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 free to chat with him: What a fascinating fellow this atheist childrens' book writer is! What a fine chance to discuss the fascinating theological implications of his anti-theological work! Of course every child in England should read the book, and then sit down over tea and have a similarly fascinating discussion about the ever-so-complicated questions it summons up! etc.
Now of course there's a sense in which this style of engagement is preferable to, say, organizing a hamfisted boycott of Pullman's work, as some of the thicker tribunes of Christendom are wont to do. But at least boycotts get at an essential point that Williams' debating-society approach misses, which is that Pullman's arguments aren't just being thrown out for the sake of some ivory-tower bull session about theology - they're embedded in a work of propaganda that's designed to win the hearts and minds of his young readers away from anything resembling Christianity. This doesn't mean that Williams should have kicked over his chair, crossed the stage and hurled holy water in Pullman's eyes, but it would seem to require something more from him that the sort of cheerful, but of course dear boy spirit with which he approached the conversation, as though he and Pullman were fellow Christ's College students chatting about metaphysics over late-night glasses of port.
In the His Dark Materials debate and the shari'a affair alike, one has the sense that Williams doesn't quite understand how poorly his academic approach to controversial questions translates to the real world. Very few readers of Philip Pullman's novels are being inspired to a deeper engagement with Christian theology, as the Archbishop hopefully suggested they might be; similarly, the "parallel jurisdictions" emerging in Britain's Muslim communities bear little or no resemblance to the sort of high-minded framework he gestured at in his address. This doesn't mean that an academic approach, whether to atheism or Islam, is always and everywhere inappropriate; far from it. It's just inappropriate for Rowan Williams, given the office that he holds, and the duties - defending the faith, speaking out against injustice - that he's charged with.
Buyer's Remorse
Jonah argues - convincingly, I think - that at least some of the anti-McCain animus on the Right is related to anti-Bush animus that dare not speak its name. I'm not sure I agree with his conclusion, though:
McCain is presented with a dilemma. How can he rally the conservatives to his flag without alienating the moderates and independents the GOP needs to win in November? As nothing in politics needs to be clear-cut, he will probably try to do both as best he can, much as he did in his speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference last week. At CPAC and elsewhere, McCain insists he's an unchanging conservative. But he might do better with his right flank if he can make the case that with him, we might get a conservative in the White House, for a change.
But how would he go about making that case? The trouble is that while there are many right-wingers who admit to being disappointed in Bush's record as a conservative, there are many, many more - particularly once you leave the pundit class behind for the world of rank-and-file activists and actual voters - for whom Bush is still a hero, a conservative icon, the only politician capable of conjuring up an "ecstactic thrill" among CPAC attendees. Which means that when it comes to shoring up the conservative base, McCain needs Bush's imprimatur too much to risk directly contrasting his record with the President's. Instead, all he can do is what he's already been doing, which is to distance himself from Bush by proxy - by drawing contrasts with "Rumsfeld" on the war, and with the GOP-led Congress on spending and earmarks. As much as the McCain campaign might like it if Bush-loving, Mac-loathing right-wingers could wake up and realize that their anti-McCain ire has at least something do with displaced disappointment about Dubya, that doesn't seem like an argument their candidate can plausibly go about making in public. Psychoanalyzing the conservative electorate seems like an unlikely way to win their hearts.
February 11, 2008
What Huckabee Wants
I defer, of course, to Jim Geraghty when he reports, here and here, that in terms of actual delegates to the GOP convention the debate over who "won" the Washington Caucus was much ado about nothing. But in terms of how the race gets covered, you can see why the Huckabee campaign would have been steamed by the possibility, however slim, that they were denied a victory in the voting by some behind-the-scenes flimflam. Nobody in the national press went into the details about how the Washington vote doesn't really matter for delegate apportionment; they justreportedit, at least at first, as a victory for McCain, full stop. And for Huck's campaign, what matters now isn't how many delegates he accumulates - since he obviously isn't going to derail McCain in the long run - but what kind of attention he gets along the way, and getting credited for a weekend sweep would have raised his profile considerably more than the two-of-three showing he seems to have actually enjoyed.
Jennifer Rubin argues that Huck’s campaign for attention can only hurt his future ambitions, but I’m not so sure. The whole “the more people see of Huck, the less they’ll like him” thesis has been bandied about by conservative pundits for months now without being borne out in the polls. Huckabee is clearly hoping that his one-on-one moment with McCain will help establish him as a force within the GOP going forward, whether it boosts his cachet as a potential VP pick, or simply helps him to consolidate his position as the spokesman for the populist, religious-conservative wing of the party. (And maybe persuades a few McCain-haters in the movement to take a second look at him – who knows?) If he keeps on the way he’s been going - winning some small states, polling surprisingly well in big ones, and racking up the occasional endorsement (yesterday, James Dobson; today, Paul Weyrich) - I don’t think this is an unreasonable calculation. Particularly since if McCain were to pick him as his veep, it would be on the assumption that Huck could help turn out the right-wing base – and every vote he gets from here to the convention is an exhibit for the theory that he’s actually more in touch with the conservative grassroots than, say, Rush Limbaugh.
Obviously there’s a balancing act here, and to the extent that he ends up being a serious thorn in the McCain camp’s side - if only by reminding the media how lukewarm the love for McCain is on the Right - it’s hard to imagine that they’ll want to hand him the keys to the Naval Observatory. But McCain probably won’t pick him as a running mate no matter what he does, in which case this is Huck’s last chance to steal even a little of the ’08 limelight. So long as he isn’t embarrassing himself (and he isn’t at the moment), why shouldn’t he make the most of it? He won’t get to play air hockey with Stephen Colbert come the fall …
Obamaland?
