Ron Brownstein's cover piece in the latest National Journal looks at what the primary season tells us about the shape of the Democratic coalition, and what he finds seems to dovetail with my last post about the shape of the Obama vote. "The party is growing younger," he writes, "more affluent, more liberal, and more heavily tilted toward women, Latinos, and African-Americans." These trends have obviously been at work for a long time now, but they've been amplified by the Obama and Clinton campaigns: He's brought more affluent voters to the polls, and more young voters; she's brought out more women, and more Hispanics. Meanwhile ...
Seniors' share of the votes cast has declined this year in all 18 states except Wisconsin (where it remained even) and New Hampshire (where it grew slightly). Likewise, white men have cast a smaller share of the Democratic vote in every comparable state except New York.
White voters with no college education, the foundation of the party's coalition from the time of Franklin Roosevelt through Lyndon Johnson, have also cast a smaller share of the vote this year in three-fourths of the states with data that can be compared with 2004 ... just before the Wisconsin primary in mid-February, ABC News polling director Gary Langer calculated that a cumulative majority of white Democratic primary voters in all of this year's contests had college or postgraduate degrees -- a remarkable tipping point for a party that since its 19th-century inception has viewed itself as the tribune of the working class.
Not only do Democratic defections nearly double in a McCain v. Obama race, but Obama loses a fifth of white Democrats to McCain, and he runs seventeen points behind Clinton among <$30K earners, reflecting continuing weakness with downscale voters. He loses 17 points among the quarter of Democrats who want to stay in Iraq, despite the fact that his and Clinton's positions on Iraq policy right now are virtually indistinguishable (apparently these people believe in Hillary's insincerity enough to know that she won't actually end the war), but he also loses five points compared to Clinton among those who want to bring our forces out of Iraq. He draws slightly less support from liberals and slightly more from conservatives than Clinton, which is rather baffling. Compared to Clinton, he also loses 14 points among Democratic women, which is a much larger figure of disgruntled women voters turning away from the Democrat and backing McCain than the three-point difference between Clinton and Obama among black Democratic voters. The story of the Clintons' permanently alienating black voters sounds good, but on the whole it doesn't seem to be true. Meanwhile, Obama's nomination definitely appears to alienate a lot of Democratic women, who perhaps resent the "upstart" (as he called himself the other day) taking Hillary's crown away from her.
Most remarkable of all is that Obama is weaker among Democrats in all age groups than Clinton. He is four points weaker, and McCain five points stronger, among Democratic voters aged 18-49 than in a Clinton v. McCain race. The losses are even greater among Democratic voters 50-64 and 65+. Democratic defections increase across income groups as well ... And those “Obamacans” we keep hearing about? They do exist, making up 8% of Republicans (three points higher than Clinton), but they are hardly the stuff of historic realignment and they are outnumbered almost two-to-one by “McCainocrats.”
Despite all this, Obama still enjoys a seven point lead over McCain, 50-43 percent, which as Daniel notes is almost entirely due to his support among independents and young voters. (Though to be fair, one reason there may be fewer "Obamacans" than you'd expect is the recent and sudden collapse of the GOP brand; a lot of people who might have called themselves "Republicans for Obama" now presumably call themselves independents.)
This landscape, if I may return to one of myhobby-horses, is exactly why Obama is such a high-risk, high-reward candidate for the Dems. He has the potential to do for the Democratic Party what Reagan did for the GOP in '80 - to win a lopsided victory in which a slew of previously-wavering independents and politically-unformed twentysomethings end up branding themselves as Democrats for a generation. That's the good news; the bad news is that if he doesn't win a lopsided victory among independents and young voters - if the bloom comes off the rose or the glass jaw starts to crack - he has the potential to hemorrhage votes in key constituencies: among downscale voters; among seniors (where I suspect the "wouldn't vote for an African-American" constituency is concentrated); among hawkish and extremely pro-Israel Dems; and even among white women. Which is to say, he could win in a walk, or lose thanks to heavy defections from groups that would have trended Democratic had Hillary been the nominee.
And if you've never heard the story of how the Buckley Review and the National Buckley helped get David Brooks his first job, go read his column today.
February 28, 2008
The Current
You may have noticed that our homepage here at the Atlantic is now headlined by something called "The Current." The idea behind the feature is to provide quick and useful takes on the obvious and not-so-obvious news of the day, with items that simultaneously offer brief commentary from a member of the Atlantic family (I'll be writing a couple a week, as will some of my fellow bloggers, and our OnDeadTree staff will be contributing frequently as well) and a round-up of some the best opinion on and around whatever the subject of the item happens to be. It's a work in progress - as you can probably guess from the "beta" tag adorning it - and it will doubtless evolve over time, but don't let that stop you from checking it out: At the moment, the headliners are my mini-obit for Buckley and James Gibney, our deputy managing editor extraordinaire, on U.S.-India relations.
The Buckley Legacy
Tim Noah suggests that William F. Buckley's politics were defined by support for segregation on the one hand and a desire to roll back the New Deal on the other, that he failed on both counts, and that we should thus be glad that "he outlived his brand of conservatism."
