Juicers And The Fans Who Love Them

Over on the Current, I use this rain-soaked Opening Day as an occasion to contemplate why the steroid scandal hasn't prompted large-scale disillusionment among baseball fans.

Lieberman Democrats

Michael Scherer doesn't think much of Joe Lieberman's "I didn't leave the Democrats; the Democrats left me" remarks on "The Week" over the weekend. Here's the quote:

Well, I say that the Democratic Party changed. The Democratic Party today was not the party it was in 2000. It’s not the Bill Clinton-Al Gore party, which was strong internationalists, strong on defense, pro-trade, pro-reform in our domestic government. It’s been effectively taken over by a small group on the left of the party that is protectionist, isolationist and basically will —and very, very hyperpartisan. So it pains me.

But as Reihan notes, Lieberman is factually correct: The Democratic Party has shifted leftward over the last decade, on the fronts he mentions as well as others. Moreover, among many of Lieberman's left-liberal foes, this leftward shift is viewed as a great achievement, which suggests that they would be better served treating his comments as a compliment than as a calumny. It's fair to pillory Lieberman for failing to change with the times; it's a little strange to pillory him for merely pointing out that times have changed.

The only truly questionable portion of Lieberman's remarks is his suggestion that the change agents responsible for the Democratic Party's progressive turn represent "a small group on the left of the party." It's too soon to tell if the the new-model Democrats are headed for a long-term majority or just a short-term, post-Bush bounce, and maybe Lieberman's right that the the Dems' leftward shift will eventually drive the party into a political ditch. But given how the landscape looks right now, Lieberman sounds an awful lot like the Rockefeller Republicans of yore, who would complain about how a "small group of extremists" in the conservative movement were hijacking their party and dooming it to defeat, even as those same extremists were leading the GOP to national successes that the Jacob Javitses and Christine Todd Whitmans and Lowell Weickers could only dream about.

There's an important lesson here: Namely, that the American "center" moves around a lot (and varies wildly on an issue-by-issue basis), and thus a party that moves leftward or rightward on the hot-button issues of the day can sometimes find a new center that nobody realized was there. This tends to leave the inhabitants of the old middle - the Rockefeller Republicans in the '70s and '80s, and perhaps the Lieberman Democrats of today - flummoxed and out-of-step, unable to figure out that just because they've always considered themselves "centrists" doesn't mean the American people will always agree with them.

Photo by Flickr user Lieberman_2006 used under a Creative Commons license.

The Mist

I just saw Frank Darabont's latest Stephen King adaptation, about small-town Mainers trapped in a supermarket while a monster-riddled mist - accidentally unleashed when a military experiment opens a portal to a Lovecraftian dimension - rolls over the world. The movie is basically a glorified Twilight Zone episode, but in an era when the horror genre is dominated by torture-porn one-upsmanship, there's something refreshing about a monster movie that traffics in Rod Serling-style social commentary, even if it runs toward heavy-handedness at times. (With the Twilight Zone comparison in mind, I'd be very curious to see Darabont's black-and-white version; if nothing else, the film's low-budget special effects might look a lot cooler than they did in color.)

That said, whether you give the film a thumbs-up or thumbs-down probably depends on what you think of the brutal twist ending, which departs significantly from the King novella. Spoilers follow ...

Continue reading "The Mist" »

Pro-Lifers and '08

I have a Current up about the Douglas Kmiec and Andrew Bacevich endorsements of Obama, and what, if anything, they tell us about the fate of the "Catholic vote." But I wanted to make another point on the subject as well. I'm an enormous admirer of Professor Bacevich, but I wish his Obama-endorsing piece hadn't stacked the deck so much; specifically, I wish he'd made a more detailed case for why issues of war and peace ought to outweigh the abortion issue for pro-life voters in '08, rather than claiming, implausibly:

... only a naïf would believe that today’s Republican Party has any real interest in overturning Roe v. Wade or that doing so now would contribute in any meaningful way to the restoration of “family values.” GOP support for such values is akin to the Democratic Party’s professed devotion to the “working poor”: each is a ploy to get votes, trotted out seasonally, quickly forgotten once the polls close.

You hear this sort of thing frequently from pro-lifers who have grown disillusioned with the GOP, and there's some truth to it: A lot of Republican leaders could care less about Roe and would prefer, if anything, to see it upheld, and even if Roe were overturned abortion would remain legal in most of the country. Nonetheless, it remains the case for all the pro-choice sympathies of leading GOPers, the Republican Party nearly succeeded in overturning Roe v. Wade fifteen years ago, and would have if one man - Anthony Kennedy - hadn't changed his mind about the issue at the last minute. It also remains the case that the Bush Administration has seemingly brought to Supreme Court within a single vote of undoing what Kennedy wrought in 1992. It further remains the case that while overturning Roe wouldn't magically restore us to some Ozzie-and-Harriet wonderland, returning control over abortion law to the hands of the voting public remains a necessary goal for any pro-life, socially-conservative politics that takes itself seriously as a change agent in American life. And it further remains the case that to vote for Barack Obama in 2008 is to give up on overturning Roe for at least a decade, probably for two, and possibly for all time. These realities may not require pro-lifers to vote for John McCain, but they deserve more serious consideration that Bacevich affords them.

Obama's Veep

The notion of an Obama-Bloomberg ticket isn't the worst idea in the world, by any means. (At the very least, it makes a heck of a lot more sense than an Obama-Clinton pairing.) But Jim Webb always made more sense, and as the inveterate Webb-booster Noah Millman points out, in the wake of the Jeremiah Wright controversy, he makes more sense than ever. After all, what's the obvious cure for having a black-nationalist pastor in your closet? Putting a white-nationalist senator on your ticket!

Reviewing The Trailer

Manohla Dargis attempts a novel gimmick, writing her review of the new blackjack flick 21 based on the trailer, rather than the actual movie.

Oh, wait - sorry, it was Chris Orr whose review did that. Hard to tell the difference ...

The Return of the Seventies (II)

Peter Suderman has kind words for my essay on Hollywood in the shadow of Iraq, but he also writes:

[The piece] gives short shrift to one point: lame-brained politics or no, the crusading, politically-infused films of the 1970’s were simply better films–and that goes for the prestige pics as well as the B-movies ... It’s essential to note that today’s crop–at least in its most explicitly political incarnations–is by any standard rife with unambiguously rotten material. Lions for Lambs, Redacted, and In the Valley of Elah were painful to sit through. Even the better stuff, like the 2005 Clooney duo of Syriana and Good Night, and Good Luck were merely average–decent productions that fail to rise to the level of most cable television series. The only recent productions in this vein that stand out at all are the three Bourne films, which tend to use their political framework as a background and succeed mostly on the strength of their dazzling action setpieces.

Contrast this with the films of the 1970’s. There’s little comparison. Apocalypse Now may have little to do with the real-life experience of Vietnam, but it’s a hypnotic, singular vision from an accomplished cinematic artist working at the peak of his powers. All the President’s Men remains one of film’s best detective stories, and probably the best movie about Washington or journalism ever made. Middlebrow fare like The Parallax View ... sparkled in a way that today’s mainstream thrillers rarely accomplish. And even low-budget films like Death Race 2000 and The Warriors crackled with a sense of outrage, awareness, and energy. Movies like these, as well as the early works of directors like John Carpenter and David Cronenberg, indulged in exploitation flick shenanigans. But they also had a tremendous amount of fun, and maybe even managed to say something about the state of the world, too.

Heaven knows the politics of Hollywood in 1970’s were off the wall, perhaps even wackier and more radical than today’s. But somehow, they still managed to turn out movies that were far less irritating than the artless, self-satisfied liberal consciousness-raisers we seem to be stuck with now.

I largely agree, and tried to suggest as much in the original essay, though Peter may be right that I should have made the point more explicitly. I do think that our neo-Seventies moment has produced movies and (especially) television shows that rival the best work done in that decade - not only highbrow work like The Wire and The Sopranos, Zodiac and No Country For Old Men, but thrillers like the Bourne films (the first two, especially) and B-movies like 28 Days Later. (I think Danny Boyle's zombie film is a vast improvement on the work of George Romero, in fact, though that's a minority opinion.) But it's certainly true that the more explicitly politically-infused material is considerably weaker this time around, often to the point of embarrassment. One problem, as Chris Orr among others has suggested, is the lack of distance on the Iraq War: Films like The Deer Hunter and Apocalypse Now came out years after we had departed Vietnam, and as a result they didn't come across as attempts to grab the viewer by the lapels and convince them to END THE WAR NOW!!!!, which was what movies like Lions For Lambs and In the Valley of Elah often seemed intent on doing. The other problem, I think, is the one I tried to get it in my post on Michael Clayton: The best paranoid movies - The Parallax View, say, or The Conversation - wear well precisely because they're willing to "stop just short of realism, to build rotten, conspiracy-ridden worlds that overlap with our own but aren’t necessarily identical to it." Whereas films like Clayton or Syriana or The Constant Gardener are too real-world for their own good, and as a result their byzantine conspiracy theories feel like agitprop rather than art.

National Greatness Liberalism

Via Matt, here's Chris Bowers, complaining about Barack Obama’s too-narrow framing of the benefits of withdrawal from Iraq:

The Iraq war is our major national project right now, equivalent to the Apollo program or the New Deal. Do we want that as our national project? I don't think many Americans would agree. Do we want a series of transactions to specific demographic groups and issues to be our national project? Even if is vastly preferable to making the Iraq war our national project, the truth is that isn't very appealing either. We need a different framing around what we want our national project to be, and we need a Democratic leader who is willing to make that case to the country as a whole.

Tell me that instead of the Iraq war, maintaining a massive global military deployment or doling out a series of narrowly targeted government programs, we are going to do other great things as a nation. Tell me that we are going to have a New Deal for America. Tell me we are going to build a Great Society. Tell me that we are going to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade. Tell me that we are going to win and end the cold war. Hell, even tell me that we are going to secure freedom around the world, because at least that is a national project that sounds worthwhile. These are the sort of transformative proposals we need from Democrats, and right now we just don't have any. Technocratic, transactional politics just is not as appealing, and ultimately secures a non-ideological mandate and a lack of purpose for the country as a whole. Until we offer just such a sense of purpose, we will never complete the progressive realignment towards which the progressive movement has been building for nearly a decade. Fighting for working families, homeowners, and Social Security recipients, however noble, just doesn't cut it.

One of the bigger internal tensions facing the Democratic Party if and when it assumes real power, I suspect, will be the division between the sort of meliorist liberalism on display in, say, this Democracy symposium (some of whose contents, as Reihan notes, could easily be swiped by a reformist conservatism) and the impatient desire among progressives like Bowers for a vastly more ambitious left-wing politics - a “national-greatness liberalism,” if you will, that harkens back to the salad days of the New Deal and the Great Society. Obama has done a masterful job straddling this divide: His rhetoric of change and transformation has been pitched to Bowers’ frequency, but his paeans to post-partisanship and his specific policy proposals have struck a more cautious, technocratic note. This two-step, though, has made it difficult to tell exactly what sort of President he’d be (a Burkean Democrat? the Reagan of Progressivism?), and it almost guarantees that an Obama Presidency will leave some liberal factions feeling disappointed and betrayed.

My own preference, I should add, is for something closer to the sort of politics that leaves Bowers cold. A “technocratic, transactional” agenda that seeks to head off long-term dangers with policies targeted to key constituencies seems vastly preferable to a crusading, self-aggrandizing spirit that wants a national project, dammit, and doesn’t care what that project is. I’m all for fostering a sense of urgency in our politics: Our book does call for Republicans to “save the American dream,” after all. But that urgency should be directed against real and pressing problems; it shouldn’t be summoned up for the sake of providing “purpose” to American life, or ensuring that the right people get to run the government for the next decade or two.

Moreover, it seems passing strange that someone like Bowers, who seems almost completely agnostic about what, precisely, our “national project” ought to be (another moon landing! another Great Society! securing freedom around the globe!), is nonetheless willing to dismiss out of hand the possibility that America’s current burdens in Iraq shouldn't be lightly set aside.

Great and Glorious Games

Being a typically provincial American, I lack the breadth of experience to adequately address Alex Massie's claim that the glories of baseball are eclipsed by the perfection that is cricket. In defense of my limited horizons, I would only say that Americans’ provincial attitude toward sports has less to do with our philistinism than with our glut of home-grown, big-time sports. The United States has not one but three national games, two of them wildly popular in their collegiate as well as professional varieties, plus a kitchen sink’s worth of popular alternatives to the football-baseball-basketball trifecta, from hockey and horse racing to boxing and tennis; meanwhile, we’re constantly being hectored by internationalist goo-goo types to support our local soccer league as well. And then of course there are the Olympics, when we’re supposed to feign interest in a slew of contests that nobody find remotely interesting if their nation’s honor weren’t at stake.