With friends like Paul Krugman, Hillary Clinton doesn't need enemies:
In 1956 Adlai Stevenson, running against Dwight Eisenhower, tried to make the political style of his opponent’s vice president, a man by the name of Richard Nixon, an issue. The nation, he warned, was in danger of becoming “a land of slander and scare; the land of sly innuendo, the poison pen, the anonymous phone call and hustling, pushing, shoving; the land of smash and grab and anything to win. This is Nixonland.”
The quote comes from “Nixonland,” a soon-to-be-published political history of the years from 1964 to 1972 written by Rick Perlstein, the author of “Before the Storm.” As Mr. Perlstein shows, Stevenson warned in vain: during those years America did indeed become the land of slander and scare, of the politics of hatred.
And it still is. In fact, these days even the Democratic Party seems to be turning into Nixonland.
By coincidence, I'm actually reading the galleys of Nixonland at the moment, and - well, let's just say that the comparison of the current Democratic race to the political landscape depicted in Perlstein's book strikes me as almost entirely laughable. But even more laughable is Krugman's culprit for the Nixonification of Democratic politics - one Barack Obama:
I won’t try for fake evenhandedness here: most of the venom I see is coming from supporters of Mr. Obama, who want their hero or nobody ...
That last clause is an accurate description of one of my fellow bloggers and some of other pro-Obama independents, but almost nobody else on the Democratic side, so far as I can tell. As for Krugman's examples of the Nixonian "venom" supposed spewing forth from the Obamanians, well, he has exactly two:
During the current campaign, Mrs. Clinton’s entirely reasonable remark that it took L.B.J.’s political courage and skills to bring Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream to fruition was cast as some kind of outrageous denigration of Dr. King.
And the latest prominent example came when David Shuster of MSNBC, after pointing out that Chelsea Clinton was working for her mother’s campaign — as adult children of presidential aspirants often do — asked, “doesn’t it seem like Chelsea’s sort of being pimped out in some weird sort of way?” Mr. Shuster has been suspended, but as the Clinton campaign rightly points out, his remark was part of a broader pattern at the network.
So David Shuster is somehow an agent of the Obama campaign? And the MLK vs. LBJ fracas is supposed to be more telling than, say, Bill Clinton's transparent attempt to paint Obama as a Jesse Jackson-style racialist niche candidate? One would think that Krugman, who's given to claiming that the entire conservative ascendancy can be explained by the GOP's exploitation of Southern racism, would aware of the irony of accusing Barack Obama's campaign of employing Nixonesque tactics in this election.
I say this, mind you, as someone who doesn't think that a Nixon-style politics of cynical management is always worse than an Obama-style politics of moral uplift. (More on this topic once I've finished Nixonland ...) But neither does Paul Krugman, so far as I call tell! Indeed, his preference for Hillary seems to reflect, at least in part, his view of politics as brutal trench warfare in which Democrats need to be a brass-knuckled as the GOP if they're going to have a fighting chance. In other words, he likes her precisely because she's Nixonesque. Which only makes his reading of the Democratic primary campaign all the more absurd.
Shari'a Comes For The Archbishop
I’ve done my duty and waded through the full text of the Rowan Williams address on “civil and religious law in England” that’s helped to kick up all the fuss about shari'a, and I can report that the Archbishop’s variousdefenders have a point – if you detach the address from the actual historical context in which it was delivered, you’re left with a somewhat-turgid but nonetheless interesting meditation on the relationship between civil law and religious law, and between the liberal state and religious communities.
Unfortunately, this is the historical context in which it was delivered:
A few weeks ago, I was chatting to a woman who works in an advocacy role for Muslim women in an area that, quite independently of the Bishop of Rochester, she described as a “no-go area” for non-Muslims. Her clients were women in the process of being sectioned into mental health units in the NHS. This woman, who for obvious reasons begged not to be identified, told me: “The men get tired of their wives. Or bored. Or maybe the wife objects to her daughter being forced into a marriage she doesn't want. Or maybe she starts wearing western clothes.There can be many reasons. The women are sent for asssessment to a hospital. The GP referring them is Muslim. The psychiatrist assessing them is Muslim and male. I have sat in these assessments where the psychiatrist will not look the woman patient in the eye because she is a woman. Can you imagine! A psychiatrist refusing to look his patient in the eye? The woman speaks little or no English. She is sectioned. She is divorced. There are lots of these women in there, locked up in these hospitals. Why don’t you people write about this?'
My interlocuter went very red and almost started to cry. Instead, she began shouting at me. I was a member of the press. “You must write about this,” she begged.
“I can’t,” I said. “Not unless you become a whistle-blower. Or give me some evidence. Or something.”
She shook her head. “I can't be identified,” she said. “I would be killed. And so would the women.”
Perhaps there will come a time when an Archbishop of Canterbury will have the luxury to muse at length on whether it might be appropriate for his nation to consider some sort of “plural jurisdiction” where Muslim communities are concerned. But regardless of his good intentions, it seems to me the height of folly for this head of the Church of England, at this moment in the history of his nation and his faith, to wander in the gardens of intellectual theory while brushing away the actual controversies on the ground. (“The ‘forced marriage’ question is the one most often referred to here, and it is at the moment undoubtedly a very serious and scandalous one; but precisely because it has to do with custom and culture rather than directly binding enactments by religious authority, I shall refer to another issue …”) It seems beyond irresponsible for a prelate in his position to build legal castles in the air, assuring us that “if any kind of plural jurisdiction is recognised, it would presumably have to be under the rubric that no ‘supplementary’ jurisdiction could have the power to deny access to the rights granted to other citizens or to punish its members for claiming those rights,” at a time when Her Majesty’s government seems incapable of preventing the spread of a de facto plural jurisdiction that may do exactly that. And it is frankly embarrassing for a man charged with the defense of Christianity in England to behave as though he's more interested in generalizing about religions (“the umma or the Church or whatever …”) than in drawing distinctions between them, or to imply that there is little in the theology, history and politics of Islam - save for what "some committed Islamic primitivists" would have you believe - that would distinguish it from any other "religious minority" seeking a "degree of accommodation" from the liberal state.