Well. There’s no question that Buckley’s mid-century moral blindness about race and civil rights – a blindness shared by most if not all conservatives at the time – is a significant stain on his record. I tend to think that treating this blindness as the defining aspect of his long career is a serious mistake – akin to using Churchill’s death as an occasion to harangue one’s readers about his views on British India, for instance, or suggesting that we should remember FDR primarily as the architect of Manzanar. Particularly since moral obtuseness where the grave evils of the twentieth century were concerned is by no means an exclusive province of conservatives, and since progressives and conservatives alike were deeply complicit, over the years, in the immense crime that was Jim Crow. But this is a matter for individual judgment. If Noah thinks we should remember Buckley primarily for what he wrote about the civil rights movement in 1963, he’s certainly entitled to his opinion.
Noah’s argument about Buckley being a failure because the modern GOP didn’t undo the New Deal, however, is just plain silliness. Around the time that Buckley founded National Review, the federal government’s share of GDP had been rising steadily for more than thirty years, from 3 percent in 1925 to 18.8 percent in 1962. In the Sixties and early Seventies, it seemed extremely plausible that the United States was a glide path to European-style social democracy. Then came the conservative ascendancy - and thirty years later, in 2001, government’s share of GDP stood at … 18.4 percent of GDP. (It’s inched up somewhat, of course, under George W. Bush.) Now obviously there are a variety of reasons why the size of government stopped rising after the Seventies, but far from least among them is the influence that Buckley-style small-government conservatism has wielded over public policy lo these many years. (And remember that he promised to stop history, not to roll it back.)
Meanwhile, in nearly every other arena of economic life – taxation, regulation, trade – the United States is a vastly more libertarian country today than it was in the years of Eisenhower, LBJ and Nixon. (Wage and price controls, anyone? Anyone?) If this is failure, we should all aspire to fail.
Q: What are some of the projects he has been working on lately? —John Bowman
A: He has a forthcoming book on Barry Goldwater and was two months away, he recently told me, from completing a book on Ronald Reagan, and — sad irony — he was considering compiling an anthology of the roughly 450 obituaries he’d written over the years for National Review. These last are, in fact, among his loveliest writings.
They are indeed, and I hope some enterprising NRnik follows through on Buckley's intentions and turns out just such an anthology. From a purely literary perspective, I tend to think Buckley's finest work could be found in his briefs and letters and columns and occasionals: His artfully recondite style worked best in small, explosive passages. Which is why, for an introduction to the Buckley-the-writer, I think I would probably recommend Cancel Your Own Goddam Subscription or the autobiography-as-anthology Miles Gone By over, say, God and Man At Yale or Up From Liberalism.
A Talkable Moment
Continuing our experiments in web media, if you click here you can hear me chatting with Marc and Megan about the race card, Hillary's swan song and (briefly) the passing of WFB.
Buckley, RIP
One of the last long-form pieces he wrote, I believe, appeared in our pages; it concerned the sale of his beloved boat, Patito. Here's how it ended:
... sailing can have so many rapturous moments, and there are accompanying pleasures. When you are in a harbor, there may be four congenial people around the table, eating and drinking and conversing, listening to music and smoking cigars, the wind and the hail and the temperature outside faced up to and faced down. Here, in your secure little anchorage, is a compound of life's social pleasures in the womb of nature. So, deciding that the time has come to sell the Patito and forfeit all that is not lightly done, and it brings to mind the step yet ahead, which is giving up life itself.
Few men were more ready to enter that undiscovered country, I would venture, than WFB. Requiem æternam dona eis, Domine; et lux perpetua luceat eis.
5. Make an issue of Obama’s acknowledged drug use.
6. Allow some supporters to risk being accused of using the race card when criticizing Obama.
...
11. Emphasize Barack Hussein Obama’s unusual name and exotic background through a Manchurian Candidate prism.
Actually, people associated with Hillary's campaign - if not Hillary herself - seems to have tried all three of these angles, to little avail. There's an assumption out there that Republicans are just way better at gutter politics than Democrats, and so of course the GOP will be able to come up with some sort of brilliantly evil strategy that weaves the drug use, the race card, the Muslim card, the funny-outfit card, and all the rest of it together more successfully than the Clinton campaign did. But I really, really don't see how this is going to work. If there's any lesson of the Billy Shaheen fiasco, or Clinton's "Jesse Jackson" line, or the Somali-costume debacle, it's that you can't just "raise" these kind of issues without some legitimate explanation for why you're raising them; voters won't care, and the media will give you hell for it. The best the Clintonites could come up with was the justification Shaheen offered - that voters should care about Obama's drug use (or his skin color, or his Muslim relatives, or whatever) because Republicans will be able to exploit it in the fall. But that just kicks the ball further down the road. How will Republicans exploit it?
Look at at it this way: Any successful political attack needs to have some sort of valence - it can push all sorts of atavistic buttons, but ultimately it needs to go to an issue, or it needs to go to the opposing candidate's character. The Willie Horton commercials wouldn't have worked if they were just about Willie Horton's race; they worked because they were ultimately about Michael Dukakis's handling of criminal justice. Same with the (in)famous "white hands" ad that Jesse Helms ran against Harvey Gantt: Yes, it arguably played the race card, but it also hit Gantt on a hot-button policy issue, affirmative action, and linked his positions, by implication, to blue-collar economic anxieties. The GOP attacks on Al Gore and John Kerry, meanwhile - as a phony and a flip-flopper, respectively - worked because they painted both men as characterologically unfit to be President.