All of which is to say that while I’d love to immerse myself in cricket – if nothing else, it would enable me to appreciate the greatest sports book ever written – as it stands I can barely keep up with the sports that I followed obsessively as a kid. In high school, I was fanatical about college basketball, baseball, and football; in college, the first of these dropped off my radar screen somewhat (too many teams, not enough time); and now that I’m a half-decade deep in adulthood my football IQ has dropped to a point where I had to turn down a chance to write a piece about about the Patriots this winter – something I would have killed to do years back – because I simply wasn’t following their season closely enough. Maybe once I’m retired I’ll finally have time to learn enough about bowlers and wickets to judge whether Massie’s making sense or full of it, but until then I have to plead ignorance and duck the argument.

Photo by Flickr user Pandiyan used under a Creative Commons license.

Sam Harris and the Prosperity Gospel

You know, I sometimes get the sense that Sam Harris doesn't have a damn clue what he's talking about:

Happily, Obama did a fine job of distancing himself from Reverend Wright's divisive views on racism in America, along with his fatuous "chickens come home to roost" assessment of our war against Islamic terrorism. But he did not (and should not) acknowledge that the worst parts of Reverend Wright's sermons, as with most sermons, are his appeals to the empty hopes and baseless fears of his parishioners--people who could surely find better ways of advancing their interests in this world, if only they could banish the fiction of a world to come.

... The problem of religious fatalism, ignorance, and false hope, while plain to see in most religious contexts, is now especially obvious in the black community. The popularity of "prosperity gospel" is perhaps the most galling example: where unctuous crooks like T.D. Jakes and Creflo Dollar persuade undereducated and underprivileged men and women to pray for wealth, while tithing what little wealth they have to their corrupt and swollen ministries. Men like Jakes and Dollar, whatever occasional good they may do, are unconscionable predators and curators of human ignorance. Is it too soon to say this in American politics? Yes it is.

I suppose it would be too much to ask for Harris to familiarize himself with the literature on the correlations between religious observance and positive personal and financial outcomes, in the nation as a whole but especially in the African-American community; it would apparently be too much, as well, for him to actually read the works of T.D. Jakes before declaring him an "unconscionable predator." There are pure charlatans in the world of the prosperity gospel, but what figures like Jakes (and Joel Osteen, Joyce Meyer, and many many others) represent is something else entirely: They're self-help authors on the one hand and apostles of moralistic therapeutic deism on the other, slapping Christian window dressing on how-to guides for upward mobility and psychological satisfaction. They aren't playing to the follies and fantasies of the poor and desperate; they're responding to the real-world aspirations of the working and the middle classes. They aren't peddling fatalism and false hope; they're offering ambitious Americans advice on how to be prosperous and happy in the workplace and the home, with a little God-talk worked in around the edges.

From the point of view of Christian orthodoxy, obviously, this sort of thing is deeply theologically problematical. From the point of view of a hardened materialist like Sam Harris, though, the sort of religion T.D. Jakes is selling is exactly the kind of religion that he ought to like: A faith that's relentlessly focused on success and happiness in this world, rather than on self-abnegation for the sake of the life to come. But to understand that, he'd have to expand his understanding of religious practice beyond the usual run of atheistic cliches and prejudices. Which would obviously be too much to ask.

Lost's Why Problem

Now that I've caught up in my viewing, I'd like to associate myself with Peter Suderman's remark that the most persistently irritating thing about Lost is that "it asks 'why' but answers 'what' and 'how.'" This problem, obviously, is built into the show's architecture, since it's not knowing the "why" that keeps us coming back for more. But it was one thing to consistently withhold the why across the first two seasons, when all the characters were more or less just as in the dark about it as the audience. Now, though, the show has reached a point where certain characters know the why - or at least some of it - and others have good reasons to want to know the why; moreover, the in-the-dark characters often have the means to force the in-the-know characters to explain the why to them. Which means that to keep the audience guessing, the in-the-dark characters have to act ridiculously, implausibly satisfied when the explanations they get stop with the how and the what.

The show is still crackerjack, mind you, but only in those episodes when everybody's too busy doing things to ask questions - as at the end of last season, and the first few episodes of this one. When the pacing slows, as it inevitably must, and the characters have time to sit around and talk things out, things get really irritating really fast. This problem made the middle of last season an enormous drag, and I'm worried it's going to kill the middle of this one too.

Shari'a For Thee ...

Do read Noah Millman, critiquing the defense of Shari'a advanced by his fellow Noah (Feldman, that is) in the Times Magazine.

Yesterday's Issues

Mickey Kaus on Obama:

... it's hard to believe we're about to nominate a Democrat who doesn't acknowledge the lesson of the 1990s--that voters are worried about issues like welfare because they are worried about welfare, not because "welfare" is a surrogate for "lack of national health insurance." Can a Dem who hasn't learned that lesson can be elected in a two-candidate general election? That's no longer unthinkable, but it would require not only that the old Carter-Ford-Reagan-Clinton issues like welfare, crime, etc. recede into the background (replaced by Iraq and the economy). It would also require Republicans who are too stupid to find a way to bring them back into the foreground.

For those Democrats worried about Obama's seemingly old-fashioned liberalism--sorry, progressivism!--the great hope has been that of course he'll pivot and turn toward the reformist, Clintonian center once he's got the nomination in hand. But what if The Pivot never happens (as David Frum, for one, has predicted)? That's a big issue--maybe the big issue--raised by Obama's "race" address. That's a big--maybe main--reason that it's a gaffe. Obama's honesty is bracing. But he honestly doesn't seem to be the sort of neoliberal politician who wins national elections.

Unless that paradigm no longer holds, and the success of neoliberal and neoconservative efforts on welfare and crime - manifest in falling welfare rolls and plunging crime rates - make it possible for a liberal candidate who doesn't really have anything substantive to say about crime and poverty policy to win a national election. Obviously, I'm hoping that Obama says something bolder about welfare than what he's said to date. But at the moment, I think the note he's hitting - acknowledging liberalism's past failures (i.e., his suggestion that welfare policies "for many years may have worsened" the state of the black family) while implicitly consigning those failures to the past - may be sufficient to inoculate him against conservative criticism. Crime and welfare are yesterday's issues, and while they may (and should) matter again some day soon, I can't imagine them playing anything close to the role they played in the 1970s and '80s in this election cycle.

The one place where Obama might be vulnerable to a neocon/neoliberal critique is immigration, and of course the GOP has proven itself utterly incapable of exploiting that issue effectively of late - and even if they could, John McCain isn't the standard-bearer to do it.

Easter

John Henry Newman:

Among the wise men of the heathen ... it was usual to speak slightingly and contemptuously of the mortal body; they knew no better. They thought it scarcely a part of their real selves, and fancied they should be in a better condition without it. Nay, they considered it to be the cause of their sinning; as if the soul of man were pure, and the material body were gross, and defiled the soul ... Accordingly their chief hope in death was the notion they should be rid of their body. Feeling they were sinful, and not knowing how, they laid the charge on their body; and knowing they were badly circumstanced here, they thought death perchance might be a change for the better. Not that they rested on the hope of returning to a God and Father, but they thought to be unshackled from the earth, and able to do what they would. It was consistent with this slighting of their earthly tabernacle, that they burned the dead bodies of their friends, not burying them as we do, but consuming them as a mere worthless case of what had been precious, and was then an incumbrance to the ground ...

Far different is the temper which the glorious light of the Gospel teaches us. Our bodies shall rise again and live for ever; they may not be irreverently handled. How they will rise we know not; but surely if the word of Scripture be true, the body from which the soul has departed shall come to life ... The dust around us will one day become animate. We may ourselves be dead long before, and not see it. We ourselves may elsewhere be buried, and, should it be our exceeding blessedness to rise to life eternal, we may rise in other places, far in the east or west. But, as God's word is sure, what is sown is raised; the earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, shall become glory to glory, and life to the living God, and a true incorruptible image of the spirit made perfect.

Good Friday

From The Everlasting Man:

In this story of Good Friday it is the best things in the world that are at their worst. That is what really shows us the world at its worst. It was, for instance, the priests of a true monotheism and the soldiers of an international civilization. Rome, the legend, founded upon fallen Troy and triumphant over fallen Carthage, had stood for a heroism which was the nearest that any pagan ever came to chivalry ... But in the lightning flash of this incident, we see great Rome, the imperial republic, going downward under her Lucretian doom. Scepticism has eaten away even the confident sanity of the conquerors of the world. He who is enthroned to say what is justice can only ask, 'What is truth?' So in that drama which decided the whole fate of antiquity, one of the central figures is fixed in what seems the reverse of his true role. Rome was almost another name for responsibility. Yet he stands forever as a sort of rocking statue of the irresponsible. Man could do no more. Even the practical had become the impracticable. Standing between the pillars of his own judgment-seat, a Roman had washed his hands of the world.

There too were the priests of that pure and original truth that was behind all the mythologies like the sky behind the clouds. It was the most important truth in the world; and even that could not save the world. Perhaps there is something overpowering in pure personal theism; like seeing the sun and moon and sky come together to form one staring face. Perhaps the truth is too tremendous when not broken by some intermediaries divine or human; perhaps it is merely too pure and far away.

Anyhow it could not save the world; it could not even convert the world. There were philosophers who held it in its highest and noblest form; but they not only could not convert the world, but they never tried. You could no more fight the jungle of popular mythology with a private opinion than you could clear away a forest with a pocket-knife. The Jewish priests had guarded it jealously in the good and the bad sense. They had kept it as a gigantic secret. As savage heroes might have kept the sun in a box, they kept the Everlasting in the tabernacle. They were proud that they alone could look upon the blinding sun of a single deity; and they did not know that they had themselves gone blind.

... And as it was with these powers that were good, or at least had once been good, so it was with the element which was perhaps the best, or which Christ himself seems certainly to have felt as the best. The poor to whom he preached the good news, the common people who heard him gladly, the populace that had made so many popular heroes and demigods in the old pagan world showed also the weaknesses that were dissolving the world. They suffered the evils often seen in the mob of the city, and especially the mob of the capital, during the decline of a society. The same thing that makes the rural population live on tradition makes the urban population live on rumor. just as its myths at the best had been irrational, so its likes and dislikes are easily changed by baseless assertion that is arbitrary without being authoritative ...

Some brigand or other was artificially turned into a picturesque and popular figure and run as a kind of candidate against Christ. In all this we recognize the urban population that we know, with its newspaper scares and scoops. But there was present in this ancient population an evil more peculiar to the ancient world. We have noted it already as the neglect of the individual, even of the individual voting the condemnation and still more of the individual condemned. It was the soul of the hive; a heathen thing. The cry of this spirit also was heard in that hour, "It is well that one man die for the people!" Yet this spirit in antiquity of devotion to the city and to the state had so been in itself and in its time a noble spirit. It had its poets and its martyrs; men still to be honored forever. It was failing through its weakness in not seeing the separate soul of a man, the shrine of all mysticism; but it was only failing as everything else was failing. The mob went along with the Sadducees and the Pharisees, the philosophers and the moralists. It went along with the imperial magistrates and the sacred priests, the scribes and the soldiers, that the one universal human spirit might suffer a universal condemnation; that there might be one deep, unanimous chorus of approval and harmony when Man was rejected of men.

The Return of the Seventies

Blogging will be light for the duration of the Triduum. If you're starved for reading material, the latest issue of the Atlantic is now online; it's thick with good stuff as usual, and it even includes an essay by yours truly, on pop culture in the shadow of the Iraq War.

And if reading the piece isn't exciting enough, you can watch me talk about it here:

Obama's Speech (III)

I'd like to associate myself with Jay Cost's characteristically thoughtful take on the speech - both his praise for it, and his reservations. Here's the key passage:

My concern with the speech is the following. I am not sure what I think about Obama's claim that he never heard Wright make incendiary comments. I think that hinges on the definition of "incendiary." More importantly, I have always thought this was a moot point. Incendiary comments make for great television - but the bigger concern, especially for somebody as smart as Obama, is the philosophy that undergirds them. Obama clearly understands Wright's philosophy - even if he never heard Wright say what has generated this firestorm. If nothing else, yesterday he contextualized Wright into the broader narrative of the American racial division. He would not have been able to do that so ably if he had only learned about this philosophy last week.