Photo by Flickr user SouthbankSteve used under a Creative Commons license.
February 10, 2008
Big Pimpin'
I don't feel all that sorry for David "Pimping Out Chelsea" Shuster, but I do feel for him a little, for precisely the reasons that James Poulos outlines:
‘As a parent’ — in the parlance of our times — I’d be seeing Hillary’s progenitorial rage and raising it a few capfuls of testosterone. But there’s little or no escape from the problem that today’s parlance defaults to the mildly, ironically offensive, and that judging by the standards of our times Shuster’s ‘Pimped Out’ Comment is not ‘incredibly’ offensive but simply mildly and ironically offensive. The appropriation of Ghetto Talk by the whitebread infotainment industry mirrors a broader ease, especially among those under 45, with casually framing the events of everyday social life in bitch-pimp terms. In a world where pimping out your ride is a great honor, ‘sort of’ pimping out your daughter would appear to be less of an honor primarily on account of the ‘sort of’ qualifier. Of course, Shuster was trying to be less-than-honorable, obeying another cardinal rule of MSM Edginess: degrade obliquely. But he was under marching orders — probably not written in neat hand by an MSNBC intern, but certainly uploaded into his hard drive over many years spent in moving through a high-budget industry devoted largely to making itself comfortable with the great American lowbrow.
It may be that sensible Republican voters are rebelling against McCain-bashing orthodox conservatives like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, etc. But to write a column dismissing those figures for "emphasizing a host of small-bore litmus tests" and not even mention the major policy conflict over immigration seems like intellectual cowardice verging on dishonesty--or else really bad editing by the NYT. ... Not quite like attacking Eugene McCarthy for challenging LBJ and not mentioning Vietnam. But close. ...
It was the editing, actually - but on my part, not the NYT's. In the original draft of the piece, instead of just noting that the movement establishment is right about certain issues and McCain is wrong, I actually enumerated some of those issues - including McCain-Feingold and embryo-destructive stem cell research as well as immigration. But I thought that given the contours of the intra-conservative debate, it made more sense for the op-ed to stick to the question of why many conservative voters didn't listen to their supposed spokesmen, which meant emphasizing what's been wrong with the right-wing response to McCain and Huckabee - both the narrowness of many of the litmus tests being imposed (the Gang of 14, waterboarding, etc.) and the tone of the attacks, from Limbaugh's claim that nominating either man would "destroy" the GOP to the Coulters and Dobsons saying they won't vote for McCain against a Democrat to the widespread and ridiculous claims that Mike Huckabee is a "Christian socialist" - rather than listing the issues on which I agree with Limbaugh et. al.
I would also note that as the last of the DLC Democrats, Kaus is (for understandable reasons) primarily interested in the GOP as a vehicle for holding his own party's feet to the fire on a few specific issues, immigration chief among them. But from within the conservative tent, where the immigration debate is just one part of a larger pantomime, things look rather different. And whereas I suspect that Kaus would be happy to see the GOP turn into a Limbaugh-led rump, so long as it somehow moved the immigration debate in a restrictionist direction, that's a future I'd prefer to avoid. Moreover, even from a Kaus-ian point of view I think the style of the right-wing attacks on McCain has been self-defeating. A focused critique that stuck to his immigration position, I suspect, would have done far more damage to his political viability - and/or forced him into more specific concessions than he's actually made - than the sweeping and implausible attempt to read him out of American conservatism entirely.
All of that said, though, in hindsight I think Kaus is right about the op-ed. Regular readers of this blog know that I think the GOP should remain to McCain's right on the immigration, as will readers - if there are any - of my and Reihan's forthcoming book. (We even quote Mickey Kaus!) But a Times op-ed reaches a different audience, and serves a different purpose, and thus it should have mentioned my views on the subject, if only to lay down a marker regarding which right-wing attacks I think McCain should ignore, and which he needs to address with meaningful concessions. So, mea culpa.
February 9, 2008
Huckabee's Path To Victory
Not even remotely persuasive, I'm afraid. And isn't it time to retire the Chuck Norris quips?
This seems like a debate tailor-made for David Brooks, and sure enough, he weighs in today:
... the essential competition in many consumer sectors is between commodity providers and experience providers, the companies that just deliver product and the companies that deliver a sensation, too. There’s Safeway, and then there is Whole Foods. There’s the PC, and then there’s the Mac. There are Holiday Inns, and there are W Hotels. There’s Walgreens, and there’s The Body Shop.
Even if you're sick of hearing candidates compared to consumer products, it's a good column.
The Mitt and Mike Show
In the wake of Super Tuesday, Ramesh made some good points about the Huckabee-Romney dynamic:
There has been a bit of a debate about whether Huckabee has been "taking votes away" from Romney. Yesterday, I posted a few links suggesting that this is not the case. Huckabee's voters told exit pollsters that they fairly strongly preferred McCain to Romney. I think that's right. But I think it's also true that Huckabee did more than anyone else to take out Romney. After Huckabee beat Romney in Iowa—something nobody else in the field could have done—almost everything else had to go Romney's way for him to win. The odds were against that happening, particularly given Romney's own weaknesses as a candidate ...
Try to picture the race if Huckabee hadn't taken off. Romney would have won Iowa and probably Michigan. There would have been no bitter Huckabee-Romney feud, so his voters might not have preferred McCain over Romney as strongly as they did yesterday. Romney might have done better in the south and might have emerged as the conservative alternative in the primary. Maybe he could even have competed in South Carolina. We'll never know.
If Romney had not been in the race, however, I'm not sure Huckabee would have done much better, given his inability to reach beyond evangelicals. Even in some of the Southern states Huckabee won last night, he might have lost a two-man race to McCain.