Now I'm sure McCain can find ways to attack Obama on issues, and I'm sure he can find ways to hit him on character. And there's probably a way to turn Obama's internationalism against him in a very general way, using his "world man" reputation as a foil to highlight McCain's more nationalistic persona. But I don't see how McCain could plausibly weave the race card or the Islam card into his attacks without coming off like both a bigot and a fool. Maybe there's some way for the GOP to plausibly raise Obama's drug use in the context of arguing that he's soft on crime, or raise his Muslim connections in the context of a debate over foreign policy and terrorism. (I assume that's what Halperin has mind with the "Manchurian Candidate" line.) Maybe some "Madrassa Veterans For Truth" will emerge to claim that Obama's lying about his Muslim past. Or maybe having right-wing talk radio hosts make Obama-Osama cracks will actually help McCain, rather than just make conservatives look like moronic frat boys. Anything's possible. But at the moment it seems as though going down the race-card path wouldn't be some brilliant machiavellian move on the part of the McCain camp, as Halperin suggests, but the purest sort of folly.
So when Jon Chait praises McCain for declaring the "Hussein" trope out-of-bounds, I'm with him. But I suspect that in addition to being a decent human being, McCain is savvy enough to recognize that if conservatives flog Obama's middle name from here to the election, it's likely to hurt his campaign far more than it helps it.
Time was, he was every reporter's favorite potential veep pick for George W. Bush. Bronze star in Vietnam. Popular governor of a swing state. Too bad he happened to be pro-choice - or, reading between the lines, too bad the Taliban wing of the GOP won't let Bush make the right choice for VP.
Then we had the chance to watch Tom Ridge on the national stage, in a role that could have made his career - the first head of Homeland Security, the man responsible for keeping us safe in our beds, the first line of defense against terrorists. And it quickly became clear that Ridge was vastly better as a journalistic fantasy-league pick than as an actual national politician. Obviously, he was dealt a difficult hand in many ways, and presumably he didn't come up with the easily-mockable "orange alert" system that became his calling card. But nothing about his record at DHS, or his current profile on the national scene, suggests that he would make a solid VP choice for John McCain.
February 26, 2008
The "Native Clothing" Card
It will be interesting, to say the least, if John McCain's campaign against Barack Obama ends up being considerably less racially-charged than Hillary Clinton's campaign against Obama. Here's hoping.
(And incidentally, I agree with the commenter on Chris's post who argues that the clumsy attempts by Clinton surrogates to inject race into the conversation are probably a symptom of a mismanaged and flailing campaign, rather than something to be laid directly at HRC's door.)
Update: Marc has more on the McCain angle on this question here.
The Two Faces of Neoconservatism
Reihan has a pair of interestingposts on this Peter Berkowitz op-ed, which argues that in their headlong rush to champion the invasion of Iraq many neocons weren’t being true to neoconservatism’s skeptical view of government action and human nature, and this Mark Lilla review of Jacob Heilbrunn’s They Knew They Were Right, which argues that the Iraq War was the fulfillment of neoconservatism’s tendency toward a politics defined by manichaeism, chest-thumping and hysteria.
Who’s right? Why, both of them. From its inception, neoconservatism has been distinguished by both pragmatic and apocalyptic strains, which have coexisted not only in the same movement but often in the same people. There are a host of factors driving this “two-faced” tendency, but I think Lilla’s point about neoconservatism being essentially a politics of reaction is a useful place to start. I don't mean to use the term “reaction” pejoratively here, and I think Lilla goes too far arguing that a politics of reaction must perforce lead to either nostalgic quietism on the one hand or "eschatological dreams of a counter-revolution" on the other; to my mind, calling the neocons reactionaries is just a simple way of describing the fact that neoconservatism began by defining itself primarily by what it wasn’t - namely, the late-60s and ‘70s Left. That Left tended toward utopianism in domestic policy and permissiveness in the social and cultural arenas; thus neocons were skeptical and empirically-minded on domestic policy (Lilla notes the modest founding motto of the old Public Interest - "to help us all, when we discuss issues of public policy, to know a little better what we are talking about") and more moralistic, pessimistic and declinist than the left on matters cultural. On foreign policy, things were more complicated, since neocons perceived the '70s liberalism to be simultaneously too utopian in its confidence in a foreign policy founded on the promotion of human rights and peaceful cooperation, and too ineffectual and weak-minded in its insistence on the limits of American power. Thus the neocon reaction tended toward hardheaded realism on the one hand, epitomized by Jeane Kirkpatrick's famous "Dictatorships and Double Standards," which Berkowitz's op-ed references, and a sweeping faith in American power on the other, epitomized by ... well, a host of recent examples spring to mind.
As that host suggests, over time the messianic and apocalyptic strands in neoconservatism have tended to crowd out the pragmatic and the realist strands - because the Cold War ended and American power seemed temporarily unlimited; because the neocon domestic policy agenda made more headway than the cultural agenda; because, as Steve Sailer notes, the earlier generation of neocons were more likely to be social scientists and the later generation has been more likely to be pundits; and a variety of other reasons besides. But like Reihan and Berkowitz, I'm hopeful that the chastening impact of the Iraq War and the changing of the generational guard provides an opening the revive the pragmatic, empirical meliorist style of neoconservative politics - a style that I would associate myself with, and that seems increasingly like the only plausible alternative to a resurgent and ambitious liberalism.