This philosophy is divisive, and Obama was aware of it even if he had not heard its most extreme articulations. At the same time, this philosophy is clearly not the core mission of Trinity United Church of Christ. Jeremiah Wright does not wake up every morning dedicated to dividing people. However, the antipode of this divisiveness is the core mission of Barack Obama. He wakes up every morning dedicated to uniting people. This is why Obama thinks Wright is not just wrong, but "profoundly" wrong. Wright's divisiveness constitutes a grievous mistake on what Obama takes to be the central question of American identity - are we one people or are we not?

Accordingly, this inclines me to ask what Obama did about this profound philosophical error. He has been a parishioner for twenty years, and he has been a strong believer in this philosophy of unity for at least four years, since his keynote address in 2004. I appreciate that he cannot walk away from Trinity because the church speaks to who he is. However, I must ask whether he worked to persuade Wright and the parishioners who applauded so jubilantly at his divisive words that they were wrong on a matter of existential importance. If he did, what was the consequence of those efforts? Did he succeed in bringing about change at Trinity?

... The essential problem of the speech is that it gives no answer to these queries.

Read the whole thing.

Clarke and Minghella, RIP

Over on the Current, Reihan ponders the science-fiction giant's views on religion, and I lavish praise on the late director's adaptation of The Talented Mr. Ripley.

Obama's Speech: The Podcast

In which Matt and I discuss:

Obama and the Right

Andrew argues that the dismissive reactions to Obama's speech from the right are "palpably fueled by fear and racism." That's unfair and unfounded: As I suggested yesterday in detailing my own qualms about the speech, they're palpably fueled by the fact that Obama is a liberal. The conservative idea of a candidate who's "transformational" on race is someone who sounds like Bill Cosby and works with Ward Connerly, and that just isn't what Obama's doing; hence the Right's disappointment, which in many cases is curdling into dismissiveness and outright dislike. Instead, Obama's trying to be a transformational figure on the following two counts: First, as John McWhorter suggests in his response to the speech, he's trying to free African-American politics from the vise grip of grievance and resentment, breaking away not only from the Sharptons and Jacksons but from the NAACP line of Julian Bond and Kweise Mfume as well, and bringing black Americans out of racialism and radicalism and into the liberal mainstream; at the same time, he's trying to bring the country, which has heretofore tilted right, into the center-left mainstream as well. (The latter achievement, obviously, depends on the former, which is why the Wright affair is potentially so damaging: It calls into question his promise as a new kind of a black politician, without which his hope to be a new kind of American politician more or less collapses.)

It's been noted before before, but to understand the Right's mounting disappointment with his candidacy it's worth pointing out again that in his attempt to bring new voters into the Democratic tent, Obama's rightward outreach is primarily stylistic rather than substantive. He's making a bet that the country is already moving left, and that by taking an unusually respectful (by liberal standards) approach to the ideas and grievances that pushed an earlier generation to the right he can win many of them, and their children, back to the liberalism that once dominated American politics. As everyone from Rod Dreher to Mickey Kaus to Steve Sailer have noted, his practical concessions to present-day conservatism are vanishingly small. But he isn't trying to win over the gang at the Corner, or movement conservatives more generally; he's trying to win over those voters (and writers) who sometimes think that conservatives make a lot of sense, but whose ideological commitments are ultimately malleable. So of course if you're an ideological conservative you don't like what you hear from him; he's talking to everybody else, but not to you.

Skynet, Stage One

I'm with Matt; this can only end badly:

David Simon Is Still Talking, Dammit

I was going to say something about David Simon's latest attempt to prove that he doesn't care what the critics thought about the final season of The Wire, not at all, not one little bit, but just for the record he's smarter than all of the self-interested, can't see the forest for the trees, would never have made it back in the old days when true newsmen roamed the earth journalists who got all caught up in boring stuff like "plot" and "characterization" and "dialogue" and just didn't have enough perspective on their business to get how frickin' brilliant his critique of the modern newsroom really was. But Vulture beat me to it.

While I'm on the culture beat, I'd also like to associate myself with Vulture's remarks about the wonderful Judy Greer.

Wright and Left

If you haven't had a bellyful of the Wright debate by now, I recommend Chris Hayes's Nation piece on the subject, and Reihan's response.

Obama's Speech (II)

It had its imperfections, yet for all that I think Charles Murray makes the crucial point: Can you think of a better speech on race in America delivered recently by any politician, black or white? Of course John Derbyshire is right that Obama’s vision of how America ought to transcend our racial divisions is essentially left-wing, with whites and blacks joining hands to raise taxes and government spending, while uniting against their common enemy, the wicked axis of corporations, lobbyists and special interests. But Obama’s candidacy is essentially left-wing; he’s attempting to be a liberal Reagan, not a difference-splitter like Bill Clinton, and I think our political moment is tilting sufficiently leftward that he might just succeed. Certainly, I would have liked to see him talk more than he did about what America has achieved over the past thirty years, rather than pivoting so quickly to how much remains to be done. This speech of all speeches could have done with a little more pure “God bless America” chest-thumping, and a little less of what Andrew Ferguson has memorably described as the Obama style of “optimistic despair," in which "America is a fetid sewer whose most glorious days lie just ahead, thanks to the endless ranks of pathetic losers who make it a beacon of hope to all mankind." But this is a conservative's quibble about a liberal politician's address; it's my way of saying "I wish Barack Obama were a little less left-wing," and it doesn't detract from the speech's overall impressiveness.

I do think the problem Jeremiah Wright creates for Obama's campaign remains unresolved, to some extent, since there was nothing Obama could say in a single speech that would undo the perception created by his long affiliation with Wright and his church - the perception that he’s only confronting what’s wrong with Wright’s style of black politics because the media narrative is forcing him too, and that when the spotlight isn’t on him, he’s more interested in fitting in and feeling comfortable than in, well, speaking truth to power. But by using the Wright controversy as an opportunity to play up their candidate's strengths - as an orator, but more importantly as the rare politician who can deliver a thoughtful, nuanced speech and make you feel like he means it - the Obama campaign made some sweet-tasting lemonade out of some awfully sour lemons.

Photo by Flickr user Daniella Zalcman used under a Creative Commons license.

Solidarity

This is also nicely done:

For the men and women of Reverend Wright’s generation, the memories of humiliation and doubt and fear have not gone away; nor has the anger and the bitterness of those years. That anger may not get expressed in public, in front of white co-workers or white friends. But it does find voice in the barbershop or around the kitchen table. At times, that anger is exploited by politicians, to gin up votes along racial lines, or to make up for a politician’s own failings ... And occasionally it finds voice in the church on Sunday morning, in the pulpit and in the pews.

... In fact, a similar anger exists within segments of the white community. Most working- and middle-class white Americans don’t feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race. Their experience is the immigrant experience – as far as they’re concerned, no one’s handed them anything, they’ve built it from scratch. They’ve worked hard all their lives, many times only to see their jobs shipped overseas or their pension dumped after a lifetime of labor. They are anxious about their futures, and feel their dreams slipping away; in an era of stagnant wages and global competition, opportunity comes to be seen as a zero sum game, in which your dreams come at my expense. So when they are told to bus their children to a school across town; when they hear that an African American is getting an advantage in landing a good job or a spot in a good college because of an injustice that they themselves never committed; when they’re told that their fears about crime in urban neighborhoods are somehow prejudiced, resentment builds over time.

... Just as black anger often proved counterproductive, so have these white resentments distracted attention from the real culprits of the middle class squeeze – a corporate culture rife with inside dealing, questionable accounting practices, and short-term greed; a Washington dominated by lobbyists and special interests; economic policies that favor the few over the many. And yet, to wish away the resentments of white Americans, to label them as misguided or even racist, without recognizing they are grounded in legitimate concerns – this too widens the racial divide, and blocks the path to understanding.

He's a smart guy, that Barack Obama. (And you can see why Paul Krugman doesn't much care for him.)

Obama's White Grandmother

When I suggested, tentatively, that Obama should find a way to compare his relationship to Wright to a white American's relationship to a bigoted grandparent, it didn't even occur to me that he could do it this smoothly:

I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother – a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.

Well played.

Obama's Speech

Barack Obama’s long association with the Reverend Jeremiah Wright isn’t significant because it suggests that Obama shares Wright’s more controversial views; I have no doubt that he does not. It’s significant because it undercuts an important aspect of Obama’s promise as a politician: Namely, his potential to break the mold of American politics, by transcending both the recent templates for African-American political activity (grievance-based shakedown politics on the one hand, Afrocentric separatism on the other) and the larger red-blue polarization in the country as a whole. His decades-long embrace of Wright, seemingly untempered by any serious qualms about what his pastor represents politically, suggests that he isn’t willing to confront the rhetoric of division and polarization within his own community, let alone in the country as whole. Which in turn suggests that that far from being the man who will tell us what we need to hear, rather than what we want to hear, he's a go-along-to-get-along figure, a man who accepts The Way Things Are and doesn't rock the boat. In other words, that he's just another politician.

I don't know exactly what he should say in the speech that he's about to give. I think he needs to acknowledge – and acknowledge with specifics, rather than generalities – the ugliness of Wright’s political rhetoric. At the same time, I think he needs to remind his audience that this ugliness - what you might call the paranoid style in African-American politics - exists for a reason: Wright, and millions more like him, grew up in an era when it was hard for blacks to say "God Bless America" full-throatedly, and an era when paranoia about white conduct was only common sense, since the government of the United States was effectively engaged in a vast conspiracy against its black citizens. Then, while nodding to the persistence of racism, he needs to talk at length about how far we've come: He needs to argue that in many respects, Martin Luther King's dream of equality has been fulfilled, so that for a rising generation of African-Americans, America has finally become the promised land that their ancestors dreamed of all through the long dark night of slavery and segregation. And finally, he needs to explain why his generation - a generation that can say "God bless America" wholeheartedly, a generation that rejects and transcends the politics of division and fear and paranoia - nonetheless has an obligation not to cast out men like Jeremiah Wright, men who did a great deal of good in their time, but men who are now simply too old to recognize that America has changed, and too set in their ways to enter the promised land. He needs to reject his minister's politics, in other words, in the name of a new generation of African-Americans, while simultaneously suggesting that the bigotries are not necessarily the only measure of the man, and that the appropriate response to Wright's noxious words isn't outrage but rather the mix of pity and tolerance that a white American might feel toward a racist parent or grandparent, who deserves to be loved and accepted in spite of their retrograde opinions.

Could he actually say all this? Can a half-white, half-Kenyan politician presume to speak for the experience of black America? Can a man who clearly loves his pastor go so far down the road toward attacking him outright? Can a black man persuade white Americans that they should feel toward a ranting black preacher the way they might feel toward their own grandparents? I doubt it. But I'd love to see him try.

Denominations and Double Standards

Here's Matt's take on the Jeremiah Wright controversy:

I'm unsure, in general, of what the standards we're supposed to apply to the political views of politicians' favored clergy. I have no idea what the rabbis at Temple Rodef Shalom (where I've gone to synagogue the past few High Holy Days) or at The Village Temple (where I had my bar mitzvah) think about political issues, but I assume I don't agree with them about everything, and certainly it'd be odd to drag up old statements made by any of the relevant rabbis about this or that and then ask me to either endorse the statement or repudiate the entire congregation.

By the same token, we don't assume that a politician who goes to mass wants to ban birth control nor do we ask Catholics who favored preventive war with Iraq to repudiate the Pope in order to prove their hawk bona fides. In short, we generally assume that a politician's stated political views express his or her position on political topics, and that affiliating with a religious congregation does not constitute an endorsement of everything the leaders of that congregation have ever said.

Which is a long-winded way of saying that I see this as a basically trumped-up issue.

This is slightly more persuasive than Ezra’s take, but it still seems like somewhat strained analysis. Obviously, nobody's going to expect a High Holy Days Jew or a Christmas-and-Easter Christian to account for their clergyman’s political opinion, since he (or she) isn’t their clergyman in any meaningful sense of the word. As for why we don't see Catholic politicians being called upon to ritually denounce the Pope, one might begin with the fact that the Pope rarely makes political statements that fall wildly outside the mainstream of American politics. John Paul II and Benedict XVI's criticisms of abortion and euthanasia and gay marriage are right-wing by American standards, sure - just as some of their comments on economics are left-wing - but for better or worse (and I think better, obviously) they simply aren't considered beyond the pale in the way that Jeremiah Wright's comments about 9/11 and sundry other topics are. Back when Popes did make statements that fell beyond the pale of American discourse (in the Syllabus of Errors era, for instance) Catholics were frequently called upon to clarify their view of the Holy See's position, and while these calls were often laced with bigotry, they also raised valid questions about Catholicism's consonance with American democracy, questions that it was entirely appropriate for Catholics to answer - just as it's appropriate for Barack Obama to answer questions about his church's view of politics today.

