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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
"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?)
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.
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.
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.)
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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 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.
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