February 25, 2008
Paul vs. Bloomberg
As someone who regularlyscoffs at Michael Bloomberg's third-party ambitions, and regularly suggests that Ron Paul ought to consider an independent bid (a suggestion that seems to have fallen on deaf ears), I don't know I missed this poll (via John Derbyshire) from a couple weeks ago, which showed Paul outpolling Bloomberg in the event they both mounted third-party candidacies. (In the increasingly likely event of a McCain-Obama race, the poll has Paul getting 11 percent of the vote, and Bloomberg only five.) Now obviously neither man is going to run, and just as obviously Bloomberg would have vastly more money to spend than Paul in the event that they both did, which would presumably boost his numbers at least slightly higher than this. But the poll is still a telling indicator of where third-party energy tends to come from - i.e., not from Bloomberg-style center-leftism.
(Apologies, incidentally, for the continued light posting: I have a mystery illness that's keeping me back on my heels.)
February 22, 2008
Don't Follow The Money
If you're looking for a savvy-sounding but deeply, deeply implausible explanation for why John McCain is a media darling, I recommend the notion, advanced by Mark Kleiman and seconded by Matt, that media types suck up to McCain because he's a longtime member of the Senate Commerce Committee, where he's presided over an era of media consolidation that (to quote Kleiman) "has greatly restricted citizens' access to diverse points of view while greatly enriching the media barons who own the networks, TV stations, and cable companies." Or as Matt puts it: "McCain getting good coverage from the corporate media is in part something just along the lines of James Inhofe being well-liked by the energy industry."
Anything's possible, I suppose, but based on my (admittedly limited) experience in the media business, I have a hard time imagining a plausible account of how, precisely, the "let's stay on McCain's good side" sentiment supposedly harbored by "media barons" filters down to impact day-to-day coverage. Particularly since it's hard to detect any pattern of pro-Commerce Committee media bias when you look at the full list of committee members. (I wouldn't describe John Kerry as a media darling, exactly.) I also think - along with Jack Shafer, among others - that the idea that our era of big-media consolidation has "greatly restricted citizens' access to diverse points of view" is risible on its face, but that's an argument for another time.
More from the same blogger here. And still more here, from a different photographer but on a similar theme.
February 21, 2008
Compressing Lost
I think Peter Suderman's exactly right about this:
A compressed season may not have been a good thing for The Wire (although, hey, it's still not bad), but I think it stands a good chance of improving the prospects for Lost. One of The Wire's strengths has always been its expert pacing, balancing the various needs for character moments, plot development, and plain old suspense. The true scope and complexity of each arc usually took five or six episodes to develop and another five or six to unravel before the last two episodes provided closure.
Lost, on the other hand, has had the opposite problem; it's been positively spastic with its pacing, usually too slow, and always too heavy on laying the groundwork for intrigue without providing nearly enough follow up. The creators are experts—perhaps the best on TV—at sucking viewers in. But they don't know exactly what to do with you once you're on the hook. A slightly compressed schedule could potentially force its writers to focus on what's truly integral to their story rather than on what's merely tantalizing.
Now whether Peter's right about this ... well, your call.
Night Falls On Shyamalan
Having been foolish enough to pen an extended defense of M. Night Shyamalan's oeuvre just before the release of Lady in the Water, a film calculated to vindicate all the haters and discredit all his defenders, I was hoping that Night would bounce back in a big way from that debacle. Unfortunately, this doesn't exactly instill confidence:
If The Happening turns out like Lady in the Water, somebody close to Shyamalan should tell him very firmly to take a new direction - by, say, directing somebody else's script for a change.
No Babies, No Problem
I'm with Rod Dreher: I went into this Nation piece on conservative demographic panic hoping for a smart, nuanced left-wing take on the thorny problem of the West's changing demographics - one that took some jabs at the "demographic winter" hype and accused social conservatives of using the spectre of population decline to justify their nostalgia for pre-modernity and the patriarchy (which would be a fair accusation, in some cases), but also acknowledged that demography is going to cause some real problems for developed societies over the next century, and grappled seriously with the possibility that falling birthrates might be one of the larger challenges facing the socialist, tolerant, post-historical paradigm so dear to readers of The Nation.
Instead, the piece basically reads: Patriarchy patriarchy patriarchy, Catholic evangelical fascist, Mussolini Hitler, racist racist racist. I guess The Nation knows its audience, but still ...
February 20, 2008
Recommended Reading
I hope to back to blogging speed soon; in the meantime, you might enjoy:
Ryan Lizza does a fine job of sketching out the contours of the debate over the GOP's future - Gingrich versus Norquist, Frum versus Gerson, reformers versus retrenchers, etc. - but his portrait of John McCain doesn't exactly inspire confidence in McCain's vision for how the Republican Party ought to be reinvented:
One day on the Straight Talk, McCain discussed what he was reading. It is safe to say that Gingrich, Norquist, Gerson, and Frum were not on his nightstand; McCain is almost always looking at military histories or political biographies. In the 2000 campaign, he seemed to be reading a lot about Theodore Roosevelt, and he frequently worked T.R. anecdotes into his conversations. These days, he often cites William Manchester, a former marine and a Second World War veteran, who has written biographies of Winston Churchill and General Douglas MacArthur ...