I would only add this, though - that once Huckabee did take off, the conservative hatefest that his candidacy summoned up almost certainly hurt Romney's chances, rather than McCain's. Joshua Trevino makes this point in the context of the current landscape, in which Huckabee is the only possible rallying point for anti-McCain sentiment:
... the decision of the Romney campaign and the conservative media establishment to go nuclear against Huckabee in late December and early January redounds to McCain’s benefit. Having demonized Huckabee as a wholesale traitor to conservatism and decency — remember George Will comparing him to anti-Semites? — it is now tremendously difficult to sell the opposite line. From conservatism’s death knell to the conservatives’ last chance is a long road. The pity for Mitt Romney is that had his surrogates not done this, he would have stood an outstanding chance in a brokered convention forced by a Huckabee surge. Conclaves of party activists and caucuses are the two arenas in which he won handily again and again: were he in play at a national convention, there is no reason his superior political operation would not have triumphed.
I don't think the dynamic Trevino is discussing redounds to McCain's benefit now - even had they responded less vituperatively to his initial success, I can't imagine the movement establishment ever rallying around Huckabee - so much as it redounded to his benefit in the weeks between Iowa and Florida. Particularly given the ample evidence that many voters, in the South especially, were torn between Huck and McCain, it seems clear that a stronger Huckabee candidacy would have meant a weaker McCain candidacy, and a better chance for Mitt. Thus the conservative movement's scorched-earth attacks on Huck probably cost him South Carolina, which in turn helped cost Romney Florida, which in turn probably doomed him on Super Tuesday. Whereas had Huck taken a little less fire from the Right, we might still have a real three-way race on our hands, one that Romney could have plausibly won - either at the convention or before.
President Bush isn't the only one making an appearance there today; I'll be around as well, at 1 PM in Congressional Room A (presumably a smaller venue than wherever the president is speaking), at an ISI-sponsored panel on the future of conservatism with Messrs. Poulos and Larison. Presumably I'll be speaking up for, er, modern conservatism against the paleo and po-mo varieties, but you won't know for sure unless you stop by.
Too bad. I actually agreed with Hugh Hewitt - it might have been good for the GOP, and conservatism, to have the McCain-Huckabee-Romney debate continue (on friendly terms, ideally) for another month or so, even if the outcome was more or less preordained. But at least this way Mitt can save some of his kids' inheritance for the 2012 campaign ...
You can watch the withdrawal speech over at the Corner; Ambinder comments on the crowd reaction here.
A People's History of the United States
Sometimes I think that conservatives go too far in their critiques of history-textbook PC. High school history classes should place a greater emphasis on American diversity and the minority experience than they did in, say, 1947, and there's no reason that a student shouldn't learn about Andrew Jackson and Tecumseh, Thomas Edison and Carrie Nation, George Washington and George Washington Carver, and so on down the line.
But then you encounter something like this poll, in which high schoolers were asked to name the ten most famous Americans in history (excluding Presidents and First Ladies), and produced - well, Rod Dreher has the details. Suffice to say that Harriet Tubman, Amelia Earhart and Oprah are perhaps slightly higher than they ought to be.
Naturally, the survey's authors fret that the list may reflect misplaced priorities among educators:
The study acknowledges that the emphasis on African-American figures by the schools leaves behind not only 18th- and 19th-century figures but others as well, such as Hispanic icon Cesar Chavez, Native American heroes such as Pocahontas and Sacagawea and labor leaders such as Samuel Gompers and Eugene V. Debs.
Yep - too much Tubman, not enough Pocahontas. That's the problem here.
Update:Steve Sailer is kind enough to point out that you might try this as an antidote.
What’s so funny about this is that CFL proponents (or more precisely, proponents of laws that would make it illegal for you to use incandescent bulbs in your house) often refer to “inefficient incandescent technology that has barely changed since the invention of the tungsten filament nearly a century ago.” This profoundly misunderstands technology. The best technologies last hundreds or thousands of years, and become so much a part of the built environment that we don’t even think of them as technologies anymore: books, stone houses, woven shirts, fire. The fact that incandescent bulbs have lasted as long as they have and that a law is required to make people give them up probably indicates that it is a great technology.
People like the kind of light that these bulbs give off. Why focus on just this technology that allows the aesthetic pleasure of pleasant light, but is “inefficient” because we get the same number of lumens with fewer units of CO2 emissions from another technology? Why not pass a law that all new or repainted buildings – homes, offices, everything – must be painted white? It would increase the albedo of the Earth and thereby reduce AGW with certainty, in spite of no loss of the functional efficiency of buildings. And what about this desire for wool, silk and cotton clothes? Shouldn’t we pass a law making it illegal to wear anything not made of petrochemical products like rayon and polyester, if we determine that the net AGW impacts of more animals is greater that the impacts of greater refinery utilization? One way or another, of course, all clothes should have to be white ...
For what it's worth, if an incandescence tax were really the most cost-effective way to fight global warming, I would happily pay an extra buck or two for my incandescent light bulbs. Happily. But of course, nobody's offering me that choice.
Fortunately, there's no way the American people will stand for this. The tree of liberty must be refreshed by the excess mercury from compact fluorescent light bulbs! Maybe this will be the issue that catapults a Huckabee-Jindal ticket into the White House in 2012 ...
Should McCain Pick Huckabee?
I'll try to run down what I see as the pros and cons of Huck-as-running-mate in the near future; for now, I recommend Ramesh Ponnuru, Noah Millman and John Heileman on the subject.
Whither Ron Paul?
No matter who emerges as the Democratic nominee, having McCain as the GOP standard-bearer seems to pretty much burst Michael Bloomberg's third-party bubble. (Haven't heard much on that front lately, have we?) On the other hand, it still leaves a fair amount of space open - relatively speaking, I mean - for Ron Paul to make a third-party run under the Libertarian banner. True, McCain isn't as ideal a foil for Paul as Rudy Giuliani would have been, but given his maximalist position on Iraq and his leftward tilt on immigration, one can certainly see the rationale for Paul to attempt a Nader-style protest candidacy - one that would also presumably attract a few Naderite votes from the anti-war left as well. I doubt he'll do it, but the opening is there.