More importantly, though, we don't demand that Catholic politicians answer for every Papal address and encyclical because most people understand that a cradle Catholic’s relationship to the magisterium of the Catholic Church tends to be dramatically different from a convert to Protestant Christianity's relationship to the pastor of the only church he's ever attended. A Catholic's relationship to his local priest is perhaps more comparable, though again the weight that Protestantism - particularly in its evangelical strains - places on individual ministry tends to make a Protestant's choice of minister far more revealing than a Catholic's choice of parish. (Traditionally, Catholics weren't even allowed to parish-shop; where you lived determined where you want to mass.) I would also add that in the course of attending mass at dozens of Catholic parishes over the last decade, I can't say I've heard a single homily remotely like the Wright sermons that are stirring up all the controversy. And if I did attend a Catholic church whose pastor went in for, say, the occasional rant about the Freemasons, I wouldn't be surprised if that fact made waves if I ever ran for office.

Here's a thought experiment: Suppose John McCain were a member of Opus Dei. Or to push things a bit further, suppose he attended a schismatic Latin-Mass parish which had, among other things, bestowed an award on a Lefebvrite bishop given to anti-Semitic remarks. Do you think this would earn him media scrutiny, and make a difference in the Presidential race? Do you think it ought to? Your answer, I think, should go a long way toward determining how you think about the case of Barack Obama and Jeremiah Wright.

Falwell and Wright

Ezra Klein’s a smart guy, so I’m assuming this is a parody of liberal cluelessness rather than the real thing:

Does anyone believe a long association with Jerry Falwell's church would have done anything but help McCain in the Republican primary, and gotten Democrats tagged as anti-religion when they tried to point out Falwell's nuttiness in the general? It's fine to be a Christian extremist in America. It's fine to believe, and say publicly, that everyone who hasn't accepted Jesus Christ into their heart will roast in eternal hellfire, fine to believe that the homosexuals caused Hurricane Katrina and the feminists contributed to 9/11, fine to believe we must support Israel so the Jews can be largely annihilated in a war that will trigger the End Times, fine to believe we're in a holy battle with the barbaric hordes of Islam, fine to believe that we went to the Middle East to prove "our God is bigger than your God." What you can't believe is that blacks have suffered a long history of oppression in this country, that they're still face deep institutional discrimination, and that a country where 100 percent of the presidents have been rich white guys is actually run by rich white guys. More to the point, even if you do believe those things, you certainly can't be angry about it!

What horseshit. If John McCain were an evangelical Christian and a longstanding member of Jerry Falwell’s congregation, and if he had written a memoir describing, say, how he was “born again” under Falwell’s influence, he would not be the Republican nominee today. With a great deal of luck, he might – might – have done as well in the primaries as Mike Huckabee did, and of course you may recall that Huck had all kinds of difficulties winning non-evangelical votes, faring particularly poorly among Catholics; you may recall, as well, that the press delighted in lobbing him questions about evolution and wives submitting to their husbands and all the rest of it, without any fear of being tagged as anti-religion. And of course Falwell’s brand of evangelical Christianity is considerably more controversial than Huckabee’s. And considerably more apocalyptic, one might add: Imagine, for instance, how McCain’s support of the surge, and his hawkishness more generally, would have been treated if he attended a church whose pastor's foreign policy views are defined by a belief in the imminence of Armageddon.

As to Ezra's larger point, of course it’s “fine” to be a white Christian extremist in America; it's also fine to be a black Christian extremist like Jeremiah Wright. This is a free country, after all. Nobody in the national media was parsing the Reverend Wright's sermons before the 2008 campaign, and nobody would be parsing them today if he was just one minister among many supporting Barack Obama for President. I have no doubt that many, many Democratic politicians have put in an appearance at churches whose pastors share Wright's outlandish political views without anyone kicking up a fuss, just as Republican politicians have long accepted the support of figures like Falwell without taking too much heat about it. The distinction here, for the umpteenth time, is that Wright isn't just Obama's supporter; he's his pastor, his friend, and his spiritual mentor, which makes him exactly the kind of person whose views ought to be of interest to a public that's considering electing Barack Obama President of the United States. And as to the substance of those views, well, if Ezra really thinks that Wright's sermons have sparked controversy because he broke a taboo against getting angry over the fact that "blacks have suffered a long history of oppression in this country" and "still face deep institutional discrimination," I would suggest that he take another look at them, paying particular attention to Wright's remarks about 9/11, as well as what appears to be his suggestion that the U.S. government created not only the crack epidemic, but the AIDS epidemic as well.

(It's also worth noting that two of the specific examples of white Christian extremism Ezra nods to - Falwell's 9/11 comments, and General William Boykin's "my God is bigger than your God" remarks - both provoked controversies that ended in public apologies, albeit of the mealy-mouthed, "I'm sorry if you were offended" variety. Whereas I'm not holding my breath waiting for Reverend Jeremiah Wright to "clarify" his remarks.)

It Isn't Brain Surgery (Or Is It?)

I'm sorry if Will Wilkinson took offense at my query about prostitution and incest. I took him to be comparing sex work to carpentry and writing, and it struck me that this analogy suggested a view of sex as a sufficiently banal, devoid-of-moral-content activity - akin to hammering a nail or writing a blog post - as to render any prohibition on the sexual abuse of children somewhat incomprehensible. In his latest post, Will explains that sex work is "emotionally complicated" and "not always pleasant," and therefore is more like surgery, or policing, or hospice care than like basic carpentry or word processing; thus, teaching your child to give a handjob is wrong because it's the equivalent of asking your child to operate on a gunshot wound victim. I appreciate the clarification - not least because this analogy suggests that Will might be amenable to some sort of regulation on sex work. Perhaps we could require would-be hookers to attend accredited academies, as we do with cops and doctors, and streetwalkers could be prosecuted for practicing without a license. (I believe John Derbyshire has suggested something along these lines, and Ezra Klein seems like he'd be amenable, so the proposal would start out with bipartisan support.)

My Country, Right Or Wrong

As defenses of patriotism go, I tend to incline more toward Daniel Larison's rejoinder to George Kateb's essay than toward the response to Kateb offered by Walter Berns. Berns takes the view that "the decisive issue in an appropriate analysis of patriotism" is the sort of government that a patriot is asked to love. But I'm with Larison: It's a mistake to conflate a country and its regime, and a patriot who ceases to love his country because it happens to be governed by a despot is no patriot at all.

This doesn't mean that the patriot has to love the despot, or follow his commands. Love of country does not require absolute obedience to its government (indeed, it often requires the opposite), any more than love of family requires absolute obedience to one's parents, or absolute support for whatever one's children or siblings decide to do with themselves. This is what Chesterton meant with his famous dictum that "'My country, right or wrong,' is a thing that no patriot would think of saying. It is like saying, 'My mother, drunk or sober.'" (Though I would add that if you read them slightly differently - as statements of abiding love in bad times, rather than blanket endorsements of bad conduct - "my country, right or wrong" and "my mother, drunk or sober" are potentially admirable sentiments.) And it's a distinction that's missing from both Kateb's and Berns's essays, both of which seem to assume that the regime is the country, and vice versa, and that to love one is to love the other.

The only complicating factor occurs in a case like the United States, where the character of the regime and the character of the people are bound together so tightly that it's hard to imagine one without the other. The government-country distinction is easier to make in countries where regimes change willy-nilly, and while obviously our regime isn't identical to the one founded in 1789, our democratic temper - both institutional and cultural - has endured through the transition from a decentralized republic to a mass democracy with a sizable administrative state. So whereas France would still be France if the current Republic were dissolved and a monarchy or a dictatorship took its place, there's a sense in which imagining an America governed by an emperor or a military junta is a little like imagining a France whose inhabitants no longer speak French.

They Hold Conventions, Don't They?

Matt, riffing on this Mark Schmitt post about the Clinton camp's ability to get the press to pretend that their candidate still has a chance at the nomination when she almost certainly doesn't:

The strangest thing about the twilight campaign of the past several weeks is that under any other circumstances, it just wouldn't be happening. Or, rather, it would be like the last few races that Mike Huckabee ran -- covered as an amusing sideshow. But because of the fact that Bill and Hillary Clinton and their close associates have been the leaders of the Democratic Party for so long at this point, they've been able to take a remarkably slender thread of hope and spin it into a full-fledged horse race. At this point, though, they're perpetrating something of a fraud on their many grassroots supporters who continue to invest money, time, and energy in an already-failed enterprise.

The bottom line, however, is that before the March primaries, Clinton looked doomed unless she could make up major ground in March. With all the March results in, Clinton hasn't made up any ground at all. That means she's doomed. The popular vote victory in the Texas primary is a nice moral victory for Clinton to console herself with, but the overall results just didn't create the kind of delegate count she needed to be viable.

But she isn't viable only if you assume the narrative that the Obama campaign has been pushing, in which the candidate with the most delegates at the end of the primary campaign wins the race regardless of whether he's reached the magic number of 2,025. Now, this narrative has a certain plausibility, but it's by no means the only narrative out there; indeed, if you'd asked me a few months ago what would happen if neither Obama nor Clinton reached 2,025 pledged delegates but both were within hailing distance of that number, I would have said "brokered convention," because that's what used to happen in these kind of circumstances. I'm a little murky on the exact details of the 1976 race (paging Michael Barone ...), but it's my impression that Gerald Ford was ahead in the delegate count going into the Republican convention, and that he had won many more primary votes than Ronald Reagan, who accumulated a lot of his delegates in less-than-democratic caucuses. But Ford wasn't far enough ahead to have clinched the nomination under party rules, and Reagan still made a play for the nomination at the convention, and nearly pulled it off. Which is how the primaries-plus-convention system is designed to work: If you don't accumulate a clear majority, you don't get to win on the first ballot, even if you have more delegates than everyone else. Thus Mike Huckabee's continued candidacy was a sideshow because John McCain was more or less guaranteed a first-ballot victory after Romney dropped out; if McCain's ability to reach the magic number had been in serious doubt after Super Tuesday, there would have been every reason to take Huck seriously, and Romney would have been a fool to quit the race in the first place.

Now obviously the Ford-Reagan race took place in a transitional period from the smoke-filled rooms of yore to the more democratic system of today, and it's entirely possible that if you re-ran the 1976 contest in our era, it would have been a Ford coronation at the convention, rather than a nip-and-tuck battle. But the nominating process still isn't perfectly democratic by any stretch, what with the caucuses in some states and the primaries in others, the arcane delegate-assignment rules, and of course the presence of the superdelegates. And it seems perfectly reasonable for the Clinton campaign to treat the race the way it would have been treated back in the day: As a contest that won't be settled until Denver, regardless of whether Barack Obama has won more votes and delegates than they have.

Photograph Courtesy of Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library

The Democrats And God

Russell Arben Fox, in the course of a characteristically thoughtful post on the book and the issues it raises, wonders why more people aren't discussing and debating Amy Sullivan's The Party Faithful. I suspect that the book would be getting more attention if the Democratic race weren't so dominated by debates over race and gender, which are temporarily swamping even hot-button topics like religion. But if you're looking for a break from the debate over Geraldine Ferraro's racism (or lack thereof), both Amy's book and E.J. Dionne's similarly-themed Souled Out make for thought-provoking reading - as the transcript and clips from this panel discussion (which happens to include yours truly) hopefully suggest.

The Politician and the Preacher

You can find my take on the Jeremiah Wright contretemps over at the Current. I had been skeptical about the notion that Wright's racialist theology would turn out to be Obama's Achilles heel, as Rod Dreher among others has suggested it might be, in part because I have the sense that most Americans view the mild Afrocentrism that many black churches dabble in with a mix of (appropriate) tolerance and (inappropriate) condescension, rather than with fear or distaste. But after watching these videos, I'm inclined to think that Wright's Chomskyite politics - and particularly the Ward Churchill-style, "chickens coming home to roost" take on 9/11 - represent a real hazard for the Obama camp, and one that the candidate needs to find a way to address directly, rather than just waving it away. Like Daniel Larison, I think there's something to be said for politicians refusing to bow to media pressure to disavow their friends, even when those friends happen to be kooks. But Wright is a mentor, rather than just a chum, which makes his kookery more relevant - and if he's really Obama's friend he'll understand that a man hoping to President needs to be "forceful and candid," as Andrew puts it, about their relationship, and more explicit than Obama's been so far about repudiating Wright's politics.