Recently, McCain said, he had read “The Coldest Winter,” David Halberstam’s account of the Korean War and its era. “I strongly recommend it,” he told the reporters. “It’s beautifully done. It’s not just about the war, but it’s a very good description, whether you agree with it or not, of the political climate at that time—the split in the Republican Party between the Taft wing”—Senator Robert Taft, of Ohio—“and the Eisenhower wing, and Harry Truman’s incredible relationship with MacArthur.” He added, “At least half the book is about the political situation in the United States during that period—the isolationism, who lost China, the whole political dynamic. That’s what I think makes it well worth reading.”
It was a telling reference and points to McCain’s transformation between 2000 and 2008—from a Teddy Roosevelt Republican to an Eisenhower Republican. In 2000, McCain railed against corporate power and the influence of lobbyists and money in politics. Today, the only mention of corporations in his stump speech is a demand that the corporate-tax rate be lowered. After 2000, McCain seemed briefly to be considering leaving the Republican Party, just as Roosevelt had. But, once terrorism and the war in Iraq became the preëminent issues, he decided instead to take over the Party, just as Eisenhower and the Republican moderates did when, in 1952, they vanquished the Old Guard isolationists who supported Taft. Instead of battling the corporate wing of his party, McCain has decided that it’s the isolationists—a group that he defines broadly, and which includes the left and the right—who are the real threat.
As someone who thinks that Eisenhower still doesn't get the credit he deserves as the finest twentieth century president whose name doesn't begin with an "R," I don't necessarily mind the idea of McCain attempting an Ike imitation, particularly on foreign policy. But the idea that the way to go about it is to make peace with the Club For Growth and make war on the GOP's "isolationists" seems fanciful at best, dangerous at worst. Especially since it's difficult to know which "isolationists" he has in mind. Immigration opponents? Mitt Romney, for using the word "timetable" with regard to Iraq? Conservative who disliked the immodesty of Bush's Second Inaugural Address - like Peggy Noonan, say? I mean, McCain can't be deluded into thinking that the "Ron Paul Revolution" represented a large-scale resurgence of non-interventionism on the Right, can he?
Apparently so:
One afternoon, McCain talked about his surprise at the resurrection of this element in his party, which has been particularly visible in the candidacy of the libertarian Texas congressman Ron Paul. “We had a debate in Iowa. I mean, it was, like, last summer, one of the first debates we had. It was raining, and I’m standing there in the afternoon, it was a couple of hours before the debate,” McCain said. “And I happen to look out the window. Here’s a group of fifty people in the rain, shouting ‘Ron Paul! Ron Paul!’ ” McCain banged on the table with both fists and chanted as he imitated the Paul enthusiasts. “I thought, Holy shit, what’s going on here? I mean, go to one of these debates. Drive up. Whose signs do you see? I’m very grateful—they’ve been very polite. I recognize them and say thanks for being here. They haven’t disrupted the events. But he has tapped a vein. And it’s a combination of isolationism, the old part of our party, and the conspiracy. You know”—McCain lowered his head and spoke in a mock-confiding voice—“ ‘We have made an important discovery: the headquarters for the organization that’s going to merge three countries into one—Canada, Mexico, and the U.S.—is in Kansas City!’"
How droll. But, um, Senator McCain, you did notice that Ron Paul topped out at about 5-10 percent of the vote, didn't you? And that every other candidate in the race (allowing for certain variations) took roughly the same foreign-policy line as you? Doesn't that at the very least suggest that there might be more pressing battles awaiting a politician looking to reinvent the Republican Party than a crusade against the isolationist menace? Please?
The Moral Vision of the Coen Brothers (II)
I linked to this Matt Zoller Seitz essay on No Country For Old Men when it first appeared, but it seems worth doing so again, because I think Seitz is exactly right about the Coen Brothers and David Denby, who has a long piece in the latest New Yorker sounding the familiar complaint that the Coens are "masters of chaos" who are guilty of "rooting for it rather than against it," is exactly wrong.
Dobson's Choice
Dan Gilgoff, who literally wrote the book on the Focus on the Family founder, argues that Romney might have won the GOP nomination if figures like Dobson - evangelical leaders who were obviously sympathetic to Mitt - had been willing to confront the Mormon issue head on, instead of tiptoeing around it:
In an interview last year, Dobson acknowledged that "there are conservative Christians who will not vote for (Romney) because of his Mormon faith," but he said that wasn't necessarily "the correct view or my view."
As Dobson warmed to Romney — the two had a getting-to-know-you session at Focus' Colorado Springs headquarters last year — he could have opened a dialogue with his millions of radio listeners about why evangelicals should feel comfortable voting for a Mormon, even if they rejected his theology.
Instead, he took public swipes at Republican candidates Rudy Giuliani, Fred Thompson and John McCain, leaving his evangelical fans to deduce his support for Romney and Huckabee by process of elimination ...