McCain And Immigration
As John Judis says, it's his biggest problem with the conservative base; indeed, it may be his only big one. Right-wingers aren't going to sit at home in a McCain-Hillary race because of the Gang of 14 or waterboarding or McCain-Feingold, but some of them might just stay home if they think there isn't a dime's worth of difference between the candidates on immigration. With this in mind, John O'Sullivan argues that he needs to take a pledge to never support anything like the comprehensive reform he backed last year; meanwhile, Peter Robinson suggests that he promise to sign an executive order to build fences along the border the day he takes office.
Knowing McCain, the former seems to me unlikely to happen, while the latter pledge doesn't seem like it would go nearly far enough. So if I were advising his campaign, I'd tell him to wait till he has the nomination sewn up - so he can't be accused of pandering to primary voters - and then roll out, as part of a broader domestic-policy agenda, a "comprehensive" (yes, that word) border security proposal, one that not only boosts spending for fence-building, agent-hiring, and new technologies along the U.S.-Mexico line, but swipes a bunch of Fred Thompson's proposals on beefing up interior enforcement as well. And he should pledge, on his honor, to make the plan a top priority for his first one hundred days in office - for instance, by promising not to sign any spending bill that Congress sends him until they deal with border security in the manner he suggests. This is already effectively his message: He's said that the lesson of last year is that voters want enforcement first. But by putting real meat on the bones of that "enforcement first" promise, he can convince at least some conservatives that he really has learned his lesson - while simultaneously leaving the door open, as he seems determined to do, to supporting some sort of earned-legalization program well down the road.
This is, not coincidentally, roughly my own position on immigration - serious enforcement today, some form of amnesty if and when we manage to reduce the rate of illegal entry. But I happen to think it's a winning political message as well, particularly for a candidate trying to manage the difficult feat of simultaneously staying true to his own reputation for principle, placating the Republican base, and winning a general election.
Photo by Flickr user MarcN used under a Creative Commons license.
Obama, Prairie Populist?
In the aftermath of his impressive win in L. Frank Baum's home state - and Minnesota and North Dakota besides - this seems like an opportune to time to link to Russell Arben Fox's meditation on Obama's Kansas stop-off, the first visit to that state by a presidential candidate in 44 (!) years.
Voter-Based Reality
Joe Carter's Super Tuesday reflections are worth a look. They dovetail, it seems to me, with Jay Cost's useful distinction, from way back in October, between the perpetual campaign - for money, pundit approbation and so forth - and the real one. Romney did very well in the former, but it didn't do him much good in the end.
February 5, 2008
Huckabee's Bright(er) Future
His various weaknesses notwithstanding, Huckabee's performance tonight - three wins and counting at the moment, after it looked like he might not win again after Iowa, and easily out-performing his showing in a lot of the pre-primary polls - has to be encouraging to those (ahem, Rod) who see him as a possible GOP contender in 2012.
Incidentally, if Romney throws in the towel after tonight - which is by no means impossible, depending on the outcome in California - and Huckabee doesn't, will any of the McCain-haters on the right insist that all good conservatives need to rally around Huck? Just asking ...
1984 All Over Again?
Chris Bowers and Patrick Ruffini agree, so it must be true: The Democratic race will come down to a competition for superdelegates. In Sunday's Times Magazine, Matt Bai looked back on the last time that happened:
I recently got a short history lesson about this from Gary Hart, who pointed out what he called “eerie parallels” between his near-upset of Walter Mondale in 1984 and Obama’s campaign against Clinton. Not least among them was that Clinton had actually gone back and unearthed Mondale’s signature line: “Where’s the beef?” (It came from a Wendy’s commercial that was all the rage at the time, but it’s doubtful that anyone under 30 had any idea what she was talking about.) Hart reminded me that by beating Mondale in the California primary, just weeks before the convention, he denied the former vice president the delegates he needed for the nomination. Had it not been for the existence of the superdelegates, who lined up behind Mondale, Hart could actually have swiped the nomination.
“Lee and I called every one of the superdelegates personally,” Hart recalled, referring to his wife. “She talked to a woman in Kentucky who said: ‘I want to vote for your husband, but my husband works for the state highway department. And I was told that if I didn’t vote for Mondale, he would lose his job.’ It was hardball at that point.”
It won't be the same kind of hardball this time around; as Bai notes, we've come a long way from the age when institutional loyalty and establishment-enforced lockstep made all the difference. But it will hardball all the same. And I can't wait to see what happens.
Learning To Love Big Brother
Writing in the overly-cheery, "just do as I say and all should be well" style of Dolores Umbridge explaining a new regulation from the Ministry of Magic, Brendan Koerner tries to persuade me to stop worrying and embrace "compact fluorescent light bulbs." (Not that I have any choice in the matter.) Why would you want to stick with "inefficient incandescent technology that has barely changed since the invention of the tungsten filament nearly a century ago," he wonders, when you can enjoy the hip and refreshing taste of New Coke - sorry, I mean, the chilly pulse of energy-efficient fluorescence? (It's the official light bulb of Tomorrowland, kids - and the Pruitt-Igoe housing project!)
You might be a little concerned about what to do when a CFL bulb breaks, but not to worry: "Just follow the EPA's easy cleanup guidelines." (Who doesn't want a lightbulb that comes with government-issued "cleanup guidelines"?) True, those guidelines suggest that you flee the room at first, and then use rubber gloves and two sealed plastics bags to clean up the broken bulb, but the good news is that "even a broken CFL bulb won't leak too much toxic metal." And while you might have trouble throwing the broken bulb away, since putting it in the trash is probably, er, illegal, there's hope on the horizon: "Look for several major retailers to set up recycling drop-off boxes this year, in order to goose their CFL sales." (Jonah Goldberg, call your office ... )
Oh, and "use common sense and don't place CFLs where they can be damaged by young children." You know, like in your living room.