One other point about the Reverend: He seems like a truly remarkable showman in the pulpit, whatever you think of the opinions he's expressing. And given the amount of attention lavished on Obama's preacherly cadences, it's interesting to contrast the restraint of Obama's style of sermonizing with his pastor's vastly more flamboyant approach:

The Obama Effect

Via Marc, I think that the explanation Mark Blumenthal advances to explain why increasing numbers of Republicans are pulling the lever for Hillary Clinton - that they're taking the opportunity to express a strong preference for a Clinton Presidency over an Obama Presidency, even though they might ultimately go for McCain in the general election - makes a lot more sense than the "Limbaugh effect" theory, in which GOP voters are cynically trying to prolong the Democratic race and ensure that the Dems nominate the least electable candidate. Obviously, these two explanations aren't mutually exclusive: One could prefer having Hillary in the White House and believe that she'd be easier to beat come November, especially after a bloody primary campaign. But if we're hazarding a guess as to which motive matters most, I'd plump for the more straightforward one, and assume that in most cases someone who votes for Hillary over Obama does so because, well, they prefer Hillary to Obama.

What's The Big Deal About Sex?

Will Wilkinson, on the ethics of renting your body out for sex:

... absolutely every form of labor involves renting out your body. The language of “selling your body” is generally intended to elicit a “wisdom of repugnance² disgust response, but it just doesn¹t when you consider that folks like Ross and me get paid for things we do with our bodies - thinking, typing. Surgeons rent out their brains, and steady hands, to meet people¹s health needs. Construction workers rent out their arms, legs, backs, brains. Etc. I sell my body for a living. So do you.
I think the real claim is not about bodies, but about vaginas and penises in particular ... But bracket your intuitions about the commercial use of genitalia for a moment and consider that a good volume of trade in sexual services involves renting an expert hand. Couldusing your hand to give another person an orgasm possibly be a form of self-inflicted violence? Delivering manual relief is a great kindness, a sweet thing to do … unless you do it for money! At this level, Ross¹s claim is evidently ludicrous. Sweet charity cannot be transformed into self-inflicted violence by a twenty dollar bill.

Kerry Howley makes a similar point:

There are any number of activities that we classify, in different contexts, as both work and markers of intimacy. You can prepare a meal for your family in the morning as an act of love, and for customers in the afternoon as a source of income. You can take care of a sick spouse and expect nothing in return, and take care of sick strangers and demand a paycheck. Yes, yes, I know - sex is different. But I'm still waiting for a convincing explanation of how and why that doesn’t hinge on the stigmatization of sexually active women.

She’s right: Any distinction between renting out your body for sexual gratification and renting out your body to, say, hammer nails is only persuasive if you accept the contention that there is a significant distinction between sexual intercourse and other kinds of human activity. And she’s also right, I think, that any such distinction has implications for sexual morality in general, not just prostitution. If you think that sex, by virtue of being bound up not only culturally but biologically with emotional attachment on the one hand and reproduction on the other, is a unique kind of physical act, one that’s intimate by its very nature in a way that, say, preparing dinner isn’t, then it makes sense to assign a hierarchy of moral value (and moral stigma) to different kinds of sexual activity – most likely with monogamy at the top, serial monogamy somewhat lower, promiscuity lower still, and activities that treat sex as a commodity to be bought and sold somewhere near the bottom. I don’t think, however, that accepting this sort of hierarchy, and believing that some of the acts at the bottom deserves to be banned as well as stigmatized, requires you to shun any girl with multiple notches on her bedpost as a slut, any more than believing in a moral hierarchy that runs from true generosity to miserliness requires you to show the mildly stingy the same disdain you would bestow Ebenezer Scrooge or Mr. Potter. (Though I will admit that given the history of the sexual double standard, one can certainly see where feminists get the idea that any sexual standard at all is just a stalking horse for misogyny, and that they have to throw out moral distinctions entirely to get rid of the bathwater of patriarchy.)

I have a serious question, though, regarding the point of view that treats the handjob as just another form of manual labor, no different from laying bricks or mowing lawns. There’s been a lot of talk during this whole debate about the fact that many prostitutes were sexually abused as children, and from my point of view, of course, this correlation makes perfect sense: If you’re abused by others as a child, you’re more likely to seek out self-destructive behaviors as an adult. In the Wilkinson-Howley worldview, I presume, the correlation has more to do with our unjust war on sex than with anything inherent to the sex trade: If prostitution is outlawed and pushed to the margins of society, only marginal, damaged people end up becoming prostitutes. You’d have more well-adjusted call girls, presumably, if streetwalking were legalized.

Now this is fair enough so far as it goes, but it seems to beg an important question: Given the premises of the pro-prostitution worldview, what’s so abusive and damaging about incest and molestation in the first place? If there’s no moral distinction between giving a handjob in exchange for twenty dollars and getting paid twenty bucks to wash dishes or mow lawns, then why is there a moral distinction between a father who teaches his daughter how to pound nails and one who teaches his daughter to do something more intimate and (to go all wisdom-of-repugnance on you) disgusting? I understand that the kids involved aren’t “consenting adults,” but if selling sex is just like selling labor, and adults force kids to perform all kinds of menial tasks as part of their education, why can’t adults force kids to have intercourse too – especially if they’re safe about it? If selling sex is no big deal because sex itself is no big deal, what’s the big deal about incest?

Prostitution and Subsidiarity

I'd like to associate myself with Jim Manzi's remarks on the subject.

Prostitution, Morality and the Law (II)

Noah Millman, responding to my earlier post:

But there are lots of ways to abuse yourself, right? A steady diet of Krispy Kremes would do some serious abuse to your body (or, I should say, the body that is you – in this scheme, the body is not an owned thing that is yours). Not serious enough to warrant legal sanction? Well, gluttony is one of the seven deadlies, right up there with lust. And the medievals did have all sorts of laws regulating consumption. Are we going there? Or pick some other sex examples: I don’t believe Ross approves of legislation against sodomy, masturbation or adultery. But those are all behaviors that are traditionally understood to be “self-abusive” (indeed, what does “self-abuse” traditionally mean?), and the last of them (adultery) isn’t even arguably victimless. Why not ban them? The law can be a moral teacher, after all, even when it’s not aggressively enforced, as Ross himself says.

Why are some forms of paternalism – of which morals legislation form a sub-category – OK and others are insulting to a free people? I don’t think you can get back to an answer that prostitution is the sort of thing we should keep illegal without some argument about the power relations that predominate in the transaction in question.

I actually think it’s perfectly possible to distinguish between forms of moral paternalism without resorting to arguments about whether the behavior that's up for regulation is ultimately non-consensual. Here are four grounds one might employ: The seriousness of the form of self-abuse in question, the avoidability of the abuse (to borrow from from Aquinas's argument that the law should only prohibit vices "which it is possible for the greater part of the multitude to abstain from"), the plausibility of regulation, and the private/public distinction. So masturbation, for instance, is a private and well-nigh universal vice (among men, at least) with no plausible means of interdiction. Sodomy and adultery are likewise acts that can only be regulated through extreme invasions of privacy; moreover, the fact that homosexuality seems to be an innate orientation rather than a choice means that even if one views same-sex sodomy as immoral, it isn't plausible to expect "the greater part of the multitude" who are inclined toward homosexuality to abstain from it. (I'm stretching Aquinas's argument a bit, but not implausibly, I think.)

The possession and abuse of illegal drugs can similarly only be prohibited at a significant cost to personal privacy. I tend to think the gravity of the self-abuse involved outweighs the cost to privacy, but only in some cases: If you’re growing marijuana in your basement, the law should probably leave you alone; if you’re running a meth lab, it probably shouldn’t.

Continue reading "Prostitution, Morality and the Law (II)" »

Prostitution and Promiscuity

Kerry Howley, criticizing feminists who oppose legalizing prostitution:

… Of course sexism restricts autonomy in all sorts of ways that deserve consideration when discussing the prevalence of prostitution or the choice to enter sex work. Of course it’s deplorable that sexually adventurous young women are constantly told they are “degrading themselves” by seeking out various experiences, that every bit of enjoyment eats away at some secret store of purity. This whole tradition–the idea that women need be preserved in glass so as not to “ruin” themselves, lest they diminish their sexual value by “giving it away”–restricts the lived autonomy of women in ways I can’t even begin to articulate. None of the slut-shaming makes sense unless you assume women live to give themselves to men in their purest possible form.

If you find all of these cultural pathologies unfortunate, what is the public policy you should prefer? It seems to me that it is not the policy that deems it a crime against the American people to open your legs. Anti-prostitution laws add a layer of legal sanction to all of our worst intuitions about the treatment of sexually independent women; they strengthen and validate the idea that women who bed men with any frequency are sick, marginal, pariahs. Even decriminalization, which treats Johns as outlaws and sex workers as victims, assumes that all sex workers are damaged, that no woman would ever love sex enough to make a career out of it. And why not? Well, because every woman knows that she is her sexual purity rating. No sane woman would ever choose to mess that up.

In sum: If we are ever going to introduce a conceptual distinction between the moral character of individual women and the integrity of their hymens, it seems extremely important not to criminalize aberrant sexual behaviors.

Hmm. The suggestion that there exists no middle ground between the virgin/whore dynamic on the one hand and a wholesale acceptance of every single kind of sexual practice on the other strikes me as moderately fanciful. The notion that the "women need be preserved in glass so as not to 'ruin' themselves" tradition is in any way dominant in American life today strikes me as fantastic in the extreme. But then again, I'm speaking as someone who thinks that there might be a few reasons besides an irrational attachment to the patriarchy to think that a little “shaming” here and there isn’t the worst response to sexual promiscuity - male and female alike. So I'm not really the target audience for this kind of argument.

I do wish, though, that we heard this sort of line from sexual liberationists more often. A debate in which Kerry Howley's side is committed to the position that true sexual liberation requires removing any distinction between having sex for love or pleasure and having sex for money is a debate that social conservatives can win. I think.

The Costs Of Living

Ezra writes:

… I was looking at some family income distribution numbers yesterday and was a bit surprised by how the distribution looked. To enter the Top 20 percent, you need to be making $88,000 a year. To enter the Top 5 percent, you need to make $157,000 a year. I've known a lot of families making around $150,000, and none of them would have described themselves as much beyond upper middle class, or "doing pretty well." And though I'd call Top 5 percent rich, in income terms, I probably would have said $250,000.

In response, Matt makes some good points about the crudeness of family income as a metric of actual wealth. I would add that geographical variations in the cost of living make an enormous difference as well, and one obvious reason why a family of Ezra’s acquaintance making around $150,000 annually might not describe themselves as rich would be that, well, they probably aren’t - at least not if they live in the greater New York or Washington or Los Angeles area, where the cost of living is far too high for 150 grand to buy the kind of lifestyle that most Americans associate with being wealthy.

I would also note that when I say the “cost of living” I really mean the “cost of raising children,” since a childless couple in NYC or DC making $150,000 annually enjoys a vastly different lifestyle than a couple trying to raise 2 or 3 school-age children on the same salary. This distinction is worth pondering in the context of the debate over whether conservatives should push for child-friendly tax policy; it’s also worth pondering the context of the desuburbanization agenda beloved of progressives nowadays. You’ll frequently hear Ezra and Matt, among others, lamenting the latticework of subsidies and tax breaks that incentivize Americans to buy biggish homes in spread-out suburbs and exurbs, rather than clustering more efficiently in inner-ring ‘burbs, medium-sized towns and urban cores. But of course these policies don’t just redistribute people from energy-saving cities to gas-guzzling exurbs; they also effectively redistribute money away from the singletons, childless couples and small families who are more likely to be drawn to urban areas, and to the larger families that are more likely to be drawn to bigger yards, quieter streets, and houses with 3-5 bedrooms.

Obviously, if you’re the sort of progressive (or conservative) who doesn’t think the government should show any pro-family bias at all, you won’t have a problem with a policy agenda that eliminates this sort of redistribution. And just as obviously, there may be more effective (and energy-efficient) ways to make it easier for parents to raise the next generation of taxpaying Americans: I’d happily combine a Ponnuru-style tax reform with, say, congestion pricing on highways and a smaller home-mortgage deduction. (And making it easier to build in urban areas is a good idea, period.) But all things being equal, it’s worth keeping in mind what when progressives talk about fighting sprawl and incentivizing re-urbanization, they’re often talking about making it vastly more expensive to raise kids the way most Americans want to raise them.

Photo by Flickr user PeterBaker used under a Creative Commons license.

Prostitution, Morality and the Law

Megan writes:

Revulsion against sex work isn't unique to female prostitutes. We're also repulsed by men who sell themselves to women, even though there's a general cultural assumption that a healthy man wants to have sex with nearly every female he sees. Something about sex work violates a deep belief--whether cultural or hard wired I don't know--that sex should only be traded for affection.