That "could have" seems persuasive to me - but then again, I'm not James Dobson. It certainly seems like an early effort by quietly pro-Romney big shots in the evangelical community might have made a big difference in the final outcome; on the other hand, I also have to assume that Dobson and his associates have a pretty fine-tuned sense of where his audience stands and what they're thinking. Once Huckabee's star began to rise, in particular, it's possible that they decided that if Focus on the Family were perceived to be siding with a flip-flopping, formerly pro-choice Mormon over a consistent social conservative and rock-ribbed evangelical like Huck, they'd look like sell-outs to an awful lot of their listeners. Huckabee liked to suggest that the religious right's leadership was out of step with its foot soldiers and more concerned with preserving the GOP coalition than standing by their principles; I doubt that Dobson et. al. wanted to do anything that would vindicate this line of argument and jeopardize their credibility with the grassroots. And I imagine, as well, that they took the derision generated by Pat Robertson's endorsement of Rudy Giuliani as a cautionary tale.
At the very least, though, Dobson might have delivered that "undorsement" a little sooner ...
Ezra Klein and John Sides explore how winner-take-all rules killed Romney's chances; they also note that if the Democrats were operating under GOP-style rules, Hillary Clinton would be performing slightly better than she is. Which gets at the nub of what's been wrong with her campaign's post-Super Tuesday strategy: She's been campaigning as if the Democratic primaries were winner-take-all, essentially giving up on the run of states where Obama looked likely to win (thus allowing him to rack up huge margins of victory, and overtake her in the delegate count) while doubling down on the later states where she'sahead. It's the Giuliani strategy all over again, in a sense - except that the Giuliani strategy at least made sense in theory, because it promised to deliver Rudy an enormous delegate haul in winner-take-all states like Florida, New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. (A haul that McCain eventually claimed, as it happens.) Whereas even if Hillary's strategy works, it won't really work, since she'd need enormous, unrealistic margins in Texas and Ohio to make up the ground she lost by essentially ceding two weeks worth of contests to Obama.
Her only hope, I think, is that Jeff Greenfield is on to something with his Slate speculation today:
Judging by the state's demographics and by its political history, Wisconsin ought to be prime territory for a strong Clinton showing. Indeed, its potential for Hillary is so promising that it's worth pondering whether the "on to Texas and Ohio!" battle cry of her campaign might be one huge head fake, designed to turn a strong Clinton showing—much less a victory—into one of those "Oh my God, what a shocker!" reactions that changes the whole tenor of the political conversation.
But even if that's the strategy, it's too clever by half. Why head-fake and aim for a below-the-radar pyrrhic victory, when a full-throttle campaign might earn you an actual (and desperately-needed) win instead?
These are the questions, I suspect, that Bill Clinton will be pondering over many a late-night game of Oh Hell come 2009.
Sympathy For The Pollster
I know that Mark Penn is a rich target these days, and deservedly so - but still, you have to feel at least somewhat bad for a guy who writes an entire book arguing that "the era of big trends is over,” only to run smack into, well, something of a macro-trend in the most important campaign of his life. This scene, in particular, inspired a twinge of pity:
On the evening of Feb. 11, Mr. Penn—the architect of Mrs. Clinton’s campaign strategy from the very beginning—took a break from the rigors of the campaign to stump for himself at the Strand Bookstore in downtown Manhattan. Surrounded by white copies of his book Microtrends (already-purchased copies of which were not permitted on the premises), Mr. Penn stood at a lectern between a dark window and a small crowd of readers ...
As Tina Brown, the former New Yorker editor who is working on a Hillary Clinton book, took notes to his left, Mr. Penn emphasized his distaste for the microtrend he calls “impressionable elites”—supposed leaders of society who, as he sees it, show more interest in a candidate’s personality than policies.
Mr. Obama enjoys the support of this chattering class, Mr. Penn believes, while Mrs. Clinton speaks more to working-class people who really care about policy because policy really impacts their lives. Worse still, Mr. Penn sees the “impressionable elites” growing in number, so much so that he has considered turning “that trend into an entire book someday, because it is becoming more and more evident.”
At least one attendee was skeptical. “Obama strikes me as a macrotrend, not a microtrend,” said Kevin Costa, a 48-year-old government analyst and undecided Democrat, during the question-and-answer session.
I mean, okay, you don't have to feel all that bad.
February 14, 2008
The Times and Life
Naturally, I agree with Ramesh that the peculiar TNR Online piece arguing that the New York Times's abortion coverage is undermining the pro-choice side of the argument is somewhat less than persuasive. The author's threemainexamples only prove her point if you think the Times has an obligation to treat their pages as an auxiliary wing of Planned Parenthood. (Which to be fair, does seem to be roughly her position.) Moreover, it isn't all that hard to find counter-examples - try here or here or here, to pick a few - where the Times' coverage was presumably more to her liking. Then there's the difficulty that if you're going to remark on how the Times Magazine covers abortion, it's tough to ignore the cover story they ran in 2006, all about the nightmare of El Salvador's abortion ban - in case anyone missed the relevance to the U.S., the piece was called "Pro-Life Nation - which didn't quite manage to get the facts all right. I expected the TNR piece to simply gloss over that incident; instead, the author brazens it out:
Then there was the disturbing flap at the Magazine two years ago, after a cover piece about illegal abortion in Latin America reported on a woman in El Salvador who supposedly was criminally convicted for aborting her 18-week fetus. Post publication, it turned out the woman was actually judged guilty of murdering her newborn, full-term baby. The reporter had never bothered to read the court records, and the Magazine's factcheckers hadn't either. In its eagerness to champion abortion rights in a country that has none, the paper had gotten sloppy. And on its own national turf, where long-established rights are being chipped at, sloppiness runs in the other direction.