Then there's the kicker:
The last, desperate swipe at CFLs ... is that their light is cold and dreadful. Perhaps this was true in years past, but the Lantern just doesn't see it anymore: In a recent test, Popular Mechanics rated CFL light as far superior to that produced by incandescent bulbs. Don't believe the hype? You've got nothing to lose by trying a single CFL bulb (one that's received EnergyStar certification) and seeing for yourself. And then, once you've become a convert, please spread the word.
Also, we have some stress tests you might be interested in ...
For the record, I've seen several of the new CFL bulbs in action, and I'm not a convert. And come 2009, you'll see in my local hardware store, frantically stockpiling incandescent bulbs against the long, dark, environmentally-efficient night to come.
Photo by Flickr user Tiago Daniel used under a Creative Commons license.
I am deeply disappointed the Republican Party seems poised to select a nominee who did not support a Constitutional amendment to protect the institution of marriage, voted for embryonic stem cell research to kill nascent human beings, opposed tax cuts that ended the marriage penalty, has little regard for freedom of speech, organized the Gang of 14 to preserve filibusters in judicial hearings, and has a legendary temper and often uses foul and obscene language.
You can read the whole thing here. I would make three points. First, Dobson conspicuously didn't endorse Mitt Romney; indeed, the entire statement more or less assumes a McCain victory, and strikes a note of near-elegiac wistfulness rather than defiance. (Insert your "evangelicals won't vote for Mormons" speculation here.)
Second, as Ramesh noted over the weekend, it was clear after South Carolina, and arguably earlier, that the nomination fight boiled down to a choice between McCain and Romney. Yet an awful lot of big conservative names waited till the eleventh hour - which in Dobson's case meant the actual day of Super Tuesday - to bestir themselves and attempt to rally the faithful against McCain. Why?
Finally, attacking McCain for his tendency to use "foul and obscene language" seems like the purest form of social conservative self-parody. Particularly given the Bush Administration's record on thatfront.
Spinning California
Matt, on the importance of the Wednesday morning media narrative:
As is frequently the case in America's oddly arbitrary candidate selection process, an enormous amount hinges not on the objective results tomorrow but on the reporting of the results. The ambiguity between the results viewed as a race for delegates, as a race for states, and as a race for the semi-national Feb 5 popular vote only increases the extent to which basically made-up media narratives will be very important. Given that he usually gets good press, Obama probably has the edge in terms of winning a spin war in the event of an ambiguous outcome.
On the Republican side, this is yet another reason why Romney is probably already toast, no matter what happens today. In the absolute best-case scenario for his campaign, he’ll win California going away and several other close states (Missouri, Georgia, etc) into the bargain. Given the state of the race just a week ago, this would be a remarkable turnaround. But for Romney to have any hope of pulling the inside straight he needs to win the nomination, he’ll need the press to report it that way, to cast him as the “comeback kid” even though McCain will still have won more states and delegates, both today and overall. And the media, as you may have noticed from time to time in this election cycle, likes McCain an awful lot more than it likes Romney. Which means that if there’s a spin war to be won tomorrow, don’t put your money on Mitt.
I don't want to appear to be saying Super Tuesday is all over — we saw last night, they play the games for a reason - but the winner-take-all/proportional split among the primaries has just sorted out terribly for Romney. He's going to get a decent slice of the vote in McCain's best states and absolutely no delegates to show for it, while McCain gets a few here and a few there in Romney's best states, and California probably splits pretty evenly.
If New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Arizona were proportional, and Colorado and Massachusetts were winner-take-all, the race would probably look quite different.
As it stands, though, unless Romney does much better than expected tomorrow he's staring this scenario in the face:
The table below shows what Romney must do for victory if the likely scenario above plays out on 2/5. Essentially - Romney must win the three remaining winner-take all states AND he must beat McCain by an average margin of 61.45% to 38.54% in the other states. That is how Romney can reach the magic number of 1,191 delegates.
In a pair of provocative posts inspired by the Obama/Louis Farrakhan controversy, both Noah Millman and Russell Arben Fox decline to be all that exorcised by the links between Obama and black chauvinism. Here's Noah, comparing the racially exclusivist views espoused in and around Obama's church to the "Jewish souls are superior to Gentile souls" views held by the Chabad Lubavitchers:
... I do not believe that Jews are distinct from other human beings, having a fundamentally different soul, not being created by God, or any of that – nor are these mainstream Jewish beliefs. But neither do I believe that I am obliged, to remain a member in good standing of polite society, to cast Chabad into the outer darkness and refuse to associate with them. Nor do I believe that Senator Obama is obliged to denounce his pastor. I believe the bar should be set really high for these kinds of defenestrations, and that the important thing to discern is not whether you believe the right thing, but whether you do the right thing.
And here's Fox, on a similar theme:
I don't make any apologies for Farrakhan, and the many times times he's been caught making antisemitic statements over the years; he's been schooled in, and has never separated himself from, a paranoid, weird, even hateful worldview. But associating with Farrakhan, and praising the kind of self-reliance, pride, and community-building his preaching invokes, does not make you a member of the Nation of Islam, or even necessarily an advocate of it. I was in Washington DC during the Million Man March, way back in 1995, and sure, there was a lot of dubious and even borderline contemptuous rhetoric heard that day, from Farrahkan and all the rest. But frankly, I found the whole thing—-complete outsider and foreigner to their collective project that I was—-rather inspiring just the same. The anger of the speakers that day was mixed with positive messages about responsibility and dignity, about remembering all that which their ancestors and progenitors had accomplished, and about conserving and building up that which remained of those accomplishments. As Noah notes in his description of the arguably "exclusivist" (even racist) elements in some Jewish talk, and as Alan Ehrenhalt noted years ago in his defense of the localist, communitarian priorities which held together neighborhoods in 1950s Chicago, many such positive arguments practially depend upon a certain amount of exclusion, of collective self-identification and unity. This isn't an excuse for racism (and it should be noted that Obama has rejected his church's association with Farrakhan and some of his more outrageous statements), but for myself at least, if the point of the message is one of identity, community, and dignity, then I figure I can handle of little bit of non-violent racism along the way.