But if the only prostitutes were men selling themselves to women, no one would want to make it illegal. Supporting yourself that way might bring social opprobrium, like becoming a Morris dancer or eating live chickens--can't you find something better to do? But we wouldn't criminalize it in the name of protecting them from violence, criminals, or the untold horrors of multiple anonymous sexual encounters.

Um ... I would still want to make it illegal. I wouldn't want to make it illegal in the name of protecting gigolos from violence or unprotected sex, but then again, that's not fundamentally why I think female prostitution should be illegal either. I think the "protecting vulnerable women" case against legalizing sex work is a perfectly reasonable supplemental argument for keeping the ban in place, but ultimately the case for the ban stands or falls on one's view of morals legislation: First, whether it's appropriate for the law to restrain people from activities that are freely chosen but ultimately self-abusive and morally degrading, and second, whether prostitution, female and male alike, is sufficiently self-abusive and degrading to warrant legal sanction.

Pace Glenn Greenwald, I suspect that a great many people in the United States would answer yes to both questions. But based on the response to the Spitzer case (and the Vitter case before it), it appears that nearly the entire liberal (and libertarian, though that's to be expected) intelligentsia would answer no the first, and dismiss the second as an irrelevancy.

Hence the search, among those liberals leery about making sex work legal, for arguments that suggest that all prostitution is essentially non-consensual - that it's too exploitative by its very nature to count as something "consenting adults" should be allowed to do. But the evidence they muster tends to depend on a pre-existing moral bias against making prostitution legal. For instance:

... most women in prostitution, including those working for escort services, have been sexually abused as children, studies show. Incest sets young women up for prostitution — by letting them know what they’re worth and what’s expected of them. Other forces that channel women into escort prostitution are economic hardship and racism.

All true - but the obvious pro-legalization rejoinder is that being sexually abused as a child, or being born poor and black in inner-city Baltimore, pushes people toward all kinds of life choices that we don't choose to regulate. We don't forbid women who were molested by their fathers from dating older men who treat them unkindly and use them for sex, and we don't make it illegal for poor women to work unpleasant jobs cleaning houses or serving food at McDonalds. It only makes sense to ban prostitution if it's in the same moral/legal category as incest itself, rather than being akin to the kind of run-of-the-mill exploitative relationship that incest might incline a woman (or man) toward later in life. Which is to say, laws against prostitution ultimately depend on the assumption that the state has an interest in preventing serious forms of self-abuse, and that renting out your body to satisfy another person's sexual needs is a form of self-inflicted violence serious enough to merit legal sanction irrespective of why and how you decided to become a prostitute in the first place.

I should note that taking this position, as I do, doesn't preclude supporting changes in how we enforce prostitution laws - by targeting johns and pimps, say, and letting streetwalkers off with a slap on the wrist - any more than my belief that crack cocaine ought to be illegal means that I wholeheartedly support the war on drugs. The view that the law should be a moral teacher where certain forms of conduct are concerned leaves one with plenty of latitude for making prudential decisions about how and where that teaching should be carried out.

Good Riddance

Megan, JPod, and Reihan agree: American politics is better off without Eliot Spitzer.

More Chatter on The Wire

The valedictory conversation continues. Here's part 2:

You can watch parts 3 and 4 here.

The Electability Primary

Jim Geraghty notes that Obama's long-running edge over Hillary in head-to-head matchups with John McCain seems to be evaporating.

The Politics of Immigration

Riffing on Dave Weigel’s post-mortem on the Paul campaign, in which Weigel suggests that Paul should have spent less time talking up his restrictionist position on immigration, Matt writes:

Time and again, I think you see that the issue of immigrant- and immigration-bashing just doesn't carry the political force that its advocates are constantly claiming and that all-too-many of its opponents seem to fear. I recall when it started to seem like maybe Mike Huckabee could be a serious contender and he, notwithstanding a sensible record on immigration, decided to go hire hard-core restrictionist Jim Pinkerton. Just before going to work for Huckabee, Pinkerton was going around Washington talking about how despite Iraq and the economy, immigration was going to deliver the election to the GOP. It turned out that restrictionism couldn't even win a Republican primary.

I don’t think there’s any question that many immigration restrictionists overstate the salience of the issue. (That’s what single-issue activists do!) But one reason that “restrictionism couldn’t even win a Republican primary” is that every single candidate – including John McCain, in rhetoric if not reality – ran as, well, a “secure the borders first” restrictionist. Now, some of them were more plausible in this role than others, but if you were a GOP voter following the race casually rather than obsessively, I think you’d be forgiven for assuming that all of the candidates were more or less on the same page on the issue. It’s not as if John McCain swept to an easy victory while promising to immediately revive comprehensive immigration reform; he limped and stumbled to a plurality victory while promising that he’d learned the error of his ways on the issue. This suggests that immigration may not matter to GOP primary voters as much as Jim Pinkerton thinks it does, but not that it doesn’t matter at all.

Likewise, I tend to think that immigration restrictionism could carry a great deal of “political force” in a general election – but only if it were handed with finesse and moderation, rather than the sort of “Death of the West” hysteria that seems like the default mode for too many immigration opponents. Americans want border security and they want a lower immigration rate; what they don’t want is to feel like they're being asked to vote for “Operation Wetback, Part II.” Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem like there are any Republican politicians who actually believe in the moderate-restrictionist position. Instead, there are politicians who make restrictionist promises they don't intend to keep in the hopes of keeping the yahoo vote appeased, and politicians who sound like, well, yahoos themselves. Campaigning on a moderate-restrictionist position hasn’t been tried and found wanting; it’s been left more or less untried.

Is Patriotism a Mistake?

This Cato Unbound dialogue, kicked off by George Kateb's characteristically provocative anti-patriotism broadside, promises to be really, really interesting. (I hope one of the respondents brings up John Lukacs' patriotism/nationalism distinction; I'm curious what Kateb thinks about it.)

Condi For Veep?

Like Hendrik Hertzberg, I can see a case for John McCain picking Condoleezza Rice as his running mate, though I think Hertzberg glosses too quickly over the ideological difficulties such a pick would pose for a candidate who already has difficulty exciting the right-wing rank and file. What I can't see, frankly, is the case for Rice accepting the veep's slot if it were offered. The job would effectively constitute a demotion, since she would almost certainly be less influential as the VP in a McCain Administration than she is as Bush's Secretary of State (and trusted confidante). Moreover, while McCain would be effectively anointing her his heir, if she has designs on the Presidency - and I don't think she does, but of course you never know - I actually think she'd be better positioned for a run if she establishes some sort of non-executive branch identity (by running for governor of California, for instance) than if she spends the next four-to-eight years hanging around Dick Cheney's old digs.

Coming Attractions

At the risk of ascribing motivations to Orlando Patterson that he may not actually harbor, I think his much-blogged-about op-ed in today's Times - in which he charges the Clinton campaign with injecting subliminal racist messages into its "red phone" ad - looks like an attempt to write talking points that the Obama camp might employ when it comes time to respond to the barrage of foreign policy attacks their candidate will undoubtedly face from John McCain this fall. I don't think it represents a particularly effective set of talking points: The long-running liberal complaint - sometimes justified, often not - that conservative arguments on crime and welfare were just code for racism didn't win the Democratic Party many victories at the polls, and Patterson's attempt to apply this template to the national security debate feels like awfully weak stuff. But if Obama finds himself on the defensive on foreign policy this fall, I wouldn't be surprised to see his surrogates pick up where Patterson's op-ed leaves off, and try to label certain kinds of security-related attacks as racist, and therefore out-of-bounds.

Stand By Your ...

Michelle Cottle, on the unhappy Mrs. Spitzer:

... how many men do you think would really do the same for their wives? Consider it: You wake up one morning to discover that the papers are awash in juicy details (and even juicier innuendo) about how you are such a loser that your woman went out looking to pay some young stud to scratch her itch. You are utterly humiliated. You want nothing more than to phone the meanest divorce lawyer in the state. Instead, you get to shower, shave, put on your special-occasion tie, and try your best to look aggreived yet supportive while standing two-steps behind your lying, cheating tramp of a wife--possibly even holding her hand--in front of God and 10,000 drooling reporters all thinking that you must be the most pitiful creature on the planet. Riiiight. That's gonna happen a lot.

Leaving aside the prostitution angle, it's hard to think of many recent adultery scandals involving politicians' marriages where the wife was accused of stepping out on her husband. There was the Andrew Cuomo/Kerry Kennedy marriage, where he charged her with adultery after they had already filed for divorce. There was the case of Nicolas and Cecilia Sarkozy: She conducted a public affair in 2005 - when he was conducting an affair as well, needless to say - and then returned to him during his campaign for the Presidency. (And we all know how that turned out.) Those are the only examples that spring to mind; can anyone think of others?

The Best Of All Possible Games

Via Crooked Timber, I see that John Rawls got at least one thing right. Here he is channeling the legal scholar Harry Kalven on the perfections on baseball:

… the game does not give unusual preference or advantage to special physical types, e.g., to tall men as in basketball. All sorts of abilities can find a place somewhere, the tall and the short etc. can enjoy the game together in different positions.

… the game uses all parts of the body: the arms to throw, the legs to run, and to swing the bat, etc.; per contra soccer where you can’t touch the ball. It calls upon speed, accuracy of throw, gifts of sight for batting, shrewdness for pitchers and catchers, etc.

… all plays of the game are open to view: the spectators and the players can see what is going on. Per contra football where it is hard to know what is happening in the battlefront along the line. Even the umpires can’t see it all, so there is lots of cheating etc. And in basketball, it is hard to know when to call a foul. There are close calls in baseball too, but the umps do very well on the whole, and these close calls arise from the marvelous timing built into the game and not from trying to police cheaters etc.

… baseball is the only game where scoring is not done with the ball, and this has the remarkable effect of concentrating the excitement of plays at different points of the field at the same time. Will the runner cross the plate before the fielder gets to the ball and throws it to home plate, and so on.

Finally, there is the factor of time, the use of which is a central part of any game. Baseball shares with tennis the idea that time never runs out, as it does in basketball and football and soccer. This means that there is always time for the losing side to make a comeback …

One could go on to note the perfect balance that baseball strikes between team effort and individual performance, a balance at once deeply Christian and deeply small-d democratic. Or its paradoxical nature, which inspires quantification and romanticization in equal measure, and offers food for statheads as well as novelists, conservatives as well as liberals, historians as well as business writers. Or …

No, enough. No argument, however self-evidently powerful, will persuade those deluded souls – and they do exist! – who would argue that the qualities that Rawls and Kalven considered strengths are actually weaknesses. Those who would claim that baseball’s physical ecumenism – the sport’s ability to find a place for Chone Figgins as well as Vladimir Guerrero, for John Kruk as well as Bo Jackson - makes it ultimately inferior to basketball or football or soccer as a test of athletic ability. Those who would assert that the skills that baseball requires are too idiosyncratic to be interesting – that whereas everyone can appreciate the physical strength required to be an offensive lineman, or the speed and agility required of a small forward, only a crank or an obsessive can get worked up about how well a paunchy middle-aged man flicks a curve or spins a knuckleball. Those who would aver that baseball’s clocklessness, its out-of-time quality and its inclination toward eternity, just means that the games take too damn long.

Such people are beyond the reach of reason. Also, they’re communists.

Giuliani Time

Nothing in his lackluster Presidential campaign suggested any real appetite for the rough-and-tumble of politics, or any ambition for higher office beyond the sense of cosseted entitlement associated with being a rich celebrity. So it’s hard to imagine Rudy Giuliani mustering the energy to run for governor of the Empire State in the looming post-Spitzer era. I will say, though, that if Rudy did still harbor political ambitions (and its hard to imagine that a man with his ego is thrilled to have the ’08 primary season remembered his political swan song), a term in Albany would offer certain attractions. He could govern from the center-left and try to revive the Rockefeller-Republican brand for a new era of Democratic dominance. Or he could govern from the right, picking fights with blue-state interest groups in the hopes of retooling his image with conservatives in time for the 2016 Presidential race. (He’d only be 70 – younger than McCain!)

Laugh if you will, but stranger things have happened, and the Republican Party will look very different eight years from now than it does today. Rudy won't try it, but he wouldn't be crazy if he did.

The Spitzer Wiretap

I have to assume the feds' next target will be Maryland Governor Tommy Carcetti.