So a prominent case in which the Times ran a factually-inaccurate, "too good to check" piece that just happened to double as a brief for the pro-choice cause is somehow an example of their supposed anti-choice turn. As I said, somewhat less than persuasive.
Declare Yourself
Five declarations of love, from Matt Zoller Seitz - including this classic, of course:
Advising Hillary
Per Marc's excellent question, I really don't know how the Clinton campaign should have gone about blunting Obama's rise last fall. I do know, however, that concentrating, Giuliani-style, on her Texas-and-Ohio firewall to the exclusion of what looks like a winnable Wisconsin race is a lousy way to blunt his momentum right now.
Roger's Version
Josh Green reports on what happens when professional sports and professional politics collide.
Iraq in 2008 (And Beyond)
The polls I cited yesterday, showing minimal support for a sustained U.S. military presence in Iraq, go to what I think is an underlying misjudgment that many conservatives are making about the surge and its impact on the domestic debate about the Iraq War. John Podhoretz, for instance, wrapping up a lengthy and very much worth-reading essay on the GOP's fortunes and Iraq, argues that the Democrats' post-surge failure to push through legislation mandating withdrawal means that "when it comes to Iraq, [the Democrats], too, appear to be at cross-purposes with a substantial body of American public opinion." Which leads him to this optimistic conclusion:
It is a great irony that the best political news for Republicans in a notably unfavorable election year—with the public telling pollsters that it is desirous of change and prefers Democratic stands on most issues by margins ranging from ten to twenty points—may come out of Iraq. Should the surge’s progress continue and deepen, the Democratic nominee may find himself or herself in a very uncomfortable position come autumn. The Democratic base will not have changed its mind about the war’s evil, and it will not be happy with a leader who does. So the nominee will find it almost impossible to embrace the surge, and certainly not after having disparaged it caustically in the past. But if the nominee does not embrace the real possibility of victory in Iraq, he or she will run the risk of appearing defeatist, or worse, in the eyes of the same independent voters who fled the GOP in droves in 2006.
So the GOP can hope. But I think Podhoretz overstates the impact that the surge has had thus far on public sentiment about Iraq. “Absent the surge strategy and the new way forward that it offered,” he writes, “Democrats would probably have prevailed on their declared intention to force a pullback from Iraq in 2007.” I agree. But it does not follow from this statement that our recent successes have done anything to fundamentally reverse the dynamic that pushed independent voters into the arms of the Dems in 2006. The adoption of the new strategy in Iraq had two major effects on the domestic debate, so far as I can tell: First, it stiffened conservative support for the war effort, which had begun to waver around the '06 midterms, and thereby placed GOP legislators in a position where they could not cross party lines to vote for withdrawal without forfeiting the support of their own base. (See Gilchrest, Wayne) Second, by reducing the body count and arresting Iraq’s spiral down to civil war, it pushed the conflict off the front pages and often out of the public eye entirely. This achievement didn’t increase support for the war, but it did reduce, at least on the margins, the priority that Americans placed on ending it, and allowed closer-to-home anxieties – over health care, the mortgage meltdown, immigration and now the looming recession – to rise to the fore.
This combination was sufficient to blunt Democratic momentum on the issue, and it allowed a determined President to rally his own party to stay the course, at least for the time being. But winning a battle on Capitol Hill when you control the White House and enjoy a sizable Senate minority is very different from winning a debate in the general election, and on that front, at least, the most that can be said is that the surge has reduced the advantage that Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton will enjoy this fall on Iraq, by increasing support for the war (and thus turnout, presumably) among once-wilting conservatives, and diminishing, if only slightly, the struggle’s salience for independent voters.
As someone who plans to buy my first home around 2011 or so, I hope Alex Tabarrok is wrong and the housing market still has a lot of correcting left to do. I imagine that many of my more settled readers, though, are hoping that he's right. (Megan weighs in here.)
Censorship
As regular readers have no doubt noticed, I don't usually have time to participate in the discussions in the comments threads. I have even less time, unfortunately, to police them for profanity, ad hominems, etc. However, starting with the last post, I'm going to make a half-hearted attempt: I've done a little deleting and banning, and I'll attempt to respond semi-expeditiously to people who can't manage to write a post without deploying terms like "asshole" and "douchebag" and "Repiglican."
And yes, I'm mainly talking about one commenter here.
Apart from the reanimated corpse of Calvin Coolidge, I mean.
Time For Huck To Go?