These excerpts don't do justice to the full argument of eitherpost, but I plucked them out because they hint at an interesting question - namely, whether our tolerance for “non-violent racism” of various sorts will increase as the the black-white binary recedes and the possibility of a horror like Jim Crow grows ever-more-remote. At the moment, there seems to be a tacit agreement – in the media elite especially, but in the wider society as well – that racial chauvinism among African-Americans is grounds for more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger disapproval, whereas racial chauvinism among whites is grounds for outrage, and dismissal from polite society. This double standard, though, coexists with a widespread sense (outside of the “whiteness studies” precincts of academe) that insofar as we tolerate Farrakhan-style chauvinism in the black community, we do so only out of deference to the legacy of slavery and all the rest, and we aspire to grow steadily less tolerant of it over time. Like affirmative action, it’s meant to be a temporary response to a temporary problem, and I assume that many people who don’t hold Barack Obama responsible for his pastor’s views today, or his pastor for Louis Farrakhan’s, aspire to inhabit a society in which no candidate for President would even contemplate an affiliation with a church tainted in any sense by racism.
Maybe this vision will come to pass. For instance, it's possible to imagine that in the multi-ethnic landscape of America’s future, the need to maintain social peace will require some form of ostracism for anyone, black or white or anything else, who even hints at chauvinistic sentiments: The Al Sharptons and La Razas of the future may be treated the way David Duke is treated today. But it seems just as possible that we’re headed toward a society that’s actually more tolerant of non-violent racism than our own, and more likely to agree with Noah and Russell that race-based chauvinism alone shouldn’t be grounds for defenestration from the national conversation. As someone who’s broadly sympathetic to the point they’re making, I like to think that this could come to pass for good reasons – for instance, because the threat of institutionalized racial oppression eventually seems so remote that even white chauvinism feels more like a curiosity to be tolerated than a threat to the liberal order that needs to be extirpated at all costs. But of course the future could belong to the Farrakhans and Jeremiah Wrights (and their counterparts in other communities) for less congenialreasons as well.
1.) The memory of the ill-fated Dean endorsement looms large for him.
2.) (Which is somewhat related to 1.) He's worried about somehow jinxing Obama.
3.) He's enjoying the contrast between himself (statesman-like, above the fray) and Bill Clinton, who's been rooting around in the mud for his wife and damaging his legacy in the process.
To that list, I can't help adding a thought of my own: If, as now seems possible, this race goes to the convention and the convention gets deadlocked, is it so crazy for Gore to imagine himself as either a.) one of the party elders who decides the outcome, or b.) a unifying, white knight candidate in his own right? And, if that's not crazy, shouldn't Gore sit tight for now?
I don’t think Al Gore still wants to be President the way, say, Mitt Romney clearly wants to be President right about now. But I bet some part of him still wants it, and though I hadn’t really contemplated the “brokered convention turns to Gore” scenario, I’d been assuming that his own lingering ambitions are playing some role in his reluctance to endorse Obama. Especially since the Dean endorsement, while it’s remembered as a blunder because the good doctor flamed out, seemed at the time like the work of a canny politician positioning himself for a future run. Howard Dean was never going to be President, whatever ex-Deaniacs claim when they’re deep in their cups, and Gore had to know it. Associating himself with the Dean insurgency was thus a way for him to officially throw his weight behind the anti-war, anti-Bush, and yes, anti-Hillary Clinton camp within the Democratic Party, a move that might have plausibly reaped great dividends had he decided to run for the party’s nomination in ’08.
In the event, he didn’t – and now he has another chance to endorse the anti-war, anti-Clinton candidate. But whereas Dean was doomed to defeat, Obama might just win this thing, and even if he doesn’t he’ll probably be back again in 2012 or 2016 with his halo more or less intact. By endorsing Dean, Gore was blessing a candidate whom he could plausibly regard as little more than a stalking horse for his own ambitions; by endorsing Obama, though, he’s giving his blessing to a man whose star increasingly outshines his own. A world in which Barack Obama becomes President is a world in which Al Gore almost certainly never will, and while I don’t think this consideration matters as much to him as it once might have, I’m sure it’s crossed his mind.
Not likely. But neither is Hugh Hewitt being delusional when he throws out Rasmussen numbers showing Romney gaining in places like Tennessee and Missouri, California and Georgia. So far, the Republican primary campaign has demonstrated fairly emphatically that the movement conservative establishment, from Rush and Hannity to the Club For Growth, isn't nearly as powerful as many observers assumed it to be. But now I think the pendulum has swung too far in the opposite direction, and many commentators are underestimating the impact that a movement establishment united behind Romney could have on the outcome of the race - or could have had, that is, given world enough and time. Except that there isn't time; the movement has rallied to him too late. Hewitt invokes the Feiler Faster Thesis, and notes how swiftly conservative activists derailed the Harriet Miers nomination and the "comprehensive" immigration package. But Patrick Ruffini, writing on the same blog, makes the key distinction:
... Hugh equates the current struggle against McCain with Harriet Miers and the 2007 McCain-Kennedy bill. But there seems to be a misapprehension here about how information moves from opinion leaders to the base, and who the target audience is.
In the Miers case, it was a fight amongst legal elites. Having no dog in the fight, the general Republican electorate eventually fell in line with the anti-Miers forces. Likewise, immigration was a tiff between party activists and Congress; our levers of influence were clear.