Posner On Buckley

He makes some fair points, but this passage strikes me as somewhat obtuse:

The suggestion in the obituaries that he united free-market economists with other conservatives is especially misleading. Free-market economists have always been on a different track from the kind of political and social conservative that Buckley exemplified. He was a friend of free markets, but on moral grounds rather than because he thought the market a more efficient method of allocating resources than the government, though he thought that also.

The conservative economic movement has had two major streams, which are convergent. One is the Austrian school, whose best-known exemplar was Friedrich Hayek ... The other stream, largely independent of the Austrian, originated with maverick economists, such as Milton Friedman, Aaron Director, and George Stigler, who at the height of the 1930s depression, when free-market economics was in the dog house and the Soviet Union's collectivist economy was widely admired including among economists, had the temerity (like Hayek) to argue that collectivist regulation of the economy was inferior to leaving the regulation of economic activity to the market ...

... The movement received virtually no hearing during the 1960s, the era of the "Great Society" programs of Lyndon Johnson. However, the stagflation of the 1970s exposed the failure of conventional “liberal” (in the welfare-state sense) policies, promoted increased acceptance of free-market economics, and stimulated the deregulation and privatization movements, which began in the Clinton Administration and expanded in the Reagan and (first) Bush Administration, continuing into the Clinton Administration, notably with welfare reform.

All this had nothing to do with William Buckley. Most of the causes dearest to his heart were unrelated to economic policy, such as his belief about the proper strategies for defending against the Soviet Union, expelling Soviet agents from the federal government, or defeating our current enemies ...

Buckley may not have united free-market economists with conservatives (though I think even that assertion is open to question), but he certainly united free-market economics with conservatism, and that marriage had a considerable impact on the developments that Posner claims Buckley had "nothing to do with." In the 1970s as today, debates over economic policy - or any policy question - aren't just settled on questions of efficiency and growth maximization; they're settled in public arguments where questions of morality play a not-insignificant role. And by wedding conservatives (and others) to the idea that the free market might be not only morally defensible but actually morally superior to socialism, Buckley helped make free-market economics seem politically as well as theoretically appealing - and that made an enormous difference to its eventual success.

See also Gary Becker's thoughts.

Exit Simon

The Wire's creator has his say, at length.

(Also, he'll be on NPR's Talk of the Nation, along with Ed Burns, at 3 PM today, if you feel like calling in and grilling him.)

Untangling The Wire

Just before the finale aired, we taped a conversation about the show with Mark Bowden and Jeffrey Goldberg, both of whom have written extensively about The Wire recently. I was the (none-too-smooth) moderator; you can watch part one here:

If you're looking for post-finale commentary, you can find the Goldberg take over at Slate; for a jaundiced view, try the Sun's David Zurawik; for a critical but somewhat more favorable assessment, head over to the House Next Door.

Notes on The Wire

Overall, I incline toward the Slate dialoguers’ take (and Matt's) on this season of The Wire, rather than the more favorable view that you’ll find at the House Next Door. Not that the season isn’t riveting television; not that I’m not desperately anticipating for the finale; not that David Simon and Co. are guilty of anything except failing to live up to the ridiculously high standard that they’ve set for themselves. But it remains the case that they just haven’t quite lived up to it. The newspaper plot would be an entertaining morality play in a different, lesser show, but compared to what The Wire has done with other institutions and their inhabitants it’s weak stuff indeed: A succession of one-note characters acting out a story that’s at best tangential to the state of newspapers, circa 2008. (If only Pulitzer-hungry editors and scumbag fabulists were the biggest problems facing papers like the Sun!) The season as a whole has been at once more melodramatic and more didactic than the ones that have come before, and while I’ve come to terms with the lurch toward soap opera – fake serial killers! kidnapped homeless men! – in the police-procedural plotline, there have been too many moments when Simon's declinist worldview (and his view of himself as Jeremiah crying unheeded in the wilderness) has felt like an artistic weakness rather than the strength it's always been.

I wrote a post a while back arguing that it can be a good thing when great television shows either set early end-dates on their own or get saddled with them, and that many of the high points of recent television from The X-Files to The Sopranos would have benefited artistically if their creators had wound them up earlier than they actually did. I certainly wouldn't go so far as to suggest that The Wire has overstayed its welcome; even with all its weaknesses, this season is still vastly stronger than the some of the more middling stretches of The Sopranos. But having just re-watched the whole of Simon's creation, for start to (almost) finish, I do think that if you compare the show to literature, as so many of its admirers do, the first three seasons feel like an organic whole, a single masterpiece - whereas seasons four and (especially) five are interesting and imperfect sequels to the original Great American Novel.

I know this is a minority opinion, and many people think the fourth season, with its child's-eye view of the inner city, is easily The Wire's best. But while I agree that the depiction of the four kids is one of the finest stand-alone sections in the show's entire run, it's embedded in a larger narrative that feels more inconsistent, and less compelling, than the long duel between the Bell-Barksdale gang and the special crimes unit that dominated seasons one through three. I don't regret any of the extra time we've spent watching Marlo and Carcetti, Bubbles and the Bunk (though I've had just about enough of Jimmy McNulty), but it's still the case, I think, that the canvas has grown overbroad at times, and somewhat scattershot as a result. The Wire's greatest story was the rise and fall of Stringer Bell, and nothing's matched it since.

Scrambling The Map (II)

I take Matt's point about the various statistical weaknesses involved in Survey USA's attempt to aggregate state-level polls and project electoral vote totals in McCain-Clinton and McCain-Obama races. Still, if you take these aggregations as indicators of which states might be in flux and where the red-blue dynamic might break down, they hint at some interesting underlying dynamics. You can see, for instance, that McCain - thanks to his credibility with liberal Republicans and center-left swing voters - has the potential to do what some Republicans hoped Rudy Giuliani would do, and put liberal-trending states in the northeast and northwest back in play for the first time in a decade. You can also see that McCain has the potential to lose ground - again, as many of us expected Giuliani to do - in the Midwest and Plains States; he's vulnerable in states like Ohio, Iowa, Arkansas, West Virginia, and even Nebraska and North Dakota, all of which went for Bush last time around. You can see that Hillary Clinton wins by essentially taking the states John Kerry captured and then improving on his showing in Ohio and Florida;, making her the candidate most likely to maintain the red-blue balance. (I'm just crying out for a link from Andrew with that line, aren't I?) And you can see that Obama, by contrast, has the potential to shake things up a bit more, picking up prairie-populist voters in North Dakota and Nebraska (to the delight of Russell Arben Fox, no doubt) and center-right suburbanites in Virginia and Colorado on his way to victory.

Is any of this dispositive? Of course not. But it's suggestive, at the very least - not only for this election, but for the shape of the political coalitions to come.

The Three Davids

The House Next Door convenes a roundtable to debate the question of the hour: Who's the greatest of the small-screen auteurs - Milch of Deadwood, Chase of The Sopranos and Simon of The Wire?

Tell Me More

This sounds interesting:

A senior Obama strategist, David Axelrod, acknowledged that he is receiving varied advice from Democrats, including changing Obama's stump speech to emphasize his American roots and pushing for a second round of changes in the nation's welfare laws, this time aimed at stray fathers.

In a different, better world, the Republican Party would already have some interesting proposals in this area. But given that the GOP has more or less lost interest in welfare reform since the successes of the 1990s, and given that Obama might profit politically by going to his party's right on a social issue with substance as well as rhetoric - and given, obviously, the importance of the problem - this seems like a promising avenue for his campaign to pursue.

The Worst Job in the World

Okay, not really, but it's hard to imagine many gigs in Washington more life-destroying than writing copy for Media Matters. (Or Newsbusters, to be bipartisan about it.) Here you are, young and impressionable and looking to make your mark on politics and journalism, and your life's work is to sit in front of the TV, waiting for someone like Christopher Hitchens to say something insulting about a liberal - which, after all, is what Christopher Hitchens comes on television to do, that is when he isn't insulting conservatives - at which point you get to write the following:

Citing the potential for increased press scrutiny of Obama, Hitchens asserted: "[T]his dumb, nasty, ethnic rock 'n' roll racist church that he goes to in Chicago, he won't be able to walk away from that anymore." In fact, while Obama's church -- the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago -- is predominantly African-American, it has been described by non-blacks as "enthusiastically welcom[ing]." According to an April 2 article on the website for The Martin Marty Center -- which is described on its website as "an institute for the advanced study of religion at the University of Chicago" -- professor emeritus Martin E. Marty wrote of Obama's church: "My wife and I on occasion attend, and, like all other non-blacks, are enthusiastically welcomed." In addition, Rev. Jane Fisler Hoffman, a minister in the United Church of Christ who attends Trinity, recently made a statement about the church -- video of which is available online -- in which she stated that "[m]inisters all around the United Church of Christ -- European-American, African-American, and other denominations -- bring people from their churches to Trinity because the worship is so powerful, the preaching is so meaningful and prophetic." Hoffman went on to add that Trinity "is a church that reaches out to everybody, locally, around the world, all colors, and it just wants to share the gospel and good news of Jesus."

Take that, Hitchens! Several people disagree with you! You got pwned!

I should note that the item also goes on to complain about Hitchens' comparison of Clinton to "zombies, vampires, and werewolves," though it's left a bit unclear whether it's protesting the comparison on behalf of Hillary or on behalf of the undead. (Yes, I'm insinuating that Hillary Clinton might be worse than Dracula. Come get me, Media Matters!)

Strategery

It’s worth noting that nothing about yesterday’s results necessarily vindicates the Clinton campaign’s strategy of effectively conceding most the states between Super Tuesday and Texas, and allowing Obama to run up huge margins, both in votes and delegates, in nearly all of them. It isn’t as if the firewall strategy allowed her to barely stave off an Obama surge that might have succeeded if she’d spread her time and resources around. The Obama surge did succeed, in Texas at least, thanks to his momentum out of the Mid-Atlantic: He swamped her firewall and pulled into the lead, and it appears that she only regained the upper hand thanks to some hard-edged last-minute campaigning. If she could have narrowed his margins in states like Virginia and Wisconsin, she might not have lost the lead in Texas in the first place – and more importantly, she’d have higher delegate and vote totals to carry into the looming argument over whose “moral claim” on the nomination is the stronger one.

I suppose that if you buy Mickey Kaus's friend S.'s argument about how Hillary tends to win and lose - with voters rallying round her when they think she’s down for the count, and spurning her when she’s just scored some victories – there’s a sense in which she needed to get hammered for a month before Texas voted to have any chance of winning there. But even if the friend-of-Kaus diagnosis of voter motivation is correct, trying to create a situation in which your candidate scores a big pity vote seems like a lousy way to run a Presidential campaign.

'68 or '96?

The problem facing the Democrats isn't exactly the one raised by Kevin Drum and debated here and here and here - the problem of 1968, that is, in which a long and nasty intra-party battle fatally weakens the eventual Democratic nominee going into the general election. It won't: There's just too much going for the Democrats this year for the election not to remain eminently winnable no matter what happens (well, within reason) between here and the convention. Rather, the problem is that the party is losing a golden opportunity to try to put the race away early, the way Bill Clinton more or less did with Bob Dole in 1996 - by using their enormous fundraising advantage to rebrand John McCain as a Dole-style loser while he's still struggling to get his money-raising operation up to par. As Patrick Ruffini suggested earlier this week, if Obama had finished off Hillary last night he could have been up with anti-McCain ads all over the country immediately, forcing the GOP to play defense in places it usually owns all through the summer. Whereas the longer the race goes on, the less leverage the Dems' fundraising edge gives them, and the lower the chances that they can make it get late early for McCain through sheer dollar-power alone.

Point-Counterpoint

A dialogue between the two Democratic candidates, filtered through the fertile mind of Noah Millman.

Rage of a Privileged Class

As regular readers know, I think populist appeals have their place in politics, but Rod Dreher nails what's so grating about Michelle Obama's shtick: It's shot through with self-pity. First, he quotes Byron York, following her through Ohio:

“I know we’re spending — I added it up for the first time — we spend between the two kids, on extracurriculars outside the classroom, we’re spending about $10,000 a year on piano and dance and sports supplements and so on and so forth,” Mrs. Obama tells the women. “And summer programs. That’s the other huge cost. Barack is saying, ‘Whyyyyyy are we spending that?’ And I’m saying, ‘Do you know what summer camp costs?’”