I know, I know - just a couple days ago I was arguing that it made sense for him to keep on keeping on. But looking at the landscape Geraghty lays out, there aren't many places between here and Texas where he's likely to make the kind of noise he did in Kansas and Louisiana (or even Virginia, for that matter); what he's facing, instead, is a slew of 55-35 or even 65-20 drubbings. At the moment, his exit strategy seems to be to wait till McCain reaches the magic number and then concede, which makes sense if he can keep up the respectable showing he's made in the last two weeks - winning some states here and there, making McCain sweat in others, and earning free media attention along the way. But it also makes sense for him to go out on a high note, and if he's just going to get pasted from now till Texas there's something to be said for making his strong showing in Virginia the last thing that voters and journalists remember about his primary-season run.
The challenge to McCain will be considerable: get past the very attractive Obama packaging and get voters to focus on what Obama is actually proposing (e.g. withdrawal from Iraq, end of the Bush tax cuts).
But at the moment, what Obama is "actually proposing," on Iraq and taxes alike, is considerably more popular with voters than what McCain is proposing. According to this month-old poll, 74 percent of Americans don't want "large numbers of U.S. troops" in Iraq for more than two years; 50 percent want to be out within a year. Or again, here's a December poll in which 56 percent say that victory in Iraq is no longer possible, and 57 percent say that we should withdraw "most troops" by 2009. This is good news for Obama, bad news for McCain. And the same goes for the Bush tax cuts. As of this October, 61 percent of Americans either wanted them repealed outright, or agreed that "tax cuts for the wealthy should be repealed, while others stay in place" - which is precisely what Obama is promising.
Now obviously future developments in Iraq could alter these dynamics, and so could the way that McCain and Obama go about debating the issues come the fall - and how the press ends up framing their positions. But at the moment, I think the GOP might have at least much luck going after Obama's "packaging," which is ideal for a Democratic primary but possibly less so in a general election, as they would going after him on taxes and Iraq. (Do Americans really want to put a "world man" in the Oval Office? Do they really want to pick a President based on his potential appeal to young Pakistani Muslims? Do they really want to vote for a guy whose campaign has become a vehicle for an "indie-yuppie political fantasy"? etc.) And I'm nearly positive that if McCain runs in the general election the way he's (wisely) run in the primary - on a platform of victory in Iraq and the Bush tax cuts and porkbusting at home - without coming up with anything else to say to voters, he'll get beaten handily.
In a general, Obama won't be running against Clinton, he'll be running against McCain, a politician that has actually taken political risks and endured the wrath of party hacks in order to make progress on real issues: "What has Obama done? Show me a single issue or piece of legislation where Obama has done something politically unpopular in order to move forward toward a greater goal." I pointed out that this argument hasn't made much of a difference so far. Ah, replied the adviser, "That's because Clinton can't show that she's done it, either." What's more, he said, the press will stop giving Obama a free ride in the general. McCain will be out there, holding court on his bus or his plane, providing unfettered access to both reporters and voters, and journalists will no longer be able to ignore Obama's lack of access and lack of interaction with real people. In fact, it'll be the only thing they talk about.
Obama's allergy to taking questions -- both from the press and from voters -- is actually an undercovered part of this campaign. Where Clinton does townhalls, Obama holds rallies. Where McCain constantly hangs out with reporters, Obama has little to do with them. They like him, to be sure, but if they continue to feel frozen out, that could change.
All along, I've made the argument that nominating Hillary is the play-it-safe strategy for the Democrats, because while she has a lower ceiling than Obama she also may have a higher floor. Now that McCain is the presumptive GOP nominee, there seems to be an assumption that the Democrats just have to nominate Obama, because you need the guy with the higher ceiling if you're up against a media-darling and moderate-friendly candidate like the Arizona Senator. And maybe that's so. But if Obama does have a glass jaw, if his candidacy is a bubble waiting to be pricked, a strong Republican nominee like McCain is precisely the guy to do it. And if I were a Democrat, the fact that Obama's campaign seems to want to keep their candidate away from debates and town halls and the media horde would make me just a tad nervous about the general election.
Just to be clear, I don't think he's a bubble candidate; I think he'd win in the fall, and probably handily. But the kind of campaign he's running does seem more vulnerable to a well-timed GOP offensive, a sudden reversal of fortune, or a press corps that wearies of his messianic shtick than the sort of dogged, cautious, get-to-51-percent war of attrition that it looks increasingly like Hillary won't get the chance to wage.
Photo by Flickr user Joe Crimmings used under a Creative Commons license.
February 12, 2008
Congratulations, Rush Limbaugh
Tonight's results demonstrate beyond a shadow of a doubt that when given a chance to vote against a candidate you said would "destroy the Republican Party," many conservative primary voters will ignore the endorsements, the media narrative and the delegate count and cast their ballots instead for ... a candidate you said would "destroy the Republican Party."
The Archbishop's Academentia
Alan Jacobs, in a fine post, suggests that Rowan Williams is afflicted with “verbal academentia." Frankly, I can't think of a better coinage to describe what’s wrong with the Archbishop’s approach to his office, both in the shari'a controversy and elsewhere.
Consider, for instance, this years-old public conversation with Philip Pullman, which was held shortly after the Archbishop praised and recommended an adaptation of His Dark Materials then playing at the National Theatre. It’s all very polite and erudite and engaging - all very academic, one might say - as the two men range across gnosticism, Original Sin, the role of fiction in education, the representation of religion in cinema, and what-have-you. You can see that Williams just lights up at the chance to be set down in the same room with Pullman, and set fr