Changing the trajectory of this primary is a lot trickier. Like Miers and immigration, the argument has been won amongst the activist class (this is why establishment conservatives are finally falling in line, and why Romney wins caucus votes everywhere but the South). The problem is that we also have to convince a plurality of 15-20 million primary voters with countervailing interests, starting in 22 states, not just that McCain is wrong but that Romney is the answer. And the lines of influence aren’t always clear. Do radio hosts based in DC, New York, and Palm Beach matter as much in places like Huntsville, Alabama and Murfreesboro, Tennessee — where McCain is good enough for many war-minded, loosely attached conservatives?
Ruffini, who's backing Romney, adds that "this is not a call to despair. It’s a call to get to work." And if the activist class had a month to work with - and Huckabee had a month to keep fading, and McCain had a month to wear out his welcome as the front-runner - I think Hewitt, Rush, NR and Co. might be able to pull it off. But my bet is that even with a last-minute surge, Super Tuesday will leave the Romney campaign in too deep a hole to scramble out of, no matter how many activists, pundits, and radio hosts are giving them a leg up.
February 2, 2008
My Vote Don't Cost A Thing
One lesson of the GOP race, Patrick Ruffini argues - a race that McCain is about to win despite raising less than half of the $100 million some observers thought it would take to get the nomination - is that in the age of internet mobilization, how a candidate raises money might matter more than how much he raises.
February 1, 2008
The Revolution Will Be Televised
Don't miss Reihan's Bloggingheads debut, alongside the redoubtable Chris Hayes.
On domestic issues, McCain’s problem is not that his views are too far from the public’s. It’s that he simply doesn’t care about any of the issues on the table. In fact (as I argue in next week’s issue of National Review) McCain doesn’t actually seem to care about any political “issues” at all. He is moved by honor and country, and this has driven him to be passionately active on a few domestic fronts, but for different reasons than those that motivate just about every other politician. (A misunderstanding of this point has, I think, been behind much of the often excessive distress at McCain’s apparent ascendancy in some quarters of the right this week). And he has not found a way to understand, say, health care in terms of honor, honesty, or character. So even though his campaign has offered a very strong conservative proposal for health care reform, McCain seems incapable of talking about it as though it were even remotely significant.
Both of the Democrats, whatever you think of their particular proposals, can communicate a sense of the significance and urgency of this and the other issues that seem increasingly likely to dominate the general election. McCain’s challenge is not only to persuade conservatives he can carry their banner, but to persuade himself that the concerns and aspirations of the middle class family matter. Although he may well be the Republican with the best chance of winning in November, this won’t be an election that naturally plays to John McCain’s strengths.
This is, of course, another difficulty with a politics that takes "national greatness" as its touchstone and heroism as its defining virtue - it breeds a disinterest, or even an impatience, with the more quotidian (but nonetheless crucial) aspects of policy and governance. This is by no means an exclusively right-wing temptation, obviously, as the cult of JFK attests, and in this election cycle I think you can see intimations of it Barack Obama as well as in McCain. But Obama has a touch of the wonk (or the law professor) about him that leavens his weakness for grandiosity, whereas the Arizona Senator can seem almost physically uncomfortable with any policy argument that isn't framed in the sort of "honor, duty, country" terms that Yuval describes.
The Conservative Crack-Up
I trust the Obama campaign is sending this to every undecided Democrat on their email list:
Why Rudy Lost
If John McCain's comeback seemed to be engineered by the goddess Fortuna, Rudy Giuliani's slow slide into irrelevance was vastly more predictable; indeed, it was sufficiently overdetermined that almost any explanation for why he didn't win the GOP nomination is likely to contain some element of the truth. Was it because he couldn't make peace with social conservatives? Absolutely. Was it the shadow of scandal from his years as Mayor? Almost certainly. Was it the waning political salience of 9/11? No doubt. Was it the unfavorable way the early primary schedule lined up - with no obviously Rudy-friendly states casting ballots before Florida - joined to the difficulty of making the leap from Mayor to President? Probably so.
To this litany, I'd just add the following: I think the Giuliani campaign was deceived by Rudy's leap to a dramatic early lead in the national polls, and allowed his huge, seemingly-enduring edge to shape how Rudy sold himself throughout the race. The polls said that he was the front-runner, so he behaved like a front-runner, running a cautious, uncreative campaign that apart from its deviations on abortion seemed designed to be as cookie-cutter conservative as possible. Tax cuts, border security, a strong national defense, school choice, strict-constructionist judges - it was an agenda ideally-suited to an establishment candidate trying to build a lead and hold it, but Rudy, despite his boffo poll numbers early on, was never actually that candidate. Whatever Gallup said, he was always a dark horse, always an insurgent running against the grain of his party, and to have any chance he needed to campaign like one, looking for ways to break the mold and capitalize on his sui generis appeal.
What should he have done instead? Well, he could have run on the Frum agenda, or something like it. He could have run as a populist of sorts, as Reihan and I suggested early on, trying to capitalize on his old-school Reagan Democrat roots and pick up on some of the themes that Mike Huckabee ended up emphasizing. Or he could have run as a radical federalist, as Dan McLaughlin has suggested, simultaneously attacking Roe and promising to cool the culture wars.
Maybe - probably - none of these strategies would have worked either. But any of them would have been better tailored to the obvious-in-hindsight reality that Rudy's candidacy was always much, much more of a long shot than it looked when he was riding high last spring. And if nothing else, they might have prevented him from coming in behind Ron Paul quite so often as he did.
Photo by Flickr User Joe Crimmings used under a Creative Commons License.
Compromise, rather than absolutism, has been the watchword of anti-abortion efforts for some time now. But the pro-life movement can't give up on overturning Roe without giving up on its very reason for being.
Forget the predatory lenders, Wall Street sharks and their government enablers: The current economic crisis, and the housing bubble that produced it, all started with George Bailey.