There's a lot more lines like this one in the York piece - all fair enough, so far as they go (it is stressful and expensive to be a Bobo parent), but perhaps not just the thing to say to women in a depressed blue-collar town. And then there's this line, from this week's New Yorker profile:

From these bleak generalities, Obama moves into specific complaints. Used to be, she will say, that you could count on a decent education in the neighborhood. But now there are all these charter schools and magnet schools that you have to “finagle” to get into. (Obama herself attended a magnet school, but never mind.) Health care is out of reach (“Let me tell you, don’t get sick in America”), pensions are disappearing, college is too expensive, and even if you can figure out a way to go to college you won’t be able to recoup the cost of the degree in many of the professions for which you needed it in the first place. “You’re looking at a young couple that’s just a few years out of debt,” Obama said. “See, because, we went to those good schools, and we didn’t have trust funds. I’m still waiting for Barack’s trust fund. Especially after I heard that Dick Cheney was s’posed to be a relative or something. Give us something here!”

There are many sorts of populism, from the optimistic (think Reagan, or LBJ) to the angry and doom-ridden (think John Edwards). But a self-pitying populism, in which a Princeton-educated, upper-middle-class woman - or a wealthy woman, really; Michelle Obama earned roughly $400,000 in 2005 - equates her own struggles to pay off her college loans with the woes of the working class seems like a remarkably unappealing variation on the theme. (Like Rod, I didn't much care for Edwards' Kingfish act, but at least he went out of his way to acknowledge both his humble beginnings and how lucky he is now.) Not that the upper-middle class doesn't have its struggles too; God knows I whine to my friends about how how hard I work from time to time. But it's mildly inappropriate to whinge about those struggles publicly, and extremely inappropriate to whine about them in the context of a political campaign. It's like having Judith Warner campaigning to be First Lady.

The People's Choice?

What Jay Cost said yesterday looks exactly right today: Hillary has a chance at victory, but only if she can pull ahead in the overall popular vote, including Florida (she's already ahead if you include Michigan, but of course Obama wasn't on the ballot there), and then argue, to the superdelegates but also to the public, that as the choice of the majority of voters in the Democratic nominating process she has a "moral claim" on the nomination. (There's also the possibility of a "re-vote" in Michigan and Florida, as Marc points out today.) To a political junkie like myself, weaned on delegate counts and caucus regulations and all the rest, this argument sounds moderately far-fetched: The nominating process has rules, arbitrary and inconsistent as they may be, that both candidates are obliged to play by, and by the rules Obama's almost certainly going to come out with more delegates. But to a public that isn't steeped in the arcana of the process, that probably doesn't really understand the difference between a primary and a caucus and that's going to wake up today to grapple with the weirdness of being told that Obama won more delegates in Texas even though Hillary won the primary - well, you can see how if Hillary wins Pennsylvania convincingly and pulls ahead in the popular vote, a "people's choice," "let the majority rule" argument might find some traction. And you can bet that the superdelegates will have their fingers in the wind.

In this vein, Cost's point today seems spot-on:

The Obama campaign is proclaiming they won the Texas caucus by double digits. Indeed, that seems to be the case. Nevertheless, they need to be careful not to proclaim this too loudly. How will it look if Clinton wins a majority of the more than 2.5 million Texans who voted in the primary, but Obama wins the caucus in which about 100,000 people participated? That might help Clinton because it is evidence that the caucuses are not a good gauge of voter preferences. Obama needs to talk up his pledged delegate lead, without reminding people of how it is heavily dependent upon the caucuses. The Clinton camp is going to start attacking these caucuses.

Now of course, there's a simple way for Obama to take care of this: He just need to stay ahead of Hillary in the popular vote, where even with Florida included he currently leads by almost 300,000 votes. And if he really is the liberal Reagan, the change we can believe in, and all the rest of it, that shouldn't be too hard.

Photo by Flickr user Daniella Zalcman used under a Creative Commons license.

I Like Sam Anderson

And here's why.

A Million Little Fabulists

Having spent some time now on the outskirts of both the book business and the fact-checking business, my first inclination when someone asks - as Rod does today, of the latest critically-acclaimed, basically fraudulent personal history to hit shelves and then get pulled from them - how a publisher could have possibly allowed themselves to be taken in by one of the seemingly endless slew of memoirist-cum-fabulists, my first instinct is to sympathize with the publisher in question. People usually assume that books are held to a higher standard of accuracy than, say, magazine pieces - after all, they're longer, more detail-rich, and more expensive to produce and market, so you'd think they'd be subjected to more scrutiny as well. But in reality, precisely because books are so much longer and more detailed than magazine articles, fact-checking becomes a luxury that your typical cash-strapped, time-strapped publishing house can't afford. The Atlantic, for instance, probably fact-checks about 50-75,000 words per issue, or about 600,000 words a year; to match our rigor, Simon and Schuster (to pick a publisher at random) would have to fact-check around half a million words for the first half of March alone. Which means that publishing-house editors are more or less at the mercy of their writers' honesty, particularly in a genre where the line between fact and quasi-fiction is always going to be at least slightly blurry. If they can't sniff out a gifted faker through some sort of sixth sense, they don't have anybody else to do it for them - until, that is, the book comes out and the wisdom of crowds (or angry sisters) takes over the fact-checking job for them.

As I said, that's my first instinct. But Rod's right: The list of fabulists has grown too long, and as resource-strapped as today's publishers may be, if you can't do just a little due diligence on a memoir whose subject matter - a white girl growing up among black gangs in South Central L.A. - sounds like it was, well, invented to sucker a publishing house, you deserve all the ignominy that's about to be heaped on the saps at Riverhead Books.

Scrambling The Map

Michael Barone argues that we'll need to throw out the red-state, blue-state map for 2008:

If I were running the McCain or Obama campaign, I would be doing in-depth polling and focus groups in 30 to 40 states and nationally, as well, trying to determine which voting groups are moving or moveable toward my candidate and which are moving or moveable the other way. I would certainly not be writing off states that were lost by my party's 2000 and 2004 nominees by 5 percent or more, and I would not assume that states they carried by that much were in the bag.

Meanwhile, at the end of a characteristically fascinating post about the Republican Party's difficulties adapting to the new fundraising landscape, Patrick Ruffini ponders how the Obama campaign might harness its financial wherewithal to try poaching reddish states from the GOP:

What does this mean for the horserace? I am not a big fan of fundraising for fundraising’s sake. Diminishing returns set in. But I think a plausible scenario is that Obama uses a 2 or 3 to 1 cash advantage is to expand the map: to play in 25 states rather than McCain’s 15-20. The most effective TV ads are those that are uncontested. Could Obama run virtually uncontested advertising in Colorado, Virginia, North Carolina, Louisiana, and Georgia to move the numbers starting in March? And organize the African American vote in the South? Or more likely, concentrate on building insurmountable leads in true swing states like Wisconsin, Iowa, and Minnesota and force him to defend GOP-leaning Missouri and Florida?

In a year when the country's trending Democratic, a scrambled map would probably be bad news for the GOP candidate no matter what. But when you throw in Obama's current fundraising advantage and how that might be leveraged, it seems obvious that whatever McCain's potential advantages in a race against the Illinois Senator, he'll be rooting for Hillary tomorrow, not Obama as Stanley Fish suggests. It's a far, far better thing for the McCain camp if Obama has spend some of his bank fending off Hillary in Pennsylvania than if he gets to start running general-election ads in Colorado and Virginia starting next week.

Staying Power

Tyler Cowen asks an excellent question: Excluding economists (i.e. no Milton Friedman), which 20th century classic of American conservative political thought holds up best?

Cowen suggests that few look all that good in hindsight - "mostly because they underestimated the robustness of the modern world and regarded depravity as more of a problem than it has turned out to be." A slightly different way of looking at the matter is that many of the classics of American conservative political thought were written when Communism seemed to be in the ascendancy worldwide, and when ever-increasing-statism, at the very least, was assumed by nearly every intellectual to be the wave of the future. Small wonder, then, that they have a tendency to view all of Western politics through the lens of creeping Marxism; small wonder, too, that they can seem alarmist and apocalyptic in hindsight, with their anxieties about "the totalitarian implications of the federal school lunch program," and so forth. (If Orwell's 1984 were a treatise of political philosophy, rather than a novel, it would have a similarly fusty and irrelevent air today. All that stuff about boots stomping on the human face forever - so over-the-top!). The fact that a lot of mid-century conservative writing doesn't seem to hold up well today is, at least in part, a testament to how complete the anti-Communist victory has been - and also how unexpected.

As for books and authors that do hold up - well, Cowen says that we can include grumpy European emigres, so I'd have to vote for the collected works of Leo Strauss (you can't pick just one!), who should be required reading whatever you think of his disciples' influence on contemporary politics. Speaking of his disciples, I'd also vote for Allan Bloom's Closing of the American Mind. (Contrary to what you may have heard, the second half of the book is better than the first: The critique of student life is curmudgeonly; the critique of the academy as a whole is brilliant.) A variety of neoconservative works, from Edward Banfield's The Unheavenly City to Charles Murray's Losing Ground to almost anything by James Q. Wilson, all hold up quite well in hindsight, and so do the classic Catholic-neocon books, Richard John Neuhaus's The Naked Public Square and Michael Novak's The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism. (Novak has been rather too carried away over the years by his enthusiasm for the affinity between Christianity and capitalism, but his early writings on the subject are very good.) And while I know Francis Fukuyama no longer calls himself a neocon, his The End of History and the Last Man remains a brilliant diagnosis of the politics of late modernity, however its prognosis ends up being remembered.

Depending on how flexible we're willing to be with the definition of "conservative" on the one hand and "political thought" on the other, I'd also put in for Christopher Lasch (The Revolt of the Elites especially, but also The True and Only Heaven), Philip Rieff (particularly The Triumph of the Therapeutic), Tom Wolfe (both in his nonfiction and in Bonfire of the Vanities), and the young Joan Didion of Slouching Toward Bethlehem and The White Album, before she went east, and downhill.

So that's a start. Meanwhile, Ezra poses the same question for liberal political thinkers.

The "Toughness" Factor

Looking at some numbers from the latest Pew poll - specifically, that 43 percent of Americans think that Obama's foreign policy approach is "not tough enough," compared to just sixteen percent who say the same of John McCain's - Matt writes:

They don't, on the face of things, seem like very good news for Obama. But they come in the context of a poll that shows Obama beating McCain by a large 50-43 margin. Meanwhile, it seems to me that the best argument McCain has available to him is to try to persuade voters that Obama isn't tough enough on national security issues. Conversely, Obama's people will try to argue that McCain is too much of a warmonger. Given that a lot of what McCain is going to be looking to accomplish has been done already and he's still losing, this looks like trouble to me.

Maybe so. But it still seems possible for McCain to gain ground on this front even if the underlying "toughness" numbers don't change that much: He just needs to raise the salience of the public's already-existing perception that Obama isn't sufficiently tough/seasoned/etc. on foreign affairs, to the point where it becomes an issue that determines which way people vote. I think this will be a difficult thing to do in the current foreign-policy landscape, but it's way to soon to say it's impossible. Obama has yet to face off against a candidate (unless you count Joe Biden) who can attack him for his foreign-policy inexperience without it seeming like at least something of a stretch - and that "red phone" ad would be an awfully lot more effective if it ended with John McCain picking up the receiver.

Basically, McCain isn't going to win this election without 1) making the race turn on foreign policy to a greater extent than it looks like it will right now, and 2) persuading a large chunk of the American public that his instincts about Iraq might be better than theirs. If he can't pull this twofer off, he doesn't have a chance; if he can, though, then those "toughness" numbers will end up mattering a lot more than Matt hopes.

Man-Crush Politics

I don't know if John McCain needs to "fire Mark McKinnon," the media adviser who's pledged to quit McCain's campaign if Barack Obama is the Democratic nominee because he admires Obama too much to have any part in attacking him. But on the evidence of this profile, I'm pretty sure McCain shouldn't be taking political advice from a guy who's crushing on Obama the same way he crushed on ... George W. Bush:

Having read Obama's first memoir, he was already drawn to the Illinois senator when they first met at a Washington dinner party in late 2006. "I think he has a history and hopefully a potential," said McKinnon. "That's what I like about him, that's what I liked about Bush."

"A history and hopefully a potential." What more do you need to know? Besides that he has really kind eyes - and really great web video:

As McCain's comeback picked up speed, McKinnon cast jealous glances toward Obama, who was the beneficiary of two unconventional, online videos that McKinnon considers the best work of the campaign: an early bootleg spoof of Apple's "1984" ad lampooning Hillary Clinton as "Big Brother" and a music video released in January by singer will.i.am featuring celebrities saying excerpts from an Obama speech.

McKinnon becomes visibly giddy when discussing the video, calling it "cool" and "really powerful stuff."

"I'm a music guy," said McKinnon. "You combine music and politics, I'm halfway there."

Pace Charlotte Allen, empty-headed swooning can be a guy thing, too.