not a would-be President grappling with a difficult issue. I'm talking about how phony he seems when he puts on his most serious face and talks about the looming threat of an "international jihadist Caliphate." I'm not talking about his flip-flops, but the graceless way he flip-flops; as Ryan Lizza wrote, "he not only shifts positions; he often claims to be the most passionate advocate of his new stances," which makes all those (equally-passionate) old YouTube clips all the more damaging. And I'm talking about the way the off-message Mitt seems no better than the on-message Mitt: the former seems phony, but the latter ranges from tone-deaf to just plain weird.
I still think Mitt Romney might make a good President. But that's based on his resume and his record; based on the campaign he's run, I'm pulling hard against him. I've been hoping for a candidate to emerge from the Republican primary who's at once electable in November and interested in reforming the GOP; at the moment, Romney looks like loser on both counts. And by golly, he annoys the ever-living heck out of me.
The Wire
If you watch The Wire, you should read Mark Bowden’s essay on the show in the latest Atlantic. If you don’t watch the show, you should run – don’t walk! – out to buy the DVDs, watch the first four seasons, and then read Mark Bowden’s essay. Like most of what’s been written about The Wire by its myriad admirers, it’s a valentine to the show’s greatness; unlike most of what’s been written, though, it gets at the show's limits as a work of sociology, and the extent to which its much-lauded "realism" is undergirded by David Simon's ultimately unrealistic sense of near-despair over the state of American life - whether in the ghetto or in City Hall, in blue-collar neighborhoods or (this season) in the offices of your local daily newspaper.
Responding to the essay, Reihan and Matt both concur with this assessment, to varying degrees, but both make the point (which Bowden makes as well) that the show’s unrelenting - and therefore unrealistic - emphasis on tragic scenarios and the impossibility of self-help is a crucial part of its success as a work of art. "It’s by no means clear to me that a more accurate show would be a better show," Reihan comments; expanding on the same point, Matt writes:
... part of what gives The Wire such great power is its creator's conviction, wrong though it is, that his tragic vision constitutes telling it like it is. While departing from both reality and realism in any number of ways, The Wire is resolutely committed to verisimilitude in a way that almost no other show is. The result is the creation of a world -- Simon's Baltimore -- that feels eminently real, but is imbued with all the artifice of Greek tragedy.
In political terms it's a dark vision that, like Dostoevsky's, veers wildly between radical and reactionary and that exists, fundamentally, outside the lines of “normal” arguments about policy. Simon believes that we are doomed, and political progress requires us to believe that we are not. But aesthetically it's an extremely powerful conceit.
I wouldn’t go so far as to say that he believes we’re “doomed,” exactly; Simon’s vision lies outside the normal lines of politics, no doubt, and I take Reihan’s point that it’s effectively “an elaborate, moving brief for despair and (ultimately) indifference.” But I’m sure Simon himself considers it a brief for radical action of some sort. He isn’t a no-hoper; he just doesn’t place any hope in the meliorist progressivism that most contemporary liberals support (or, needless to say, in Reihan’s applied neoconservatism).
Noah Millman and Reihan discuss. On the question of the wisdom of McCain picking Huckabee as his running mate (versus, say, Pawlenty, as Reihan suggests), I'm of two minds; it all depends (as Noah notes, while making the pro-Huckabee case) on the extent to which Huck self-immolates in the process of losing the primary fight, and the extent to which his large-and-growing enemies list within the party makes him look like a liability, rather than an asset, when it comes to rallying the base. On the possibility of Obama-Webb, though, I agree completely with Noah, that in picking a running mate, Obama should worry more about balancing his cultural liabilities and foreign-policy liabilities than his lack-of-DC-experience liabilities:
What Obama needs to do is reassure people who are nervous about voting for a black man, nervous about voting for a Harvard man, nervous about voting for a man who grew up in Hawaii and came up in politics from Chicago’s South Side ... Moreover, Obama – who has run his primary campaign as if he intends to draw a contrast on foreign policy in the general election – needs to reassure voters that he is ready to be Commander in Chief. He’s had no relevant experience whatsoever in that particular area.
This calculus leads almost inexorably to Webb:
Webb covers both bases, without overshadowing the nominee. Webb is a guy who wrote a book about his pride in his Scots-Irish heritage. He campaigned – and won – in Virginia on a platform of economic populism and protectionism (whereas Obama is a free-trader who seems basically comfortable with the globalist consensus on economic matters). Webb would substantially respond to any antipathy by certain voters to voting for a man who could simultaneously represent the lumpen and the uber of our social order.
Moreover, Webb is a former Reagan Secretary of the Navy who left the GOP for two reasons: because he thinks the GOP’s economic policy is detrimental to working people, and because he was disgusted by the Iraq War. He has far more credibility as a spokesman for a change in foreign policy than a John Kerry or even a Wesley Clark. Inasmuch as he and Obama see eye-to-eye – and they don’t, precisely, though I think they do more than they don’t; Webb, as a former Navy man, is no Buchananite neo-isolationist – Webb’s presence on the ticket substantially bolster’s Obama’s critique of the direction of our foreign policy. This becomes especially important if he’s up against McCain, but it would also be extremely useful against Romney or Giuliani.
The best case against the Webb-for-Veep meme (expressed here in vlog form by Matt) is that idiosyncratic, cocksure figures - particularly ones who aren't career politicians - make lousy second bananas. I can easily imagine a Vice President Webb being a headache for an Obama Administration, and I can imagine Webb going crazy spending four-to-eight years in the Veep straitjacket, and regretting ever signing up for the job. But that's a danger that you worry about after you win an election: I don't think it changes the calculus that makes Webb a natural fit for an Obama campaign gearing up to spend six months duking it out with the GOP.
Photo by Flickr user Marcn used under a Creative Commons license.
Crack-Ups, Past and Future
In the comments to my post on the looming conservative civil war, Jay Reding writes:
For all the talk of a conservative crackup, the GOP is exactly in the same position that the Democrats were in at this time in 2003. There was no clear winner, there were major differences of opinion over what the face of the party should be, and there was even talk of brokered conventions and splits in the party.
I agree! But in 2003, the Democrats were facing a crack-up - hawks versus doves, Clintonites versus Deaniacs, Peter Beinart versus Michael Moore, the DLC versus Daily Kos. The bloodletting was halted only because the Iraq occupation turned out to be a disaster rather than a triumph, which simultaneously discredited the party’s hawkish faction and incentivized the party to unite against a weakened GOP. But it didn’t have to be that way: The Lamont-Lieberman race in '06 was a fading echo of a civil war that might have continued unabated, if George W. Bush’s approval ratings had kept hovering around sixty percent and foreign policy had continued to be an electoral trump card for the Republicans.
Instead, the Bush Administration drove the GOP brand into a ditch, creating an enormous opening for the Democrats – and parties with a clear path back to the White House don’t tend to engage in bloody internecine strife. Which is why a scenario like the one Matt sketches out here, in which Romney goes down to defeat and the GOP just keeps on keeping on, seems unlikely to me: Parties and movements only keep on keeping on when they can tell themselves that they’re within hailing distance of real power, and if the Republican Party wakes up in ’08 with a Democrat in the White House and solid Dem majorities in the House and Senate, it’ll take some serious self-deception for conservatives to convince themselves that they still have a winning formula for ’10 and ’12 and beyond. (Particularly since they can’t count on Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton starting an enormously unpopular foreign war, which is what pulled the Democratic Party back from the abyss in ’03 and ’04.)
This doesn’t mean that there will be blood in the hallways of the Heritage Foundation; but a party doesn't need to experience a bloodbath to come out altered in significant ways. The Democratic infighting of the Bush years may not have been all that severe, but it had a real effect on the political landscape: All of the party’s ’08 candidates, you may have noticed, are running to the left of any Democrat since Dukakis, a turn of events that would have been hard to imagine just five years ago. I don’t know how or how much the Republican Party will change if it goes into the political wilderness this fall, but we don’t live in an environment where politicians and parties have a chance to settle in and get comfortable in the minority. Everything happens too fast, and too much attention is paid to politics for the out-of-power party to do anything except cast about for ways to change.
Compromise, rather than absolutism, has been the watchword of anti-abortion efforts for some time now. But the pro-life movement can't give up on overturning Roe without giving up on its very reason for being.
Forget the predatory lenders, Wall Street sharks and their government enablers: The current economic crisis, and the housing bubble that produced it, all started with George Bailey.
Kicking off our 
